The 6 - 7 - 8 Fractal

Part 3 - The 'Great Triad'

*This essay has been amended/updated since its original publication.

We now arrive at part 3 of the 6 - 7 - 8 fractal series, where I’ll attempt to bring to conclusion the pattern we’ve been progressively elaborating and piecing together in the Gospel of John. In part 2 I started calling that pattern a ladder and traced out the first ‘big triad’ that constitutes the rungs of the ladder’s lower half. My task here will be to do the same for the upper half and show how the two come together to form part of the ‘great triad,’ or the pattern at the most “zoomed-out” level. 

If you know me personally or have read any of my other writing on this newish Substack or elsewhere, you’ll likely be aware that I’m disposed to making disclaimers. Keeping true to form, I’ll say here at the top that the particular way I’m putting together the 6 - 7 - 8 fractal skips over some important figures and events in John, and by doing that I’m simply presenting the elements that I think most clearly highlight the pattern. These elements are ones that noticeably portray the healing and development of human body and soul faculties. They do form a discernible through line of progressive iteration of the 6 - 7 - 8 kernel, and so they stand out strongly when viewing this Gospel with that schema in mind. Does this pattern continue into the unaccounted-for material? Yes. Just how far, I’m not sure at this point. It seems it might be possible to view the elements presented here as key landmarks in a more all-encompassing structure, the missing details of which would serve to elaborate and add dimension to the basic ‘fractal skeleton,’ if you will. In any case, what we’ll look at now seems like a decent amount to consider for the time being!

Part 3 will involve some potentially difficult concepts which, as I’m writing this introduction, I’m not entirely sure how I’ll end up handling. I’ll do my best to make sure any dips into the esoteric side of things will yield tangible payoffs. That said, I might end up needing a further installment to synthesize these payoffs into a more overtly practical reflection. I hereby reserve the right to a part 4. “Ken, it’s your Substack. You can do whatever you want with it, and you don’t need to tell us.” You might have a point there, but I’m going conversational(ish), so I’ll resist the temptation to delete lines that aren’t substantive problems (even if all the talk of payoffs, yields, and installments makes it sound like mammon’s gotten the best of me. It’s tax season y’all…dare I make a Gospel tax joke? Better stop while I’m ahead). 

The foot of the upper ladder  

The first rung on our upper ladder brings us back to two Gospel figures that I focused on in my Three Marys article: the 6 - 7 pair of Mary Magdalene and Mary of Clopas. Through examining the way this pair functions in relation to the lower ladder, specifically to the “top” of it, a preliminary sense of how the second big triad relates to the first can begin to form. Although the Magdalene-Clopas pair lies on a “higher level” in this schema than the Mary-Martha pair, we can perhaps understand them to be two sides of the same coin, with Magdalene and Clopas as a kind of ‘soul side’ to Mary and Martha’s sensible side. How so? Haven’t I already identified Mary and Martha as lower and higher aspects of the intellect? And isn’t the intellect proper to the soul and therefore already beyond the sensible? How could there be a ‘soul side’ to what is of the soul to begin with?¹ This is a tricky issue, but one I think an appeal to the modern colloquial usage of the word intellect can help illustrate. 

In contemporary parlance, the intellect is the faculty of the mind involved in analytical, scientific modes of thinking. This intellect involves itself in the apprehension and categorization of phenomena by way of abstract concepts, or shadowy thought-containers that perceptions can be grouped into to be kept track of mentally. This mode of thinking is a basic human faculty, and it’s arguably always been around. But it’s been the universally dominant thought paradigm at least since the Copernican revolution, and – depending on how you look at it – probably since the ancient Greeks (who themselves of course had a more robust understanding and set of terms for these things than we tend to now). The hyper-rational Roman culture of Jesus’s time can be characterized by an intensely amplified tendency toward this facet of the intellect. 

