Forward to the Past: John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress

Put on your comfortable shoes and grab your walking stick because today we're embarking on the most famous allegory in the English language: John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress from 1678.  We'll cross plains, endure temptations, descend valleys, fight monsters, and ford rivers in our quest for the Celestial City!  Along the way, we'll talk about how this most Puritanical of texts is, ironically, deeply indebted to the ideas of the preceding religions it rejects.  Last one there's a rotten egg!

An apology: please do forgive the plosives on this episode.  Reckon I got too near the microphone's pop filter.  I shall work on my technique in future.

Link to The Pilgrim's Progress:

 https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/bunyan/The%20Pilgrim's%20Progress%20-%20John%20Bunyan.pdf

Transcript

Hey there, cats and kittens, you’ve curled up to the Classic English Literature Podcast, as sweet and nourishing as a saucer of fresh cream.  Thanks for lapping it up.  We’re still milling about here in Restoration England, the merry monarch Charles II – The Return of the Son – sits perched upon his throne with a wig to make Brian May weep with envy – and all is right with the world. Isn’t it?  Isn’t it?

Well, no, clearly it isn’t, since I’m asking the question.  One only interrogates happiness when one feels it to be inauthentic.  Oscar Wilde . . . would have said that much more pithily.  No, though the turmoil of the previous decades has largely subsided and the lemon-sucking Puritans had been given their cards culturally, still there lurked resentment and fear and suspicion.  “The king’s exuberance and indulgence will lead this country down the path of destruction,” said all those who did not receive invitations to the most fashionable parties.  John Bunyan, a Roundhead veteran and tinker from Bedford, who found God after his marriage (he had evidently misplaced God in the garrison towns during his service, during which, by his own admission, his life was a raucous round of sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, speed, weed, and birth control) took to the preaching trade and, like many reformed fun people, began inveighing against the pleasures he had so wickedly indulged.  We’ll take a look at his most famous work, called The Pilgrim’s Progress, in today’s show.  First published in 1678, it is sometimes a candidate for the first novel in English, and takes the form of an allegory.  The story follows the progress of a pilgrim, cunningly named Christian, as he journeys toward the Celestial City. I should confess that I had not actually read it until preparing for this episode, mostly because I had a prejudice about what I was sure would be a Puritanical screed.  Turns out I was right.

Well, mostly.  It really is Puritan down to its socks, but despite its cocksure and rather inflexible theology, the book has rather an ambiguous and ambivalent relationship with its own form and genre.  There’s some disagreement about when exactly Bunyan began composing his masterwork, but all agree it was during one his frequent stays in prison.  You see, Bunyan was no ordinary Puritan, who grumbled a bit at the way things were with these Anglicans, but mostly got on with it.  Oh no, Bunyan was a red-blooded, red-pilled nonconformist – would not abide any accommodation with the high church.  He spent the first twelve years of Charles II’s monarchy in one his majesty’s penal institutions because he wouldn’t give up preaching (during this stretch in chokey, Bunyan wrote his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.  Interesting, isn’t it, how these professionally humble God-botherers just love to wallow pridefully in their own disgusting pasts?).  Four years later, he did another six months for not learning his lesson, and it’s probably during this little sabbatical that The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come came to its completion.  The book became a real smash; by some reckonings, the most read book in English apart from the Bible itself.  Its separatist attitude made it particularly popular among the English colonists in New England.  It’s a quirk of history that this once most radical and seditious of stories later became a staple of children’s literature, particularly in America.  Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn both testify to its ubiquity in the lives of children.  Huck gives it a rather flippant review, saying of the books he discovers in the Grangerford home: “One was Pilgrim’s Progress, about a man that left his family; it didn't say why.”  

Oh, Huck, it does so.  But I take your point, and we’ll talk about it later.  But right now, let’s see if we can improve on ol’ Huckleberry’s quick and dirty.

The narrator begins by telling us of his wandering through the world’s wilderness, and how, weary, he lays down to sleep, and dreams a dream.  Not the hazy, disjointed kind, but the sort that feels like it’s trying to tell you something—a man named Christian wakes up with a problem. He lives in a place called the City of Destruction, and he’s been reading a strange book, which has convinced him that judgment is coming—for him, for his family, for everyone around him. The truth of it hits him so hard that it becomes a literal burden on his back. He can’t shake it, can’t get comfortable, and worse—no one else seems to care.  Womp womp.  

