How to Grow in Perseverance

The virtue that decides everything—the virtue of the end

All virtues are exercised in the moment; perseverance, however, is exercised in time. One can be courageous once, generous for a day, fervent during a retreat: that does not yet make a saint. What makes the saint is continuity—the ability to remain faithful when the initial momentum has faded, when no one is watching anymore, when nothing visibly changes. Saint Bonaventure sums it all up in three sentences:

“Persevere. What matters is not to have begun well, but to finish well. The crown is given only to perseverance.” — Saint Bonaventure^[4]

This is why the enemy concentrates his efforts not on the beginning, but on duration. He willingly lets a soul catch fire, make beautiful resolutions, multiply beginnings: he knows that beginning costs nothing and commits to nothing. What he watches for is the moment when one grows weary. “Many begin a life with Me, but they grow weary and abandon Me, poor unhappy souls!”^[5], the Lord complains to Blessed Conchita Cabrera de Armida. Spiritual history is paved with good beginnings without arrival.

“Whoever perseveres to the end will be saved”

Perseverance is not an ornament of the Christian life: it is its condition for salvation. Christ does not say that the one who believed one day, or loved for a moment, will be saved, but the one who has endured:

“You will be hated by all because of my name. But whoever perseveres to the end will be saved.” — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 24:13^[6]

The Letter to the Hebrews says it again in the register of effort: “You have need of perseverance, so that after you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised” (Heb 10:36)^[7]. And Saint Paul, at the end of his life, does not boast of having begun well, but of having finished:

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. All that remains for me is to receive the crown of righteousness.” — Second Letter to Timothy 4:7-8^[8]

That is why this virtue deserves to be cultivated more than any other: without it, the highest graces remain unfinished. “Whoever puts his hand to the plow and then looks back is not fit for the kingdom of God” (Lk 9:62)^[9].

What makes us give up along the way

Why do so many souls give up? Rarely by a great refusal: almost always by weariness. Thomas à Kempis named the hidden root of all abandonments:

“The beginning of all temptations is inconstancy of spirit and little trust in God. For, as a ship without a rudder is driven here and there by the waves, so the weak and changeable man, who abandons his resolutions, is tossed by various temptations.” — Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ^[10]

We do not give up because evil has become too strong, but because the good has become monotonous. Sensible fervor dies out, dryness sets in, results are slow to come; then the heart, deprived of flavor, thinks all is lost and becomes discouraged. Growing in perseverance means learning to endure without flavor—to remain faithful to the good precisely when it brings no taste at all. It is there that the virtue is forged, and nowhere else.

Before considering the means, a decisive clarification is needed. Many fail to grow in perseverance because they aim for a counterfeit: they confuse the virtue with a rigidity of will, or with stubbornness in never changing one’s mind. Defining exactly what perseverance is—and what it is not—is already half the journey.

A Virtue of Fortitude, Not Stubbornness

For Saint Thomas Aquinas, perseverance is a part of the virtue of fortitude (fortitudo). Fortitude has two acts: to attack what is difficult and to endure in what is difficult. Perseverance belongs to the second: it is the firmness that allows one to “persist for a long time in good until it is accomplished”, against the particular difficulty that arises from the duration of the act itself^[11].

“It belongs to perseverance to persist firmly in a difficult good, by reason of the length of time.” — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 137, a. 1^[12]

The key word is duration. What makes perseverance arduous is not the intensity of a sudden peril (that is the domain of courage properly speaking), but the gray length of a good that continues with no visible end. To hold on for an hour is easy; to hold on for thirty years wears one down. Perseverance is therefore less the heroism of a moment than the fidelity of duration—and that is why it is so rare.

Perseverance, Constancy, Patience, Longanimity

The spiritual tradition distinguishes several related virtues that are often confused. Naming them precisely helps us know what we are working on. The following table compares these four forms of steadfastness according to the difficulty each one faces.

Saint Thomas clarifies the subtle distinction between constancy and perseverance: perseverance faces the difficulty that comes from the duration of the act; constancy faces the difficulty that comes from external obstacles that would tend to turn us aside^[13]. Both are necessary: one can endure for a long time (perseverance) and yet give in at the first sign of pressure (lack of constancy), or resist pressures (constancy) but grow weary over time (lack of perseverance). It is their alloy that makes for complete fidelity. For patience properly speaking—the art of enduring present evil—see How to Grow in Patience.

