Sebastian Barry and the Enneagram

This was a wonderful summer for the novels of Sebastian Barry.  How do I describe them, beyond the regret at arriving at them so late - but mercifully not too late?  The authors of the back covers’ recommendations do their best to locate the most apt, the most precise descriptions, “Luminous anecdotes, hidden truths”, “tender, acerbic, necessary and potent”, “it’s the language that seduces you - elegant, comical, tragical, musical”, and so on. but I’ll bet they were frustrated by failing to pin down the praise they deserve.

I have been immersing myself in the McNulty and Dunne trilogies, trying, but failing to ration them to make the books last.  But the images, the people and their hauntingly lovely and often tragic apperceptions will stay.  Barry’s characters’ lives are distorted, sometimes destroyed by political, societal and historic violence, yet they remain without self-pity and responsive to goodness and beauty in other people and in nature.  Their vulnerability proves often both their undoing and their saving. Perhaps it is the characters’ openness to register and relish all the small, unregarded joys of life which gave them the capacity and courage to face much bigger shocks of trauma, even annihilation itself, with philosophical fortitude - and still find beauty and show kindness.  “Notice, sense and wonder”, the mantra of my spiritual direction course is their habitual practice.   “If our suffering is great…yet at close of day the gift of life is immense.  Something larger than old Sligo mountains, something difficult but oddly bright, that makes equal in their fall the hammers and the feathers,”  muses Rosanne Clear as she surveys her difficult life.  They instruct us how to live.

I also attempted The Enneagram in Personal Development, by Gert Jurg, a rather drier read.  But with this, and a Sebastian Barry, in tandem, a connection made itself.  Jurg explores the ancient patterning of nine personality types, a subtle and complex schema of all that we are, the characteristics we are born with, and how we are liable to react with our particular  strengths and stress points, according to the number of our type.  If we know our number, we can diligently cultivate our strengths and realise our weaknesses, which can assist us in achieving fulfilment in our lives.  There is no value judgement - no one type is better or worse.  But our  ensuing curiosity awakens a greater consciousness in us, enabling a courage to lead more evolved, kinder lives.

Jurg’s explanation of the model which underpins the formation of the ego is simple in theory.  The baby is born with its “state of essence” - Wordsworth might say, “trailing clouds of glory”.  This “essential” aspect is pure and untainted by life’s vicissitudes.

As we grow we each express this essence in a “personal quality”, which is recognisable to others.  So who we essentially are is reflected in how we show up in the world.

But - and this is where it becomes trickier- we run up against problems and  each type will find particular difficulties according to their number.  Inevitably this will cause discomfort - and who wants that?

So we try to rid ourselves of that which we cannot tolerate in ourselves.  It might be that we employ one of Freud’s defence mechanisms to deny or displace the problem, or project it onto others, but whatever tactic we use depletes our vital energy for connecting to our essence.  Some features of type shine from us; others can be misused in negative or destructive ways.  Something feels wrong, but most likely we haven’t identified what because it is probably being played out in the unconscious.

The next, most dismal stage for us is when that “ego reaction”, habitually used, becomes fixed as an “ego state”, an attitude which is in danger of defining us and stalling our growth.

This ‘ego state’ is as far removed from our essential nature, connected to our truest Self, as it is possible to be.  We might pick up intimations of that gulf through physical, mental or spiritual ‘meso-health’ - perhaps not outright illness but definitely a sub-optimal state of well-being, or we may just remain bogged down and resistant in that smaller self, the ego.  Generally something uncomfortable, even painful, needs to happen to provoke our realisation that all is not tip-top - so it rarely feels good.  Book 6 of Vergil’s Aeneid remarks how the way to the underworld is quick and easy to slide down, but the slow and laborious climb back is a different matter.   “hoc opus, hic labor est” -  “This is the task, this is the hard work”.  And that’s precisely what Gert Jurg identifies as needing to be worked back through to achieve transformation, to return to our state of bliss, our essence.  Neither is it a matter of a one-time task sorting our life and returning us to the Garden; it will need repeating, time and time again, but each effort takes us nearer transformation.  Perhaps we should pause and survey what we have achieved so far, for encouragement.

So where do Sebastian Barry’s novels fit into all this?  Back to Rosanne Clear, the narrator of The Secret Scripture, who has suffered greatly in misogynistic and sectarian Ireland, been disparagingly dismissed by the family she married into and consequently does not value herself very highly.

Sebastian Barry's characters build strong walls of resilience from small details of beauty

“ My own story, anyone’s own story, is always told against me, even what I myself am  writing here.  There is no difficulty not of my own making, because I have no heroic history to offer.  The heart and soul, so beloved of God, are both filthied up by residence here, how can we avoid it?  These seem not my own thoughts at all, but maybe are borrowed out of old readings of Sir Thomas Browne.* But they feel as if they are mine.  They sound in my head like my own belling thoughts.  It is strange.  I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old first pattern in them, and cherish them for that”. 

Our “old first pattern”, our essence cherished by God.  Let us live with that uplifting insight.

•  Thomas Browne, the seventeenth century author of Rosanne’s treasured “Religio Medici” wrote,  “We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Achilles; Fortune hath not one place to hit me.”

All blessings, Valerie

October 2025