The ultimate virtue

It is common, during moments when our patience is sorely tried, to hear someone say, admonishingly, “patience is a virtue.” I would like to rephrase this wise statement slightly: patience is the virtue.

Or perhaps, stated another way, patience is the ultimate virtue. With it, every other virtue becomes attainable, every trial is conquerable, and true strength is found. Without it, every virtue disappears, strength withers, and vices of all kinds, shapes, and flavors take their place.

Franz Kafka put it best. He said (and I paraphrase somewhat): “there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience we lost the Garden of Eden, and because of impatience we may never return.”

I first began to see the connection between patience and every other virtue – and its converse correlation: impatience’s link to every kind of sin – while thinking about the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Kafka must have noticed the same connection, because his quote resonated strongly in my mind when I read it.

This ancient and well-known story has never seemed quite complete to me, and I don’t think we generally understand it. As it is commonly told, God gave Adam and Eve two commands: not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; and to have children. But there is a contradiction in the two commandments – as they were stated above, Adam and Eve could not obey both forever. As long as they kept one, they could not keep the other.

Let me explain. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (myself included) believe that before we were born here on Earth, each of us lived with God as a spirit; the soul, in other words, existed long before it was joined with a mortal body through birth. It was God’s plan that we each obtain a physical body in addition to our spiritual one, and this was to happen by being born to a mother and father here on Earth. Adam and Eve were the first couple, and all the rest of us would gain a physical body through them or their children. Hence, the commandment to multiply and have children. So far, so good.

But unless they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve would remain in their innocent state, not able to tell the difference between good and evil. They were like little children, who have no comprehension of sex and the process of reproduction, let alone the mental, physical, and emotional maturity necessary to be a parent and raise children. So if they didn’t eat the fruit (commandment #1) then they would never be able to have children of their own (commandment #2).

Why would God give contradictory commandments? The answer is quite simple: he wouldn’t. He’s not dumb, and he doesn’t give commandments that are impossible to obey. Clearly, the story is not telling us everything – we’re only getting part of the picture. What I think God actually told Adam and Eve was: don’t eat the fruit of the tree yet. He knew perfectly well that Adam and Eve would eventually need to be able to comprehend good from evil. That was, after all, a core part of the whole plan he had put together. Understanding good and evil and learning to choose the good is at the core of what this life is all about. So why would God forbid it absolutely? It makes no sense. It seems pretty clear to me that God fully intended for Adam and Eve to eat the fruit eventually, but not right away.

Why couldn’t they eat the fruit right away? Good question. And I don’t know the answer for sure. But I have a couple guesses.

First, Adam and Eve needed to grow and increase in understanding before they could eat the fruit. You might be thinking, “wait a second! I thought you told me they couldn’t grow in understanding until they ate the fruit.” Good point. But just as a child grows in understanding very gradually at first, so perhaps did Adam and Eve. Even though a one-year-old doesn’t fully grasp what good and evil are, and has a very limited understanding of the world, he certainly knows and understands more than an infant who is, say, only one week old. Perhaps Adam and Eve needed a similar growth period before they could understand the consequences of eating the fruit of the tree. I mean, it would change their world forever – opposition would enter the story and the perfect world they had inhabited would become the imperfect one we all know so well. The God I know would never force anyone – let alone his own children – to make that choice without understanding what it meant. If Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree, it would be because they chose to do so.

Second, perhaps patience was the very lesson God was trying to teach Adam and Eve by telling them not to eat the fruit just yet. In essence, he was testing their ability to wait. After all, the fruit was delicious, and some of the consequences at least were very desirable. I mean, if someone else knows something that you don’t, it makes you want to know too, doesn’t it? Adam and (especially) Eve realized that there was a lot more to life than what they knew, and that eating the fruit was the key to discovering what that was. I even believe that God may have told them that eating the fruit was a good and necessary step for the plan to unfold – but that they were to wait until later to eat it.

What does all this have to do with patience, virtue, and vice? In essence, Eve’s sin – the first of all and, I believe, the archetype of all sin – was impatience. When she ate the fruit from Satan’s hand, she was saying to God, “I want this, and I want it now. I’m not willing to wait for you to give it to me when you think the timing is right.”

Similarly, nearly all our sins are impatience in some form or another. Take immorality, for instance. Sexual desire is neither virtue nor vice, in and of itself. It all depends on how and when it is acted upon. And it’s primarily a question of timing: sex with someone with whom you have not made sacred, solemn commitments is a serious sin; sex with that same person after making those solemn commitments (i.e. the commitments entailed in the marriage covenant) is not. Sexual sin, therefore, is fundamentally a matter of impatience. By the same token, virtue – immorality’s opposite – can only be found where there is patience enough to wait until marriage vows have been made.

Our ability to forsake sin and return to God’s presence after this life is predicated on cultivating patience. Without patience, we will never be able to return home to the paradise with God our Father that the Garden of Eden represents.

But patience isn’t only necessary to forsake sin. It is also essential to cultivate every virtue that we have a name for. This is in part because we are all imprefect beings and overcoming  our weaknesses and cultivating virtues in their place is a painstaking, slow process that requires persistent effort over time. In effect, it requires patience. But even more than that, every virtue incorporates patience into its very essence. Patience is the very fabric out of which each virtue is woven.

It’s like energy: almost every form of energy man knows how to exploit is, in essence, solar energy. Obviously photovoltaic solar panels use solar energy, but nearly all the other forms we’re familiar with do as well. Take wind power, for instance. The sun heats up the land masses and seas of the Earth at different speeds. This is because the specific heat of water is higher than that of rock or earth – meaning that during the day the land heats up faster than the oceans and seas, while at night the land cools faster. This temperature difference between land and sea gives rise to a corresponding temperature difference in the air directly above them, and masses of air with different temperatures have different pressures also. It is this pressure difference in adjacent masses of air that gives rise to wind, which we harvest for energy using wind turbines. So even wind energy is, essentially, solar energy. Similar arguments can be made for oil and natural gas too, which are solar energies at heart.

In the same way, all virtues are patience in essence, but in a different form. Take hope, for instance – in my mind one of the greatest virtues. Hope is more than mere wishing, it is believing in good things, and believing that good things will come. The realization of our hope is not instantaneous, obviously, or else there would be no need to hope at all. To hope, then, is to be patient. It is to accept a delay between our good, noble decisions, and the consequences that we firmly believe will follow from them. One cannot hope, therefore, without patience. And patience brings hope within reach.

With all the numerous ways in which we can do evil and hurt or harm others; and with the equally numerous virtues we can and must cultivate, it can seem overwhelming and even impossible to lead a good life by forsaking sin and cultivating virtue. Our attention is pulled in too many directions at once, and we never seem to make any real progress in any of them. So, for me at least, it’s comforting to greatly reduce the complexity of the picture and simply focus on one virtue and on discovering its applications in all areas of life.

Patience is the ultimate virtue.