Bunyan, John

born November 1628, Elstow, Bedfordshire, Eng.

died Aug. 31, 1688, London

English minister and author.

Bunyan encountered the seething religious life of various left-wing sects while serving in Oliver Cromwell's army in the English Civil Wars. He underwent a period of spiritual crisis, converted to Puritanism, and became a preacher. After the Restoration, he was jailed as a Nonconformist for 12 years, during which he wrote his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding (1666). He is best known for The Pilgrim's Progress (1678–84), a religious allegory expressing the Puritan religious outlook. A symbolic vision of the character Christian's pilgrimage through life, it was at one time second only to the Bible in popularity among ordinary readers. Despite his ministerial responsibilities, he published numerous works in his last 10 years.

John Bunyan, pencil drawing on vellum by Robert White; in the British Museum

By courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum

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▪ English author

Introduction

born November 1628, Elstow, Bedfordshire, England

died August 31, 1688, London

 celebrated English minister and preacher, author of The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), the book that was the most characteristic expression of the Puritan religious outlook. His other works include doctrinal and controversial writings; a spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding (1666); and the allegory The Holy War (1682).

Early life

      Bunyan, the son of a brazier, or traveling tinker, was brought up “among a multitude of poor plowmen's children” in the heart of England's agricultural Midlands. He learned to read and write at a local grammar school, but he probably left school early to learn the family trade. Bunyan's mind and imagination were formed in these early days by influences other than those of formal education. He absorbed the popular tales of adventure that appeared in chapbooks and were sold at fairs like the great one held at Stourbridge near Cambridge (it provided the inspiration for Vanity Fair in The Pilgrim's Progress). Though his family belonged to the Anglican church, he also became acquainted with the varied popular literature of the English Puritans: plain-speaking sermons, homely moral dialogues, books of melodramatic judgments and acts of divine guidance, and John Foxe's The Book of Martyrs. Above all he steeped himself in the English Bible; the Authorized Version was but 30 years old when he was a boy of 12.

      Bunyan speaks in his autobiography of being troubled by terrifying dreams. It may be that there was a pathological side to the nervous intensity of these fears; in the religious crisis of his early manhood his sense of guilt took the form of delusions. But it seems to have been abnormal sensitiveness combined with the tendency to exaggeration that caused him to look back on himself in youth as “the very ringleader of all . . . that kept me company into all manner of vice and ungodliness.”

      In 1644 a series of misfortunes separated the country boy from his family and drove him into the world. His mother died in June, his younger sister Margaret in July; in August his father married a third wife. The English Civil Wars had broken out, and in November he was mustered in a Parliamentary levy and sent to reinforce the garrison at Newport Pagnell. The governor was Sir Samuel Luke, immortalized as the Presbyterian knight of the title in Samuel Butler's Hudibras. Bunyan remained in Newport until July 1647 and probably saw little fighting.

      His military service, even if uneventful, brought him in touch with the seething religious life of the left-wing sects within Oliver Cromwell's army (New Model Army), the preaching captains, and those Quakers, Seekers, and Ranters who were beginning to question all religious authority except that of the individual conscience. In this atmosphere Bunyan became acquainted with the leading ideas of the Puritan (Puritanism) sectaries, who believed that the striving for religious truth meant an obstinate personal search, relying on free grace revealed to the individual, and condemning all forms of public organization.

      Some time after his discharge from the army (in July 1647) and before 1649, Bunyan married. He says in his autobiography, Grace Abounding, that he and his first wife “came together as poor as poor might be, not having so much household-stuff as a dish or spoon betwixt us both.” His wife brought him two evangelical books as her only dowry. Their first child, a blind daughter, Mary, was baptized in July 1650. Three more children, Elizabeth, John, and Thomas, were born to Bunyan's first wife before her death in 1658. Elizabeth, too, was baptized in the parish church there in 1654, though by that time her father had been baptized by immersion as a member of the Bedford Separatist church.

Conversion and ministry

      Bunyan's conversion to Puritanism was a gradual process in the years following his marriage (1650–55); it is dramatically described in his autobiography. After an initial period of Anglican conformity in which he went regularly to church, he gave up, slowly and grudgingly, his favourite recreations of dancing and bell ringing and sports on the village green and began to concentrate on his inner life. Then came agonizing temptations to spiritual despair lasting for several years. The “storms” of temptation, as he calls them, buffeted him with almost physical violence; voices urged him to blaspheme; the texts of Scriptures, which seemed to him to threaten damnation, took on personal shape and “did pinch him very sore.” Finally one morning he believed that he had surrendered to these voices of Satan and had betrayed Christ: “Down I fell as a bird that is shot from the tree.” In his psychopathic isolation he presents all the features of the divided mind of the maladjusted as they have been analyzed in the 20th century. Bunyan, however, had a contemporary psychological instrument for the diagnosis of his condition: the pastoral theology of 17th-century Calvinism, which interpreted the grim doctrine of election and predestination in terms of the real needs of souls, the evidence of spiritual progress in them, and the covenant of God's grace. Both techniques, that of the modern analyst and that of the Puritan preacher, have in common the aim of recovering the integrity of the self; and this was what Bunyan achieved as he emerged, from his period of spiritual darkness, gradually beginning to feel that his sin was “not unto death” and that there were texts to comfort as well as to terrify. He was aided in his recovery by his association with the Bedford Separatist church and its dynamic leader, John Gifford. He entered into full communion about 1655.

      The Bedford community practiced adult Baptism by immersion, but it was an open-communion church, admitting all who professed “faith in Christ and holiness of life.” Bunyan soon proved his talents as a lay preacher. Fresh from his own spiritual troubles, he was fitted to warn and console others: “I went myself in Chains to preach to them in Chains, and carried that Fire in my own Conscience that I persuaded them to beware of.” He was also active in visiting and exhorting church members, but his main activity in 1655–60 was in controversy with the early Quakers (Friends, Society of), both in public debate up and down the market towns of Bedfordshire and in his first printed works, Some Gospel Truths Opened (1656) and A Vindication of Some Gospel Truths Opened (1657). The Quakers and the open-communion Baptists (Baptist) were rivals for the religious allegiance of the “mechanics,” or small tradesmen and artificers, in both town and country. Bunyan soon became recognized as a leader among the sectaries.

      The Restoration of Charles II brought to an end the 20 years in which the separated churches had enjoyed freedom of worship and exercised some influence on government policy. On Nov. 12, 1660, at Lower Samsell in South Bedfordshire, Bunyan was brought before a local magistrate and, under an old Elizabethan act, charged with holding a service not in conformity (Nonconformist) with those of the Church of England. He refused to give an assurance that he would not repeat the offense, was condemned at the assizes in January 1661, and was imprisoned in the county jail. In spite of the courageous efforts of his second wife (he had married again in 1659) to have his case brought up at the assizes, he remained in prison for 12 years. A late 17th-century biography, added to the early editions of Grace Abounding, reveals that he relieved his family by making and selling “long Tagg'd laces”; prison conditions were lenient enough for him to be let out at times to visit friends and family and to address meetings.

Literary activity

      During this imprisonment Bunyan wrote and published his spiritual autobiography (Grace Abounding, 1666). It reveals his incarceration to have been a spiritual opportunity as well as an ordeal, allowing “an inlet into the Word of God.” Bunyan's release from prison came in March 1672 under Charles II's Declaration of Indulgence to the Nonconformists. The Bedford community had already chosen him as their pastor in January, and a new meetinghouse was obtained. In May he received a license to preach together with 25 other Nonconformist ministers in Bedfordshire and the surrounding counties. His nickname “Bishop Bunyan” suggests that he became the organizing genius in the area. When persecution was renewed he was again imprisoned for illegal preaching; the circumstances of this imprisonment have remained more obscure than those of the first, though it does not appear to have lasted longer than six months. A bond of surety for his release, dated June 1677, has survived, so it is likely that this second detention was in the first half of that year. Since The Pilgrim's Progress was published soon after this, in February 1678, it is probable that he had begun to write it not in the second imprisonment but in the first, soon after the composition of Grace Abounding, and when the examination of his inner life contained in that book was still strong.

Literary style

      Bunyan's literary achievement, in his finest works, is by no means that of a naively simple talent, as has been the view of many of his critics. His handling of language, colloquial or biblical, is that of an accomplished artist. He brings to his treatment of human behaviour both shrewd awareness and moral subtlety, and he demonstrates a gift for endowing the conceptions of evangelical theology with concrete life and acting out the theological drama in terms of flesh and blood.

      Bunyan thus presents a paradox, since the impulse that originally drove him to write was purely to celebrate his faith and to convert others, and like other Puritans he was schooled to despise the adornments of style and to treat literature as a means to an end. Bunyan's effort to reach behind literary adornments so as to obtain an absolutely naked rendering of the truth about his own spiritual experience causes him in Grace Abounding to forge a highly original style. In this style, which is rich in powerful physical imagery, the inner life of the Christian is described; body and soul are so involved that it is impossible to separate bodily from mental suffering in the description of his temptations. He feels “a clogging and a heat at my breast-bone as if my bowels would have burst out”; a preacher's call to abandon the sin of idle pastimes “did benumb the sinews of my best delights”; and he can say of one of the texts of scripture that seemed to him to spell his damnation that it “stood like a mill-post at my back.” The attempt to communicate the existential crisis of the human person without style had created a style of its own.

      The use of a highly subjective prose style to express personal states of mind is Bunyan's first creative achievement, but he also had at his disposal the more traditional style he used in sermons, treatises, and scriptural exposition. In the allegories some of his greatest imaginative successes are due to his dreamlike, introspective style with its subtle personal music; but it is the workaday vigour and concreteness of the prose technique practiced in the sermons which provide a firm stylistic background to these imaginative flights.

The Pilgrim's Progress

      Bunyan's great allegorical (allegory) tale was published by Nathaniel Ponder in 1678. Because it recapitulates in symbolic form the story of Bunyan's own conversion, there is an intense, life-or-death quality about Christian's pilgrimage to the Heavenly City in the first part of the book. This sense of urgency is established in the first scene as Christian in the City of Destruction reads in his book (the Bible) and breaks out with his lamentable cry, “What shall I do?” It is maintained by the combats along the road with giants and monsters such as Apollyon and Giant Despair, who embody spiritual terrors. The voices and demons of the Valley of the Shadow of Death are a direct transcription of Bunyan's own obsessive and neurotic fears during his conversion. Episodes of stirring action like these alternate with more stationary passages, and there are various conversations between the pilgrims and those they encounter on the road, some pious and some providing light relief when hypocrites like Talkative and Ignorance are exposed. The halts at places of refreshment like the Delectable Mountains or the meadow by the River of Life evoke an unearthly spiritual beauty.

      The narrative of The Pilgrim's Progress may seem episodic, but Calvinist theology provides a firm underlying ground plan. Only Christ, the Wicket Gate, admits Christian into the right road, and before he can reach it he has to be shown his error in being impressed by the pompous snob Worldly Wiseman, who stands for mere negative conformity to moral and social codes. Quite early in his journey Christian loses his burden of sin at the Cross, so he now knows that he has received the free pardon of Christ and is numbered among the elect. It might seem that all the crises of the pilgrimage were past, yet this initiation of grace is not the end of the drama but the beginning. Christian, and the companions who join him, Faithful and Hopeful, are fixed in the path of salvation, so that it is the horrors of the temptations they have to undergo that engage the reader's attention. The reader views Christian's agonized striving through his own eyes and shares Christian's uncertainty about the outcome.

      Though conscientiously symbolic throughout, the narrative of The Pilgrim's Progress does not lose the feel of common life. In the character sketches and humorous passages scattered throughout the book, Bunyan's genius for realistic observation prevents the conversion allegory from becoming too inward and obsessed. Bunyan displays a sharp eye for behaviour and a sardonic sense of humour in his portrayals of such reprobates as Ignorance and Talkative; these moral types are endowed with the liveliness of individuals by a deft etching in of a few dominant features and gestures. And finally, Christian himself is a transcript from life; Bunyan, the physician of souls with a shrewd eye for backsliders, had faithfully observed his own spiritual growth.

      The Pilgrim's Progress was instantly popular with all social classes upon its publication, though it was perhaps the last great expression of the folk tradition of the common people before the divisive effects of modern enlightened education began to be felt.