The abstract concepts of this type of intellect are akin to what we referred to with Maximian language in part 1 as the “principles of sensible things.” They’re subordinate to the sense world and are in fact derived and built up from, as well as conditioned by it. That being the case, this intellect looks upon the world through a natural lens and expects natural results. It seeks sensible proofs that it can slip back into the thought-containers it first created from the sensible world. It’s sixth-day thinking through and through, and on its own it stays at this level. This was exactly what we saw initially in Mary of Bethany, who as the lower rational component of the intellect needed the higher noetic component to remove the barrier to a higher, graced mode of thinking. 

So the rational intellect, though of a soul nature in relation to the more overtly physical nutritive and sensitive faculties, is itself still the sensible side of a more broadly-conceived faculty. Abstract concepts, as the containers for sensible things, have as their flip side the panoply of objective, concrete entities which populate the invisible world and which can be found weaving through sensible things as common spiritual impulses and principles. And so the aspect of the intellect which builds webs of conceptual relationships is also one which brings the soul into resonance or contact with spiritual forces, both good and bad. This contact takes place on the lower intellect’s ‘soul side,’ which presses up close (figuratively speaking) to the sensitive faculty shared with animals, contributing to the beastly character of the manifestations of bad spiritual influence. In the diagram below, I’ve labeled this faculty, for lack of a better term, ‘soul-sensitive’ (we could just as easily, from another angle, call it ‘soul-nutritive’). Furthermore, these sensible and soul sides mirror each other. A diet of concepts derived entirely from corruptible things will let in parasitic spiritual influences that fuel the passions, and vice versa. In order for positive spiritual influences to gain sway, concepts must be enriched and enlivened by what is incorruptible and above the world of sense.  

Martha played that crucial illuminator role for Mary in the sensible half of our pattern, where faith served as the doorway to the intelligible. Here at the foot of the intelligible, it’s Mary of Clopas who opens the space to allow Mary Magdalene, formerly filled with demons, to remain free of evil influence. In my Three Marys article, I spoke of how we know from Mark and Luke that Mary Magdalene was cleansed of seven demons by Jesus. But we don’t really need that information to know of her demonic susceptibility. It’s clearly visible in John, in her drive to replay Eve’s sin in the “touch me not” scene after the Resurrection. To recap that briefly, Mary Magdalene reaches out to prematurely touch the resurrected Jesus, as Eve had prematurely grabbed after wisdom in the Garden. Jesus rebukes her, and she obediently pulls back, in effect reversing Eve’s sin. 

So how does Mary of Clopas come into play here? You might recall, once again from the Three Marys article, that Mary of Clopas – as the sister of the Virgin Mother whose name means exchange – represents passing from the old blood to the new blood. The old blood is the blood of natural generation and familial relationship, while the new blood is the sacrificial blood of Christ, allowing those who follow him to be born directly of God.² To understand this a little more and to see how it connects with Mary Magdalene, we have to ask the question, “what is the significance of blood?” 

The full extent of blood’s spiritual-symbolic significance is beyond the scope of what I intend to get into in this piece, so I’ll focus on one important element: identity. Blood is the carrier of a person’s identity, both at the community (national, ethnic, etc.) level and the individual level. The individual level is extremely important, since it's the level at which a human being says “I” to him or herself as a completely unique person into whom is breathed the image and likeness of the divine Spirit. It’s also the level at which the full freedom of human autonomy and agency is operative. And that freedom is the very thing that allows the human being to either accept or reject the love of the Creator, to keep holy the seventh day, to allow the sensible to be illumined by the intelligible and the natural to be raised up to the supernatural. When Eve sinned (and Adam too – let’s not let him off the hook), she allowed her “I” and corresponding vertical human orientation toward heaven to be drawn down to the ground, to the level of the slithering horizontal animal. 