Final Perseverance: The Gift of Gifts

Above the acquired virtue, there is a higher mystery: final perseverance, that is, the grace to die in a state of friendship with God, after having held firm until the very last moment. This is what crowns everything, for what good would it be to have lived well if one were to fall at the end? The Council of Trent defined it as a free gift that no one can secure by their own strength alone:

“He who perseveres to the end will be saved”: this gift can come only from Him who has the power to strengthen the one who stands, so that he may stand with perseverance, and to raise up the one who falls.” — Council of Trent, Session VI, Decree on Justification, ch. 13^[14]

The Catechism states it simply: we must “ask God for the grace of final perseverance”, that is, “the gift of dying in a state of grace”^[15]. Saint Augustine devoted an entire treatise to this mystery, Le don de la persévérance (De dono perseverantiae), where he shows that this ultimate grace is precisely what the Christian asks for each day in the Our Father, when saying “lead us not into temptation”^[16].

An Acquired Virtue and a Gift to Be Asked For

From this twofold nature flows the entire balance of the spiritual life. Perseverance is at once something I build—through repeated acts, discipline, a “perseverance always renewed in effort”, as the Catechism of human virtues says^[17]—and something I receive, for “the gift of salvation by Christ grants us the grace necessary to persevere”^[18]. One without the other is a dead end: relying on my own strength alone is presumption; waiting for grace without doing anything is laziness.

That is why the right attitude consists of two simultaneous movements: to work as if everything depended on me, and to ask as if everything depended on God. “Do not be afraid, for little by little we will do everything. I know how weak you are. It is from Me that you will receive strength, perseverance, and good will”^[19], says Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta. Perseverance is therefore built as much on one’s knees as standing. For filial trust, which is its soul, see How to Grow in Trust and How to Grow in Abandonment to God.

The virtue of perseverance, like every virtue, stands at the summit between two slopes. One can fail in it by defect—by giving up too soon—or by excess—by stubbornly persisting where one ought to yield. Saint Thomas names these two opposing vices and locates them precisely^[20].

Inconstancy and Softness: Abandoning the Good Begun

The first pitfall, and the most common, is giving up. Saint Thomas calls it mollities—softness, or “enervation”: yielding before the difficulty or sadness that accompanies the good to be pursued, letting go because the effort is prolonged^[21]. It is not a great spectacular sin; it is a silent resignation. Nothing is denied, one simply “lets it drop”: the morning prayer that becomes less frequent, the resolution that is forgotten, the struggle one no longer has the heart to fight.

The root of this softness is often the inconstancy of the heart, that instability which spiritual masters link to a lack of rootedness. “Without obedience, resignation and humility are subject to instability,” Jesus teaches Luisa Piccarreta: what “binds together” the virtues and “makes them persevering” is their attachment to a fixed point outside our moods^[22]. The inconstant soul is “like a ship without a rudder” (Kempis): not that it wills evil, but it does not hold any course long enough for it to bear fruit.

Obstinacy: Persevering in One’s Own Will

The second pitfall is more subtle, because it has the appearance of virtue. It is obstinacy—pertinacia: persevering, yes, but in one’s own will, one’s own judgment, one’s own project, beyond what reason and obedience would allow^[23]. The obstinate person “holds firm,” but holds to himself. He confuses fidelity to the good with fidelity to his idea of the good; and he comes to resist a director, a legitimate authority, even the light of God, in the name of a false constancy.

True perseverance, then, is not the refusal of all change: it is fidelity to the good willed by God, which may, on the contrary, require letting go of my plan for His plan. That is why it needs humility and docility: without them, tenacity degenerates into rigidity. “Take great care not to trouble yourself” and not to “give in to self-pity; for all that comes only from pride,” warns Saint Francis de Sales^[24]—and pride is precisely what transforms perseverance into obstinacy.

The Right Mean: A Flexible and Tenacious Fidelity

Between resignation and rigidity, virtue is a fidelity both tenacious and flexible: tenacious about the essentials (the end pursued, the conversion undertaken, the duty of state), flexible about the means (methods, rhythms, consolations). It holds firm to the “what” and remains docile about the “how.” It is the opposite of moodiness: mood changes its goal according to feelings; perseverance keeps the goal and accepts that feelings change.

