Spirituality Studies 10-2 Fall 2024 5 Samuel Bendeck Sotillos Bakhtiar’s (1938–2020) ground-breaking research – which adopted a spiritual hermeneutic (Ar. ta’wil) – has given a renewed focus on the traditional origins of the Enneagram within Islamic spirituality (Bakhtiar 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 2013a; 2013b). Thus, through a discernment that is properly metaphysical, the Enneagram may be viewed as a universal symbol that can support wayfarers on any path. This study argues that only when the Enneagram is situated within humanity’s spiritual traditions can we comprehend its meaning and utility as a sacred psychology. It is through a “science of the soul” grounded in metaphysics and cosmology that the nine-pointed symbol becomes operative for the purposes of healing and transformation. From the perspective of sacred symbolism, the Enneagram reveals a spiritually “operative” aspect. René Guénon (1886–1951) writes, “the whole of nature amounts to no more than a symbol of the transcendent realities” (2004b, 22), and additionally “the entire natural order can in its turn be a symbol of the divine order” (2004c, 10). Everything in the manifest world of the five senses pertains to symbolism. Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) observes that “to exist is to be a symbol” and that we need sacred tradition to supply us with “wisdom… to perceive the symbolism of things” (2002 57). Our identity as human beings, and the meaning of our lives, are inseparable from symbolism and its metaphysical significance. In learning again to discern the “signs of God” (Lat. vestigia Dei; Ar. āyāt Allāh), we can reintegrate the science of the cosmos with a science of the soul, a unitive knowledge that had never been sundered prior to the modern age. Awakening to our True Self is to recognize our fundamental identity in the Divine. In contrast, modern psychology is confused as to what comprises our fundamental personhood. The relative reality of the ego is perceived to be who we really are, whereas the personal dimension of our being is rooted in a transcendent origin. For this reason, Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215) could say: “[I]f one knows himself, he will know God” (1867, 273). Phenomenology, as contextualized in the epistemological pluralism of the sacred, will be the interpretive framework adopted in our analysis. This approach to the study of the Enneagram will be undertaken in a manner consistent with the method expounded by Henry Corbin (1903–1978); that is, “tracing a thing back to its source, to its archetype” (1980, 3). Corbin translated phenomenology as kashf al-maḥjūb or “unveiling of the hidden” as informed by the spiritual hermeneutics (Ar. al-ta’wīl) of Súfism [1]. In the same way, a phenomenological approach is taken here as a method of studying the essence (or essential meaning) of phenomena in a way that is not limited to a given religious or spiritual form. Without knowing its origins, one cannot account for the Enneagram, and its meaning will thus be left to the winds of conjecture and subjective whim. Ichazo explains: “[T]hey have created an unending labyrinth over the descriptions and suppositions of each type with no other foundation, except for the wit of their own opinion. No wonder the contradictions amount, and there is no way they will ever get into any agreement” (quoted in Isaacs and Labanauskas 1996, 18). What fundamentally distinguishes a sacred from a modern perspective – not only with respect to the Enneagram – is the attribution of a divine origin to all traditional symbols, rather than to a source based solely on human contrivance. It is a traditional understanding of symbols, alone, that provides the integrated knowledge necessary to situate them beyond a purely psychological point of view. The world’s sapiential traditions unanimously recognize that “symbolism is of ‘non-human’ origin” (Guénon 2004c, 9). We must therefore distinguish two ways of comprehending the Enneagram: a traditional interpretation rooted in divine revelation, and a modern approach that is divorced from the sacred. The Enneagram has profound implications for our understanding of the human psyche and its spiritual potential, yet this is not to suggest that its purpose is merely “psychological”. Such an outlook can only lead to psychologism – the reduction of reality exclusively to the domain of the psyche, which is to fundamentally confuse ontological levels. In the same way that the human microcosm is a tripartite entity – consisting of Spirit, soul, and body – so too the cosmos at large, according to traditional cosmologies, has a three-fold structure, comprising realms that are spiritual, psychic, and corporeal. Titus Burckhardt (1908–1984) observes that “man in his integral nature… is not only a physical datum but, at one and the same time, body, soul, and spirit” (1987, 173). An exclusive use of the Enneagram for the sole purpose of understanding the empirical personality, at the expense of what transcends it, is to radically curb its metaphysical scope and integrative potential. Such reductionism not only undermines a profound understanding of this nine-pointed symbol, but of everything pertaining to the transcendent order. What is needed is a deeper discernment that differentiates New Age parodies from authentic expressions of the sacred. This degeneration is what Guénon refers to as “a parody of spirituality, imitating it so to speak in an inverse sense, so as to appear to be its very opposite” (2001b, 267).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTUwMDU5Ng==