When I was taking a tour of the church Saint-Germain-l’Auxerois in Paris, the tour guide pointed out an archway over the portal and said “There are seven angels in the arch. One angel for each of the heavens”. The portal dates from the Middle Ages.
I began wondering whether the tour guide was making this up to give a rational explanation about the seven angels or whether the concept of seven heavens was widespread in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Can anyone tell me if it was? Are there any scriptural or apocryphal references to seven heavens that may have influenced the artists to create seven angels?
The concept of “Seven Brides For Seven Brothers” was widespread on CBS for a short time in the 1980s.
The concept of seven compartments of heaven exists in Judaism and can be found in Midrashim that date back at latest to the second century CE (of course, Orthodox Jews such as myself consider the concept to be part of a much older oral tradition). However, heaven contains countless angels, so I’d guess that the “one angel for each heaven” is merely a bit of artistic symbolism indulged in by the sculptor of that arch.
According to some sources, there are seven archangels, not just the three (Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael) that most of us have heard of. Cite forthcoming, if I can find it…
I have a hunch that this is “tour guide history” of the sort that makes a production number over what Joan of Arc or Thomas Jefferson did when she/he was in that town, usually with little or no historical warrant.
Though I’ve run into the idea that there are seven archangels before, I’ve never heard them associated with the seven heavens (if there are indeed seven of the one and seven, not nine, of the other).