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The Pilgrim's Progress in the Context of Bunyan's Dialogue with the Radicals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Dayton Haskin
Dayton Haskin
Affiliation:
Boston College
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Extract

My text from The Author's Apology suggests two reasons for the extraordinary popularity that The Pilgrim's Progress enjoyed for more than two centuries. First, despite its adherence to a rather harsh doctrine of double predestination, which divides the world into the saved and the damned, it is essentially a work of reconciliation, demonstrating the fundamental compatibility of ancient paradigms (“Gospelstrains”) and modern experience (“Novelty”). Second, it invites, even necessitates, the active engagement of its readers, who will enlist their knowledge of the Bible to recognize the “sound and honest Gospel-strains” beneath or behind or within what seems a novel. But that Bunyan felt somewhat ambivalent about this achievement is indicated here, I think, by his choice of the word “seems” to characterize the surface of his book. This ambivalence derives from the author's position midway between the hermeneutical procedures of his chief precursor, Martin Luther, and those of the radical Protestants with whom he had come in contact from the time that he experienced his conversion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 77 , Issue 1 , January 1984 , pp. 73 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1984

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References

1 The Pilgrim's Progress (ed. Wharey, James Blanton; revised by Roge Sharrock; Oxford: Clarendon, 1960) 7.Google Scholar Page references are hereafter given in parentheses. I have silently omitted italics when an entire passage (as here) is italicized.

2 See Dutton, A. Richard, “‘Interesting, but tough’: Reading The Pilgrim's Progress,” Studies in English Literature 18 (1978) 439–56.Google Scholar

3 On Bunyan's debts to Lutheran theology, see Greaves, Richard L., John Bunyan (Courtenay Studies in Reformation Theology 2; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969) 24–25, 153–61.Google Scholar

4 See Haskin, Dayton, “Baxter's Quest for Origins: Novelty and Originality in the Autobiography,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 21 (1980) 145–61.Google Scholar

5 See Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972) 320–36.Google Scholar For some nuances on Hill's remarks, cf. Brean S. Hammond, ”The Pilgrim's Progress: Satire and Social Comment,” in Newey, Vincent, ed., The Pilgrim's Progress: Critical and Historical Views (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1980) 118–31.Google Scholar Recently, Bunyan's historical contacts with radicals have been described by Greaves, Richard L. in “John Bunyan and the Fifth Monarchists,” Albion 13 (1981) 83–95.Google Scholar

6 Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 328.

7 I have treated Some Gospel Truths Opened more extensively in “The Light Within: Studies in Baxter, Bunyan, and Milton” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1978) 76–88.Google Scholar The present article freely incorporates some materials from the dissertation.

8 See Hardin, Richard, “Bunyan, Mr. Ignorance, and the Quakers,” Studies in Philology ( = SP) 69 (1972) 496–508.Google Scholar

9 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (ed. Sharrock, Roger; Oxford: Clarendon, 1962) 22.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 10.

11 Ibid., 43.

12 See “Bunyan, Luther, and the Struggle with Belatedness in Grace Abounding” University of Toronto Quarterly 50 (1980–1981) 300–313.Google Scholar

13 My argument does not depend on (though it is not incompatible with) the theory of poetic influence set out by Bloom, Harold, especially in The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).Google Scholar It is perhaps germane to advert, however, to the fact that many of the leading figures in the visionary company that descends from Milton were raised in the tradition of nonconformity and dissent with which Bunyan continued to struggle.

14 See The Saints Paradise (ca. 1648) 84–85. Sabine, in his edition of Winstanley's Works (1941; reprinted New York: Russell & Russell, 1965)Google Scholar, neglected to print this text, presumably because it dates to the period before Winstanley had discovered communism. For a recent study that draws heavily on the work of Hill, see Hayes, T. Wilson, Winstanley the Digger: A Literary Analysis of Radical Ideas in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979).Google Scholar

15 Biblical quotations are from the Authorized Version unless otherwise indicated.

16 “Truth Lifting Up Its Head,” Works, 123.

17 See Coolidge, John S., The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970).Google Scholar Cf. Milton's, introductory epistle to “The Christian Doctrine,” in Complete Prose Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953- ) 6. 118–20.Google Scholar

18 Lux & Lex, or the Law of Jacob's House: Held Forth in a Sermon Before the Honourable House of Commons … March 31, 1647 (1647) 27.

19 “Truth Lifting Up Its Head,” Works, 123–24.

20 “Bunyan, Mr. Ignorance, and the Quakers,” 508.

21 On the hermeneutical procedures that inform Bunyan's book, see Haskin, Dayton, “The Burden of Interpretation in The Pilgrim's Progress,” SP 79 (1982) 256–78.Google Scholar

22 Reliquiae Baxterianae: or, Mr. Richard Baxter's Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times (ed. Matthew Sylvester; 1696) 1. 77–78. For an account of Pordage's self-defense, see A Complete Collection of State-Trials and Proceedings upon High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors (hereafter, State-Trials) (6 vols.; London, 1730) 2. 217–59, esp. 218, 221.

