LONG, CONTENTIOUS CENTURIES HAVE BURIED OUR TRADITIONAL religions beneath a sediment of awesome
scholarship. (Think, say, of Trimingham on the Sufi Orders or Bultmann on Judas
Iscariot.) Although the domains of exegesis and kerygma remain volatile
(sufficiently so, cynics might complain, to stir the pot of human misery), the textual
and historical substrate affords theologians scant latitude. One solecism,
one fatal slip in this grim arena, signals the thumbs down to academic reputation….
How startlingly different the realm of New Religions! Neither the
large self-advertisements of its protagonists, nor the free-floating idealism of its
young adherents, nor the anti-cult organizations' delight in hearsay
calumny, nor the all-permeating influence of money, nor the cynicism
of the press and the innocent indifference of the public—nothing here conduces
to decent accuracy.
In so-to-say the noman's land between religions new and old, between slack subjectivism and scholarship of rabbinical nicety, there looms today the enigmatic figure of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. Given the reclusion and a-historicism of the Gurdjieffian nucleus and the chutzpah of his denigrators, imitators, and peripheral fellow travelers, it is hardly surprising to encounter wild New Age distortions. And nevertheless a canon of scholarship begins, slowly and painfully, to accrete about this Gurdjieff; increasingly, we his self-appointed "judges" stand to be judged.
One fascinating proving-ground of relevant scholarship is the burgeoning oeuvre sketched in Anthony C. Edwards' welcome piece "Competitiveness and Apartheid in the New Age: The Enneagram Schools." It is only a pity that, wielding the authority of Lancaster University, Edwards no less than seven times binds Gurdjieff and the enneagram to Sufism. His core idea—namely: given Gurdjieff's interest in Sufism, it does seem likely that the Enneagram was known to Sufi scholars before Gurdjieff—is syllogistically re-expressible thus:
Major: Gurdjieff was essentially a "Sufi-inspired teacher" (Mr. Edwards' definition).Minor: Gurdjieff propounded the enneagram.
Conclusion: Therefore the enneagram probably has Sufic antecedents.
This seemingly innocuous proposition deserves, both for its typicality and topicality, the compliment of reasoned scrutiny.
One applauds, of course, the historically respectable minor premise: Gurdjieff did indeed first propound the enneagram to his Petrograd and Moscow groups in 1916, and all early enneagrammatic commentaries (Ouspensky, 1949; Maurice Nicoll, 1952–54; J. G. Bennett, 1956–66) salute Gurdjieff's pre-eminence…. Contextually we do well to reinforce this premise. Why?—Because in 1972, when the clever Bolivian ideological opportunist Oscar Ichazo initiated the current trend with his luridly colored booklet The Human Process for Enlightenment and Freedom, he blandly presented the familiar diagram as the "enneagon," vouchsafing Gurdjieff no acknowledgement whatever. "Oscar claims," explained one of his lieutenants, "to have worked out the ancient meanings and uses of the enneagram himself." Oscar did more than that: he actually protested that others had stolen his idea and that, in "...masking the plagiarism, some variations had been introduced that …produce negative and dangerous effects." A singular claim indeed! Rather as though an irate Alfred Russel Wallace had burst upon the public with the theory of natural selection 50 years after Darwin.
Edwards' major premise merits at least two cheers. Sufism undoubtedly
did interest and inspire Gurdjieff. Like Richard Burton, he made a pilgrimage to
Mecca —and plainly his monotheism and ample recognition
of Muhammad as a genuine messenger of God, satisfy the tashahud
or First Pillar of Islam (without which any profession of Sufism is specious). Gurdjieff commends,
as the epicenter of practical esotericism, Persia, Mesopotamia, and
Turkestan—regions permeated by Sufic tradition. He accords a telling significance
to the "incomparable Mullah Nassr Eddin," mediaeval wise fool of Turkish
literature. Program notes (Paris, 1923; New York, 1924) of Gurdjieff's Sacred
Dances hint at his contact with specific dervish orders: Qadiri, Naqshbandi, Kubravi, Yesevi, and—not least—Mevlevi. Certain dances could hardly parade
their Sufic provenance more openly: the "Camel Dervish," the "Trembling Dervish,"
the "Ceremony for a Dead Dervish," etc. In his ballet The Struggle of the Magicians,
Gurdjieff incorporated a Persian dervish song. His whole lifestyle—which courted
the epithet "charlatan"—recalls "The Way of Blame" of the
Qalandaris and Shems-Eddin, the Sun of Tabriz.
That Gurdjieff drew inspiration from Sufism is thus the truth, and nothing
but the truth—yet it is light years from being the whole truth. The fault of
Edwards' major premise lies not in suggestio falsi but in
suppressio veri. Only compare the Christian facet. The boy
Gurdjieff (a chorister at Kars Cathedral and his education entrusted to Dean
Borsh and Deacon Bogachevsky) came early under Christian influence. The
youth's precocious pilgrimages to Echmiadzin and the monastery of Sanaine,
presaged the man's longer journeys: seeking in Cappadocia the origins of
Christian liturgy; in Mount Athos the legacy of Hesychasm; in Jerusalem the
link with the Essenes, and in Coptic Abyssinia the roots of Christian gnosis.
Gurdjieff's first British pupil (Paul Dukes, 1913) received a teaching squarely
grounded in Christianity:
"…the gospel became intensely personal, free of any kind of dogma
whatsoever, a living message, with the Lord's Prayer its emblem, the parables its
illustration."
Venerating Jesus as a Divine Messenger with a teaching of unexampled
love, Gurdjieff composed (in collaboration with a distinguished Russian pupil,
Thomas Alexandrovitch de Hartmann) a wealth of extant Christian liturgical
music: "Hymn for Easter Thursday," "Hymn for Good Friday," "Easter Night
Procession," "The Story of the Resurrection of Christ," etc. Once indeed,
Gurdjieff even defined his own self-referential teaching as "esoteric Christianity."
When he died, high requiem mass was sung for his soul in the packed
Alexander Nevski Cathedral in Paris, and it was by his own wish that he was buried
at Avon with the full rites of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Space constraints alone forbid my advancing an equally persuasive and
unbalanced case that Gurdjieff's teaching flowed chiefly from Buddhism—with
particular redolences of Ch'an (or Zen). Nor can one blithely disregard elements
evidently drawn from Pythagorean, Stoic, Essene, Zoroastrian, and Shamanist
material…. Since 1980, when James Webb published
The Harmonious Circle, with its complex chapter "The Sources of
the System," no self-respecting critique of Gurdjieff's thought can rest on any
single-source hypothesis whatever. Still less can the "Sufi-inspired" drum be
banged unaccompanied, in sheer disregard of L.P. Elwell-Sutton's magisterial
"Sufism and Pseudo-Sufism" and Robert Amadou's lucid "Gurdjieff et le
soufisme"…. In formal terms, the major premise that Gurdjieff was fundamentally
a Sufi-inspired teacher must politely be summed up in one unavoidable adjective: false.