BUNYAN, JOHN. — English writer and preacher, born on 28 November 1628 at Elstow near Bedford, died in London on 31 August 1688. He served for two years in Cromwell’s army, absorbing those Puritan-Calvinist doctrines, which he did not abandon even upon joining the Baptists. After his marriage he abandoned his dissolute life and was ordained a minister of the Baptist sect. Morality and religion thereafter constituted the two forces on which he founded his principles of life and thought, principles which he continued to preach even after the Restoration (1660), on account of which he was arrested and kept in prison for more than twelve years. A modest commoner (he was a tinsmith), he derived his only literary education from the Bible and a few other religious books.
His major work, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), a prose poem destined to become the most widely read devotional vademecum of the English-speaking world, allegorically presents the struggles of the soul in search of salvation. Christian, the pilgrim protagonist, on his journey from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, passes through a series of obstacles; having overcome them, he can contemplate from the summits of the Delectable Mountains the towers of the desired Zion. The narrative unfolds in a style of almost childlike simplicity, with monotonous insistence on details, illuminated at times by strokes of representational force derived from biblical models. The comparison with Dante’s Commedia cannot be taken beyond the outline of the spiritual itinerary common to the two works and their value as representations of the collective consciousness of an entire age. The work reveals Puritan-Calvinist hatred and contempt for the Catholic Church. More directly autobiographical is Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), in which B. appears obsessed by the fear of eternal damnation. Interesting for its realistic character is The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680). But almost all B.’s works, alien as they are to literary ambitions, succeed in communicating to the Anglo-Saxon reader the intimate experiences of
this singular writer, who was nevertheless so distant from the demands of Mediterranean spirituality.