Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] So far we have spoken of patience considered simply and uniformly, and lodged only in the mind — though we have worked hard at that same patience also as it earns merit in the body, seeing that it was produced by the Lord himself in the virtue of the body as well, since the ruling mind readily shares with its own dwelling-place the spirit that has been poured into it. [2] What, then, is patience's business in the body? First of all, the affliction of the flesh — a victim offered to placate the Lord through the sacrifice of humiliation, when it pours out to the Lord a libation of squalor amid privation, content with plain food and pure drink, when it joins fasting to this, when it grows familiar with ashes and sackcloth. [3] This patience of the body commends our prayers, strengthens our entreaties; it opens the ears of Christ, God, disperses his severity, draws out his clemency. [4] So that king of Babylon, when he had offended the Lord, was banished from human form for seven years amid filth and squalor; and when he had offered up the patience of his body as a sacrifice, he both recovered his kingdom and — more desirable still to a man — made satisfaction to God.
[5] Now if we set out the higher and happier stages of bodily patience, that same continence of the flesh also procures holiness: it holds the widow to her state, marks out the virgin, and lifts the voluntary eunuch to the kingdom of heaven.
[6] What comes from the virtue of the mind is carried through to completion in the flesh: the patience of the flesh, in the end, does its fighting in persecutions. If flight becomes urgent, the flesh does the soldiering of the hardships of that flight; if imprisonment overtakes it too, the flesh is in chains, the flesh is on the rack, the flesh is on the bare ground, amid that poverty of light and that want of the world. [7] But when it is brought forward for the test of true happiness, for the occasion of the second baptism, for the very ascent to God's own throne, nothing there counts for more than the patience of the body. Though the spirit be eager, yet the flesh, lacking patience, remains feeble — where then is the rescue of spirit and flesh alike? [8] But when the Lord speaks so of the flesh, calling it feeble, he reveals what must reinforce it — patience, naturally — against every scheme prepared to overturn or punish faith, so that the flesh may endure with utter steadfastness the lash, the fire, the cross, the beasts, the sword, which the prophets and the apostles overcame by enduring.