T.S.엘리엇의 기독교 신앙

Abstract

T. S. Eliot was raised and educated under the influence of his Unitarian parents and family. Thanks to William Greenleaf Eliot, the founder who is Washington University in St. Louis and the Church of the Messiah, which is the first Unitarian church, Eliot’s father and mother practised and inculcated the family religion to T. S. Eliot. His mother, Charlotte Champe Eliot, was a writer and a reformer and committed to father-in-law’s decrees. But Eliot criticized radicalism of Christianity―it made it too tepid, too liberal, too much like the enlightened Unitarianism of his family. Eliot also worried about the Church as an institution. Eliot’s denounced empty idolatry of forms with the reforming zeal that his forebears had. Eliot took up a position opposite to the humanitarian attitude of his mother and grandfather, the faith that one tries to approach God through human effort. Everytime he went back during these undergraduate years to join in his family’s Sunday’s worship, he found it an increasingly stifling ritual. Eliot suffered religious experiences “as though traversing the Boston street were like wading through time” in undergraduate years at Harvard which are described in his Four Quartets. Eliot divorced his wife through his attorney in spite of her refusal to recognize a divorce. Eliot repented his wrongdoing due to the consciousness of guilty to her and marriage life since his former wife died lonely in mental hospital. During the rest of his life he suffered from his deeds, for which he was possessed of the consciousness of guilty and sin to his dead wife. The sense of damnation, the remorse and guilt that Vivienne evoked were essential to Eliot’s long purgatorial journey that continued long after his formal conversion and their separation six years later. He could escape from her, morally, only by embracing the ascetic Way of the Catholic mystics. In “Little Gidding” of Four Quartets written during in remorse and the sense of guilt due to the debt to Vivienne, we can find the opposite meanings that are both the fire of bomb implying the death of desire and the fire of Christ implying the love of Spirit. Eliot showed a sense of sin through the protagonists of his later poetic plays. In his poetic plays, Eliot sought human love, which was the fruit of blessings of his second marriage free from guilty consciousness after revealing his sin to his family.