But it offers a whole further level beyond that. This means that the central action, as well as the places and characters, refers to spiritual realities. This additional level is not a substitute for the literal narrative level. It is an added layer. The allegorical level has something of the quality of a riddle in the sense that we need to figure out what various details stand for. The allegory is what chiefly carries the edification of the book, making it more than a top-rate story.
But this trait makes it equally attractive to literary scholars. Prick him anywhere; his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him. Ryan Lister. For many years, the country was in the grip of a religious fundamentalism. Religion in the seventeenth century was also highly political. When Bunyan joined the Baptist Church, he began preaching to his own congregation without a state license to do so and was jailed in by the Church of England for this infraction.
Bunyan and other outspoken Protestants were not simply discriminated against but were persecuted and imprisoned. The book was later published in Bunyan also drew on personal experience when writing and preaching in public. After Bunyan was eventually freed from prison in , he began to preach again and became a pastor of the Bedford church.
In the six years between Parts I and II, his confidence as a writer grew visibly. Jul 17, Annie rated it did not like it. Reads like satire, but just I feel like it's mocking itself but I really don't think it is? It's just really hard to take this book seriously. It's incredibly dated, mind-numbingly boring, and obscenely moralizing.
This book felt like my entire childhood of nuns making me kneel on the hard marble floor for laughing in chapel on Friday mornings. I love allegory as much as your mom, but I do like just a tiny bit of subtlety. In Pilgrim's Progress, Allegory comes over to you and she slaps Reads like satire, but just In Pilgrim's Progress, Allegory comes over to you and she slaps you in the face see what I did there? Over and over again. And then she tells you to turn the other cheek. A summary: a guy named Evangelist helps a guy named wait for it Christian, who by the way is married to wait for it twice Christiana, find Jesus.
He gallivants down the road to meet Jesus and makes new friends, like Faithful and Hopeful. They meet some nefarious people- shockingly, named after vices- who prepare to be shocked again meet righteously unhappy ends. Later on, Christiana, who got left behind, makes the same journey with the rest of the fam. The End!
Did you enjoy that? Me neither. I fuck you not, there are characters named Lord Hate-Good, Mrs. Inconsiderate, and Mr. It's like 17th century Clue. It was Mrs. Inconsiderate, in the Valley of Humiliation, with a candle-stick! How very inconsiderate of her! Paradise Lost, it ain't. Sep 09, Nocturnalux added it.
I have something of an unhealthy interest in Christian apologetics. Of all the oodles of material written by Christians and connected to their faith, it is the "defense" kind of works that get my attention even though I am not even remotely the target audience.
Over the years, as I waded through hour upon hour of Christian gentlemen yes, this is a field that is dominated by men which I am sure is a coincidence. Even books, lectures, what have you that claim to be targeted at nonbelievers are, in essence, aimed at Christians. This causes a disconnect and a lot of unnecessary friction as plenty of Christians read "plenty of" and don't me "not all Christians will skip actually interacting with nonbelievers and trust in the latest full proof method of conversion feel emboldened to spread the faith.
When instead of the paper cutout atheist who is blown away by such jewels as, "Jesus died for ME?! I had never heard this before! Pilgrim's Progress, given when it was written, is of course aimed at a Christian audience so in that regard it is at least honest.
What makes it so fascinating to me is how this rehashed text that tries so hard to repackage Medieval literature into the Protestantism of its day manages to replicate the same kind of being way behind its own times that modern apologetics faces. To be fair, PP may not be technically apologetics but for the sake of this review, it will be treated as such as there is enough overlap to warrant in.
Just like good old Bunyan saw fit to recycle Piers Plowman, did Bunyan get the alliteration from Piers as well? Now, one can of course claim that the main inspiration was not Piers but The City of God.
And again, to be fair, this was done a lot in his day. If it sounds like bloviation is because the content of the text- and more on that later- just so happens to ring even more So When Written Thusly. Be it the Governing Body of the Jehovah's Witnesses defining basic words everyone knows, in excruciating detail, or Bunyan giving us a character called "Christian" get it? Guess the name of his wife. Go ahead, take a wild guess. And she has her own sequel although penned by an anonymous author so I bet there'll talk of Harlots therein facing such character as "Mr.
