#genius work

A concept that has always fascinated me in Ancient Near Eastern cosmologies and their relatives in the general Mediterranean and greater Asia is the concept of many “heavens”, the most well-known number of which is seven, followed perhaps by three. The Wikipedia entry for this concept is misleading when it states that “Each of the seven heavens corresponds to one of the seven classical planets known in antiquity”. As Adela Yarbro Collins argues[1], concurring with a number of previous studies, there is no necessary link between the seven heavens and the seven planets, at least in early Christian, Jewish, and even Babylonian thought. I can’t say enough about Greek thought to extend it there. She demonstrates how varied the number of heavens is in different Jewish and Christian texts and how their contents and descriptions are also just as varied.

My concern, however, is not with any particular numerical configuration of heavens, their contents, or any particular description. That is still something I am not grounded in. What I am interested in is a general understanding of why there can be a number of “heavens” in the first place, and how we may understand or re-understand them today, for our metaphysical purposes. The modern revolutions in science famously destroyed the Ptolemaic universe, but if what matters for existence (according to Platonism) is something’s individuation, then there is a relevant way to re-understand even that universe today. Instead of a reactionary rejection of the modern, we have a creative reception of it. Indeed, that’s the only way to receive anything. You are either doing it well, or badly, in the many ways this might work.

I had an insight that was only somewhat given a boost when Collins says this about the “sixth” heaven in the “Apocalypse of Abraham”:

“In the sixth expanse, he saw a multitude of spiritual angels, without bodies, who do the bidding of the fiery angels on the seventh firmament; there was no power on that expanse either, only the spiritual angels.”[2]

I had always associated the layered heavens with an ascending sequence of ever more “fine” or “divine” physicality. What this myth is saying is that it doesn’t have to be physical. It is possible to have all “layers” be manners of physicality, but it isn’t necessary, which leads me to the following speculation:

The concept of many heavens is connected to the idea of a “chain of being”. Indeed, in several places, these layers are a part of or a whole of the chain of being. But what if we thought of this in less spatially hierarchical terms, and in so doing, re-understand our understanding of the chain of being? What if – since “heavens” (formal regimes) are supposed to contain, cover, and organize “earth” (material configurations) – we can see the heavens as instead different formal regimes, different monisms, as ways of seeing the totality, considered as overlapping, but of some more fundamental than others. This way, we liberate it from the heavy history of wonky physical height into the overlapping fractal splendour of ontological wavefronts. We can see these “heavens” as corresponding on the one hand to certain idealisms, where idealism is “not speaking of ideas over matter but the cognizing of a World, and whether that World is a given or emergent.”[3]; and corresponding on the other hand to certain monisms, such as “The coherent fabric of ideas woven by Zeus; of psychical motions, woven by Poseidon; of images, woven by Hades: three demiurgies, three monisms.”[4]