"7 circles of Angels"

[Fides_et_Ratio]

So... my youth group is having a "hot topic" night where the teens got to pick the topic... and one of the topics they picked was "7 Circles of Angels".

A bit confused. We tried to get at what this meant, and a few of them said it came from Dante. Since I'm the only one on the CORE team who's read Dante... I get to lead the discussion.

But there's one problem. This isn't Dante. There are 9 circles in Hell, 9 spheres in Heaven, and 7 terraces of Purgatory. So I'm supposed to just go over the basic gist of Dante, underscoring that it's fiction and was never meant to be taken dogmatically, and then go over what the Church teaches about Heaven and Hell.

My only concern is this "7 circles of Angels" thing... I have a sneaking suspicion that it's a pagan/new age sort of thing that they are mixing up with Dante. Because when I originally googled the phrase, I got a lot of pagan mumbo-jumbo and I feel like even though they said it came from Dante... I'm going to get a lot of questions unrelated to Dante that I won't have any knowledge about.

Any ideas? Has anyone else run across this phrase/idea before?

[Paphnutius]

I thought that it was 9 choirs of angels.

[Mateo el Feo]

Maybe someone was just confused about the 7/9 thing?

Anyway, here's [url="http://www.ccel.org/d/dante/paradiso/para28.htm"]Paradiso Canto XXVIII (link)[/url]. That's the section that discusses the nine circles of angels. I guess what's important is what is at the center of all of the circles.

Mateo

[blovedwolfofgod]

i havent heard anything on the new age front about 7 circles of angels. they probably meant the 9 choirs. aquinas outlines them in the summa.

[jswranch]

We get this list scriptures. Check out [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_angels"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_angels[/url] for more info.

[blovedwolfofgod]

word on the street, wikipedia isnt the most reliable source of info. anyone can write for it as long as they sound intellegent.

[jswranch]

[quote name='blovedwolfofgod' date='Mar 18 2006, 12:00 PM']word on the street, wikipedia isnt the most reliable source of info. anyone can write for it as long as they sound intellegent.
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True, very true. But the wikipedia list on this topic matches the same bible verses and explanations on most other catholic websites. Wikipedia just happens to have the simplest and straight to the point article I found in a few google searches.

[Laudate_Dominum]

You'll find the idea of the "spheres" in ancient pagan thought. There is a hierarchy of nine spheres in neo-platonism. These sorts of ideas are to be found in medieval Islamic and Christian thought as well. However, the nine choirs of angels is rooted in mystical visions recorded in the Bible. The ranking of angels, archangels, principalities, thrones, virtues, dominations, cherubim and seraphim comes from the Old Testament prophets and is also in the New Testament. The medievals were familiar with some neo-platonic writings as well as certain Islamic treatises and in different ways, and to different degrees correlated the two ideas, but they are still very distinct ideas. In some Neo-Platonic thinking the spheres are used to explain the motion of the solar system or represent a hierarchy of ascent to the Divine and the general ordering of the cosmos. There are similarities between this and some Christian appropriations of the whole idea, but neo-platonism cannot be said to be the origin of the idea of nine choirs of angels. One source through which some of these ideas informed medieval angelology is the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius. His writings are in many ways a synthesis of neo-platonic philosophy and Christian Theology so it is not surprising that such a correspondence would be made.
It is just a case of understanding a theological reality in light of the prevailing view of reality. If people today generally believed that the universe began with the big bang, and theologians wanted to expound upon the theological doctrine of creation in light of this, we would not say that secular ideas spawned christian doctrines, we would just say that we understand said doctrines in a particular way in light of the prevailing view of the cosmos.
That is sort of how I look at it. It is a revealed doctrine that there are nine choirs of angels, but interpreting this doctrine in light of the nine spheres in some way is not a part of christian revelation per se. But on the other hand such speculation is not necessarily a bad thing.

I hope this helps somewhat.