This all played out for the first couple largely in that soul side of the intellect which presses up close to the sensitive faculty, where the ability to categorize and rationalize falls prey to the false promise of the shiny but corrupted “I” that asserts itself as God’s equal. After this the first couple not only opened to a faulty way of seeing (“Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked” - Gen. 3:7), but to a faulty identity. Man’s identity, intended to be a reflection of the Most High, was progressively overtaken by a host of lower spiritual entities, including wicked powers who assert their dominion over large groups and prevent the proper funneling of identities, as it were, back up to God. Hence Mary Magdalene’s seven demons, which represent a kind of complete takeover of the soul by such forces. So she’s the continuation of the first woman. Standing next to her on Golgotha then,³ Mary of Clopas represents the transition away from the old identity, which had attained its natural upper limit under the Law, to the new identity. This is the new identity in Christ, which Mary Magdalene then accepts and takes on by her own volition, with her “I.” With fallen and fragmented spiritual influences out of the way of the true identity, the soul side of the lower intellect is thus redeemed. Bringing together Martha and Mary of Clopas, faith in combination with the new identity in Christ collectively lead upward to the next rung of the ladder: true entry into the domain of intelligible things. 

Peter and John 

Moving up to the next 6 - 7 pair, we come to Peter and “the one whom Jesus loved.” This latter figure is commonly identified by tradition as John the Apostle, so I’ll stick with that interpretation here. With these two we come to a wholly new domain. Up to now we’ve moved through increasingly advanced levels of purification, first aimed at lifting the sensible up to something higher and then at clearing the entryway to the intelligible. The accomplishment represented on one side by Martha and Mary and on the other side by Clopas and Magdalene leads us now into that “something higher” itself, which, as you’ll remember, is “the fulfillment and rest of the natural activities of those who contemplate the ineffable knowledge.”⁴ It’s on this foundation, in a sense, that Christ establishes the Church.⁵ But, even at this quite exalted level, we’re still not free of the need for purification! St. Peter, the foundation stone himself, denies knowing the Lord. Just like Mary of Bethany who is at first blocked at a lower level and undergoes purification with the help of an illuminator, Peter too at first exhibits unsteadiness in the faculty he embodies. Whereas with Mary it was relegation to the sensible due to sheer ignorance, with Peter it’s arguably a more intense offense. His detriment isn’t really a lack as it is a conscious rejection, specifically of familiarity with (or in other words, knowledge of) Jesus. One might say that the higher the faculty, the more an action is a reflection of forces coming from entirely within the person, from what is under the fully conscious and autonomous control of the will. 

At any rate, it’s John who ‘goes and gets’ Peter, becoming the eyes to the body, or the head to the foot, we might say. Just like with Mary and Martha, a criss-crossing occurs between them, ramping up to a climax at the scene of Christ’s tomb. They both run to the tomb, and John (the head) gets there first. But he stops short, and Peter (the foot/body) enters ahead. Doesn’t this sound familiar? It’s pretty much the exact same pattern that we found in the first healing back in part 2, where others kept getting to the pool before the paralytic and blocking him from washing. Except this time that obstacle is immediately reversed. John arrives first, but he stays outside, in effect letting Peter go in first. We can’t be sure of his motive, but it’s as if the beloved disciple, with his special intimate relationship to Jesus, has the superior knowledge to know to be the illuminator for Peter’s purification. It seems John has fully taken the Christ into his will, and from the depths of his own being does the work of Christ. Compare this to, say, Martha, who had to be told to fetch Mary. 

Once both are inside, they see Jesus’s burial garments – separate ones for his body and head – lying in different places. John, the head, sees and believes, while we’re left unsure about Peter. A little later on, Peter’s understanding is still questionable when Jesus appears to the disciples at the Sea of Tiberias, while John continues to unshakably affirm, “It is the Lord” (21:7). Not until Jesus asks him again directly does Peter counteract his threefold denial and affirm thrice “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you” (21:15-17). So it takes a while, but Peter’s purification does eventually come to pass. 

