Day of Judgement

The Day of Judgement enters the text through a gloss on the opening words of a medieval hymn by Thomas of Celano. It names a final reckoning in which the world dissolves into ashes and salvation itself appears uncertain, giving the phrase its force as an image of universal judgment rather than an ordinary moment in time.

The Hymn and Its Vision

The commentary identifies the words as the beginning of a hymn whose full opening sense is “That day of wrath, that day will dissolve the world into ashes”. Its vision joins cosmic destruction to moral judgment: the day brings the world to an end, while the righteous are described as barely escaping. The prospect is therefore not simply that of catastrophe, but of a reckoning that reaches everyone.

Appearance in Faust

Three verses of the hymn are familiar from the Cathedral scene in Faust I. Their appearance there connects the idea of judgment to a dramatic and religious setting, while the commentary’s gloss supplies the larger horizon behind the quoted words: an anticipated Day of Judgement in which worldly existence and the fate of the soul converge.

Significance

The phrase compresses two scales of consequence into a single image: the dissolution of the world and the precarious survival of the righteous. In the text’s account, that combination explains the hymn’s association with the Day of Judgement and its capacity to make a brief quotation carry the weight of final, universal reckoning.