Patience

Is patience a moral virtue or merely prudential? Is it even really a virtue at all? For the Stoics, patience is a fundamental virtue, arising from, yet also sustaining, the reasoned detachment crucial to Stoic ethics. Through patient study we gain an understanding of the world and come to see there is only one genuine good: virtue. This knowledge allows us to calmly accept burdens and delays that would frustrate most people because we realize that wealth, pleasure, and other commonly pursued objects are only indifferents, and not in fact real goods. A proper understanding of the world enables us to avoid the passions that undermine our virtue and self‐control. Early writers in the Christian tradition also treat patience as a central moral virtue. For them, patience involves turning ourselves over to God's will, and accepting our own weakness. In enduring burdens calmly and demonstrating forbearance with others, we accept God's will, and imitate God's own patience and forbearance with us. These writers would reject a Stoic understanding of patience, with its emphasis on detachment from the external world and self‐mastery. For them, this would reflect both a rejection of God's creation, and a problematic pride.