Aka, "Madame Bubble" and then it is explained again the harlots gather on my lawn and I bring the wrath of GOD upon them!
And again if need be and more often than not, the need most definitely be. And this because Christian is an idiot. If I were a Christian, I'd feel truly annoyed at being depicted as an utter fool who keeps falling for the same tricks. I have a feeling he'd jump headlong into the famous Slough of Despond if someone told him to.
Because that is, in essence, what he does: he gets swayed very easily. The plot requires him to be a tool but sadly it seems to expect the reader to also be one. It is remarkable, really, how little is left to the imagination. Just when you think the allegory may gain a layer or two, Bunyan undercuts you by explaining everything.
It is this over-explaining that settles it as a work of apologetics. Needless to say, I did not like it one bit. I bet if I were to reread it, I would hate it even more so I think I will save myself the pain.
But I will just add even though this one is like the Slough of Despond itself, it is still much better than contemporary works of apologetics. For all its faults and while it was already losing its foothold on the marketplace of ideas, it is understandable why Bunyan should think as he does. The works of apologetics are dead in the water in the 21st century but they sell and perhaps even importantly, they give a certain kind of Christian the reassurance that they are not dumb.
The likes of William Lane Craig doesn't think animals feel pain so you know you are dealing with a bright mind right there! In a sense, it is reassuring as it gives me impression that they aware that having a veneer of reason is important. But in another it is kind of And I am not saying Christians are dumb.
That is the true tragedy. And for the record, if I had a nickel for every truly dense atheist I meet, I'd be a rich woman- which would still get me lectured by apologists because lady. Bunyan knew better. He has no interest in even giving the illusion of greater understanding, here's the Jesus, take it or BURN. A theme that remains virtually unchanged is the demonizing of The Atheist.
In this PP is prescient as it pointed to the bizarre obsession apologetic material would develop regarding this dangerous figure. In the 17th century it was still something of a footnote, the core of religious discussion centered around flinging accusations of heresy to competing Christian sects as can be seen in PP's Anti-Catholic rants. But as atheists gained a greater presence a bit all over, the latent existential threat they present came to the front.
To the point that it is no exaggeration that one of apologetics' main thrust is indeed producing material instructing Christians on how to "share" the faith with atheists.
You can trace this evolution across the centuries. From Bunyan's Atheist, to Graham Greene's absurd atheist in End of the Affair, culminating in the horrendous farce that is the atheist in the Christian movie "God's Not Dead": if you ever wondered why atheists got the reputation of being angry all the time, take a moment to consider how Christian culture has been demonizing us- at times in the most literal of senses- for centuries on end.
Nor is this an artifact of the distant fact with no present time reality, even now there are many who are sidelined, maligned, slandered, simply for not being able to believe that a Palestinian Jew is also the Son of God who died and resurrected so that they could be vicariously saved. So if you happen to be a Christian, lean in that direction, or just happen to be a lot more lenient than I am and feel that my review is too scathing, perhaps even insulting, to those who hold the faith, keep in mind that my puny review is but a reaction to an ongoing phenomenon that harms fellow nonbelievers to this day.
Now tell me about how empty that tomb is, I am sure if I hear it another time over the one million others, it will truly convert me. Apr 11, David Sarkies rated it really liked it Recommends it for: People who haven't read it. Shelves: christian. Okay, I probably don't follow the readings of many of these groups as closely as some do, but they can be good to spur me on to reading a book that I probably wasn't thinking of reading at the 7 things you probably knew about Pilgrim's Progress 22 April Well, I will have to thank the Classics of the Western Canon discussion group for selecting Pilgrim's Progess for this month's read because otherwise it would have continued to sit on my shelf until such a time as I got around to reading it.
Okay, I probably don't follow the readings of many of these groups as closely as some do, but they can be good to spur me on to reading a book that I probably wasn't thinking of reading at the time.
The discussions on this book have also been interesting to follow as well, though I do note the comments do tend to come quite thick and fast and I end up getting left behind.
