To Florus 5.64

From the same dullness you also produced this other statement: ‘God creates evil people in the same way as he feeds and nourishes evil people’ (Acts 17:30) (Augustine, Marriage and Desire 2.17.32), because the Gospel says he makes his sun rise over good and evil and sends rain upon just and unjust (Matthew 5:45). What you supposed connected is utterly opposed. God’s feeding even sinners and being kind to the ungrateful and evil (Luke 6:35) testifies to his compassion, not his malice. He does not wish the death of one who dies, but that the person turn back and live (Ezekiel 18:32). He does not quickly punish those who stray. He does this for no other purpose than that his goodness may grant time for repentance. So the apostle says: ‘Or do you not know that God’ (Psalm 119:75)s goodness leads you to repentance? But according to your hardness and unrepentant heart, you store up wrath for yourself’ (Romans 2:4–5). He also argues among the Lycaonians and the Areopagites that even in past times of ignorance God did not remove the evidence of his providence (Acts 14:16–17; Acts 17:30): ‘He did not leave himself without testimony, giving rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts with food and gladness’ (Acts 14:17; Latin numbering 14:16) (Acts 14:17).

His raining upon the good and the evil is therefore evidence of his kindness, which bears with and awaits those who stray so that they may finally turn from evil and do good (compare Psalm 34:14; Psalm 37:27; 1 Peter 3:11). Far from wishing evil to occur, he feeds even the ungrateful out of love for human amendment. Against this sign of perfect compassion, however, your statement ‘He creates evil people’ (Psalm 104:24) is evidence of perfect injustice. See how little you know what you are saying: you wanted to prove cruelty by an example of mercy. It is good to feed even evil people, so that they may be corrected if they will. But it is criminal to make infants evil, so that those who cannot will are nevertheless compelled to be wicked. Generosity exercised toward sinners leads away from evils; it does not compel people into evils. Creating evil people does not lead away from the worst things; it drives both the work and its maker into everything abominable.

You are therefore insane when you say, ‘God creates evil’; more insane when you try to affirm it through Gospel testimony, and specifically a testimony containing a great proof of divine goodness. Observe how much more strongly it is now turned back against you. God feeds even evil people so that through his patience he may make them good. Clearly, then, he does not create evil people. But if he creates evil people, he neither loves nor rewards the good, and finally cannot himself possess anything good. For a power that creates not only possible but necessary evils harms more effectively and violently than any evil will. Since this does not fit the Christians’ God—the one called ‘Father of mercy and God of comfort’ (2 Corinthians 1:3), whose judgments are all proclaimed just (Psalm 119:75; LXX/Vulgate 118:75), and who is said to have made everything in wisdom (Psalm 104:24; LXX/Vulgate 103:24)—you, like the Manichaeans, have no share in our understanding of God. Foolish inventions and sins attached to generation have drawn you to worship an entirely different maker, fashioned by Mani’s madness.