One image sums up this balance: not the rock that never moves (obstinacy), nor the reed that bends to every wind (inconstancy), but the rooted tree—fixed by its roots, living and mobile by its branches. Such is evangelical perseverance: rooted in the will of God, free and adaptable in its daily exercise.

Perseverance, like every virtue, is both received and cultivated. It is not decreed by a mere act of will: it grows through specific means, which the saints have experienced. Here are seven, from the most fundamental—prayer—to the most everyday.

Asking for Perseverance as a Grace

The first means is not an effort, but a request. Since final perseverance is a gift that no one can secure by their own strength, the first thing to do is to ask for it unceasingly. This is the great lesson of Saint Augustine and, after him, of Saint Alphonsus Liguori, who made it the heart of his treatise Du grand moyen de la prière: God gives everyone the grace to pray, and to the one who prays, He refuses no grace—not even perseverance.

“How could the Father refuse us any grace, since He has given us His only Son? […] No grace is excepted, neither forgiveness, nor perseverance, nor His holy love, nor perfection, nor paradise: He gives us everything, absolutely everything.” — Saint Alphonsus Liguori, La Pratique de l'amour envers Jésus-Christ^[25]

It is therefore a grace that must be begged for every day, and especially for the hour of death. Catholic devotion has translated this into countless prayers—such as the Hail Mary: “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death”—a direct request for final perseverance. For more on prayer itself as a school of fidelity, see How to Grow in Mental Prayer.

Starting Again Each Day Without Discouragement

The second means is paradoxical: to persevere, one must accept to start again. For perseverance is not the absence of falls; it is the refusal to remain on the ground. The great enemy is not the fault itself, but the discouragement that follows the fault and makes one believe that all is lost. Saint Francis de Sales, master of gentleness, made daily recommencement the key to all fidelity:

“Be patient with everyone, but especially with yourself. […] I am very glad that you start again every day: there is no better way to finish the spiritual life well than always to begin again, and never to think you have done enough.” — Saint Francis de Sales^[26]

“Every day, we must begin again the journey toward perfection,” he adds elsewhere: whoever forgets this “is surprised to find misery in himself” and becomes discouraged^[27]. Perseverance, thus understood, is not a straight line: it is a series of new beginnings, where what matters is not never having fallen, but always getting back up. The Lord Himself teaches this to Elisabeth Kindelmann, when she is discouraged at “not seeing any progress”: “For that, do not worry! Start again every day!”^[28] Perseverance is the art of starting again one more time than you fall.

Being Faithful in Small Things and the Gray Duration

The third means is to shift the effort from the spectacular to the everyday. Perseverance is not won in great decisions, which are rare, but in faithfulness to the small things that return each day: keeping the hour of prayer, fulfilling one’s duty of state, keeping one’s word, repeated service. This is the “gray duration”—those long periods when nothing is exhilarating, when one moves forward without consolation—which tests and builds virtue.

Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus made this faithfulness in small things her entire “little way”: letting no small sacrifice, no small act of fidelity pass by, and offering all out of love. The Gospel logic is explicit: “Whoever is faithful in small things is also faithful in great ones” (Lk 16:10)^[29]. Wanting to persevere in the heroic without being faithful in the tiniest things is an illusion: one learns endurance only in the matter of each day.

Holding Fast in Aridity and Dryness

The fourth means is the most decisive, for it is what separates the persevering from the rest: holding fast when there is no longer any savor. Aridity—the absence of sensible delight in prayer and service—is not a sign of failure; it is often a trial willed by God to purify love and detach it from consolations. Venerable Marthe Robin expressed this with luminous firmness:

“Let us never abandon the pious exercise of prayer, even if we find in it only dryness and suffering. […] Let this, on the contrary, urge us to persevere, for very often God wants to test how far we have embraced the Cross.” — Venerable Marthe Robin^[30]

Dryness, far from being a reason to stop, is a reason to continue—it is there that love proves itself gratuitous. Saint Padre Pio reassured souls troubled by this night: darkness and aridity are “a mere accident, which God allows for weak souls and those not yet advanced”, and which he later withdraws “from souls already strengthened”^[31]. Perseverance in aridity is thus the antechamber of spiritual maturity. For more on the weariness and spiritual disgust that threaten during these passages, see How to Grow in the Fight Against Acedia.

