Discuss T S Eliot's Murder In The Cathedral as a conflict between the individual and the state.

If you look at Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as
representing the individual, and King Henry II as representing the state, Murder in the
Cathedral may be read as the dramatization of a conflict between the individual and
the state. But Eliot's play, commissioned by the Anglo-Catholic Church for the Canterbury
festival in 1935, was intended to be a play on Christian martyrdom, the Archbishop surrendering
his individual will and self at the altar of Divine Will to welcome the Pre-ordained death of a
martyr, a champion of God.

Eliot's play, divided in two parts with
an intermediate section in which the Archbishop sermonizes on the subject of Cristian martyrdom,
deals with the spiritual self-abnegation of an individual, an individual sacrificing his own will
to embrace the transcendental Will of God. In my view, the political acrimony between an
individual leader and the despotic supremacy of the state has been transcended by Eliot into an
allegory of the cessation of the individual self and the Dantesque sublimation in which the
political is superseded by the spiritual or the Divine.