The last four cantos of the Paradiso furnish the Empyrean, and Dante's choices are doctrine rendered as imagery. Entering, the pilgrim is wrapped in a light that is intellectual, light made of love, and his sight must be remade before he can use it; the realm is perceived by capacity, not by distance. What he then sees is the blessed arranged as an immense white rose, tier upon tier of saints seated as in an amphitheater, Mary at the summit, the angels moving between the rose and God like bees between flower and hive. The figure answers a question theology had labored at: how can the blessed be many and yet one, each ranked in differing glory, none envious? The rose shows hierarchy without distance, every seat a full view of God, difference of degree with no difference of access, and Piccarda's earlier formula, in His will is our peace, is here made visible as architecture.
Time and space have been left below; the petals do not move, because nothing remains to move toward. Then even the rose is surpassed. In the final canto the pilgrim looks past the assembly into the light itself and sees, bound with love in one volume, all that is scattered in leaves through the universe, substance and accident fused, and, within the three circles of the Trinity, our image, humanity in God. Sight exceeds speech, memory fails like a dream at waking, and the poem ends not with a description but with a motion, the pilgrim's desire and will turned, like a wheel moved evenly, by the love that moves the sun and the other stars, the Empyrean's stillness communicated at last to a human heart.