: Grace Whitfield
: Discover The Enneagram Understanding Personality Types Through a Christian Perspective
: Publishdrive
: 9781807654320
: 1
: CHF 7.40
:
: Christentum
: English
: 175
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

This book provides an introduction to the Enneagram of personality viewed through a Christian spiritual perspective. It explores the historical roots of the Enneagram, tracing connections to ancient philosophical traditions, Christian theology, and mystical teachings that have influenced the development of personality typology. The text explains how the Enneagram symbol and its nine personality types can serve as a framework for understanding human motivations, behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses, while also reflecting on the relationship between personality patterns and spiritual growth. The book describes each of the nine Enneagram types in detail, outlining their characteristic traits, emotional patterns, fears, and developmental paths. Through explanations, examples, and reflections on communication, relationships, and self-awareness, the work presents the Enneagram as a tool for personal insight and spiritual reflection. Written in an explanatory and descriptive style, it is intended for readers interested in personality studies, Christian spirituality, and approaches to understanding human behavior through psychological and spiritual frameworks.

CHAPTER 1:The Sacred Enneagram: Historical Origins


The history of the Enneagram of Personality is widely disputed, but there are some main points that are agreed upon as major contributing factors. There certainly seem to be roots that can seem be traced back at to the philosophy of Ancient Greece. Some will emphasize the mathematical and geometrical qualities and evoke Pythagoras and Boethius; others point to its connections to the tradition of Kabbalah. These various traditions make up the framework that expresses the intrinsic archetypes that can be found in the Enneagram of Personality, and serve as perspectives and traditions to consider when approaching the use of the Enneagram for self-development. The Enneagram’s ancient history provides the basis for its relevance with Christianity; many of these sources had been influences on Christian thinking from the very beginning.

Platonic Essentialism serves as a founding for many of the archetypes and symbolic systematology involved in the foundations of the Enneagram. Basically, this comes from the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato and, it states that every person has an “essence.” This “essentialism” is a core human concept that alludes to the Essence of the soul, and it was germinated in Greece and Asia Minor. Eventually the ideas moved, as spices and materials did, geologically south, to areas now known as Syria and even further to Egypt. It was in these places that the ideas were adopted by early Christian mystics who focused on the ways that the divine form was lost in the ego. This is the origin of the Christian concept of the seven deadly sins. The original inspiration for the Christian seven deadly sins was contained by the same material that contained the nine types in the Enneagram.

Most scholars agree that it was the Sufis, people from sect of Islam that emphasizes mysticism and ecstasy, who developed the concept of personality types. They were a spiritual and mystical people, who did a lot of work in the area of spiritual research. The Sufis’ culture was deeply ingrained with mysticism. It was under their influence in the 14thand 15thcenturies that the idea of personalities become defined. It was a Sufi belief that there were nine essential patterns or orientations to life. These patterns and orientations represented the image of God that exists within that person. There is also the other side of this representation: the opposite force within the person, which serves to block the realization of the power within.

The Sufis had a tradition of spiritual development that encouraged people to find their way to God over many years, and they witnessed from direct observation the nine ways in which peoples’ personalities manifest, and how they run in to obstacles in their journey. To condense the Sufi’s primary que