T. S. 엘리엇: 동방의 ‘낯선’ 신

Abstract

This study reexamines a long-pending attitude of T. S. Eliot regarding Eastern gods by revisiting the publication of University of Virginia lectures in 1934, a volume titled After Strange Gods. We have been vividly aware of Eliot’s critical attitude towards gods or religio-philosophy in the East, including anti-Semitism in 1935, which the young poet Karl Shapiro attacked Eliot later. In May 1933, T. S. Eliot delivered three lectures at the University of Virginia, as part of the Page-Barbour Series, the lectures which further developed the attitude of non-Western thoughts Eliot had first discussed in the essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” One of the lectures, “Personality and Demonic Possession,” appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review in January 1934, gaining most of their notorious reputation, because it demonstrates Eliot’s intolerance for non-Christian religions, the so-called ‘strange’ gods, and his anti-Semitism. The original typescript of the lecture appears for the first time with a cover story, titled “T. S. Eliot’s Suppressed Lecture,” online 2007 Virginia Quarterly Review. The Waste Land brings the inhabitants of the unreal city to be fertilized and enriched through the mythic circle: death and rebirth. The birthplace of all the religions of the East remains silent. The people who experience living death are the sick marks of Western civilization and culture. Eliot moves back to the orthodoxy of a Christian faith, which had earlier been scorned because of its fusion with Eastern wisdom. The Four Quartets further reflects the process of Eliot’s spiritual development in Eastern and Western metaphysics. Eliot first seeks spiritual strength through exotic metaphysics, and then he encounters difficulties while trying to unite its metaphysical mazes with his Anglo-Catholicism. Eliot wishes to unite these opposite views of the East and the West in a single experience, bringing into play an entire ethos: love and monism in the words of Christ, “I and the Father are one.” His final word “one” dedicates to regarding Eastern gods as strange and exotic. This monism suggests, in Eliot’s long experience, a consistent tradition of metaphysical, psychological, and religious debate, a debate in which Eastern and Christian points of reference play a particularly important role. The faith in Anglo-Catholicism is the final resting place for the truth which Eliot wants to teach us. Dante was, for Eliot, one of the ideal minds taken for Eastern religions. Eliot clearly points out the Dantean or Buddhist way of religio-philosophical wisdom at the end line of The Four Quartets, one of the late poems in his life: “The fire and the rose are one.”