One of the major claims by Christian Enneagram teachers nowadays is that the Enneagram has ancient roots and specifically Christian ancient roots. By the grace of God, in the following article, we will attempt to analyze that claim and prove its falsity. In order to do that we will split our argument into three parts. The first one is whether the Enneagram has Christian ancient roots going back to the desert fathers of Egypt. The second claim (which is the most recent claim within the Christian church) is whether the writings of Evagrius Ponticus were the seeds of the Enneagram. And then in the third and last one we will shall take a quick look at the main ideas that formed the theology of that church father (Evagrius) and especially his opinions on creation, the origin of souls and much more.

Part 1: The ancient Christian roots claim :

The claims of antiquities of the Enneagram started with George Gurdjieff (who described himself as a Pythagorean Greek and Gnostic Christian) and his disciple Ouspensky based on a claim that the Enneagram knowledge was taught to the Eastern Orthodox mystic (Gurdjuieff) by Sufis and specifically the Naqshbandi Sufis.

Further, the claim states that Gurdjeff toured the world and acquired secret knowledge from Egypt specifically the Desert Fathers. The claim itself cannot be substantiated by any means, nor do we have a proof or a witness account showing that Gurdjeff met with any Sufis or monks.

The use of numerology or number symbolism to denote a metaphysical reality in order to explain the cosmos is a practice that predates Christianity (as we shall explain in part2). Gurdjeff was heavily influenced by it as well as those Enneagram founders who followed his path. That “Pythagorean” theory of numbers talks about many concepts and principles. “The Law of Three” determines the character and nature of a vibration (as in music) and “The Law of Seven” determines how vibrations develop, interact and change” that’s from Ouspensky (Gurdjieff’s disciple). Both also believed that the esoteric knowledge behind those unique numbers (3, 6 and 9) permeate the whole cosmos and it is the foundation to understanding it. In fact they said it affects musical notes, Gurdjieff created some kind of mystical cosmic dance as an occult ritual.
The Pythagorean principle of some mystical power behind the numbers is extremely old and has created a cult that founded an esoteric science that was handed down along the lines of mystery schools in the Hellenistic period and even to the Sufis later on.

A few decades following Gurdjeff and Ouspensky, we find the testimony of 2 new Age and occult practionners , Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo admitting (despite Ichazo’s known connections to Sufism and eastern mysticism) that the ancient roots claim was completely made up for “marketing reasons”. There is a special appeal to ancient knowledge from old civilizations especially in the “New Age” milieu. And that’s why not even one New Age Enneagram teacher would repeat such unsubstantiated claim. The actual ancient Judeo-Christian roots claim started with the Christian author Christopher L. Heuertz, in his book “The Sacred Enneagram: Finding Your Unique Path to Spiritual Growth” (foreword by Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr” as he writes :
“Others point to the Jewish philosopher Philo (who also happened to live in Egypt), hinting that perhaps his esoteric Judaism and the Tree of Life, which is considered the key symbol of the tradition of the Kabbalah, root the earliest forms of the Enneagram in Jewish mysticism. Now if those links to the Kabbalah doesn’t concern the faithful Christian learning about Enneagram, I don’t know what else would? Christopher further advances the claim to focus mostly on the “Christian” origins as he writes: “Much has been written to suggest that the early Egyptian Christian monastic ascetics, the desert mothers and fathers, were the chief architects of the Enneagram, led by the fourth-century mystic Evagrius Ponticus. Ponticus’s writings are often cited to support theories on the Christian origins of the Enneagram, specifically as it relates to his work on his list of eight vices and virtues (in one place he names nine), which closely resemble the nine Virtues and Passions of the Enneagram as we have it today.” Christopher claims “much has been written,” yet nothing can be found anywhere about that odd claim. As we will see in the second part of this article, the source of this claim is not “many” but mostly one person: Franciscan priest Richard Rohr.

Part 2: The Evagrius connection:

Evagrius Ponticus a famous church father (345-399 AD) left a few works that reflect his Christian views that were mostly influenced by Origen. What matters is where did the above claim originate?

According to Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert, the whole Evagrius claim is based on one single passage in his work: the Praktikos: Chapters on prayers “ where Evagrius talked about “the shape of the numbers”…One single passage with a twisted interpretation created a whole theory out of nothing. Evagrius talking about “the shape of numbers” is a Pythagorean school of thought that attempted to link numbers and shapes to the mysteries the cosmos. This school of thought certainly predates Christianity and has its foundation outside the “soil” of the Christian faith. Evagrius Ponticus, is said to have used that Pythagorean number theory to describe a symbol that looked like an Enneagram (there was no drawing so all we can do is speculate). However, this association falls apart when we discover that the zero, the decimal point, and the repeating decimal values which are key to the Enneagram system, were unknown until the 14th Century. Now why does this matter? Well because the decimal point system is a central element in the Enneagram. The Enneagram is composed of a circle, a triangle, and an irregular hexagon. The circle represents the law of infinity , in the middle is a triangle representing the “law of three” where the vertices represent the numbers 3 , 6 and 9. According to Gurdjeff and his disciple Ouspensky , those numbers have mystical esoteric features and enable us to understand the cosmos.

