Patience

Patience, patientia, is set against wrath, and the tradition understands it as the capacity to bear evils without being broken or deformed by them, not as passivity or as the suppression of feeling. Aquinas treats it as a part of fortitude rather than as an independent virtue, on the ground that enduring is a harder and more characteristic act of courage than attacking, and he distinguishes it from longanimity, the bearing of a long delay, and from perseverance, the continuance in a good work. Tertullian and Cyprian both wrote treatises on it in the early centuries, and it is one of the fruits of the Spirit at Galatians 5:22. The tradition is explicit that patience does not require accepting injustice: bearing an evil well and working to end it are compatible, and the failure to distinguish them has been used to counsel endurance where resistance was owed.

Tertullian opens his treatise De Patientia by candidly admitting the irony of a notoriously combative writer attempting to praise a virtue he confesses he possesses only poorly, a rare moment of self-deprecation in early Christian literature. Cyprian of Carthage, writing a generation later during the mid-third-century Decian persecution when Christians faced real pressure to apostatize, composed a companion treatise, De Bono Patientiae, explicitly building on Tertullian's earlier work but addressing patience to a community actually facing martyrdom, giving the virtue, in his hands, an immediate and dangerous practical urgency Tertullian's more philosophical treatment had lacked.

Patience and wrath fight the longest single combat in the Psychomachia, and it is the one Prudentius plainly enjoyed writing. Wrath attacks with every weapon she has. Patience stands still in armour and lets each one break. When the last spear has shattered, wrath, having nothing left to throw and no target that will respond, turns her own sword on herself. Patience walks off the field without having struck a blow.

The scene is the clearest statement anywhere in the tradition of what the virtue is held to be. Patience is not endurance in the sense of merely surviving, and it is not calm. It is a refusal to enter the exchange on the terms offered, and its whole strength consists in the fact that anger requires an answer and can be starved.

Later moral writing kept the structure and dropped the battle. The confession manuals of the thirteenth century and after treat impatience as a fault of appetite, a wanting of relief now, and treat patience as the same virtue that carries a person through illness, poverty and the slowness of other people. That widened it considerably. The Psychomachia's patience faces one enemy for one afternoon; the manuals' patience faces a life.

She has no settled attribute in art. Where she appears with an object it is usually an ox or a lamb, borrowed from patience of another kind, and the atlas draws no emblem for her.