The Patience of a Devout Woman

Of this patience, then, I want to give you at least two examples. The first is of a certain devout woman who pursued the virtue of patience so eagerly that she not only did not avoid the assaults of trial, but actually made occasions of trouble for herself so that she would never stop being tested. [a]

This woman lived at Alexandria. She came of no humble ancestry, and was serving the Lord devoutly in the house her parents had left her. She came to Athanasius the bishop, of blessed memory, and begged him to give her some other widow to support, one of those being provided for at the church’s expense. To give her request in her own words, she said: “Give me one of the sisters to look after.”

The bishop praised the woman’s purpose, because he saw she was very ready for a work of mercy. He ordered a widow to be chosen out of the whole number, one preferred above all the rest for the goodness of her character and her serious and well-ordered life. He feared that otherwise her wish to be generous might be overcome by the fault of the one receiving her kindness, and that she who sought gain from the poor might be disgusted at the other’s bad character and so suffer injury to her faith. So the widow was brought home. The woman served her with every kind of service, and found out her excellent modesty and gentleness, and saw that every moment she was honored with thanks for her kind attentions. After a few days she came back to the bishop and said: “I asked you to have a woman given to me whom I could support and serve with obedient compliance.”

At first he did not understand the woman’s aim and desire. He thought her request had been neglected through the deceitfulness of the one in charge, and asked, not without some anger, what the reason for the delay was. At once he discovered that a widow better than all the rest had been assigned to her. So he secretly ordered that the very worst of them all be given to her: the one, I mean, who outdid everyone under the power of these faults in anger, quarreling, heavy drinking and talkativeness.

She was found only too easily and given to her. The woman began to keep her at home and to serve her with the same care as the former widow, or even more attentively. And this was all the thanks she got for her services: she was constantly tried by undeserved wrongs and continually harassed with reproaches and abuse. The widow complained about her and scolded her with spiteful and belittling remarks, saying she had asked for her from the bishop not to refresh her but rather to torment and annoy her, and had taken her from rest to labor instead of from labor to rest. Her constant reproaches went so far that the insolent woman did not even hold back from laying hands on her. But the other only redoubled her services in still humbler tasks. She learned to overcome that vixen not by resisting her but by submitting to her still more humbly, so that, provoked by every kind of indignity, she might calm the shrew’s madness by gentleness and kindness.

When she had been thoroughly strengthened by these exercises and had reached the perfect virtue of the patience she longed for, she came to the bishop to thank him for his decision and choice, and for the blessing of her training. For he had at last, as she wished, provided her with a most fitting teacher of patience. Strengthened daily by that woman’s constant annoyance, as a wrestler by oil, she had arrived at complete patience of mind. “At last,” she said, “you have given me one to support. The former one rather honored and refreshed me by her services.”

This is enough to have told about the female sex, so that by this story we may not only be built up but even put to shame, since we cannot keep our patience unless, like wild beasts, we are put away in caves and cells.