IV. But how can this generation be
passionless? In that it is incorporeal. For if corporeal
generation involves passion, incorporeal generation excludes it.
And I will ask of you in turn, How is He God if He is created?
For that which is created is not God. I refrain from reminding
you that here too is passion if we take the creation in a bodily sense,
as time, desire, imagination, thought, hope, pain, risk, failure,
success, all of which and more than all find a place in the creature,
as is evident to every one. Nay, I marvel that you do not venture
so far as to conceive of marriages and times of pregnancy, and dangers
of miscarriage, as if the Father could not have begotten at all if He
had not begotten thus; or again, that you did not count up the modes of
generation of birds and beasts and fishes, and bring under some one of
them the Divine and Ineffable Generation, or even eliminate the Son out
of your new hypothesis. And you cannot even see this, that as His
Generation according to the flesh differs from all others (for where
among men do you know of a Virgin Mother?), so does He differ also in
His spiritual Generation; or rather He, Whose Existence is not the same
as ours, differs from us also in His Generation.