, little by little. Whether by “speech” they mean knowledge or articulation, neither of the two is intrinsic to the rational soul; rather, they arise within it and it only becomes described by them after previously lacking them—even though the soul is predisposed to them, being potentially speaking. Hence, when they liken the generation of speech from the Lord to its generation from the intellect, this necessitates that the Lord was first only potentially speaking and then became actually speaking, which in turn implies that He became knowing after not having been knowing. Such a notion is among the gravest forms of unbelief and the most impossible to conceive, for nothing other than Him can endow Him with the attributes of perfection after He had not possessed them. Everything besides Him is His creation, and whatever perfection it enjoys is from Him; therefore it is inconceivable that anything else could render the Lord—glorified and exalted—perfect.

That leads to a vicious circle that sound reason utterly rejects: a thing cannot confer the attributes of perfection upon another unless it already possesses them itself. If it acquires them only after something else grants them to it, an impossible circularity results—just as if each of two things were simultaneously the agent of the other and the cause of the other’s attributes that are themselves required for agency. It is thus evident that the idea of His speech being generated from Him in the manner speech is generated from the intellect is false, and equally false is the claim that His essential attributes have some originator that precedes them or brings them into existence.

Third reply: When they say that the Son is “born of God,” if by this they mean that he is an inseparable attribute of Him, then life, too, is an inseparable attribute of God—and thus the Holy Spirit