It is also been interesting that my evening church has been studying the Book of Hebrews or at least the last part of the book because there are connections, and references, in that part of the Bible to Bunyan's work. Mind you, Bunyan draws heavily on the Bible in this book, but the exploration of the struggles of the Christian life is a central theme to this work.
Anyway, instead of simply dumping my thoughts onto the page as I normally do, I thought that I might discuss a number of ideas that came to me as I was reading it. Also, since this is probably one of the most well known books in the English Language, I probably don't need to give a synopsis, or a background, and if you want one there is always Wikipedia.
Oh, and I should also mention that Pilgrim's Progress is listed as number two on The Guardian's list of best novels of all time. Mind you, I'm not really sure if allegory was actually all that big simply because there are very few allegorical novels that come to mind — Piers Plowman and Gulliver's Travels are two more, but other than that I really can't think of any others.
The main reason that I suspect that people don't write allegory is simply because it is really hard to read. However there are a couple of reasons why authors occasionally do so: a The literature is subversive : One of the reasons is because if they were to say what they were saying directly, and the literature fell into the wrong hands, then the author would land up in an awful lot of trouble.
This was the case with some of the more difficult books of the Bible, such as the book of Revelation as well as Gulliver's Travels and Animal Farm.
By writing the way that they did the authors were able to challenge the system, or criticise the ruling authorities, without fear of retribution. As with the case of Revelation, John the Baptist was able to continue to promote his religion in an environment that had effectively banned it.
What Bunyan was trying to do was to paint a picture of the Christian walk, and to simply write like your standard, everyday theologian would have probably put quite a lot of people off and the book would never have become as well known, and as popular, as it did.
Thus through the use of allegory Bunyan is able to turn a dry, and somewhat very heavy topic, into a form that is not only accessible, but also quite enjoyable. In fact there is quite a lot of discussion about the nature of faith and spirituality. As Christian travels on his journey, not only must he overcome obstacles, but he also meets various people, some good, some bad, and enters into conversation with them.
Through these conversations we learn about quite a few aspects of the Christian faith and concepts such as grace, the nature of God, and salvation, are all explored. While the book does paint a number of pictures, Bunyan to does resort to simply explaining a number of concepts through the mouths of his characters.
Okay, while prison is probably not a place that any of us should ever aspire to spend the rest of our lives, at least what it does give us is a lot of time, which means we can sit down and write stuff without having to be interrupted with work.
It is also a place of solitude meaning that you are less likely to be disturbed. Okay, it probably wasn't a prison like this one: or this one: but that does not necessarily mean that it was any better, or any worse. I'm not sure whether he had to wander around wearing orange overalls, or even if he was given three meals a day if you were in prison back then you were not guaranteed any of the things that prisoners these days are guaranteed — well, yes, a roof over your head, but that didn't necessarily mean that the place was dry , however he did have time to write, which meant that he must have had access to writing materials.
One person even suggested that quite a lot of books were written in prison, but once again that is not surprising because, as I mentioned, you do have a lot of time on your hands in there. Mind you, not all of them were good, or even popular, though I must admit that Mark Chopper Read did generate a decent income from his writings and even boasted about how he, an uneducated illiterate became a best selling author while all of these university types, such as me, can't get a single book published — but then people like books about crime.
Which brings me to: 4 Bunyan didn't go to school Well, maybe he did, but apparently he didn't stay there long enough to be considered educated, and he certainly wouldn't have had the education that many of the other great writers of the time would have had, yet much like Chopper Reed, while many of them were writing rubbish, he not only wrote a best seller, he wrote a classic which sort of outclasses Chopper's efforts in my books.
Another reason I mention this is because there has been some suggestions that he was inspired by Dante hey, another allegory, I forgot that one but there is one big problem with that — he couldn't read Italian, and it wasn't translated into English until the 19th Century. Sure, Dante goes to sleep and has a dream, as does Bunyan, but that does not necessarily mean that he copied Dante, or was even influenced by him how could he have been.
Rather, what I suspect both authors are doing is bringing the reader on a journey with them, and by placing themselves into the text and then turning it entirely into a dream sequence I suspect gives more credence to what they are trying to say. Anyway, here is a picture from Wikipedia: The other thing that I want to mention are references to classical literature — there aren't any.
