Apoftegm
Amma Eugenia said: “It is profitable for us even to beg, so long as we are with Jesus. For rich is the one who is with Jesus, even if bodily he lacks. He who honors the things of earth before the spiritual things will lose both; but he who desires the heavenly things will find the earthly goods in any case!”
— The Great Paterikon
The Word That Does Not Praise Poverty
The saying opens with a concession that takes the breath away: “It is profitable for us even to beg.” Not “to grow poor,” not “to strip away the superfluous,” but to beg — the lowest rung the world can imagine, the one modern man fears more than sickness and almost as much as death. And Amma does not say it as an ascetic raising her own labor to the skies, but as one who has done a calculation and closed the books: the distance between the dignity of the world and the profit of the soul is smaller than a single condition — “so long as we are with Jesus.”
The whole saying rests on two small words, “only” and “with.” “Only” cuts off every other measure: neither poverty nor wealth is the goal. “With” is the preposition of the entire Gospel: “God with us” (Matthew 1:23), “Jesus Himself drew near and went with them” (Luke 24:15), “I am with you always” (Matthew 28:20). Amma does not compare two quantities of goods; she compares two companionships — the company of Someone, and solitude with things.
Therefore the definition of wealth moves from the hand to the presence: “rich is the one who is with Jesus, even if bodily he lacks.” Notice that “bodily” keeps all its weight: the lack is real, hunger is hunger, cold is cold. Amma does not spiritualize the empty stomach to make it bearable. She utters two truths at once, as the Apostle does: “as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things” (2 Corinthians 6:10).
Poor Smyrna and Rich Laodicea
The Apocalypse sets side by side two balance sheets drawn up by the same Lord, with the figures turned upside down. To Smyrna: “I know your tribulation and your poverty — yet you are rich” (2:9). To Laodicea: “You say, I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing — and you do not know that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked” (3:17). The one is poor and rich, the other rich and poor: the judgment does not fall on the accounts but on whatever stands in the place of God. And Laodicea’s wealth lies entirely in “I have need of nothing” — and whoever needs nothing has no one to receive. That is why, a few verses later, the Lord stands outside, like a beggar: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock” (3:20). The rich man’s door is bolted from inside by his own contentment.
And the Gospel says plainly who it is that knocks at doors: “I was hungry and you gave Me food… Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me” (Matthew 25:35, 40). “To be with Jesus” thus takes concrete shape, at anyone’s gate: the one who begs at the door is, in mystery, the One with whom we are to be. And “it is profitable for us” — plural: the profit is not only the beggar’s but also that of the one who happens to pass by. The beggar gives the rich man the one thing that cannot be bought: the occasion.
In the parable of Luke 16, the only character who receives a name is the beggar — Lazarus, “God helps” — while the rich man, with all he had, remains nameless. The name is given to the one who is with God. And the rich man’s fault was not cruelty with fists, but a step over a body, repeated day after day. So he lost both: his wealth, left behind on this side of the threshold, and the bosom of Abraham, from which a chasm now separated him.
The Two Losses
The Lord’s word in Matthew 6:33 — “Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” — is the text Amma is interpreting. “First” is not a date on a calendar but a rank in the heart. And her verb, “honors,” is a liturgical verb: to honor is to give honor, to give worship. The Apostle calls covetousness “idolatry” (Colossians 3:5). Whoever honors earth before heaven makes no error of management, but a change of altar.
Why does he lose both?
He loses the spiritual things first — and this is easy to see: “the cares of this age and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word” (Matthew 13:22). Evagrius Ponticus, who places the love of money (philargyria) third among the eight thoughts, shows where its power comes from: not from a taste for luxury but from fear. The thought presents to the monk a long old age, the inability to work with his hands, famines to come, sicknesses, and the shame of receiving necessities from others (Praktikos 9). Avarice is the fear of begging dressed up as prudence. That is exactly why the saying begins with begging: it lays its hand on the very thing the thought fears most, and says that even this need not be feared, if one is with Jesus.
He loses the earthly things too. Ecclesiastes describes the man “to whom God has given riches and wealth and honor, so that he lacks nothing of all he desires, yet God does not give him power to enjoy them” (6:2). Aristotle says the same in the language of reason: wealth is merely useful and exists for the sake of something else (Nicomachean Ethics I, 5). A means set in the place of the end ceases to serve: it is no longer used but served. St. Maximus the Confessor would add that a thing, in its logos, is good, and the passion lies not in the thing but in the manner of using it, “against nature,” out of self-love (philautia). The earth honored beyond measure is no longer earth but master.
Contemporary psychology describes the mechanism without being able to name its root. Brickman and Campbell called it the “hedonic treadmill”: pleasure gained is absorbed into the new baseline and demands a larger dose. Kasser and Ryan (1993) showed that people who place financial success at the center of their aspirations report lower well-being, more anxiety and more depression. The research of Chang and Arkin (2002) links materialism to insecurity: the more insecure a person feels, the harder he clings to things — and things, unable to give the security demanded of them, increase it. Seneca had said it nearly two thousand years before any laboratory: not the man who has little, but the man who craves more, is poor (Epistles 2, 6). The description is exact; the cure is missing. The treadmill stops only when the step changes direction, not when it changes speed.
