How Faust, Part Two drew on The Divine Comedy
A documented line of influence: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe demonstrably engaged Dante Alighieri’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri · 1320
MedievalThe influenced
Faust, Part Two
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1832
RomanticismRelevance
5/10
On Faust, Part Two’s page
- The heavenward finale — the choir of souls rising through celestial spheres, Gretchen as intercessor before the Mater Gloriosa — is Goethe modeling the close of Faust on Dante's Paradiso
- That last line about the Eternal Feminine is held to be reminiscent of the Comedy's final lines: the love that moves the sun and the stars
- Read the Paradiso first and Faust's salvation stops being a surprise and becomes the answer to a five-century-old question about how a striving soul gets carried up
On The Divine Comedy’s page
- The Comedy doesn't just end with Heaven — it ends with a soul carried upward through graded spheres of light toward a feminine intercessor, and that ascent is the template Goethe reaches for to close Faust, Part Two
- Faust's redemption rises through the Mountain Gorges to the Mater Gloriosa just as Dante rises through the Paradiso to Beatrice and the Virgin
- Goethe's famous last line — the Eternal Feminine drawing us upward — echoes the Comedy's closing image of the love that moves the sun and the other stars