Let me say straight up that I was baptised Catholic when I was twelve and for a long time that religion played an important part of my life. And though I am not as religious as I used to be when I was a child, my Catholic upbringing still shapes who I am as a person in terms of my interactions with others, as well as my values and beliefs. Still, I was surprised by how extremely Christian The Pilgrim’s Progress was.
John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress as a companion piece to the bible, to teach the values preached in the bible to a more accessible audience and to weave it with the story of a pilgrim, Christian (I see what you did there, Bunyan), who left his wife and family in order to find the Kingdom of God. Along the way he met countless obstacles and characters who distract him off the path of goodness lest he becomes lost.
The Pilgrim’s Progress is unashamedly allegorical in its method. There is no masking on what every single one of its characters stand for: Faithful is generally pretty faithful, Talkative is exactly that without resorting much to action, Giant Despair is as beastly as his name sounds, so it goes. This is also true for names of places: the Slough of Despond, the Valley of Humiliation, Doubting Castle, Vanity Fair (famously yoinked by Thackeray) to name a few. Some names are more ambiguous and though it carries positive / negative connotation, it is not immediately obvious in the story. Characters such as Discretion, Piety, Prudence can all be interchangeable, or the origins of the Madam Bubble and the Masons are more cryptic.
Originally, Bunyan wrote the progress of the first Pilgrim, Christian, whose burden (his sins) became too much for his back and he needed a place to get rid of it — through the Wicket Gate and into the Celestial City. The second part of Pilgrim’s Progress is the sequel, of Christian’s wife, Christiana who finally got her stuff together and who decided to take the rest of the family to the Celestial City, all the while regretting her errors of not having listened to her husband and followed him. She went through the same path, but this time meeting different friends and colliding with different obstacles and villains.
The Pilgrim’s Progress was a stock standard of those with Christian beliefs in the Western civilisation for a very long time, that is, many people. As an evangelical text, it is only second to the bible in publication for Christian text and it was a powerful for conversion. Stories speak loudly, and allegories have a high sugar content. In this way, the book has had some impact in the tides of world history.
But what interests me more is the relationship of the author with his work. How true was Bunyan to his text (and vice versa)? Bunyan was imprisoned while he was writing the book for preaching without a licence. They offered to release him if he promised to stop preaching to which he famously retorted that he will preach the next day if they released him. Foolish? Maybe. Honest? Definitely. And there is something admirable about someone who sticks to his principles.
But on the other side of the coin, I’m not a fan of preachy texts and this is the intention of The Pilgrim’s Progress. In some regards, the book gets a bit repetitive and being a cynical man that I am, much too soapy. Preachiness in any context rubs me the wrong way, even though I may share the same values and beliefs. It’s like that vegan in the party questioning why you’re eating meat, and who you could brush off with “cos I like it”, or those scientologists who wanted you to do their free questionnaires in the back alleyway. They all smell the same to me.
There is no denying the influence of the book to other writers who come after. Some of the terms from the book has become more popular than the original, such as Thackeray’s Vanity Fair or C.S. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress. The list of authors who have borrowed parts of The Pilgrim’s Progress is too many to count: Dickens, Alcott, Vonnegut, Twain — some heavy hitters. But if you are not a Christian, or like me, wary of being preached to, you can still read it as a theological text or even a historical text. It is in part, the reflection of the times and for it to be considered as one of the earliest novels (if not the earliest), it merits a place in your reading list.
