In the three lower heavens, to which earth’s shadow was supposed to extend (_Par._ ix. 118, 119), appear the souls whose lives were marred by inconstancy in their vows, who were moved by vain glory, or yielded to sensual love. They descend into these lower spheres to give Dante a sensible sign of the lesser degree of the perfection of their beatitude in the Empyrean. _Domus est una, sed diversitas est ibi mansionum_; “The house is one, but there is a diversity of mansions there.” There are different mansions of beatitude in God’s house, proceeding from inequality in the soul’s capacity of the Divine Charity; but in that house all are fulfilled with the Vision of the Divine Essence, and each perfectly beatified according to his own capacity of love and knowledge. In the spheres of the four higher planets appear the souls of great teachers and doctors, of Jewish warriors and Christian knights, of just rulers, of ascetic monks and hermits; they appear as types of lives perfected in action or in contemplation, as a sign of the different ways in which perfection may be reached on earth and beatitude attained in Paradise. These successive manifestations in the seven spheres of the planets obviate what might otherwise have proved the monotony of a single heaven, and suggest that, although each soul partakes supremely according to its individual capacity of the Beatific Vision, which is essentially one and the same in all, yet there are not only grades but subtle differences in the possession of it, in which the life on earth was a factor. In the eighth, the Stellar Heaven, still under sensible figures and allegorical veils, Dante sees “the host of the triumph of Christ, and all the fruit gathered by the circling of these spheres” (_Par._ xxiii. 19-21), representing the Church in which these various modes and degrees of life are brought into unison. In the ninth, the Crystalline, the angelic hierarchies are manifested with imagery symbolical of their office towards God and man, representing the principle of Divine Order, the overruling and disposition of Divine Providence in which the celestial intelligences are the agents and instruments. The Empyrean Heaven depicts the soul _in patria_, with all the capacities of love and knowledge actualised in the fruition of the Ultimate Reality, the supreme and universal truth which is the object of the understanding, the supreme and universal good which is the object of the will.