To Florus 5.15

What wise reader could hold back laughter on reaching the examples you next added? You say: ‘The apostle’s own words would refute this man, who bashfully names and shamelessly praises not a devout will but lustful pleasure. The very seeds farmers sow in the fields can refute him. Why should we not believe that God could have granted a blessed human being in paradise, concerning his own seed, what we see granted to farmers concerning wheat seed: that the former could be sown as the latter is, without any shameful lust?’ (Augustine, Marriage and Desire 2.14.29). How charmingly this bashful namer and shameless praiser makes utterly disorderly gestures and chants the songs of street entertainers!

But the other point cannot be read without great amusement: if Adam had not sinned, a woman could have been prepared for fertility like a crop field. Perhaps ears of children would burst out through every joint and through the tiny channels of the body which doctors call pores. Fertile in every part, she would sweat offspring instead of lice. But if some burst through her eyes, the mother would lose her sight; and if helmeted swarms emerged from the little globes of her pupils, blindness would undoubtedly pray for childlessness. Offspring not born but sweated out could easily be killed. We would thus have a race, like the Myrmidons in fables, but in Manichaean doctrine a race of lice or fleas. That would be the woman’s production. What could the man do? He would of course apply tools, not organs; deprived of genitals, he would drive in plowshares and hoes. The first human beings’ fault therefore deserves the fullest thanks, because it spared such a blessed nature these torments! Childbirth and a husband treat women more gently than if they felt plows or grew wild with importunate fertility all over their bodies.

‘Let the Manichaeans’ faces be filled with disgrace, and let them seek your name, Lord’ (adapted from Psalm 83:16; LXX/Vulgate 82:17). What monstrous accusers of the innocent and God! What support from arguments and testimonies! ‘Why,’ he asks, ‘should we not believe nature could have been made differently from what we see?’ (Psalm 83:16) As though the question were what God could have done rather than what he established! If this lust for conjecture entitles us to criticize what was made—saying that because things could have been made differently, their actual arrangements do not testify to a good nature—let us declare that God could have made mortals two-headed. Therefore one-headed people who stand on their feet were badly made: they could have been given a head at each end. This shape sometimes appears in little worms, whose belly is enclosed by a head at both ends, so that they begin from either shoulder and are understood to end in the middle. Admit these absurdities, and where will delirium stop?

God, then, could have made human beings sprout from the earth with flowers. As far as his power goes, I do not deny he could. But he willed them to be born only from the sexes. We are asking what he did, not what he could do. On this point it is a mad answer to say: ‘What exists is evil because God could have done it differently.’ (adapted from Psalm 83:16) This is to praise God as an insult to himself and proclaim his almighty power as a stain upon his judgment. It is not praise at all, but a great insult, to give to his strength what you take away from his wisdom and say that God possessed power but lacked good judgment. Criticism of his judgment reaches directly into denial of his power: he cannot do everything if he cannot arrange things well. Indeed, if he falls short of supreme wisdom, he retains no claim to reverence as God. Since even to suspect this is utterly impious, we return to the point that cuts your doctrine of inherited transmission’s throat. God, who made everything very good, established nothing in such a way that it can be proved that, within the kind actually made, it could have been made more suitably or reasonably (Genesis 1:31). Equally endowed with wisdom and almighty power, he would not establish something a mere little man could rightly criticize. Whatever is shown to be natural in all creatures whatsoever was therefore made so excellently that a proposed correction of it is shown foolish and impious.

The shape of a horse and the shape of an ox differ when compared with each other. Yet within their own kinds they have received a harmony so suitable in every respect that neither horse nor ox should or could have been established differently from the form we see. This rule can be applied to everything swimming, crawling, walking, or flying, and finally to things of the upper air and heavens: no creature’s form can be proved capable of being better established for the kind for which it was prepared. So too the human being, already included above among walking creatures, is formed throughout in a way no one could improve. Wisely, the human body received both parts for display and parts for modest concealment, so that a person would learn both modesty and confidence within himself. He would look misshapen if veiled all over, but would become idle and careless if always exposed all over. Human fertility therefore should have received no organs in either sex other than those it has, no other arrangement of internal parts, no other sensations, and no other pleasure.

Let us therefore warn the Manichaeans to stop criticizing the works of divine wisdom and correct their own perverse opinions. Saying that human beings would have reproduced differently from the way universal experience attests does not concern the question. Both reason and Scripture testify that they could not have been made better than they were: Scripture proclaims that God made everything not merely good but very good (Genesis 1:31; Sirach 39:16, Latin numbering 39:21). Thus here too, as throughout the whole work, the Manichaeans’ doctrine has collapsed. We do confess that in the future the blessed will have more glorious bodies needing no assistance. But this too was excellently established by the most just and wise God: nature should not displace the condition belonging to reward. There should be a first stage in which natural freedom stands and from which, by the right of free will, a person either descends to the depths of punishment or strives toward the summit of glory by the paths God established.