by Lynn Quirolo
The enneagram was introduced to the West by G.I. Gurdjieff in 1916 as a symbol of the harmonic structure and inner dynamic of the cosmos. In the early 1970s, Oscar Ichazo’s Enneagram of Fixations, an application of the enneagram quite distinct from Gurdjieff’s original diagram of the “Laws of 3 and 7,” began its evolution in Claudio Naranjo’s Seekers After Truth (SAT) groups in Berkeley.
Gurdjieff never explicitly divulged the sources of his teachings and the origin of the enneagram has been a source of speculation. The most prominent theory regarding the source of the enneagram is probably J.G. Bennett’s who believed that Gurdjieff learned the enneagram from Sufis in Central Asia (Gurdjieff: Making a New World, 1973). Although Oscar Ichazo states that he worked out the Enneagram of Fixations himself using Gurdjieff’s enneagram as a template (“The Arica Training,” in Charles Tart’s Transpersonal Psychologies, Harper & Row, 1975, p. 331) it is a common belief that his typology is “ancient wisdom” stemming from either Sufi or Christian origins.
The search for the origin of the enneagram leads into a labyrinth of historical and spiritual cross currents. Yet in the writings of Evagrius Ponticus, a Greek Christian contemplative living in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century AD, I think we stumble across a major indication of the origin of the enneagram. In Evagrius’ writings are found both an enneagram-like symbolism and the “8 evil thoughts” which were later to become the “7 deadly sins” of Christianity.
Evagrius lived in a historic period when a rich commingling of Christian, Hellenistic, pre-Islamic and probably also Hindu and Buddhist influences was occurring in the Middle East. This raises many interesting issues concerning the history and original meaning of the enneagram. What is the meaning of Evagrius’ number symbolism? Is the enneagram “ancient wisdom?” Were the “fixations” wedded to the enneagram as early as the 4th century AD? Was Gurdjieff influenced by the early Christian teachings of Evagrius Ponticus and the Desert Fathers?
Before the dawn of our modern scientific (and problematic) way of thinking, there were different ways of explaining the world, ways that may seem contrived, arbitrary and even superstitious to us. Pythagoras, a Greek contemporary of Buddha and Lao-tzu, devised a philosophy, now almost unknown, which shaped our Western world view from the pre-Christian era up to the beginning of the modern age. The Pythagorean theory of harmonics would guide Kepler in the 17th century to correctly determine the order of the solar system and presage Newton in the discovery of gravity before becoming a discarded artifact of scientific and cultural history.
Below is the writing of Evagrius Ponticus in which he uses Pythagorean number theory and describes an enneagram-like figure. This text is part of a letter written as an introduction to Chapters on Prayer, a guide to contemplative practice (from The Philokalia, translated from the Greek by G. Palmer, P. Sherrard, and K. Ware, pp. 55-57):
“I have divided this discourse on prayer into one hundred and fifty-three texts. In this way I send you an evangelical feast, so that you may delight in a symbolical number that combines a triangular with a hexagonal figure. The triangle indicates spiritual knowledge of the Trinity, the hexagon indicates the ordered creation of the world in six days. The number one hundred is square, with the number fifty-three is triangular and spherical; for twenty-eight is triangular, and twenty-five is spherical, five times five being twenty-five. In this way, you have a square figure to express the fourfold nature of the virtues, and a spherical number, twenty-five, which by form represents the cyclic movement of time and so indicates true knowledge of this present age. For week follows week and month follows month, and time revolves from year to year, and season follows season, as we see from the movement of the sun and moon, of spring and summer, and so on. The triangle can signify knowledge of the Holy Trinity. Or you can regard the total sum, one hundred and fifty-three, as triangular and so signifying respectively the practice of the virtues, contemplation of the divine in nature, and theology or spiritual knowledge of God; faith, hope and love; or gold, silver and precious stones. So much then for this number.”
I. What is the Meaning of Evagrius’ number symbolism?
To make sense of Evagrius’ number symbolism, I will give a brief overview of Pythagorean philosophy, a set of Pythagorean definitions and then discuss his three interpretations of the Biblical number 153. The number 153 refers to the number of fish caught by the disciples after the resurrected Jesus instructs them how to cast their net. The passage (John 21, 11) reads, “Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net onto the land full of large fishes, one hundred and fifty-three in number. And though there were so many, the net was not torn.” Evagrius was not the only theologian to interpret this significant number.
