Grace-ful Reading

393 Pages·2013·14.68 MB·English

Grace-ful Reading:
Theology and Narrative in
The Works of John Bunyan
Thesis submitted for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
at the University of Leicester
by
Michael T. Davies BA (Oxon)
Department of English
University of Leicester
December 1997
UMI Number: U105034
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Grace-ful Reading:
Theology and Narrative in
The Works of John Bunyan
Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
at the University of Leicester by Michael T. Davies
December 1997
This thesis challenges the literary tradition of reading Bunyan’s narrative works separately from
the theology that fundamentally informs them. It argues that a full understanding of texts like
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim ’s Progress is possible only through
a more accurate appraisal of Bunyan’s religious doctrines, and a critical practice that pays due
attention to Bunyan’s Nonconformist poetics.
‘Grace-ful Reading’ regards Bunyan’s theology in terms very different from those of the
abhorrent Calvinism that studies often emphasise. Bunyan’s narratives are understood here as
propounding a doctrine of Law and grace that is essentially accommodating and comforting.
Moreover, in terms of the experiential nature of Bunyan’s theology, this thesis aims to
demonstrate that his narrative works are constructed according to a specific purpose - to teach
the reader about reading the self and the Word in terms of a faith that is experimental rather than
rational.
Consequently, ‘Grace-fiil Reading’ views Bunyan’s narrative works as attempting to elicit a
specifically doctrinal reader-response, one that foregrounds spiritual understanding over
anything knowable and reasonable. Indeed, Bunyan’s texts teach about grace, faith, and
spiritual perception by frustrating the reader’s rational expectations of them as narratives.
Hence, Bunyan’s textual procedures are considered as essentially anti-narrative, his spiritual
autobiography and spiritualised allegories effectively curtailing any ‘historical’ interest in them
as moralistic or imaginative fables.
‘Grace-ful Reading’ offers a more detailed and contextually situated understanding of Bunyan’s
doctrines while exploring the textuality of his writings through a contemporary, even
postmodernist narrative discourse.
This study is organised into six chapters. Chapter 1 specifically addresses Bunyan’s theology
while Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim ’s Progress receive extensive analysis in chapters 2
and 3, 4 and 5 respectively. Chapter 6 assesses The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, The Holy
War, and The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II as sequels to Bunyan’s most popular allegory.
Contents
Thesis Abstract ii
Acknowledgements iv
A Note on the Texts and Abbreviations v
Introduction 1
1. A Comfortable Doctrine: Bunyan’s Theology of Grace 12
2. Bunyan’s Exceeding Maze: Doctoring and Doctrine in
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners 74
3. Of Things Seen and Unseen: Grace-ful Reading and
Narrative Practice in Bunyan’s Grace Abounding 110
4. Into an Allegory: Method, Metaphor and the Apology
of The Pilgrim’s Progress 168
5. ‘Sweet fiction and sweet truth’: Theology and Narrative
in The Pilgrim’s Progress 216
6. First Amongst Sequels: John Bunyan’s Other Allegories 285
Conclusion: The Legacy of The Pilgrim’s Progress 337
Appendix: Bunyan and Medical Discourse in the Restoration 348
Bibliography 363
Acknowledgements
This thesis has been completed only with the help of a number of individuals and academic
bodies to whom I am most grateful. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor,
Professor Vincent Newey of Leicester University’s English Department, both for his
professional and personal support for this research project. Without Professor Newey’s
backing and confidence, I would not have been given the opportunity to come to Leicester and
write this thesis at all. Over the past four years, his faith in me has indeed been as a ‘Mill-post
at my back’.
I would also like to acknowledge the University of Leicester Faculty of Arts Research Budget
Centre for funding essential trips to the British Library and Bedford Central Library during the
period of my Scholarship at Leicester, and for enabling me to attend (and participate in) the first
International John Bunyan Society Conference at the University of Alberta, Canada, in October
1995. Gratitude must also be expressed to the University of Leicester’s Academic Registrar,
Kathy Williams, as well as the Higher Degrees Office, for extending the writing-up period of
this thesis and kindly waiving any further registration fees.
