There are many themes and many contradictory aspects in T. S. Eliot's works, such as religious themes of Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, and philosophical themes of time and space, conflict and unification, and good and evil. It is natural that a researcher of T. S. Eliot has an impulse of finding out a whole and inclusive code which can cover most of the themes in his work. My argument is that we can find an effective critical Ariadne of Christian mysticism to provide a narrative thread to unite and reconcile various contradictory themes like conflict and unification. This thesis intends to reveal that T. S. Eliot’s criticism has much in a common with many kinds of mystic thoughts. Many mystic scholars define the various aspects of mysticism; immanence and transcendence, and introvertive mysticism and extrovertive mysticism. F. C. Happold, Evelyn Underhi11, and Colin Wilson are the influential mystical scholars whose concepts of unification and transcendental experience are found in their works. Among the critics who approach Eliot’s works from the perspective of Christian mysticism are Karl Shapiro, Robert Sencourt, Lyndall Gordon, Kristian Smidt and F. M. Ishak. Their comments provide effective supplement to the thought of medieval Christians represented by Pseudo-Dionysius and John of the Cross. The core concepts of Eliot’s criticism can be found in Eliot’s critical discourse about his predecessors, written from the perspective of Christian mysticism. As Eliot says, surrendering oneself to the work to be done is the best way to reaching depersonalization. We can say that the course of depersonalization is similar to the course of the union to God in that each of them has the extinction of emotions and selves. And so it will be said that the objective correlative is to the art what the union with God is to the religious self. The sexual experience of Dante is said to be not a simple experience but a mature reflection related to the attraction towards God. This shows that a common and simple everyday experience can be a divine and reverential experience in the mystical point of view. Seen from the point of view of Eliot, the terrible experience like the despair and disil1usion of Baudelaire can also be the prelude and joy of faith. Eliot said that Tennyson also had the aspect of Christian mysticism in that he was desperately anxious to hold the faith of the believer. According to Eliot's view, Tennyson’s despair and doubt can be said to be an intense experience and a penultimate stage of ‘dark night of soul'. In conclusion, various critical and philosophical concepts of Eliot such as impersonal theory, unified sensibility, tradition, objective correlative, and the Absolute can be unified ín the scheme of Christian mystícism. By followíng various critical essays about poets, Eliot can be said to manifest his attitude and belief towards Christian mysticism.

T. S. Eliot was immediately accepted as one of the qualified philosophers in the letter of June 23, 1916 by Prof. J. H. W oods in the Department of Philosophy, Harvard University immediately after the completion of Eliot’s doctoral dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy 01 F. H. Bradley in April, 1916. Eliot, however, did not go back to U.S.A., which was clearly understood by Eliot himself as the critical decision to give up the bright future as a prominent scholar and to face severe financial difficulties because of the expected problems of the relationships with his own parents in U.S.A. The literary turn of Eliot’s main attention from philosophy is explained in this essay through the examination of Eliot’s doctoral dissertation itself. 1 think Eliot could not accept Bradley’s absolute idealism fully, even though he could not reject it completely. Eliot is not a relativist to give up the whole Bradley’s absolute idealism, i.e. metaphysics, but a relative idealist not to reject blatantly nor to accept, without any condition, the probabi1ity of transcendental experience, i.e. the presence of the Absolute in this world. His dilemma in the study of Bradley’s idealism, the most important philosophy at that time as Eliot thought, led him to the poetry. As Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction is a little different from Postmodernism especially in the view that it did not deny completely the present necessity of metaphysics or the Project of Englitenment, Eliot’s philosophical position is quite similar to that of deconstruction. Eliot’s poetry and literary criticism, which have been regarded as one of the representative cases of Modernism, is discussed in this essay in terms of deconstruction, one of the major literaη criticisms of Postmodernism. 1 think Eliot has to use the ironic language or logic in his literary work, for he has to use the language or logic of Modernism for his already achieved postmodern thought against his manifested intention.

