The Empyrean

The Empyrean is the schoolmen's answer to a question Aristotle's cosmos could not ask: what is outside the outermost sphere? For Aristotle, strictly nothing, not even void; the universe simply ended. Christian doctrine, however, required a heaven, the dwelling of God, the angels and the saints, and locating it inside the machinery of moving spheres seemed to subject beatitude to physics. The solution, developed by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and adopted by Aquinas's teachers, was a tenth heaven of pure light, caelum empyreum, fiery in splendor rather than heat, created on the first day, filled with glory from its beginning, and, decisively, immobile.

The immobility is the doctrine. Motion, in the Aristotelian analysis, is the signature of incompleteness, a thing moving toward what it lacks; the spheres turn because they desire. The Empyrean desires nothing, lacking nothing, and therefore rests, and its rest is not idleness but plenitude, the stillness of arrival. From this followed its odd relation to place: it contains the whole moving universe while being contained by nothing, so that, as the axiom ran, the heaven of heavens is a place only in the sense that it embraces all places while needing none. Later writers drew the mystical corollary: to ascend through the spheres is to pass from time toward its rim, and the crossing into the Empyrean is the crossing from time into eternity, not a further distance but a change of state, the point where the journey stops being travel.

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.