2 Peter 1:6Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

Behold the qualities that have been indicated: virtue, discernment, self-control, patience, piety, brotherly love, and love. They must not only be in us, but be present in abundance. If their existence is useful, their abundance is even more so. What benefit comes from them? This: that we may have boldness on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. I speak of His second coming, when He will come to judge the living and the dead. It is truly a great and extraordinary good to have boldness at the divine and dread judgment.

Then comes self-control. It too is necessary for one who has reached the indicated measure, lest he grow proud because of the greatness of the gift. Yet a gift cannot be made secure by brief self-control. For the passions, despite the freedom that restrains them, always love to rush toward what is worse. Therefore patience must surpass them. It will accomplish everything, and piety will bring peace, and hope in God will perfect it.

On the contrary, those who practice abstinence should be exhorted to watch carefully at all times. When they flee gluttony, graver vices must not arise in them as though from virtue itself.

While they exhaust the flesh, they must not fall into frenzy of spirit. There is no virtue in victory over the flesh if the spirit is overcome by anger.

Sometimes, while the mind of those who practice abstinence restrains itself from anger, joy corrupts it, entering like a foreigner. Thus it destroys the good of abstinence through the very thing by which it is too little on guard against spiritual vices.

Therefore the prophet rightly said: In the days of your fasts, your desires attack. And a little later: in judgment and bringing hunger to quarrels, you strike with fists.

After they learn to do what is good, those who practice self-control soon renounce evil, if they turn away from earthly temptations, lest heavenly knowledge prove vain. Self-control is necessarily always accompanied by patience. Whoever has learned to abstain from the pleasures of the world needs firmness of spirit in order to withstand them, defending himself “with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left” (2 Cor 6:7). In patience there is piety, because through the things he patiently endures he also becomes virtuous, according to the word of the Apostle Paul: “Love suffers long and is kind” (1 Cor 13:4).

The apostle exhorts Christians, having received great and precious promises and all the powers necessary for a pious life, to withdraw from the corrupting lusts that rule in the world. They must use every effort to reveal and increase in themselves the various forms of virtue.

The apostle's table of virtues is an eight-rung ladder of Christian perfection, leading the Christian from faith to love. According to the apostle Paul, love is the bond of perfection (Col 3:14; 1 Cor 3:13).

Faith serves as the foundation or beginning. Good works must be joined to it (Jas 2:17). To avoid the dangers that threaten the fulfillment of good works, discernment is needed, γνῶσις.

Self-control: not merely temperance, but self-control as self-mastery and self-limitation, accomplished with effort. It is abstinence from the corruption by lust that rules in the world (2 Pet 1:4).

It is the bridling of evil desires and of the abuse of Christian freedom. It is a great and strong virtue in the order of the other virtues.

Patience: this is stability in the whole manner of thought, action, and life. It is opposed to levity, impatience, and inconstancy, which acts now one way and now another.

It is a lofty and firm virtue in the order of the other virtues. It is like ballast on a ship, which does not allow the ship to be driven about by every wave. It makes the ship steady amid all storms and tempests, giving it stability.

Having indicated to Christians the highest foundation for withdrawal from the vice then widely spread in the world, and having awakened a striving toward constant moral perfection, the apostle indicates a successive series of steps for possible ascent to moral perfection.

This ascent is the necessary means to a better knowledge of God. The first step of this ladder is indicated in faith, which serves as the first foundation in the knowledge of God. Christian life begins with it.

Good works, and virtue in general, depend on its growth. Virtue is nothing other than the living manifestation of faith. Therefore virtue is indicated by the apostle as the second step.