erfection.
If you find yourself uncomfortable with these Christian formulations, I suggest turning to Aristotle for a congruent philosophic version, drawn from book 10, chapter 7 of his Nicomachean Ethics:
So if the intellect is something divine in comparison to the human being, the life in accord with this intellect would also be divine in comparison to the human life. But one ought not—as some recommend—to think only about human things because one is a human being, nor only about mortal things because one is mortal, but rather to make oneself immortal, insofar as that is possible, and to do all that bears on living in accord with what is the most excellent of the things in oneself. For although that most excellent thing is small in bulk, in point of its capacity and the honor due it, it prevails by far over everything. And it would seem that each person even is this thing, if in fact it is what is authoritative and better in him.
Needless to say, this is not the approach to the life of the mind that prevails on college campuses. Leaving out of account what our current utilitarian habits mean for the otherworldly fate of our souls, my concern as a teacher is that the restriction to material and efficient causes (think of Machiavelli’s “effectual truth”) impairs the full amplitude of student response and the full scope of student inquiry.
Our native powers of reasoning have been artificially truncated. Lacking much sense of either formal or final causation, students today arrive at college ill-prepared to claim their rightful inheritance—a legacy that Michael Oakeshott in his wonderful little book, The Voice of Liberal Learning, called “three thousand years of the fortunes and misfortunes of human intellectual adventure.”