엘리엇의 改宗

T. S. Eliot’s Conversíon T. S. Eliot’s Conversíon

This article which was originally written for a chapter included in the writer’s A Study η T. S. Eliot (Seoul, 1988) aims at investigating the na ture of T. S Eliot’s spiritual venture before and after his conversion to the Church of England. Though Eliot was born and grown in Unitarian family backgrond, he could not feel attached to the ’materialistic’ unorthdox Chris-tianity. When he failed to awaken to religious emotions in his early years, Eliot as “the type of one kind of religious sceptic, had to endure his loneliness and suffering for his long hesitation and painfuf soul-searching. For Eliot there was no sudden grace but a long period of doubt and soli-tude. Eliot’s conversion was not a dramatic change, but only an expansion or development of interest. He did not turn from atheism to belief but from spiritual self-reliance to the support of a Church. He was attracted, for this reason, to the intelligent believers like Lancelot Andrews, Pascal, Dante and SO on. They were his life models, and their biographical essays he wrote for many occasions reflect an image of himself. What all Eliot’s models have in common is the pattern of a life in which spiritual struggles are link-ed to Church‘ His words on Pascal, “His despair, his disillusion… are sen-tial moment in the progr s of the intellectual soul can be said on himself. And it can also be said that Eliot s poetical works from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Wasle La :d， through Four Quartets are his autobiographical writings as personal grievances.