He’s got to get out of here, to save himself from the coming destruction.  His wife and kids think he’s lost it. Why leave home, comfort, routine, for some unknown city called Celestial and an invisible King? Then comes a guy named Evangelist, who offers direction. There’s a narrow wicket gate ahead, he says—a small, hard-to-spot way that leads to life. Other paths might look easier, even friendlier, but they’ll only take you so far before they drop you off a cliff. The true way is narrow, and it’s hard. But it’s the only one that leads to the Celestial City.

With that, Christian runs. He doesn’t walk, he runs—burden and all—straight toward the wicket gate. People shout after him, mock him. A couple try to join him but give up almost immediately when things get rough.  He nearly gets stuck in the swampy Slough of Despond, weighed down by his burden, his depression and desperation, but he’s given help by a helpful fella named Help.

Reaching the gate, he’s told to visit someone called the Interpreter. Inside the Interpreter’s house, Christian is shown strange and symbolic sights—lessons in patience, warnings about legalism, visions of what it takes to stay faithful. It’s not a pep talk. It’s a reckoning.

Then comes the moment everything changes: a hill, a cross, and a tomb. Christian reaches the Cross, and the burden that’s crushed him for so long? It breaks loose. Rolls down the hill. Disappears into the tomb. He’s finally free. Angels meet him there with robes of righteousness and a scroll—his passport to the Celestial City.

But the road doesn’t get easier. He passes other travelers asleep by the side of the road or trying to skip the hard parts. He climbs the Hill of Difficulty, gets rest and teaching at a place called House Beautiful, and hears about a pilgrim ahead of him named Faithful.

In the Valley of Humiliation, he’s attacked by a monstrous being called Apollyon. The two fight brutally, and Christian nearly dies—but finds his strength in Scripture, and the beast flees. Then comes the Valley of the Shadow of Death, full of dread, false doctrine, and the bones of pilgrims who didn’t make it. Christian pushes through and finally catches up with Faithful.

Together they reach a place called Vanity, where a never-ending fair sells every distraction the world can offer. The pilgrims refuse to buy. The town doesn’t take it well. Faithful is arrested, tortured, and martyred. Christian is spared, but not without scars. A young man named Hopeful, inspired by Faithful’s witness, joins Christian, and the two keep walking—side by side, asking questions, encouraging one another.

Eventually, even they lose their way. A pleasant-looking meadow tempts them off the path. It ends badly. They’re captured by the Giant Despair and imprisoned in Doubting Castle, where they’re beaten and starved. All seems lost—until Christian remembers the key he’s carried all along: a key called Promise. With it, they escape.

The rest of the road is long, hard, and full of encounters with pilgrims of every sort—some sincere, some self-deceived. But at last, they reach the river. No bridge. Just the water between them and the Celestial City. Christian crosses, and on the far bank, he’s greeted with trumpets and light and joy.

So, subtle The Pilgrim’s Progress is not.  We call it an allegory, which is an extended narrative metaphor, but some readers argue that there’s not much metaphor here – things are pretty in your face.  You know, Hopeful doesn’t stand for Hope – he is Hope.  The Giant Despair is Despair.  This can make for pretty tedious reading, I fully admit, especially if you’ve even any inkling of what the Christian story of salvation is.  Not a lot of plot twists here.

This bluntness, though popular with the lower and middling sorts, earned its author unfavorable comparisons to his fellow Puritan scribbler, John Milton, by the literati.  I believe someone actually rendered Bunyan’s work in some faux-Miltonic verse – can’t imagine that’s much of a page-turner, either.  But, to be fair to Bunyan, let’s consider what he felt his mission to be and look at his work in light of that purpose.

It seems obvious that Bunyan saw his book as part of the great tradition of devotional literature, and by the late 17th century – despite a rise in literacy – reading was still a class-bound activity.  His proselytizing proclivities aimed him toward a broader audience, one for whom Milton’s  tortured syntax and classical allusion proved an impediment to their spiritual understanding.  So Bunyan writes in prose, not verse – a more natural and unaffected style.  And even this is in a fairly low register.  Some of you may remember an episode last November when I talked about the Puritan plain style, a rhetorical mode characterized by simple, straightforward language and clear organization,  in order to convey a message directly. It avoids elaborate rhetoric, complex sentence structures, and overly figurative language, aiming to make the text accessible to the groundlings.  This is why Bunyan’s writing can seem so crude when put against the more elevated writers of his day.  

In fact, to add to this sense of ground-level accessibility and reality, many scholars have noted that the allegorical geography of Christian’s journey bears striking real-life analogues to Bunyan’s native Bedfordshire.  Almost two dozen locations in the book have been identified with actual counterparts: obviously, the plain across which Christian runs is Bedford Plain; the Slough of Despond, where he encounters his first depressing setback, seems to be a clay pit used by nearby brick works; the Valley of the Shadow of Death has been linked to Millbrook Gorge, and so on and so on.  I point this out merely to emphasize how concrete and available Bunyan wanted his allegory to be.  The unadorned language, the reality of the setting, not to mention the heavy autobiographical influences of service in the Civil War and imprisonment, make for a story of a dream that is nonetheless physical.

