Abstract
The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684) could be said in some ways to be the reverse of Paradise Lost: where Milton seeks to liberate the imagination, Bunyan seeks to confine and curb it. Every step of his Christian’s path towards the New Jerusalem is to be significant, every item is to be glossed, whether with biblical references or with clear allegorical significance or overt explanation. Symbolic of Bunyan’s difference from Milton is the way his world is one with a single narrow path through it towards a goal, whereas Milton’s is the whole range of the universe. Satan makes his own passage, while the path in The Pilgrim’s Progress is already there. As a Puritan, Bunyan was acutely conscious of the seductive dangers of allegory, the way the reader might be tempted to stay with the literal picture rather than apprehend its significance: ‘Take heed’, he says, ‘that thou be not extream, / In playing with the outside of my Dream....’
Put by the Curtains, look within my Vail; Turn up my Metaphors and do not fail: There, if thou seekest them, such things to find, As will be helpful to an honest mind. (Conclusion to Part 1)1
In this aim Bunyan is much more in harmony with his age than his fellow Nonconformist Milton, even while he had little kinship with the established thinkers of the time.
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Notes
References are to The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. J. B. Wharey, rev. R. Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960).
It has been suggested that Bunyan had written The Pilgrim’s Progress by 1666 (near the time when he is assumed to have written the analogous work The Heavenly Footman) and that he then held it back from publication through uncertainty concerning its worth and possible reception: see Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church, 1628–1688 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) pp. 197–8. This only adds to our sense of the danger Bunyan felt in using such an earthly method to put over unearthly truths. On the evidence of the book’s reception by his fellow believers, Bunyan was right to be nervous of his use of fiction: see Roger Sharrock, John Bunyan (London: Macmillan, 1968) p. 139.
There have been those who suggest that Bunyan suspended his elective and predestinarian theology here: Nick Davis, ‘The Problem of Misfortune in The Pilgrim’s Progress’, in Vincent Newey (ed.), ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’: Critical and Historical Views (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1980) p. 198, says, The doctrine of election, which has such a central place in Bunyan’s theological writings, is virtually elided from The Pilgrim’s Progress. This has to do with Bunyan’s deliberate adoption of a human rather than a divine perspective in his presentation of Christian’s struggle: election qua property of the divine will cannot be a part of human experience.’ See also Gordon Campbell, ‘The Theology of The Pilgrim’s Progress’, ibid., pp. 256–7. It has been argued also that the sense of free will and of election are both present in the allegory: see for example Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People, pp. 209–10;
and Gordon Campbell, ‘Fishing in Other Men’s Waters: Bunyan and the Theologians’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), John Bunyan, Conventicle and Parnassus: Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) pp. 149–51.
There have recently been various attempts to deny our understanding of ‘progress’ as ‘moving forward’ or ‘advance’ (OED, sb. 1, 4). Stanley E. Fish, ‘Progress in The Pilgrim’s Progress’, in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972) pp. 224–64, suggests that Bunyan continually subverts his narrative so that our illusion of forward motion is exposed. This ‘non-progressive’ approach goes together with an acceptance of Bunyan’s ‘elective’ theology as dominant in The Pilgrim’s Progress: Gordon S. Wakefield, ‘“To be a Pilgrim”: Bunyan and the Christian Life’, in Keeble, Bunyan, p. 131, says, ‘It has been questioned whether there is any real pilgrim’s progress — Is it not a matter of imputed righteousness to the end...?’, and concludes that this is the case (pp. 131–3). Others question the seventeenth-century meaning of the word ‘progress’: for example, Philip Edwards, ‘The Journey in The Pilgrim’s Progress’, in Newey, The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 111; and Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People, pp. 221–2. (The debate has also occupied other grounds than these.) For various replies see Vincent Newey, ‘Bunyan and the Confines of the Mind’, in Newey, The Pilgrim’s Progress, pp. 21—48; David Mills, The Dreams of Bunyan and Langland’, ibid., p. 165; Nick Shrimpton, ‘Bunyan’s Military Metaphor’, ibid., pp. 205–24 (which attempts a synthesis of ‘progressive’ and ‘anti-progressive’ views). Here it may simply be maintained (1) that the examples of subversion of Bunyan’s narrative cited by Fish are relatively infrequent; (2) that ‘progress’ had its ‘progressive’ meaning well-established by Bunyan’s day, and that it is unlikely that he would have chosen the word at all if one of its meanings so flew against an anti-progressive intention. No one has asked why Bunyan did not call his work, say, The Pilgrim’s Journey, if that was what he meant; Bunyan had no especial penchant for alliterative titles. (Actually the word ‘Walking’ would have been still more appropriate, as it was used by several Puritan manuals of spiritual conduct at the time: see James Turner, ‘Bunyan’s Sense of Place’, in Newey, The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 106.)
For a fuller account see C. N. Manlove, ‘The Image of the Journey in Pilgrim’s Progress: Narrative versus Allegory’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 10, no. 1 (Winter 1980) 16–19, 30–1. The references to Simon Patrick’s The Parable of the Pilgrim are to the 3rd edn (1667), pp. 323, 386.
U. Milo Kaufmann, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ and Traditions in Puritan Meditation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966) esp. pp. 134–6, locates The Pilgrim’s Progress in a Puritan tradition oriented towards mythos rather than logos in the dissemination of faith, and in particular relates it to an affective tradition based on heavenly promise.
This theologically orthodox view is taken by Fish. Contrast John R. Knott, Jr, ‘Bunyan’s Gospel Day: A Reading of The Pilgrim’s Progress’, ELR, 3 (1973) 443–61; Newey, ‘Bunyan and the Confines of the Mind’, The Pilgrim’s Progress; and David Seed, ‘Dialogue and Debate in The Pilgrim’s Progress’, ibid., pp. 74, 80.
Parts of this reading are indebted to Dorothy Van Ghent, ‘On The Pilgrim’s Progress’, in The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Harper and Row, 1961) pp. 23–5, though with different interpretation.
Henri A. Talon (ed.), God’s Knotty Log: Selected Writings of John Bunyan (Chicago and New York: Meridian 1961) p. 301 nn. 42, 48. See also Wharey (ed.), The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 321; and Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People, p. 217, agreeing.
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© 1992 Colin Manlove
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Manlove, C. (1992). Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress. In: Christian Fantasy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12570-8_9
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