Nine Lenses on the World: the Enneagram Perspective

by Jerome Wagner

We typically view the world through lenses but usually don't examine the lenses themselves. From time to time we need to check our glasses to see if they are filtering the world cleanly or are distorting our vision. The Enneagram spectrum of personality styles describes nine useful lenses for viewing the world and shows how they may become distorted. These nine perspectives are: the Idealistic Perspective, the Perspective of Love, the Productive Perspective, the Aesthetic Perspective, the Perspective of Wisdom, the Perspective of Tradition, the Joyful Perspective, the Perspective of Strength, and the Peaceful Perspective.

Genres: Self Help, Psychology, Personal Growth

573 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 1, 2010

Reviews

[William G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted more "levels" to my Enneagram understanding (not just 9 types and their wings) and this book is very much about that, which was good. In the end though, there was so much repetition on so many points, and thus lengthy discussions of each type and it's various variations, that I just quit reading. I don't often do that, but it was just too much. (I did read everyone on the One (me) and the Nine (my partner), and it was good to get into more detail there. So . . . valuable at points, but in need of editing in my opinion.

[Edward Hodge · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to take the deep dive into the Enneagram with a strong psychological and Biblical perspective, this is your book. Dr. Wagner was one of the early adopters of the modern Enneagram of personality and brings great depth of insight into his descriptions of our types. Must read for anyone who wants to get serious with this.

[Ryan Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amidst a genre that is littered with over-identification of personality styles with who YOU are, Jerome Wagner takes the road less traveled when it comes to appropriating the enneagram: each type is merely a set of glasses (outside of you) that we grab to make sense of the world... and (spoiler) while we may identify with one type primarily, we’re prone to grab many of the types.

After pushing back on the notion that the enneagram is ancient (to be sure, it is less than 100 years old, much less if we consider how long it has been a tool for personality typing), this work is absent the language of discovering your “true” or “authentic” self and thus appropriates within the Christian worldview most robustly. For example, those who identify primarily with the personality patterns present in a Type 1 do not have the “divine gift of God’s goodness” (Vancil, 84) but rather, intensely value and are uniquely attracted to goodness (Wagner, 29). Needless to say, this is not a subtle shift.

Indeed this is Wagner’s significant deviation from the Enneagram literature and because of it the Christian is not tempted towards one of the great historic heresies of the faith: to think we can discover God by looking inside ourselves. This is the ignorant or insidious nature of most of the popular Christian Enneagram works used today, but Wagner keeps us on the right track and in the right realm with regards to conceptualizing the Enneagram as a tool for self-awareness, nothing more. 5/5