This study wi1l examine the Eliot‘s reaction to the American Puritanism. One of the remarkable characteristics of American Puritan society was that it kept its balance between two contradictory doctrines. While the American Puritans had the Calvinistic notion of original sin, they emphasized their self-confidence and pride as the chosen people and believed that they had been already saved as New Israelites of the City of God. As a result, they paradoxical1y came to dilute the doctrine of original sin. It is the American Puritan jeremiad that reveals this paradox and has worked through American rhetoric as the ideology accelerating Americanization up to the present. Though it was a kind of reprimand and lamentation, the jeremiad was at the same time the rhetoric that directed an imperiled people of God to fulfill their destiny and guided them individually toward salvation and collectively toward the American City of God. This study examines Eliot’s reaction against such an optimistic progressive rhetoric. In a sense, E1iot as a Christian poet should be fundamentaIIy optimistic. Therefore it might be said that he is opposed not to optimism or progress itself, but to shallow such optimism and blind belief in progress without understanding of human life as Eliot thinks is Emerson’s Transcendentalism. And it is the transition from American Puritanism to Transcendentalism that Eliot pays attentlOn to. In the course of his reaction to American Puritanism inc1uding Unitarianism and Transcendentalism as a sequence of American Puritanism, Eliot in turn criticizes humanism for the be1ief in the goodness of human nature and the ignorance of original sin, which drives the modem world to what he regards as wrong, i. e., Romanticism, Democracy, and Protestantism. Therefore what concems Eliot the most about the modem world is the disappearance of the sense of sin, which, he argues, is another product of the American Puritan optimism.

T. S. Eliot owed the Unitarian belief of his family for his early interest in the Orient. He was introduced to Indian religion and philosophy by George Santayana and Irving Babbitt in his undergraduate years at Harvard, which led to his serious studies of lndian religion and philosophy in his graduate years under Char1es Rockwell Lanman and James Woods. My concern here, however, is why be could not accept lndian religion and philosophy. lt is apparent that Eliot's interest in Indian religion and philosophy remained much later after completion of his graduate studies. N aturally enough, Indian religious and philosophical speculations are echoed in his various poems, particularly in The Waste Land and Four Quartets. While he worked as editor of The Criterion from 1922 to 1936, he allowed space for the forum of debate on the culture of the East and the West. By this time his early view of Indian religion and philosophy had been very much discolored, reveaIing that his position was quite similar to Henri Massis’s negative attitude towards the Oriental philosophy, which is representative of the c1assicist’s view of Action Française based on the concept of sin. Because of "a Catholic cast of mind, a Catholic heritage, and a Puritan temperament," Eliot’s interest in Indian religion and philosophy, which does not allow the concept of Original Sin, could not be permanent. The three points, among others, count for the reasons for his having not fully involved in Indian religion and philosophy. One is that he left his studies of Indian religion and philosophy half done and completed his doctoral dissertation on the Westem mystical philosophy of F. H. Bradley. Another is that he became an Anglo-Catholic in 1927, whose belief is based on the concept of Original Sin. The third is that he chose to become a man of letter rather than a philosopher by profession and declared on several occasions that he could not become a Buddhist. Eliot’s belief in Original Sin prevented him from being fully involved in Indian religion and philosophy for the emotional or practical reasons. He was simply responsive to it intellectually. His East was always next to the West and was partly appropriated to support his own poetic ideas, which shows a phase of the general Westem prejudice against the East.

T. S. 엘리엇의 후기 작품들은 그의 기독교적 세계관， 구원적 시간(역사) 관， 상정시학의 깊은 연관성을 보여주고 있다. 초기의 허무주의적 세계관을 극복한 엘리엇윤 파편화된 현대적 삶은 절대자에 대한 믿음을 복원함으로 써만 치유될 수 있다고 생각한다. 구원적 세계관에 부합하는 시적 언어로 서 엘리엇은 조화， 유기성， 통일성을 담지하고 있는 상정을 중요시 한다. 엘리엇의 상정시학은 감정과 지성， 주관과 객관， 표현과 내용의 통일을 강 조하는 그의 통합된 감수성， 객관적 상관물 이론 둥에 부분적으로 나타나 고 있으며， 또한 단테에서 보들레르에 이르는 형이상학적시 전통을 재해석 하는 1926년 클라크 강연에서 구체화되고 있다. 시간의 측면에서 엘리엇의 상징시학은 순간과 영원의 교차를 중시하며 이 주제는 그의 후기 장시인 「네 사중주』 에서 기존의 직선적 혹은 순환적 시간관에 대한 대안으로서 제시되고 있다. 이 시에서 엘리엇은 현대성의 지배적 역사관인 진보의 서 사와 그 자신의 초기 허무주의 역사관을 지양하고， 동 시대의 영국을 순간 과 영원이 교차하는 시/공간으로 다시 읽음으로써 그의 후기 상징시학과 구원적 역사관의 통합을 보여주고 있다.