Whenever I’m asked to give advice about life to young people, I give the same answer: be patient.

What I mainly mean when I say this is: Slow down. Don’t be in a hurry. Life is long. Work hard, and the rewards will come. The dreams you have—some of them—will come true; those that don’t will be replaced by others, maybe even better ones.

In the context of everyday life, we think of patience in more mundane terms. Being patient is what we aim for (or fail at) when sitting in traffic, standing in line, or waiting for a table. But the virtue of patience entails much more than merely waiting. The essence of patience is the willingness to endure suffering.

PATIENCE AS SUFFERING

That “suffering” is the meaning of the root word for patience1 is made clear by the fact that we also use the word patient to refer to someone under medical care. The patient is someone “suffering” from an ailment—not merely waiting. Patient shares the same root as the word passion, which also means “suffering.” Someone who has a passion—a passion for music, a passion for soccer, a passion for a person—suffers on behalf of that love. When we speak in the church about “the passion of Christ,” it literally refers to the suffering of Christ on the cross on our behalf. The overlap between the words suffering and patience can be seen in another meaning of both words: “permit.” When Jesus said, “Suffer little children . . . to come unto me” (as Matthew 19:14 is rendered in the King James), he meant “permit” them to come. And when we speak of women’s suffrage, we refer to women being permitted to vote. The word permit in these contexts suggests willingness; the willingness to endure suffering is the meaning of the word patient. The expression “the patience of Job,” describing the great test of faith Job underwent in the Bible, refers to Job’s suffering, not merely his endurance. As connected as patience is to suffering, it is no wonder that, as theologian N. T. Wright points out, we “applaud patience but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.”2

Suffering is not something we do well in the modern age. It’s certainly not something I do well. This is why patience is, as they say, a virtue. Since suffering is inevitable in this world, it might seem silly to consider the willingness to endure it as a virtue. But while suffering is inevitable, we can choose how we bear it. Patient character has everything to do with our will, as opposed to our circumstances.

Like all virtues, patience is the mean between an excess and a deficiency. The excessive vice related to suffering is wrath. Evil and suffering should result in a righteous anger. To fulfill the admonition of Paul to “be angry and do not sin” (Eph. 4:26 ESV) requires patience that is the fruit of the Spirit. Patience is a virtue, not in overlooking wrong, but in refusing to do wrong in overcoming wrong. But untempered by patience, such an impulse becomes wrath. On the deficient side of the scale is a lack of spirit or carelessness or sloth. If in the face of evil or suffering one simply does not care, no patience is required. But such lack of care is, like wrath, a vice. Patience is not inaction. As the Bible says in James 5:11, patience is not passivity but perseverance. When faced with suffering or wrong, the virtuous person responds neither with wrath nor with stoicism but with patience. A person who has true patience is “angrily virtuous,”3 whether that means giving time for the emotional heat to subside before acting or simply waiting for the slow wheels of justice to turn.

The character most famous in literature for patience is the legendary Griselda of ancient folklore. Her story is best known in the telling found in Boccaccio’s Decameron, but it is retold with more Christian overtones by the clerk in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and other variations appear throughout world literature. In this story, a nobleman who spends all his time hunting and hawking resentfully gives in to his subjects’ desires for him to marry by choosing as his wife the daughter of a poor cottager. Her beauty, graciousness, and exemplary character only draw her husband’s ire, and he subjects her to the cruelest tests of constancy: he orders their first and then their second child to be put to death; he tells her he has gained papal permission to divorce her and remarry; he brings home a young woman he introduces as his new bride. Through all of this, Griselda responds graciously and submissively. At this point, her husband reveals all has been but a test. The girl is their daughter. He reunites Griselda with their children and takes her back as his faithful and beloved wife. Her character is known as the Patient Griselda. Griselda may represent some male fantasies of a patient wife, but her patience is not the virtuous kind.

A VIRTUOUSLY PATIENT CHARACTER

In contrast to Griselda, Anne Elliot of Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion may be one of the most virtuously patient heroines in literature. She is exemplary of the virtue of patience that comports with both the classical and the biblical understanding of that quality.

