The Patience of God

On Patience

I confess openly to the Lord God that it was rash of me, if not shameless, to have dared to write a treatise on patience — a thing I am wholly unfit to practice, being a man of no good at all. It would be more fitting that people who set out to demonstrate and commend some particular thing should first be conspicuous in practicing it themselves, and should steady their advice by the authority of their own conduct, so that their words are not left blushing at how far their deeds fall short. And I wish that blushing brought a remedy with it — that being ashamed of not displaying what we are about to urge on others would turn into a schooling that made us display it. Except that the sheer size of some good things, as of some evils too, is more than a person can carry, so that only the grace of God’s own prompting is enough for reaching them and practicing them. For what is best rests chiefly with God, and nobody hands it out except the one who owns it, as he judges right for each. [b]

So to discuss what it is not given me to enjoy will be a kind of consolation — the way sick people, since they have no health, cannot keep quiet about how good it is. And so I, most miserable of men, always feverish with impatience, must of necessity sigh for that health of patience I do not have, call on it, and keep begging for it. Meanwhile I call to mind, and, looking hard at my own weakness, chew over, this truth: that sound faith and a sound hold on the Lord’s discipline do not come easily to anyone unless patience is sitting beside him. Patience is set over the things of God in such a way that no one can obey a single command, or finish any work that pleases the Lord, if he is a stranger to it.

Even people who live outside it honor the good of it with the name of highest virtue. The philosophers — who are reckoned as animals of some considerable wisdom — give it so high a place that, quarreling as they do with each other over the various fancies of their schools and the rivalries of their opinions, they still hold a shared regard for patience alone; on this one of their pursuits they have agreed to make peace. For it they conspire; for it they band together; this, in their affectation of virtue, they chase after with one mind; on patience they display the whole of their showy wisdom. Grand testimony to patience, that it stirs even the empty schools of the world to praise and glory! Or is it rather an injury, that something divine should be knocked about among worldly sciences? But let them see to that — they who will shortly be ashamed of their wisdom, ruined and disgraced along with the world they live in.

For us Christians the warrant for practicing patience is no human affectation of doglike calm, got up out of sheer insensibility. It is the divine arrangement of a living and heavenly discipline, which holds up before us God himself, first of all, as the example of patience — who scatters the bloom of this daylight over just and unjust alike, and who lets the good offices of the seasons, the services of the elements, and the tribute of the whole of nature come at once to the deserving and the undeserving. [e]

He bears with the most ungrateful nations, though they worship the playthings of the crafts and the works of their own hands, and persecute his Name along with his household. He bears with extravagance, greed, wrongdoing and spite, growing more insolent by the day. He goes so far in patience that he cheapens himself by it; for the reason many do not believe in the Lord is that they go so long without any sign that he is angry with the world.

This sort of divine patience is, so to speak, at a distance, and may perhaps be reckoned among the “things too high for us.” But what about the patience that in a certain way has been handled with human hands, out in the open, on the earth? God allows himself to be conceived in a mother’s womb and waits out the time until birth; once born, he puts up with the delay of growing up; once grown, he is in no hurry to be recognized, but goes further and treats himself with contempt — he is baptized by his own servant, and beats off the tempter’s assaults with words alone. From Lord he becomes Teacher, showing people how to escape death, having himself been schooled in the complete forbearance of a patience that has been wronged. [g]

He did not quarrel; he did not shout; no one heard his voice in the streets. He did not break the bruised reed; the smoking wick he did not put out. The prophet — no, the sworn statement of God himself, who set his own Spirit, and patience entire along with it, in his Son — had not spoken falsely. There was nobody who wanted to attach himself to him whom he did not take in. He looked down on no one’s table or roof; in fact he himself did the work of washing the disciples’ feet. He turned away neither sinners nor tax collectors. He was not even angry with the town that had refused to receive him, when his own disciples wanted fire from heaven hurled at once on so insulting a place. He looked after the ungrateful; he gave way to the men who set traps for him.

That would be a small thing, if he had not kept his own betrayer in his company as well, and steadily refused to point him out. And while he is being betrayed, while he is being led up “like a sheep to the slaughter” — for “he opens his mouth no more than a lamb in the hands of the shearer” — he who at a single word could have had legions of angels present themselves from heaven, if he had wished it, would not approve the avenging sword of even one disciple. The patience of the Lord was wounded in the wound of Malchus. And so he cursed the works of the sword from that time on, and by restoring the man’s health made amends to the one he had not injured himself — through Patience, the mother of Mercy.

I say nothing about his being crucified; this was the purpose he had come for. But did the death he had to undergo need insults as well? No — but on the point of leaving, he wanted his fill of the pleasure of patience. He is spat on, flogged, laughed at, dressed foully and crowned more foully still. What astonishing faith in a level mind! The one who had set himself to hide who he was in the shape of a man imitated nothing of a man’s impatience. From this more than from anything else, you Pharisees, you ought to have recognized the Lord. No human being would ever manage patience of this kind.

Such evidences, and so great — evidences whose very size turns out among the nations to be a reason for rejecting the faith, but among us the faith’s reason and its upbringing — prove plainly enough, to those to whom it is given to believe, that patience is God’s own nature, the working and the excellence of something that belongs to him by its own property. And they prove it not only by the Lord’s sermons, where he commands it, but by his sufferings, where he endured it.

So then: we see every servant of any honesty and right feeling shaping his conduct to suit his master’s disposition; we see that the art of earning favor is willing obedience, and that the rule of obedience is a compliant submission. How much more, then, should we be found with a character that matches our Lord’s? We are servants of the living God, whose verdict on his servants turns not on a chain or a freedman’s cap, but on an eternity either of punishment or of salvation. To dodge that severity, or to win that generosity, we need as much diligence in willing obedience as the severity’s threats are terrible and the generosity’s offers are large. [m]

And yet we ourselves demand obedience — not only from men, who carry the badge of their slavery under the chin, or are bound by some other legal tie to serve us, but even from farm animals, even from wild beasts, understanding that the Lord has furnished them and handed them over for our use. Are the creatures God has put under us going to be better than we are at the discipline of willing obedience? After all, the creatures that obey do at least acknowledge their masters. Do we hesitate to listen carefully to the one to whom alone we are subject — that is, the Lord? How unfair it is, and how ungrateful too, not to pay back out of your own person the very thing you get from others by your neighbor’s indulgence — not to pay it back to the one through whom you get it.

No more words are needed about the willing obedience we owe to the Lord God; anyone who acknowledges God understands what is required of him. But so that these remarks on obedience do not look like a detour, remember that obedience itself is drawn out of patience. An impatient man never renders it; a patient man never fails to take pleasure in it. Who, then, could say enough about the good of that patience which the Lord God — who both shows and accepts every good thing — carried about in his own person? And who could doubt that every good thing, since it belongs to God, ought to be pursued with the whole mind by those who belong to God? By these considerations both the commendation of patience and the call to it are briefly settled, as if in the short compass of a legal plea.

Still, carrying a discussion forward on the necessities of faith is not idle, because it is not unfruitful. In building people up, no amount of talk is disgraceful — if it is ever disgraceful at all. And so, if the discussion is about some particular good, the subject requires us to review the opposite of that good as well. You will throw more light on what should be pursued if you first sum up what should be avoided. [q]

Let us consider, then, in the case of impatience, whether — just as patience is found in God — its opposite quality was born and first detected in our adversary, so that from this it may appear how deeply hostile to faith it is at the root. What was conceived by God’s rival is of course no friend to God’s things. Things are as much at odds as their authors are. And since God is the best of beings and the devil, on the contrary, the worst, by their very unlikeness they testify that neither works for the other: nothing good can be brought about for us by the Evil One, any more than anything evil by the Good.

So I trace the birth of impatience to the devil himself, at the very moment when he could not patiently bear that the Lord God had made all the works he had made subject to his own image — that is, to man. If he had endured it, he would not have grieved; and he would not have envied man if he had not grieved. He deceived him because he had envied him; and he had envied because he had grieved; and he had grieved because, of course, he had not borne it patiently. Which that angel of ruin was first — malicious or impatient — I decline to inquire. This much is plain: either impatience arose together with malice, or malice out of impatience; afterwards they conspired together; and they grew up inseparable in one father’s lap.

Then, having learned from his own experiment what a help toward sinning this thing was that he had been the first to feel, and by which he had started on his own career of offending, he called it in to help him push man into crime. The woman, the moment he met her, was — I can say this without rashness — breathed on, by his very conversation with her, by a spirit infected with impatience. She would certainly never have sinned at all if she had honored God’s edict by keeping her patience to the end.

And what of this: that she could not endure having been met alone, but in the presence of Adam — not yet her husband, not yet bound to lend her his ears — she is impatient of keeping quiet, and makes him the carrier of what she had drunk in from the Evil One? So a second human being also perishes through the impatience of the first. And presently he perishes on his own account too, through his own impatience committed on both counts — over God’s warning and over the devil’s trick — since he endured neither to keep the one nor to refute the other.

So from the same source as the offense came the first origin of judgment; from the same point where man was led into offending, God began to be angry. And where God’s first indignation came from, from there came his first patience: content at that time with a curse only, he held back from striking the devil with punishment on the spot. Otherwise, what crime is charged against man before this guilt of impatience? He was innocent, on close terms with God, and the farmer of paradise. But once he gave way to impatience, he stopped being of any sweet savor to God, and stopped being able to bear the things of heaven. From then on he is a creature handed over to the earth and thrown out of God’s sight, and he begins to be turned easily by impatience to every use that offends God.

For at once that impatience, having conceived of the devil’s seed, in the fruitfulness of her malice bore anger as her son, and, once he was born, trained him in her own arts. The very thing that had sunk Adam and Eve in death taught their son too to begin with murder. It would be pointless of me to lay this at impatience’s door if Cain — that first killer, and killer of a brother — had borne the Lord’s refusal of his offerings evenly rather than impatiently; if he is not angry with his own brother; if, in the end, he takes no one’s life. Since he could not have killed unless he had been angry, nor been angry unless he had been impatient, he shows that what he did in anger has to be charged to whatever suggested the anger — to impatience in her cradle days, still, in a manner of speaking, in her infancy.

And how she grew from there! No wonder. If she was the first offender, it follows that, being first, she is also the one parent stem of every offense, pouring down from her own spring the various channels of crime. Of murder we have already spoken. Murder is from the very beginning the outgrowth of anger; whatever other causes it later found for itself, it charges them all together to the account of impatience, as to its own origin. Whether a man commits that wickedness out of private enmity or for the sake of plunder, the earlier step is that he becomes impatient of the hatred or of the greed. Whatever it is that drives a man, it cannot be carried through into a deed unless he is first impatient of it.

Who ever committed adultery without impatience of lust? And when a woman’s modesty is put up for sale under pressure of the price, of course that sale is arranged by impatience of thinking little of gain. These I name as the chief offenses in the Lord’s sight; for, to put it briefly, every sin can be traced back to impatience. Evil is impatience of good. No indecent person is not impatient of decency; no dishonest person, of honesty; no irreverent person, of reverence; no restless person, of quiet. For any man to become evil, he will first have to be unable to keep on being good. How, then, can such a hydra of offenses fail to offend the Lord, who disapproves of evils?

Is it not plain that it was through impatience that Israel too always failed in his duty toward God? From that time when, forgetting the arm from heaven by which he had been pulled out of his Egyptian misery, he demands from Aaron “gods to go before him”; when he pours out his gold contributions for an idol — because he had borne with impatience the so-necessary delays of Moses while Moses was meeting with God. After the edible rain of the manna, after the water that came after them out of the rock, they despair of the Lord because they cannot endure a three days’ thirst — and this too the Lord charges against them as impatience. And, not to wander through the cases one by one, there was no instance in which they perished except by failing in duty through impatience. How did they lay hands on the prophets, except through impatience of hearing them? And on the Lord himself, except through impatience, likewise, of seeing him? Had they set foot on the road of patience, they would have been set free.

So it is patience that comes both after faith and before it. In short, Abraham believed God and was credited by him with righteousness — but it was patience that proved his faith, when he was told to offer his son up as a sacrifice, not (I would rather say) as a test, but as the symbolic sworn statement of his faith. God already knew whom he had credited with righteousness. So heavy a command — one whose actual completion was not even pleasing to the Lord — Abraham both heard patiently and, if God had willed it, would have carried out. Deservedly, then, he was called blessed, because he was faithful; deservedly faithful, because patient. [v]

So faith, lit up by patience, when it was spreading among the nations through “Abraham’s seed, which is Christ,” and was bringing grace in over the law, made patience her chief helper for enlarging and fulfilling the law — because that was the one thing the teaching of righteousness had been missing. Men used to insist on “eye for eye and tooth for tooth,” and to pay back “evil for evil” with interest, since patience was not yet on earth, because faith was not either. Meanwhile, of course, impatience made the most of the openings the law gave it. That was easy while the Lord and Master of patience was absent.

But now that he has arrived and has joined the grace of faith to patience, it is no longer permitted even to attack with a word, nor even to say “fool,” without the “danger of the judgment.” Anger is forbidden, our tempers reined in, the hand’s impudence checked, the tongue’s poison drawn out. The law has found more than it lost, since Christ says: “Love your own enemies, and bless those who curse you, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.” Do you see whom patience wins for us as a Father? In this one chief command the whole discipline of patience is briefly wrapped up, since doing evil is not conceded even where it is deserved.