T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Murder in the Cathedral inherited the religious and philosophical tradition of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theology and Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Anglo-Catholicism, as distinguished from the Roman Catholicism, thereby may be seen to designate Eliot’s religious identity. Dante’s Divine Comedy shows the apex of his contemplation based upon the intellect. Dante illustrates “paradiso” reaching contemplation by using various lights, and Eliot’s Four Quartets similarly reveals a still point that is a mystical experience filled with much light. In Four Quartets the moment of mystical experience can be seen like those in the works of Thomas Aquinas and Dante belonging to a Catholic tradition that reaches sanctification. The action of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Murder in the Cathedral might just sin as a failure to will in accordance with God, which is the choice of good and evil of human acts interpreted by St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theology. For the true martyr is the person who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself.

• 양재용(강원대학교) | Yang, Jae-yong (Kangwon National University)