Luke 2:52

I blush not at an error which I have ceased to hold, because I am delighted at having ceased to hold it, because I recognise myself to be better and more modest. No one blushes at his own improvement. Even in Christ, knowledge had its stages of growth; through which stages the apostle, too, passed.

And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men. This passage refutes both the Manichaeans and the Apollinarians alike, showing that the Lord truly had flesh and a true soul. For as stature pertains to the body, so wisdom and favor pertain to the soul. And indeed, it would not have increased in wisdom if it did not have the natural understanding that was granted to humans for the sake of reason. Not because the God who assumed this needed it, especially since He is described above as having been full of wisdom even as a child, but because He chose this as part of the remedy for our salvation, through the effect of a loving assumption, so that while flesh and a rational soul were assumed by God, both would be equally saved.

Jesus "advanced in wisdom" and appeared wiser through each successive age. Was he not wise, that he should become wiser? Or was it that, since he had "emptied himself, taking the form of a servant", he was taking up again what he had laid down, and being filled again with the virtues which, a little before, upon assuming a body, he had seemed to relinquish? He "advanced", therefore, not only "in wisdom", but also "in age". There is also an advancement of age. Two ages are spoken of in the Scriptures: one of the body, which is not in our power but in the law of nature; the other of the soul, which properly lies within us, and according to which, if we will, we daily grow and come to its summit, "so that we may be no longer little children, tossed about and carried around by every wind of doctrine", but, ceasing to be "little children", may begin to be "men" and may say: "when I became a man, I destroyed the things that belonged to a little child". Of this age, as I said, the advancement, which is the increase of the soul, is in our power. But if this testimony is not enough, let us take yet another example from Paul: "until we all attain", he says, "to a perfect man, to the measure of the age of the fullness of the body of Christ". It is in us, therefore, that we should "attain to the measure of the age of the body of Christ"; and, if it is in us, let us strive with all effort to lay aside the little child and to destroy him and to come to the remaining ages, so that we too may be able to hear: "but you shall go to your fathers in peace, nourished in a good old age"—a spiritual old age, surely, which is truly a good old age, growing gray and coming through to the very end in Christ Jesus: to whom is glory and dominion unto the ages of ages. Amen.