On a personal level, I would like to thank my mum and dad (and my family as a whole) for
their encouragement and concern throughout my years of study, as well as the friends who
have made the writing of this thesis a thoroughly pleasurable, sociable, and (though only at the
worst times) an endurable thing to do: especially David Salter, Mike and Andy Hagiioannu,
Greg Walker and Pete Smith, and, of course, Carina Vitti (who has waited with the most
patience of all for this to be finished).
A Note on the Texts and Abbreviations
The editions of Bunyan’s narrative works referred to in this thesis are: The Pilgrim's Progress
(Parts I and II), ed. by James Blanton Wharey, 2nd edn, rev. by Roger Sharrock (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1960), Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. by Roger Sharrock
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), The Holy War, ed. by Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), and The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, ed. by James F.
Forrest and Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
Where Bunyan’s non-narrative tracts and treatises are referred to, The Miscellaneous Works of
John Bunyan, 13 vols, General Editor: Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976-1994)
have been used wherever possible. Where relevant volumes of the Oxford Miscellaneous
Works have not been readily accessible, The Works of John Bunyan, ed. by George Offor, 3
vols (Glasgow: W. G. Blackie and Son, 1854; repr. by The Banner of Truth Trust, 1991) have
been cited. Offor’s edition of Bunyan’s Works is still both widely available and very often
referred to by literary commentators. Offor’s Works also usefully includes Reprobation
Asserted (1674), which was once attributed to Bunyan.
Both original and twentieth-century editions of other seventeenth-century texts have been cited
in this study and no attempts have been made to modernise spelling or grammar when quoting
from Bunyan’s or any other author’s works.
The only abbreviations used in this thesis are for the titles of the following academic journals:
ELH A Journal of English Literary History
ELR English Literary Renaissance
MLN - Modem Language Notes
NLH - New Literary History
PMLA - Publications of the Modem Language Association of America
RES Review of English Studies
SEL Studies in English Literature
Introduction
This is the sweetest study that a man can devote himself unto; because ’tis the
study of the love of God and of Christ to man. Studies that yield far less profit
than this, how close are they pursued, by some who have adapted themselves
thereto?1
This thesis presents a reassessment of one of the most problematic issues in the literary study
of John Bunyan’s writings: how narrative works like Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
and The Pilgrim’s Progress are to be read and understood in relation to Bunyan’s Calvinist
theological convictions. As such, this is a study which, given the critical reception of Bunyan
(over the last century, at least) could seem to be far from ‘the sweetest’ that anyone would
‘devote himself unto’. Indeed, much criticism of Bunyan’s writings seems to offer a sentiment
exactly opposite to this, finding the theological aspect of Bunyan’s imaginative and narrative
works both difficult to accept in itself and, moreover, hard to assimilate into a concept of
‘literature’ that has developed according to the positive and humane precepts of what might be
termed ‘liberal humanism’.2 Consequently, literary studies have tended, on the one hand, to
encourage readers to read texts like The Pilgrim’s Progress in more general, moral, or
universally ‘religious’ terms, thereby ignoring the tougher aspects of Bunyan’s Nonconformist
doctrinal stance completely. On the other hand, however, those critics who have addressed the
specifics of Bunyan’s faith have often done so simply to condemn it as unacceptable in any
case - that is, as an abhorrent doctrine of predestinarian Calvinism that gladly sees the majority
of mankind damned to eternal perdition.3
1 John Bunyan, The Saints Knowledge of Christ's Love (1692), in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan
XIII, ed. by W. R. Owens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 407.