Patience isn’t the most obvious theme in Persuasion. Just as Pride and Prejudice is about pride and prejudice, and just as Sense and Sensibility is about sense and sensibility, so too the central theme of Austen’s last novel, published posthumously in 1817, is captured straightforwardly by the title (which was chosen by her brother after her death). Most of the characters in the novel can be evaluated in terms of how easily and by whom they are persuaded,4 beginning with Anne’s father, a baronet who must be persuaded to reduce his expenses in light of his dwindling fortune. Anne, we soon learn, was persuaded several years before the story’s beginning to make a decision that dramatically altered the course of her life, a decision she has come to regret.

When she was nineteen, Anne fell in love with and quickly became engaged to Frederick Wentworth. While Wentworth was honorable and hardworking and fully returned Anne’s affection, he was also a naval officer—not a member of the aristocracy. A trusted and beloved family friend, Lady Russell (who is “able to persuade a person to anything!”5), convinced Anne that her engagement to Captain Wentworth was ill-suited and that she could make a better match. Young and trusting, Anne followed this advice. When the novel opens eight years afterward, Anne is twenty-seven, still unmarried (a spinster by the standards of the day), and possesses a face and figure from which the bloom of youth has slipped away. Anne is painfully conscious of all of these facts, yet she is forbearing of her lot.

Then Captain Wentworth reenters the scene. He too has remained single. But unlike Anne, time has improved his station and allure, and he is ready to seek love again.

The social circle at the center of the story includes, along with Wentworth, a number of eligible women and men, each bent on settling down with a marriage partner from among many possibilities and rivals in love. It’s not difficult to imagine the acts of persuasion that ensue with such a cast of characters. When one of the would-be lovers, an impatient Louisa Musgrove, failing to be persuaded not to do so, jumps off a step—expecting to be caught by Captain Wentworth, who is a beat too late—she is knocked unconscious as her head hits the stone surface. This fall precipitates a series of consequences that shifts the dynamics of the budding romances, each one involving persuasions of various levels and types.

However, underneath this surface-level theme of persuasion runs an even more interesting theme. Anne’s virtuous patience is what makes her such an intriguing character and what makes Persuasion, I think, the most artful of Austen’s novels.

Anne is unlike most of Austen’s heroines and heroes because, as C. S. Lewis points out in an essay on Austen, she does not undergo illumination or enlightenment; but, in contrast to these other characters, she has no need to. Anne, as Lewis says, “commits no errors.”6 Too-perfect characters are rarely, if ever, interesting. But Anne’s passion, insight, maturity, and fortitude make her a winsome character despite her lack of a great flaw,7 a characteristic modern readers expect. An additional feature that makes Anne—and the novel—most interesting is her patience. She is called to practice patience because she suffers.

It is, as the narrator explains early in the story, Anne’s “usual fate” to have “something very opposite from her inclination fixed on.”8 In everything from her father’s financial irresponsibility to her family’s resulting removal from the country home she loved to the city of Bath that she detested, from one sister’s insufferable hypochondria and the other sister’s egocentric snobbery to being left alone as caregiver for her sick nephew, from serving as sounding board for family members’ complaints about one another to having lost the chance to marry the one man she loved, Anne suffers. And she suffers alone. C. S. Lewis calls Anne a “solitary” heroine, one who suffers in solitude.9 But she suffers virtuously. Anne is not the doormat Griselda who passively accepts the wickedest of wrongs. Nor does Anne succumb to the vice of wrath in spite of recognizing the suffering she and others around her experience as the direct consequence of evil or foolish decisions.

Because Anne suffers virtuously, she doesn’t let her pain cause her to turn inward upon herself. Rather, her patient bearing of suffering allows her to recognize the suffering of others. When the recently widowed Captain Benwick joins their party, Anne’s patience draws him out as others have been unable to do. Following a conversation with the bereft widower, Anne is persuaded she has “given him at least an evening’s indulgence in the discussion of subjects which his usual companions had probably no concern in” as well as guidance about “the duty and benefit of struggling against affliction.”10 Captain Benwick gratefully accepts Anne’s recommendations of reading to help him better bear his pain—a list that includes the “best moralists” as well as letters and memoirs by “the strongest examples of moral and religious endurances.” When the evening ends, Anne is “amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before.” She thinks, “like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would bear ill examination.”11 She suffers, yet does not recognize the virtuous way in which she bears it.

When Louisa Musgrove, who has lately received the attentions of Anne’s former suitor Captain Wentworth, falls and knocks herself unconscious, of all the company in attendance it is Anne whose patience brings order to everyone else’s panic and confusion. Time and time again, when others are rude or catty or neglectful or demanding, Anne’s patience is shown in graciousness that is gracious because it is not blind.

Anne’s greatest patience, however, is in bearing over the years her regret at breaking off her engagement to Wentworth. It would be easy for her to be bitter—bitter at her fate, at herself, or at Lady Russell for being the one to advise the break. But again, Anne exhibits true patience precisely because she is not blind. Her patience prevents her from hurriedly accepting a subsequent offer of marriage and from too hastily accepting the courtship of a new suitor, who, as it turns out, has ill motives. As a result, Anne is still free, and readier, all these years later, when her beloved Wentworth returns, better situated now than before and even more convinced of his love and desire for Anne. In the years that have passed, Anne, “forced into prudence in her youth, . . . learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning.”12 She has come to recognize that time is required “to be wise and reasonable”13 and is wise enough to recognize when she is not.

NO REGRETS

When she and Wentworth finally overcome the many obstacles to reuniting after all these years and are on their way to their reasonably-happy-ever-after, Anne explains to Wentworth how unavoidable her past decision was:

I have been thinking over the past, and trying impartially to judge of the right and wrong, I mean with regard to myself; and I must believe that I was right, much as I suffered from it, that I was perfectly right in being guided by the friend whom you will love better than you do now. To me, she was in place of a parent. Do not mistake me, however. I am not saying that she did not err in her advice. It was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides; and for myself, I certainly never should, in any circumstance of tolerable similarity, give such advice. But I mean that I was right in submitting to her, and that if I had done otherwise, I should have suffered more in continuing the engagement than I did even in giving it up, because I should have suffered in my conscience. I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in human nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and, if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman’s portion.14

Anne is confident that she made the right decision in being guided by Lady Russell, a good and rightful (if not infallible) authority in her life. “If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once,” she tells Wentworth, “remember that it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk. When I yielded, I thought it was to duty.”15

Anne’s reasoning reflects a quality of patience insisted on by Augustine in order for patience to be considered virtuous. “When therefore you shall see any man suffer anything patiently, do not straightway praise it as patience; for this is only shown by the cause of suffering. When it is a good cause, then is it true patience.”16 Patience is a virtue only if the cause for which that person suffers is good. Yet the source of suffering might not always be good. We cannot—in the name of patience—ask someone to endure abuse, since the cause of such suffering is evil, not noble. Anne suffers because she made a right decision to take the reasonable and well-intentioned advice of the mother figure in her life. The advice proves to have been wrong, but Anne’s patient bearing of the consequences of her decision to follow the advice is virtuous.

PATIENCE AND FUTURE PLEASURES

While others in the novel are eager to locate the cause of their suffering, and therefore to assign blame, Anne is more concerned with what future pleasures might possibly arise from difficulty. When Captain Wentworth marvels at Anne’s desire to visit Lyme again, on account of it being the location where Louisa took her terrible fall, Anne explains,

“The last few hours were certainly very painful,” replied Anne; “but when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering, which was by no means the case at Lyme. We were only in anxiety and distress during the last two hours, and previously there had been a great deal of enjoyment. So much novelty and beauty! I have travelled so little, that every fresh place would be interesting to me; but there is real beauty at Lyme; and in short,” with a faint blush at some recollections, “altogether my impressions of the place are very agreeable.”17

