Must the Child Be of One Substance with the Mother?

The second blasphemous slander, or slanderous blasphemy, of your heresy is your claim that the one who is born must be of one substance with the one who bears him. It is not very different from the first. It differs from it in terms rather than in fact and reality. For when we are dealing with the birth of God, you maintain that one of greater power could not be born of Mary, just as you maintained above that one older could not be begotten. So you may take it that the same answer can be given to this as to what you said before, or you may consider that the answer given to the claim you are making now applies to that one too. You say, then, that the one who is born must be of one substance with the one who bears him. If this refers to earthly creatures, it is most certainly true. But if it refers to the birth of God, why do you look to the precedents of nature in the case of his birth? Arrangements are subject to the one who arranged them, not the arranger to his arrangements. [a]

But would you like to know more fully how these slanders of yours are not only wicked but foolish, the idle talk of someone who has no idea at all of the omnipotence of God? Tell me, I ask you, you who think that like things can be produced only from like things: where did that countless host of quails come from long ago in the wilderness to feed the children of Israel? Nowhere do we read that they had been hatched beforehand from mother birds; they were brought up and arrived suddenly. Again, where did that heavenly food come from which fell on the camp of the Hebrews for forty years? Did manna produce manna? But these are ancient miracles. What about more recent ones? With a few loaves and small fishes the Lord Jesus Christ fed countless crowds of the people who followed him, and not just once. The reason they were filled did not lie in the food. A secret and unseen cause satisfied the hungry people, especially since far more was left over once they were filled than had been set before them when they were hungry. How did it all come about that, while those who ate were being filled, the food itself was multiplied by an extraordinary increase?

We read that in Galilee wine was produced from water. Tell me, how did something of one nature produce something of an altogether different substance from its own? Especially when, and this applies exactly to the birth of the Lord, a nobler substance was produced from what was inferior to it? Tell me, then, how rich and splendid wine could be produced from plain water. How was it that one thing was drawn out and another poured in? Was the cistern a well of such a kind that it turned the water drawn from it into the best wine? Or did the nature of the jars or the care of the servants bring it about? Most certainly neither. And how is it that the heart’s thoughts cannot grasp the manner of the fact, though the conscience holds firmly to the truth of it? In the gospel, clay was put on the eyes of a blind man, and when it was washed off, eyes were produced. Did water have the power to give birth to eyes, or clay to create light? Certainly not, especially since water could be of no use to a blind man, and clay would actually hinder the sight of those who could see. How was it, then, that something harmful in its own nature became the means of restoring health, and that what usually hurt healthy people was then made the instrument of healing? You say that the power of God brought it about, that God’s remedy caused it, and that all the things we have been speaking of were simply done by divine omnipotence, which is able to make new things out of unaccustomed material, to make useful things out of their opposites, and to turn what belongs to the realm of the impossible and the impracticable into possibilities and real deeds.