The top of the ladder and the ‘great triad’

So John and Peter have seen the head and body garments in the empty tomb. When Mary Magdalene, who had stayed outside, enters a little later on, she sees two angels, “one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain” (20:12). We get the impression that these two angels are somehow connected to Peter and John as a pair, perhaps as the spiritual image of their divine purpose. Indeed they are in fact the top of the ladder, the abode of the purely intelligible. Not only that, but this image – an angel at both the foot and the head of the Lord’s fleshly resting place – can be understood as the ideal realization of the entire 6 - 7 - 8 fractal and simultaneously a spiritual picture of the basic kernel active at every rung. It’s the whole and all the parts at once. And what happens immediately after we’re presented with this image? Mary Magdalene encounters the risen Lord and announces the good news to the other disciples. Mary Magdalene, having just witnessed the whole “pattern of reality” (to use a Pageauvian expression), connects the bottom of the upper ladder back up to the top, and through her announcement renders it possible for the upper ladder or second ‘big triad’ to ‘go and get’ the lower ladder. She opens a window for the ‘sensible half’ onto the full extent of the promise of salvation in Christ, now accessible through faith and the new identity. Martha was who connected the lower ladder to the upper, and it’s Mary Magdalene who now reaches back down to pull the lower part up. 

Let’s see how Substack feels about this insanely large diagram: 

Not too bad. How about a condensed version?

In part 1, I referred to the first ‘big triad’ as the sensible, natural component of the ladder and the second ‘big triad’ as the intelligible, supernatural component.⁶ Broadly speaking, this designation now seems fully supported by the full 6 - 7 - 8 fractal ladder on display. The entire upper ladder is illumination, or the seventh day, to the lower ladder, or sixth day. Correspondingly, we’re now poised to make more sense of why both ‘big triads’ culminate in a resurrection. We have a triad with critical activity centering around the Lazarus climax and one that centers around the Golgotha climax. In the first, it’s the natural man who’s raised, and in the second, it’s the God-man, in whom the fullness “was pleased to dwell” (Col. 1:19). Speaking to Peter in the next-to-last paragraph of this Gospel, Christ then references his second coming, the parousia: “What if I want him [John] to remain until I come?” (21:22) With this final image, we're made to imagine arriving at the destination that the ladder has been leading to the whole time, that tacit ‘8’ in parentheses which seemed to point ever upward while remaining always present. 

Looking out over the full ladder – the ‘great triad’ – one is reminded of Jacob’s Ladder and of the fact that it is itself considered a type of the Virgin Mary who, higher than the angels, is “the peak of the world”⁷ which “touches heaven”⁸ but is also “firmly planted on earth.”⁹ Of the three Marys – Magdalene, Clopas, and the Mother of God – I mentioned in my article on them that the Most Pure is "on her own the fullness of creaturely existence, while the other two Marys show hierarchically differentiated aspects of Christ's relationship to the created, within the limited domain of the temporal." What we have here in the Gospel of John is an elaboration of these differentiated aspects. The rungs of the 6 - 7 - 8 fractal ladder are all brought to perfection in the Most Pure, who both contains and transcends them. A glimpse of this fact is given by St. John, who tells us that at the Cross, Christ looks to the beloved disciple – the one whose knowledge of and love for him stood always firm and resolute – and says, "Behold your mother" (19:27). The disciple poised near the top of the ladder, whose guiding spiritual image we've thought of as the angel at the head, from then on "took her into his home" (19:27). One possible interpretation of this: the whole ladder connecting Heaven and Earth is taken up within his person. The rungs are to be scaled by a continual process of purification, illumination, and perfection within the individual, and John is here the pinnacle example pointing to what is still to come.

