In ancient European cosmologies inspired by Aristotle, the Empyrean Heaven, Empyreal or simply the Empyrean, was the place in the highest heaven, which was supposed to be occupied by the element of fire (or aether in Aristotle's natural philosophy). The word derives from the Medieval Latinempyreus, an adaptation of the Ancient Greekempyros (ἔμπυρος), meaning "in or on the fire (pyr)".[1]
In Christian religious cosmologies, the Empyrean was "the source of light" and where God and saved souls resided,[1] and in medieval Christianity, the Empyrean was the third heaven and beyond "the heaven of the air and the heaven of the stars."[2]
The Empyrean was thus used as a name for the incorporeal "heaven of the first day",[3] and in Christian literature for the dwelling-place of God, the blessed, celestial beings so divine they are made of pure light, and the source of light and creation.[1] Notably, at the very end of Dante's Paradiso, Dante visits God in the Empyrean.
The word is used both as a noun and as an adjective, but empyreal is an alternate adjective form. The scientific words empyreuma and empyreumatic, applied to the characteristic smell of the burning or charring of vegetable or animal matter, have the same Greek origin.[1]
Christianity
Early Christians took inspiration from Aristotle's cosmology in their reckoning of heaven.[2] From the 7th century onwards, the idea of the Empyrean gained traction in the faith because of writers like Isidore of Seville and Bede.[2]
↑ Randles, W. G. L. (1999). The Unmaking of the Medieval Christian Cosmos, 1500–1760. Routledge. According to Saint Basil, the First Heaven (which in the Middle Ages came to be called the Empyrean), has existed already before the Creation in the form of incorporeal light. There was, declared Saint Basil, a certain condition, older than the birth of the world and proper to the supramundane powers, one beyond time, everlasting, without beginning or end. In it the Creator and Producer of all things perfect the works of His art, a spriritual light befitting the blessedness of those who love the Lord...
The classical elements typically refer to earth, water, air, fire, and (later) aether which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances. Ancient cultures in Greece, Angola, Tibet, India, and Mali had similar lists which sometimes referred, in local languages, to "air" as "wind", and to "aether" as "space".
Flat Earth is an archaic and scientifically disproven conception of the Earth's shape as a plane or disk. Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat-Earth cosmography, notably including ancient near eastern cosmology. The model has undergone a recent resurgence as a conspiracy theory.
The Divine Comedy is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of Western literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval worldview as it existed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.
The cosmos is an alternative name for the universe or its nature or order. Usage of the word cosmos implies viewing the universe as a complex and orderly system or entity.
Biblical cosmology is the account of the universe and its laws in the Bible. The Bible was formed over many centuries, involving many authors, and reflects shifting patterns of religious belief; consequently, its cosmology is not always consistent. Nor do the biblical texts necessarily represent the beliefs of all Jews or Christians at the time they were put into writing: the majority of the texts making up the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament in particular represent the beliefs of only a small segment of the ancient Israelite community, the members of a late Judean religious tradition centered in Jerusalem and devoted to the exclusive worship of Yahweh.
The celestial spheres, or celestial orbs, were the fundamental entities of the cosmological models developed by Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, and others. In these celestial models, the apparent motions of the fixed stars and planets are accounted for by treating them as embedded in rotating spheres made of an aetherial, transparent fifth element (quintessence), like gems set in orbs. Since it was believed that the fixed stars did not change their positions relative to one another, it was argued that they must be on the surface of a single starry sphere.
Chaos is the mythological void state preceding the creation of the universe in ancient near eastern cosmology and early Greek cosmology. It can also refer to an early state of the cosmos constituted of nothing but undifferentiated and indistinguishable matter.
The Genesis creation narrative is the creation myth of both Judaism and Christianity. The narrative is made up of two stories, roughly equivalent to the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis. In the first, Elohim creates the heavens and the Earth in six days, then rests on, blesses, and sanctifies the seventh. In the second story God creates Adam, the first man, from dust and places him in the Garden of Eden. There he is given dominion over the animals. Eve, the first woman, is created from Adam's rib as his companion.
