The pattern of dreaming and deferral and compromise is an altogether familiar one: it is the epitome of a failed life. - Stephen Greenblatt

Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all still in place, so that the bystanders, who crave psychological security and a sense of well-being, can persuade themselves that the rule of law is being upheld.

Shakespeare believed that the tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely extinguished. The best chance for the recovery of collective decency lay, he thought, in the political action of ordinary citizens. He never lost sight of the people who steadfastly remained silent when they were exhorted to shout their support for the tyrant, or the servant who tried to stop his vicious master from torturing a prisoner, or the hungry citizen who demanded economic justice. "What is the city but the people?"

Things change profoundly in the church after Luther. The church becomes much more embattled. It makes some attempts at internal reform. But it also makes very vigorous attempts to silence dissent. With some exceptions — I’m no historian of the Catholic church — but it seems to me that the church has never entirely, as it were, come out from the other side on the Council of Trent. It’s not an accident that the current Pope was the head of the [Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith], the ideological wing of the church [that led the inquisition].