But despite such a clearness of purpose on the one hand, I’m intrigued by the more mixed inflections one finds in the text.  We’re clear that this is a Puritan text, with rather radical nonconformist and Calvinistic streaks.  Bunyan’s theology is transparently predestinarian; that is, he fully endorses the idea of predestination as propounded by the 16th century French theologian John Calvin, who argued that from the beginning of time, God had elected who shall be granted salvation and who will be condemned, and this independent of any action on the individual’s part.  One cannot earn one’s way to heaven – the burden on our backs cannot be shaken loose by our own efforts.  That certainly explains some of those deus ex machina moments in The Pilgrim’s Progress, such as when Christian remembers he had the key all along.

Fine, rather standard Puritan stuff so far.  In addition, though, Bunyan seems to present a rather extreme ecclesiology, which means theories about the nature and structure of a church.  Many Puritans were separatists, that is true – some even left England to come to North America to establish communities along their own ecclesiastical notions.  Literal separation.  But it seems to me that Bunyan here proposes an ecclesiology of one, a church of the individual.  There is no congregation, no strength in numbers.  The salvation drama is a one-man show.  Consider how Bunyan uses the dream-vision trope – it’s an individual’s direct access to salvation.  It’s not mediated by a church hierarchy or scholastic theology or even communal understanding.  The spirit speaks to the individual alone.

For instance, it seems to me that, unlike that other well-known Christian allegory, the late medieval play Everyman, Bunyan’s protagonist does not stand in for all of humanity.  Christian is an individual, distinctly a human, not humanity.  The narrator describes things peculiar to a single man: his wife, his children, how he sleeps, and so on.  Perhaps common enough attributes, but somehow they bespeak a particular person and not an archetype.  I use the term in a colloquial sense.  Also, the narrator takes a third-person omniscient point of view, so we are privy to Christian’s inner thoughts.  We get information about his moods, fears, and anxieties that seem to indicate an individual’s experience.  We know that Christian is “greatly distressed in his mind” and “yet he stood still because. . . he could not tell which way to go.”

Furthermore, as Huck Finn pointed out, Christian’s crisis leads him to abandon his family.  He speaks with a man named Evangelist, who directs him on the path to travel to avoid utter destruction:

So I saw in my dream that the man began to run. Now he had not run far from his own door when his wife and children, perceiving it, began to cry after him to return; but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on crying, Life! life! eternal life!

Hardly seems the act of a communally-minded churchgoer.  No soft Good Samaritan twaddle here – every soul for itself.  It’s a radically nonconformist view of salvation, one that really reduces the implications of Martin Luther’s sola fide doctrine down to its very essence – the demi glace of soteriology.  There are, of course, Biblical warrants for this interpretation, but it still can strike one as ruthlessly selfish.

I should note, in all fairness, that there is a less famous part two to The Pilgrim’s Progress in which Christian’s wife and kids repent of letting him fly off on his own and embark on their own pilgrimage to the Celestial City.  Happy ending.

Anyway, I had also been curious about all the people Christian meets with along the way, especially the good ones.  Why are they hanging out along the pilgrim road instead of hightailing it to the Celestial City?  Why isn’t Evangelist there?  Or the ladies of the Palace Beautiful?  Or Help, who pulls Christian from the Slough of Despond?  I wondered if they were like Christian bodhisattvas, who forego heaven for a while to help others along the way.  Finally, I decided to suspend my disbelief, reckoning that it was a necessary inconsistency for the narrative to work as a narrative.  Then I figured, well, what if these good characters are not among the Elect, those predestined for salvation?  That was a kind of disturbing thought – that, if so, Bunyan’s theology is so strict that even the virtuous are liable to damnation, through no fault of their own, that his God is indifferent and capricious.  In fact, the book seems to indicate that only good people suffer.  When Christian panics in the river before the Celestial City, Hopeful calms him by quoting the Psalms:

Then said Hopeful, My brother, you have quite forgot the text where it is said of the wicked, “There are no bands in their death, but their strength is firm; they are not troubled as other men, neither are they plagued like other men.”

So God only torments the good?  I am struck by the fact that Christian’s two major travelling companions are Faithful and Hopeful, the first is martyred in Vanity Fair and the second enters the Celestial City after fording the river.   But as I said a second ago, Faith seems to bring much misery and uncertainty.  Think of the Man in the Iron Cage and his despair Christian meets back in Interpreter’s house.

