19. You ask what was the manner in which, as the Spirit teaches, the Son was born? I will put a question to you as to things corporal. I ask not in what manner He was born of a virgin; I ask only whether her flesh, in the course of bringing His flesh to readiness for birth, suffered any loss. Assuredly she did not conceive Him in the common way, or suffer the shame of human intercourse, in order to bear Him: yet she bore Him, complete in His human Body, without loss of her own completeness. Surely piety requires that we should regard as possible with God a thing which we see became possible through his power in the case of a human being This is an argument against the objection that God, if Christ is His Son, must have suffered loss. If God is His Father and the sole source of His existence, Christ must have come into being by separation from the Father; i.e. the Father must have suffered diminution and lost His completeness. The answer is that a woman—and a fortiori the Virgin, who was the only human parent Christ—suffers no loss of bodily completeness through becoming a mother. There is no allusion to the belief in the perpetual virginity of the Mother of our Lord..