2 According to Tamsin Spargo ‘liberal humanism’ embodies ‘many values now assumed to be self-evident truths
about the nature of language, power and subjectivity’ and which arose from ‘the struggles and discontinuities of
the contest for meaning in the seventeenth century’. It is in this tradition that ‘the notion of the author as
individual subject and source of meaning, and of critic as individual subject in confident possession of the
objects of knowledge’ seems to have its roots (The Writing of John Bunyan [Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997]), pp. 7-
8.
3 These critical viewpoints and the works in which they are demonstrated will be discussed in detail in the first
chapter of this thesis.
2
In these terms, the segregation of Bunyan the ‘Parnassian’ creative writer and proto-
novelist from Bunyan the harsh conventicling theologian seems to have become the necessary
function of a literary appropriation of Bunyan that seeks to redeem him from his own doctrine
in order for him to remain readable as ‘literature’. It is the purpose of this thesis, however, to
suggest a different and more constructive way of reading Bunyan’s narrative and doctrinal
works, one which integrates a literary understanding of Bunyan’s texts with (rather than
separating it from) the theology that so obviously and wholly informs them. This study will
show how Bunyan’s texts can and should be read as works seriously engaged with complex
literary issues of narrative practice and textual manipulation, metaphor and interpretation, but
precisely in (and not in spite of) the tenets of a theology that is so often amputated from them.
*
In order to achieve such an explicit renegotiation of our understanding of Bunyan’s narrative
art, this thesis begins by instating a reassessment of Bunyan’s theology itself in relation to the
terms often used to describe it by literary commentators (whose ‘critical controversies’, it is
being assumed here, are largely ‘disguised reports of what readers uniformly do’ when reading
Bunyan’s writings).4 What this thesis proposes is that the common perception of Bunyan’s
theology as harsh, predestinarian, and essentially Calvinist is largely inadequate (if not wholly
misleading) in the face of a more detailed exploration of Bunyan’s writings and beliefs.
Indeed, such a mistaken view of Bunyan’s theological convictions is not only detrimental to a
more precise understanding of Bunyan’s narrative works but has been used frequently to
justify an ignoring of the doctrinal in Bunyan’s works altogether.
Consequently, and before anything else, this thesis will establish a comprehension of
Bunyan’s theology as far from harsh and inhumane but, rather, as accommodating and
4 Such a defence of the conflation of the practice of literary criticism with a more general process of ‘reading’
Bunyan’s texts takes its precedent from Stanley Fish, ‘ Interpreting “Interpreting the Variorum” ’, Critical
Inquiry, 3 (1976-1977), 191-196 (p. 194), and reprinted in Is There A Text in This Class: The Authority of
Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 174-
180. Fish argues that while the interpretations of a text among critics and their debates vary, the ‘problems and
controversies’ which are the focus and source of these debates ‘do not and therefore point to something all readers
share’ (p. 193). However, unlike Fish (who claims not to be interested in critical controversies in the literary
study of an author), this thesis specifically addresses how Bunyan has been read specifically in literary studies in
any case, literary criticism being assumed, here, to reflect ways of reading that have developed over time and
which often signals broader cultural implications in terms of how an author and his works are perceived and
received.
3
comforting. It will be shown that what is central to the doctrine of grace that informs each of
Bunyan’s writings is a covenant theology that is far from obsessed with any Calvinist
introspection and predestination but which, in fact, accords the human will a particularly
positive role in salvation and which, moreover, warns against any preoccupation with the
issues of predestined election and reprobation in any case. In this way, a detailed revaluation
of the central tenets of Bunyan’s soteriology will be presented, here, with specific reference to
many of Bunyan’s tracts and treatises as well as to a large body of scholarship on
Nonconformist theology and ecclesiology which, having long viewed Bunyan’s as a
comfortable doctrine indeed, seems to have been ignored by most literary criticism on the
subject so far.
On one level, therefore, the ‘grace-ful reading’ of Bunyan’s works that this thesis
proposes will involve an explicit analysis of texts ranging from A Mapp Shewing the Order and
Causes of Damnation to The Holy War in terms of a revised understanding of Bunyan’s faith.
