SOURCE: Knott, John R. “Bunyan and the Cry of Blood.” In Awakening Words: John Bunyan and the Language of Community, pp. 51-67. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Knott examines the violent judgments meted out to sinners in Pilgrim's Progress, theorizing that the severe consequences met by characters in turn reflects the severity of Calvinist thought absorbed by Bunyan.]

My point of departure is an episode from the second part of The Pilgrim's Progress [PP] that I have always found disconcerting: Mercy's encounter with three men that she sees “hanged up in irons” by the side of the way. Great-heart responds to her questions by summarizing the case against the three (Simple, Sloth, and Presumption), explaining that they formerly turned pilgrims out of the way by mocking their enterprise and giving “an evil report of the Good Land” that is the object of their pilgrimage. We see none of these activities in the first part, where Simple, Sloth, and Presumption are memorable chiefly for the sleepy complacency with which they respond to Christian's efforts to rouse them. Christiana, accepting Great-heart's indictment, regards them as bad men justly punished (“they have but what they deserve”) and expresses approval of the display. When Great-heart invites the two to “go a little to the Wall” and inspect the engraved plate describing their crimes, Mercy responds with vehemence, “No no, let them hang and their Names Rot, and their Crimes live for ever against them.” Mercy recoils at the thought of moving closer, but she is quick to approve the punishment. Her response mingles repulsion, fear (she has just said it is fortunate that they were hanged, since “who knows else what they might a done to such poor Women as we are”), and vigorous moral judgment. Her subsequent song, directed to the three victims, affirms her moral superiority and transforms their bodies into a warning for pilgrims:

Now then, you three, hang there and be a Sign
To all that shall against the Truth combine:
And let him that comes after, fear this end,
If unto Pilgrims he is not a Friend.

(PP, 214)

Mercy begins her journey as a shy, uncertain young woman and develops into the embodiment of mercy, busying herself with making clothes for the poor. When Mr. Cruelty says of Faithful at the conclusion of his trial in Vanity Fair, “Hanging is too good for him” (97), the comment at least seems in character. But Mercy's harshness (“let them hang and their Names Rot”) seems startlingly out of character, here and a little later when she endorses the punishment of Mistrust and Timorous (“burned thorough the Tongue with an hot Iron, for endeavouring to hinder Christian in his Journey” [218]) by quoting Psalm 120: “what shall be done unto thee thou false Tongue? sharp Arrows of the mighty, with Coals of Juniper.” In the second instance, Bunyan authorizes the punishment and Mercy's acceptance of it by the fierceness of the biblical metaphor, but the shift from the metaphoric to the literal (a hot iron burning through the tongues of malefactors) jars, as does the image of rotting bodies in irons. Mercy may avoid speaking of bodies—she would have their names (reputations) rot and would fix their significance as a sign—but readers cannot avoid the presence of these bodies at the center of the scene.

Mercy's uncharitable sentiments seem surprising, even unintentionally ironic, to a modern reader, but they reflect an uncompromising attitude toward unregenerate sinners and temptations to sin that runs through The Pilgrim's Progress. Bunyan frequently shows the presumptuous and the unwary meeting violent ends, as exemplary in their way as the criminal justice administered by some mysterious agency to a Sloth or a Timorous. In the first part, for example, Formalist and Hypocrisy quickly find themselves on dangerous ground, with one taking the way to Destruction where he meets his death in the surreal “wide field full of dark Mountains” (PP, 42); Christian and Hopeful see the bodies of those who have fallen from the Hill of Error “dashed all to pieces” (120) at the bottom; Ignorance is snatched from the gate of Heaven and thrust into Hell, prompting critics to seek explanations for what has seemed to some a gratuitous severity. Bunyan enacts a form of judgment in such cases, offering a fictional analogue to the supposed judgments of actual sinners he reports in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman.¹ The “judgments” of sinners in The Pilgrim's Progress, like the conventional ones Bunyan invokes in Mr. Badman, reflect a need to see events as providentially ordered. They offer confirmation of a divine power to punish the erring, although without removing the sense of danger and uncertainty that hangs over the way. One can easily fall into a pit and be dashed to pieces, the unhappy fate of Vain-confidence.

