Seven heavens

The idea of multiple heavens layered above the earth, usually seven of them, is widespread across the ancient Near East and the traditions descended from it. Its origin is generally traced to Mesopotamian astronomy, where the seven visibly moving bodies, the sun, the moon and the five planets visible to the unaided eye, were each associated with a level or sphere.

In Judaism, seven heavens are described in rabbinic literature, which names them and assigns contents to each (Hagigah 12b), and in apocalyptic works such as 2 Enoch and the Testament of Levi, where a visionary ascends through them in sequence. Paul's reference to a man caught up to "the third heaven" (2 Corinthians 12:2) presupposes a multiple-heaven cosmology without specifying which scheme he has in mind.

In Islam the seven heavens are Qur'anic and mentioned repeatedly (2:29, 65:12, 67:3, 71:15). The narrative of the Prophet's night journey and ascension, the Isra and Mi'raj, has him ascend through them and meet a prophet at each, a sequence developed extensively in hadith and in a large later literature, and among the most frequently represented episodes in Islamic devotional art.

The scheme merged with Greek astronomy in late antiquity, and the Ptolemaic system of concentric spheres carrying the planets, with the sphere of the fixed stars beyond them, became the standard cosmology of the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds. Dante's Paradiso is organised on it, ascending through the spheres of Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn before the fixed stars and beyond, and it structures a great deal of medieval and early modern imagery.

Two connections are worth drawing out. The association of the number seven with the visible planets is also the origin of the seven-day week and of the ordering of its days by planetary rulers, a derivation that survives in the day-names of the Romance languages and, partially, in English. And the layered heavens were dismantled as physical cosmology over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after which the traditions that had held them divided between reading the scheme figuratively and treating it as of no doctrinal consequence at all. There is very little modern theological investment in the number, and the phrase "seventh heaven" survives in ordinary English long after the cosmology that generated it.

Article one traces the seven-heaven scheme through the ancient Near East, Judaism and Islam into medieval Christian cosmology. A newer American tradition took the same underlying impulse, a graded afterlife matching different lives to different destinies, and built it on a different number entirely, which is worth setting beside the older scheme rather than treating as a variant of it.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches three degrees of glory, celestial, terrestrial and telestial, set out in Doctrine and Covenants section 76, a revelation attributed to Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon and dated to 1832. The celestial kingdom, the highest, is reserved for those who receive the fullness of Latter-day Saint ordinances and covenants; the terrestrial for honourable people who lacked that fullness; the telestial, still described as glorious rather than as punishment, for the remainder, with only a very limited category held to be excluded from any degree of glory at all. The scheme explicitly departs from a simple heaven-and-hell binary and is distinctive within American Christianity for that reason.

The contrast with the seven-heaven tradition is instructive precisely because the underlying religious problem, that people plainly differ in merit and that a single undifferentiated afterlife feels inadequate to that fact, recurs across traditions that never had contact with one another's specific number. Seven derives from Mesopotamian planetary astronomy carried into Judaism and Islam; three degrees derive from Latter-day Saint scriptural revelation with no debt to that astronomical inheritance at all, which is a clean case of independent invention answering a shared problem rather than of one tradition borrowing from another.