Editor’s Note: Personality portrait systems such as the Myers-Briggs typology or the enneagram have long been popular with many Catholics, especially those in religious life. Clarence Thomson is the author of Parables and the Enneagram, a look at how the scriptures and the enneagram enrich each other. Thomson works as an enneagram coach and is coauthor of the Web site www.enneagramcentral.com, where a free test can give visitors a sense of where they fit. Thomson was interviewed by Thomas C. Fox, NCR’s former editor and publisher, for an NCR podcast.

How did you get interested in the enneagram?
I heard Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr giving a talk to bishops and having trouble holding their attention. He then started discussing the enneagram, and that caught their interest. I began to inquire into why it’s so interesting to people and found that the enneagram will tell us in a short time much about ourselves, about what troubles us and possibly what can save us. It’s a profound tool of self-knowledge.

People have been using it for some 20 centuries probably. We can trace its history directly back to Bolivian philosopher Oscar Ichazo in the early 1960s. He says he got it from the kabbalah or from a vision. Research shows that the nine-faceted diagram itself is from Islamic mystics, the Sufis, while the terms of the styles are in Latin. The word “enneagram” itself is Greek, so here Hebrew, Greek and Roman Catholic all come together.

Each of the enneagram styles is basically a sin, but not “sin” in the Baltimore Catechism sense of a wrong deed. It is much closer to the medieval Scholastic thinking of sin as an energy you push too far and turn into a fault.

The nine enneagram styles are centered either within the body, within the heart or emotions, or within the intellect. Each number has a particular problem or sin associated with it: For Ones, it’s anger; for Twos, it’s pride; for Threes, it’s vanity. For Fours, envy; for Fives, avarice; for Sixes, fear; for Sevens, gluttony; for Eights, lust; for Nines, sloth.

How does it help me to know my style, if I’m stuck in it and won’t change?
It’s helpful to look at how Jesus described it when they asked him why he talked in parables. He answered them saying that it’s because seeing they do not see and hearing they do not hear or understand. That’s a good first-century definition of a trance, and it’s valuable to know what kind of trance we are in. Just as the diagnosis of a disease helps us, so does the diagnosis of our carefully distorted and protected vision of the way the world is.

With self-awareness we can change our perspective. If you are wearing sunglasses, it’s a good idea to be aware you are wearing them. Study of the enneagram reveals to you the distorting lens you are wearing and it helps you see the distorting lens others wear. What I do as a coach is help facilitate that awareness.

I graduated from college at 22 with a degree in philosophy. Few are as self-importantly smart as a youth with such a degree. I was cured of that though on my first job working in a mental institution. One day I talked with a woman whose belief was that her mother was an African queen and her father a Bengal tiger. Armed with a philosophy degree, I knew I could talk her out of this craziness. An hour later, she still believed what she did. How could she be so clever and logical, and so crazy? A seasoned doctor told me that insanity resides in the imagination, not in logic.

Our enneagram style is our imaginary view of the world. When I know what someone’s imaginary view is, I can help them see it too, thereby weakening imagination’s hold. Fr. Andrew Greeley and others tell us that the Catholic tradition is rich in imagination. When I saw the enneagram styles as a distortion of imagination, I knew I had lots of Catholic resources with which to help people with their imaginative constructs. For example, Sixes are the most explicitly fearful type. Well, angels appear in the scriptures 365 times, so I always encourage a devotion to angels for Sixes so that their imaginative world can have some support in it, with recourse to angels.

You deal with not just individuals but with institutions, religious communities as a whole.

I would never coach anyone without an awareness of the background of their company, religious order, or country of origin. In America, for example, we have a Three-ish culture, marked by a can-do attitude, impressed with the importance of self-fulfillment, with rugged individualism, with a focus on image and spin. A popular book now with both Protestants and Catholics is called The Purpose-Driven Life. It’s just advice on how to be a good Three.

Once I learn my style, how will it benefit me in walking my own spiritual path?
Every enneagram style has certain problems associated with it that, when dealt with, increases the sense of being one with others and with God. Fr. Rohr calls it “naming our illusions.”

Every enneagram style is an experience of some kind of deprivation, while interestingly Jesus’ parables about God’s kingdom are stories of abundance.

Most spiritual traditions -- Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism -- all love to tell stories. They say that we are all asleep, and the way to awaken is to hear stories that get underneath the protective radar of our particular illusions.

For example, in the Old Testament, David has made love to Bathsheba. Nathan then asks him what he would do with a man who has many sheep yet steals one from a poor shepherd. Nathan hints that’s what David did, and because Nathan got under his radar screen with that little story, David did public penance.

When Jesus had to deal with stiff-necked Pharisees, he got under their prejudices with stories. In Chapter 10 of Luke, the lawyer asks him, “What must I do to be saved?” The lawyer wished to be justified, or, in other words, to have his enneagram view validated. Jesus told him instead the story of the man from Jerusalem on his way to Jericho. Jesus gave the lawyer the view from the ditch, a perspective he’d never encountered before. Storytelling experts tell us that we always identify with the first person mentioned. Thus Jesus tricked him and blew up his enneagram illusion. Parables dismantle trances.

How well does the enneagram fit with Catholic theology?
Extremely well, except with that catechism view of sins as action-oriented, isolated deeds. You go to confession and say how many times you did a nefarious deed.

Traditional Catholic theology, back to the medieval Scholastics, shows that sin is a force over which we don’t have much control. It’s expressed well in St. Paul’s famous passage in Romans about not doing the good that he sees, but rather doing the evil that he doesn’t want. If you see sin that way, you are much closer to a notion of addiction, and right on top of the concept of an enneagram style. The enneagram is an explanation of and a partial cure for sin.

On the Web
To listen to the full interview with Clarence Thomson, go to NCRcafe.org for Tom Fox's podcast.

National Catholic Reporter, February 2, 2007