This piece has been adapted from the forthcoming book: Water, Faith and Wood: Stories of the Early Church's Witness For Today, which is available from Doulos Christou Press.

One of the fundamental attitudes that shaped the life of the Early Christian communities was that they commonly referred to as "patientia."  Patientia is indeed the Latin word that is the source of our English word "patience." However, I have chosen to retain the Latin term, as a reminder that this attitude was much broader in meaning in the Early Church than the practices that come to our minds when we think of patience.  Above all, patientia was understood as an essential part of God’s nature.  Today, we would be quick to affirm that God is love (I Jn. 4:8, 16), but we have a tendency to forget the Apostle Paul’s definition of love in which it is described as first and foremost patient (I Cor. 13:4).  Similarly, the Early Church also understood Jesus as providing us with a model of patience.  Tertullian spends a chapter of his treatise ON PATIENCE describing the connection between the beatitudes and patientia.  He says, for instance:

When [Jesus] marks "the peacemakers" (Matt. 5:9) with the [title] of blessedness, and names them as "children of God," do the impatient have any affinity with "peace?"  Even a fool may perceive the answer to that question. When, however, he says, "Rejoice and be glad, when they curse and persecute you; for very great is your reward in heaven," (Matt. 5:11-12) of course it is not to the impatience of exultation that he makes that promise; because no one will "exult" in adversities unless he has first learned to endure them, and no one will endure them unless he has learned to practice patience (XI).

This passage reminds us that the attitude of patientia, in the early Christian communities, was largely comprised of endurance.  Cyprian likewise describes God’s endurance through the sins of humanity:

But what and how great is the patience in God, that, most patiently enduring the profane temples and the images of earth, and the sacrilegious rites instituted by men, in contempt of his majesty and honor, he makes the day to begin and the light of the sun to arise alike upon the good and the evil; and while he waters the earth with showers, no one is excluded from his benefits, but upon the righteous equally with the unrighteous he bestows his undiscriminating rains. We see that with indiscriminate equality of patience, at God's behest, the seasons minister to the guilty and the guiltless, the religious and the impious - those who give thanks and the unthankful; that the elements wait on them; the winds blow, the fountains flow, the abundance of the harvests increases, the fruits of the vineyards ripen, the trees are loaded with apples, the groves put on their leaves, the meadows their greenness.
(ON THE ADVANTAGE OF PATIENCE IV).

Tertullian also reminds his readers of their calling to endure through violence, grief, and indeed through all circumstances until the coming resurrection.  While it is not difficult to think of patience as a mindset, Tertullian notes that although patience begins in the mind, it also serves as a guide for all our being.  In particular, he refers to endurance through torture as bodily patience.   He says: "But when the Lord pronounces the flesh ‘weak,’ he shows what need there is of strengthening it - that is by patience - to meet every preparation for subverting or punishing faith; that it may bear with all constancy stripes, fire, cross, beasts, sword; all of which the prophets and apostles, by enduring, conquered!"  Tertullian proceeds to name Isaiah, Stephen and above all Job, as examples of bodily patience (ON PATIENCE XIV).  Cyprian also finds Job to be a paragon of patientia:

Thus Job was searched out and proved, and was raised up to the very highest pinnacle of praise by the virtue of patience. What darts of the devil were sent forth against him! What tortures were put in use! The loss of his estate is inflicted, and the privation of numerous offspring is ordained for him. The master, rich in estate, and the father, richer in children, is suddenly neither master nor father! The wasting of wounds is added; and moreover an eating pest of worms consumes his festering and wasting limbs. - And yet Job is not broken down by his severe and repeated conflicts, nor the blessing of God withheld from being declared in the midst of those difficulties and trials of his, by the victory of patience.
(ON THE ADVANTAGE OF PATIENCE XVIII)

Indeed Job provides us with a stellar example of patientia: patience under material loss, patience under grief, patience under illness and patience under the mockery of his wife and friends.  Although Job’s story stands as a stellar model of endurance, patientia for the Early Church consisted of more than mere endurance.  