Anne’s perspective of suffering, in the words of Augustine, sees beyond what is “temporal and brief,”18 seeking instead what is greater and more lasting. I had a similar perspective, even as a child. Because I read so much and loved stories from an early age, when I encountered some sort of difficulty—teasing or getting in trouble for wrongdoing or disappointment in a friend or crush—I always had a sense that there was a story in the making. Although I didn’t find whatever unpleasantness I was in any happier because of it, simply wondering how the story would resolve gave me patience to bear it a little better. This seems to be Anne’s tack too.

A subtle contrast can be seen in the book between Anne’s posture, which transcends merely temporal concerns, and that of her father, Mr. Elliot, who makes constant observations about the effects of both time and suffering on people’s faces, complexions, and lives (particularly those of a lower class). Numerous connections are made throughout the novel between time and patience (or lack thereof). “How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!” the narrator observes concerning Lady Russell’s eagerness to leave the Elliot’s country estate and remain in Bath.19

Persuadability, too, is connected to time. While Anne’s rival Louisa Musgrove brags that she is not easily persuaded, Anne questions whether firmness of character is always ideal, arguing that “a persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness as a very resolute one.”20 Here we see a hint of the connection between persuasion and patience—both rooted in time, easily subject to it but also able to transcend it. As Anne remarks hopefully about the mourning of the widowed Captain Benwick, “We know what time does in every case of affliction.”21 When she realizes the corrupt character of her relation, the younger Mr. Elliot, she is patient in allowing his character to reveal itself rather than forcing the matter herself. She realizes, too, the effect of time on “pain, once severe, but now softened.”22

Anne’s transcendent view of persuasion and patience owes to what Alasdair MacIntyre says in After Virtue is her “teleological perspective,”23 a perspective that keeps ultimate purpose and end in mind. As we have seen, After Virtue explores what it means to live in a modern world that no longer believes in the essential part of virtue in human flourishing. MacIntyre points to Austen as one of the last modern writers whose worldview remains shaped by virtue ethics. Such principles are, MacIntyre says, “essential to Jane Austen’s art” and form a “grammar of conduct”24 within the world of her novels, a world newly characterized by social mobility, ideological flux, and increasing skepticism toward authority. In contrast to the modernity overtaking the world she lived in, Austen was Aristotelian in her view of happiness, drawing together in her novels Aristotelian and Christian themes25 that unite in an emphasis on “cheerful moderation.”26 Her novels demonstrate that the “virtues and the harms and evils which the virtues alone will overcome provide the structure both of a life in which the telos can be achieved and of a narrative in which the story of such a life can be unfolded.”27

MacIntyre attributes to Austen one virtue particular to her world, one not emphasized in most catalogs of classical virtues: constancy. Constancy is an important virtue in the world of Austen’s characters, according to MacIntyre, because of the emphasis their world places on two other qualities found liberally throughout Austen’s novels: amiability and agreeableness. Agreeableness is an impression one makes by conforming to expected manners (which, notably, was reflected in Austen’s original title for Pride and Prejudice: First Impressions). Amiability, however, is deeper and more genuine than mere agreeableness. Amiability “requires a genuine loving regard for other people as such, and not only the impression of such a regard embodied in manners.”28 A world of many rules and expectations lends itself to outward conformity that makes an impression—an impression that need not be in agreement with internal nature. The more appearances matter, the more counterfeits abound.

As a writer of comedies of manners, Austen is concerned with what MacIntyre calls counterfeit virtues. As with all counterfeits, those who are most often taken in by them are those in possession of them. Austen’s novels show that the antidote to counterfeit virtue is self-knowledge. Constancy depends on self-knowledge, “a recognition of a particular kind of threat to the integrity of the personality in the peculiarly modern world.” Constancy is what holds all other virtues together. Constancy is “reinforced by and reinforces” patience, which “involves a recognition of the character of the world.”29 This is exactly the patience—and constancy—Anne Elliot displays.

