From the book
The Golden Chain of Homer
Anonymous (traditionally attributed to Anton Joseph Kirchweger) · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordThe Empyrean is the divine dwelling expressly excluded from the natural changes discussed in the treatise.
- In the Golden ChainThe author distinguishes it from the subtle created heaven that circulates, gives influence and becomes terrestrial.
- Translation“Empyrean” translates the attested Empyreum. Its brief textual role is to establish a boundary for the cosmological argument.
- A place to readB1C09S001 states the exclusion; B1C09S008 locates the highest natural heaven beside that boundary.
Meaning
The Empyrean is the heaven in which God dwells with the elect, exempt from changes and natural operations. The author introduces the distinction to prevent a misunderstanding: his statements about heaven becoming earth concern a natural heaven below this divine dwelling. The explicit restriction is part of the work’s cosmology, even though it receives only brief treatment (B1C09S001).
The term therefore marks a limit rather than another ingredient in the analysis. Nothing in these passages makes the Empyrean one of the four elements, a fraction of distilled rainwater or a stage through which a metal must pass. Those operations belong to the changing created order the author has set beneath it (B1C09S001; B1C10S004).
Use in the book
The first definition of nature already excepts God from the world of creatures under discussion. The Empyrean passage later adds a more precise warning about the word heaven. Without it, readers might take the transformation of heaven into earth to imply transformation within God’s dwelling. The author prevents that inference before continuing his account of earthly exhalations and their ascent (B1C01S001; B1C09S001).
The next reference places the subtlest natural heaven at the upper edge beside the Empyrean. Heaven nearer air is less subtle, just as air nearer water is coarser than upper air. This does not dissolve the boundary: it explains grades within natural heaven while retaining an upper region excluded from their processes. The relevant relation is adjacency, not identity or unrestricted passage into the divine dwelling (B1C09S008).
The distinction also clarifies the book’s claim that all natural things share water and spirit and contain heaven within them. The circulating heaven is the life-bearing, volatile degree that can be incorporated through air and water. It is that degree which becomes fixed earth and returns toward volatility. The Empyrean is not thereby said to be mixed into every stone, putrefy in a vessel or circulate in rain. Reading the qualification alongside those expansive statements preserves their actual stated scope (B1C05S002; B1C07S003; B1C09S003; B1C09S001).
Places to read
- Book I · Ch. 1 · §1The definition of nature includes creatures but expressly excludes God.
- Book I · Ch. 6 · §1Natural heaven is the subtle active water-vapour whose downward influence joins the common seed.
- Book I · Ch. 9 · §1The Empyrean is exempt from the natural operations and transformations described below it.
- Book I · Ch. 9 · §8The highest natural heaven borders the Empyrean while remaining internally distinguished by degrees.
- Book I · Ch. 10 · §4The heaven named in the rainwater analysis belongs to the operative elemental account.
Translation in this edition
Empyreum is the source form translated as Empyrean. The adjacent German Himmel can refer to either heaven, so the qualification is decisive. A heading that merely gathered all occurrences of Himmel without preserving this distinction would merge what the author explicitly separates (B1C09S001).
Auserwehlten is the word rendered “elect” in the description of God’s companions. The passage supplies no extended account of their condition or a detailed map of the Empyrean. This entry accordingly treats the name’s delimiting function, without filling its brevity with an external theology or an unsupported celestial hierarchy (B1C09S001).