Establishing a Rule of Life and Firm Resolutions

The fifth means is of a practical order: perseverance needs a structure. The heart alone, left to its moods, cannot endure; it must be given a framework that supports it when the initial momentum fades—a simple rule of life, fixed times of prayer, concrete and verifiable resolutions. A vague resolution (“I will pray more”) does not last a month; a precise resolution (“fifteen minutes every morning, at such an hour”) endures through the gray seasons.

This is the whole meaning of the “structures” that grace weaves around the soul. “As soon as the soul resolves to do some good, to be holy, immediately I arrange what is necessary around her: Light, Graces, Knowledge of Me, and detachments,” Jesus confides to Luisa—but he adds with sadness: “How many abandon this structure that my Love weaves for them! Very few persist and allow Me to accomplish my work.”^[32] To give oneself a rule, and to return to it after every lapse, is precisely not to abandon the structure. Spiritual direction plays here a decisive supporting role: see How to Grow in Spiritual Direction.

Combating Acedia, Enemy of Endurance

The sixth means is a targeted battle against the proper enemy of perseverance: acedia. The Desert Fathers called it the “noonday demon”—that weariness, that disgust for the things of God that strikes in the middle of the journey, when the novelty has passed and the end is not in sight. Acedia does not urge to evil: it urges to “leave everything”, to change place, method, commitment, out of an inability to remain. It is the direct temptation against endurance.

The remedy of the ancients was simple and formidable: do not flee, remain at one’s post, “keep to the cell”. Where acedia says “go away, change,” perseverance replies “stay, begin again.” Saint Pier Giorgio Frassati saw in fervent prayer, and above all in the Eucharist, “the most effective means to obtain from God […] the strength to persevere”^[33]. Acedia is not fought by sheer willpower, but by patiently returning to the sources: prayer, sacraments, community.

Relying on Hope and the Sacraments

The seventh means is to reconnect perseverance to its theological source: hope. One does not endure over time by force of character, but because one is expecting something—Heaven, God himself. A lively hope makes perseverance almost natural: whoever knows where he is going finds the strength to walk. “Promised to those who begin well, the reward is granted to those who persevere,” summarizes the Liber de modo bene vivendi, a work long attributed to Saint Bernard^[34]: it is the gaze fixed on the reward that sustains the step.

This hope is nourished by the sacraments, which are the channels of grace over the length of a lifetime. Regular confession lifts up after falls and prevents discouragement from taking hold; the Eucharist, “pledge of the glory to come”, restores each time the strength for the next step. Living from the sacraments is not multiplying pious acts: it is letting oneself be carried over time by the One who alone gives the strength to endure. For the theological virtue that underpins this whole movement, see How to Grow in Hope.

A perseverance that grows gradually transforms the whole of life. Its fruits are not immediate — it is the very nature of a virtue of duration to bear fruits that last — but they are the most precious of all.

The Completion of the Work and Fidelity

The first fruit is completion. Perseverance is the virtue that brings things to their end: without it, everything remains sketched out, begun, unfinished. A persevering life is a life that bears fruit, according to Christ’s words about the good soil: these are those who, “having heard the Word with a noble and good heart, hold it fast and bear fruit through their perseverance” (Lk 8:15)^[35]. The fruit is not promised to the sower’s enthusiasm, but to the patience of the soil that keeps the seed until the harvest. “Let us not grow weary in doing good; for in due season we shall reap, if we do not give up” (Gal 6:9)^[36].

The Peace and Freedom of a Strengthened Heart

The second fruit is interior: a stable peace, made of coherence. The inconstant soul is restless — always starting over, regretting, reproaching itself for its abandonments. The persevering soul, on the contrary, rests in fidelity: having ceased to seek itself according to its moods, it tastes the freedom of one who knows where he is going. “Constancy in good puts everything in safety,” Jesus says to Luisa^[37]: the quiet firmness of a strengthened heart is already a foretaste of the promised rest. This peace is not the absence of struggles, but stability within the struggle.

The Promised Crown

The third fruit is the highest: the crown. To perseverance, and to it alone, Scripture promises the final reward. It is the last word of the risen Christ to the tried Churches:

“Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.” — Revelation 2:10^[38]

This crown is not owed to talent, nor to the brilliance of beginnings, nor to the greatness of works, but to fidelity held to the end. It is the fruit of final perseverance, that “great gift” which crowns a life of repeated little “yeses.” This is the whole meaning of Saint Paul’s race: “let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, our eyes fixed on Jesus” (Heb 12:1-2)^[39].

