On religious and philosophical foundation of T. S. Eliot's “Choruses from the rock”

The goal of this paper is to study T. S. Eliot’s “Choruses from The Rock” from the perspective of those religious and philosophical traditions on which this text is based. This Eliot’s text, which has been given little attention both in Russia and abroad, is the object of our research. Eliot effectively unites Western and Eastern spiritual traditions in “Choruses from The Rock"; therefore, this paper belongs to the realm of topical research. The biographical method allows the author to trace the development of Eliot’s philosophical and religious views throughout his life. The historico-typological and comparative methods help to outline common grounds for Eastern and Western religious and philosophical teachings. To detect the elements of these teachings in Eliot’s “Choruses from The Rock”, this text is analyzed in terms of structure and imagery. The evolution of the meaning in the text is defined as a movement from the disjunction of macrocosm and from microcosm to their absolute unity. The author comes to a conclusion that Eliot’s intention in regard to “Choruses.” was to unify Western and Eastern concepts of being, to identify the place of a human in the universe, to approach human creative activity as a kind of spiritual practice, which elevates a human being to the state of oneness with all things in existence.