The Perfection of Patience

I had a double reason for telling you this story. The first is that we should weigh this man’s steadfastness and constancy, and, since the enemy attacks us with lesser wiles, hold all the more firmly to calm and patience. The second is that we should settle it with firm resolve that we cannot be safe from the storms of temptation and the assaults of the devil if we rest all the defense of our patience and all our confidence, not on the strength of the inner man, but on the doors of our cell, or the hidden places of the desert, or the company of the saints, or the safeguard of anything else outside us. For unless our mind is strengthened by the power of his protection who says in the gospel, “The kingdom of God is within you,” it is useless to imagine that we can defeat the plots of our enemy of the air with the help of the men who live with us, or escape them by distance, or shut them out with walls. Saint Paphnutius lacked none of these things, and yet the tempter still found a way in to attack him. Neither the surrounding walls, nor the solitude of the desert, nor the merits of all the saints in that congregation drove off that most foul spirit. But because the holy servant of God had fixed the hope of his heart, not on those outward things, but on him who is the judge of all secrets, not even the schemes of such an assault could move him. On the other hand, did not the man whom envy had driven headlong into so grievous a sin enjoy the benefit of solitude, the protection of a secluded dwelling, and the company of the blessed Isidore, abbot and presbyter, and of other saints? And yet, because the storm the devil raised found him on the sand, it did not merely beat upon his house; it overturned it. [a]

We must not, then, look for our peace in outward things, or imagine that another person’s patience can do anything for the faults of our own impatience. For just as “the kingdom of God is within you,” so “a man’s enemies are those of his own household.” No one is more my enemy than my own heart, which truly is the member of my household closest to me. And so, if we are careful, enemies within can never harm us. For where those of our own household are not set against us, there the kingdom of God is kept safe in peace of heart. If you look into the matter carefully, no one, however spiteful, can injure me if I do not fight against myself with a warring heart. And if I am injured, the fault lies not in the other’s attack but in my own impatience. Strong, solid food is good for a man in good health and bad for a sick one; yet it cannot harm the one who eats it unless his own weakness gives it the power to harm.

So if any such temptation ever arises among the brothers, we need never be shaken out of our steady course, or give an opening to the blasphemous snarling of people living in the world. Nor should we wonder that some bad and detestable men have slipped secretly into the number of the saints. For as long as we are trodden down and trampled on the threshing floor of this world, the chaff destined for eternal fire is quite sure to be mixed with the choicest of the wheat. Finally, if we bear in mind that Satan was chosen among the angels, and Judas among the apostles, and Nicholas, the author of a detestable heresy, among the deacons, it will be no wonder that the basest of men are found in the ranks of the saints. Some maintain that this Nicholas was not the same man whom the apostles chose for the work of the ministry. Even so, they cannot deny that he was one of the disciples, and all of them were plainly of the same character and perfection as the few we can now barely find in the coenobia.

Let us hold up, then, not the fall of the brother I spoke of, who collapsed so grievously in the desert, nor the horrible stain he afterward washed away with the abundant tears of his repentance, but the example of the blessed Paphnutius. Let us not be ruined by the fall of the first, whose ingrained sin of envy was swollen and made worse by his pretended piety. Let us instead imitate with all our might the humility of the second, which was no sudden product of the quiet of the desert, but had been won among men and was then completed and perfected by solitude.

You should know, however, that the evil of envy is harder to cure than other faults. I would almost say that a man whom it has once tainted with the harm of its poison is beyond remedy. For this is the plague of which the prophet says, in a figure: “See, I will send among you serpents, basilisks, against which there is no charm, and they will bite you.” The prophet rightly compares the stings of envy to the deadly poison of basilisks, since by envy the first author and chief of all poisons himself perished and died. He killed himself before he killed the one he envied; he destroyed himself before he poured out the poison of death against man. For “through the envy of the devil death entered the world, and those who are on his side follow him.”

Just as the one who was first corrupted by the plague of that evil admitted no remedy of repentance and no healing plaster, so those who have given themselves up to be struck by the same stings shut out all the help of the holy charmer. They are tormented, not by the faults of those they are jealous of, but by their prosperity, and so they are ashamed to show the real truth, and look instead for some outside cause of offense, needless and trivial. And because these causes are entirely false, the hope of a cure is vain, while the deadly poison they will not bring out lies hidden in their veins. Of this the wisest of men has rightly said: “If a serpent bites without hissing, there is nothing the charmer can supply.” These are the silent bites, the only ones the medicine of the wise cannot help.

For this evil is so far beyond cure that attentions make it worse, kindnesses increase it, and gifts provoke it, because, as the same Solomon says, “Envy endures nothing.” The more another advances in humble submission, or in the virtue of patience, or in the merit of generosity, the sharper the stings of envy that goad a man, because he wants nothing less than the ruin or death of the one he envies. So it was that no submission on the part of their harmless brother could soften the envy of the eleven patriarchs. Scripture says of them: “But his brothers envied him, because his father loved him, and they could not speak peaceably to him.” In the end their jealousy, which would listen to no pleading from their obedient and submissive brother, wanted him dead, and was barely satisfied with the sin of selling a brother.

It is plain, then, that envy is worse than all the other faults and harder to get rid of, since it is inflamed by the very remedies that destroy the rest. For example, a man grieved by a loss someone has caused him is healed by generous compensation; a man sore over a wrong done to him is calmed when amends are humbly made. But what can you do with someone who is all the more offended the humbler and kinder he sees you to be? He is not stirred to anger by greed, which a bribe could satisfy, or by an injury or a love of revenge, which attentive service could overcome. He is irritated only by another’s success and happiness. And who is there who, to satisfy someone who envies him, would want to fall from his good fortune, or lose his prosperity, or be caught up in some disaster?

That is why we must constantly beg for the help of God, to whom nothing is impossible, so that the serpent may not with a single bite of this evil destroy all that is flourishing in us and that is, as it were, alive and quickened by the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit. The other poisons of serpents, that is, the sins and faults of the flesh, in which human frailty is easily entangled and from which it is just as easily cleansed, show some traces of their wounds in the flesh. By them the earthly body is very dangerously inflamed; yet if a charmer well skilled in divine incantations applies a cure and an antidote, or the remedy of saving words, the poison does not reach as far as the everlasting death of the soul. But the poison of envy, as if breathed out by the basilisk, destroys the very life of religion and faith even before the wound is felt in the body.

For the man who finds fault with nothing in his brother except his happiness does not rise up against men but, in his blasphemy, against God. He blames no fault of man, but simply the judgment of God. This, then, is that “root of bitterness springing up” which lifts itself to heaven and goes on to reproach the very Author who gives good things to man. Nor should anyone be troubled that God threatens to send “serpents, basilisks” to bite those whose crimes offend him. It is certain that God cannot be the author of envy. Yet it is just, and worthy of the divine judgment, that while good gifts are given to the humble and refused to the proud and reprobate, those who, as the apostle says, deserve to be handed over “to a reprobate mind” should be struck and consumed by envy sent, as it were, by him, as in this passage: “They have provoked me to jealousy with those that are no gods, and I will provoke them to jealousy with those that are no nation.”

With this discourse the blessed Piamun stirred still more keenly the desire with which we had begun to move up from the infant class of the coenobium to the second grade, the life of the anchorites. It was under his teaching that we made our first start in living alone, a life we afterward came to know more thoroughly in Scete. [p]