Later on, occultist and New-Ager Claudio Naranjo came up with the idea of the 9 personality types (please notice how recent this invention is) and he added the third and last shape mentioned above (the irregular hexagon) which he designed using what he called “The Law of Seven”. The law of seven is based on the arrangement of decimal numbers resulting from dividing any integer less than seven by the number seven. When this division is completed, six recurring numbers are produced in a fixed order, and they are repeated endlessly in the decimal part as follows: 142857 142857 142857 and so on… Hence Naranjo added those six numbers to the circumference of the circle to reach the number of points to “9”, then he completed the sides of the irregular hexagon by placing arrows that connect the numbers in the order they appear in the decimal portion (so the arrows appear in a specific direction to express this arrangement or that relationship between the types of personalities.) – Lookup 142857 – Wikipedia.

From all the above, we can conclude that -contrary the claims made by Rohr and Ebert – Evagrius cannot be the inventor of the Enneagram, as they mistakenly reached that conclusion by anachronistically misinterpreting one single passage in Evagrius’s writings.

But the myth becomes even murkier once we find out that Rohr and Ebert did not claim a Christian origin for the Enneagram in the earlier edition of their book “The enneagram: a Christian perspective”. Ebert writes in the 1992 introduction to Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert’s, Discovering the Enneagram: An Ancient Tool for a New Spiritual journey: “The Enneagram is a mysterious model of the psyche that is not originally Christian. I believe that the Enneagram can help us to find a deeper and more authentic relationship with God—even though it was not discovered by Christians”. Again, it is important to note that in 1992, according to Rohr and Ebert, the Enneagram was “not originally Christian” and “not discovered by Christians. Further claims trying to link Evagrius “8 sins” to the enneagram is just laughable, since the whole concept is based on the number “9” (ennea) as key to understanding personalities. It’s the same “lame” attempt to link later Christian writings about the “7 deadly sins” to the enneagram while adding 2 extra sins. How could the author of a system that is solely based on the number 9 miss such a major principle and use the number 7 or 8 instead?

Before we move to part 3, there is a relevant piece of information that ought to be mentioned here. As we realize that the “Christianising” of the enneagram is a later invention mostly done by Richard Rohr, it’s important to shed the light on Rohr’s theology. While it’s impossible to go over all his doctrines, suffice it to say that Rohr’s views by no mean represent typical Orthodox views. He believes that hell doesn’t exist, that all humans will be saved, and that the truth is found in all religions. He doesn’t believe scripture to be God’s revelation but that it is a representation of people’s own experiences. He rarely discusses sin and repentance as he claims returning to God is just a matter of transforming our consciousness!! Hence, he talks about the Cosmic Christ which is the idea that Christ was in all creation from the very beginning of the cosmos. And finally, Rohr has been associated with many New Agers and was heavily influenced by them.

Part 3: is the “Evagrius connection” the hill they are willing to die on?

Now let’s assume all the previous evidence did not dissuade some from the “Desert Fathers origin hypothesis”. Let’s assume they insisted on planting the enneagram flag on the “Evagrius” hill. Does the Evagrian school represent an orthodox mainstream Christianity? Historians have sufficiently demonstrated that Evagrius depended on Origen and Gregory of Nysa all while being less biblical than his two mentors and more Hellenistic / Neoplatonic than them. In fact, Evagrius according to scholars represented an extreme Origenism and mysticism that has a gnostic flavor. According to catholic priest and Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, Evagrius was an ardent Origenist pursuing several heterodox doctrines and ideas to the extreme as the pre-existence of souls, the return of all creation to God including demons (Apokatastasis) which led to his condemnation at the fifth ecumenical council (553 AD) which is accepted by the Byzantine Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church. While some of his writings express a deep Coptic discipline, other doctrinal writings display an extreme gnostic Neoplatonic influence. His doctrine on Creation describes a primitive “Henad” where all spirits and creation was contained inside this one “unity”. The fall of those primitive “spirits” has led to the creation accounts as stated in Genesis; hence the creation of man and of the material world seems more like a judgment. Evagrius describes a hierarchical system where the angels have light fiery bodies, demons have the thickest densest ones and humans stand in between. We can clearly see a distinct gnostic influence in this doctrine. That gnostic flavor certainly affected his spiritual discipline as he states that “wherever one finds himself situated on this scale of life he has the duty of advancing higher through the various intermediate stages until he returns to the primitive state. Man therefore must advance by means of purification so that he attains by ascesis and prayer the angelic state with its more spiritual form of knowledge. As the individual advances from one type of knowledge to another he puts on the form of body, or rather is transformed into that bodily form, which is appropriate to his new state”. That construct that Evagrius describes is certainly gnostic and it is “works” based and is eerily similar to the New Age consciousness transformation through an individual act of mediation and contemplation. Now we can go on to further analyze his Christology and soteriology which will eventually lead us to one conclusion: Evagrius doctrines and spirituality is not a typical model of the Coptic monastic movement but rather an extreme ascetic discipline with much Gnosticism, Neoplatonism and Hellenistic influences.
So, my question remains: do you still want to link the enneagram to Evagrius Pontus? Such a link is a condemnation to the enneagram rather than a seal of approval; especially since the Orthodox church. And one final question: why is everyone linked to creating and advancing the Enneagram is either an occult practitioner (Gurdjieff, Ouspensky), a New Ager with occult links (Itchazo , Naranjo) or a Christian with heterodox ideas (Rohr, Evagrius)? What does that tell you about the Ennegaram?

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