God Does Not Have Nine Faces: A Christian Appraisal of The Enneagram (Part I)

“Only what a man is able to put into the enneagram does he actually know, that is, understand. What he cannot put into the enneagram he does not know.” - Piotr D. Ouspensky, mathematician, writer, and student of George Gurdjieff

“The enneagram is more than a picture of yourself, it is yourself….the enneagram is a living diagram and…we can experience ourselves as enneagrams.” - John Bennett, student of George Gurdjieff

~

It would be too obvious to say that the popularity of the enneagram is growing like wildfire among modern evangelicals. It is being taught in churches. Books about it are being read and studied as fast as publishers can print and distribute them. In-the-know Christians converse with one another about their enneagram numbers with the kind of casual but complete understanding that reminds one of the interchanges that are often had by sports aficionados or annual Comic Con attendees.

In short, despite having been around for a while, it is the new thing.

Presented as an ancient personality typing system, the enneagram (from the Greek ennéa, meaning “nine”), is a circular grid made up of nine points interconnected through a geometric pattern. Each of the nine points represents a certain personality type, and each type is defined by strengths, weaknesses, propensities, and ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Apparently, all people in the world possess one of the nine types of personality contained within the enneagram figure, and the interconnectedness of the numbers and the types they each represent are the keys to unlocking deeper levels of self-understanding, insight, and knowledge.

When I first began to hear about the enneagram, I admit that I was immediately dismissive of it. My skeptical nature of all things trendy and faddish raised the first red flags, and my initial impressions were only bolstered by my almost total lack of patience for pseudo pop psychology. What cinched the deal for me, however, was when I first saw the figure itself, which felt disturbingly familiar to even my layman’s knowledge of occult symbolism (more on that later).

So, imagine my consternation when I began to realize that not only was this thing quickly becoming all the rage within evangelical communities, but that I couldn’t find much at all in the form of evangelical critique or response. Concerned and aware Catholics, by contrast, have put out much more in the way of raising alarms to the enneagram’s dangers.

It is with all of this in mind that I bring to you the following two posts, which serve to not only inform the reader as to the Gnostic and occultic origins of the enneagram, but also to challenge the legitimacy of its use among biblical Christians. This first post will be dedicated to painting a quick but concise portrait of the primary characters who have worked to make the enneagram prominent in Western Christianity. The second will constitute my challenges, questions and warnings in light of what we’ve learned.

Let’s begin with a brief history of how the enneagram found its way first to the West, and then, eventually, to a church near you.

~

George Ilych Gurdjieff
Born in what is now Georgia in 1869, 1872, or 1877 (the dates differ according to his passport, what he told his disciples, and how old people said he was when he died), George Ilych Gurdjieff is the man most directly responsible for introducing the enneagram to the West. A Greek-Armenian who rejected his parents’ desires for him to pursue the Orthodox priesthood due to a fascination with the occult, Gurdjieff wrote in his autobiography that astrology, mental telepathy, spiritism, table turning, fortune telling, and demon possession all greatly interested him in his youth. His fascinations led him to journey through the Mediterranean, Egypt, Tibet, India and other parts of Asia.

Gurdjieff claimed to have first learned the enneagram in 1897 from a secret school of mystic Sufis he had been searching for called the Sarmoung, supposedly founded in Babylon around 2,500 BC. Another 15 years of traveling, education in the occult and communing with demonic spirits followed, until Gurdjieff finally returned to Russia in 1912 to open his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, where he would teach all that he had learned to his students and disciples. The institute eventually made its way to Paris in 1922, with a New York branch opening two years after that. 

Fr. Mitch Pacwa, a Jesuit priest who first learned the enneagram in the early 1970’s and came to reject it after researching its origins, writes that Gurdjieff taught “‘esoteric Christianity’ along with a program to help students reach the highest levels of consciousness,” and that “everyone has an essence and a personality. The essence is ‘the material of which the universe is made. Essence is divine — the particle of god in our subconscious called Conscience.’ The personality is a mask of compulsive behavior which covers the essence. Though everyone is born in essence, they choose a personality ego style around the age of three or four. It is nearly impossible to return to the essence, but with slow, deliberate, conscious work one can arrive at it again.”

(The elements of “essence” and “personality” should be ringing bells of recognition for those familiar with modern day enneagram teachings, but note the distinctly pantheistic and Gnostic elements: everyone is born with an innate connection to the divine we eventually lose, and “slow, deliberate, conscious work” according to secret, mystical knowledge can reconnect a person with it.)

Though Gurdjieff was the first to introduce the enneagram into the Western consciousness, its teachings have grown and evolved since those early days when he was teaching it. To him, and to the Sufi mystics from whom he learned it, the enneagram was primarily about numerological divination. Gurdjieff taught that “all things in life work on two laws — 3 and 7;” that all “psychological laws” fall within the “law of three,” and all “material things” within the “law of seven.”

Take a look at the figure of the enneagram. What do you see? First, a triangle uniting the numbers 3, 6, and 9 (the law of three, based on dividing the number 1 by 3 along with its multiples, 0.3333, 0.6666, 0.9999), and a six-pointed figure connecting the numbers 1, 4, 2, 8, 5 and 7 (the law of seven, based on dividing the number 1 by 7, which yields an endless repetition of 0.142857….)