A. Pythagorean Philosophy
Pythagoras (582-500 BC) was a Greek philosopher who studied in Egypt and returned to teach in Greece on the island of Samos. His philosophy has been regarded by some historians as the cornerstone of Western thought and science. Pythagoras is credited with the dictum, “All is Number.” To the Pythagorean, the universe was organic and living, its elements obeying an inner order. The form of creation was a divine fabrication in accordance with the Reason of the Creator and as such was to some extent comprehensible by the human mind. This form or divine structure could be apprehended, although imperfectly, in the study of number, a study which followed logically from the belief in the progression of the divine reason to its imperfect reflection in humanity. Number represented the structure behind appearances, the archetypal pattern upon which all the complexities of perceived creation was determined.
To understand the Pythagorean philosophy of number, it is important to know that Indian numerals such as we use today were unknown in 500 BC as were the early numeric systems which used letters. Numbers were represented by markers, such as pebbles (which the Romans called calculi) and were arranged in figures or shapes (we still use the word “figure” to refer to a number or calculation). Relationships and patterns among numbers were highly significant. The zero and decimal point were also unknown and therefore the calculation of a repeating decimal, such as the decimal representation of 1/7 (0.142857142857) upon which Gurdjieff’s enneagram symbol is based, could not have been derived.
Evagrius explains in his introduction to Chapters on Prayer, “The way of prayer is twofold: it comprises practice of the virtues and contemplation. The same applies to numbers; literally they are quantities but they can also signify qualities.” Evagrius applies the “qualitative” meaning of number to give us three interpretations of the inner meaning of the 153 fishes of the Gospel of John.
B. Pythagorean Definitions
(references: The Philokalia and G. Sarton, Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece, Dover, 1952).
(1) Triangular number: The sum of continuous numerals starting with 1.
Examples: 3 = 1 + 2
6 = 1 + 2 + 3
10 = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4
(2) Square numbers: The sum of numbers starting at 1 and omitting one number between each computation.
Examples: 4 = 1 + 3 (2 is omitted)
9 = 1 + 3 + 5
16 = 1 + 3 + 5 + 7
(3) Hexagonal number: The sum of numbers starting at 1 and omitting 3 numbers at each computation.
Examples: 6 = 1 + 5 (2, 3 and 4 are omitted)
16 = 1 + 5 + 9
28 = 1 + 5 + 9 + 13
(4) Circular number: A number which is the product of a number which when squared reproduces itself as the last digit.
Examples: 25 = 5 x 5 (5 reappears as the last digit in 25); 36 = 6 x 6
C. Evagrius’ 3 interpretations of 153
(1) 153 is “a symbolical number that combines a triangle with a hexagonal figure. The triangle indicates spiritual knowledge of the Trinity, the hexagon indicates the ordered creation of the world in six days.”
Explanation: 153 is triangular, that is, 153 = (1 + 2 + 3 + .... 17) and it is also hexagonal because 153 = (1+ 5 + 9 ... + 33). These two qualities found in a single number Evagrius would find highly significant according to Pythagorean philosophy. The number 153 therefore possesses both a trinitarian quality, symbolic of the trinity, and a 6-term quality symbolic of the creation. This symbolization is very close to Gurdjieff’s enneagram which expresses the Law of Three and the Law of Seven. The graphic representations of this number would include:
(2) “The number one hundred is square, with the number fifty-three is triangular and spherical; for twenty-eight is triangular, and twenty-five is spherical, five times five being twenty-five.”
Explanation:
100 is a square number because 100 = ( 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 .... + 19) and thus represents the fourfold nature of the virtues;
28 is a triangle because 28 = (1 + 2 + 3 .... + 7) and thus signifies knowledge of the Holy Trinity;
25 is circular because 5 x 5 = 25 and thus represents time and indicates true knowledge; and
100 + 28 + 25 = 153.
The graphic representations of this interpretation include:
Explanation:
100 is a square number because 100 = ( 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 .... + 19) and thus represents the fourfold nature of the virtues;
28 is a triangle because 28 = (1 + 2 + 3 .... + 7) and thus signifies knowledge of the Holy Trinity;
25 is circular because 5 x 5 = 25 and thus represents time and indicates true knowledge; and
100 + 28 + 25 = 153.
