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The Christian, however, must never abandon himself to the autonomous pull of his nature. Though he may pursue all kinds of licit objects with intensity, he must never install such a pursuit, as it were, in sovereign omnipotence. He must keep it always dependent on the sanction of his central personality and confront it with the rest of his valid interests—particularly, his tasks and duties. Yet, most people are prone to obey the impulse of their nature without submitting it to any control, on certain points at least: whenever, notably, the object pursued is not by itself illicit or fraught with sinful implications.

Impatience rooted in an illegitimate sovereignty of self

But there is a second root of the impatience we are now dealing with. A certain type of persons—who may be described as impatient par excellence—are apt to lose their temper not merely when obliged to wait for the realization of an object they passionately desire, but whenever they face a delay in the attainment of an aim they have once set up, even if that aim is a neutral or unimportant one as far as its actual content goes. They allow themselves unreservedly to be swayed by the weight which the thing they have proposed as an aim acquires simply on the strength of having been so proposed. The very failure of this chosen aim to find immediate accomplishment strikes them, in their obstinacy and arrogance, as an insupportable affront.

This unlimited subserviency to their own nature also creates in them an egocentric attitude, for they ascribe to any pursuit they are engaged in an importance over and above everything else. They recklessly disregard other people’s needs.

This second source of impatience, then, lies in one’s attribution of an unrestrained formal sovereignty to one’s nature. That is why typically impatient persons are likely to manifest such a self-indulgence and lack of discipline not merely when they have to endure a strong pain or the frustration of a violent desire, but whenever any purpose of theirs suffers a delay in its realization.

Our impatience is a mark that we have quit the status of habitare secum, and are swimming with the current of a predominant impulse or the formal automatism of our nature. There is an analogy with a fit of anger in this type of self-importance, or even more closely, with an act of frivolous swearing and cursing. We then, giving free rein to impatience, stake, as it were, everything on one card and give away our whole person without the sanction of our central and responsible self.

In other words, and viewed from a different aspect, we sever the fundamental link with God that defines the constitution of our life as a creature. This second factor—the tendency to erect any purpose, once it has been set up, into a formal absolute—is more characteristic of impatience than is the first-named one, the inordinate stress attached to certain of our pursuits, for it bears a direct relation to our scorn for time as a dimension of objective reality independent of our will.

Impatience rooted in a prideful denial of our creatureliness

Hence, we may proceed immediately to the third and most basic factor of impatience: the assumption of a false position of supremacy above the universe, the non-recognition of one’s own creatureliness, limitation, and finiteness. Thus illegitimately arrogating to himself a status of sovereignty, the subject clings to the illusion of being a lord over time. He would extricate himself from all dependence on the causae secundae, on the order and interaction of created causes. The impatient man experiences any obstacle to the progress of his pursuits as an injurious interference. He revolts at the check placed on human volition by the interval of time that must lapse between conceiving and attaining a purpose, and would conjure up the intended effect by a mere fiat—the likeness of a divine command.

Herein lies the primary and deepest sinfulness of impatience. It contains an act of hybris: an