The spirituality of the Divine Will, received by Luisa Piccarreta, sheds a particular light on perseverance. Living in the Divine Will is not about accomplishing a single feat, but about unceasingly repeating the same “Fiat” — placing, at every moment and after every fall, one’s will in that of God. Perseverance here becomes a constancy of love: not holding on by tense effort, but remaining by loving fidelity in the good that has been begun.

Jesus makes to Luisa a promise of great sweetness, which turns even dryness itself into a treasure:

“Constancy in good puts everything in safety. […] If you are cold, arid, or anything else and you remain constant, how many additional renunciations you accomplish. […] If you are constant, everything will contribute to your good. And I will give you my grace in abundance.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, Il Libro di Cielo, vol. 12, September 18, 1917^[40]

The lesson is clear: what pleases God is not sensible fervor, but the fidelity that remains when fervor has disappeared. “Very few persist and allow Me to accomplish my work”^[41], the Lord laments; but to the one who persists, he promises to complete himself the work begun. Perseverance, in this light, is no longer primarily mine: it is God’s work in me, to which I consent day after day by not leaving his “structure.” The secret is not to hold on by oneself, but to let God hold on by giving oneself to him again and again without ceasing.

Every Christian virtue has its living model in Christ, and its perfect reflection in Mary. Perseverance is no exception: it has a face before it has a definition.

Christ is the absolute perseverer. Saint John sums up the entire Passion in a single word of duration: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (Jn 13:1)^[42]. This “to the end” — eis telos — is the seal of perseverance: a love that does not stop halfway, that endures in Gethsemane in anguish (“thy will be done”), that endures on the Cross until “it is finished” (Jn 19:30). All Christian perseverance is nothing but a participation in this fidelity of Christ who “goes to the end.”

Mary is the reflection of this perseverance. The Gospel shows her “standing” — Stabat Mater — at the foot of the Cross (Jn 19:25): not collapsed, but standing firm in the darkest night, faithful when almost all have fled. And after the Ascension, it is again she who remains, “persevering with one heart in prayer” with the Apostles in the Upper Room, awaiting the Spirit (Acts 1:14)^[43]. Mother of perseverance, she is the one who teaches us to “remain standing” and to “persevere in prayer”: this is why we implore her “at the hour of our death,” for the ultimate gift of final perseverance.

At the end of this journey, perseverance can be summed up in a few simple convictions, which one can keep before oneself as a compass.

First, what matters is to finish, not to start well. The saint is not the one who has never fallen, but the one who has gotten up one more time than he has fallen. Perseverance is the art of beginning again: every morning is a new start, and the fidelity of a life is made up only of the fidelities of each day, added together.

Next, perseverance must be asked for as much as it is worked at. Since final perseverance is a gift, the first act of fidelity is prayer — humble, daily, confident — by which we beg to hold fast to the end. We work as if everything depended on us; we pray as if everything depended on God.

Finally, we hold fast especially when there is no longer any sweetness. True virtue is forged in the gray duration, aridity, monotony — precisely where love ceases to be repaid in consolations and becomes gratuitous. To hold on without taste, to remain faithful at one’s post, not to leave the “structure” that grace has woven: that is the secret. “Let us bind ourselves so closely to Him that we may have the great happiness of never being separated from Him,” prayed the Curé of Ars^[44]. In this way, perseverance, the virtue of duration, ultimately becomes a story of faithful love — the only one worthy of the crown.

• How to Grow in Patience — the sister virtue of perseverance: enduring present evil without collapsing, where perseverance endures in the duration of good.
• How to Grow in Hope — the theological virtue that sustains perseverance: awaiting Heaven and relying on grace.
• How to Grow in Fortitude — the cardinal virtue of which perseverance is a part: facing and enduring what is difficult.
• How to Grow in the Battle Against Acedia — the fight against spiritual weariness, the direct enemy of faithful endurance.
• How to Grow in Mental Prayer — persevering in prayer, the school and support of all fidelity.
• How to Grow in Trust and How to Grow in Abandonment to God — the filial attitude that prevents perseverance from hardening into stubbornness.