The graphic representations of this interpretation include:
(3) “Or you can regard the total sum, one hundred and fifty-three, as triangular...”
Explanation: 153 = ( 1 + 2 + 3 ... + 17) which can be graphically represented as a triangle of dots:
Explanation: 153 = ( 1 + 2 + 3 ... + 17) which can be graphically represented as a triangle of dots:
Evagrius give us 3 trinitarian interpretations:
a) practice of the virtues, contemplation of the divine in nature, and spiritual knowledge of God
b) faith, hope and love
c) gold, silver, and precious stones
II. Is the Enneagram “ancient wisdom?
Evagrius expresses the purpose of his spiritual practice in Verse 51 of Chapters on Prayer:
“We seek after virtues for the sake of attaining to the inner meaning of created things. We pursue these latter, that is to say the inner meanings of what is created, for the sake of attaining to the Lord who has created them. It is in the state of prayer that he is accustomed to manifest himself.”
This verse on the purpose of prayer expresses a spiritual method and goal unfamiliar to most modern Western notions of religion, which, as Alfred North Whitehead states, is “tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.” (Science in the Modern World, Lowell Lectures, 1925, p. 223).
Why do phrases such as “seek after virtue” and “attain to the inner meaning of created things” seem strange to us? To partially answer this question, a look at the history of Evagrius’ teachings is helpful.
Evagrius wrote these texts in the fourth century, a critical period in the development of the Christian Church. In 324 AD, Constantine declared Christianity the Roman state religion and as Rome was Christianized, Christianity was Romanized. In a twist of history, as the Pagans had persecuted the Christians, now the Roman Christians were persecuting the Pagans and many “heretical” Christians as well. To Christians motivated to solidify the temporal power of the early church, the danger of contamination of the faith by Pagan ideas was of paramount concern (for a historical account of the political forces that shaped Christianity see Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels).
Evagrius “was considered by his disciples to have attained a rare degree of harmony in his personality through his ascetic practice and through his pure prayer.” (Bamberger, J.E., The Praktikos, p. XXV) Yet in 399 AD, the same year as his death, his followers were persecuted as heretics and forced into exile. Evagrius was condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 and also by the following 3 Councils. Fortunately, Evagrius’ followers managed to take some of his works with them into exile, into areas outside the Roman Empire including the Arabic world where he influenced the Persian Sufis and Armenia where his works exerted a great influence on Byzantine theologians.
However great the efforts of the early Christian church were to cleanse itself of Hellenistic influence, a residue remained. As George Sarton states, “(the Greeks) created theological instruments that were needed for the development of the three dogmatic religions of the West—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In each of these religions there is a woof of scripture and tradition, but the warp in Greek” (Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece, p. 198). The symbolic use and interpretation of number was a prevalent element in the fabric of Hellenistic philosophy and is evident in the theology of the early Christian theologians. Two of Evagrius’ contemporaries, St. Jerome (died 420) and St. Augustine (354-430), have also interpreted the number of fishes in Simon Peter’s net.
“Perhaps it was St. Jerome who provided the right solution to the meaning of the 153 fish of great size when he observed that, according to the opinion of Oppianus of Cilicia, there are 153 species of fish…thus the passage refers symbolically to the universality of the Church.” (Bamberger, Chapters on Prayer, footnote 11, page 54). Here the symbolism is concrete, single, “correct,” and is “quantity” rather than “quality.”
St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, interprets the meaning of the 153 fishes in Simon Peter’s net in his Letters (Letter LV to Januarius, Chap. XVII 31):
“Hence also, in the number of the large fishes which our Lord after His resurrection, showing this new life, commanded to be taken on the right side of the ship, there is found the number 50 three times multiplied, with the addition of three more [the symbol of the Trinity] to make the holy mystery more apparent; …Then [in this new life] man, made perfect and at rest, purified in body and soul by the pure words of God, which are like silver purged from its dross, seven times refined, shall receive his reward, the denarius; so that with that reward the numbers 10 and 7 meet in him. For in this number [17] there is found, as in other numbers representing a combination of symbols, a wonderful mystery. Nor is it without good reason that the seventeenth Psalm is the only one which is given complete in the book of Kings, because it signifies that kingdom in which we shall have no enemy. .... And when shall this His body be finally delivered from enemies? Is it not when the last enemy, Death, shall be destroyed? It is to that time that the number of the 153 fishes pertains. For if the number 17 itself be the side of an arithmetical triangle…the whole sum of these units is 153.”
