In the Divine Comedy St. Bernard prays: 

     So mighty art thou, Lady, and so great,
     That he who grace desireth and comes not
     To thee for aidence, fain would have desire
     Fly without wings.

The Chorus mysticus could equally well form the conclusion of the Comedy.  The inadequate which to fulness groweth, is what the Provencals already, in their time, realised as folly, as a paradox:  the metaphysical love of woman, for ever remaining dream and longing, always unfulfilled, the eternal-feminine.

As the Mater Gloriosa appears, Dante exclaims: 

     Thenceforward what I saw
     Was not for words to speak, nor memory’s self
     To stand against such outrage on her skill.

And Goethe: 

     In starry wreath is seen
     Lofty and tender,
     Midmost the heavenly queen,
     Known by her splendour.

Here the “sacred fire of love,” metaphysical eroticism, has reached its absolute climax.  The universe is represented by a divine woman, and man, abandoning himself to her, worships her.  Goethe’s Faust concludes at this point, but Dante went further, right into the heart of the eternal glory of the Deity, there to lose himself.

I have previously said that the last scene of Faust was the final unfolding of the manifold blossom of metaphysical eroticism, and I will proceed to establish my point.  Hitherto I have used the term metaphysical eroticism always in its narrow sense of love of woman.  Henceforth I shall use it in its broader meaning of mystical love in general, all love that is projected on the transcendental and the divine.  Emotion is the specific domain of humanity, its power, its essence.  And in the profoundest emotion, in love, a connection between the temporal and the eternal may be divined.  Hence the Christian mystery of mysteries, God giving His Son to the world for love of humanity; God unable to approach the world other than as a lover—­sacrificing Himself for the sake of love.  We cannot conceive the Sublime with any other principal function than that of love; for love is the deepest and profoundest emotion of the human heart, and, in accordance with the first postulate, must therefore be the soul of the universe.  On this point all mystics and all metaphysical ecstatics are agreed; “God is love” is written in the Gospel of St. John.  “Love which moves the sun and all the stars,” stands at the termination of Dante’s masterpiece:  and in Faust the Pater Profundus confesses: 

     So love, almighty, all-pervading,
     Does all things mould, does all sustain.

He is still wrestling for divine love; he still has to fight against the temptations of doubt (of thought),

     Oh, God!  My troubled thoughts composing,
     My needy heart do thou illume!

But the true enthusiastic lover of the divine, compelled to annihilate himself so as to become absorbed in God, the lover who no longer knows the difference between pain and delight, is represented by the Pater Ecstaticus:  The condition of rest is foreign to him, ceaselessly moving up and down, he sings: