Patience Comes from Humility

True patience and calm are neither gained nor kept without deep humility of heart. If patience has sprung from this source, it will need neither the help of a cell nor the refuge of the desert. For it will look for no support from anything outside if it has the support within of the virtue of humility, its mother and guardian. But if we are disturbed when someone attacks us, it is clear that the foundations of humility have not been firmly laid in us, and so at the outbreak of even a small storm our whole building is shaken and ruinously disturbed. [a]

Patience would not deserve praise and admiration if it kept its intended calm only when no darts of enemies were striking it. It is grand and glorious because it stays unmoved when the storms of trial beat on it. For where a man is thought to be troubled and hurt by adversity, there he is strengthened all the more; and where he is thought to be annoyed, there he is the more exercised. Everyone knows that patience takes its name from suffering and enduring. So it is clear that no one can be called patient except the one who bears without annoyance every indignity done to him. It is not without reason, then, that Solomon praises him: “Better is the patient man than the strong, and he who restrains his anger than he who takes a city.” And again: “For a patient man is mighty in prudence, but a fainthearted man is very foolish.”

So when someone is overcome by a wrong done to him and blazes up in a fire of anger, we should not hold that the bitterness of the insult is the cause of his sin. It is rather the uncovering of a hidden weakness. This agrees with the parable our Lord and Savior told about the two houses, one founded on the rock and the other on the sand. On both of them, he says, the storm of rain and floods and wind beat equally. But the one founded on the solid rock felt no harm at all from the violence of the shock, while the one built on the shifting, moving sand collapsed at once. And clearly it fell not because it was struck by the rush of storms and torrents, but because it was foolishly built on the sand.

For a saint does not differ from a sinner in not being tested in the same way, but in not being beaten even by a great assault, while the other is overcome by even a slight trial. As we said, the courage of any good man would not deserve praise if he won his victory without being tested, since there is certainly no room for victory where there is no struggle and conflict. For “Blessed is the man who endures trial, for when he has been proved he will receive the crown of life which God has promised to those who love him.” According to the apostle Paul too, “strength is made perfect” not in ease and pleasures but “in weakness.” “For see,” God says, “I have made you this day a fortified city, and a pillar of iron, and a wall of bronze, over all the land, to the kings of Judah, and to its princes, and to its priests, and to all the people of the land. And they will fight against you and will not prevail, for I am with you, says the Lord, to deliver you.”