St. Leo I, the Great is sometimes called the Doctor of Doctrine..
He shares with us some ideas on perfection: I shall use several different sermons found here.
My comments are in blue. I have left on the links, as usual with this site. To be continued....
Our perfection is found in and with Christ, the Incarnate God. Just as Christ is True God and True Man, so we are made in the image and likeness of God, in our will, our mind, our soul.
The bodily Nativity therefore of the Son of God took nothing from and added nothing to His Majesty because His unchangeable substance could be neither diminished nor increased. For that the Word became flesh
does not signify that the nature of God was changed into flesh, but that the Word took the flesh into the unity of His Person: and therein undoubtedly the whole man was received, with which within the Virgin's womb fecundated by the Holy Spirit, whose virginity was destined never to be lost , the Son of God was so inseparably united that He who was born without time of the Father's essence was Himself in time born of the Virgin's womb. For we could not otherwise be released from the chains of eternal death but by Him becoming humble in our nature, Who remained Almighty in His own. And so our Lord Jesus Christ, being at birth true man though He never ceased to be true God, made in Himself the beginning of a new creation, and in the form
of His birth started the spiritual life of mankind afresh, that to abolish the taint of our birth according to the flesh there might be a possibility of regeneration without our sinful seed for those of whom it is said, Who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God John 1:13 .
To deny that one can become perfected is to deny the Incarnation. If Christ became Man in order to redeem our human nature, then, it is redeemed to the point of having the capacity for sinlessness.
