The 6 - 7 - 8 Fractal

Part 4 - Reflection and final thoughts

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

Okay, so I’ve decided to do the “more overtly practical reflection” that I said in part 3 I might need in order to wrap things up with this series. I’ve thrown a lot at you, and in my characteristic fashion I’ve leaned in a little on the complexity in an effort to be precise. There are some takeaways from this extended contemplation that I’ve left somewhat hazy and which could be spelled out in plainer language. Also there are, I’m sure, a few issues that might arise in your consideration of the framework I’ve laid out, some of which I’ll now attempt to preemptively address.

Is he flipping the order? 

Let me start with one of the potential issues, which will actually lead to and shed light on one of the takeaways. You might have found it curious that, while I’ve consistently presented purification, illumination, and perfection in that order, I seem to have at the same time arrived at a kind of “illumination first” model. A friend pointed this out to me. I did explicitly say toward the end of part 3 that “each 7 unblocks the 6 below from moving upward to yet higher 7s, allowing for free and unimpeded flow up the ladder.” 7 before 6? What gives? Sounds a little like putting the cart before the horse, no?

I agree it might at first sound that way. The picture I’m attempting to paint here is actually pretty simple and straightforward once you see it. I’m not flipping the order, but merely highlighting one aspect of the fractal dynamics. When I say that 7 unblocks 6, what I mean is that 6 is allowed to now move forward to a higher level of purification. To understand this we have to imagine the 6 in our 6 - 7 pairs as dividing into “before” and “after” versions of itself: the lower-level purification which leads up to the initial illumination, and the higher-level purification which then becomes possible thanks to that initial illumination. This is a feature that I admit isn’t readily apparent in the diagrams I presented throughout this series.

The following image gives a sense for the way the two levels of 6 (both embodied in the single narrative of one individual) flank the initial 7:

Here we see the single individuality of Mary of Bethany illustrates two progressive stages of purification, one which “caps out,” so to speak, at the level of the Law and the other which has moved beyond. Likewise for Mary Magdalene.

The Sabbath of the Law is like a flowering plant that has produced an unopened bud. The stem shoots up toward the bloom but arrives at the bud and stops there. The season isn’t yet right for it to blossom. When the season is right, however, illumination brings forth the flower. New shoots then spring forth, passing from bud to blossom in a manner not possible before.

The lower-level 6th day is the stem of the plant that buds but doesn’t flower. The higher-level 6th day is the new shoots on their way to full flowering.

***

Another point to spell out better is that, at the personal-microcosmic level, 7 is something that begins as an outside guiding influence but is then taken up within or integrated into the person during their purification. 7 at first sets the example and points the way for 6, as an illuminator (you’ll recall that’s the term I’ve been using). Once initial purification has come to rest, the foreshadowed goal set by the illuminator is attained by the purifier and is now their illumination. We might catch a faint hint of this, on a more macrocosmic level, in the following statement from St. Maximus: “The grace of the New Testament is mysteriously hidden in the Old.”¹ You might say that prophecy in general in a way illustrates the same thing, where what is to come is held out in front of the current moment in time as an image of something as of yet mysterious and to be afforded fully in the future. But one trusts that purification will clear a path toward that revealed endpoint, toward making the path straight, so to speak, for the even grander endpoint.

So it’s really all about letting go and submitting to an authority higher than oneself and one’s personal control, where that higher authority presents itself to us first, asking only that we allow it to guide us. This general pattern is encapsulated quite powerfully in the story of the Samaritan woman, to whom Jesus says, “give me a drink,” promising “living water” in return (John 4:4-42). If she’ll only give a little something (open her heart), she’ll be rewarded with something far greater. This is also more or less the same pattern as the “come and see” phrase that we get multiple times at the beginning of John. Both are an invitation to open one’s eyes, open one’s heart. Submit the lower faculties to the higher ones. Purification will be necessary in order to bring those capacities to full fruition, to complete the work of properly orienting the foot to the head.

Returning to the point about integrating the outside influence for a moment: think about learning a new skill. Let’s use the concrete example of student and teacher. The skill at first belongs to the teacher and is only latent in the student. Once the skill is transferred, the student now has it too and no longer has to be shown. Does this mean the student is now the teacher? No! The student-teacher relationship remains even though the student can now perform the skill on their own. The student has achieved “illumination,” while remaining the foot to the teacher’s head. Importantly though, neither the student nor the teacher should allow their joint activity to be self-contained or self-directed. Their foot-head relationship must itself submit first and foremost to the ultimate head, to the highest teacher, lest their relationship become circumscribed within its own limits.

