that designation for the Word alone. But how could an eternal attribute of the Eternal ever be described in such terms? They transmit no report from any prophet that he called any of God’s attributes His “son” or “child.” Never did a prophet say that God’s knowledge, or His speech, or His wisdom is His child or His son, or that it is generated from Him.

It follows that these people have reached the height of contradiction in both meaning and wording. They oppose every divine scripture, the rational principles with which God has endowed His servants—what they themselves call the axioms of reason—and they contradict every human language. All this lays bare the unsoundness of their analogy.

They claim, “The Word is generated from Him, just as word and wisdom are generated in us from the intellect.” We reply: even supposing the prophets had used the term “generated,” whatever arises within us does so after previously not existing; its coming-into-being depends on our own action, power, and will. As for our inherent attributes—those inseparable from us, in which we have no choice and with which we have always been described—no rational person would say that they are generated within us or from us.

Yet you maintain that the eternal, inherent attribute of God—one with which He has always and will always be characterized—is generated from Him. Even if the sort of intellectual “generation” you posit were genuinely acknowledged in language, reason, and revelation, you would still have no right to call God’s knowledge and wisdom—by which you explain His Word—His son, born of Him, eternally begotten of Him; for such a claim is invalid in reason, scripture, and language alike.

From the standpoint of reason, an inseparable attribute of its bearer—even if the bearer is created—