What’s Missing in the Fourth Way? The Forgotten God of Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff's "Whim" was to bring a New Conception of God.

There is a strange paradox at the heart of modern Gurdjieffian practice. The deeper one journeys into the labyrinth of “the Work” as preserved by official and unofficial lineages, the more one is struck by what is not there.

For all the talk of “presence,” “self-remembering,” and “being-effort,” there is a deafening silence where Gurdjieff’s original theological vision once resounded. We hear little of God. Little of Worship. Little of Thanks. And even less of Remorse of Conscience as the law of reciprocal relationship with the Holy Absolute.

Instead, a kind of anthropocentric ascesis takes center stage—esoteric technique without telos, “presence” without praise, and inner work divorced from its ultimate function: to serve God.

A Work without purpose?

Gurdjieff did not offer a system for psychological optimization. He did not teach mindful breathing or conscious labor as an end in itself. His cosmology is radically theistic. He wrote not as a mystagogue dabbling in comparative technique, but as a kind of prophet confronting modern humanity with its forgotten vocation: to consciously participate in the redemption of the cosmos through transubstantiation of being.

In Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff is unequivocal. The human being was designed with the possibility of developing a “Kesdjan body” (middle part of the Soul) and, beyond it, the “Higher Being-body” (higher part of the Soul) that could participate in the Divine Working. This is not metaphor. It is metaphysical realism. Theosis—union with God—was the ultimate goal. Not unity with the Self (though a unified self). Not ego dissolution (though the realization of one's nothingness). But participation in the Great Whole.

Yet today, many Gurdjieff groups appear to resemble Zen retreats, Sufi circles, or Jungian salons. The emphasis falls on method over metaphysics, consciousness over conscience, silence over supplication.

God—the very object of our development—is either sidelined as archaic metaphor or subtly redefined as impersonal Being. Worship is replaced by witnessing. Gratitude by attention. And the Work itself is quietly transformed into a form of esoteric yoga with no clear reference to the Creator it was designed to serve.

Soul creation

Central to Gurdjieff’s teaching is the shocking assertion that the human being is not born with a soul. Soul must be created—through conscious labor and intentional suffering within cosmic laws. The purpose of spiritual effort is not to just “realize the Self” but to become a vessel capable of receiving the Divine Energies that allow for cosmic participation.

This, too, is where modern groups falter. In their allergic reaction to “religion,” they often forget that Gurdjieff did not reject Christianity; he sought to restore it to its cosmic and initiatory function. His critique was not of Christ, but of Christendom. His teaching on the creation of the soul echoes the theology of the early Church Fathers, the Hesychasts, and the Trinitarian metaphysics of theosis.

Yet, seldom do you hear a Gurdjieffian school or prominent Gurdjieffian representative speak of praise, worship or thanksgiving to the Creator. Instead, we largely find a technocratic spirituality—esotericism without liturgy, cosmology without doxology, development without devotion.

Worship, praise and thanksgiving

In Gurdjieff’s cosmological physics, every process corresponds to a transformation of energies of different qualities. The ingestion of food, air, and impressions is a technical process, but it is not merely technical. The aim is to refine the substances necessary for higher being bodies (Souls). Yet the final stage—what we might call the Eucharistic function of man—is to consciously participate in these energies through Aiëssirittoorassnian-contemplation in which praise, thanksgiving, and worship are essential orientations for this contemplation in Divine relationship and exchange.

In other words, the Work is Liturgy.

When the human being consciously praises God—not merely with words, but with the total offering of a balanced and potent "three-centred" attention, will, and love—he becomes a transmuter of creation’s suffering into joy. He fulfills the Law of Three. He harmonizes the denying force of entropy with the affirming force of divine grace, in the reconciling act of glorification.

Toward a Christic Gurdjieffianism

What we need today is not another fusion of Gurdjieff with Eastern mindfulness, Jungian depth psychology, or neo-Sufi poetry. What we need is a return to Gurdjieff’s own theological horizon: the tragic grandeur of a fallen cosmos, the possibility of soul-creation, and the high calling of man to serve God through conscious participation in the cosmos.

We must re-center the Work on God. Not merely as an idea, but as the Living Reality toward whom our entire being must be directed.

To do the Work without God is not only incoherent—it is idolatrous. It reduces sacred teaching to spiritual technique, and renders the solemn cry of Conscience into a quiet echo in an empty room.

Let us remember that the Work begins in self-observation, but it ends in self-offering.

And only those who become particles of the Great Whole through praise, thanks, and submission to the Will of God can fulfill their cosmic function.

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G.I.Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, pages 367-368 (bold emphasis in the text is mine):

“And so, after arriving in the town Djoolfapal, the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash established corresponding relations with these brethren of the mentioned brotherhood who were working upon that abnormally proceeding functioning of their psyche which they themselves had constated, and he began enlightening their Reason by means of objectively true information, and guiding their being-impulses in such a way that they could sense these truths without the participation either of the abnormally crystallized factors already within their presences, or of the factors which might newly arise from the results of the external perceptions they obtained from the abnormally established form of ordinary being-existence.

“While enlightening the brethren of the said brotherhood in the mentioned way and discussing his suppositions and intentions with them, the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash occupied himself at the same time in drawing up what are called the ‘rules,’ or, as it is also said there, ‘statutes,’ for this brotherhood, which he, in association with these brethren he initiated of the former brotherhood Tchaftantouri, founded in the town Djoolfapal and which later was called the brotherhood ‘Heechtvori,’ which signified ‘Only-he-will-be-called-and-will-become-the-Son-of-God-who-acquires-in-himself-Conscience.’

“Later, when, with the participation of these brethren of the former brotherhood Tchaftantouri, everything had been worked out and organized, the Very Saintly Ashiata Shiemash sent these same brethren to various places and commissioned them under his general guidance to spread the information that in the subconsciousness of people there are crystallized and are always present the data manifested from Above for engendering in them the Divine impulse of genuine conscience, and that only he who acquires the ‘ableness’ that the actions of these data participate in the functioning of that consciousness of theirs in which they pass their everyday existence, has in the objective sense the honest right to be called and really to be a genuine son of our COMMON FATHER CREATOR of all that exists.