Each of Bunyan’s major narrative works will be explored as promoting Bunyan’s doctrines of
Law and grace and justification by faith rather than any concern over predestination. In turn, it
will be shown how problematic textual, narrative, and critical issues in the reading of Bunyan’s
texts (such as matters of structure, form, and closure) can be illuminated and resolved through
such a theologically-centred approach. But a reading of Bunyan’s texts according to doctrine
alone is not the sole point of this study. Indeed, the ‘grace-ful reading’ of this thesis’s title
involves not only a revision of our reading of Bunyan’s texts according to a more
accommodating concept of his doctrine but implies something quite specific about the way that
the texts themselves need to be read.
What is suggested in this study, in fact, is that Bunyan’s theology not only imbues his
narratives with a doctrinal language that needs to be decoded more accurately by the
contemporary reader and critic but which informs the very organisation of those narratives
according to a particularly ‘spiritual’ concept of hermeneutics. Consequently, narratives like
Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim ’s Progress reveal a textual practice at the heart of which lies
a distinct (albeit obvious) intention: to encourage the reader to read him- or herself in terms of
Bunyan’s theology of grace. As such, Bunyan’s works demand to be read according to the
4
tenets of Bunyan’s particular type of salvation but, at the same time, they encourage also a
‘grace-ful reading’ of the reader’s self in relation to his or her own soterial concerns (or lack of
them).5 Central to the concept of ‘grace-ful reading’, therefore, lies the need to recognise that
Bunyan’s texts not only bear a salvatory imperative in urging the reader to have faith but that
they encourage the reader to approach the issues of coming, believing, and interpreting
according to a ‘rule of faith’ which reflects the spiritually (if not radically) experiential nature of
Bunyan’s theology as a whole.
In order to read one’s self and the Word grace-fully, for instance, Bunyan primarily
asserts that a far different hierarchy of understanding must be invoked by the believer, one
involving not a worldly carnal reason or a merely intellectual comprehension of salvation but
one that is largely irrational, unworldly, and illogical - a reading of ‘things unseen’ via the light
of the Spirit, not of the mind. It is this need to read the self in terms of an unworldly faith that
Bunyan’s narratives always encourage in the reader. Consequently, Bunyan’s works, on one
level, teach the reader in a straightforwardly didactic way about the right way to apply the
promises of salvation to the soul. With more complexity, however, Bunyan’s narrative
practice itself also provides the reader with lessons in a grace-ful hermeneutics through
strategies intended to frustrate any reader who brings a conventional or faithless mode of
interpretation to them. Bunyan’s narratives will thus be shown to urge the reader to read the
self and the Word ‘grace-fully’ first by refusing to be read themselves according to any this-
worldly precedent of narrative logic, causality, and sequentiality, nor any earthly notions of
knowledge and reason. As a result, Bunyan’s works can be said to demand a hermeneutic
approach according to the more strict meaning that the term ‘hermeneutics’ postulates: ‘a
transcendental function’ of reading which raises, ‘questions about the extralinguistic truth value
of literary texts’, and the ‘ultimate aim’ of which, ‘is to do away with reading altogether.’6
5 While the terms ‘soterial’ and ‘soteriological’ may be (and often are) taken synonymously in referring to
matters of salvation (and damnation), in this thesis a subtle distinction is to be maintained between them.
Whereas ‘soteriological’ pertains to a doctrine of salvation (and, subsequently, to the knowledge of that doctrine
as a ‘soteriology’), ‘soterial’ pertains more directly to the matter of salvation in itself. See the definitions of
these terms given in, for instance, the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
6 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, transl. by Timothy Bahti, intro, by Paul de Man
(Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), p. ix. For a critical approach which regards Bunyan’s works as emphasising
that ‘the only point of reading is to stop reading’, see Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory end
the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp.