Patience, patientia, is set against wrath, and the tradition understands it as the capacity to bear evils without being broken or deformed by them, not as passivity or as the suppression of feeling. Aquinas treats it as a part of fortitude rather than as an independent virtue, on the ground that enduring is a harder and more characteristic act of courage than attacking, and he distinguishes it from longanimity, the bearing of a long delay, and from perseverance, the continuance in a good work. Tertullian and Cyprian both wrote treatises on it in the early centuries, and it is one of the fruits of the Spirit at Galatians 5:22. The tradition is explicit that patience does not require accepting injustice: bearing an evil well and working to end it are compatible, and the failure to distinguish them has been used to counsel endurance where resistance was owed.
Tertullian opens his treatise De Patientia by candidly admitting the irony of a notoriously combative writer attempting to praise a virtue he confesses he possesses only poorly, a rare moment of self-deprecation in early Christian literature. Cyprian of Carthage, writing a generation later during the mid-third-century Decian persecution when Christians faced real pressure to apostatize, composed a companion treatise, De Bono Patientiae, explicitly building on Tertullian's earlier work but addressing patience to a community actually facing martyrdom, giving the virtue, in his hands, an immediate and dangerous practical urgency Tertullian's more philosophical treatment had lacked.