John Bunyon

John Bunyon (1628-1688) from a sketch done by his friend Robert White.

Like his father, his early in life in the forepart of the seventeenth century was that of a tinker, but unlike most of the wandering tinkers, his family actually had a home and he went to the village school. At 17 in 1645 he served in a local military campaign, on the side of English Parliament; it left him with a life-long admiration for the military. When one of his fellow soldiers beside him was shot, the circumstances were such that he felt it could have been him who was shot. Ever after he held the conviction that Providence had saved his life. John Bunyan felt that God had intervened to save him because he had a special task for him to do in life. And he set about doing it with a good heart.

Conflicting sectarian waves of Protestant doctrine constantly buffeted England during the seventeenth century. These doctrines generally agreed on the misery and sinfulness of man. The Puritan version of these doctrines held sway around the village of Elstow. John himself disagreed with many articles held by various local sects and on that account came to be recognized by most of them as not being one of themselves, but rather as a Dissenter.

John suffered not only from an unusually strong imagination, but also from some form of nerve disorder. He was given to overacting in response to whatever touched upon his current emotional enthusiasm. His bizarre acting out and bursts of violent speech caused a lot of social embarrassment. And it earned him considerable negative gossip about his notable lack of common sense. Particularly in his speech.

From our contemporary perspective, looking back on the historical remarks about John Bunyon, his reported behavior suggests that he might have suffered from Tourette's Syndrome. Chronic tics, Parkinsonian-like shaking and uncontrollable urges to use violent abusive language are the kinds of behavior that would suggest the possibility of a diagnosis of mild Tourette’s Syndrome for John Bunyon.  

His disorder affected his religious presentations. Although he eventually joined a Baptist group and even began to give sermons by 1655, his tendency to burst out into abusive speech in the pulpit made for a short career in public speaking.

With his reputation as a dissenter who was out-spoken, the politically correct clergy of the Restoration imprisoned him in a dungeon at Bedford goal in November 1660 when he was 32. He deliberately chose to be faithful to his personal convictions and go to prison, even though it meant that his wife and several children, including one tenderly loved blind daughter, were put on the street to beg for their bread.

In 1671, when Charles II reinstated Catholicism in England and incidentally freed imprisoned dissenters, John Bunyan was released from prison at the age of 43. His family had to try to survive for ten years while he languished in prison for his moral principles.

The Pilgrim’s Progress was written, perhaps around 1669, while John was in Bedford prison ministering to his fellow inmates. It was written for the poor and barely literate and it was circulated among them as a private publication at first. Thus there are no ‘first editions’ of the text. It was not publicly printed until a second edition in 1678, maybe 10 or 11 years later. its popularity gradually grew with the result that it was being repeatedly republished, eventually it was even published with illustrations.

'It was a book which gratified the imagination of the reader with all the action and scenery of a fairy tale, which exercised his ingenuity by setting him to discover a multitude of curious analogies, which interested his feelings for human beings, frail like himself, and struggling with temptations from within and from without, which every moment drew a smile from him by some stroke of quaint yet simple pleasantry, and nevertheless left on his mind a sentiment of reverence for God and of sympathy for man, began to produce its effect.' - Thomas Babington Macaulay

The book happened, the author tells us, while writing a treatise, in which he had occasion to speak of the stages of the Christian progress. He compared that progress of his protagonist, Christian, as many others had compared it, to a pilgrimage. But he did a better job of it than others had done. Once begun, it was a book that almost seemed to write itself, at least that is how he seems to have felt about it himself.

With subsequent editions, Bunyan modified the text. Then he produced ‘the second part’ of the story: the remainder of the life of widow ‘Christiana’ in 1685. These two works were followed immediately by an extended treatment of the battle between good and evil, perpetrated by a rebellious ingrate against the King in Holy War (1685).

Going on a pastoral mission to try to mediate a family dispute, he was overtaken by heavy rain. He caught a cold that led to a fever, probably pneumonia, and death in 1988 at the age of 60. He was buried in Bunhill Fields and his grave became something of a Protestant holy site and the object of pilgrimage itself.

The book was written for the poor and uneducated. They loved it. It has been republished repeatedly until today. It is regarded as a spiritual classic because its allegorical character allows so much of the text to be applied to human beings in general, no matter what their religious perspective. It has been praised and imitated and parodied and rewritten time and again.

John BunyonFigure 1 John Bunyon (1628-1688) from a sketch done by his friend Robert White.

 

 

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