Foreword: The Teachings and Legacy of G.I. Gurdjieff

I approached Gurdjieff as a curious and sympathetic outsider, as a scholar of philosophy and religion in the ancient Mediterranean world and Near East, but neither well-read in his writings or those of his students nor involved in “the Work.” Gurdjieff appeared to me, at first glance, as somewhat exotic—an impression I suspect he cultivated. Perhaps that’s why I was grateful for Roger Lipsey’s invitation, in his recent study, Gurdjieff Reconsidered: The Life, the Teachings, the Legacy, to look upon the teacher through the lens of two ancient Greek philosophers, Pythagoras and Diogenes. This bifocal interpretation helped me to bring Gurdjieff into focus, to familiarize him, and to see him in the company of other, no less remarkable men.  

As I read further into and about Gurdjieff, I came to recognize in him another familiar figure from antiquity: the holy fool.  The holy fool is an important figure in both Eastern Christianity and Islam and a well-known religious type in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Caucasus, the Silk Road, and the whole Eurasian steppe, including Russia. These are precisely the lands and traditions that gave birth to Gurdjieff and through which he traveled widely, as recorded in his Meetings with Remarkable Men. I wish to invite you to look upon Gurdjieff through this third lens, perhaps for a third eye. 

In Christianity, the figure of the holy fool is often traced back to the apostle Paul and his first letter to the Corinthians, where we read remarkable verses such as these: 

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the foolishness of what we preach to save those who believe. (1 Cor. 1:20-21) 

For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness,” and again, “The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.” (1 Cor 3:19-20) 

For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death; because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are ill-clad and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things. (1 Cor 4:9-13) 

Many of these phrases from Paul seem to resonate with Gurdjieff’s writings and especially his manner of teaching. Did he not regard the wisdom of the world as foolish? And did he not recognize that, as a result, one who is wise would have to appear in such a world as a fool? That one might even have to play the fool to reveal the world’s folly and to awaken (in humans and even in angels) a deeper wisdom than the world’s? That one might have to become a spectacle, to endure humiliations, and to meet every insult with the other cheek? 

Paul is the least and the last of the apostles, and he understands himself to be walking in the footsteps of his Lord, a man sentenced to death, a man made a spectacle for the salvation of others. For Paul, Christ’s cross stands as the most potent symbol of this paradox at the crossroads of life and death: “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18).  Although Gurdjieff was a baptized Orthodox Christian, and, as far as I know, always understood himself as such, the cross seems to play almost no role in his teachings. His Christianity is not found at the foot of the cross. He is not alone, of course: many Christians throughout history have sought to highlight other moments in Christ’s life and teaching as the true crux, as it were, of the matter. Gurdjieff seems to me to walk in the footsteps of the Christ who heals and confronts his audience with confounding parables, and not the Christ who walks the Via Dolorosa to his death on Golgotha. 

I will leave it to others who know Gurdjieff’s teachings infinitely better than I do to judge my impressions. But let me return, briefly, to the figure of the holy fool. The Christian tradition of the holy fool is generally said to have begun with Symeon of Emesa in the sixth century, whose life was recorded by Leontius of Neapolis in the seventh century.¹ After spending nearly 30 years in the deserts around the Dead Sea, Symeon was deemed by God worthy to return from the desert to the sown, to his native Syrian city of Emesa, to save souls through his outlandish behavior. With Symeon, there officially began a long tradition of the holy fool in Eastern Christianity, especially strong in Russia. The best study of this tradition is Sergey A. Ivanov’s Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, where he defines a holy fool as someone who “feigns insanity, pretends to be foolish, or who provokes shock or outrage by his deliberate unruliness.”²  

Centuries before Symeon, other holy men and women were already taking up Paul’s invitation to play the fool to show up the world’s foolishness and to reveal Christ’s wisdom. These holy men and women were among the earliest to shun society and its norms and to experiment with new modes of piety in the deserts of Egypt. They would eventually be known in Greek as “monks”: monachoi (sg. monachos) or “solitary ones.” Although they were fashioned as solitaries, these “desert fathers” (and also a few mothers) had to live in some form of loose community to survive at the edge of the unforgiving deserts of Egypt. The elders among them were called “abbas”—an Aramaic word meaning “father”—and aspiring young monks would often ask the elders for a teaching: “Give me a word, Abba.” Often, that teaching came in the form of a word, a line from scripture perfectly suited to that specific young seeker’s soul. But sometimes, the teaching came in the form of a strange and seemingly fruitless practice. A particularly haughty aspirant might be given a meaningless, menial task to do, to test his commitment, to break his pride, and to awaken the humility necessary for holiness. 

As I read further in and about him, I came to see Gurdjieff in this lineage, as a holy man at times feigning foolishness, provoking shock and outrage by his unruliness, inviting scorn and censure so as to teach deeper lessons; and behind the tradition of the holy fool, the even longer lineage of ascetic teachers who assign their disciples confounding tasks suited to their individual psychologies. How many memoirs from the days of the Prieuré in Fontainebleau include such stories of his confounding behavior and inexplicable tasks? 

It should come as no surprise that Gurdjieff is part of this lineage because it was (and to some degree is) alive and well in his day, and in his meetings with remarkable men, he spent time among the living descendants of these communities, Christian and otherwise, real and imagined. Since the time of the desert fathers and mothers and Symeon in Emesa, the tradition of the holy fool also took root in Islam, with its distinctive logic and rhetoric among the Sufis.³ Presumably, during his travels, Gurdjieff played the part of the young aspirant, the seeker after wisdom, where it was he who had to receive the confounding teaching, the difficult lesson, from the abba, shaykh, or pir. In Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff is the bee collecting pollen from these desert flowers; he had yet to become his own remarkable man. 

I readily admit that the holy fool is simply one facet of the Gurdjieff gem. But as a student of these ancient traditions, I report that this facet shone very brightly for me. Perhaps it will not shine so for you, whether you are new to Gurdjieff and the Work or an old hand. Gurdjieff is, like Odysseus, a polytropos or “many-minded man,” and perhaps the way of the holy fool is just one of his many minds. I offer it and the longer lineage of desert asceticism as another lens, besides Lipsey’s helpful bifocals, to see something new in this old soul.  

I want to thank Roger Lipsey, Cynthia Reeves, and Charles Langmuir, for collaborating with the Center for the Study of World Religions for their collaboration with the Center for the Study of World Religions in bringing this conference to fruition after years of patient planning. And I wish to thank my colleague at the Center, Gosia Sklodowska, for all her tireless work, good humor, and inspiring curiosity. Finally, I wish to thank Carole Cusack, without whom we could never have organized this conference or edited this anthology. It is a pleasure and a privilege to make these remarkable essays on Gurdjieff available to a wider readership.