In short, the numerological origins of the enneagram still persist today even in its modern form. The numerical connections of the enneagram figure are not haphazard or coincidental - they are the specific results of the beliefs of its creators in the spiritual, transcendental power of certain numbers to divine the future and determine purpose and meaning. 

The enneagram on the cover of Gurdjieff's book, All and Everything

Furthermore, Gurdjieff taught that the enneagram is a symbol of the cosmos, in that the universe itself is ordered in the same specific, numerological way as the enneagram (even the “nine faces of God”, represented by the nine points, are contained within - not outside or beyond - the circle of the cosmos). In other words, therefore, as Pacwa summarizes, “any information that cannot be assigned its numerical value and then run through the enneagram diagram could not be understood in terms of its true cosmic significance.” (IE: even Jesus Christ is described as a “complete 9”).

Oscar Ichazo
Born in Bolivia in 1931, Oscar Ichazo rejected his Catholic upbringing because of what he claimed to have learned during out-of-body experiences. He delved into Eastern philosophy and spirituality instead, studying and experimenting with martial arts, Zen, yoga, shamanism, hypnotism, psychology, and psychedelic drugs. Meditation and mantra eventually put him in touch with, in his words, “Metatron, the prince of the archangels,” and he and the students of his Arica school still communicate with spiritual entities as part of their regular practices today, including, according to Ichazo, “all previous masters of the esoteric school, including those who have died.”

During his own season of spiritual searching, Ichazo encountered the teachings of Gurdjieff and the enneagram. Adapting it to some of his own ideas and theories, Ichazo developed the Enneagram of Personality (while tripping on mescaline), attaching an “ego fixation” and personality type (along with symbolic colors and animals) to each of the nine points on the enneagram figure. It was Ichazo who began to teach that, “a person's fixation derives from childhood subjective experience (IE: self-perception) of psychological trauma when expectations are not met in each of the instincts.” 

Claudio Naranjo
Ichazo was not alone in his development of the Enneagram of Personality theories. Claudio Naranjo is a Chilean-born psychiatrist who assisted Ichazo in the formation of the nine personality types that were attached to the enneagram and he correlated the Freudian defense mechanisms that supposedly accompany each type. In 1970, Naranjo brought a group of 50 students from the Esalen Institute in Big Sur - a key pillar in the American counterculture/New Age movement of the 1960’s - to Chile in order to learn the enneagram from Ichazo. When the group returned to Esalen, Naranjo began to teach the enneagram there, to people such as Helen Palmer (a psychic intuitive and modern-day master teacher of the enneagram who authored one of its most important texts) and Fr. Robert Ochs (the man most primarily credited with exposing the enneagram to the Catholic community). 

It was from the Jesuits taught by Fr. Ochs that Richard Rohr learned the enneagram, and it is most directly through Rohr that it has begun its breakthrough into evangelical Christianity. 

Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr is a lapsed Franciscan priest who has become a darling of liberally-minded evangelicals (think Rob Bell, Shane Claiborne, Jim Wallis, and the like.) He is many things – mystic, New Age, universalist, progressive, pantheist, unorthodox, postmodern, emergent – but what he is not, despite his insistent attempts to identify otherwise, is a Christian. He teaches, for instance, in contradiction to the Scriptures, that the male and female genders are mere social constructs, that indulgence in homosexual behavior is not sinful, that Christ’s death was not necessary to accomplish redemption, that Abraham was a fictional character, that hell is not real, that people are meant to become a fourth member of the Trinity, and that, “Strictly speaking, it is not correct to say Jesus is God. Jesus is the combination of God and human.” In regard to the immediate topic at hand, he has written that when he “first learned of the enneagram, it was one of the three great conversion experiences” of his life.

…along with many, many other things.

What he is, essentially, is a New Age motivational guru and cultural Marxist superficially cloaking himself in the guise and language of Catholicism. Consequently, when reading his influential The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective, it should come as no surprise to anyone that he claims things like the Gospel of John misquoted Jesus or that certain figures within the scriptural accounts are this or that enneagram number, based solely on a few paragraphs’ (or even sentences’) worth of description. Rohr is Christian in the same way that Christian Science is (which is to say not at all, despite its use of the term).

And it is Rohr’s book and teaching that led Episcopal priest Ian Morgan Cron to write his popular The Road Back to You along with Suzanne Stabile, a student of Rohr’s who, coincidentally, teaches at his Center for Action and Contemplation. Cron relates that after encountering Rohr’s book for the first time, he was warned off the enneagram by a professor at the “conservative seminary” he was attending, but renewed his interest in it years later after attending one of Stabile’s enneagram workshops. His website features endorsements on the book from, shall we say, less-than-orthodox (and far less than biblical) “Christian” celebrities like Wm. Paul Young (author of the dismally heretical The Shack) and Mark Batterson (whose book The Circle Maker draws from the completely unbiblical Talmud to teach that drawing prayer circles around what you desire will help you “claim God-given promises, pursue God-sized dreams, and seize God-ordained opportunities.”) Not exactly the kind of crowd intent on inspiring doctrinal fidelity or theological soundness, despite their fame within Christian pop culture.

Cron has said regarding use of the enneagram, “20 years later, it’s fascinating to me [that] even the conservative evangelicals are completely fine with it. … I have not received any pushback from anybody.”

With all due respect, Mr. Cron, I’m here to push back.

+

Continue with Part II: