SOURCE: Hawkins, Anne H. “John Bunyan: The Conflictive Paradigm.” In Archetypes of Conversion: The Autobiographies of Augustine, Bunyan, and Merton, pp. 73-99. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Hawkins analyzes the differences between the methods of conversion espoused by Augustine and Bunyan.]

I. THE MODE OF LOGOS: THE UNACCEPTABLE SELF AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

The “universals” of religious experience that I have been describing as archetypes and discussing in psychological terms were recognized by writers of the seventeenth century in the metaphors and language of religion. The assumption that the life of the spirit will be more or less the same for everyone is characteristic of seventeenth-century spiritual autobiography. G. A. Starr sums up this attitude as maintaining “that there are universal and recurrent elements in human affairs, particularly in vicissitudes of the soul. History repeats itself not only in man's outward, group existence, but in the spiritual life of individuals.”¹ This assumption validated both the writing and reading of autobiography for the seventeenth-century seeker after God. It was an era that abounded in spiritual autobiographies, intended as maps to help the would-be-believer chart his journey into the depths and heights of the spiritual pilgrimage. “No man,” Bunyan warns in one of his tracts, “can travel here without a guide.”² And Thomas Halyburton, a contemporary of Bunyan, writes about his own autobiography:

should the book ever fall into the hands of any other Christian, it may not prove unuseful to him, considering that the work of the Lord, in substance, is uniform and the same in all; and “as face answereth to face in a glass,” so does one Christian's experience answer to another's, and both to the word of God.³

This mirror quality of “face answering to face” is in a sense the relation between parts 1 and 2 of The Pilgrim's Progress: Christiana is both following the trail blazed by Christian, and led by the hero Great-heart, himself the archetype of the regenerate Christian soul.

Henri Talon's perceptive remark, “It is not books that copy books, but souls that copy souls,”⁴ epitomizes the curious similarity between one spiritual autobiography and another, explaining why various figures so frequently “see themselves” in another's autobiographical story. We remember St. Teresa's and Petrarch's responses of self-recognition upon reading Augustine's spiritual autobiography. To these we can now add Bunyan's remarks about the importance of Luther's Commentary on the Galatians for his spiritual development: “I found my condition in his experience, so largely and profoundly handled, as if his Book had been written out of my heart. …”⁵

One of the functions of spiritual autobiography is to serve as a kind of mirror, not only for its readers but for its author as well. For Augustine the model is that of a darkened mirror—the “dark glass” through which we are shown both what he knows about himself and also the ‘self’ that only God knows.⁶ For Bunyan spiritual autobiography is also a kind of mirror: a double mirror, through which he observes both the “acceptable” self and the “nonacceptable” self. In Grace Abounding, the unacceptable self is personified in the voice of the Tempter, who articulates all those thoughts and feelings which are repressed and denied, and subsequently projected outward.⁷ As I shall show, this too is a mode whereby the soul enters into a relationship with its God. For the ultimate purpose of this pattern of denial and projection is to be able to confront, combat, and defeat forms of intestine evil. Thus Bunyan's “good” and “bad” selves are in a similar dynamic relationship, the one to the other, as are Augustine's “known” and “unknown” selves. Spiritual autobiography functions for Augustine to illumine the obscurity of the self; for Bunyan, to purify its dark recesses.

For both Augustine and Bunyan the end and purpose of the religious life is union with God. But their methods for achieving this are quite different. Augustine does so by transforming carnal into spiritual love: as the Heavenly City, “Mother of us all,” sublimates and transvalues the natural mother, so the spiritually seductive figure of Continence is set against the “toys of toys and vanities of vanities” who whisper blandishments and temptations into his ear just before conversion (Conf. 8.11). Bunyan, however, achieves union with God by adoptive identification with Christ. This is a process whereby the depraved natural self is gradually converted into the sinless person of Christ in a threefold manner: first by emptying the self of all that is unacceptable (a process that inverts, as it parallels, the kenosis of Christ), second by projecting these negative aspects of the self onto Satan, and third, by combating and defeating them with God's help.

For Augustine the relation between self and God is grounded in the sensation of yearning, and union is achieved by sublimative possession. For Bunyan, though, the relationship between creature and creator is based on a sense of worthiness or unworthiness, and union is arrived at by identification. The differences here point toward two alternative modes whereby the soul comes to God—modes that I will refer to as “eros” and “logos.” The way Jung uses these two terms supports my appropriation of them here for contrasting religious attitudes: “eros” is a function of relationship, it is “that which connects”; “logos” is a function of the spirit, it is “that which discriminates.”⁸ The spiritual dynamic of eros is the yearning for God and the archetype of pilgrimage that embodies that yearning; that of logos is guilt before God and the archetype of psychomachia, or conflict, embodying the inner tension between good and evil impulses which produces those feelings of guilt.

Moreover, these two modes characterize other aspects of religious experience as well. For example, a religiosity governed by eros will be God-centered, or theocentric; governed by logos, it will be self-centered, or autocentric. Though Augustine seeks within his memory for the immanent God, the eros-mode requires a deity outside the self who can be desired and sought after. This kind of religious psychology will be constructed out of the sublimation, not the repression or destruction of the “natural” man. The Augustinian conversion embodies the Roman Catholic truism that “grace builds on nature,” for it assumes that in our embrace of the divine, the natural man will simply be absorbed, transformed, and assimilated. This is the principle of all archetypally erotic transformation—of love and idealism—that we tend to become what we love; that we “possess” God by loving God with our creaturely faculties. Implicit in all this is an affirmation of the creaturely as basically “good.” But in Grace Abounding the archetype of the guilty soul replaces that of the longing soul as the inner dynamic of the work: as William Haller observes, the Puritan saint “was a fighting, not an innocent soul. He put on the whole armor of God and went forth to war against the sin that dwells in all flesh.”⁹ The difference between the Augustinian eros and the Bunyanesque logos is that of the incomplete self, longing for completion in the divine embrace, and the wrong self, whose sinfulness requires that it be punished and disciplined.

What Géza Róheim has asserted of cultural groups might be said of religious systems: “Human groups are actuated by their group ideals and these are always based on the infantile situation that provides those unseen libidinal ties without which no human group could exist.”¹⁰ Mediative religions (those where the experience of God is mediated by rite and sacrament) can be seen as modalities of the spiritual eros: they affirm the temporal reality of the world and the body, and utilize the faculties of the senses, as well as the hierarchies and structure of our social systems, to achieve religious ends. Jung would see mediative religions as archetypally maternal in that they affirm, in this way, the things of the senses. But nonmediative religions (such as Bunyan's Protestantism) are analogous to a different phase of psychospiritual development. They urge us to pass beyond the eros which affirms to the logos which questions. For the primary function of the logos principle is discrimination: such religions aim at locating the causes of sin and guilt and bringing them into the light of day. “There is no consciousness without discrimination of opposites,” writes Jung. “This is the paternal principle, the logos, which eternally struggles to extricate itself from the primal warmth and primal darkness of the maternal womb; in a word, from Unconsciousness.”¹¹ It is appropriate that religions of eros emphasize God the Creator; religions of logos, God the Savior. Thus the Confessions concludes with the work of God in the creation, whereas Grace Abounding concludes with an account of the author's ministry in saving souls. At the end of Grace Abounding [GA] Bunyan writes in his role as preacher, whose introspective forays into the darkness of the self are externalized and reenacted for the benefit of others: “My great desire in fulfilling my Ministry, was, to get into the darkest places in the Countrey … because I found my spirit leaned most after awakening and converting Work …” (GA, 89).

The itinerant evangelist who defeats Satan on the battlefield of the soul is a variant on the warrior archetype. A religious ethos that emphasizes the battle of the soul with the principle of evil, and that casts the hero in the role of warrior, is one that asserts as primary the archetypal relationship between father and son—a relationship often thought to be marked by strong ambivalence.¹² In Grace Abounding the ambivalence of the spiritual child toward the spiritual father is given vivid and concrete representation in the contrasting figures of absolute good and absolute evil—Christ and Satan. Christ, of course, represents the father perceived as good, with whom the son wishes to identify; Satan, the evil father, whose claim on the son is perverted into possession. Thus Bunyan writes of his union with Christ by identification: “The Lord did also lead me into the mystery of Union with this Son of God, that I was joyned to him, that I was flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone … if he and I were one, then his Righteousness was mine, his Merits mine, his Victory also mine” (GA, 73). The metaphor of possession, on the contrary, suggests a kind of union that is at the same time consciously forbidden and unconsciously desired. Thus Bunyan writes of Satan: “it was my delight to be taken captive by the Devil at his will …” (GA, 6). In the seventeenth century, giving in to temptation, or falling into sin, is almost always experienced passively—thus the metaphor of being taken captive by the Devil. Because of this experienced passivity, it is psychologically appropriate that possession should blend into apathy, inertia of the spirit, acedia, as in the following: “suddenly there fell upon me a great cloud of darkness … I was also so overrun in my Soul, with a senceless heartless frame of spirit, that I could not feel my soul to move or stir after grace and life by Christ …” (GA, 81).

Thus it is the individual's stance toward whatever is perceived as evil, bad, and sinful—both within the self and also within the larger self of our corporate body—that informs the religious dynamic of logos. The Confessions and Grace Abounding are useful as illustrations of these two modes because they are strikingly pure examples—Augustine of eros; Bunyan of logos. In a religiosity governed by eros, the experiential reality will be a deep and unappeasable yearning, with satisfaction as the ultimate goal. Where logos is dominant, the experience will center on feelings of guilt about one's own inadequacies and anger over injustice in the world, and perfection will be the ultimate good. Broadly speaking, eros is a more primitive attitudinal stance than is logos: it occurs more often in individuals with strong regressive tendencies and more often dominates in religious movements that either have a very strong element of sacramentalism or that exist apart from the cultures in which they occur. On the contrary, individuals and religious groups governed more by logos will tend to be actively involved in self-improvement or in ameliorating social and economic problems.

As abstractions, eros and logos are contrasting or complementary aspects of the religious imagination. But only rarely will they be so clearly discernible; more often, religious experience will consist of elements of both these modes. Thomas Merton is a good example of a figure in whom the two are mixed; his strong sense of the sacramental nature of reality tends to align him with a religious eros, but his equally strong concern with evil—both in himself and in the world—suggests the mode of logos. Ultimately the eros-principle seeks to return us to a matrix of peace, tranquillity, cessation of desire; in a sense the logos principle seeks the same end—yet it strives to achieve that same end not in spite of, but in the context of a world and self perceived as severely flawed.

At this point any reader who has not already objected to what might seem an optimistic revision of Augustine—that great opponent of Pelagius who is traditionally associated with a dark and pessimistic view of fallen man—will protest this contrast between “guilt” in Grace Abounding and relative “innocence” in the Confessions. But I do not mean to equate the Augustinian archetype of the soul with an underlying concept of innocence: we are all familiar with the continuity between Augustinian and Puritan theology, especially with the anti-Pelagian emphases that both share on the depravity of human nature, and with the concomitant need for a down-flowing of divine grace to soften the hardness of the unregenerate heart. What I am emphasizing, in these ideas of eros and logos, is the individual's stance toward God. For Augustine the nature of the soul is to love God. And, given the combination of Platonic idealism and the doctrine of evil as a privatio boni, then even Augustine's corruption—his lust—becomes a distortion or a lower form of a deeper and truer love, the love of God. But for Bunyan the nature of the soul is characterized not so much by a capacity for love as by a capacity for hope and fear—a binary set of emotions that ultimately looks back to the initial act of predestination in election and reprobation, and looks forward to the final act of judgment in salvation and damnation. Moreover, for Augustine it is assumed that once the “turning” of conversion is accomplished, God will welcome back the prodigal soul with open arms. The equivalent in parable is the story of the Prodigal Son, whose return occasions the ultimate rejoicing for the father. But for Bunyan the turning of conversion does not imply God's acceptance: on the contrary, it is the occasion for even more terrible trials and tests. The parabolic model for Bunyan (so he fears) is the story of Esau and Isaac, where the son who gives up his birthright can never find repentance, can never return to the father.

Certainly there are historical determinants to these two religious stances—eros and logos. Though it would be reductive to account for the striking contrasts between Augustine and Bunyan as simply the differences between early Christianity and Reformation Christianity, nonetheless to ignore the historicity of these writers would be equally misleading. The history of Christianity shows a variety of religious formulations, each developed in response to a felt spiritual need. The metaphor of illness and healing is an established favorite—one that spans differences of religious denomination, culture, and era—for describing the ills of the human condition and the need for some sort of deliverance. The formulations of religious experience—both as experienced in the individual and codified in a religious system—can be seen as diagnosing at the same time that they attempt to cure whatever ills afflict individual and culture. The diagnosis suggested by the principle of eros is that of misdirected love; the cure is the conversion of the soul wherein the long journey through life becomes an ascent, and the “signs” of the Earthly Kingdom are transformed into the “things” of the Heavenly Kingdom. On the other hand, the principle of logos diagnoses the problem as that of a powerful intestine evil and a concomitant moral paralysis to withstand evil; the cure, again, is conversion—but this time figuring as a form of radical surgery whereby the natural man (the “sick self”) is excised and in its place is substituted the spiritual self that is Christ.

It has often been said that the Reformation was a response to the failure of secular and spiritual forms of mediation.¹³ But it is also possible to see the failure of the older ecclesiastical structures as due to problems that are primarily spiritual. The theology of Luther and Calvin (of which Grace Abounding is a product) can be seen as a response to a pervasive state of spiritual pathology; that is, as an attempt to provide a more adequate spiritual therapy for souls overwhelmed with guilt. The particular configurations of Grace Abounding derive from this cultural ethos of new remedies, new therapies, new solutions. Norman O. Brown has written that Luther's Protestantism represents a response to a new experience of evil—new in its scope and intensity, and new in the concomitant feeling of powerlessness in the face of such evil.¹⁴ It is the problem of evil that requires Reformation Christianity to replace the maternal eros with the paternal logos as its animating psychospiritual force. And this problem of evil can be seen as the result of the inadequate solution arrived at by the early Church Fathers, chiefly Augustine, whereby evil is denied any status in reality and determined to be merely the absence of good. But the doctrine of privatio boni, which so neatly solves the theological problems of evil for a Church threatened by the heresy of Manichaeism, does not solve the experiential problem of evil for the individual soul seeking salvation. Indeed, the notion of privatio boni can be thought of as a kind of theological repression, because it represents a refusal to deal with evil by simply denying it the status of “really real.” Denied a place in the nature of things, evil develops its own negative reality in Hell—the underworld of Man's mythic unconscious—propagates the countless demons and spirits of the Middle Ages, and finally bursts into consciousness in the agonized, guilt-ridden conscience of the Reformation.

The religious consciousness which informs Grace Abounding begins with a situation where the individual's sense of sinfulness is so overwhelming as to be unendurable, and where the Church, in its doctrine of evil as privatio boni, lacks any effective remedies to deal with it. The therapy suggested by Reformation theology consists of two successive stages: the first, the inculcation of an intense predestinarian anxiety and the second, a functional demonism.¹⁵ It may well raise critical eyebrows to describe anxiety or demonism as a “therapy” of any kind. But we may here call to mind Róheim's observation “that diseases themselves are also attempted cures” and subsequent elaboration: “fundamentally we find that the disease and the cure of the disease are successive phases or identical.”¹⁶ Predestinarian anxiety (the first stage) serves to increase guilt to such an extent that it may become manifest, visible, and palpable; the projection of negative impulses onto Satan (the second stage) serves to isolate the source of guilt outside the self. When considered in this way, the predestinarian anxiety of such figures as Luther, Calvin, and Bunyan is at the same time disease and cure; it serves as a propaedeutic phase in an extended therapy which, though it is lifelong, achieves both release and relief in that unacceptable feelings and thoughts are reified, projected onto Satan, and there combated.

Reformation theology opened the way to predestinarian anxiety in the addition of the doctrine of perseverance to the conversion process—a doctrine where the certainty of salvation is paradoxically achieved by cycles of doubt and despair in the march toward perfection. In Haller's words: “So long as sin vexed him [the seventeenth-century sinner-saint], he might know that God was with him. All he had to do was to continue to be vexed, and he was sure to triumph, because all existence is the conflict of Christ against Satan, the foreordained outcome of which is the triumph of the elect.”¹⁷ Similarly Bunyan observes that “great sins do draw out great grace; and where guilt is most terrible and fierce, there the mercy of God in Christ, when shewed to the Soul, appears most high and mighty” (GA, 78). Anxiety is thus a defining quality of the Bunyanesque archetype of the soul—a soul that is portrayed as vacillating between peace and terror, hope and fear: “my soul did hang as in a pair of Scales again, sometimes up, and sometimes down, now in peace, and anon again in terror” (GA, 65). These ambivalent sets of emotions produce an anxiety that is to be finally resolved only eschatologically, in a Heaven of eternal bliss or a Hell of eternal damnation.

Though there can be no total resolution to predestinarian anxiety for the seventeenth-century saint, partial resolution can be achieved by the process whereby the sinful thoughts and feelings so magnified by intense brooding upon them are then projected onto some demonic figure and there dealt with outside the self. This functional approach to Satan is the Reformation's response to the rather passive doctrine of privatio boni inherited from the days of early Christianity. It is a technique whereby the ancient principles of negation, death, sin, and despair, having asserted themselves so definitely as to defeat the remedial powers of the Church, are not only recognized but assimilated into the religious scheme of things, and, paradoxically, used as positive forces. In Grace Abounding, the self not only projects evil onto a reified figure of sin, the Tempter, but uses the negative self and its impulses so projected to tempt the self. Although this would seem to be a process initiated by the negative self (Satan) for destructive ends, it is in fact a process initiated by the true self (or God) for positive ends; in the case of God to refine, perfect, and instruct the soul, and in the case of the self to induce the conflicts and tests by which it may finally come to a realization of the predestined decree that defines its identity.

Paradoxically, the seventeenth-century emphases on temptation and inner conflict as necessary to salvation served to bring the actual components of “this world” (as opposed to the transcendent world of essences and ideas) into sharper focus. One of the most important contributions of Protestantism was to flesh out the narrative austerity of the Augustinian peregrinatio by concentrating on what happens to the individual during his pilgrimage—on his hardships and battles, his victories and defeats. In effect, this renewal of focus is a logical extension of the doctrine of the Incarnation. For if the spiritual and the natural are inextricably linked in the person of Christ, then this fallen world is indeed redeemed, and the older medieval distinction between sacred and secular, along with the principle of mediation, must be set aside. The supreme paradox of Protestantism was its wholesale condemnation of all that is “fleshly” while, at the same time, affirming such “fleshly” institutions as marriage, family, business. It is this paradoxical return to a more fully incarnational theology that is the source of the intensity, the energy, the exuberance of the seventeenth-century religious experience that Grace Abounding documents; an experience that is not content to deny and ignore evil, the way Augustine did in his attempts to be un-Manichaean, but is courageously committed to fighting the battle with Sin, Death, and Satan. In this transvaluation of spiritual archetypes, the Augustinian image of the homo viator, the pilgrim-soul traversing the insubstantial and unreal wastes of this world toward a final destiny in the next, becomes later on the agitated image of the Christian warrior engaged in fierce battle against the mighty forces of Satan. Concomitantly, there is a reassessment of the Christian life that brings into focus the life in “this world”—a new emphasis on the process of living rather than on the end of life.

II. ARCHETYPE OF PSYCHOMACHIA: THE “STATIC” HERO AND HIS CRISES OF TEMPTATION

Roy Pascal observes that in a successful spiritual autobiography the author is able to achieve a balanced integration “between outward experience and inward growth or unfolding, between incidents and the spiritual digesting of them.”¹⁸ In Grace Abounding, however, there is no such balanced relationship between inner and outer realities. Unlike the Confessions, where most of the facts of Augustine's life are woven into the texture of the autobiography, Grace Abounding is characterized by an exclusive focus on the inner life and the radical elimination of corresponding events of the outer life. Although fascinating in its excited, nervous prose and its pathological obsessiveness, it is a difficult narrative to read. This is partly because it seems so repetitive; the narrative strikes the reader as simply an additive sequence of temptations. But it is also because of the abstract and formulaic way in which Bunyan presents those temptations. That “whether I had Faith or no” and “[whether] the day of grace should now be past and gone” are orthodox Calvinist problems goes without saying; that these doctrinaire problems have their correlates in the nonformulaic truths of the heart is not so evident (GA, 18, 20). As I hope to show, there is indeed a pattern to Grace Abounding, and it is one that is constructed around those temptations.

The title of Bunyan's autobiography tells us much about his idea of the spiritual hero. For in assuming the appellation “chief of sinners,” with his great sins and great deliverances, Bunyan is placing himself in a very special category—an attitude that Esther Harding appropriately refers to as “the tendency to inverted self-aggrandizement.”¹⁹ In other words, Bunyan sins in the grandiose pridefulness of his self-perceived humility. Much of the content, as well as the tone, of Grace Abounding can be accounted for by what one scholar calls Bunyan's need to “blackwash” his autobiographical persona in an attempt to appear more humble, more wicked, more unlearned, more lowly than anyone else. This he accomplishes in the early part of the narrative by observing (and exaggerating) his inferior social rank, his early childhood depravities, and his lack of learning. Of course it was a convention of the times to exaggerate one's sins and Bunyan was doing no more than other Puritan autobiographers, since the greater the original depravity, the more glory to God in the salvation of such a soul: “where guilt is most terrible and fierce,” Bunyan writes, “there the mercy of God in Christ, when shewed to the soul, appears most high and mighty” (GA, 78). Yet the intensity of Bunyan's language suggests that he really convinced himself that he was utterly depraved, the “chief of sinners,” even though his worst transgressions seem to have been swearing and game-playing: “… I was more loathsom in mine own eyes than was a toad, and I thought I was so in Gods eyes too: Sin and corruption … would as naturally bubble out of my heart, as water would bubble out of a fountain. … none but the Devil himself could equalize me for inward wickednes and pollution of minde” (GA, 27).

At the tender age of nine Bunyan finds in himself a psychomachia of conflicting desires: “even in my childhood [God] did scare and affright me with fearful dreams, and did terrifie me with dreadful visions” (GA, 6). His early ambivalence is resolved when the love of pleasure triumphs and the chastising dreams cease as he becomes “the very ringleader” in vice and ungodliness. These froward tendencies are tempered by his marriage later on, which causes him to fall in “very eagerly with the Religion of the times” (GA, 8). On one particular morning the Parson's sermon on the evils of breaking the Sabbath awakens deep feelings of guilt in Bunyan. That same afternoon an accusing voice breaks in upon a Sabbath-breaking game of cat: “Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven? or have thy sins and go to Hell? “(GA, 10). Bunyan concludes that it is too late to reform, despairs, and decides he might as well take his fill of sin. A month or so later a woman rebukes him for swearing, whereupon he reforms, begins to read the Old Testament, and tries to keep the commandments—all to the amazement of his neighbors. Not long thereafter he comes upon some poor women speaking of “the New Birth” and begins reading the New Testament. The seeds of Bunyan's conversion have been sown, and thereupon follows a series of temptations; a crisis of uncertainty as to whether he has faith or not, a crisis as to whether he is of the elect, a crisis as to whether or not the day of grace has passed, a crisis as to whether he is effectually called. Each of these crises is instigated by Satan, “the Tempter,” and resolved by God, speaking through Scripture. During this time he comes under the tutelage of John Gifford, pastor of the Bedford Church.

Then Bunyan narrates his receiving proof of his election: “Now had I an evidence, as I thought, of my salvation from Heaven, with many golden Seals thereon, all hanging in my sight. …” (GA, 40). It is symptomatic of the structural defect in Bunyan's autobiography that this important event is narrated in such a way that we can read through the passage scarcely knowing what is happening, unless we reflect upon the significance of such evidence of election for the Calvinist. In other words, if one does not know the Calvinist doctrinal superstructure, the inner sense of the spiritual pilgrimage is lost. This climactic episode does not seem to be anticipated, in either a religious or a literary sense, by the inner events that precede it (the temptations), nor do those events which follow the sign of election seem to be at all affected by it.

Yet after this episode about election, the crises of temptation are represented as longer, more severe, and more luridly persecutory than those which precede it. The very next one, “a more grievous and dreadful temptation then before,” is represented as the temptation to sell Christ for the things of this life and comes to Bunyan in the form of an obsessive verbal formula, “Sell him, sell him” (GA 41-42). It is interesting that Bunyan tells us in one place that this particular crisis lasted two hours, and a paragraph later that it lasted two years (GA, 41). He torments himself with the scriptural story of Esau, fearing that his sin of blasphemy is the “unpardonable sin,” the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thus proof of his reprobation. He is delivered several times by comforting scriptural quotations and voices, but falls back again. The conflict in his heart between hope and despair, which he perceives as a conflict between the forces of Satan and the forces of Christ (both represented by scriptural passages), finally reaches a climax in a battle between the two textual passages—the first about the sufficiency of grace (“My Grace is sufficient for thee”) and the second about Esau losing his inheritance (“For ye know, how that afterward, when Esau would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected; for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears”) (GA, 43-66). The battle ends several days later, happily for Bunyan, with the victory of the more favorable of the two texts. The episode is followed by a triumphant exegesis of the Esau story—an in-depth analysis of the causes and advantages of the temptation that somehow reminds one of a victor despoiling his conquered foe. The two remaining sections of the narrative—Bunyan's account of his ministry and imprisonment—are quiet and somewhat more restrained; we sense that he has exhausted himself in the long and turbulent story of his conversion.

Bunyan's election-theology effects a radical reshaping of his account of his inner life. It is like a fairy-tale where he knows, but cannot admit that he knows, that the prince will survive his ordeals and win both kingdom and princess in the end. Behind the personality of John Bunyan, the evangelical tinker of Bedford, is the seventeenth-century version of the archetypal soul—that “elected Everyman” who figures both as Christian pilgrim, journeying from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, and as Christian warrior, allied with the armies of God in combat with the Devil. The pilgrim and the knight are familiar representations of the spiritual hero: one thinks of Chaucer and of Spenser, of medieval romance and allegory. By the seventeenth century the archetypes of pilgrimage and battle were universal terms that could both evoke and explain the life of the spirit. The image of the pilgrim with his staff aligns the hero with the archetype of peregrinatio; that of the knight with his sword suggests the archetype of psychomachia. The archetypes themselves are the same as those in the Confessions, but the differences in how the two authors portray and emphasize them are significant. In the Confessions, psychomachia is a minor theme within the overarching archetype of the Christian life as quest; in Grace Abounding this is reversed.

That Bunyan was familiar with both archetypes as metaphorical representations of the spiritual life is evident in his later allegories, where The Pilgrim's Progress portrays the archetype of quest in the journey of the wayfaring Christian soul and The Holy War depicts the archetype of psychomachia in the vicissitudes of the warfaring Christian soul. Grace Abounding, however, is dominated by the archetype of psychomachia: the journeys of heart and mind are rendered as various bouts with temptation, and the archetypal figures of The Pilgrim's Progress are here condensed into the antagonistic voices of Satan and God. And in this the autobiography is structurally more similar to The Holy War than to The Pilgrim's Progress. In The Holy War, the archetype of a psychomachia is allegorized as a continual siege upon the soul of Man led by Satan, from which the soul is finally delivered by Emmanuel, the Christ. The pattern in Grace Abounding is identical and relentless: assaults on the soul by the Devil and deliverance by Christ.

If Grace Abounding is the personal story out of which the later allegories were conceived,²⁰ its own predecessor can be glimpsed in the Morality Play. For the hero of Grace Abounding, divested of his good and bad thoughts, reminds one of Mankind in The Castle of Perseverance—a naked figure alone on the platea of his small ego, surrounded by the looming personifications of his good and bad impulses. And indeed, Bunyan's religious experience is predicated on a violent disunion between the two parts of the self, the “earthly” and the “spiritual.” His conversion entails the radical severance of the one term from the other and their reunion by adoptive identification with the person of Christ: “Now could I see myself in Heaven and Earth at once; in Heaven by my Christ, by my Head, by my Righteousness and Life, though on Earth by my Body or Person” (GA, 73). The Augustinian dualisms, both as experienced in the self and perceived in the world, are binary terms in a developmental or sublimative relation to each other, as the archetype of the pilgrimage from the Earthly to the Heavenly City implies. But the dualisms of Bunyan set each term against the other; they are conflictive, as the archetype of psychomachia implies: hope against fear, salvation against damnation, God against Satan, the New Law against the Old Law, grace against wrath. For Bunyan the very conditions of the spiritual pilgrimage are those of psychomachia. Thus even that great allegory of pilgrimage, The Pilgrim's Progress, begins with the threat of imminent destruction in Christian's fear “that this our City will be burned with fire from heaven.”²¹

In Grace Abounding Bunyan wryly observes that he is one who is “no stranger to combat with the Devil”—a self-perception that typifies the Bunyanesque spiritual hero. This is not the soul that seeks a loving deity so much as the soul that flees a wrathful God; not the individual who defines himself by a lost innocence that he seeks to remember and thus regain but the individual who defines himself by an invisible and predestined decree—an intolerable spiritual ambiguity that he seeks to clarify by battles lost and won. So early in Grace Abounding Bunyan describes himself as willing to be put on trial as to “whether I had Faith or no” (GA, 18). Significantly, after this venture of spiritual warfare, the Tempter makes his very first appearance in the narrative: “Wherefore while I was thus considering, and being put to my plunge about it … the Tempter came in with this delusion …” (GA, 18). The next time the Tempter makes an appearance Bunyan parenthetically tells us something of the psychology of this technique of spiritual combat: “indeed, I little thought that Satan had thus assaulted me, but that rather it was my own prudence thus to start the question …” (GA, 21). Bunyan is here scoffing at his spiritual naiveté; later on he will identify Satan, not “[his] own prudence,” as the source of doubt and temptation. What he is describing in this sequence is important because it reveals the process whereby the condition for spiritual warfare, the trial, is created in projecting and externalizing anxiety, doubt, or despair onto the ready figure of Satan.

Bunyan's representation of the conflicted soul in terms of projected and reified constructs of good and evil tends toward a static character portrayal, and thus to a narrative situation representing the conversion of the soul in a sequence of events that is additive, not developmental. Whereas in the Confessions and in The Pilgrim's Progress geographical movement serves as a metaphor for the development of the soul in its spiritual quest, in Grace Abounding there is no such geographical movement. It is tempting to suggest, as did Stanley Fish in his analysis of “anti-progression” in The Pilgrim's Progress,²² that there is no spiritual progression in Grace Abounding either. And indeed, a common critical response to Grace Abounding as a literary work is that it is so loosely structured that there seems to be no real development at all in the protagonist's inner life. But this impression may be due not to any intrinsic failure of spiritual growth, but to the predominance of the archetype of psychomachia in Bunyan's religious imagination and literary formulation. In Grace Abounding, what appears to be an absence of spiritual development may be only a failure of form, where the repetition of temptation sequences or the abrupt victory or defeat of the battle images is less successful than the journey image in rendering spiritual life into narrative.

An example of the way that Bunyan depicts the spiritual development of the “static” protagonist of Grace Abounding is the episode already mentioned when he is interrupted in the midst of a forbidden Sabbath game of cat: “a voice did suddenly dart from Heaven into my Soul, which said, ‘Wilt thou leave thy sins, and go to Heaven? or have thy sins, and go to Hell?’” (GA, 10). It is a description of a motionless event: “Thus I stood in the midst of my play, before all that then were present, but yet I told them nothing …” (GA, 11). From outside appearances—from the spectator's point of view—it would seem as though nothing is happening. But this is not so, for Bunyan is undergoing the initial movings of the conversion process: the event that directly precedes the dramatic interruption of the game is a guilt-inducing sermon, which Bunyan describes as follows: “I fell in my conscience under his Sermon, thinking and believing that he made that Sermon on purpose to shew me my evil-doing; and at that time I felt what guilt was, though never before, that I can remember …” (GA, 10). In a seventeenth-century conversion, intense guilt-feelings are absolutely necessary, for guilt makes the heart tender, and thus receptive to religious awakening. Not surprisingly, the very next event in Bunyan's narrative is his “great Conversion, from prodigious profaneness, to something like a moral life” when he is reproved for swearing (GA, 13). These three events—the guilt-inducing sermon, the voice and vision that interrupt the game, and the conversion from profanity—may seem to lack any relation to each other, but this is because Bunyan presents them not developmentally but sequentially. In fact, they are interlocking spiritual events of great inner significance in the gradual process of his conversion.

Not only is there character development in Grace Abounding but also there is indeed spiritual progression, though it is a kind of spiritual progression accomplished by fits and starts—bursts of aggressive, forward movement alternating with periods of passivity and torpor.²³ And in this, Bunyan is very different from Augustine. In the Confessions, as we have observed, Augustine's life manifests itself in a series of journeys—literally, from Thagaste to Carthage to Rome to Milan; intellectually, from Manichaeism to Neoplatonism to Catholic Christianity; and affectively from the concubine, to Monica, to the maternal “City of God.” In the Confessions, then, not only does the quest dominate the archetypal patterning of the narrative, but what is emphasized in the quest is its object—whether this is God or the concubine who deflects Augustine from his true path (though she is able to do so because his love for her is a dim copy of his love for God). But in Grace Abounding what is emphasized in the protagonist's spiritual progress is movement itself—or its absence. In this way the quest motif turns into the theme of progress, and the Augustinian ethos of seeking, desiring, and yearning into a more aggressive ethos of moving forward, marching onward, and conquering whatever stands in one's way.

But the imperfect soul cannot sustain so arduous an ideal of spiritual perfection and thus the progressive march of the spirit periodically and cyclically breaks down into periods of stagnant regressive states—the “miry bogs” of The Pilgrim's Progress. These states represent a reassertion of a primary ambivalence in the self, where the clear certainty of faith achieved in the battles against evil is once again compromised by doubt and despair. Moreover, these regressive states of temptation and backsliding are not accidental parts of the conversion process; rather, they are internally necessary to achieve that overall progressive transformation of the soul that Bunyan's election-theology requires. For the Christian who has been effectually called is a composite figure uniting in himself an awareness of “the insufficiencie of all inherent righteousness” (GA, 103) and the imputed righteousness of Christ. And the right relationship of divine and mortal in the individual is a learned one, a learning effected by means of these intermediate states of spiritual regression. Bunyan is saying as much when he stands back from his narrative and comments on the function of temptation in his march toward spiritual perfection:

in general [God] was pleased to take this course with me, first, to suffer me to be afflicted with temptation concerning [the things of Christ], and then reveal them to me; as sometimes I should lie under great guilt for sin, even crushed to the ground therewith, and then the Lord would shew me the death of Christ, yea and so sprinkle my Conscience with his Blood, that I should find, and that before I was aware, that in the Conscience where but just now did reign and rage the Law, even there would rest and abide the peace and Love of God thorow Christ.

(GA, 39-40)

When Jung writes that “the constant companion of sanctity is temptation, without which no true saint can live,”²⁴ he could be describing the psychology of a seventeenth-century conversion, where temptation is always the interface of sanctification.

This formulation of the spiritual life, where progressive movements of the soul alternate with their regressive equivalents—hope with despair and joy with fear—is represented in Grace Abounding as a structural oscillation between positive and negative religious experiences: the “positive” represented by Bunyan's encounters with various religious figures and the “negative” by his struggles with Satan in the temptation sequences. For example, Bunyan's encounter with the women from the Bedford Church is followed by his temptation as to whether or not he has faith, which in turn is followed by his vision of the Bedford women and his regeneration, then the linked temptations as to the question of his election and whether “the day of grace should now be past and gone,” then his initial encounter with Gifford the pastor, then the crisis of the “negative call,” where he is pursued by the scriptural passage “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you,” then his spiritual apprenticeship under Gifford, and so forth.

Moreover an outline of the text reveals that this structural oscillation between progress and regress itself constitutes a definite pattern—one that consists of two series of temptations and two conversion episodes:

introduction	childhood and youth (pp. 5-6)
temptations:	a series of some six temptations (pp. 15-40)
First Conversion:	receiving evidence of election (p. 40)
temptations:	“Sell him, sell him” (plus related temptations) (pp. 41-66)
Second Conversion:	the battle of the two texts (p. 67)
conclusion:	analysis of the last temptation (pp. 74-82)

The progress of the soul in Grace Abounding is demonstrable in the difference between the two kinds of temptation series and the two conversions. The first series of temptations occurs before the experience of receiving evidence of election; their purpose is to bring Bunyan to a realization of his utter helplessness and the necessity of taking on the imputed righteousness of Christ in order to be saved. The second series of temptations occurs after the evidence of election; they represent both the period of testing and trial that is lifelong for the Calvinist elect, and also the “right way” to withstand temptation. Bunyan himself tells us this when he steps out of his narrative at the end of the second temptation sequence and comments on his text: “I will now (God willing) before I proceed any further, give you in a word or two, what, as I conceive, was the cause of this Temptation; and also after that, what advantage at the last it became unto my soul” (GA, 74).

The progress of the soul in Grace Abounding is recorded in the fact that the temptation sequences increase in severity and length after the first conversion until a climax is reached in the temptation that leads into the second conversion; then they taper off. For example, the temptation where Bunyan is haunted by the phrase “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you” (occurring fairly early in the narrative) is described with some intensity: “a very great storm came down upon me, which handled me twenty times worse then all I had met with before …” (GA, 30-31). The subsequent temptation, to “Sell Christ,” is described as even more intense—“a more grievous and dreadful temptation than before” (GA, 41). Bunyan resists assent for one year, but finally in a weak moment permits the blasphemous thought and its verbal formula, “sell him, sell him,” to enter his consciousness—a “passive” sin that causes him to suffer agonies of guilt and despair for two-and-a-half years (GA, 44). This sin of assent to a blasphemous thought is embroidered with the guilt of a multitude of scriptural saints and sinners, and tesellated with such fearful distinctions as being the “Unpardonable Sin”—the sin against the Holy Ghost—and as being evidence that he is indeed an Esau doomed to reprobation. Finally, as the Tempter continues to afflict him, the two opposing armies of good and evil meet together, head on, in the battlefield of the heart. The forces of despair and damnation are represented by the Old Testament story of Esau; the forces of hope and salvation by the New Testament idea of grace. The battlefield is first set up in Bunyan's imagination: “Lord, thought I, if both these Scriptures would meet in my heart at once, I wonder which of them would get the better of me” (GA, 66). The psychological state represented by “I wonder” is followed by “I had a longing mind that they might come both together upon me” and then succeeded by “I desired of God they might” (GA, 67; emphasis added). Several days later the battle begins: “they boulted both upon me at a time, and did work and struggle strangly in me for a while; at last, that about Esaus birthright began to wax weak, and withdraw, and vanish; and this about the sufficiency of Grace prevailed, with peace and joy.” The victory is that of hope over fear, exultation over despair, the New Law over the Old Law, “the Word of Life and Grace” over “the Word of Law and Wrath” (GA, 67). It is a process of spiritual exorcism, for along with the departure of the ghost of Esau, “Moses and Elias must both vanish, and leave Christ and his Saints alone” (GA, 67).

III. LYSIS CONVERSION: THE ITERATED ARCHETYPE

Augustine's spiritual autobiography is structured around his conversion in the garden: everything that precedes this turning point either leads up to it or prepares for it, and everything subsequent to the conversion is based on the “new man” born out of that climactic event. But Bunyan's autobiography does not have this structure. In Grace Abounding, the single arc of Augustine's conversion is replaced by a series of arcs, as the Augustinian crisis is repeated over and over again. And this is one's initial response to Grace Abounding: that is is a series of temptations, falls, and deliverances, where the two conversion-episodes appear as manifestations—with exclamation marks—of the iterated archetype.

Structure in Grace Abounding seems poorly realized, and this is one reason why it is less successful as a narrative than the Confessions. Augustine's crisis conversion, with its single, transforming event, is admirably suited to the dramatic potentials of spiritual autobiography. But Bunyan's lysis conversion is by definition diffuse, cumulative, and repetitive—a conversion model that does not readily lend itself to the narrative dimensions and dramatic potential of spiritual autobiography.

But if Grace Abounding lacks the clear arc of spiritual turmoil-conversion-spiritual peace, it is because Bunyan's personal experience of conversion, and the theology behind that experience, conforms to a different model.²⁵ In the seventeenth century there was a significant minority of religious thinkers who recognized the discrepancy between the way conversion was represented in the exemplary lives of the saints and prophets, and the manner in which it was actually experienced by ordinary people. In other words, personal experience often failed to live up to the paradigmatic expectations created by crisis conversion. In a fine book called The Heart Prepared, Norman Pettit shows how the English preparationists sought to give to their congregations a model whereby conversion could occur without violent transformation or dramatic supernatural intervention. The conversion of Lydia served for some as a scriptural example of a more gradual conversion. The account in Acts 16:14 is as follows: “And a certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city of Thyatira, which worshipped God, heard us: whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul.” For the Puritan preachers Richard Rogers and Richard Sibbes, the conversion of Lydia both explained and justified conversions that did not conform to the Pauline model, since it exemplified an individual for whom conversion came gradually, and after the Lord “opened” her heart.²⁶

Those who were sympathetic to this model of conversion could claim a similar emphasis on the gradual aspects of conversion in Calvin's theology. For though the doctrinal Calvinist equivalent to Augustine's crisis conversion in the garden is the sure knowledge of salvation—the knowledge that one has been effectually called—the important difference between the two is that the acquiring of this knowledge, for a Calvinist, is not an event but a process, and a lifelong one at that. In Calvin's own words, “… God assigns [believers] the race of repentance to run during their whole life. … that they may employ their whole life in the exercise of repentance, and know that this warfare will be terminated only by death.”²⁷

This emphasis on conversion as a gradual process, or a lifelong struggle, is analogous to James's definition of lysis conversion, of which Bunyan's is cited as an example: the “gradual” or “conscious and voluntary way,” which “consists in the building up, piece by piece, of a new set of moral and spiritual habits.”²⁸ And yet Bunyan's religious experience, as he presents it to us in Grace Abounding, cannot be summed up as simply a gradual and voluntary process of unification. As he himself writes in his preface, it is a record of “my castings down and raising up”—and few were so repeatedly cast down and then raised up again as was Bunyan during the course of his conversion.

