To Florus 6.41

In this passage Augustine thinks death’s sting is that ancient sin, failing to understand what follows: ‘Sin’s power is the law’ (1 Corinthians 15:56). He tries to identify this law as the command given to Adam. But that law was not sin’s power; it was the occasion of sin’s coming into being. Giving strength to an existing thing differs from bringing into existence what did not exist.

Eating from that tree would not have been evil if it had not been forbidden. Once forbidden and then taken through transgression, sin arose there from the encounter of prohibition and contempt. The law was not given for the purpose of wrongdoing. Nevertheless, in doing the same thing—that is, eating from the tree—the human would not have sinned, because the tree was good, unless tasting it had been forbidden by law.

What is wrong in itself—for example, murder of a parent, sacrilege, adultery—and is recognized as evil even without enacted law can rightly be said to gain strength through the law in transgressors whom prohibition makes more eager. But when an act is not wrongfully undertaken unless forbidden, the law’s occasion properly supplies its origin as sin, not its strength.

Since I have been rather lengthy here, I close this book too by reminding my reader to examine carefully and see that God’s law offers no occasion for Manichaean impiety. If any passages are thought ambiguous, let the reader not doubt that they can be explained according to the rules of truth and reason and made consistent with justice. We condemn with the same force, a force fitting God’s law, both those who say there will be no resurrection of the dead through Christ and those who equally oppose the apostle by asserting that Christ did not possess a body of our nature, thereby honoring Manichaean doctrines (Genesis 2:16–17).