Swap out learning a skill for stilling the passions and developing virtues and you’ve got a pretty decent analogy. Also now picture a student trying to bypass the teacher’s method and grabbing straight for the skill and you get a serviceable picture of the fall, which isn’t merely a one-time historical event, but something that’s continually happening, keeping the sixth day circumscribed within its own domain. The hasty, desirous student keeps himself from properly learning the skill and ultimately from “entering the teacher’s house.”

Now imagine that there’s a whole group of teachers, all with different levels of skill, in a hierarchy. They all report up to the very top head of the teacher organization. The teachers at each level learn their skill from and are guided by the level above, to whom they’re but students. Furthermore, an individual teacher doesn’t have to stay at one level always, and when there is a change of role, the whole hierarchy – the unified body of teachers – remains intact. Additionally, if and when an individual moves up the ranks, they gain more of a command of the whole structure, folding an image of it into themselves, as it were. This is one way to think of the ladder we’ve looked at in John. It’s also the basic dynamics of properly functioning groups, where the parts are individuals, as well as properly functioning individuals, where the parts are faculties. St. John paints a picture of both of these simultaneously in his Gospel, where at both the group level (what will go onto become the Church) and the individual level, he depicts the hierarchical organization flowing up to the highest identity (Christ). I’ve tried to show in this series how this takes shape through a fractal ordering of purification, illumination, and perfection. As long as the

The what and the who

Another important point to narrow in on in this analogy is that it’s not just what the teacher teaches that’s important, but who they are. When you sign on to be their student, you might not know exactly what they’re going to teach you or how they’re going to do it. You just have to trust them, to take it on faith that they’ll lead you in the right direction. They’re the teacher. The title alone is worthy of your respect, but they also show you their identity by their teacherly works.

The teacher-student analogy comes to a certain limit, at which point another analogy is more useful. There’s perhaps nothing that strikes closer to the heart of the what-and-who issue than the relationship between parent and child. The parent of course has all the things a teacher has: on the what side – the skills to impart, on the who side – the title and the works to show for it. But another thing they’ve got is their undying love. The undying love of a mother for her child, for instance, brings her into an intimate person to person connection with that child which in fact underlies the skills, the title, and the works. It’s that connection at the deepest level of who, which creates (or should at least, in a healthy relationship) a powerfully strong bond of faith in the child for the mother. 

These analogies illustrate how and why, as we climbed up the ladder in John’s Gospel, we saw the healing action of Jesus become less and less focused on the what and more and more on the who (think about the progression from the paralytic all the way up to Peter’s threefold affirmation). It’s of course both the whole time – we mustn’t forget the mutual interpenetration of all things fractal. Jesus is right there at all the healings and other crucial events. But these follow an upward through line, opening up ‘peripheral gateways,’ if you will, which lead increasingly to a closeness and intimacy with the person of Christ. First the lower, sensible faculties had to be cleansed and awakened to seeing Christ’s incarnation in the sensible world. These are the basic whats being conferred – the rectification of: base materiality (nutritive faculty), sense perception (sensitive faculty), principles of sensible things (rational faculty). In the teacher analogy these are like the lessons or skills being taught. The stamp of the teacher is in all the lessons. Likewise the stamp of the Logos is in all of these whats, and we begin to see this stamp on deeper and deeper levels by the time the ladder reaches the higher intellective domain, where we’re drawn ever nearer to the who, to the Logos himself who unites the sensible and the intelligible, as well as the created and Uncreated. Again, the whats never become unimportant but rather partake in the synchronous beauty of the whole picture. They’re the foot to the head, the side of the ladder which anchors the many to the One. 

What’s with all the “faculties”?

Another thing I suspect some folks will be wondering is, “what’s the deal with all these so-called ‘faculties’?” A few of these are fairly standard Aristotelian designations for the hierarchy of soul functions found in organisms. You’ll hear Aristotle’s lowest soul faculty called the nutritive, vegetative, or vital. Then comes the sensitive, which is sometimes divided into sensitive and appetitive. This division follows along the lines of what I described in part 2, when I mentioned the sensitive faculty as being associated also with drives, urges, and emotions. This makes intuitive sense: sense perceptions are what allow those appetitive elements to come alive. There’s also a locomotive faculty, which I’ve skipped over in my analysis, that’s involved in an organism’s ability to turn the lower faculties into action. Then finally we arrive at the faculty that’s proper only to the human being, which as we’ve seen can be viewed as one faculty but can also be understood as being further differentiated. Looked at as a unity, it’s given a host of different names. Sometimes it’s called rational, other times noetic; sometimes intellective, other times still simply mind. To make matters more confusing, sometimes, when a differentiation is recognized, the terms assigned to the different aspects are used in varying ways as well. So what one thinker means by ‘rational’ can be what another means by ‘noetic,’ etc. I’ve even come up with a few names for certain faculties myself. You’ll recall that in doing so, I’ve assigned terms in such a way as to highlight the ‘sensible side’ vs. ‘soul side’ of things (yet another set of terms that could potentially be confusing). 