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of patientia was the mindset that the disciple of Jesus was to let God be his avenger, and was not to take revenge upon his enemies.  Tertullian spends a chapter describing how we are to leave vengeance to God.  In this chapter, he argues that when God proclaims, "Vengeance is mine" (Rom. 12:19, Heb. 10:30), we are to understand that it indeed is God’s alone and not our own (ON PATIENCE X).  Thus, patientia was a guide for the early Christians when they faced persecution; it taught them that it is better to endure the suffering, as Christ and the Apostles did, than to return evil for evil, even to the point of not cursing their oppressors (cf. Tertullian On Patience VIII).  Patientia could therefore be summarized as trust in God’s sovereignty and omnipotence in all situations, even those in which we have to endure physical or emotional suffering.  To have patientia is to proclaim with Job, in the midst of our suffering: "Blessed be the name of the Lord" (1:21) or "I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted" (42:2 NRSV).  Thus, the stories of the Early Church show that the attitudes of prayer and patientia shaped the early Christian communities and defined the practices that were essential to their gathered life.

Patientia: A Lesson for our Churches Today

If we come to God in all humility, praying that the Kingdom of God would come "on Earth as it is in Heaven," God will undoubtedly move powerfully in and through our communities.  We will enjoy a bumper crop of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23 ), and we will start to see signs that the mission of Jesus is being carried out in our midst: the sick will be healed, the blind will see, and the oppressed ones will be set free (cf. Luke 4:18-19).  However, we must remember that God’s work will unfold according to the divine timing and not according to our own wishes.  Thus, one final lesson that our churches need tolearn from the Early Church is that of patientia.  The culture of the world, and particularly that of present day America, is centered around impatience.  One does not have to go very far to find examples of our impatience; in fact, we are often inclined to use "convenience" as a euphemism for our impatience.  There are convenience stores on practically every corner, and even many of our home appliances have their origins in convenience, especially ones like the microwave and the dishwasher.  Fast food restaurants, the modern icons of convenience, are just as abundant as convenience stores.  Out on the highways, the average speed is almost always in excess of the posted speed limit.  All these phenomena are, to some degree, symptoms of our impatience.

Our churches are, generally speaking, no less impatient than the society that surrounds them.  As we alluded to in the previous section on the power of prayer, we tend not to believe that God can or will move powerfully in difficult situations.  Practically speaking, we reject the omnipotence of God when we impatiently rush to take matters into our own hands.  Our unwillingness to let God be the Judge and Avenger is one of the fruits of our churches’ impatience. The patientia of Jesus that was so fundamental for the Early Church taught them that it was better to suffer than to inflict harm  Many churches in the United States have clearly demonstrated their impatience by supporting the government’s current war in Iraq.  Maybe the government is justified in going to war and maybe it is not, but regardless the Church has been called to be a nation of peacemakers, a people who demonstrates God’s love for humanity by loving their enemies, and not returning evil for evil.  It seems that the Church is particularly adept at making excuses for why we will not follow our calling, and this is particularly true with regard to our calling to return good for evil.  This teaching of Jesus is generally relegated to the realm of the individual if it is recognized at all.  One major problem is that we are unwilling to recognize the Church as a nation among all the other nations of the world, a nation founded and formed by the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles.  Our excuses and justifications are grounded not only in our impatience and disbelief but also in our fear of suffering.

Our fear of suffering stems in large part from our reliance upon technology and from our present lack of persecution.  As we learn to come to God in brokenness and to trust in Divine omnipotence, we will be taught patientia.  This process of learning patientia will certainly be a painful one, but we have not been left alone in these struggles.  We have a host of faithful witnesses that have gone before us, not least of which was Jesus himself, whose stories serve to inspire and encourage us.  We also have been given a new family, a community of brothers and sisters who enter with us into this painful journey of discipleship, and who will carry our burdens when they become too much for us to bear.

Hello !

Congratulations for your site.
We are building a site based in the concept of Patientia. It is written in spanish, soon we ll translate it to english. www.patientia.org

See you arround

Regards
Martin Crom
--Martín ( info at patientia dot org ) on 11/11/2004; 6:36:16 PM