John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
The Pilgrim’s Progress is the most widely-read work in English except the Bible. It has never gone out of print, and has been translated into over 200 languages, being preached to Native Americans and South Sea-Islanders by Christian missionaries. It even proved a surprise hit with Muslim intellectuals during the rise of individualism in Islam. Not bad for a book written by a Puritan jailbird. John Bunyan (1628-88) received only a basic education, before becoming a Parliamentarian soldier in the English Civil War then working as an itinerant tinker. He began preaching at the instigation of the Bedford Free Church.
At the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, the religious tolerance that allowed Bunyan to preach freely ended. The new laws required all preachers to be ordained by an Anglican bishop (the Church of England recognised the reigning monarch as its head, and thus non-conformity to it represented treason), and he was arrested for preaching illegally in 1660. Bunyan was found guilty of this and having ‘devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear divine service’. He was sentenced to 3 months in prison, but this term actually lasted 12 years because he refused to cease preaching.
Like Boethius before him, Bunyan was imprisoned for a crime of which he did not believe himself guilty. Unlike Boethius, however, Bunyan was not facing the death penalty, and his imprisonment was so lax that he was able to attend the nearby Bedford Free Church on occasion and even managed to father a child with his wife. He was also surrounded by other stubborn nonconformist preachers in Bedford County Jail, and thus was able to start work on his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and The Pilgrim’s Progress, which is far more universal in applicability.
The Pilgrim’s Progress is a religious allegory, and relates the journey of the everyman-figure of the narrator, Christian, from his hometown of the ‘City of Destruction’ to the ‘Celestial City’, which correspond to Earth and Heaven. Along the way, Christian is burdened by the consciousness of his sins, which threaten to sink him into hell, and meets a variety of allegorical figures, with names such as Mr. Worldly Wiseman and Mr. Legality. The work was finally published in 1677, and proved an instant bestseller. Bunyan’s influence on thought and spirituality around the world through the book cannot be overstated.