54 pages • 1 hour read
The Pilgrim's Progress
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Background
Authorial Context: John Bunyan
Because Bunyan’s personal experiences impacted his religious beliefs, the work’s authorial and ideological contexts intertwine. Countless familiar Christian views shape The Pilgrim’s Progress, including belief in Jesus Christ’s divinity, heaven, and hell. Bunyan’s Puritan ideology manifests in the simplicity of the journeys. Christian and Christiana don’t require popes or priests; what they need are straightforward Christian values like faith (Faithful), hope (Hopeful), and a good heart (Mr. Great-heart). Puritans thought the Church of England was too Catholic and meddlesome. They didn’t think the government had the right to determine who could preach, and they disapproved of the C of E’s Book of Common Prayer—a text intended to standardize religious worship. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, what makes an honorable Christian isn’t formulaic prayers or deference to church hierarchy but one’s personal relationship with God. As Roger Pooley writes in his introduction the 2008 Penguin Classics edition, “[Bunyan] claimed authority from God, and God’s word in the Bible, which he claimed to discern as well as they [the gentry, including the clergy]” (unpaginated).
Pooley detects aspects of Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin in Bunyan’s ideology. As with Luther, whose Ninety-Five Theses sparked the Protestant Reformation, The Pilgrim’s Progress makes the Bible the main source of wisdom and stresses Faith’s Necessity for Salvation. Christian reaches heaven with guidance from numerous Bible verses and by maintaining faith in God. Calvin’s influence appears through the idea of predestination, the notion that God has preselected a limited number of people for paradise. The allegorical genre itself suggests strict predestination because it links people to their traits—Sloth is slothful, Presumption is presumptuous, etc.—suggesting that God already knows who will enter heaven. The idea also manifests in the journey of Christiana, who receives a visitor who pushes her on the path toward salvation. Mr. Great-heart describes Christiana as having “a special Grace” (795), referencing God’s saving mercy (i.e., “grace”) and implying that only certain people enjoy it.
Bunyan’s family wasn’t wealthy, and he didn’t have much of an education, both of which inform the book’s criticism of rich people and certain types of scholarship. W. R. Owens sees Bunyan’s contempt for English law in the court trial at Vanity, with Lord Hategood representing the English judges that persecuted people like Bunyan. Bunyan’s experiences also manifest in the conversions his protagonists go through. Like Christian, Hopeful, and Christiana, Bunyan didn’t embrace Christianity from the get-go. In his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), Bunyan describes himself as “taken captive by the devil” and “cursing, swearing, lying, and blaspheming the holy name of God” (unpaginated).
Literary Context: Christianity and Allegory in Western Literature
The Pilgrim’s Progress has much in common with other literary works about Christianity. Like Dante’s famous narrative poem The Divine Comedy (c. 1308-1321), The Pilgrim’s Progress follows people as they try to set themselves on the path toward salvation. John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) was published around the same time as The Pilgrim’s Progress and shares that work’s Protestant sensibilities in its recreation of the story of Adam and Eve and Satan’s conflict with God. Milton described Paradise Lost to “justifie the wayes of God to men” (Book 1, Line 26), and Bunyan uses his book to “direct thee to the Holy Land” (173). The Pilgrim’s Progress is a part of a body of literature that teaches the reader about Christianity and shows them how to lead a Christian life through narrative.
The complex narrative of The Pilgrim’s Progress leads some critics and scholars to identify it as the first example of the English novel. The Guardian included Bunyan’s book in its list of the 100 best novels (McCrum, Robert. “The 100 best novels: No 1—The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan.” 23 September 2013). Like a traditional novel, The Pilgrim’s Progress has multifaceted characters and a sustained plot. The journeys of Christian and Christiana aren’t all that different from the journeys of fictional characters like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), the eponymous heroine in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), or even Katniss Everdeen from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008). These characters have to confront themselves and overcome their adverse surroundings. They are also ordinary people—not kings or legendary warriors—just as Christian is a Christian “everyman.” This shift from the epic to the everyday was another characteristic of the evolution of the novel, and one that the Protestant Reformation might have contributed to.
As an allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress relates to a range of literary works, including Plato’s philosophical “Allegory of the Cave” (375 BCE), Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queen (1590), and George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm (1945). Plato uses the cave to symbolize truth and ignorance, Spenser’s verses represent assorted virtues and the greatness of Queen Elizabeth I, while Orwell builds a story around farm animals to demonstrate the pitfalls of the Russian Revolution. Although Bunyan worries about his use of allegory and metaphor in his opening “Apology,” the direct tone, simple style, and frank characterization make it understandable for readers of different levels. The accessibility of the allegory might be why it’s been such a popular literary work for diverse groups of people—including young readers, soldiers, and the working class.
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