Daily Reading for August 28 • Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 430

Augustine of Hippo’s On Patience. . . confines itself to two questions: where does Christian patience come from and what is its character? . . . Augustine argues that patience has but a single source, the free and unmerited grace of God, and defines patience as that which helps us “endure evils with equanimity so as not to abandon, through a lack of equanimity, the good through which we arrive at the better.” But calm and faithful endurance is a theme that gathers about itself a cluster of associated ideas: forbearance, expectation, and perseverance. “The patient,” he continues, “who prefer to bear wrongs without committing them rather than to commit them by not enduring them, both lessen what they suffer in patience and . . . do not destroy the good which is great and eternal.” Through a forbearance that has no thought of punishment or revenge, those who are patient neither permit an injury to become an obsession even more painful than the original hurt, nor do they retaliate, which would cancel out the difference between themselves and those who harm them. Leave judgment to God, counsels Augustine, . . . lest you yourself be found wanting because you have yielded to the stirrings of impatience.

From “The Gift of Perseverance” in Patience: How We Wait Upon the World by David Baily Harned (Cowley Publications, 1997).