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"Purgatory in literature."
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Hamlet in purgatory
This book delves into the author's longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet. In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities abruptly changed the relationship between the living and dead. Declaring that Purgatory was a false poem, they abolished the institutions and banned the practices that Christians relied on to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Greenblatt explores the fantastic adventure narratives, ghost stories, pilgrimages, and imagery by which a belief in a grisly prison house of souls had been shaped and reinforced in the Middle Ages. He probes the psychological benefits as well as the high costs of this belief and of its demolition.
Book
Timeless Moments
What happens to us after death is one of the oldest and most difficult questions. Even the standard response of many Christians, that we go to either Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, can only partly satisfy, because while we experience the passing of time in a linear manner, those places are said to exist completely outside of time. How, then, can it make sense to speak of “going” to Heaven or Hell after death? Must we not always and forever be there—even during our lifetimes? Russell Kirk, a Catholic historian from Michigan who often speculated about the afterlife in his fiction and non-fiction, developed the idea of “timeless moments” to explain how our mortal lives could be placed within the context of an immortal afterlife. Such moments represent a fusion of the human and divine, in which past, present, and future come together. Timeless moments both help to determine whether we end up in Heaven or Hell and constitute our experience of those places. This paper applies Kirk’s framework to the depictions of Purgatory and Hell in certain novels by Charles Williams and Stephen King. All three authors characterize the afterlife as a state of mind that is nevertheless closely associated with specific physical locations where the living and dead work out their salvation or suffer damnation at one and the same time. The timeless nature of Hell, finally, ensures that it is never too late to try to escape from it and seek redemption.
Journal Article
Into the void: 'Stop the boats' and refugee activism on screen
Through harrowing firsthand accounts by personnel, advocates and even detainees themselves, this revelatory documentary condemns Australia's continued mistreatment of the refugees and asylum seekers held in processing purgatory on Nauru and Manus Island. But, while the film succeeds in shedding light on current ills, it perhaps falls short of reaching an audience that needs convincing.
Magazine Article
The Catholicism of literature in the age of the Book of Common Prayer
Offering a complete reading of English Literature throughout 1558-1689, this book demonstrates the continuity of Roman Catholicism in English Literature from the accession of Elizabeth I to the deposing of James II. Rist shows that poetry and plays promoted Roman Catholic ideas in a Biblicist age which established the Church of England through the Book of Common Prayer. From the very idea of literary works to chapters on the Eucharist, Purgatory, Christian worship and the Virgin Mary, Rist joins together major and minor authors of the era to present English Literature afresh. Important literary figures include William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Queen Henrietta Maria, John Donne, John Dryden, Robert Herrick, Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn.
eBook
The Struggle to Define Pilgrimage
This essay arises from research carried out between the summer of 2018 and the spring of 2020 among pilgrims who had participated in the Camino de Santiago in north-western Spain and St Patrick’s Purgatory, on Lough Derg in the northwest of Ireland. Research focused on embodied experience in relation to pilgrim motivation, groundedness and the enduring power of sacred travel as ritual. Convergent considerations about psychology, theology and pilgrimage studies clarified perspective on descriptions and definitions of pilgrimage in contemporary literature. Long-standing questions about journey vs. destination are subsumed into a description of pilgrimage which emphasizes larger process. Interconnected elements of this process are a most significant part of the enduring appeal of contemporary Western pilgrimage.
Journal Article
'Guests of the nation'? The Southern Irish Protestant Identity through the Lens of Literature
The term \"Southern Irish Protestant\" encompasses a three-dimensional notion of geography, national consciousness—and religion. Southern Protestants were often reviled as having \"an alien creed, an alien culture and alien aspirations.\" While only 7 percent of the population of the Irish Free State at independence in 1922, they were economically prominent and educationally privileged. As such, this elite generated an extensive literature of memoir, novels, autobiography, plays, and poetry out of proportion to their numbers. This essay explores the Southern Irish Protestant experience and identity in this new, but still old, Ireland through literary representation, hearing hostile voices as well as empathetic ones.
Journal Article
Fire, Beards, and Bread: Exploring Christian East–West Relations à Propos of Edward Siecienski’s (Latest) Work
The debate on Christian East–West relations usually centres on the “usual suspects”: papal primacy, the filioque and core doctrine in general, the interpretation of Scripture, ecclesiology, and so on. This review article of Edward Siecienski’s Beards, Azymes, and Purgatory explores other issues that divide East and West, particularly those that may be approached via material ecologies: Fire, Beards, and Bread. “Bread” as in the debate on the Azymes, following Siecienski’s 2023 book; “Beards” as in the beardfullness or beardlessness of clerics; and “Fire” as in ignis purgatorius, yet at an even wider scale, the very fire of Gehenna: the question of the hereafter and the location of the dividing line between doctrine and theologoumena. Thus, a wider spectrum of the debate emerges, with which the present review article aspires to familiarize its readers.
Journal Article
Acting and Being Acted Upon
Though usually construed in terms of defective or recalcitrant agency (not doing what should be done), Hamlet’s delay can be freshly illumined by considering it in terms of patiency: the liability to be affected in various ways. Like the Ghost, Hamlet’s patiency involves a process of purgation—not of sin, as with the Ghost, but of a way of thinking. The purgative process is challenged by the penetrative violence of a countervailing process—the speech of others, whose words, entering the ears of auditors like the poison poured into the ear of the sleeping King, profoundly influence and disrupt their thoughts. The purgation of Hamlet involves a multistage development whereby new cognitive characteristics displace or coexist alongside old ones, in one of the most subtle, elusive, and consequential mental evolutions depicted in drama. Highlights of this essay’s explication include (a) the motif of the secondary ghost, (b) the striking interrelationships between the scene in Ophelia’s closet and the narrated scene aboard the ship bound for England, (c) the removal of the arras that the revenge morality hangs between act and consequence, and (d) the recasting of the notion of agency such that inaction, not action, facilitates the achievement of the agent’s ends.
Journal Article
Poetics of Purgation in Seamus Heaney's \Station Island\ Sequence
Ten years before Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize, he imagined the third place in his sixth published collection of poems, Station Island (1984). He named the collection, along with its central poetic sequence, \"Station Island,\" for the sanctuary set in the middle of Lough Derg, a penitential site in Ireland dedicated to Saint Patrick that has been a destination for countless pilgrimages since purgatory was declared an eschatological otherworld in the late twelfth century. The \"Station Island\" sequence at the core of Heaney's volume is bound up in politics and biography, and at several moments Heaney presents a view of history as dark and empty. Heaney's sequence announces its debts to and uneasy affections for a long literary and religious tradition, taking as its setting a place of intersection between this world and the next, where the living might meet the dead. \"Station Island\" records Heaney's experience of \"doing the station,\" a three-day penitential pilgrimage to the shrine at Lough Derg. At once confessional, biographical, and meditative, the sequence is deployed almost entirely in dialogue with imagined ghosts. Here, Sawyer argues that through a sustained engagement with Heaney's imagined ghosts, \"Station Island\" develops a poetic ideal which recognizes and incorporates the ethical accusations those ghosts level at him.
Journal Article