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John Bunyan's 'The Pilgrim's Progress' and the King James Bible
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
David Norton |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, first published in 1678, was for generations one of the most widely-read books in English. Its tale of Christian and Hopeful travelling towards the heavenly city was for at least two hundred years a profoundly influential Christian book. David Norton, Reader in English at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, considers the relationship between Bunyan's writing and the King James Bible, the Authorised English version of the scriptures produced in 1611. |
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| John Bunyan pictured by a Victorian engraver. | |
 fter the cathedral splendours of John Milton, John Bunyan (1628-88) is like a dissenting meeting-house. Yet the two belong together as the greatest Christian writers in English, and The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) overtopped Paradise Lost to become the most popular English religious work of the imagination. Like Paradise Lost, it has been both a central part of the religious education of generations and a creator of attitudes to the Bible. Indeed, though it lacks a narrative base in the Bible such as Milton's poems had, The Pilgrim's Progress is close enough to the Bible in some of its subject matter, language and imagery to be thought of by some critics as written in the style of the King James Bible (KJB). So the nineteenth-century historian, John Richard Green, could proclaim that in no book |
do we see more clearly the new imaginative force which had been given to the common life of Englishmen by their study of the Bible. Its English ... is the English of the Bible ... so completely has the Bible become Bunyan's life that one feels its phrases as the natural expression of his thoughts. He has lived in the Bible till its words have become his own. (A Short History of the English People (1874); new edition, (1888), p. 627.) |
 Green, writing in the full flush of late-Victorian literary reverence for the KJB, also attributed Milton's 'loftiness of phrase' to the Bible (p. 602), which, given the disparity between the two writers, speaks much of the kind of thoughtlessness that could enter into such claims. Nothing could be further from the super-Olympian ambition of Milton's invocations than the modest but moving words of the preface to Bunyan's autobiographical Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666): |
I could also have stepped into a style much higher than this in which I have here discoursed, and could have adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do: but I dare not: God did not play in convincing of me; the devil did not play in tempting of me; neither did I play when I sunk as into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell caught hold upon me: wherefore I may not play in my relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was. (pp. 5-6) |
In general terms he is describing the prevailing perception of biblical style. Indeed, he invites comparison between an aspect of his writing and the Bible in arguing essentially the same point in 'The author's apology for his book' prefaced to The Pilgrim's Progress. He is particularly concerned to defend his use of allegory by appeal to the example of the Bible, but the point extends to include the question of how far religious writing needs to be artful. He takes it as axiomatic that 'Solidity indeed becomes the pen / Of him that writeth things divine to men', and argues specifically about his use of allegory: |
But must I needs want solidness, because
By metaphors I speak; was not God's laws,
His gospel-laws in older time held forth
By types, shadows and metaphors? Yet loth
Will any sober man be to find fault
With them, lest he be found for to assault
The highest wisdom. (The Pilgrim's Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock, 1966, p. 142.) |
So he takes the Bible as a faultless literary model because it comes from God, 'the highest wisdom'. His sense of 'solidness' is that it is 'as a dark ground or foil' to set off the beauty of God's truth: although the Bible 'for its style and phrase puts down all wit' (p. 142), that is, is superior to all rhetoric and poetry, this is not because it possesses wit, rather because, as he puts it in a fine image, 'dark clouds bring waters, when the bright bring none' (p. 140). So The Pilgrim's Progress, 'my little book', is empty of rhetoric, 'void of all those paintings that may make / It with this or the other man to take'. Yet it is superior to superficially fine work because of its religious truth: it 'Is not without those things that do excel / What do in brave but empty notions dwell' (p. 141). |
The styles of Bunyan and the King James Bible
The closeness that there can be between Bunyan's and the KJB's styles--a closeness which seems to justify an identification between the two--is visible when Christian and Hopeful wade into the river of death: |
They then addressed themselves to the water; and entering, Christian began to sink, and crying out to his good friend Hopeful, he said, 'I sink in deep waters, the billows go over my head, all his waves go over me, Selah.'
