A Weapon Blunted on Rock

Now, as we run through the causes of impatience, all the other rules will fall into place along the way. If our spirit is stirred up by the loss of property, the Lord’s Scriptures warn us in nearly every place to think little of the world; and no stronger argument for despising money is put before us than this, that the Lord himself is found in the middle of no riches at all. He always counts the poor righteous and condemns the rich before the fact. So he provided loss in advance as patience’s own portion, and contempt as wealth’s, showing by his own refusal of riches that injuries done to riches are not much to be minded either. When a thing is one we have not the slightest need to go looking for, because the Lord did not go looking for it either, we ought to bear the cutting down or the taking away of it without heartsickness. [a]

“Greed,” the Spirit of the Lord has declared through the apostle, is “a root of all evils.” Let us not read that greed as consisting only in craving what belongs to someone else. Even what seems to be ours belongs to someone else, for nothing is ours: everything is God’s, and we are his too. And so, if we feel impatient when we suffer a loss, grieving over what has gone from what was never our own, we will be caught bordering on greed — we are after what is another’s when we take it badly to lose what is another’s. A man greatly worked up by impatience over a loss puts earthly things ahead of heavenly ones, and so sins against God point-blank; for the sake of a worldly matter he badly shocks the Spirit he received from the Lord. Let us lose earthly things willingly, then, and keep hold of heavenly ones. Let the whole world perish, so long as I gain patience!

In fact, I doubt whether a man who has not made up his mind to bear steadily the loss of something of his — by theft, or by force, or even by his own carelessness — would readily or gladly lay a hand on his own property in order to give it away. Who that cannot bear at all to be cut by someone else draws the sword on his own body? Patience under losses is training in giving and sharing. A man who is not afraid to lose does not find it tiresome to give. Otherwise, how will anyone who has two tunics give one of them to a man with nothing to wear, unless he is also the sort who will offer his cloak as well to the man who takes his tunic? How will we make ourselves friends out of mammon, if we love it so much that we cannot put up with losing it? We will perish along with the mammon we lost. Why do we go looking for gain here, where our business is to lose? Being impatient at every loss is the nations’ business — people who put money ahead of their own soul, perhaps. That is what they do when their greed for profit sends them into the paying risks of trade at sea; when for money’s sake, even in the courts, there is nothing so damnable that they hesitate to try it; when they hire themselves out to the arena and the army; when they turn bandit along the highway like wild animals. But we are marked off from them by the difference between us, and it suits us to lay down not our soul for money but money for our soul — either freely, by giving it, or patiently, by losing it.

We carry our very soul and our very body around this world open to injury from anyone, and we show patience under that injury — so are we going to be hurt when something less important is nibbled away? Let no servant of Christ be stained like that: patience made ready for the greater trials deserting him in trivial ones. If someone tries to provoke you with his fists, the Lord’s warning is right at hand: “To the one who strikes you on the face, turn the other cheek as well.” Let his insolence wear itself out on your patience. Whatever that blow is, joined as it is with pain and insult, it will take a heavier one from the Lord. You wound the insolent man more by putting up with him, since he will be beaten by the one for whose sake you put up with it. [g]

If the tongue’s bitterness breaks out in a curse or an insult, look back to the saying, “When they curse you, rejoice.” The Lord himself was “cursed” in the eye of the law, and yet he alone is the Blessed One. So let us servants follow our Lord closely, and be cursed patiently, so that we may be able to be blessed. If I hear some reckless or vicious word said against me and take it too hard, I have no choice but to pay the bitterness back myself, or else be torn apart by a silent impatience. And when I am cursed and then strike back with my tongue, how will I be found to have followed the teaching of the Lord, in which it was handed down that a person is made unclean not by unclean dishes but by what comes out of his mouth? It is said, too, that a charge awaits us for every empty and needless word. It follows that whatever the Lord keeps us from doing, he is telling us to bear patiently when someone else does it.

Let me add something about the pleasure of patience. Every injury, dealt by tongue or by hand, once it has landed on patience, will be written off the same way a weapon is when it is launched at a rock of the hardest kind and blunted on it. It falls flat on the spot, its work useless and fruitless; and sometimes it springs back and spends its rage on the man who sent it, with the force turned around on him. No doubt the reason anyone hurts you is so that you will be pained, since the enjoyment of the one who hurts consists in the pain of the one hurt. So when you have upset his enjoyment by not being pained, he is bound to be pained himself by the loss of his enjoyment. Then you not only walk away unhurt — which by itself is enough for you — but pleased into the bargain by your opponent’s disappointment, and avenged by his pain. This is the usefulness and the pleasure of patience.

Not even that kind of impatience is excused — the kind we feel at the loss of the people we love, where a claimed right to grieve stands up as its defender. We have to set the apostle’s declaration in front of us. He says: “Do not be overwhelmed with sadness at anyone’s falling asleep, the way the nations are, who have no hope.” And rightly, for if we believe in the resurrection of Christ we believe in our own as well, since it was for our sake that he both died and rose again. Given, then, that the resurrection of the dead is certain, grief over death is pointless, and impatience in grief is pointless. Why should you grieve, if you believe the person has not perished? Why should you take it impatiently that someone has been withdrawn for a time when you believe he will come back? What you think is death is a departure. The one who has gone on ahead of us is not to be mourned, though he is certainly to be missed. [n]

That longing has to be tempered with patience too. Why should you carry beyond all measure the fact that someone has gone ahead whom you will be following shortly? Besides, impatience of this kind is a bad sign for our hope, and it deals dishonestly with the faith. And we wound Christ when we do not take it calmly that he has called someone out of this world — as though they were to be pitied. The apostle says: “I want to be taken up now, and to be with Christ.” How much better a longing he shows! If, then, we grieve impatiently over people who have reached the very thing a Christian wants, we show that we do not want it ourselves.

There is another chief spur to impatience: the appetite for revenge, working either for glory or for spite. But glory is “empty” wherever you find it, and spite is never anything but hateful to the Lord — most of all in this case, when, provoked by a neighbor’s spite, it sets itself up as the greater of the two by carrying revenge through, and doubles by repayment the wickedness that had been done once. Revenge, by the reckoning of error, looks like a comfort for pain; by the reckoning of truth it is convicted of malice. What is the difference between the man who provokes and the man provoked, except that the first is caught being earlier in the wrong and the second later? Each one stands charged before the Lord with harming a man, and the Lord both forbids and condemns every kind of wickedness. In doing wrong no account is taken of the order; place does not separate what likeness joins. [p]

The rule is absolute: evil is not to be repaid with evil. Like deed, like desert. How are we to keep to that principle, if in our loathing we do not loathe revenge as well? And what honor will we be offering the Lord God, if we take the right to decide a punishment into our own hands? We are corrupt — pots of clay. If our own slave boys take up the right to avenge themselves on their fellow slaves, we are seriously offended; while the ones who make us an offering of their patience we not only approve, as men who remember their humility and their servitude and are jealous for their master’s right and honor — we also make them a fuller settlement than they would have collected in advance for themselves. Is there any risk of a different outcome with a Lord who judges so justly and carries it out so powerfully? Why, then, do we believe he is a Judge, if he is not an Avenger as well? He promises he will be that for us in return, saying: “Vengeance belongs to me, and I will repay.” That is: leave patience to me, and I will reward patience.

For when he says, “Do not judge, so that you are not judged,” is he not asking for patience? Who will hold back from judging someone else, except the man who is patient enough not to avenge himself? Who judges in order to pardon? And even if he does pardon, he has still taken care to indulge a judge’s impatience, and has taken away the honor of the one Judge, who is God. How many disasters this kind of impatience has been in the habit of running into! How often it has regretted its revenge! How often its violence has turned out worse than the causes that led to it! Nothing undertaken in impatience can be carried through without recklessness, and nothing done recklessly fails either to stumble, or to fall outright, or to go headlong over the edge. Besides, if you avenge yourself too lightly you will be out of your mind, and if too fully you will have the weight of it to carry. What have I to do with a vengeance whose measure I cannot control, because I cannot bear the pain? Whereas if I settle down on patience, I will feel no pain; and if I feel no pain, I will not want to avenge myself.

Having listed the chief material causes of impatience as well as I could, why should we wander off among the rest — the ones we meet at home, the ones we meet abroad? The Evil One’s work is wide and far-reaching; he hurls all kinds of irritations at our spirit, some of them trifling and some enormous. But the trifling ones you can despise for their very smallness, and to the enormous ones you may give way because they overpower you. Where the injury is smaller, there is no need for impatience; where the injury is greater, the remedy for injury — patience — is all the more necessary. So let us work at enduring what the Evil One inflicts, so that the answering zeal of our own steadiness may make a mockery of the enemy’s zeal. [u]

If we ourselves bring something on ourselves, whether carelessly or on purpose, let us meet what we have only ourselves to blame for with the same patience. And if we believe that some things are sent on us by the Lord, to whom should we show patience sooner than to the Lord? In fact he teaches us to give thanks on top of it, and to be glad at being counted worthy of God’s correction. “The one I love,” he says, “I correct.” Happy is the servant whose improvement the Lord has his mind on! whom he thinks worth being angry with! whom he does not cheat by keeping his reproofs to himself! On every side, then, we are bound to the duty of practicing patience, whatever the quarter from which we bring the Lord’s reproofs down on ourselves — our own mistakes, or the Evil One’s traps.

The reward of that duty is great: it is happiness. For whom has the Lord called happy, if not the patient, when he said: “Happy are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of the heavens is theirs”? Certainly no one is “poor in spirit” unless he is humble; and who is humble unless he is patient? No one can bring himself low without patience enough, first of all, to bear being brought low. “Happy,” he says, “are those who weep and mourn.” Who puts up with such misery without patience? And it is to people like that that “comfort” and “laughter” are promised. “Happy are the gentle” — a heading under which the impatient plainly cannot be counted. And when he marks out “the peacemakers” with the same title of happiness and calls them “sons of God,” tell me, do the impatient have any connection with “peace”? Even a fool can see it. But when he says: “Rejoice and be glad whenever they curse you and persecute you, for your reward in heaven is very great,” that promise is of course not made to an impatience that cannot be glad; because no one will “be glad” in hardship unless he has first learned to think nothing of it, and no one will think nothing of it unless he has learned to practice patience.

As for the rule of peace, which is so pleasing to God — who in a world born for impatience will forgive his brother even once, never mind “seven times” or “seventy-seven times”? Who, with a lawsuit against his opponent in view, will settle the matter by agreement, unless he first cuts away the sulking, the hard-heartedness and the bitterness, which are in fact the poisonous growths of impatience? How will you “let a thing go and have it let go” for you, if the absence of patience makes you hold tight to a wrong? Nobody who is at odds with his brother in his own mind will get to the end of offering his “gift at the altar” unless he first comes back to patience, meaning to “be reconciled to his brother.” If “the sun goes down on our anger,” we are in danger: we are not allowed to go one day without patience. [x]

But since Patience takes the lead in every kind of healthy discipline, it is no wonder that she also waits on Repentance — Repentance, whose habit it is to come to the rescue of those who have fallen. When a marriage comes apart (I mean for the cause that makes it lawful, for a husband or a wife, to hold to a lifelong widowhood), Patience waits for repentance, longs for it, and pleads it into everyone who is one day to come into salvation. How great a blessing she gives to each of them! One she keeps from becoming an adulterer; the other she puts right. She is found, too, in those holy examples of patience in the Lord’s parables. It is the shepherd’s patience that looks for the straying ewe and finds her: Impatience would have written off one ewe easily enough, but Patience takes on the work of the search, and the patient carrier brings the abandoned sinner home on his shoulders. That runaway son, too, is taken in by his father’s patience, and clothed and fed and defended, right in front of his angry brother’s impatience. So the one who “had perished” is saved, because he set out on the road of repentance. Repentance does not perish, because it finds Patience there to meet it.

For whose teaching trains Love, if not Patience’s — Love, the highest sacred pledge of the faith, the treasury of the Christian name, which the apostle commends with the whole strength of the Holy Spirit? “Love,” he says, “is long-suffering”: there she is applying patience. “She does good”: patience does no harm. “She is not envious”: that is certainly patience’s own mark. “She is not insolent”: she drew her self-restraint from patience. “She is not puffed up; she does not trample”: that has nothing to do with patience. “She does not look after her own”: she offers her own, if only she may be of use to her neighbors. “She is not irritable”: if she were, what would she have left over for Impatience? And so he says, “Love bears everything, puts up with everything” — because, of course, she is patient. Justly, then, “she will never fail,” while everything else will be closed out and reach its end. “Tongues, kinds of knowledge and prophecies are used up; faith, hope and love remain”: faith, which Christ’s patience brought in; hope, which a man’s patience waits for; love, which Patience keeps company with, and God is her teacher.

So much, at last, for patience plain and all of one piece, as it exists purely in the mind. But I work at it in many forms in the body as well, in order to “gain the Lord” — since it is a quality the Lord himself displayed in bodily strength too, if it is true that the mind, as master of the house, passes the Spirit’s goods along readily to the body it lodges in. What, then, is Patience’s business in the body? First of all, it is the hard usage of the flesh — an offering able to satisfy the Lord by a sacrifice of self-abasement — poured out to the Lord in shabby clothing, together with scant food, content with a plain diet and the clean drink of water; in adding fasts to all of this; in breaking herself in to sackcloth and ashes. This bodily patience adds grace to our prayers for good and force to our prayers against evil; it opens the ears of Christ our God, breaks up severity, and draws out consideration. [ad]

That is how the king of Babylon, after he had been exiled from human shape through seven years of filth and neglect for having offended the Lord, not only got his kingdom back by the bodily sacrifice of patience, but — what a man ought to want more — made things right with God. And if we set out in order the higher and happier grades of bodily patience, we find that it is she who is trusted by holiness with the keeping of the flesh’s self-control: she guards the widow, she sets the seal on the virgin, and she lifts the man who has made himself a eunuch into the kingdom of the heavens. What starts as a strength of the mind is brought to completion in the flesh.

And finally, it is by the flesh’s patience that the fight is fought under persecution. If flight presses hard, the flesh is given strength to meet the hardship of flight; if imprisonment gets there before we can go, it is the flesh that is in chains, the flesh in the shackle, the flesh on the bare ground, and in that lack of light, and in that endurance of the world’s ill-treatment. And when it is led out to the final proof of happiness, to the occasion of the second baptism, to the climb up to the divine seat, no patience is needed there more than bodily patience. If “the spirit is willing but the flesh” — without patience — “weak,” then where is the safety of the spirit, and of the flesh itself, except in patience? And when the Lord says this about the flesh, calling it “weak,” he is showing how badly it needs strengthening — that is, by patience — to face every apparatus set up to overturn faith or punish it; so that it may bear with complete steadiness the whips, the fire, the cross, the wild animals, the sword, all of which the prophets and apostles conquered by enduring them.