Abba Euprepius said: “If you have it in yourself that God is faithful and powerful, you believe in Him and you will share in what is His; but if you are small of soul, you do not believe.”
And: “We all believe that He is powerful and that all things are possible to Him; but believe also the things that are in yourself, that He works wonders in you too.”
The Faith That Stops at the Threshold of the House
Abba Euprepius is not speaking to those who do not believe. He speaks to those who do — “we all believe” — and right in the middle of that “all” he sets a boundary the hurried eye does not see. The boundary does not run between the one who believes in God and the one who does not, but between two places within the same faith: the faith that remains outside the man, and the faith that enters his house. To believe that God parted the Sea, raised Lazarus, and made a Paul out of Saul is easy, because the object of such faith stands far away — in Scripture, in the Paterikon, in the lives of others — and asks nothing of the believer. But to believe that the same power works here, in your anger, in your old passion, in the past that will not let go — that is no longer assent but danger: for now faith has a price.
The Apostle James gave a name to the first kind: “You believe that there is one God? You do well; the demons also believe, and tremble” (James 2:19). The demons too assent to God’s power; what they do not have is trust. The Fathers lived a distinction that our own language preserves: to believe that (to hold something true), to believe in (to set oneself upon Someone), and to entrust oneself (to place one’s life in His hand). Abba Euprepius says “you believe in Him” and “you will share in what is His” — that is, the second and third, not only the first. His faith does not stop at knowing; it leads to receiving.
The Gospel holds two faces at the same door. Zechariah, the priest, at the altar of incense, knows the Scriptures; he knows of Abraham and Sarah, the aged couple to whom God gave fruit beyond the season of nature. And yet when the angel announces fruit for his own house, he does not look at the Word but at his own body: “I am an old man, and my wife is well advanced in years” (Luke 1:18). He believed that God can; he did not believe that He can in his house. And the rebuke is pedagogy: the one who did not believe the word is left without a word, until the miracle comes to pass (Luke 1:20). Beside him, a girl of Nazareth asks only about the manner — “How can this be?” — not about the possibility, and says: “Behold the maidservant of the Lord; let it be to me according to Your word” (Luke 1:34, 38). “Blessed is she who believed,” she will be told (Luke 1:45). The same angel, the same house about to receive a miracle, two answers: the priest who believes in omnipotence in general, and the virgin who believes it in her own womb. Here is Abba Euprepius’s boundary, set between two souls.
Oligopsychia: Unbelief Dressed as Humility
The Paterikon says “small of soul” (Gr. oligópsychos). Note: it does not say “of little faith” (oligópistos, as the Lord calls Peter, Matt. 14:31), but small of soul. The Father looks beneath faith, to the measure of the vessel in which it is to fit. The small soul has no room for the promise; faith is lacking not because it was refused, but because it has nowhere to stand. Hence the healing is not an effort of persuasion but an enlargement: “I will run the way of Your commandments, when You enlarge my heart” (Ps. 118:32 LXX); and Paul to the Corinthians: “Our heart is wide open; be open wide also” (2 Cor. 6:11–13). The enlargement is at once God’s gift and man’s work.
The old philosophy knew the disease but not the cure. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics (IV, 3), sets the megalopsychos, the great-souled man, between the vain man who thinks himself worthy of more than he is and the mikropsychos, the small-souled man, who, being worthy of great things, deems himself worthy of less; and he adds, with fine psychological insight, that the latter is at bottom ignorant of himself and robs himself of the very good for which he was made. The Father takes a step the Stagirite cannot take: the measure is no longer the man’s worth but God’s power inthe man. The small soul does not underestimate itself; it underestimates Him in itself. That is why what sometimes looks like humility is, at the root, a withdrawn form of unbelief.
Contemporary psychology has described the mechanism without naming it. Seligman and Maier showed in 1967 that a creature exposed to pain it cannot control learns to stop trying, even when escape has become possible; their own 2016 reappraisal overturned the picture still more deeply: passivity is the default response, and what must be learned is control. “I can’t,” “I’m not that kind of person,” “I’ve always been this way” are rarely observations about reality; they are conclusions drawn from repeated failures and stretched over the whole future. Scripture knew it: under the heavy bondage of Egypt, Israel did not heed Moses “from smallness of soul and from hard labor” (Ex. 6:9 LXX). Hardship cramps the soul. That is why the Apostle does not rebuke the faint-souled but commands: “Comfort the fainthearted” (1 Thess. 5:14). The Fathers distinguish wound from fault and take care not to confuse them.
