The Guide for the Perplexed
Benefit of clergy (the exemption of priests and deacons from secular trial on felony charges) was abolished in 1827. Frank Sinclair’s ‘benefit of clergy’ is an elasticated metaphor touching on third-party mediation in salvific esotericism. Heavy going? Have no fear. As Sinclair populates his theme within the dramatic context of ‘The Work’ – the legacy of George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff – one quickly grasps that ‘archaeologists of these concerns of the spirit’ can unearth real treasures. Sinclair’s unindexed, fuzzily illustrated book begins as a relaxed State-side saunter down memory lane but ends as high-octane polemic: a dialectical banquet for Gurdjieffians, anti-Gurdjieffians, and sociologists of New Religious Movements wheresoever.

Sinclair is au fond a mystic. Early in life his vocational guidance counsellor, a psychology professor from Columbia University, told him so. One paragraph which Sinclair may regret when older (he is only 76) celebrates the conception in him of ‘a brilliant, shining, golden embryo’. This epiphany occurred back in his neophyte years at Franklin Farms, the New Jersey estate of Gurdjieff’s early pupil Sophie Grigorievna Ouspensky. Here Sinclair was grudgingly received; and here Leonid Savitsky, Madame Ouspensky’s pest of a grandson, bought a pistol and schemed to shoot him - but later shot himself instead...It was nevertheless at Mendham on 29 October 1958 that Sinclair met the individual whose presence broods over this entire book. Her name was Jeanne de Salzmann.
Beelzebub’s Tales. And she had designated Dr Michel de Salzmann, her son by Gurdjieff, as her successor.

What most enthuses Sinclair is that Madame de Salzmann insistently promoted - in Movements classes, group meetings, and communal, Zen-like meditations - an innovatory discipline relating the corporeal body to Higher Mind. Thousands of pupils sat at her feet, although the Parisian Work eminence Pauline de Dampierre confesses: ‘Very few people, perhaps only two or three, understood what Madame de Salzmann was trying to bring.’ Such a cost/benefit ratio, if true, might dismay a lesser apologist, but not Sinclair. Guilelessly he paints the scene: Madame ‘would indicate the flow of this subtle energy with a gesture almost (dare I say it) of papal authority.’

In appraising his teacher’s long, historically significant, pontificate (she lived to 101) Sinclair awards her ten out of ten – tacitly implying that the awesome, complex, integrated body of Gurdjieff’s original teaching is utterly subsumed in, or transcended by, Madame’s 'there-is-an-energy-from-above' experience. Commonsense and historical probity may well ask: ‘Do you think so?’ but, in today’s Work ambience, they keep their voices down.

Sinclair is a regular-kinda-guy whose pride in his modesty attains oxymoronic heights. His understanding impoverished, his recollections beggarly, his mind ‘a tattered sieve’, he unconvincingly presents as an insignificant peripheral figure - though not necessarily ‘a prospect for a straightjacket and heavy sedation’ and certainly ‘no mean hand at shovelling manure’. Curiously enough, his judgemental manure falls from a great height upon ‘group leaders’ – the unfrocked clergy who mediate the Work to ordinary marching-up-and-down Gurdjieffians. Roundly he castigates their ‘downright ignorance, appalling self-conceit, unexamined arrogance, and presumptuous elitism... endless ego gratification, divisive personal agendas, boorishness, inconsiderateness, crass exploitation, and even brazen intimidation.’

This problematical indictment invites crushing rebuttal by the President of The Gurdjieff Foundation. But Sinclair is President of The Gurdjieff Foundation... Supposing Madame de Salzmann’s institution has indeed painted itself into a corner, nevertheless all is not lost. For, as she herself once thrillingly said, Gurdjieff’s is ‘a thought which, passing through a great diversity of echoes, keeps its own resonance and its power of action’.

James Moore is Gurdjieff’s biographer. His memoir ‘Gurdjieffian Confessions: a self remembered’ was published in 2005.