People who love watching horse races often do something like this. Even when the racers they support are already driving themselves as hard as they can, the spectators’ eagerness for victory makes them shout from the stands. Their eyes follow the race, and they imagine that their cries can spur the charioteer to greater speed. They even shout at the horses and wave their hands toward them as though their hands were whips. None of this actually helps win the race. It simply shows, in voice and gesture, how strongly they are cheering for the competitors.
I think I am doing much the same with you, my very dear friend and brother. You are already competing well on the course of virtue, running the divine race and pressing toward the prize of the heavenly calling with swift, light strides. So I call out encouragement, urge you onward, and tell you to run still faster. I do this not from thoughtless enthusiasm, but because it gives me joy to encourage a beloved child.
Your recent letter asked us to offer you some guidance for the perfect life, and I thought I should do so. Perhaps nothing else I say will be useful to you, but this at least will not be useless: I can give you an example of obedience. Even with these gray hairs, we who have been placed as fathers over so many souls think it fitting to accept a command from a self-disciplined young man. How much more, then, should your own practice of obedience grow stronger, since we have trained you from youth to obey willingly?
That is enough on this. Now we must turn to the matter at hand, with God as the guide of our discussion. My dear friend, you asked us to sketch for you what the perfect life is. Your aim is clear: if our discussion can discover what you are seeking, you want to bring into your own life the excellence it reveals. But here I face two equal difficulties. I cannot capture perfection in words, and I cannot live out in my own life what can be understood in thought. Both are beyond my power. And perhaps not mine alone. Many who are great and far advanced in virtue would admit that this is beyond them too.
But I do not want to seem, as the Psalmist says, to “fear where there is no fear.” So I will explain more clearly what I mean.
Everything else that can be measured by the senses reaches perfection within definite limits. Take quantity, whether continuous or made up of separate units. Every measurable quantity has its own boundaries. If you measure a cubit or count to ten, you know where it begins and where it ends; its completeness lies in reaching that endpoint. But when it comes to virtue, the Apostle has taught us that perfection has only one limit: it has no limit at all.
The great Apostle, with his lofty mind, kept running the course of virtue, always reaching forward to what lay ahead and never stopping. For him, stopping the race was not safe. Why? Because every good, by its very nature, has no limit of its own. It is bounded only by its opposite—life by death, light by darkness. In general, every good comes to an end only where its opposite begins. So just as the end of life is the beginning of death, stopping in the course of virtue becomes the beginning of a course toward vice.
So our argument was not wrong to say that perfection in virtue cannot be enclosed within limits. We have shown, after all, that virtue is not something bounded by limits. But I also said that those who pursue the life of virtue cannot reach perfection. I will now explain that point as well.
God Himself is the good in the first and fullest sense, since His very nature is goodness. Whatever He is understood to be by nature is truly what He is and what He is called. We have already shown that virtue has no limit except vice; and since nothing contrary can be admitted in God, the divine nature must be understood as limitless and without end.
Anyone who pursues true virtue, then, shares in nothing other than God Himself, because He is perfect virtue. Those who know what is good by nature necessarily desire to share in it. And because that good has no limit, their desire also extends without limit and never comes to rest.
It is therefore impossible to attain perfection in full. As we have said, perfection is not enclosed within limits; virtue has only one limit, and that is to have no limit. How, then, can anyone reach the end he is seeking when there is no end to find?
Still, even though our argument has shown that what we seek cannot be attained in its entirety, we must not neglect the Lord’s command: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” When something is good by nature, people of understanding count it a great gain not to miss even part of it. That remains true even when attaining the whole is beyond reach.
We should therefore make every effort not to fall completely short of the perfection that is possible for us, but to gain as much of it as we have the capacity to see in what we seek. Perhaps this is what human perfection is: always wanting to go further in what is good.