The travelling companions are obviously representations of two of the cardinal virtues, Faith and Hope.  Conspicuous by its general absence in this Christian allegory is Charity, the third and most important virtue according to St. Paul.  She does appear as one of the maidens at the castle, but mostly to chastise Christian for leaving his family – she doesn’t accompany him as do Faith and Hope. Isn’t that curious?  Love, caritas, does not feature here.  Does Bunyan envision a deity who is not loving?  

I can hardly believe that, or maybe I just don’t want to.  Maybe Bunyan has backed himself into a rhetorical corner by so stridently arguing a “by faith, not works” theory of salvation.   One can’t help but notice the virulent anti-Catholicism of The Pilgrim’s Progress – the position of the Roman Catholic Church is, of course, that it is through both faith and good works that one ascends to heaven, but Lutheran and Calvinist Protestantism utterly deny the role of works – they see it as an argument that fallen humanity can somehow deserve, or earn, salvation.

Most listeners will be familiar with a strain of anti-Catholic sentiment in much English culture during the early modern period, ever since Henry VIII decided to let his own little sceptre do the ruling.  But Bunyan the Puritan is writing against the backdrop of an anti-Catholic that will result in the deaths of 22 men and forever forbid a Catholic from ascending the English throne.

In the autumn of 1678, England found itself gripped by a tale of Catholic conspirators, Jesuit assassins, and a plan to murder King Charles II.  The teller’s name was Titus Oates—a failed Anglican priest with a feverish imagination and a lust for glory.  Oates claimed he had uncovered a vast Catholic conspiracy to overthrow the Protestant monarchy. According to him, Jesuits and foreign agents were plotting to kill the King, massacre Protestants, and install his Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, on the throne. 

Oates didn’t just make accusations—he gave names, dates, secret meetings in shadowy rooms. He knew just enough Latin, just enough theology, and just enough about Catholic politics to make his story sound plausible. He presented his findings to the Privy Council, and Parliament soiled its collective breeches.  Catholic priests were arrested. Some were executed. Others vanished into prisons. Even innocent men were caught in the crossfire of public hysteria. 

But unlike the Ridolfi, Babington, and Gunpowder plots of the good old days, when conspirators really conspired, the Popish Plot was complete bovine biosolids. But that didn’t stop it from becoming real in the minds of the people. It shaped laws, ruined lives, and deepened the rift between Catholics and Protestants for a generation. It was, in many ways, England’s first true conspiracy theory—complete with political manipulation, false witnesses, and a public hungry for scandal.

In such a febrile cultural climate, any dormant loathing for Catholics is bound to wake up, and it is not awoken gently.  After Christian passes through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, he meets the giants Pagan and Pope:

I espied a little before me a cave, where two giants, Pope and Pagan, dwelt in old time, by who Power and Tyranny the Men whose bones, blood, ashes, etc. lay there, were cruelly put to death…Pagan has been dead many a day, and [Pope], though he yet be alive, he is by reason of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, now so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can now do little more than sit in his Cave’s mouth…

Paganism is dead, though the corpse still hangs around to keep crazy Pope company.  The Catholic Church still exists, but is addled and sclerotic.

At the fair in Vanity, Bunyan recounts for us all the wonderful wares each nation has on offer to sell:

houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures; and delights of all sorts, as harlots, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.

And moreover, at this fair there is at all times to be seen jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind.  Here are to be seen, too, and that for nothing, thefts, murders, adulteries, false-swearers, and that of a blood-red color.

Of course, we are to be repulsed at such luxury and greed.  But he points out that Rome’s offerings are the most vile and wretched: “But as in other fairs, some one Commodity is as the chief of all the Fair, to the Ware of Rome and her Merchandise is greatly promoted in this Fair: only our English Nation, with some others, have taken a dislike thereat.”  Bully for us!

The character Formalist, whom Christian meets at the Hill of Difficulty, embodies a recurrent accusation of Catholic perversion: its crypto-pagan rituals.  The charge of formalism meant that Catholics were too slavishly devoted to the forms of their religion – its rote prayers and prescribed rituals and sacraments.  Protestants saw it as only a performative kind of religion, an act, without deep commitment to faith. A Pharisaic kind of hypocrisy is implied here.  When Christian meets him, Formalist says that he is heading “for praise to Mount Zion.”  Devilish bit of ambiguity in that phrase.  It could mean that he expects to do a bit of praising when he reaches his destination, but the strict grammar of the sentence indicates that Formalist intends to be praised at Mount Zion, which is really the Celestial City.  Then, Christian accuses Formalist of taking a short-cut to the City, rather than going the way he had been originally directed:

Why came you not in at the gate which standeth at the beginning of the way? Know ye not that it is written, that “he that cometh not in by the door, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber?”

When Formalist attempts to vindicate himself by saying, essentially, I follow the rules, Christian retorts: “By laws and ordinances you will not be saved, since you came not in by the door.”  Here, Bunyan renders Catholicism as not only moribund, but actively hypocritical and deceptive.  Its ways are the way to damnation.

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So, Bunyan wallows in some good old Catholic-baiting.  Fair enough.  Despite his England having “taken a dislike” to Popery, he’s still not happy with its light beer version: Anglicanism.  He sees the Church of England as much too accommodating to Roman forms and style.  The characters Talkative and Ignorance bear this charge out.

But despite its stern, almost hyper-individualistic, Calvinism, The Pilgrim’s Progress does not fully extricate itself from the Slough of the Old Religion.  Bunyan still operates on a very deep Catholic operating system.  The most obvious evidence here is the form of the book itself.  It’s an allegory, and that form explicitly codes Roman Catholic.  Additionally, it’s an allegory of pilgrimage, a metaphor for the believer’s life on earth that dominated the Catholic imagination going back at least to St. Augustine of Hippo in the early 5th century.  In his weighty tome The City of God, Augustine writes: 

It is recorded of Cain that he built a city, while Abel, as though he were merely a pilgrim on earth, built none.  For the true City of the saints is in heaven, though here on earth it produces citizens in whom it wanders as on a pilgrimage through time looking for the Kingdom of eternity.

You don’t get more Catholic than St. Gus – you might even argue that he invented Catholicism as it came to dominate the Western world for at least the next millennium and change.

So, let’s look at The Pilgrim’s Progress’s first line: “As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a dream.”  Any reasonably well-read listener immediately recalls Dante’s famous opening to The Divine Comedy, his vision of the afterlife written in the early 1300s:

Midway upon the journey of our life

  I found myself within a forest dark,

  For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

So influential is Dante’s version of our posthumous existence that many of its descriptions have become our culture’s de facto beliefs about the afterlife.  It is as Catholic as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and fish on Friday.  And Bunyan basically cribs its first line!

Of course, we’ve discussed several allegories on the poddie, like The Vision of Piers Plowman from about the 1380s.  You know, while we’re right here, let’s look at some early lines in William Langland’s poem:

I was weary with wandering · and went me to rest

Under a broad bank · by a brook's side,

And as I lay and leaned over · and looked into the waters

I fell into a sleep · for it sounded so merry.

Then began I to dream · a marvellous dream,

That I was in a wilderness.

Huh!  Would you look at that!  Fellow wandering about, falls asleep, has a dream, wilderness.  OK, yes, to be fair, Piers Plowman is heavily influenced by that reformist group called the Lollards, whose critiques of the Catholic Church would find there way into the Protestant Reformation, but my point is that Bunyan is actively, consciously working within a tradition that is deeply imbricated with Catholicism, its tropes and its assumptions.

So, The Pilgrim’s Progress is an odd sort of book.  It positions itself as an assertion of a radical nonconformist theology.  It argues that salvation is determined by a faith in one’s predestination, and that “the law” as put forth by Judaism and “works” as proposed by Catholicism – both conceptions that allow for human choice and agency – are irrelevant at least, damnable at worst.  Note how we are to scorn the counsel of characters like Worldly Wiseman, and Legality, and Morality.  If we read through Bunyan’s disapproval, we can see these characters as arguing the points and doctrines of the religions Bunyan believes Puritanism to have superseded.  Indeed, he seems to take a rather literalist view of St. Paul in the Book of Romans, in which the apostle can be read as saying that the law – in fallen humanity – can foster sin: “For without the law sin was dead. For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.”  I think perhaps the Tentmaker from Tarsus is being rather nuanced and subtle, but Bunyan – as we have seen – has no time for such intellectual dalliances.  

And yet for all its separationist, year zero posturing, The Pilgrim’s Progress is only accessible, is only understandable, within the context of the literary traditions deployed and perfected by the old religions.

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That’s all for today, gang.  Hope you had a swell time.  Remember, this is a listener supported endeavor, so please consider making a modest financial contribution – you can hit the support the show button or click on “Buy Me a Coffee” to make a one time gift.  Please leave a groovy review on your platform so other folks can hear about all the fun we have.  Take care of yourselves, and I’ll talk to you in a couple of weeks.