St. Augustine gives us 2 interpretations of 153. One is Trinitarian and is similar to that of Evagrius.
Like St. Jerome and St. Augustine, there were most likely many early theologians who found symbolic significance in the numbers of the Scriptures. This interest in symbolic number was pervasive at the time of the early Christian Church and was rooted in pre-Christian thought at least since the time of Pythagoras and probably even earlier.
Today, of course, we tend to look upon number symbolism as a confused, pre-scientific form of thought. Numbers in the Bible may mean nothing, just selected at random to indicate quantity or comparison; or they may have had some superstitious or self-referent meaning for the authors of the Scriptures. Another possibility, however, is that some Biblical numbers and possibly the structure of some of the Scriptures encoded information or indicated other sources of knowledge (c.f. “legomonism,” Anthony Blake, The Intelligent Enneagram of Gurdjieff, Shambhala 1996, in press).
That symbolic number and sacred geometry were indicative of the divine structure of the universe was self-evident to many early philosophers and theologians. Although this “qualitative” understanding of number which had its roots in Hellenistic philosophy was almost entirely purged from Christianity during its early development, it appears to have left its trace in the Scriptures whose authors, as educated people of their day, were probably versed in the sacred science of number and proportion. Most of the symbolic meaning of this sacred canon of number is lost to us but this may not be irrevocably so as interest in ancient more “holistic” forms of thought is growing as the limitations of our fragmented, technological “rationality” become ever more apparent. There is reason to believe that the enneagram may be a fragment of an early sacred cosmology.
3. Did Evagrius Ponticus combine the “evil thoughts” with the enneagram?
In John Bamberger’s double text (The Praktikos, Chapters on Prayer, Cistercian Publications, 1970) we see that Evagrius knew both a psychology based on “8 evil thoughts” and a cosmology symbolized by a hexagon plus triad. Can we therefore conclude that the “Enneagram of Fixations” originated in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD?
For several reasons, I think the answer to this question is No. One reason lies in the structure of the text. Although we find both systems in a single text in Bamberger’s translation, this text is comprised of two books which were written at different times for different purposes. The first book, Praktikos, describes the evil thoughts. The enneagram-like symbol is described in an introductory letter to the the second book, Chapters on Prayer. As the purification and codification of Christian thought was in progress during Evagrius’ entire lifetime, he was no doubt aware of the heretical nature of Pythagorean philosophy and was, therefore, prudent to restrict his number symbolism to an introductory dedication. The proto-enneagram and the “evil thoughts” are not combined in his work.
A second reason to conclude Evagrius considered his psychology separate from the symbolic cosmology is that in his 3 interpretations of the number 153, none include the number 8, his number of “evil thoughts.” In other words, the two systems don’t coincide numerically. His hexagon plus triad would be a 3, 6 or 9-term system and he does not adjust the number of his “evil thoughts” to fit.
A third reason to believe that to Evagrius these 2 systems were disparate is that as a contemplative, Evagrius would understand the passions to be obstacles to gnosis of the divine. That is, the passions would not participate in or in any sense determine the logos or sacred order of the cosmos but would be obstacles to its perception. The purpose of the contemplative life is to purify or eliminate obscurations to gnosis.
4. Was Gurdjieff influenced by Evagrius Ponticus?
Gurdjieff, a Greek Armenian, was raised in the border area between Armenia and Georgia where, to this day, Evagrius, a Greek native of Georgia, is accorded great honor. The teachings of Evagrius and the Desert Fathers were an intrinsic part of the Eastern Orthodox culture and would have certainly influenced Gurdjieff during his childhood and early intellectual development.
Gurdjieff, who described himself as a Pythagorean Greek and Gnostic Christian, is infamous for having gone to great lengths not to divulge the sources of his teachings to even his closest pupils. This has given rise to much speculation about the sources of Gurdjieff’s teachings. J.G. Bennett recounts Gurdjieff’s ongoing rewriting of his magnum opus, All and Everything, each time with increasing obscurity. Gurdjieff explained this as “burying the dog deeper.” Bennett recounts, “When people corrected him and said that he surely meant “bury the bone deeper,” he would turn on them and say “it is not ‘bones’ but the ‘dog’ that you have to find.” (J.G. Bennett, Making a New World, p. 274)
Yet, in the teaching of the Desert Fathers of the 4th century students of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky will recognize a root source for many of the inner exercises of the Fourth Way. Mt. Athos, a Russian Orthodox monastery in Greece where the esoteric Christian tradition of the Desert Fathers was practiced in the early twentieth century is cited by Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous. Gerald Palmer who translated The Philokalia was a student of Ouspensky. E. Kadloubovsky, who also translated writings of the Desert Fathers, was Ouspensky’s secretary from the mid-1930’s until Ouspensky’s death in 1947. Both J.G. Bennett and P.D. Ouspensky used The Philokalia as a primary spiritual text in their work with students. The teaching of Evagrius Ponticus and the Desert Fathers must be considered as a major source of the Gurdjieff Work, which Gurdjieff himself called “esoteric Christianity.”
Conclusion
In the 4th century writing of Evagrius Ponticus we find a highly developed contemplative psychology which has become all but extinct in the West. We also find a Pythagorean interpretation of an important Biblical symbolic number. Fragments of both the psychology and symbolism are found in the teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. As these ideas were part of the Hellenistic “warp” of the fabric of Christian and Islamic religions, we find striking similarities between early Christian thought and the later Sufi spirituality and cosmology.
In our search for “ancient wisdom” it is important to keep in mind our natural tendency to reinterpret what we find through our own preconceptions, according to our own cultural and historic context. In this way, symbols of other cultures and contexts become invested with our own “meaning” and in the process become a mirror which reflects our own contemporary interests. The writings of Evagrius and the Desert Fathers, now 1600 years old, are an inspiration to seekers in a technologically bright but spiritually dark age, to open our hearts and minds to the greater possibilities that lie in each of us.
__________
Lynn Quirolo is a 1972 graduate of J.G. Bennett’s International Academy for Continuous Education at Sherborne, England. Since 1976 she has occasionally taught the Enneagram.
__________ Enneagram Monthly, Issue 14 & 15, April & May 1996
a) practice of the virtues, contemplation of the divine in nature, and spiritual knowledge of God
b) faith, hope and love
c) gold, silver, and precious stones
II. Is the Enneagram “ancient wisdom?
Evagrius expresses the purpose of his spiritual practice in Verse 51 of Chapters on Prayer:
“We seek after virtues for the sake of attaining to the inner meaning of created things. We pursue these latter, that is to say the inner meanings of what is created, for the sake of attaining to the Lord who has created them. It is in the state of prayer that he is accustomed to manifest himself.”
This verse on the purpose of prayer expresses a spiritual method and goal unfamiliar to most modern Western notions of religion, which, as Alfred North Whitehead states, is “tending to degenerate into a decent formula wherewith to embellish a comfortable life.” (Science in the Modern World, Lowell Lectures, 1925, p. 223).
Why do phrases such as “seek after virtue” and “attain to the inner meaning of created things” seem strange to us? To partially answer this question, a look at the history of Evagrius’ teachings is helpful.
Evagrius wrote these texts in the fourth century, a critical period in the development of the Christian Church. In 324 AD, Constantine declared Christianity the Roman state religion and as Rome was Christianized, Christianity was Romanized. In a twist of history, as the Pagans had persecuted the Christians, now the Roman Christians were persecuting the Pagans and many “heretical” Christians as well. To Christians motivated to solidify the temporal power of the early church, the danger of contamination of the faith by Pagan ideas was of paramount concern (for a historical account of the political forces that shaped Christianity see Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels).
Evagrius “was considered by his disciples to have attained a rare degree of harmony in his personality through his ascetic practice and through his pure prayer.” (Bamberger, J.E., The Praktikos, p. XXV) Yet in 399 AD, the same year as his death, his followers were persecuted as heretics and forced into exile. Evagrius was condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 and also by the following 3 Councils. Fortunately, Evagrius’ followers managed to take some of his works with them into exile, into areas outside the Roman Empire including the Arabic world where he influenced the Persian Sufis and Armenia where his works exerted a great influence on Byzantine theologians.
However great the efforts of the early Christian church were to cleanse itself of Hellenistic influence, a residue remained. As George Sarton states, “(the Greeks) created theological instruments that were needed for the development of the three dogmatic religions of the West—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In each of these religions there is a woof of scripture and tradition, but the warp in Greek” (Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece, p. 198). The symbolic use and interpretation of number was a prevalent element in the fabric of Hellenistic philosophy and is evident in the theology of the early Christian theologians. Two of Evagrius’ contemporaries, St. Jerome (died 420) and St. Augustine (354-430), have also interpreted the number of fishes in Simon Peter’s net.
“Perhaps it was St. Jerome who provided the right solution to the meaning of the 153 fish of great size when he observed that, according to the opinion of Oppianus of Cilicia, there are 153 species of fish…thus the passage refers symbolically to the universality of the Church.” (Bamberger, Chapters on Prayer, footnote 11, page 54). Here the symbolism is concrete, single, “correct,” and is “quantity” rather than “quality.”
St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, interprets the meaning of the 153 fishes in Simon Peter’s net in his Letters (Letter LV to Januarius, Chap. XVII 31):
“Hence also, in the number of the large fishes which our Lord after His resurrection, showing this new life, commanded to be taken on the right side of the ship, there is found the number 50 three times multiplied, with the addition of three more [the symbol of the Trinity] to make the holy mystery more apparent; …Then [in this new life] man, made perfect and at rest, purified in body and soul by the pure words of God, which are like silver purged from its dross, seven times refined, shall receive his reward, the denarius; so that with that reward the numbers 10 and 7 meet in him. For in this number [17] there is found, as in other numbers representing a combination of symbols, a wonderful mystery. Nor is it without good reason that the seventeenth Psalm is the only one which is given complete in the book of Kings, because it signifies that kingdom in which we shall have no enemy. .... And when shall this His body be finally delivered from enemies? Is it not when the last enemy, Death, shall be destroyed? It is to that time that the number of the 153 fishes pertains. For if the number 17 itself be the side of an arithmetical triangle…the whole sum of these units is 153.”
St. Augustine gives us 2 interpretations of 153. One is Trinitarian and is similar to that of Evagrius.
Like St. Jerome and St. Augustine, there were most likely many early theologians who found symbolic significance in the numbers of the Scriptures. This interest in symbolic number was pervasive at the time of the early Christian Church and was rooted in pre-Christian thought at least since the time of Pythagoras and probably even earlier.
Today, of course, we tend to look upon number symbolism as a confused, pre-scientific form of thought. Numbers in the Bible may mean nothing, just selected at random to indicate quantity or comparison; or they may have had some superstitious or self-referent meaning for the authors of the Scriptures. Another possibility, however, is that some Biblical numbers and possibly the structure of some of the Scriptures encoded information or indicated other sources of knowledge (c.f. “legomonism,” Anthony Blake, The Intelligent Enneagram of Gurdjieff, Shambhala 1996, in press).
That symbolic number and sacred geometry were indicative of the divine structure of the universe was self-evident to many early philosophers and theologians. Although this “qualitative” understanding of number which had its roots in Hellenistic philosophy was almost entirely purged from Christianity during its early development, it appears to have left its trace in the Scriptures whose authors, as educated people of their day, were probably versed in the sacred science of number and proportion. Most of the symbolic meaning of this sacred canon of number is lost to us but this may not be irrevocably so as interest in ancient more “holistic” forms of thought is growing as the limitations of our fragmented, technological “rationality” become ever more apparent. There is reason to believe that the enneagram may be a fragment of an early sacred cosmology.
3. Did Evagrius Ponticus combine the “evil thoughts” with the enneagram?
In John Bamberger’s double text (The Praktikos, Chapters on Prayer, Cistercian Publications, 1970) we see that Evagrius knew both a psychology based on “8 evil thoughts” and a cosmology symbolized by a hexagon plus triad. Can we therefore conclude that the “Enneagram of Fixations” originated in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD?
For several reasons, I think the answer to this question is No. One reason lies in the structure of the text. Although we find both systems in a single text in Bamberger’s translation, this text is comprised of two books which were written at different times for different purposes. The first book, Praktikos, describes the evil thoughts. The enneagram-like symbol is described in an introductory letter to the the second book, Chapters on Prayer. As the purification and codification of Christian thought was in progress during Evagrius’ entire lifetime, he was no doubt aware of the heretical nature of Pythagorean philosophy and was, therefore, prudent to restrict his number symbolism to an introductory dedication. The proto-enneagram and the “evil thoughts” are not combined in his work.
A second reason to conclude Evagrius considered his psychology separate from the symbolic cosmology is that in his 3 interpretations of the number 153, none include the number 8, his number of “evil thoughts.” In other words, the two systems don’t coincide numerically. His hexagon plus triad would be a 3, 6 or 9-term system and he does not adjust the number of his “evil thoughts” to fit.
A third reason to believe that to Evagrius these 2 systems were disparate is that as a contemplative, Evagrius would understand the passions to be obstacles to gnosis of the divine. That is, the passions would not participate in or in any sense determine the logos or sacred order of the cosmos but would be obstacles to its perception. The purpose of the contemplative life is to purify or eliminate obscurations to gnosis.
4. Was Gurdjieff influenced by Evagrius Ponticus?
Gurdjieff, a Greek Armenian, was raised in the border area between Armenia and Georgia where, to this day, Evagrius, a Greek native of Georgia, is accorded great honor. The teachings of Evagrius and the Desert Fathers were an intrinsic part of the Eastern Orthodox culture and would have certainly influenced Gurdjieff during his childhood and early intellectual development.
Gurdjieff, who described himself as a Pythagorean Greek and Gnostic Christian, is infamous for having gone to great lengths not to divulge the sources of his teachings to even his closest pupils. This has given rise to much speculation about the sources of Gurdjieff’s teachings. J.G. Bennett recounts Gurdjieff’s ongoing rewriting of his magnum opus, All and Everything, each time with increasing obscurity. Gurdjieff explained this as “burying the dog deeper.” Bennett recounts, “When people corrected him and said that he surely meant “bury the bone deeper,” he would turn on them and say “it is not ‘bones’ but the ‘dog’ that you have to find.” (J.G. Bennett, Making a New World, p. 274)
Yet, in the teaching of the Desert Fathers of the 4th century students of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky will recognize a root source for many of the inner exercises of the Fourth Way. Mt. Athos, a Russian Orthodox monastery in Greece where the esoteric Christian tradition of the Desert Fathers was practiced in the early twentieth century is cited by Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous. Gerald Palmer who translated The Philokalia was a student of Ouspensky. E. Kadloubovsky, who also translated writings of the Desert Fathers, was Ouspensky’s secretary from the mid-1930’s until Ouspensky’s death in 1947. Both J.G. Bennett and P.D. Ouspensky used The Philokalia as a primary spiritual text in their work with students. The teaching of Evagrius Ponticus and the Desert Fathers must be considered as a major source of the Gurdjieff Work, which Gurdjieff himself called “esoteric Christianity.”
Conclusion
In the 4th century writing of Evagrius Ponticus we find a highly developed contemplative psychology which has become all but extinct in the West. We also find a Pythagorean interpretation of an important Biblical symbolic number. Fragments of both the psychology and symbolism are found in the teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. As these ideas were part of the Hellenistic “warp” of the fabric of Christian and Islamic religions, we find striking similarities between early Christian thought and the later Sufi spirituality and cosmology.
In our search for “ancient wisdom” it is important to keep in mind our natural tendency to reinterpret what we find through our own preconceptions, according to our own cultural and historic context. In this way, symbols of other cultures and contexts become invested with our own “meaning” and in the process become a mirror which reflects our own contemporary interests. The writings of Evagrius and the Desert Fathers, now 1600 years old, are an inspiration to seekers in a technologically bright but spiritually dark age, to open our hearts and minds to the greater possibilities that lie in each of us.
__________
Lynn Quirolo is a 1972 graduate of J.G. Bennett’s International Academy for Continuous Education at Sherborne, England. Since 1976 she has occasionally taught the Enneagram.
__________ Enneagram Monthly, Issue 14 & 15, April & May 1996
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