The nature of the world is that it is fallen—but will be created anew. Because it is fallen, the world is filled with people who are fallen—but who have the possibility of redemption. Nevertheless, pain, suffering, wrongdoing, and injustice are, because of this fallenness, inevitable. Failure to recognize either the current condition of the world or the promise of its future will lead to either of the vices that patience moderates: wrath owing to an unwillingness to accept this reality of the world or dispiritedness that is a form of withdrawal from this reality. Anne Elliot may be a character who doesn’t change over the course of the book, but she is interesting because she embodies in her patience this tension.

Recognizing the true character of the world requires recognition of the God who made it and his character. The most perfect patience grows out of not only teleology but eschatology too. “The end of a matter is better than its beginning, and patience is better than pride. Do not be quickly provoked in your spirit, for anger resides in the lap of fools” (Eccles. 7:8–9). N. T. Wright says about the virtue of patience: “Those who believe in God and the creator and in the eventual triumph of his good purposes for the world will not be in a hurry to grasp at quick-fix solutions in their own life or in their vocation and mission—though they will not be slow to take God-given opportunities when those arise.”30 Because God is sovereign over all, even over natural phenomena, James Spiegel explains, “all patience or impatience is ultimately patience or impatience with someone.” This fact helps to explain how impatience is ultimately rooted in egocentrism. Patience is difficult because it “concerns what philosophers call the ‘egocentric predicament,’ which is the natural human condition of being immediately aware only of one’s own thoughts and feelings.” He further explains: “I know, however, only my own thoughts and am intimately aware of only my own needs, which naturally incline me to put myself first. The result is frustration that I’m not first, and this strongly tempts me to be impatient.” Patience “is not a fundamental virtue so much as a complex of other virtues,” particularly generosity, self-control, and humility.31 These are virtues necessary to take us out of our natural, human egocentrism.

Even more than character and theme, the literary form of Austen’s novels embodies the decentering of self that is necessary to achieving the habit of patience. The satirical mode Austen uses depends on the double perspective of irony. Irony occurs when the intended meaning is the opposite of the stated meaning. Understanding irony requires the reader to accommodate both levels of meaning, the stated and the intended meaning, thereby forcing the reader out of the single perspective that defines most of one’s interior life. In this way, such a narrative form cultivates the virtue of patience.

Furthermore, for a Christian writer such as Austen, this technique has a specifically Christian purpose. As MacIntyre explains, “Jane Austen’s moral point of view and the narrative form of her novels coincide. The form of her novels is that of ironic comedy. . . . She is a Christian and she sees the telos of human life implicit in its everyday form. Her irony resides in the way that she makes her characters and her readers see and say more and other than they intended to, so that they and we will correct ourselves.”32

PATIENCE AND THE POSSESSION OF ONE’S SOUL

N. T. Wright says that patience is required in order to attain the other virtues.33 “Patience is one of the places where faith, hope, and love meet up,” he writes.34 Augustine describes patience as the virtue by which “we tolerate evil things with an even mind.” The patient person, he continues, chooses to bear evil rather than to commit further evil in response to it. Patience keeps us from yielding to evils that are “temporal and brief” and from losing “those good things which are great and eternal.”35 Patience is a high virtue, that’s certain. No wonder patience is traditionally understood to be a subvirtue of courage. Indeed, all the virtues, Aquinas says, “are directed to the good of the soul.” He continues: “Now this seems to belong chiefly to patience; for it is written (Luke 21:19): ‘In your patience you shall possess your souls.’ Therefore patience is the greatest of the virtues.”36

Of all Austen’s characters, Anne Elliot is the one who is most lovable and most admirable. Elizabeth Bennet is lovable, but until she overcomes her pride, she is not entirely admirable. Fanny Price and Elinor Dashwood are perhaps Austen’s two most admirable characters, but they are too passionless to be greatly lovable. Anne Elliot is both of these. She is so because she is self-possessed. In her patience, she possesses her soul.