St. Thomas further explains to Dante the grades of perfection in God’s creatures, from the Angels downwards; whereby His Divine light is more or less imperfectly reflected, and the likeness of the Divine ideas more or less imperfectly expressed--perfectly only when the Trinity creates immediately, as in the case of Adam and the humanity of Christ (_Par._ xiii.). Solomon, whose peerless wisdom St. Thomas had explained as “royal prudence,” instructs Dante concerning the splendour of the body after the resurrection, when human personality will be completed and the perfection of beatitude fulfilled (_Par._ xiv.). In a mysteriously beautiful apparition of what seems to be another garland of spirits in the Sun, this vision of the fourth heaven closes; and Beatrice and her lover are “translated to more lofty salvation” in the glowing red of Mars. THE HEAVEN OF MARS.--The fifth heaven, the sphere of Mars, is ruled by the angelic Virtues. This is the order which images the Divine strength and fortitude; their name, according to Dionysius, signifies “a certain valiant and unconquerable virility.” According to St. Bernard, they are those “by whose command or work signs and prodigies are wrought among the elements, for the admonition of mortals,” and it is through them that the sign of the Son of Man shall appear in heaven as foretold in the Gospel.[39] Therefore, in Mars, Dante beholds a great image of the Crucified, blood-red, formed by stars which are the souls of the warrior saints, whom the Virtues impressed at their birth with the influence of the planet (_Par._ xvii. 76-78), to be strongly and manfully valiant, and to do notable things on earth (_ibid._ 92, 93), even as the Virtues, according to St. Bernard, work signs and prodigies among the elements.