Hamlet in Purgatory Quotes

“Allusions to “hidden counsels” and “mysterious reasons” are almost always the mark of doctrinal incoherence.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory

“It may at first seem difficult to understand why so many people would willingly abandon their innate freedoms, but in fact the process is quite simple. A tiny group chooses, for strategic purposes, to declare allegiance to a single person. The qualities of that person—who may, for all anyone knows, be a dolt or a scoundrel—are not particularly relevant; what matters is his (or her) symbolic position at the apex of the system. Nor does it greatly matter if the members of the inner circle have any serious regard for the person to whom they declare their allegiance; what matters is that their immediate dependents feel similarly bound to them and, through them, bound to the person at the pinnacle. Each of those dependents in turn has his dependents, and before long tens of thousands of people are locked into a system that is exploiting rather than protecting or serving them.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory

“Of course, their religion had had long experience in doing this: Heaven and Hell are overwhelmingly impressive predecessors and models, next to which the middle space of souls is a relatively minor, belated innovation. But the very belatedness enables us to view close-up what the antiquity of Heaven and Hell largely obscures: the process by which philosophical abstractions, institutional ambitions, and inchoate fears acquire a local habitation and a name.

This process turns out to rely heavily on literature”
― Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory