The Eternal Feminine draws us on.

Goethe’s line “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan” occurs at the very end of Part Two of his dramatic poem Faust (completed late in Goethe’s life and published posthumously in 1832). In the closing “Chorus Mysticus,” Faust—after a life of striving, error, and restless ambition—is ultimately redeemed, and the drama shifts into a visionary, quasi-Christian-mystical register. The phrase is spoken not by an individual character but by a choral voice that summarizes the work’s final movement: ascent, transfiguration, and the idea that a feminine principle (figured through Marian and saintly imagery in the finale) participates in drawing the human soul upward.

In the finale of Faust II, the “Eternal Feminine” is less a comment on women as such than a symbolic principle associated with attraction, mediation, mercy, and spiritual elevation. After Faust’s relentless pursuit of experience and achievement, the closing chorus suggests that what finally “draws us on” (or “draws us upward”) is not mere willpower but a transcendent pull toward the higher and the reconciled—imagined through feminine-coded figures of love and grace. The line has been influential and controversial: it has inspired readings ranging from Romantic idealization of the feminine to theological and psychological interpretations (e.g., the feminine as a mediating force between the human and the divine).

Alles Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulängliche,
Hier wird’s Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist’s getan;
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.

1) “The Eternal Feminine draws us upward.”
2) “The Eternal Feminine leads us on.”
3) “The Eternal Feminine draws us on high.”