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 Pagels 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 WestJudaism, 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 Peters 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 fishthus 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 Peters 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 trianglethe 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 Bambergers 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 Bambergers 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 dont 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 Gurdjieffs teachings. J.G. Bennett recounts Gurdjieffs 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 Ouspenskys secretary from the mid-1930s until Ouspenskys 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.

ConclusionIn 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. Bennetts 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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Pythagoras, Gurdjieff and the Enneagram - Enneagram Monthly