Moreover, this analogy is unsound for several reasons:

First: The ray is not itself generated from the substance of the sun, just as the glow of a flame is not generated from the substance of the fire. Rather, it is a transient effect that comes to be outside the body of the sun, although the sun is the cause of its appearance.

For this reason, the knowledge that settles in a student’s heart through study is compared to that ray: it arises by means of the teacher’s instruction without actually being part of the teacher’s own knowledge. Likewise, a scholar’s knowledge is likened to a lamp from whose light everyone may take while the lamp itself is not diminished.

This stands in contrast to the birth of a child from its parent, for the child is generated from the very being of the parent.

Furthermore, the ray that exists in the air and upon the earth does not exist within the essence of the sun or the fire; it is an accident inhering in another locus, and one single accident cannot inhere in two separate loci at once.

Yet the Christians claim that the Word—by which they mean God’s knowledge or His wisdom—is generated from Him and is eternal without beginning, and that an attribute must inhere in the One described. An attribute is like the sun’s own roundness and brightness: it belongs to the sun itself and is distinct from the ray that exists in the air, for that ray is separate from the sun. How, then, can the former be equated with the latter?

If they say, “What we mean is that God’s wisdom, knowledge, and light were sent down to the Messiah and poured upon him, just as a ray pours forth from the sun,”

we reply, “This is something the Messiah shares with all the other prophets; it is not unique to him.”