Q. Is the Enneagram Personality Test OK?
A. Personality tests can be a lot of fun: you answer some questions, and the test supposedly tells you about yourself or your friends.
Personality tests are also occasionally administered by employers, ostensibly to help them fit employees with their ideal roles. Understanding one’s own personality can be a valuable tool for self-knowledge and growth in virtue. Popular systems of classifying human personality include the four Temperaments, the 16 Meyers-Briggs types, the Big Five, and the Enneagram of Personality.
It’s understandable why a Catholic might view the Enneagram of Personality with particular suspicion. The system as it is taught today was developed by the Chilean thinker Claudio Naranjo and Bolivian-Chilean thinker Oscar Ichazo, based on ideas from Russian-Armenian spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff. All three men could broadly be counted as part of the “New Age” movement, a modern system of alternative spirituality with ties to Hinduism, Buddhism, hermeticism, and the occult. For our purposes, the strength and precise nature of these ties is not important: all three men sought spiritual perfection apart from the grace of God granted to us through Christ and His Church.
The thing is, however, that nobody has to believe New Age things, practice New Age devotions, or deny any Catholic teachings in order to analyze themselves according to the Enneagram of Personality, or take the test. The Enneagram of Personality posits that all human beings endure one of nine types of trauma as small children, and that this type of trauma disposes them toward a particular one of nine sets of virtues, vices, ideals, desires, aversions, and relationships. The test(s) for determining which of the nine types you are is usually just you telling the tester things about yourself, and the tester quantifying your results. No problematic spiritual beliefs or magic required!
So, is it a sin to take an Enneagram Personality Test? No. If you take one and then start taking the other spiritual teachings of Naranjo, Ichazo, or Gurdjieff seriously, such as Naranjo’s belief that all religions are the same, or Gurdjieff’s religious ritual dances, that would be another matter entirely! Should you take an Enneagram Personality Test, or try to figure out what your Enneagram Personality type is? That’s more complicated.
Regarding any personality system, there are two big questions: Is the testing system accurate? Does the personality system actually describe the way human beings tend to behave, given the human nature that God created them with? If the testing system isn’t accurate, there’s no point in taking the test, even if the system itself is sound. If the system doesn’t describe how human beings tend to behave, or reflect actual human nature, getting deep into the system isn’t going to help you know yourself, grow in virtue, or become more holy. For various reasons that I won’t get into here, it’s my opinion that the Enneagram of Personality and its test fail on both counts. But that’s just my opinion. Go learn about it, and if we disagree, we can have a friendly argument sometime!
For Catholics who want to use systems of personality as a tool for self-knowledge, there is an abundance of Catholic reflection on some of the other systems of personality, especially the four Temperaments. This system has been around since the time of the ancient Greeks, after all, and so the Church has had a lot of time to reflect on it! It’s nice and simple too, classifying personalities on whether they react to things quickly (choleric, sanguine) or slowly (melancholic, phlegmatic), and whether they hold those reactions for a long (choleric, melancholic) or a short (sanguine, phlegmatic) time. I (a phlegmatic, if you’re curious) was introduced to the Four Temperaments by the boys’ branch of the Schoenstatt movement, and a number of accessible Catholic books exist on the topic, including “The Temperament God Gave You” by Art and Laraine Bennett. Regardless of which system you end up finding useful, the goal is the same: know thyself, so that you can grow in virtue, remove obstacles to God’s grace, and become holy!
This question was answered by Father Evan Winter, pastor of St. John the Baptist Parish in Minden and Holy Family in Heartwell.
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