One can find an explanation for the violence of such judgments, whether in the form of deliberate punishments or of unexpected deaths, in the severity of the Calvinist thought Bunyan absorbed, which allows no room for mercy for the reprobate and a considerable amount for the wrath of God. Thomas Luxon has argued recently that false pilgrims are personifications of the attachment of true pilgrims such as Christian and Faithful to “worldly things and worldly thinking”; he explains the violence, interestingly, by claiming that Christian and Faithful “violently ‘out’ their own carnal nature and attach it to others, who must be destroyed.”² The Calvinist emphasis on relentless mortification of the flesh would support such a view, although some false pilgrims may seem more nearly projections of the weaknesses of Christian and friends than others. A problem with this view of the allegory is that it risks dissolving the social ground of Bunyan's frequently satiric vision. That is, it slights the sense in which these characters embody social types as well as tendencies to which would-be pilgrims may be subject. Bunyan's “judgments” should be seen, I think, as reflecting attitudes toward these types as well as recognition of tendencies to particular forms of sin. I would agree with Luxon in finding brutality in the treatment of Sloth, Simple, and Presumption and Mercy's reaction to it. He locates this ultimately in Bunyan's religion and suggests that “Allegorizing the world helps to make such brutality thinkable.”³ The question of why one finds this kind of brutality in Bunyan's imaginative writing, if brutality is indeed the right word, deserves further exploration.

Cultural violence offers another kind of explanation. Bunyan's writings reflect a culture in which the Quaker leader James Nayler could be punished for blasphemy, by act of Parliament, by having his tongue pierced with a hot iron (he also had his forehead branded with a “B” and was whipped through London and Bristol, the site of his alleged impersonation of Christ). Heads of those convicted of treason were still displayed as a warning. In January 1661, in a notorious incident that commemorated the execution of Charles I, those of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton were exhibited on poles on top of Westminster Hall after their bodies were exhumed.⁴ One could find other manifestations of violence in the culture, but the interesting question, to which I will return, is why Bunyan incorporated the kinds of violence he did in his allegory. Bunyan was far from sympathetic with Nayler's views, but why would he inflict on false pilgrims (Mistrust and Timorous) a brutal punishment for blasphemy most likely to be used against Nonconformists?

I believe that the answer is to be found partly in the atmosphere of Bunyan's imaginative world, in which violence against the reprobate and the enemies of God cannot be separated readily from instances of violence that Bunyan uses to express the struggles of the soul and of the Christian community on the path to the New Jerusalem. The violent confrontations that effectively blend Bunyan's reading in chapbook romances with biblical imagery, from Christian's combat with Apollyon to Great-heart's victories over the giants of the second part, convey a sense of urgency that is fundamental to Bunyan's Christianity. All uses of the popular imagery of Christian warfare in the period suggest some degree of urgency, but Bunyan's, especially in the first part of The Pilgrim's Progress, create an atmosphere of virtually continuous crisis. Bunyan would have his readers believe that the journey is a matter of life and death, from the moment of Christian's flight from the City of Destruction, with danger and incipient violence never far away until one reaches the security and ease of Beulah, in the environs of the New Jerusalem. Even then the crossing of the river lies ahead, dangerous for those who forget the promises that sustain them, as Christian nearly does. In the world of The Pilgrim's Progress those who feel an insufficient sense of crisis, and are consequently neither anxious nor watchful, are frequently surprised by disaster. To claim a truth one does not in fact possess, or to impede others in the pursuit of truth, is to invite a violent end that suggests the damnation of the soul.

The hazards that Christian encounters reflect an anxiety about election that often takes the form of fears of destruction. I have commented elsewhere on Bunyan's habit of expressing psychic states through imagery of bodily abuse, including the spectacular physical torments inflicted upon the early Christian martyrs.⁵ Bunyan's fascination with the most extreme form of bodily abuse, dismemberment, suggests a dread of losing the sense of identity as a member of the elect that he continually seeks to confirm. Images of dismemberment surface when Christian's grip on this identity, and even his sanity, seems most precarious. In the Valley of the Shadow of Death Christian imagines that he will be “torn in pieces” (63) by the fiends whose noises he hears; Giant Despair's ultimate threat to Christian and Hopeful, after beating them and urging suicide, is to tell them how he tore their predecessors in pieces and how “within ten days I will do [the same] to you” (117). Such threats of annihilation suggest a paralyzing dread that would undermine the faith necessary to sustain the journey.

Bunyan's imagination was haunted by images of lions, which he could have found in popular romances but knew primarily from Scripture, where lions frequently threaten destruction and in the New Testament come to be associated with Satanic power, notably in Peter's description of the devil as a “roaring lion” walking about and “seeking whom he may destroy” (1 Peter 5:8). Bunyan uses lions to suggest the external threat of persecution, as in the case of the lions that flank the way up Hill Difficulty, but they typically suggest a threat to psychic equilibrium as well. When Timorous and Mistrust tell Christian about the lions in the path, his imagination leaps to the thought of them ranging in the night for their prey: “how should I escape being by them torn in pieces?” (45). Christian manages to control this potentially disabling dread, barely, encouraged by Watchful's assurance that the lions are chained, and thus survives what Bunyan presents as a trial of faith. Bunyan's lions take on some of the resonance they have for the psalmist, who prays for deliverance from his persecutors, “lest he tear my soul like a lion, rending it to pieces” (Ps. 7:2). The threat to the body becomes a threat to the soul, and to Christian's sense of identity as a pilgrim. Apollyon the destroyer, with his lion's mouth, suggests both the pride Christian must master if he is to get through the Valley of Humiliation and a demonic power that challenges the truth and authority of God and threatens Christian's whole being. The superior power of the Scripture he remembers in the nick of time enables him to survive this particular trial of faith, of course, and Christian can emerge from his death struggle to give thanks “to him that hath delivered me out of mouth of the Lion” (60), in words that echo Paul's upon his (temporary) escape from Nero's persecution in Rome (2 Tim. 4:17).

