Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 179:714 (Apr 2022)
Article: The Enneagram’s False History And Occult Roots
Author: Ronald V. Huggins

BSac 179:714 (April-June 2022) p. 146

The Enneagram’s False History And Occult Roots

Ronald V. Huggins

Ronald V. Huggins is an independent scholar who was professor of Historical and Theological Studies at Salt Lake Theological Seminary, Salt Lake City, Utah, and of New Testament and Greek at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri, where he also served as editor of the Midwestern Journal of Theology.

Abstract

In 1996 Andreas Ebert announced the discovery of a passage by Evagrius of Pontus indicating that the fourth-century desert father used the Enneagram, significant since Evagrius’s eight (or nine) deadly thoughts eventually evolved into the seven deadly sins. Many Christians embraced Ebert’s claim. This article shows two factors that refute Ebert’s claim. First, Evagrius’s text is a typical example of a widespread patristic practice that sought theological significance in figurate numbers, and had nothing to do with diagrams such as the Enneagram. Second, the proto-New Age teacher Oscar Ichazo first connected the Enneagram symbol and the seven deadly sins around 1969.

In 1971 a new approach to discussing differences in personality emerged.1 This model, the Enneagram of Personality, identified not four or five different personality types, as in other early, popular Christian personality profiles, but nine. After cycling through the New Age and business communities for decades, the Enneagram of Personality finally came to the attention of evangelical Christians and presently enjoys unprecedented popularity among them. No small part of the Enneagram’s present success among Christians rests on the claim that it represents an ancient Christian practice, attested by the fourth-century church father Evagrius of Pontus. It is the purpose of this article to show why this claim of ancient Christian origins is unfounded and to examine the question of the Enneagram’s actual roots.

BSac 179:714 (April-June 2022) p. 147

The Argument For Christian Origins (1996)

In 2001 Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert released an updated edition of their 1992 book The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective, which, unlike the previous edition, claimed that the Enneagram had ancient Christian roots. In 1995 Ebert encountered a text by the church father Evagrius of Pontus, which he argued was “the first and only written source pointing to the emergence of the Enneagram symbol.”2 In the earlier version of their book, Rohr and Ebert had said that the Enneagram was probably derived from “Sufi wisdom” but in any case was “not originally Christian”; they did commend its usefulness “even ...