A lot of writers at the time where returning to many of the texts of the Greek and Roman world and were drawing inspiration from them. However Bunyan wasn't one of them, which is not surprising since he didn't have a classical education. Rather, the only book that he draws upon is the Bible.
In fact there are quite a lot of Biblical allusions in the text, many of them being quite obscure. What I suspect Bunyan is doing is drawing upon the parables of Jesus, as well as other Biblical allusions, to paint his picture. For instance there is a section where Pilgrim passes Mount Sinai, which is on fire, while travelling towards Mount Zion. This is taken straight out of Hebrews 12, where Mount Sinai represents the law, and Mount Zion represents grace.
What Bunyan is doing here is showing how Christians can be tempted to earn their salvation by being good, however that is not actually how salvation comes about. One cannot be so good as to earn their salvation, and even if they are, there are still deeds that have been done that cannot be wiped out by a few good deeds. It is sort of like me going and robbing a bank and then giving all of the money to a charity.
Sure, I did a noble thing by giving it to charity, and sure, the bank may and probably did deserve to be robbed due to the fact that the money that it has was no doubt earned through nefarious means — but that does not exonerate me from my act of violence.
Even if one could say that the bank itself was bad, there are still innocent people working in the bank such as the teller in whose face I stuck the shotgun, or the old granny who was cashing in her pension cheque.
In the end, the law does not care whether I robbed the bank to give the money to the Salvos who wouldn't accept it anyway , or that they bank had committed fraud and were laundering money, I still committed a crime, and no act on my behalf will be able to exonerate me from that crime.
I have to be punished, and the only way that I can escape that punishment is for somebody else to takes that punishment on my behalf. The problem is that the Christian sect that Bunyan was a practitioner of, and was eventually gaoled for, no longer exists. The thing is that Bunyan was what was termed as a 'non-conformist', and honestly, that classified an awful lot of people.
Milton was a non-conformist as well though I believe the word puritan is more appropriate to him — another sect that no longer exists. The thing about non-conformists is that they were not Anglicans Epsicopalian or Church of England. In Bunyan's day the only place you could worship, and the only people that were allowed to preach, were Anglican churches.
If you live in England and you were not an Anglican you could get yourself into a lot of trouble, especially if, as Bunyan did, you were holding regular church services. However, the thing about non-conformists is that they were not: a Baptists; b Methodists; c Assemblies of God; or d Pentacostal either.
Okay, those denominations may have eventually emerged from the non-conformist movement, but that does not mean that a non-conformist subscribes to any of those particular denominations — they simply did not exist.
You see, if everybody in Bunyan's day were Christians then he wouldn't have needed to write this book, or his others such as A Journey to Hell.
Okay, while the multitude of faiths that we have today think Hinduism, Buddhism, etc didn't exist in Europe back then, and the only religion you would find was Christianity though there were Jews , and everybody went to church, it did not mean that they actually believed it.
In fact many of the people who went to church went there because it was expected of them, and even then it was mostly a middle and upper class phenomena. If everybody was Christian then, as I have suggested, you would not have had Bunyan writing his book, or even characters such as the Wesleys going out and preaching to the people of England.
Even then, the Anglican church was not necessarily a place that would teach evangelical Christianity, and there were quite a lot of people out there that simply did not like the way the church operated. What Bunyan is showing in his book suggests that even though people would go to church, they were not necessarily saved, and in many cases simply left standing in the City of Destruction. Also, consider the fact that Christian leaves his wife and children suggests that even when one was living in an apparent Christian country, one would still be mocked and ridiculed for their faith.
It is interesting that they don't follow him on his journey, in a sense rejecting what he believes. In the end though, what the book does in a way is to challenge an apathetic society into understanding more about the faith to which their nation allegedly adheres. January I seem to have settled into a pattern of revisiting this in January.
I am not averse to this pattern. Which is it? And I weekly weakly d January I seem to have settled into a pattern of revisiting this in January. And I weekly weakly doubt that He really wants me. Bunyan reminds me. The LibriVox volunteers, bless their hearts, all sound like mamas trying to lull their boys to sleep. Max McLean's recording was recommended to me, but I could not bring myself to set aside my aversion to his voice.
