BETRAYING GURDJIEFF: The Fourth Way is Not Sufism

A General Rebuttal of the Sufi and Sufi-Adjacent Misidentifications of Gurdjieff's Fourth Way, with a Defence of Its Identity as Esoteric Christianity.

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Summary

Is Gurdjieff's Fourth Way secretly a Sufi teaching? A growing ecosystem of online groups, popular teachers, and syncretic practitioners says yes — pointing to Gurdjieff's travels in Muslim lands, his contact with Sufi masters, and contested transmission narratives about the Enneagram's origins.

This rebuttal says otherwise, and the evidence is decisive.

The argument isn't about whether Sufism influenced Gurdjieff — it clearly did. The question is whether influence constitutes identity. It doesn't, and Gurdjieff's own texts make this unmistakable.

The Law of Three, the Fourth Way's foundational cosmological law, is explicitly equated by Gurdjieff with the Holy Trinity — a doctrine Islam identifies as its primary theological error. The system's teleology aims not at fana' (Sufi self-annihilation) but at theosis — the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of divinisation, the permanent crystallisation of an individuated soul. Its liturgical prayers reproduce the Eastern Christian Trisagion. Its creative principle encodes Johannine Logos theology in its very name. And Gurdjieff himself — baptised Orthodox, buried in the Orthodox rite, never a practicing Muslim — explicitly declared the Fourth Way to be esoteric Christianity.

The Sufi identification survives only as long as you look at method and ignore metaphysics. When you look at what Gurdjieff actually wrote about God, Christ, the soul, and the destination of the path, it collapses entirely.