What Does Empyrean Mean?

The Greek and Latin origins

The English word empyrean derives through medieval Latin empyreus from Greek terms associated with fire: en, “in,” and pyr, “fire.” Medieval Christian writers used the term for the luminous heaven inhabited by God, the angels, and the blessed. Their descriptions of radiance drew upon an older vocabulary of flame.

Online Etymology Dictionary: Empyrean ↗

The Empyrean in Dante’s Divine Comedy

In the Convivio, Book II, chapter III, Dante describes nine moving heavens enclosed by the Empyrean. Within this final heaven, the blessed dwell in perfect stillness. They possess what they desire and have no need to seek it elsewhere. Dante places their dwelling beyond physical space, in the divine mind.

Dante, Convivio, Book II, chapter III (A. S. Kline translation) ↗

Near the end of the Divine Comedy, Dante the pilgrim enters the Empyrean with Beatrice. In Paradiso XXX, she describes a heaven of pure light, in which understanding and love are united. Longfellow translates the central phrase as Light intellectual replete with love. Dante is initially dazzled. As his sight strengthens, he begins to comprehend the realm before him.

He first sees a river of light, with sparks passing between its banks and the flowers growing there. He bends toward the river. The scene changes, and he perceives the blessed arranged in an immense rose. Beatrice guides him through an experience for which his earthly habits of perception have left him unprepared.

Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXX (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation) ↗

In Canto XXXIII, Dante sees the scattered elements of the universe united through divine love. Afterward, he struggles to remember and describe what he has seen. He compares himself to someone waking from a dream who retains the feeling of it after forgetting its particulars. He concludes his journey with his desire and will in accord with God.

Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII (Henry Francis Cary translation) ↗

Milton and later uses of the word

John Milton used Empyrean in Paradise Lost, published in 1667. In Book VI, he describes the heavenly realm shaking during the war against the rebellious angels. His use belongs to a Christian epic concerned with rebellion, judgment, and obedience. The Empyrean serves as the setting for a conflict between beings who have known God and have chosen whether to obey him.

Dartmouth Milton Reading Room: Paradise Lost, Book VI ↗

Writers also use empyrean for the heavens generally, or for an ideal state of happiness. In figurative usage, someone who reaches the empyrean has attained an exalted position in art, thought, or achievement. These uses retain the association with height and perfection familiar from the word’s religious history.

Merriam-Webster: Empyrean ↗

The meaning of Empyrean in the novel

Bavaria, 1945. A wounded American captain lies in a field hospital, counting the men he has lost. A nurse replaces his dressings. A chaplain sits beside the bed and hears the questions the captain once believed his religion had answered. Elsewhere, Jewish prisoners endure starvation, forced labor, and the decisions of men who can order their deaths. Above these lives, Chapman places a name for heaven.

The Captain, Sabina, and Pierson

The Captain has commanded men through combat and written to their families after they died. He returns to those losses in his conversation with Pierson. The priest stays and listens, though he has other beds to visit and doubts of his own. Sabina, having examined the captain’s wound, brings him Dostoyevsky and agrees to discuss it. They spend time with a difficult, angry man and learn what he has endured. Dante’s blessed see one another in the fullness of divine understanding. Here, a nurse and a chaplain come to know a patient through the hours they give him.

Ionel and Esther’s life in Paris

Ionel hides books beneath the floor of the family’s apartment. Esther questions the safety of his plans and tends to their daughter, Miriam. They remember stories, disagree about leaving, and try to make a frightened child feel secure. Nazi officials will register them, separate them, and assign them to work. The reader has already met a poet, a woman skilled with a needle, and parents who know the stories their daughter asks to hear.

Mercy in the hospital and the camp

The characters discuss God, obedience, and moral responsibility while tending wounds, distributing food, and searching for relatives. A physician can prolong a prisoner’s life or use his knowledge to injure him. An officer can authorize provisions or leave a family waiting. A nurse can remain beside someone whom others have passed over. The people in their care have to live with what they decide.

Chapman’s characters act under threat, with little knowledge of what will follow. They search for the people they love, sometimes unable to learn whether they are alive. To read these lives under the name Empyrean is to remember Dante’s account of souls who can finally see and know one another, free of fear. In the wards and barracks, anyone hoping for such mercy must depend on another person to provide it.