# Longanimity: the Christian virtue Homer understood

**By:** Clement Harrold  
**Published:** 2026-07-27T13:00:00.000Z  
**Source:** [The Catholic Herald](https://thecatholicherald.com/article/longanimity-the-christian-virtue-homer-understood)

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 Something Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of The Odyssey conveys very well is that Homer’s epic is all about waiting. Well, “all” might be putting it a little too strongly. But certainly waiting is among the central themes of both the poem and the film.
Penelope waits for her husband to return. Her suitors wait for her to give up on her waiting. Ithaca waits for the return of its king. Telemachus waits to become a man. Odysseus waits to get home. And when he does finally arrive home, there is more waiting to be done before he can finally reveal his true identity.
All of this makes for a riveting story, particularly in our modern society, which, it seems fair to say, does not enjoy waiting. Ours is a culture of instant gratification where goods and services must be administered without delay. Netflix perceived this back in 2013 when it introduced the binge-TV model, in which all the episodes in a series are released in one go. Even our recent political debates over assisted suicide hint at our general impatience with life. Since we aren’t content with waiting to die, we prefer to take matters into our own hands.
For the Christian, all of this raises an interesting question. Is there any virtue to be found in waiting? We might answer this in a couple of ways. If we mean waiting around for nothing in particular, then clearly no, there isn’t anything virtuous about this. But if we mean waiting for something that is not only good but good for us, then this certainly is a virtue that we must learn to master.
Here Homer reminds us that our waiting ought not to be entirely passive. If our waiting for Christ’s Second Coming leaves us twiddling our thumbs and neglecting to prepare oil for our lamps, then our vigil-keeping has clearly gone wrong. But if our waiting is an active waiting, guided by patience and hope, then we have discovered one of the most distinctively Christian of all the virtues.
The name the tradition gives to this virtue is longanimity, also known in English as long-suffering. St Thomas Aquinas compares this “long-souledness” with the closely related virtue of magnanimity, or “great-souledness”. St Thomas explains that just as magnanimity is what enables us to accomplish good things that are great and daunting, longanimity allows us to accomplish good things that are far off but no less daunting.
In his book The Prodigal Church, Brandon McGinley characterises longanimity as “the virtue of taking the long view, of regarding something beautiful on the distant horizon and striding confidently towards it.” Bl Stefan Wyszyński, in his book translated into English as Working Your Way into Heaven, called longanimity “the virtue by which we acquire a spirit of lasting endeavour in the pursuit of a distant good”. The late cardinal noted that this good can only be achieved with much time and effort, and he offered a wonderful image: “Let us look at the work of the gardener grafting trees whose fruit he will never taste.”
 In traditional lists of the twelve fruits of the Holy Spirit, longanimity features as its own distinct virtue alongside patience. (These days generosity is often substituted for longanimity.) St Thomas dedicates a whole article in his Summa to understanding the distinction between longanimity and patience, both of which are intimately tied up with the theological virtue of hope.
Patience is the hope-filled virtue of guarding our souls against the kind of sadness that impedes our reason and prevents us from pursuing the good. Longanimity, by contrast, is the hope-filled virtue that fortifies our will in the pursuit of goods that are still far off. If patience empowers us to persevere in the race when the going gets tough, longanimity helps us put these difficulties in perspective by teaching us to keep our eyes on the prize. Longanimity attunes our hearts to Heaven, and in this way it supports patience without being identical to it.
JRR Tolkien offers his own literary embodiment of this vital virtue in the figure of the elf queen Galadriel, who explains how “through ages of the world” she has “fought the long defeat”. Like any good Christian, Galadriel is not naive. She knows that victory in the present life is not promised to righteous men. Yet she still considers the battle worth fighting, because she possesses the long-suffering (longanimity) that gives her an eternal perspective. Tolkien himself elucidated this point in a letter to a friend: “Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.” Longanimity provides us peace in our labours by reminding us that evil does not have the last word.
As such, both patience and longanimity play a pivotal role in securing us from final despair. In more proximate terms, they shield us against the vice of acedia that threatens our daily work. St Thomas variously characterises acedia as “disgust with activity” and as “sadness about the spiritual good”, where the prospect of carrying out some virtuous deed makes us sad because we know that it will be onerous and demanding. In his incisive book The Noonday Devil, Abbot Jean-Charles Nault warns that acedia paralyses our interior dynamism and causes us to lose the joy of living. We see vivid illustrations of this spiritual paralysis in Odysseus’s own journey, first with the Lotus-Eaters and again on Calypso’s island.
There’s no denying that Nolan has given us a Christianised retelling of Homer’s tale. Matt Damon’s Odysseus evinces a level of compassion, forgiveness and scepticism towards the gods that is totally foreign to Homer’s original. But something Nolan and the blind bard can agree on is the depth of character that Odysseus must discover on his long journey home.
At times this nostos demands patience. “Endure, my heart, you have suffered worse than this.” On other occasions, such as in his dialogue with Calypso, the Greek hero proves that even a pagan can be longanimous in some primitive sense: “I know myself that wise Penelope is less than you, it’s true, in looks and stature, being a mortal, while you are immortal and ever young. Even so I yearn day after day, longing to reach home, and see the hour of my return.”
 In poem and film alike, Odysseus’s perseverance through his many setbacks offers us an imperfect yet compelling model for what it means to wait with hope.
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