Show how the Christian Puritan spirit is manifest in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Show how the Christian Puritan spirit is manifest in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.

The 16th century saw the rise of immense religious change, starting with the Protestant Reformation. This trend in religious unrest continued into the 17th century when Puritanism began to emerge with the express purpose of creating a more Protestant Anglican Church, which the Puritans felt was still too Catholic. From this movement came one of the most popular Christian books of the era, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan’s story, written in 1678, was the second most-read book in English for 200 years and follows the trials and tribulations of Christian, a man who has to learn of the grace of God the hard way. The story is a fairly obtuse allegory for Puritan ideals, but in this way it does its job well and makes it clear exactly what Bunyan wanted his reader to walk away thinking about. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, there are four elements of Christianity that Bunyan seems to view as absolutely essential to the Puritan way of life: Christ over church or law, a dearth of religious pluralism, religious activism and perseverance, and humans’ ultimate powerlessness to the grace of God.

Bunyan fully subscribes to the Protestant perspective that belief in the power of Christ is more important than following any other sort of authority, such as a church or the secular law, and this is readily apparent in The Pilgrim’s Progress. One of Christian’s first tests is with the law, when he has been traveling for some time, literally carrying the burden of human sin, wearied by its weight, and he meets Mr Worldly Wiseman. By this point, Christian has met another character by the name of Evangelist, who advises him to follow a specific path in order to rid himself of the weight, but it proves to be much more difficult than Christian has anticipated. The charming Mr Worldly Wiseman convinces Christian that he knows a better path to help him relieve his burden, but Bunyan has already set him up to be an untrustworthy character with the poor regard he gives the Bible and the way he urges Christian to simply throw down his burden (i.e. his faith), and through this the reader knows that this counsel can come to no good. Mr Worldly Wiseman enjoins Christian to head up the Hill of Morality to seek the man named Legality and get his advice on how to rid himself of this burden. With high hopes, Christian sets off toward Morality but finds that the Hill is too hard to climb, and just as he is losing hope Evangelist rejoins him. This is all a metaphor for the Puritan, and Protestant, belief in the sole authority of the Bible, the book which gave Christian his burden in the first place and which Mr Worldly Wiseman disdains. Christian cannot climb the Hill of Morality because only God can choose what is or is not moral, and Legality’s counsel would not have helped relieve his burden because the law cannot take the place of religion..........................................

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Milan Tomic

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