23 For a detailed account, see Braithwaite, W. C., The Beginnings of Quakerism (2d ed.; revised by Cadbury, Henry J.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955) 244–69.Google Scholar

24 At his trial, although he claimed to “abhor that any of that Honour which is due to God should be given to me, as I am a Creature,” Nayler persisted in speaking as if he were Christ: “if any one do know the Father, they shall know what I am … and none can know my Life further than they know the Father” (State-Trials 2. 270, 266).

25 Grace Abounding, 39.

26 Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 78, 186–207. Cf. Braithwaite, Beginnings, 12–27.

27 Fox, George, Journal (revised by Nickalls, John L.; London: Religious Society of Friends, 1975) 35.Google Scholar

28 See Nuttall, Geoffrey F., The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946) 29.Google Scholar

29 Lewalski, Barbara, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) 126.Google Scholar Note chap. 4, “The Biblical Symbolic Mode: Typology and the Religious Lyric.”

30 Ibid., 128.

31 Ibid., 129.

32 See Reiter, Robert E., “On Biblical Typology and the Interpretation of Literature,” College English 30 (1968–1969) 562–71Google Scholar, esp. 563. Among other studies of typology and seventeenth-century literature, see Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed., Typology and Early American Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972)Google Scholar, which contains an annotated bibliography. More recent bibliographical data can be found in the notes for Lowance's, Mason I.The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980) 318.Google ScholarTayler, Edward W. provides a penetrating analysis of typological symbolism in Milton's Poetry: Its Development in Time (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979) 22ff.Google Scholar

33 It is worth remembering that seventeenth-century writers did not have to conform their practice of reading and writing to the maps provided by modern theorists, many of whom have sought to set up sharp distinctions between typological and allegorical modes of symbolism.

34 See Language of Canaan, 4–6, 19–23, and passim. Unfortunately, Lowance does not treat the radicals; his book confines its study to liberal and conservative puritans. More helpful is Paul Korshin's “The Development of Abstracted Typology in England 1650–1820,” in Miner, Earl, ed., Literary Uses of Typology from the Late Middle Ages to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) 147–203.Google Scholar

35 In the posthumously published Solomon's Temple Spiritualized, Bunyan attempts to perform the work of typological exegesis on Old Testament texts. He often confuses typology and allegory, not least when he uses the language of “types” while seeking to extract a timeless spiritual significance. Thus, for example, he explains that the pinnacles of the temple are “types of those lofty, airy notions, with which some men delight themselves.” See The Works of John Bunyan (New Haven: Nathan Whiting, 1830) 1.Google Scholar 31 (actually, the page numbering starts over with 1 at the point where page 433 would appear).

36 The best treatment of the ways in which Bunyan makes use of scriptural passages is Brainerd P. Stranahan's “Bunyan's Special Talent: Biblical Texts as ‘Events’ in Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress,” English Literary Renaissance 11 (1981) 329–43.Google Scholar

37 See Lowance, Language of Canaan, 4.

38 See, e.g., Reeves, Paschal, “The Pilgrim's Progress as a Precursor of the Novel,” Georgia Review 20 (1966) 64–71.Google Scholar

39 See Bunyan's Works (ed. Charles Doe; 1692) 70.

40 See The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) fol, 5Google Scholar

41 Lectures on Genesis, Chapters 6–14, in Luther's Works (gen. ed. Pelikan, Jaroslav and Lehmann, Helmut T.; St Louis: Concordia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955-) 2. 179.Google Scholar

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid., 180.

44 Ibid., 184.

45 Ibid., 185.

46 Ibid., 186.

47 For an especially perceptive treatment of Quaker hermeneutics and writing, see Cope, Jackson I., “Seventeenth-Century Quaker Style,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 71 (1956) 725–54.Google Scholar

48 See my paper, “Bunyan and the Book of Acts,” presented at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, Los Angeles, 27–30 December 1982.

49 In the margin, Bunyan cites Acts 16:31. See also Acts 2:37 and passim.

50 Bunyan's fascination with this passage is attested by the book he published on it in 1658, A Few Sighs from Hell.

51 “Stephen and the Son of Man,” in Schneemelcher, W., ed., Apophoreta: Festschrift fur Ernst Haenchen (BZNW 30; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1964) 35ff.Google Scholar See also Jerome on Joel 2:1–11, PL 25. 965B, ®188.

52 My emphasis here on Acts is meant to complement, not to contradict, the convincing case made out by Stranahan, Brainerd P. in “Bunyan and the Epistle to the Hebrews: His Source for the Idea of Pilgrimage in The Pilgrim's Progress,” SP 79 (1982) 279–96.Google Scholar

53 Introduction, The Pilgrim's Progress (New York: Holt, 1949) vi.Google Scholar

54 See the Commentarie of Master Doctor Martin Luther upon the Epistle of S. Paul to the Galathians (trans. Thomas Vautrollier [?]; 1644 ed.) fol. 101v–102r.

55 The whole episode with Mr. Worldly Wiseman serves in The Pilgrim's Progress to act out this Lutheran reading.

56 See Stendahl, Krister, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” HTR 56 (1963)Google Scholar, reprinted in Paul among Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976) 85–86.Google Scholar Cf. the critique of Stendahl's argument by Käsemann, Ernst in Perspectives on Paul (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971) 60–78.Google Scholar