Modern science has given a devastating blow to conventional religion and man’s concept of a purposive universe and his place in it. This resulted in a saddening regression from early-Victorian optimism to a twentieth century despair. Modern man has been threatened by a world created by himself. Burdened with a dogmatic secularism and an opposition to any belief in the transcendental he confronts the question of meaning and tries to rediscover and scrutinise the immutable and the permanent which constitute the dynamic and unifying aspect of life as well as the principle of differentiation. With a sense of desperation T.S. Eliot looked for some principle of organisation and integration in life and art, and found it in religion which is not necessarily theology and its doctrinal forms but the feelings, aspirations and acts of man as they relate to total reality. Eliots’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism and his aggressive religiosity created a lot of controversy among his contemporaries. The author has made an enthusiastic attempt to re-examine and reconsider Eliot’s Christian centrality in his life and his works, and that, too, from a non-Christian and non-doctrinal perspective.
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