But the wound can become an ideology. Evagrius described the “noonday demon” — acedia — which shows the monk that the place is useless, the labor in vain, salvation elsewhere or nowhere. And St. John Climacus (Step 5) exposes the double craft: before the sin, the enemy paints God as the lover of mankind, to urge you into sin; after the sin, he shows Him as a merciless Judge, to drive you to despair. The same lie with two faces: a God measured by my measure. Both laxity and despair are oligopsychia, since both decide in advance how much God can do in me. Cain is its portrait: “My guilt is too great to be forgiven” (Gen. 4:13 LXX) — he put guilt in one pan and God’s mercy in the other and found the guilt heavier. It was not the sin that destroyed him, but the scale.
How, then, do we tell humility from oligopsychia? By what each does with the miracle. Humility confesses it and gives it back: “By the grace of God I am what I am… I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me” (1 Cor. 15:10) — Paul affirms both the labor and the Giver. Oligopsychia cuts the labor in order to keep a facade of humility and, with the labor, cuts the Giver too. A humility that makes God powerless in you is not humility but pride turned inside out: you have decided what is possible.
The Miracle Within: The Mystery of Synergy
What does it mean for God to work “wonders in you”? Orthodoxy does not let the word slide into metaphor. God is, according to St. Basil the Great (Ep. 234), unapproachable in essence and descended in energies; on the basis of this distinction St. Gregory Palamas defended the truth that the saints partake of the uncreated energies — of God Himself at work — not of His essence. “You will share in what is His,” says Abba Euprepius. The miracle within is not an impression but a real participation. The Apostle puts it in the simplest sentence: God is “able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us” (Eph. 3:20); and: “It is God who works in you both to will and to do” (Phil. 2:13). But that verse is not spoken without its beginning: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (2:12). This is synergy: fellow workers with God (1 Cor. 3:9).
Here too is the dogmatic boundary, like a blade between two abysses. Whoever would regard the miracle within as the fruit of his own power falls into Pelagianism, the pride of the one who is his own savior. Whoever would regard it as wrought without man’s will, as upon a thing without a soul, falls into fatalism or into lazy quietism, where man is an inert mass. St. Maximus the Confessor, who defended in Christ the two wills, divine and human, and paid for it with hand and tongue, shows the pattern: the human will is not abolished but assumed and healed, and “not My will, but Yours” (Luke 22:42) is the free obedience of a will that remains a will. This is the miracle within: not the suppression of the will but its liberation. And he also teaches (Ambigua 7) that the Word wills to work, always and in all, the mystery of His incarnation — of the divine in human form, that is, in you.
But the miracle we expect is often the wrong one. We think miracles are outside: healings, voices, signs. The Fathers look for them elsewhere. Blessed Augustine says that it is a greater work for the ungodly to be made righteous than for heaven and earth to be created — for the things created will pass away, while the righteous remains (Tractate on John 72). The Lord Himself says: “He who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also; and greater works than these he will do” (John 14:12). What are the “greater works” in your house? A heart of stone made a heart of flesh (Ezek. 36:26); the anger that no longer rises; the word held back instead of the word let slip; a forgiveness that nature refuses; a tear that comes on a dry day; a prayer that goes on when there is nothing left to feel; a patience that was not there yesterday. These are miracles without witnesses, and therefore they go unnoticed: “The kingdom of God does not come with observation… for behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20–21). And the psalmist knows them by an organ he names: “Wonderful are Your works, and my soul knows it very well” (Ps. 138:14). The soul knows them — if it is not too small to contain the knowing.
Paul asks the same thing as Euprepius, in almost the same words: “Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith… Do you not know that Jesus Christ is in you?” (2 Cor. 13:5). Believe also the things that are in yourself. Baptism is not an empty sign but a planting: Christ in us, the hope of glory (Col. 1:27). To disbelieve what is already in you is to live like an heir who does not know he is an heir, like a poor man with the key to the treasure in his bosom, carrying the treasure in earthen vessels (2 Cor. 4:7) and not daring to open them.
How Faith Grows in What Is in You
The psychology of Albert Bandura (1977) named self-efficacy a person’s conviction that he can carry through what is asked of him; he showed that it decides whether a man will try, how long he will persevere, and how he will endure failure — more than his actual abilities. It has, Bandura says, four sources. Each has in the Church an older and deeper counterpart.
First, the experience of mastery. In the language of the Fathers: faithfulness in the little thing. “He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much” (Luke 16:10). The soul learns grace through the doing of the commandment: St. Mark the Ascetic says that Christ is hidden in the commandments and discloses Himself in the measure they are fulfilled. Paul calls this dokimé, tested proof, lived verification: “perseverance produces proven character, and proven character hope” (Rom. 5:4).