And not just the individual on his or her own, but as part of a community as well. We're reminded by St. Paul that this community is one body whose many parts all play a significant but different role.¹⁰ We can apply this to our ladder. Not everyone is a St. John. Different people will invariably be on different rungs of the ladder, but as we’ve seen all the rungs high and low require purification. At every stage that purification is made possible by a hand reaching down from the level above it, helping the one below to be lifted up ever higher, like a little reflection of the outstretched hand God offers man on the seventh day. Likewise, within the individual the fractal image of these different roles all lifting each other up is imprinted in the faculties of the soul, where oftentimes the higher faculty is needed to light up – if only briefly – and clear the space for purification, to point the lower faculty in the right direction and alert it to the fact that purification is necessary to begin with. A little grace has to be let in in order for the work of purification to begin.¹¹ And don’t we all have something in our lives that can serve as a continual reminder of this fact? Is not the guardian angel always there, door open, offering loving guidance whether or not we choose to respond? In order to be guided by such a heavenly friend, one has to first accept their offer. Doing so, one can set right and reharmonize the nutritive, sensitive, and intelligent faculties (and any and all subtle ones in between), allowing Christ to be the eighth day perfection that unifies and resurrects them all, from the feet all the way up to the head.

This is the intensely fractal nature of the 6 - 7 - 8 pattern, in which all three elements are contained within each other. They mutually interpenetrate in a way that’s really beyond total comprehension. There’s a little bit of the top of the ladder already in the bottom, and vice versa. And the ladder’s destination – it’s present everywhere and is the very thing bringing it together.

Each 7 unblocks the 6 below from moving upward to yet higher 7s, allowing for free and unimpeded flow up the ladder. Furthermore, each time a level is advanced, what was formerly an outside helper becomes integrated within. So by the time the top of the ladder is reached, every part has been folded into the whole and the whole into the parts.

We caught a glimmer of this in the staged levels of Sabbath that we referenced from St. Maximus early on in this series, which each contain within themselves a kind of purification for the next higher level. You set your sights on the Sabbath. You purify leading up to it. You observe the Sabbath. This brings the first purification to rest and yields the tangible fruits of illumination: the initial development of virtues and gaining of preliminary knowledge. But these fruits are themselves facilitated and brought to rest by observing a still higher Sabbath and themselves provide the foundation for another purification and yet higher virtues and knowledge. At a certain point, however, the cherished fruits become indistinguishable from an overflowing love. There is no longer any denying the Christ. Approaching the precipice of perfect virtue and perfect knowledge – where these are taken wholly up into one’s innermost being – one is moved to say, unshakably and in total devotion, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”

I of course speak from a limited vantage point, not as one who intimately knows these things, but as someone who finds themselves standing low on the ladder looking up. Such a person can perhaps make out something of the blueprint even if they’ve only begun to assemble the structure. It’s through the illumined life and work of figures like St. Maximus the Confessor that we’re given both an example to strive for and tools for gaining glimpses of deeper understanding. In this series I’ve attempted to apply an interpretation of his concepts, along with a few of my own observations, to the arrangement of certain key details in the Gospel of John. I hope I’ve understood these concepts and taken them to heart enough to do so with at least some clarity of vision.

1. I’m using the phrase “of the soul” here to mean “of a more purely spiritual character.” There is of course no totally “non-soul” faculty in the human being, as even the nutritive and sensitive faculties are soul faculties, just on a more sensible-facing level.

2. See John 1:13.

3. See John 19:25.

4. Maximus the Confessor. “Chapters on Knowledge,” in “Maximus Confessor, Selected Writings,” Trans. George C. Berthold, p.138. Paulist Press, 1985.

5. Referencing Matt. 16:18 - “upon this rock I will build my church.”

6. Note I’m not using the words ‘intelligible’ and ‘supernatural’ as synonyms here, nor ‘sensible’ and ‘natural’.

7. Bulgakov, Sergius. “The Bride of the Lamb,” p. 414. Trans. Boris Jakim. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002.

8. Bulgakov, Sergius. “Jacob’s Ladder: On Angels,” p. 46. Trans. Thomas Allen Smith. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010.

9. Ibid., p. 46.

10. See 1 Cor. 12-31.

11. A simple analogy I’ve been thinking of recently for this is “marking your calendar for church.” You have to set the Sabbath as a destination and commitment in order to work toward it. This also entails, crucially, submitting to a higher authority beyond oneself (the church) for its illumined and guiding discernment as to what’s important to commit to.