On the Heavens is Aristotle's chief cosmological treatise: written in 350 BC, it contains his astronomical theory and his ideas on the concrete workings of the terrestrial world. It should not be confused with the spurious work On the Universe.
The Apocalypse of Paul is a fourth-century non-canonical apocalypse and part of the New Testament apocrypha. The full original Greek version of the Apocalypse is lost, although fragmentary versions still exist. Using later versions and translations, the text has been reconstructed, notably from Latin and Syriac translations, the earliest being a seventh-century Iranian Syriac codex known as Fonds Issayi 18.
In ancient near eastern cosmology, the firmament signified a cosmic barrier that separated the heavenly waters above from the Earth below. In biblical cosmology, the firmament is the vast solid dome created by God during the Genesis creation narrative to divide the primal sea into upper and lower portions so that the dry land could appear.
John Philoponus, also known as John the Grammarian or John of Alexandria, was a Byzantine Greek philologist, Aristotelian commentator, Christian theologian and an author of a considerable number of philosophical treatises and theological works. He was born in Alexandria. A rigorous, sometimes polemical writer and an original thinker who was controversial in his own time, John Philoponus broke from the Aristotelian–Neoplatonic tradition, questioning methodology and eventually leading to empiricism in the natural sciences. He was one of the first to propose a "theory of impetus" similar to the modern concept of inertia over Aristotelian dynamics.
The unmoved mover or prime mover is a concept advanced by Aristotle as a primary cause or "mover" of all the motion in the universe. As is implicit in the name, the unmoved mover moves other things, but is not itself moved by any prior action. In Book 12 of his Metaphysics, Aristotle describes the unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: self-contemplation. He equates this concept also with the active intellect. This Aristotelian concept had its roots in cosmological speculations of the earliest Greek pre-Socratic philosophers and became highly influential and widely drawn upon in medieval philosophy and theology. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, elaborated on the unmoved mover in the Quinque viae.
Nous, from Greek: νοῦς, is a concept from classical philosophy, sometimes equated to intellect or intelligence, for the faculty of the human mind necessary for understanding what is true or real.
Incorporeality is "the state or quality of being incorporeal or bodiless; immateriality; incorporealism." Incorporeal means "Not composed of matter; having no material existence."
The term Hexaemeron, literally "six days," is used in one of two senses. In one sense, it refers to the Genesis creation narrative spanning Genesis 1:1–2:3: corresponding to the creation of the light ; the sky ; the earth, seas, and vegetation ; the sun and moon ; animals of the air and sea ; and land animals and humans. God then rests from his work on the seventh day of creation, the Sabbath.
In mythological or religious cosmology, the seven heavens refer to seven levels or divisions of the Heavens. The concept, also found in the ancient Mesopotamian religions, can be found in Judaism and Islam; the Christian Bible does not mention seven levels of heaven. Some of these traditions, including Jainism, also have a concept of seven earths or seven underworlds both with the metaphysical realms of deities and with observed celestial bodies such as the classical planets and fixed stars.
Philosophy of matter is the branch of philosophy concerned with issues surrounding the ontology, epistemology and character of matter and the material world. The word matter is derived from the Latin word materia, meaning "wood", or “timber”, in the sense "material", as distinct from "mind" or "form". The image of wood came to Latin as a calque from the ancient Greek philosophical usage of hyle (ὕλη).
In Abrahamic religious traditions, an angel is a heavenly supernatural or spiritual being. In monotheistic belief-systems, such beings are under service of the supreme deity.
Paradiso is the third and final part of Dante's Divine Comedy, following the Inferno and the Purgatorio. It is an allegory telling of Dante's journey through Heaven, guided by Beatrice, who symbolises theology. In the poem, Paradise is depicted as a series of concentric spheres surrounding the Earth, consisting of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Fixed Stars, the Primum Mobile and finally, the Empyrean. It was written in the early 14th century. Allegorically, the poem represents the soul's ascent to God.
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