The important thing here is not the names of the different faculties but what the names point to. The faculties themselves are experiential realities, regardless of how one chooses to classify them ontologically. For instance, the ‘soul-sensitive’ faculty I came up with as a term to describe the lower portion of the intellect’s ‘soul side’ refers to a real domain of experience. Arguably this faculty has some involvement with the lower “aerial realm” where fallen spirits dwell. Purifying oneself from their influence might then involve submitting the soul-sensitive faculty to the higher intellect, if one is at that point. But it’s also not that simple, because all the faculties are connected and all influence each other. And multiple levels are active at once. Remember that the lower faculties are contained in the higher ones, so something like being “filled with demons” would manifest mostly sensibly to someone whose purification work is still taking place largely on the sensible side of things. (One certainly hopes not to have to confront demons “on their own level”!) But the more rudimentary levels of purification would ostensibly still “reach into” those higher, as of yet hidden ones, and have an effect there.

What and where is the intelligible world? What and where is the aerial realm of fallen spirits? Likewise, what is the nature of the faculties used to “perceive” them? Are they subtle or spiritual “organs” of some kind? Are these even meaningful questions to ask? The point is we don’t really have to have ready answers to these questions in order to discuss the things that the terms point to as real categories of experience. 

Furthermore, though it’s at times helpful to differentiate the faculties, it’s also important to remember that they’re all seamlessly united within the undivided human soul. It’s not really possible to say exactly where one stops and the other begins. We can perhaps think of a prism which can be used to split white light into the color spectrum. When you look up close at the rainbow it makes, you’ll see the colors passing from one to the other continuously. Although there’s no definitive point at which green becomes yellow, we know when we’re looking at green vs. yellow. Such is the case with the faculties of soul. There’s really no place where the nutritive ends and the sensitive begins, but we know pretty well when nutritive processes are dominating over sensitive ones. This is what happens when a person is asleep, for instance. 

So in the way John constructs his ladder in his Gospel, we can recognize a clear progression through faculties that are experiential realities, regardless of how we name them or think of them ontologically. Orthodox readers might find this whole way of thinking about the soul in potential conflict with the more familiar tripartite soul model. My admittedly amateur opinion (okay, I guess that’s more of an intuition) is that these two ways of conceiving the soul are simply different and ultimately harmonious ways of looking at the same picture. But I’ll let others come to their own determinations. 

And lest one sense a dip too far toward a scholastic tendency to, shall we say, concretize or “metaphysicalize” in this whole discussion, these experiential realities are also obviously symbolic realities as well. The fractality of the 6 - 7 - 8 pattern confers this property automatically, rendering every literal level of 6 - 7 - 8 capable of standing for itself and all the others – as well as the microcosm and macrocosm –simultaneously, with unique shadings of meaning at each level.

Sign-off

Alright, I think this is where I’ll really bring things to a close. I’ll conclude by mentioning that the head-foot symbolism that abounds in the Gospels, particularly of course in John, is really where this whole contemplation initially kicked off for me. It first began to stand out after I was exposed to Jonathan Pageau’s treatment of right hand vs. left hand symbolism, I guess about a year and a half ago at this point. The criss-crossing he describes with this pattern was something I started noticing in the head-foot symbolism as well. I took to charting out all the various hierarchies of this relationship in the Gospel of John (way more than what I’ve presented in this series) before I thought to apply the pattern of purification, illumination, and perfection to it. This was actually suggested to me as a possibility to explore by a few fellow Symbolic World blog contributors, so I thank them (they know who they are) for their suggestion, which I believe has proven fruitful, even if I’ve perhaps still got a few screws to tighten in the way I’m formulating things. 

I’ve been writing a lot lately, probably a little too much. That said, I think I’ll probably take a short break from it for a while. Gotta give these seeds some proper nourishment and time to grow. There’s also no shortage of practical and person to person work that could use my tending to at the moment. So long for a little bit!

1. Maximus the Confessor. “Chapters on Knowledge,” in “Maximus Confessor, Selected Writings,” Trans. George C. Berthold, at 145. Paulist Press, 1985.