The cultivation of the virtues cannot issue in any further happiness. Consequently, when Johnson praises patience, the distance between his conception of patience and that of the medieval tradition is as great as the distance between Hume’s concept of justice and Aristotle’s. For the medievals the virtue of patience, as I pointed out earlier, is intimately related to the virtue of hope; to be patient is to be prepared to wait until the promise of life is fulfilled. For Johnson—at least so far as this life is concerned—to be patient is to be prepared to live without hope. Hope is necessarily
...more
