A CHRISTIAN TRANSPOSITION OF THE ENNEAGRAM: WITH ...

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appropriation and acceptance of who I am, i.e. my authentic self. As I do this, I develop my
own unique personality.
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Soul: the soul, or psyche, is closer to spirit, while the body is closer to the outside world. The
stimuli from the outside world which come through the body and its senses trigger off the
functions of knowing and feeling within my psyche. This trigger begins with sensory knowledge
and spontaneous feelings in relation to what is outside myself, and leads to a process of
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experiencing, understanding, judging, deciding, loving. Once engaged by outside stimuli, my
self becomes present to itself, and this self-awareness is the basis of my life-long struggle for
self-appropriation and self-acceptance such as I am in God’s eyes. In common enneagram
parlance these two functions of the psyche, knowing and feeling, are termed head and heart
respectively. (Heart here is used in a sense other than that of Paul.)
Body: It is through the intermediary of the body that stimuli from the outside world awaken
the psyche and the spirit. More than mere biological organisms, our bodies with their sensory
equipment insert us in the world, that of the physical universe, that of man-made objects, and
that of other human persons and communities. Our bodies are a means of communication,
enabling us to share with others both passively (we are impacted by them in various ways) and
actively (we react in various ways and have an impact on others). As bodily, we need to situate
ourselves (1) within communities of other human persons, (2) with other individuals with
whom we have personal relations, and we need (3) to assure our survival within the world as a
whole. In the enneagram teaching, these three needs are seen as a cluster of instincts, and
together with the body itself are often are described as the “gut”, which, with the two main
functions of the soul, knowing and feeling, yield the enneagram triad of head, heart, and gut.
Within our diagram one would situate these instincts at the border point between body and
soul: on the one hand they are grounded in the needs of our bodies to survive, to enter into
communication with other bodily beings, to belong to a “pack”of similar bodily beings, but on
the other they are an integral part of our psychic life and thus enter into our awareness.
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If something impinges on my sensory apparatus, I become aware of it and focus on it. But,
having been made alert to it, I am also at the same time aware, but in an unfocused and sub-liminal
way, of myself and my process of awareness or knowledge. My vital self-presence is always in the
background, even when I focus on my own self and my own processes of knowledge, making of them an
object. I can develop a deeper understanding of it but will never exhaust its reality.
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One has to be careful to recognize that “soul” has two different meanings. In this threefold
scheme, it is distinct from the spirit; in the commonly taught twofold scheme, in which humans are
composed of body and soul, soul includes spirit.
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This progression is formulated by Bernard Lonergan in his epochal work Insight. It is fuelled by
a series of questions: how do I understand the experience I am having Is my understanding correct
How am I to act responsibility in response to this understanding which I have judged to be correct
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