Second, the example of others. That is why the Church keeps the Paterikon: “Remember those who rule over you… whose faith follow” (Heb. 13:7). Abba Euprepius’s own saying is a plank laid across the abyss by someone who has crossed.
Third, persuasion by the word. The word of Scripture, of the spiritual father, of the Elder: “faith comes by hearing” (Rom. 10:17).
Fourth, the state of body and heart. Fear paralyzes, and “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18); the peace of God guards hearts (Phil. 4:7); and hesychia is not a relaxation technique but the place where fear is laid aside.
Here, though, truth parts from its likeness. In Bandura the source of faith remains the self; in the Fathers it is Christ in the self. The first can grow without limit — and a self-confidence that grows without repentance becomes, according to St. Maximus, philautia, self-love, mother of the passions, or, according to Evagrius, vainglory, which seeks its witness. The second cannot grow without humility, because its object is not my power but the Person who works it in me: “Without Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5) and “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13) are one law seen from two sides. This is why the Abba’s word cannot be confused with “positive thinking,” with Coué’s autosuggestion, or with the “law of attraction,” which take the form — believe in what is in you — and change the object: there it is the self or the universe, here it is the living God; there the fruit is a bigger self, here a lower bowed head. The test is in the direction: true faith increases repentance, false faith increases self-admiration.
Philosophy too has something worth keeping here. Kierkegaard, in The Sickness Unto Death, named the despair of weakness — not willing to be oneself — and saw that the believer has the sure remedy: possibility, for with God all things are possible at every moment. But he only voices in philosophy what the Fathers held in experience: St. Gregory of Nyssa shows that the human soul has no limit to its growth, since what fills it is the Infinite; the more it partakes, the more it widens, in an endless epektasis (Phil. 3:13). It is the opposite of oligopsychia: a soul not “small” by nature, but enlarged by gift, without end.
Guard and Measure
Abba Euprepius says “believe,” not “demand signs.” Whoever seeks miracles in himself to measure his holiness falls from oligopsychia into the opposite abyss: into delusion, into prelest. The Lord rejected the temptation of the leap from the pinnacle — “You shall not tempt the Lord your God” (Matt. 4:7) — and the generation that seeks a sign (Matt. 12:39). And those who will say on that day, “Did we not do many wonders in Your name?” will hear: “I never knew you” (Matt. 7:22–23); and Paul sets beside faith that moves mountains the word that empties it: “but have not love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 13:2). Whoever believes the miracles within without love and without humility believes in something else. The true sign of God’s work in a man is not feeling but fruit — love, joy, peace, longsuffering (Gal. 5:22) — and, before all else, not seeing one’s own work: “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but to Your name give glory” (Ps. 113:9).
This is the measure. The Lord does not ask for great faith but for living faith in a fitting place: “as a mustard seed” (Matt. 17:20). The father of the tormented boy did not receive a ready-made faith; he cried out the place where each of us stops: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24) — after the Lord had told him: “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes” (9:23). A small faith, but set aright, fits within the Almighty. Peter, who stepped out upon the waters, did not sink because he did not believe in Christ, but because he looked at the wind (Matt. 14:30): for a moment he believed what was in him, then looked at what was around him. “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?” He cried out: “Lord, save me!” — and the hand was already stretched out (Matt. 14:31).
The Mighty One Has Done It to Me
“For He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His name” (Luke 1:49). The Virgin uses the Abba’s word, the Mighty One, and the word the Abba asks for: for me. In the same utterance stand the boldest confession of the wonder within in all of Scripture and the deepest humility: “for He has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant” (Luke 1:48). Here the two faces of faith are reconciled: whoever confesses the wonder within most fully is the one who receives it most fully as gift. The small-souled hides it in order to seem humble; the proud takes it in order to be great; the Virgin confesses it so that God may be glorified. The Church has taken this utterance as her evening prayer.
Apoftegm
A brother asked an elder: “Father, I believe that God can do all things; why does nothing change in me?”
The elder said: “You believe He can in heaven; believe now that He can in your cell, today, in the small thing you keep putting off.”
The brother said: “And if I feel nothing?”
The elder said: “Peter did not set out upon the water feeling it firm beneath his foot, but obeying a word: ‘Come.’ Put your foot on the word.”
God is faithful and powerful; what remains is for the soul to widen to His measure. “You are the God who does wonders” (Ps. 76:14–15 LXX) — and who does them in the house of the one who believes, too.