Later life and works

      Bunyan continued to tend the needs of the Bedford church and the widening group of East Anglian churches associated with it. As his fame increased with his literary reputation, he also preached in Congregational churches in London. Bunyan followed up the success of The Pilgrim's Progress with other works. His The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680) is more like a realistic novel than an allegory in its portrait of the unrelievedly evil and unrepentant tradesman Mr. Badman. The book gives an insight into the problems of money and marriage when the Puritans were settling down after the age of persecution and beginning to find their social role as an urban middle class.

      The Holy War (1682), Bunyan's second allegory, has a carefully wrought epic structure and is correspondingly lacking in the spontaneous inward note of The Pilgrim's Progress. The town of Mansoul is besieged by the hosts of the devil, is relieved by the army of Emanuel, and is later undermined by further diabolic attacks and plots against his rule. The metaphor works on several levels; it represents the conversion and backslidings of the individual soul, as well as the story of mankind from the Fall through to the Redemption and the Last Judgment; there is even a more precise historical level of allegory relating to the persecution of Nonconformists under Charles II. The Pilgrim's Progress, Second Part (1684), tells the story of the pilgrimage of Christian's wife, Christiana, and her children to the Celestial City. This book gives a more social and humorous picture of the Christian life than the First Part and shows Bunyan lapsing from high drama into comedy, but the great concluding passage on the summoning of the pilgrims to cross the River of Death is perhaps the finest single thing Bunyan ever wrote.

      In spite of his ministerial responsibilities Bunyan found time to publish a large number of doctrinal and controversial works in the last 10 years of his life. He also composed rough but workmanlike verse of religious exhortation; one of his most interesting later volumes is the children's book A Book for Boys and Girls (1686), vigorous poems serving as comments on emblematic pictures.

      Bunyan died in 1688, in London, after one of his preaching visits, and was buried in Bunhill Fields, the Nonconformists' traditional burying ground.

Reputation

      Until the decline of religious faith and the great increase in books of popular instruction in the 19th century, The Pilgrim's Progress, like the Bible, was to be found in every English home and was known to every ordinary reader. In literary estimation, however, Bunyan remained beyond the pale of polite literature during the 18th century, though his greatness was acknowledged by Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. Later literary historians noted his indirect influence on the 18th-century novel, particularly the introspective fiction of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. After the Romantic movement he was recognized as a type of natural genius and placed alongside Homer and Robert Burns. Twentieth-century scholarship has made it possible to see how much he owed to the tradition of homiletic prose and to Puritan literary genres already developed when he began to write. But the sublime tinker remains sublime, if less isolated from his fellows than was formerly thought; the genius of The Pilgrim's Progress remains valid. Nothing illustrates better the profound symbolic truth of this noted work than its continuing ability, even in translation, to evoke responses in readers belonging to widely separated cultural traditions.

      Thomas Babington Macaulay (Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron)'s biography on John Bunyan appeared in the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (see the Britannica Classic: John Bunyan).

Roger Sharrock Ed.

Additional Reading

Biographical and critical works include John Brown, John Bunyan: His Life, Times, and Work, new ed. rev. by Frank Mott Harrison (1928), heavily documented and still useful; Henri Talon, John Bunyan: The Man and His Works (1951, reprinted 1976); Ola Elizabeth Winslow, John Bunyan (1961), a straightforward and readable biography; Monica Furlong, Puritan's Progress (1975); Lynn Veach Sadler, John Bunyan (1979), an introduction; Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church, 1628–1688 (1988; also published as A Tinker and a Poor Man, 1989), placing Bunyan within a radical tradition; William York Tindall, John Bunyan, Mechanick Preacher (1934, reissued 1964), on the background of the sects; Richard L. Greaves, John Bunyan and English Nonconformity (1992), on his theology; Roger Sharrock, John Bunyan, new ed. (1968, reprinted 1984), and John Bunyan: “The Pilgrim's Progress” (1966), both critical studies; E. Beatrice Batson, John Bunyan: Allegory and Imagination (1984), a study of the literary merits of Bunyan's writings; and three collections of essays: Vincent Newey (ed.), The Pilgrim's Progress: Critical and Historical Views (1980); N.H. Keeble (ed.), John Bunyan—Conventicle and Parnassus (1988); and Robert G. Collmer (ed.), Bunyan in Our Time (1989).

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