The one most perfect being cannot have been occupied from eternity with anything other than the contemplation of that which is most perfect.

That which is most perfect is himself; thus God can have thought from eternity only of himself.

To represent, to will, and to create are one and the same for God. One can therefore say that everything which God represents to himself, he also creates.

God can think of himself in only two ways: either he thinks of all of his perfections at once, and himself as the embodiment of them all; or he thinks of his perfections discretely, one separated from the other, and each divided by different degrees within itself.

God thought of himself from eternity in all his perfection; that is, God created from eternity a being which lacked no perfection that he himself possessed.

This being is called by Scripture the Son of God; or what would be better still, the Son God. A God, because it lacks none of the qualities pertaining to God. A Son, because that which represents something to itself seems, to our way of thinking, to have a certain priority to the representation.

This being is God himself and cannot be distinguished from God, because we think of it as soon as we think of God and we cannot think of it without God; that is, because we cannot think of God without God, or because anything which we were to deprive of its representation of itself would not be a God.