We are not a patient age. Since the time Ogden Nash penned the witticism, “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker,” the pace of life has become even more hectic. We are in love with speed. We want “fast food,” “instant replay,” immediate seating,” “instamatic cameras,” “rapid recoveries,” and “quick fixes.”
We want to spend money before we have time to acquire it, and arrange for our children’s college education before we have them baptized. We can dine in Paris, catch the Concorde, and have indigestion in New York. A certain Sean Shannon has become a kind of theatrical icon in our frantic age by reciting Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy at the break-neck speed of 24 seconds. A best-selling book is entitled If It Works, Break It. Things become obsolete the moment they are purchased. In the world of computer engineering there is the saying, “If it travels at the speed of light, it is too slow.” Perhaps Goethe’s Faust provided the slogan for the modern age when he exclaimed, “And cursed, above all, be patience.”
The old adage, “Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can; seldom in a woman, but never in a man,” is no longer as cynical as it once seemed, since we no longer prize patience as a virtue. Why wait? people ask, and then do not bother to wait for an answer. People have trouble waiting for the traffic light to change, let alone waiting for their coffee, waiting before they jump to conclusions, or waiting until marriage.
If speed is a way of life for our restless age, then “speed kills” is its epitaph. The paradox is that speed does not intensify or improve our experience of life. Rather, it destroys it. By contrast, patience gives us the opportunity to practice discernment, to test what is true, and separate it from what is not true. Patience allows us to live more fully and realistically.
The point is reiterated many times in the New Testament that God is patient with man, and that men must be patient in order to receive God’s word and allow it to bear fruit. As Our Lord Himself says, the seeds that fall in good soil “are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit with patience” (Lk. 8:15).
St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that patience is a part of fortitude. Unlike fortitude, however, that remains steadfast when there is danger of death, which is most difficult to endure, patience consists in holding fast to what is good in the midst of sorrow or pain. He is in fundamental agreement with St. Augustine, who states that through patience a person is able to bear an evil without being disturbed by sorrow, so that he does not abandon those goods that might advance him to better things.
The present obsession with speed, an unambiguous symptom of impatience — if we allow ourselves to be enlightened by the Christian tradition — is the immediate result of trying to avoid sorrow. But what is the sorrow or pain that modern man is trying to escape? It is the sorrow that results when one does not believe that his life is good. This absence of good, in itself, is reason enough for sorrow.
“It is sad not to see any good in goodness,” laments the Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol. This is a most insightful comment on modern man, who has lost a sense of the goodness of life. Unable to tolerate his boring situation, he reaches out frantically for some form of excitement, distraction, or stimulation that will make him forget the pain of his emptiness.
We need patience to endure the sorrow that besets us so that we do not betray the good we have. This is the thinking of Augustine and Aquinas. But if we have lost our sense of the good, our problem cuts deeper than a mere absence of patience. We must first learn to discern what is good and hold on to it with love. Then patience in times of sorrow will help us to be faithful to that love. We are an impatient society, to be sure, but we are a society that has lost its sense that what it has is good and worth suffering for.
Malcolm Muggeridge, in an interview with a Russian writer by the name of Anatoli Kusnyetsov, asked him how he managed, during Stalin’s reign of terror, to maintain his Christian orientation. Kusnyetsov answered for himself and many other Russians. He said that was because Stalin made one fatal error: He neglected to suppress the works of Count Leo Tolstoy.
Tolstoy’s writings were celebrations of the good of Christianity. These classics educated, even inspired, his readers to see that it was far better to suffer great wrongs than to abandon their Christian faith. They taught the nobility of patience and, as a result, his readers practiced it.
Patience, as Aquinas writes, is not the greatest of all virtues. It is a virtue for those who have found something good enough to suffer for. But for those whose boring lives drive them to desperation, what they most need is not patience but someone to love.
Dr. DeMarco is a professor of philosophy at St. Jerome’s College in Waterloo, Ontario. He is the author of The Many Faces of Virtue and The Heart of Virtue.
This article originally appeared in Lay Witness, a publication of Catholics United for the Faith, Inc., and is used by permission. Join Catholics United for the Faith and enjoy the many benefits of membership.
