From the Great Paterikon — Abba Euprepius
A brother asked the same elder, Abba Euprepius, saying: How does the fear of God come into the soul? And the elder said: If a man has humility and non-possession, the fear of God comes to him.
The same said: Fear and humility and lack of food and mourning, let them remain with you unceasingly.
The same Abba Euprepius, at the beginning, visited an elder and said to him: Abba, give me a word that I may be saved! And he said to him: If you wish to be saved, wherever you go, do not hasten to speak before someone asks you. And he, pierced to the heart by the word, made a prostration, saying: Truly, I have read many books, but never have I known such profit. And greatly profited, he went out.
Three sayings of the same Abba stand side by side like three steps. The first gives the root: the fear of God is not born of striving to feel fear but of two emptinesses, humility and non-possession. The second gives the climate: fear, humility, lack of food and mourning are to remain unceasingly. The third shows the first fruit: where a man places his tongue. The thread that binds them is non-possession, understood more broadly than the lack of goods: hands empty of things, a body empty of satiety, a mouth empty of the unsummoned word. Whoever reads the saying as three counsels on three matters reads it by half; it is one counsel about one emptiness.
A Fear That Is Not Dread
The phrase “fear of God” sits hard in today’s ear. Psychology has trained itself to hear in “fear” a symptom, and a softened religiosity has trained itself to replace it with a “love” without remainder. The Fathers drew the distinctions our age has lost. St. John Cassian (Conference 11) distinguishes three motives of service: the slave’s fear, the hireling’s hope of wages, the son’s love. The slave’s fear is the one that “perfect love casts out,” because “fear has torment” (1 John 4:18). But the psalm says that “the fear of the Lord is pure, enduring for ever and ever” (Ps. 18:10): the son’s fear is not the dread of punishment but the trembling of a child before a love he can neither measure nor master. The Fathers also call it reverence (eulabeia). It is “the beginning of wisdom” (Ps. 110:10), and a beginning does not vanish when what follows arrives; it remains as foundation.
The saying speaks with care: the fear “comes to” a man. He does not produce it; he receives it. It is a gift of the Spirit (Isa. 11:2–3), and the psalm names it a thing to be taught: “Come, children, hearken to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord” (Ps. 33:12). Man prepares the place; God gives. The elder does not command “fear,” but shows the soil in which fear grows: where two things are empty.
What becomes of the fear of God when it is absent? Fear does not disappear; it moves. The psalm says it in a sentence any age may read with profit: “There they feared with fear, where no fear was” (Ps. 13:5). Kierkegaard (The Concept of Anxiety) distinguished fear, which has an object, from anxiety, which has none and is born of the dizziness of freedom; clinical psychology names it free-floating anxiety and counts it among the most common of psychic sufferings. The Fathers would say that the man who does not fear God fears everything: death, the opinion of others, loss, diagnosis, what he cannot name. The fear of God is the only fear that has a Face, and therefore the only one that gathers and orders the other fears (Matt. 10:28). He who fears a Face no longer flees from shadows.
The Two Empty Hands
Humility (tapeinōsis) is not self-contempt but the true measure of the creature: the knowledge that it did not make itself and does not hold itself in being. Non-possession (aktēmosynē) is the humility of the hands: not making of things a fortification of the self. The Lord says it so: “a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:15). And the parable of the rich fool shows the mechanism: his goods speak to the soul in the first person, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease” (Luke 12:19), and only at night, when goods can no longer speak, does fear arrive: “this night your soul is required of you” (Luke 12:20). Wealth is a cushion set between the soul and the Face.
Psychology has described this cushion without naming it. Russell Belk showed (1988) that people live their possessions as an extension of the self, an “extended self”; Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler showed (1990) that what seems ours seems more precious and that loss weighs more heavily than an equal gain. The soul that accumulates then moves its fear from the Giver to things: it fears loss, not God. Fear of loss is the counterfeit of the fear of God, the same power of trembling directed at an object that cannot bear it.
The first fear of Scripture shows it plainly. After the fall Adam answers: “I heard Your voice in the garden and I was afraid, for I am naked, and I hid” (Gen. 3:10). The nakedness is the very one the saying asks for; the difference is that Adam hides. The humble man’s fear stands in the same nakedness and does not flee: “whither shall I flee from Your face?” (Ps. 138:7) becomes for him not a desperate question but a stillness, because he has nothing left to hide and nowhere to hide it. Adam stretched out a hand to a fruit and seized it; Christ “did not count equality with God a thing to be seized” but “emptied Himself” (Phil. 2:6–7). Between the two hands lies the whole difference between the fear that hides and the fear that remains.
The Four Inseparables
“Fear and humility and lack of food and mourning, let them remain with you unceasingly.” “Unceasingly” does not ask for four exercises at set hours but for a settled state. Aristotle called hexis what virtue has and a deed does not: a settled disposition, a way of being, not an act. The saying asks for a climate of the soul, not a deed.