But after two friends recommended PP to me in one week, I was determined to give it another go, so I sampled all the ten or so versions on Scribd and settled on David Shaw-Parker's. He performed beautifully all the way through. This title was a better choice than my last for sickbed listening. I can follow a narrative well enough even when my weary attention flags and wanders. What touched me most was the gentleness shown to the weak and to the strong in their weak moments.
It wasn't excusing of their faults, and it did not fail to exhort them to be better, but it did not abandon and it did not despise. How much better a restorative can gentleness provide than anything exasperation and contempt have to offer! The classic allegory of the Christian life. I've read the updated modern English version of this and enjoyed it. I found this copy, written in the original text, hard going.
I abandoned it earlier in the year but then started again and persevered until more or less the end. It is both parts of the dream: Christian and then Christiana's journey. The amazing thing really is how many Scriptures Bunyan has managed to cram into the narrative. It is a remarkable achievement, overlooking the fact that so The classic allegory of the Christian life.
It is a remarkable achievement, overlooking the fact that some of them are taken out of context and quoted randomly, most are weaved cleverly into the story. I did get fed up with some of the lengthy dialogue, an example being the catechism of the children and their word perfect responses. Also, some of the theology is very dodgy especially in part two. Apparently, Christian women don't need to fight their own battles, they just need to find a hero Great heart or Braveheart or whatever his name is to conquer their enemies I definitely prefer Christian's journey part one as the Gospel is clearer and it bears more relation to the Christian life as we know it.
I'm not sure I would want to read this times as Spurgeon did but I'm glad I struggled through it if only to say that I've read the original! For Christian's journey I would give 4 stars and Christiana's only 2 so it'll be 3 for this version. Sep 21, C. I must say that I struggled rather with this book; I continually procrastinated from picking it up, and even when I actually got around to reading it, it was frankly pretty boring. Nonetheless, I'm sure it's a much better book than I give it credit for; context is all, so don't come back to me with essay-length descriptions of the circumstances under which it was written I already know.
I can and do read. Also I possess a brain I did not like this book and this review explains why. Later, the book was translated into other languages, including even the Chinese. The first edition had small pages, octavo in size, and ran to pages. Rather messily printed on cheap paper, it sold for ls. This was within the means of those whom Bunyan wished to reach.
He did not write for the literati or the carriage trade, for the nobles and others who lived in the Big Houses. He wrote for the people among whom he had been born and lived his life — humble and rather poor people, for the most part, such as he had met in the cottages of the Bedfordshire countryside. He knew and shared their way of life, their interests, their dreams.
He talked their language, and they responded. That Pilgrim's Progress, at the time it appeared, was ridiculed and scorned by the literati, academic pundits, and polished, sophisticated aristocrats did not bother Bunyan one bit. He had found his audience, a much larger audience than any other writer of his day enjoyed. In his writing, Bunyan commanded a good effective style.
It was simple, strong, masculine, and direct, without any literary flourishes or affectations. As he more than once said, "do not affect high expressions; they will drown your children. Words easy to be understood do often hit the mark when high and learned ones do only pierce the air. He could tick off a character by merely giving him a name — Pliant, Obstinate, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Evangelist, Mr.
His syntax is often faulty, his punctuation misleading, and his spelling very erratic even by the lax standards of his day in the seventeenth century, almost every man was his own speller. Even so, he captures and holds the reader's attention, and knows how to keep his story going except in those passages where he gets his characters involved in long conversations about abstruse points of theology.
To Bunyan, there were angels, and they were real, not merely symbolic. So, too, were fiends, devils, giants, and hideous monsters. Bunyan could describe them so well because he had seen them and encountered them in the hallucinations and nightmares to which he was subject in his younger years.
Bunyan accepted dreams as real, as well as prophetic. He never forgot the time he "saw" God, "wrapped all in fire," riding a dark thunderhead in the sky and scowling down on the earth as if about to hurl a thunderbolt to destroy it in a single blinding flash.
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