The fact that the conversion in Grace Abounding is problematic is demonstrated in the various attempts of Bunyan scholars, though they acknowledge that the Calvinist conversion is not an event but a process, to try to find in Grace Abounding the turning point, or definitive episode to which they can affix a sense of structure. Thus Margaret Bottrall, although she observes that Grace Abounding “is a recapitulation of the long quest for salvation that culminated in Bunyan's conviction that he was one of the elect,” nonetheless asserts that “by his own reckoning” his spiritual rebirth began on that day when he encountered the Bedford women. Roger Sharrock, too, though he recognizes that in Grace Abounding “there is no single sudden dawning of grace to wipe out entirely the darkness of unregeneracy; conversion is a long process of struggle”—still maintains that “there is a clear turning point. … This was when he listened to the poor women of Bedford sitting in the sun and ‘talking about the things of God.’” Ola Winslow, though observing that “his conversion story is the great story of his life, and it was life-long,” nevertheless perceives that lifelong process as beginning with the divine interruption of the game of cat. Richard Greaves observes that “a turning-point of a sort came when the rebuke of ‘a very loose and ungodly Wretch’ caused him to turn once again to a fervent religious life.” For Dean Ebner, it is the battle between the two scriptural passages that is the actual conversion: “this point in his narrative [is] both the zenith of his spiritual experience and the structural climax of the autobiography.”²⁹

This great need for there to be a single, dramatic episode in a conversion is indeed striking, especially when accompanied by the stated recognition that there is no such definitive turning point. Equally striking is the confusion as to precisely when this turning point occurs. Certainly, the crisis model exerts a formidable suggestive power over our expectations of conversion. The Augustinian and Pauline examples have been imitated both in life and in literature to such an extent that they have unconsciously shaped our very definition of conversion. Thus in Young Man Luther, Erikson points out that though tradition has led us to expect a single, dramatic event, Luther's conversion occurred over the course of three quite distinct experiences: “The fact that Luther experienced these clearly separate stages of religious revelation might make it possible to establish a psychological rationale for the conversion of other outstanding religionists, where tradition has come to insist on popular faith.”³⁰

James's definition of lysis conversion as a “gradual process” might seem precisely the “psychological rationale” called for by Erikson. But James's terms, gradual and voluntary, do not adequately describe conversions like Bunyan's; they are too vague and too general. Indeed, it would seem here that James's psychological view is, paradoxically, too unpsychological: it does not suggest what is going on in the mind of the convert. Perhaps a more precise way of discussing lysis conversion might be to consider it in terms of structure and function. For lysis and crisis can be thought of not only as descriptive terms but also as morphological categories, each having its own specific form and function. Let us then redefine lysis conversion, at least for the purposes of this study, as a gradual form of regeneration that often includes two or more crisis events. Moreover the number of crisis episodes in this more diffuse kind of conversion is not random but is shaped by particular theological arguments and dominant cultural patterns of thought.

The lysis paradigm of seventeenth-century conversion can be thought of as both a gradual awakening and an experience of two conversion-episodes. The orthodox Puritan conversion is most often considered either as a sequence of progressive, graduated stages (predestination, justification, adoption, sanctification, glorification, etc.) or in dyadic terms, the most common being justification and perseverance, or justification and sanctification. Both these alternatives are dogmatic equivalents of lysis conversion, whether it is defined as a gradual (and graduated) process of spiritual maturation or as a double conversion. Similarly, in Grace Abounding Bunyan's conversion is represented as a process that unfolds gradually over a long period of time and also as a process in which there are two specific transitional nodes—in other words, where there are two conversions. The first of these is the episode when he receives evidence of his election—the envisioned scroll “with many golden Seals thereon, all hanging in my sight” (GA, 40); the second is the later episode when the New Testament passage about the sufficiency of grace defeats the Old Testament passage about Esau's losing his inheritance.

At this point, one might want to question the assertion that there is a dyadic structure to lysis conversion. Why two events? Why not three, or four? And why the selection of these two particular episodes in Grace Abounding as the two conversions? A dyadic paradigm of conversion is variously described in the religious literature of the seventeenth century.³¹ Thus, although Calvin writes of conversion as a lifelong process—“an incessant conflict with the vices of our corrupt nature”³²—he also treats it as a process consisting of the two stages of mortification and vivification, the death of the fleshly nature and rebirth in the spirit—a pattern that derives from the two parts of the atonement, the crucifixion and resurrection. In Calvin's own words, conversion consists “in the mortification of our flesh and of the old man and in the vivification of the Spirit.” He goes on to align these two aspects of repentance with “our participation in Christ”: “For if we truly partake of his death, our old man is crucified by its power, and the body of sin expires, so that the corruption of our former nature loses all its vigour. If we are partakers of his resurrection, we are raised by it to a newness of life. …”³³

A two-stage conversion is also to be found in the Puritan theologian William Ames, whose work precedes Bunyan's by some forty years, and whose transposition of the original “Calvinese” may be said to be typical of the English theology of the times. Ames observes that conversion “is twofold, relative and absolute (or real).” The relative change he identifies as justification and adoption—it marks a “judicial or moral change,” and concerns the remission of sins both past and future by which “a believer is properly freed from the guilt of sin”; the “real” change is both the manifestation and the consequence of the “relative” change of state—it frees the believer from the “sordidness and stain of sin” and restores “the purity of God's image.” The distinction is a fine one: the relative change concerns guilt; the real change, purity. What Ames seems to mean by this distinction between “relative” and “real” is the same as that between potential and actual, or a promise made and a promise carried out. Thus sanctification (and also glorification) is “the carrying out of the sentence of justification.”³⁴

These two stages in conversion, the “relative” and the “absolute,” correspond to Bunyan's own idea of repentance as having two aspects, which he compares to the stairs leading to the chambers of Solomon's temple:

That by which we turn from nature to grace, and that by which we turn from the imperfections which attend a state of grace, to glory. Hence true repentance, or the right going up these turning Stairs, is called repentance to salvation; for true repentance stopeth [sic] not at the reception of grace, for that is but a going up these Stairs to the middle Chambers.³⁵

The iterative theology of repentance—nature to grace/grace to glory—is structurally represented in Grace Abounding as the two conversions. Thus the first conversion, when Bunyan receives evidence of his election, is the equivalent to the turning from nature to grace; a “relative change” whereby the elected Christian undergoes a kind of death to self as he takes on the imputed righteousness of Christ. And appropriately, Bunyan follows this sign of his salvation with a reference to the crucified Christ: “… [I] should often long and desire that the last day were come, that I might for ever be inflamed with the sight, and joy, and communion of him, whose Head was crowned with Thorns, whose Face was spit on, and Body broken, and Soul made an offering for my sins …” (GA 40). The second conversion, the battle of the two texts about Esau and grace, represents the turning from grace to glory; an “absolute change” wherein the soul effects a real victory over its sinful elements. Implicit here is the soul's identity with the triumph of Christ over sin and death, and thus this episode is followed by a vision (several pages later) of the risen Christ: “But one day, as I was passing in the field … I saw with the eyes of my Soul Jesus Christ at Gods right hand, there, I say, as my Righteousness …” (GA, 72).

In the language of Calvinist dogma, the progress between the two conversion episodes is represented dogmatically as that between election and sanctification (or glorification), and it is imaged forth in the transition between the early allusion to the crucified Christ and the later vision of Christ risen. The life of Christ here figures as a formative model in determining the shape of individual conversion. And this is in accord with the archetypal model of lysis conversion, where “education” or modeling oneself after a divine ideal replaces birth as the central redemptive metaphor, and the logos is split into those two antinomies of “the Word of Law and Wrath” and “the Word of Life and Grace” (GA, 67).³⁶ The two postures of Christ exemplify the two contrasting attitudes of the autobiographical persona. The crucified Christ represents the youthful hero at the beginning of his soteriological journey, burdened by guilt both acknowledged and unacknowledged; the exalted Christ represents the mature Bunyan's deliverance from guilt—a certitude that affirms the self only by looking beyond it. The conversion of the soul in Grace Abounding is always a paradoxical one because from God's vantage point of predestined election the soul has already arrived, but from the individual's vantage point of faith and humility he is always still traveling, his gaze fixed on “yonder shining light.”

I have been discussing the seventeenth-century lysis model as one that consists of two conversion experiences. But William James suggests that all conversion is inherently dyadic: “In the mind of the candidate for conversion,” he writes, there are two motions: “first, the present incompleteness or wrongness, the ‘sin’ which he is eager to escape from; and, second, the positive ideal which he longs to compass.” In a footnote several pages later, he observes that these two phases only seem to be different experiences; they are in reality the same thing: “Self-surrender sees the change in terms of the old self; determination sees it in terms of the new.”³⁷ Although James does not take this step, it seems to me that whether an individual conversion takes the shape of the lysis or the crisis model is related to the positioning of these two phases. In other words, in a crisis conversion, negative reality and positive ideal coalesce and occur at the same time. But in a lysis conversion, these two motions (the turning away from sin and the turning toward God) are not only separated, but the space between them is extended and prolonged. The allegorical equivalent to this “space” is the three days Christ spends in the harrowing of Hell (the time between crucifixion and resurrection). The psychological equivalent is the sense of anxiety and uncertainty where the individual is neither in one world nor in the other, but is suspended between the two realms of despair and elation, damnation and salvation. For Christ, the symbolic passage from “old man” to “new man” took three days, but for the ordinary human being it takes a lifetime. It is this created psychological space that is the unique contribution of the Reformation to the Christian theology of redemption.

The kind of spirituality characteristic of Bunyan and his contemporaries, one that is obsessed with guilt and sin, requires a model of conversion that is not only excessively punitive but also where there is a good measure of suspense and anxiety about redemption—in other words, a model where one can never be “too sure.” Lysis conversion is especially appropriate for the sinner-and-saint of the seventeenth century because its iterative and dyadic structure serves to deny him the too-pleasurable release of a climactic conversion experience. The notorious Calvinist anxiety, where one can never know whether conversion has taken place at all, thus stems from the very nature of lysis conversion. This is because there is no single turning point, no certain event upon which to focus a certainty about salvation. The structural diffuseness of lysis conversion is evident in the attempts of Bunyan scholars to explain the autobiography by identifying some particular event as the focal point in Bunyan's conversion, and in the anxiety about salvation that permeates Grace Abounding. It is important that we recognize that this structural diffuseness is not a product of faulty craftsmanship but a literary counterpart to the theological anxiety underlying lysis conversion—where salvation is perceived not in birth imagery, as the simultaneous death of the “old man” and rebirth of the new, but in the language and metaphor of education, as a gradual process of error and relearning, or fall and recovery, or wrongdoing and punishment whereby the soul matures into a regenerate state.

Perhaps a final reason why crisis conversion exerts so compelling an influence on the religious imagination, despite the apparent fact that the gradual model is often more true experientially, is that a dramatic, fulminant conversion is more resonant to the archetype of death and rebirth. Like birth, and death too, the conventional triadic arc of crisis conversion has an innate and compelling dramatic shape—the tension-climax-resolution that underlies Western drama from Aristotle on. Lysis conversion lacks this strong and unifying pattern. Though it reflects real and poignant religious experience, doctrinal truth, and the same archetype of death and rebirth (though it is an extended death and rebirth), lysis conversion lacks the dramatic focus and structural stability of a single, climactic turning point—a deficiency that is manifested in Bunyan's experience of a near-tolerable degree of anxiety, ambiguity, and uncertainty, and in the corresponding structural diffuseness of the autobiography. Death and rebirth are opposed phases of a single, archetypal event. The crisis pattern preserves this unity; the bipolar lysis pattern splits it in two.

It would seem as though a conversion is more compelling when it is experienced or perceived as a single, dramatic event. The attractiveness of crisis conversion is very much a part of our twentieth-century religious ethos, but so too is the belief that life consists in a sequence of changes or transformations as one passes through the enabling portals of various life-crises from one stage to the next.

Notes

1. G. A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 13.

2. William York Tindall, John Bunyan, Mechanick Preacher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), p. 39; quoting Bunyan's Building, Nature, Excellency of the House of God, 2:582.

3. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, p. 14; quoting from The Memoirs of the Rev. Thomas Halyburton.

4. Henri Talon, John Bunyan, the Man and his Works, trans. Barbara Wall (London: Rockliff Publ. Co., Ltd., 1951), p. 26.

5. John Bunyan, Grace According to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 41. All subsequent references to Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners will be to this edition and cited within the text. The full title will be shortened to Grace Abounding and abbreviated as GA.

6. “I will confess that which I know about myself and also that which I know not …” (Conf. 10.5).

7. The depth psychologist might see the unacceptable self and its personification in the “Tempter” as the archetype of the shadow.

8. Jung uses these terms most often in describing the function and characteristics of anima and animus: “The animus corresponds to the paternal Logos just as the anima corresponds to the maternal Eros” (“The Syzygy: Anima and Animus,” in Aion, p. 14). Paul Pruyser's notion of “attitudinal transference”—the idea “that belief and unbelief are embedded in, and ideational portrayals of, our actual human object relations”—is most relevant here. The terms eros and logos, which I have been using to refer to modes of relating to God, can be seen as analogous to concepts in psychoanalytic object-relations theory, eros being the anaclitic position, emphasizing blissful union with the mother, and logos being what Freud calls the narcissistic position, where union with the love object is achieved by identification. Pruyser, following Michael Balint, sees this second position as one either of idealization of the love object and self-abasement of the subject, or of humiliation of the love object and idealization of the subject (A Dynamic Psychology of Religion, pp. 223-24). Both Freud's original idea of this second form of object-choice and Balint's adaptation of it are descriptive of the psychodynamic of logos as it is manifested in Bunyan's autobiography.

9. William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper, 1975), p. 88.

10. Géza Róheim, The Origin and Function of Culture, Nervous and Mental Disease Monographs 69 (1943; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Org., 1968), pp. 39, 38.

11. Jung, “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype,” in Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p. 96.

12. See Joseph Campbell: “As the original intruder into the paradise of the infant with its mother, the father is the archetypal enemy; hence, throughout life all enemies are symbolical (to the unconscious) of the father” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces [New York: Meridian, 1956], p. 155).

13. John Dunne writes that

    “the mediation, whether spiritual or temporal, was mediation between man and God and thus between man and all reality, and all men in the Middle Ages could experience it, including the mediators themselves. Its breakdown, the breakdown of spiritual mediation in the Reformation and the breakdown of temporal mediation in the Revolution, meant a fundamental change in the structure of human life”

    (Search for God, pp. 75-76).

14. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), pp. 210-11.

15. I am here developing ideas formulated by N. O. Brown in his discussion of Luther: “The positive features in Luther are his diabolism and his eschatology. Actually the diabolism and the eschatology are two sides of the same coin. It would be psychically impossible for Luther to recognize the Devil's dominion over this world … without the faith that the Devil's dominion is doomed, and that the history of man on earth will end in the kingdom of God, when grace will be made visible” (Ibid., p. 217). I have substituted “predestinarian anxiety” for Brown's “eschatology” and have discussed it as a modality of disease and therapy. As “this world” is related to “that world” and the ambiguities of time to the clarities of eternity, so is predestinarian anxiety related to eschatological certainty. Indeed, it was Luther who translated the language of eschatology into that of psychology: “Hell, Purgatory and Heaven appear to differ as despair, near-despair, and security” (Thesis 16 of 95 Theses, Heidelburg Disputations, quoted in and translated by Dunne, Search for God, p. 79).

16. Róheim, Origin and Function of Culture, p. 83.

17. Haller, Rise of Puritanism, pp. 153-54.

18. Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, p. 10.

19. M. Esther Harding, Journey into Self (London: Vision, 1958), p. 34. See also L. P. Lerner, who observes that “a confession of one's own weakness … is not incompatible with spiritual pride. Puritanism can glory in its own debasement, thanking God that its weaknesses and sinfulness are a sign of its superiority to others” (“Bunyan and the Puritan Culture,” Cambridge Journal 7 [1954]: 239).

    When Bunyan describes himself as “chief of sinners,” he is sharing that title with such diverse Puritan saints as Oliver Cromwell, who wrote, “O, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated light; I was a chief, the chief of sinners,” with Anna Trapnel, who likewise called herself the “chief of sinners” and with Sarah Wright, who is described in an edition of her life by Henry Jessey as a “chief of sinners.” The Cromwell quotation is from Roger Sharrock, John Bunyan (London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1954), p. 59; the Trapnel and Wright/Jessey quotations are from Tindall, John Bunyan, Mechanick Preacher, pp. 30, 37.

20. Cf. Ebner, who observes that nearly everything Bunyan wrote deals with the psychology of conversion. He remarks that “this is especially true of The Pilgrim's Progress, Grace Abounding, The Holy War, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. Whenever he put his pen to paper, the result was usually another version of the conflict which he had found within his own soul since he was nine years of age” (Autobiography in Seventeenth-Century England, p. 22). See also Roger Sharrock: “In [The Pilgrim's Progress] all the concrete and anthropomorphic hints of the autobiography are developed. … Christian's progress reflects each stage of Bunyan's spiritual history in its due order” (“Personal Vision and Puritan Tradition in Bunyan,” Hibbert Journal 56 [1957]: 58) and “the narrative of his introspective pilgrimage through doubts and terrors is intimately linked with the allegorical treatment of the Christian life in The Pilgrim's Progress.” (Grace Abounding, introduction, p. xxvi). See also Henri Talon, who writes: “The spiritual development which is found in the autobiography, Grace Abounding, appears again in the allegory …” (“Space and the Hero in The Pilgrim's Progress,” Etudes Anglaises 14 [1961]: 124).

21. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, ed. James Blanton Wharey, rev. Roger Sharrock, 2d ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 8.

22. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, p. 32.

23. One might well at this point sense a contradiction between the idea of the static hero and the motif of forward-moving progress. But my point is precisely that the spiritual life of the seventeenth-century warrior-saint is represented as developing or progressing in terms of a particular metaphorical figure that has distinct formal or narrative limitations. Perhaps this is one important reason why The Pilgrim's Progress, the allegory based on the pilgrimage motif, has for generations been a major literary rendition of the Christian life, whereas The Holy War, the allegory based on the archetype of psychomachia, has never enjoyed this kind of popularity.

24. Jung, “The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother,” in Symbols of Transformation, p. 286.

25. Almost always, the theology behind such autobiographies as Grace Abounding is discussed in relation to Calvin. And this seems appropriate, since the sectarian movement (of which Bunyan's autobiography is a product) was so strongly influenced by Calvinism through the return of the Genevan exiles when Elizabeth succeeded Mary Tudor. Richard Greaves, however, helpfully observes that Bunyan's theology is as much an amalgam of Luther as it is of Calvin: “[Bunyan's] foundation principles were basically Lutheran, but much of his theology was in full accord with the orthodox Calvinism of his period.” Moreover, Greaves observes that “on this Lutheran foundation Bunyan built an essentially Calvinist superstructure with the ideas which he assimilated from the writings of Bayly and Dent, the teaching of Gifford and Burton, his ministerial association with men such as Owen, and his contact in general with the recurrent and often controversial discussion of basic Christian principles which absorbed the minds of so many in the seventeenth century” (John Bunyan, Courtenay Studies in Reformation Theology 2 [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1969], pp. 159, 156).

26. Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), esp. pp. 51-55, 66-75. But the introduction of the gradual conversion as a valid model in itself raised a new problem. As Pettit observes, “the very fact that spiritual preachers began to think of regeneration as a process, rather than as a moment in time, meant that conversion itself no longer implied immediate assurance of final election. … rarely could [an individual] gain election without the agony of doubt” (p. 56).

27. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John Allen, rev. and cor. by B. B. Warfield, 7th Amer. ed., 2 vols (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, 1813), 3.3.9, p. 658.

28. James, The Varieties, pp. 183, 206. Although the two classifications of the sudden and the gradual types of conversion are repeatedly referred to in the literature on the subject, there is far less understanding of the gradual model. The best example of this one-sided treatment of the two categories is James himself, who never discusses lysis conversion with the same interest and vigor as he does crisis conversion.

29. Margaret Bottrall, Every Man a Phoenix (London: John Murray, 1958), pp. 89, 94; Roger Sharrock, “Spiritual Autobiography in The Pilgrim's Progress,” The Review of English Studies 24, no. 94 (April 1948): 113-14; Ola Elizabeth Winslow, John Bunyan (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 48-50; Greaves, John Bunyan, p. 17; Ebner, Autobiography in Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 58-59.

30. Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1962), p. 39.

31. The idea of the double conversion is also to be found in other sectarian autobiographies, for example, the Baptist Anna Trapnel's A Legacy for Saints, Being Several Experiences of the Dealings of God with Anna Trapnel, In and After Her Conversion (London, 1654) and the Rev. James Fraser's autobiography (“Memoirs of the Rev. James Fraser of Brea, Minister of the Gospel at Culross, Written by Himself,” Select Biographies, ed. for the Wodrow Society by the Rev. W. K. Tweedie [Edinburgh, 1847]), and in Bunyan's major works. For a fuller discussion of this, see my article “The Double-Conversion in Bunyan's Grace Abounding,” Philological Quarterly 61, no. 3 (Summer 1982): 259-76.

    Bunyan's allegory The Holy War is exemplary in its allegorical rendition of the double conversion. The story is as follows: The town of Mansoul, built by Shaddai (God) “for his own delight” has a garrisoned castle in the very center, five gates, and a wall that is unique in that it can be penetrated only with the consent of the town's inhabitants. Diabolus (Satan), disguised as a dragon, lays siege to the town, and finally persuades the townspeople to open their gates and let him in. After many years of hardship under his tyranny the citizens repent. Shaddai sends an army, led by Emmanuel (Christ), who finally defeats Diabolus and enters the city in triumph. There is a trial, after which the repentent townspeople are pardoned. But the narrative does not end here; there is a second fall, begun by “Mr. Carnal Security.” Emmanuel departs and Diabolus enters the city again. Once more the people repent; once more Emmanuel defeats Diabolus and enters the city. The pattern is thus of conversion, relapse, and reconversion—the same double-conversion paradigm as in Grace Abounding (The Holy War, ed. Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest [Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980]).

32. Calvin, Institutes, 3.3.20, p. 672.

33. Ibid., 3.3.5, p. 654 and 3.3.9, p. 657.

34. William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, trans. John D. Eusden (Philadelphia: Pilgrim, 1968), pp. 161-74. I am indebted to Alden T. Vaughan, in whose anthology I first read this material (The Puritan Tradition in America, 1620-1730 [Columbia, S.C.: The University of South Carolina Press, 1972], pp. 14-20). In his introduction, Vaughn observes that Ames was an influential Puritan writer who “codified more clearly than any of his contemporaries the growing body of Puritan doctrine” (p. 14). Similarly, Eusden writes that “for a century and a half, William Ames' Marrow of Theology held sway as a clear persuasive expression of Puritan belief and practice” (p. 1). Ames's work first appeared in Latin in 1623, and underwent many subsequent translations in English and Dutch.

35. Greaves, John Bunyan, p. 76; quoting Bunyan's Solomon's Temple Spiritualiz'd.

36. Dunne, in A Search for God, quotes Max Weber as writing that “both Luther and Calvin believed fundamentally in a double God.” Dunne then goes on to observe: “Both believed in a God who had two faces, a wrathful face and a gracious face. The wrathful countenance of God and the gracious countenance alternate throughout the Bible, especially in the Psalms, but one has the feeling that these are only different expressions, so to speak, which the same face can assume. With Luther and Calvin, however, the opposition of God's wrath and God's grace is carried so far that it is rather like two faces” (p. 95). In Grace Abounding the dual face of the deity is rendered somewhere between expression (which conveys an attitude) and reification (which represents a separate autonomous being).

37. James, The Varieties, pp. 209, 214-15.

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