Then said the other, 'Be of good cheer, my brother, I feel the bottom and it is good.' Then said Christian, 'Ah my friend, the sorrows of death have compassed me about, I shall not see the land that flows with milk and honey.' And with that a great darkness and horror fell upon Christian so that he could not see before him; also here he in great measure lost his senses so that he could neither remember nor orderly talk of any of those sweet refreshments that he had met with in the way of his pilgrimage. (p. 266) |
Christian's two sentences are a mixture of quotation, allusion and imitation, clearly intended to invoke the Psalms without ever becoming an exact quotation. His first sentence could easily be mistaken for a quotation, especially as it uses the characteristic refrain, 'Selah', but it is an adaptation of Ps. 42:7, 'all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me', and Ps. 69: 2, 'I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me'. Most striking is the way Bunyan has adopted biblical parallelism. 'The sorrows of death have compassed me about' is almost a quotation from Ps. 18: 4, and it balances the next phrase as if the whole of the sentence, not just the biblical cliché, 'land that flows with milk and honey', were a single quotation. This is a deliberate effect: Bunyan knew the KJB far too well to accidentally misquote. |
If The Pilgrim's Progress were full of such writing then what Green thought was true, that the KJB's words have become Bunyan's own, would be undeniable. But he does not often write in this way. His characteristic style with its very different sound shows in the rest of the passage. The KJB rarely uses participial phrases such as 'crying out to his good friend Hopeful', but they are a standard unit of structure for Bunyan. Rather than subordinating 'crying' to 'he said', the KJB would co-ordinate to give 'crying and saying'. The last sentence, 'and with that' etc., shows the characteristic pace of Bunyan's prose. Moreover, while its opening statement is an allusion (Gen. 15: 12), none of the remaining expressions have anything of the KJB in them. |
Bunyan's use of quotation
George Eliot describes her heroine Dorothea Brooke at the beginning of Middlemarch as having 'the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible ... in a paragraph of today's newspaper'. Bunyan's prose may not be that of 'today's newspaper', but the description shows one of the effects of his use of biblical quotations and allusions. Fine as his prose so often is, it generally serves to highlight the quotations through its contrast with them, underlining their religious value and perhaps also implying that they have the quality George Eliot sees in Dorothea, 'that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress'. Not everyone would take the inference, but those of Bunyan's many, many readers who read him less for his teaching than for his ability to tell a story and create character in simple but energetic language, might well have found themselves relishing the language and image as well as the truth of the KJB. If so, The Pilgrim's Progress, more commonly read by generations than any book but the KJB, helped to form a love for the language of the KJB itself, as represented in isolated quotations, and also to form a respect for it as a source for imaginative literature and the imagery therein. |
It is difficult to believe that Bunyan did not contribute to a literary as well as a religious sense of the KJB, and that he did not help show later writers ways they might use it, but just how this contribution worked, and over what period, anyone may guess. In the end these facts remain, that the first and greatest writer to found his work closely on the KJB neither adopted its style nor showed any more sense of it as a literary work than, say, the English Psalm translators had done. He did not think of adorning his work with biblical quotations but of using the Bible as the final source for, as he puts it, citing Isa. 38: 19, 'the truth of God' he always aims at (preface to Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock, 1966, p. 4). This is most blatant in The Life and Death of Mr Badman where discussion of Mr Badman's sins constantly leads Attentive to ask Wiseman what the Bible says of the particular sin, a request Wiseman always responds to copiously. |
Grace Abounding shows Bunyan's response to the Bible--which in his case is always the KJB, known with an intimacy few have ever approached--to have had a pathological intensity. Having heard a man talk well of the Bible, he recalls that he 'began to take great pleasure in reading, but especially with the historical part thereof' (section 29, p. 14). This pleasure in narrative seems to have been matched by a pleasure in language, so one reads in this part of the book of him hearing four women talk 'as if joy did make them speak; they spake with such pleasantness of Scripture language' (38, p. 17), and then of how Paul's epistles in particular 'were sweet and pleasant to me' (46, p. 19). But if indeed his recollection of pleasure in narrative was a literary one, already he has made the familiar movement from appearing to describe an aesthetic response to describing a religious one. In the same paragraph he continues, 'I was then never out of the Bible, either by reading or meditation, still crying out to God that I might know the truth'. |
When he comes to examples he leaves no doubt as to the purely religious nature of his pleasure; quoting from Luke 14: 23, 22, he comments, 'these words, but especially them, "And yet there is room", were sweet words to me; for, truly, I thought that by them I saw there was place enough in heaven for me' (68, p. 25). This is the essence of his sense of Scripture: he loves it as he sees in it promise of his salvation, fears it as it seems to prove his damnation. Just as the Scriptures can be sweet, they can be 'most fearful and terrible' (222, p. 72). |
The intensity of Bunyan
This is where Bunyan's peculiar intensity comes in. It is as if he is not reading words at all, but encountering and wrestling with a nightmare world of physical things. The whole Bible seems to live inside his head, not only obsessing him, but sallying forth with individual texts over whose selection he has no control, to wrestle, assault and torture him, sometimes also to salve him. As if he himself is on a pilgrimage, he meets with Scriptures or is followed by them; they come suddenly upon him, tearing and rending his soul, fastening on it like fetters of brass, even striking him down as dead; sometimes every sentence of the Bible seems to be against him, 'more I say than an army of forty thousand men that might have come against me' (246, p. 79). As suddenly, different Scriptures come on him, releasing him, spangling in his eyes and sweetly visiting his soul. Ultimately this tells us about Bunyan rather than about the Bible. 'I have sometimes', he writes, 'seen more in a line of the Bible than I could well tell how to stand under, and yet at another time the whole Bible hath been to me as dry as a stick; or rather, my heart hath been so dead and dry unto it that I could not conceive the least dram of refreshment, though I have looked it all over' (conclusion, p. 104). He is the most intense and subjective of readers. |
His work could only produce a similar response to the KJB in those who shared his rare temperament. For the majority of his vast numbers of readers it would be an emphatic encouragement to revere the truth of the KJB and also, though less emphatically, to appreciate both fineness in biblical quotations and, to an extent greater than in Milton, the possibility of incorporating the KJB's language into creative work. It might also mislead readers into taking what is in fact Bunyan as authentic KJB. |
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