The lack of food is not a diet. Evagrius places the gluttony of the belly (gastrimargia) first among the evil thoughts, and St. John of the Ladder devotes a whole step to it (Step 14), because here a man begins the war: the belly is the first rule the soul must face. Hunger is the body’s daily confession that it does not suffice. But hunger alone does not make humility. The Minnesota experiment (Keys, 1944–1945) showed that semi-starvation brings men to obsession with food, irritability and dark mood, not to gentleness. Therefore the Fathers do not separate fasting from its three companions. It is told of Abba Macarius the Great that he met the devil, who told him that neither he nor his host eats or sleeps; only humility they do not have, and by it they are overcome. Fasting without fear, without humility and without mourning is a hungry body and a sated pride. Here too is the measure for all that is sold today under the name of “fasting”: what is done without these three companions may be diet, discipline, hygiene, anything, but it is not fasting in the Fathers’ sense.
Mourning (penthos) is the fourth, and its root is the piercing of the heart (katanyxis). “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:4). The Apostle distinguishes “godly sorrow,” which works repentance unto salvation not to be regretted, from “the sorrow of the world,” which works death (2 Cor. 7:10). St. John of the Ladder calls it joy-making sorrow (Step 7). Psychology today has an instrument for the distinction: June Tangney and her colleagues showed that shame (“I am bad”) leads to hiding, defensiveness and aggression, while guilt (“I did bad”) leads to repair. Patristic mourning goes a step further than both, for it is sorrow turned toward Someone: “a broken and humbled heart God will not despise” (Ps. 50:17). Sorrow that circles around the self is acedia or depression; sorrow turned toward God carries its consolation within, and so it can remain “unceasingly” without crushing the man.
The Word That Is Not Acquired
The third saying seems to change the subject, but it does not. The brother asks for a word of salvation, and the elder gives him a rule of the tongue. Why? Because speech is the first and subtlest acquisition: whoever speaks unsummoned acquires an audience, a place, a weight. St. John of the Ladder says that talkativeness is the seat of vainglory (Step 11), and Evagrius shows that vainglory needs a witness. James sets it in the order of deeds: “let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak” (James 1:19); and the Wise Sirach: “be swift to hear and answer with patience” (Sir. 5:11).
Our age has raised this acquisition to a norm. Language itself betrays it: a man “has an opinion,” as he has a possession. The unsummoned opinion, the comment on everything, the one-second reaction are property gathered into a display window. A 2016 study of social networks (Gabielkov and colleagues) showed that the majority of links shared on a network were never opened at all; the word went out, that is, before any ear had received it. Goffman would have said that the front stage has overshadowed the back stage: man speaks in order to be seen speaking. That is why nothing is heard, though much is said.
Plato caught the same movement in the Phaedrus (275d–e): the written word “does not know to whom to speak and to whom to be silent” and says the same thing to all alike. The living word of the elder waits for the question precisely in order to know to whom it speaks: the question is the showing of hunger. A word given to the hungry is bread; given to the sated it is a stone or, as the Lord says, a pearl before swine (Matt. 7:6). Clinical psychology has rediscovered the rule: Miller and Rollnick (motivational interviewing) call the “righting reflex” the impulse to repair another by advice, and show that it awakens exactly the resistance it meant to overcome; therefore the method begins by asking permission. The elder in the saying knew it without a method.
Euprepius had been a reader: “I have read many books.” The saying does not disparage the book, for the elder’s own word feeds on Scripture; but it shows that between the written word and the living, the hunger of the listener decides. The word of a reader remains information; the word received by a man emptied of himself pierces him. “Pierced to the heart” is katenygēsanfrom the Acts of the Apostles (2:37), a word of the same root as katanyxis, the piercing of the heart that accompanies the mourning of the second saying. The third saying is therefore the first applied: the man with empty hands asks, is pierced, bows to the ground.
“Wherever you go”: the rule has no place; it goes with the man. Abba Moses said to sit in the cell and the cell will teach everything; here the cell of the tongue travels on the metro, to the office, onto the screen. Not hastening to speak is non-possession carried in the mouth.
The Same Man, Two Questions
The sayings are not set down at random. In the first, Euprepius is the one asked, and his answer has exactly the length of the question: one line, without explanation, without unsummoned counsel, with the two conditions named. He had been taught. In the third, he is the one who asks, and the answer he receives is likewise one line long. The same man, once with hands stretched out to receive, once with hands open to give what he had not acquired. This is how a word is transmitted in the Paterikon: the pierced one becomes the one who knows not to speak until he is asked. The order is visible too: humility asked, the word pierced, fear remained, and now fear itself makes the Abba keep silent until he is asked.
Psalm 33 gathers in one place all four inseparables and the tongue above them. “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (v. 9) is hunger finding bread. “Fear the Lord, all you His saints, for there is no want to those who fear Him” (v. 10) is fear. “The rich have become poor and hungry, but those who seek the Lord shall not lack any good thing” (v. 11) is non-possession. “Come, children, hearken to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord” (v. 12) is the word that waits for the disciple. “Keep your tongue from evil” (v. 14) is silence. “The Lord is near to the broken-hearted, and the humble in spirit He will save” (v. 19) is mourning. He who has tasted that the Lord is good no longer seeks satiety elsewhere, neither in things, nor in food, nor in words.
