Miscellanies 4.21.130

Here I find the perfect understood in many ways, according to the one who succeeds in each virtue. For one is perfected as reverent, as enduring, as self-controlled, as a worker, as a martyr, and as one who knows; but whether anyone among men, while still a man, is perfect in all at once, I do not know, except only the one who for our sake put on humanity. Yet even according to the bare law one might be perfect, who professes abstinence from evils; and this is a way both to the gospel and to doing good. But the perfection of the one under the law is the knowing reception of the gospel, so that the one who is perfect according to the law may come to be; for so Moses, according to the law, foretold that we must listen, so that we might receive, according to the apostle, Christ as the fulfillment of the law. In the gospel the one who knows makes progress, not using the law only as a step, but understanding and grasping it as the Lord who gave the covenants handed it down to the apostles. And if he should also live rightly (just as knowledge cannot follow from bad conduct), and become a martyr besides, confessing most rightly out of love, receiving greater worth among men, not even so will he first be called perfect in the flesh, since the completion of life has taken this name beforehand, the knowing martyr having already first shown the perfect work and properly presented it, the blood made an offering of thanks through knowing love sending on the spirit.