Brendan Lupton: Gregory the Great's Development of the Virtue of Patience

A steady current in the Latin patristic tradition was the virtue of patience. Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine all devoted specific treatises to this virtue. Some even claim that Tertullian was the first to develop the Christian understanding of patience. Scholars, such as Robert Louis Wilken, David Harned, and Alan Kreider have studied the development of this virtue within this western stream. Gregory the Great’s understanding and development of patience, however, has not been explored in detail, perhaps since he himself did not pen a separate treatise on the topic unlike his predecessors. This omission in scholarship is a little surprising, since the protagonist of Gregory’s magnum opus, The Moralia,is Job, whom many consider to be an archetype of patience. Further, Thomas Aquinas will pepper his articles on patience with quotations from the last of the Latin fathers. This paper will explore Gregory’s development of patience and how the two currents of monastic theology and the fall of the West contributed to his articulation of this virtue.