A. The Son is not Generated from the Substance of the Father as from Matter or Quasimatter

93. Therefore by holding with the ancient doctors - because they all from the time of Augustine up to the present did not dare to speak of matter or quasi-matter in divine reality, although all said in agreement with Augustine that the Son is generated from the substance of the Father - I say that the Son is not generated from the substance of the Father as from matter or quasi-matter.

94. And this can be made clear as follows:

Generation in the creature states two things, change and production; the formal ideas of these are different and separable from each other without contradiction.

95. For production is formally of the product itself, and it is accidental to it that it is done with change of some composite part, as is plain in creation [sc. where there is production but not change]; change is formally the act of ‘the changeable’, which passes from privation. But change accompanies production in creatures because of the imperfection of the productive power, which cannot give total being to the term of the production, but something of it that is presupposed is changed to another part of it and thus it produces the composite. Therefore they can without contradiction be separated, and they really are separated in comparison to a perfect productive power.

96. This is also plain in creation, where, because of the perfection of the productive power setting it first in total being, there is truly the idea of production, insofar as through it the produced term receives being, - but there is not there the idea of change, insofar as change states that some substrate ‘is otherwise disposed than it was before’, Physics 6.3-4.234b5-7, 10-13. For in creation there is no substrate.

97. To the proposed case. Since in divine reality nothing of imperfection is to be posited but the whole of perfection, and since change in its idea states imperfection, because it states potentiality, and that in a changeable thing, - and concomitantly too it states imperfection of the active power in the changer, because such a changer necessarily requires a cause causing along with it so that it may produce (but no imperfection happens in divine reality, neither of the sort that is in the passive power nor any imperfection either of the active power, but supreme perfection), - in no way would generation be posited there under the idea of change or of quasi-change, but in divine reality would be posited only generation as it is production, namely insofar as something by it gets being. And therefore generation as it is in divine reality is without matter, - and therefore to generation as it is in divine reality there is not assigned matter or quasimatter, but only the term; and this either total as first term, that is the adequate term -namely which is first produced in being [n.27] - or formal term, according to which the first term formally receives being [n.28].