singing together, and upon the beautiful appeal to the "stars and light" in the song of the three children--the Benedicite--which the Anglican communion has so wisely retained in its Liturgy.
Other fathers thought the stars abiding-places of the angels, and that stars were moved by angels.

The Gnostics thought the stars spiritual beings governed by angels, and appointed not to cause earthly events but to indicate them.
As to the heavens in general, the prevailing view in the Church was based upon the scriptural declarations that a solid vault--a "firmament"-- was extended above the earth, and that the heavenly bodies were simply lights hung within it.

This was for a time held very tenaciously.

St.Philastrius, in his famous treatise on heresies, pronounced it a heresy to deny that the stars are brought out by God from his treasure-house and hung in the sky every evening; any other view he declared "false to the Catholic faith." This view also survived in the sacred theory established so firmly by Cosmas in the sixth century.

Having established his plan of the universe upon various texts in the Old and New Testaments, and having made it a vast oblong box, covered by the solid "firmament," he brought in additional texts from Scripture to account for the planetary movements, and developed at length the theory that the sun and planets are moved and the "windows of heaven" opened and shut by angels appointed for that purpose.
How intensely real this way of looking at the universe was, we find in the writings of St.Isidore, the greatest leader of orthodox thought in the seventh century.