Socrates, Solomon, and the Order of the Gift
Amma’s last sentence has an ancestor in philosophy. In the Apology, Socrates tells the judges that virtue does not come from money, but from virtue come money and all the other goods of men, in private and in public life (30b). The same order: first the great good, then, besides, the small ones. And yet between Socrates and Amma lies a chasm: for Socrates, the higher good is a virtue that a man acquires; for Amma, “the heavenly things” are a Person, and man does not acquire Her, but is “with” Her. A virtue can be mastered; a Person is received.
Scripture has its own test case. At Gibeon, Solomon asks for an understanding heart, and the Lord answers that because he asked this — and not long life, nor riches, nor the death of his enemies — He gives him also what he did not ask: both riches and glory (3 Kingdoms 3:11-13). “Will find in any case”: wealth comes unbidden, like the shadow that follows the body. But the same Scripture tells the end: Solomon, grown old, comes to foreign women and to high places raised for idols (3 Kingdoms 11:1-8). The things that were added, unguarded in their order, climbed again to the first step. The saying does not promise an annuity, then; it sets an order that must be kept daily, as vigil is kept.
All the World of Wealth, and Not a Penny
In the Septuagint, Proverbs preserves a saying (17:6) that Blessed Augustine also quoted: to the faithful man belongs the whole world of riches, but to the unfaithful not a penny. It is the same mystery as Amma’s: the man who is “with Jesus” has “all things,” whether he holds them in his hand or not — “as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.”
Here the Apostle does something remarkable with a very Stoic word. In Philippians 4:11 he writes that he has learned to be autarkes — self-sufficient, content. Stoics and Epicureans sought autarkeia, self-sufficiency: freedom from things through the withdrawal of desire. Paul takes the word and turns it over at its end: “I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound… I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (4:12-13). Contentment is no longer that of the self gathered into itself, but of the man who is “with.” The Stoic kind is a citadel; the Pauline kind is a presence. And a citadel, as every citadel shows, needs walls, whereas “godliness with contentment is great gain” (1 Timothy 6:6).
Psychologically, it is almost an application of attachment theory. Bowlby and Ainsworth showed that a child explores the world, plays and takes risks only so long as the “secure base” is near — the one who protects him; when the base disappears, the toys are dropped and clinging begins. The adult who hoards and gathers, who holds to things as to a life-ring, is often an explorer left without a secure base. (The analogy is not identity, but it illuminates.) “With Jesus” is the base from which the world can be held in an open palm as gift, not clutched to the chest as salvation. That is why the earthly goods found by the one who desires the heavenly are not the same as those of the one who honored them: the same in substance, different in condition — received with thanksgiving and sanctified “by the word of God and prayer” (1 Timothy 4:4-5). Bread is no longer the rescue, but the gift.
Two Errors the Saying Avoids
The first: the cult of poverty. “So long as we are with Jesus” is a condition, not an ornament. The beggar who curses those who pass, who envies, who makes of his lack a right, is rich in nothing: he is poor in things and poor in God. Poverty without Christ is only poverty.
The second: the gospel of prosperity. “Will find the earthly goods in any case” is not a contract with profit clauses. The Epistle to the Hebrews recalls those who “wandered in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, afflicted, tormented — of whom the world was not worthy” (11:37-38); not one of them found, in the bookkeeper’s sense, what Amma seems to promise. What they find is the earthly goods at their true size: the bread of the day — the bread the raven brought to Elijah (3 Kingdoms 17:6), the widow of Zarephath’s jar of flour that did not empty (3 Kingdoms 17:14-16), “our daily bread” of the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:11). That is the measure of the finding: as much as suffices for today, with thanksgiving.
And above all, the saying has the Lord Himself as precedent. He had nowhere to lay His head (Matthew 8:20); He was served out of the means of certain women (Luke 8:3); at the well, the One who gives living water said to the woman: “Give Me a drink” (John 4:7). The One with whom we are to be begged first. “It is profitable for us even to beg” means, in its depth, that it is profitable for us to be where He has placed Himself.
“Abide with Us”
On the road to Emmaus, two travelers without baggage and without hope walk with a stranger they do not know. When the village draws near and He makes as though to go farther, they “constrained Him, saying: Abide with us, for it is toward evening” (Luke 24:28-29). It is the prayer of the unmixed beggar: they have nothing to offer but an evening and a table — and they ask, they do not give, for the One they hold back is, in truth, the Host. He stays; and in the breaking of the bread their eyes are opened.
Whoever asked Him to stay has begged — and has received more than he asked: he has received the Bread that is broken. This is Amma’s wealth: not an account, but a table at which Someone has sat down. And whoever has it — even if bodily he lacks — has neither heaven nor earth left to lose.
