T. S. 엘리엇과 St. 아우구스티누스

T. S. Eliot and St. Augustinus: A Vision of Double Bind

The paper has the aim to search for why humans should feel spiritual emptiness in spite of material fullness. This is the epistemological reality that humans differ from animals loyal to satiety of stomach. Humans are created with reason as the tool to admire and worship the amazing grace of the Creator and get closer to divinity leading humans to heaven. Eliot as a kind of common human pursued through his poems the ultimate themes such as origin of existences, goal of life, and good / evil, while Augustinus that relied on The Absolute God as the donor of reason as a part of divinity told us them in terms of theology. In the sense, Eliot pursuing the ultimate themes like life and death and also Augustinus resorting to the sacred providence of God, mean representing common people’s desire trying to grasp eternity in spite of having transient longevity. The only two things that we humans including Eliot and Augustinus can know are the terrible realities that we are absurdly thrown into the world and necessarily face with death as the unavoidable and gloomy termination. The pious vision from the saint of Hippo on Eliot’s some ultimate themes is aimed for the practice of ‘caritas’ that means sacred love to both the Absolute and ordinary people. In conclusion, R. Descartes depending upon human’s own apparent thought rather than turning to God, F. Nietzsche declaring the death of God, and K. Marx disregarding divinity and reducing human to molecular state would commit errors because they misused reason given by God that they hated, and produced the proposition of ‘Cogito ergo sum’, the Birth of Tragedy, and the Capital, which also can be recognized as a reality of double bind.