No Comparison Fits in Every Point

When you hear the word “Son,” you must not think of a birth after the flesh. Remember that it is said of a bodiless substance, a nature simple and not made of parts. For, as we said above, when the understanding gives birth to a word, or the mind to sense, or light brings forth brightness from itself, nothing of that sort is looked for, and no weakness or imperfection of any kind is imagined in such a begetting. How much purer and holier, then, ought our idea to be of the Creator of all these! [a]

But perhaps you say, “The begetting you speak of produces nothing with a substance of its own. Light does not produce a brightness with a substance of its own, nor does the understanding beget a word with a substance of its own; but the Son of God, it is claimed, was begotten with a substance of his own.” To this we reply, first, that when examples or illustrations are used for other things, the likeness cannot hold in every particular, but only in the one point for which the illustration is used. For instance, when it is said in the Gospel, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman hid in about six gallons of flour,” are we to imagine that the kingdom of heaven is like leaven in every respect, so that like leaven it can be touched and can spoil, so as to turn sour and unfit for use? Clearly the illustration was used for this purpose alone: to show how, through the preaching of God’s word, which seems so small a thing, people’s minds could be filled with the leaven of faith. So too, when it is said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a net cast into the sea, which draws in fish of every kind,” are we to suppose that the substance of the kingdom of heaven is likened in every respect to the nature of the twine a net is made of, and to the knots that tie its meshes? No; the only point of the comparison is to show that, as a net brings fish to shore from the depths of the sea, so by the preaching of the kingdom of heaven people’s souls are set free from the depth of the error of this world. From this it is clear that examples or illustrations do not match in every particular the things they are brought in to illustrate. Otherwise, if they were the same in every respect, they would no longer be called examples or illustrations; they would be the things themselves.