I dwell on this fear of being devoured, or torn to pieces, because it seems to me related to the violence Bunyan shows visited upon sinners and, especially, upon persecutors of the godly.⁶ In reading Bunyan's imaginative works one gets the sense of entering a world in which violent forces are in play, representing divine as well as demonic power. The violence of these forces, which Christian must somehow understand and survive, has the effect of establishing the intensity of his spiritual life and the urgency of the crises in which he finds himself. His initial flight is precipitated by a vision of collective destruction (“This our City will be burned with fire from Heaven” [8]), and he quickly finds himself personally threatened by the terrors of the law in the form of a lowering hill flashing fire. The wrath of God hovers over The Pilgrim's Progress, although once Christian has passed through the wicket gate and committed himself to the way he finds himself dealing with other kinds of forces in the threats presented by Apollyon and the Valley of the Shadow of Death and by the hostility of society toward pilgrims in Vanity Fair. Confronting and mastering the terrors such experiences arouse, by drawing strength from the sustaining power of God's Word, becomes a necessary part of the process of establishing his identity as a member of the elect. The violence or threatened violence that he must contend with in these trials of faith confirms him in his role of Christian soldier. Bunyan would have seen this process as analogous to that by which the violence directed at the early martyrs (“thrown to the wild Beasts, burned at the Stakes … and a thousand other fearful Torments” [MW, (The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan)5: 167]) strengthened their faith and enabled them to triumph spiritually over their persecutors. If Christian is a soldier who stumbles in the first part of The Pilgrim's Progress, he becomes more clearly heroic when seen from the distancing perspective of the second part. Great-heart tells the story of Christian and Faithful standing “undaunted” before the judge of Vanity Fair, “a couple of Lyon-like Men” who “set their Faces like Flint” (272).

To call Christian “Lyon-like” is to invest him with a boldness and power that derive from faith and from the confidence in divine support that faith engenders. Those not so bold or persevering as Christian and his godly companions are more obviously exposed to the wrath of God. One way to see the fate of such characters as Sloth and Timorous is as a manifestation of this wrath, although in these cases judgment takes the form of punishment that would have been recognizable to Bunyan's contemporary audience. It was important to establish the force of this wrath, to show it as the dominant power in the imaginative world of The Pilgrim's Progress and to see it as vindicating the perseverance of the faithful. The satisfaction that Bunyan's pilgrims often take in the judgments of those who lack their vision or who actively oppose them suggests a need to see the evidence of this power displacing that of the state in a world in which they can believe.

Bunyan gave divine wrath a more explicit and powerful role in The Holy War, [HW] written at a time of intensified pressure on Nonconformists.⁷ In their initial conquest of the lapsed Mansoul the captains of Shaddai display a remarkable ferocity. Judgment speaks in the language of Isaiah (66:15) in an effort to arouse terror in the besieged inhabitants: “He hath prepared his Throne for Judgment; for he will come with fire, and with his Chariots like a whirl-wind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebukes with flames of fire” (HW, 46). Execution, following him, invokes a homelier and more immediately threatening New Testament metaphor from Matthew (3:10): “Behold the Ax is laid to the root of the Trees, every Tree therefore that bringeth not forth good fruit, is hewen down and cast into the fire” (46). When Boanerges and Conviction take possession of Mansoul in the name of Emanuel, after a slaughter that Bunyan represents in graphic terms (Conviction splits Secure's head open with a two-handed sword), we are told that “their faces were the faces of Lions, and their words like the roaring of the Sea” (93). Bunyan draws here upon Old Testament passages representing God as a lion in his wrath⁸ to heighten the ferocity of the captains and to suggest that they embody a power superior to that of Diabolus, described earlier as roaring upon Mansoul “as a Lyon upon the prey” (11).

In the posture of these captains, and in the insistence of the victorious Emanuel upon complete submission by the inhabitants of Mansoul, Bunyan offers an allegorical version of the process of salvation that places heavy stress upon the wrath and threatened judgment of God and the impotence of the sinner before God. I would agree with Stuart Sim that these scenes embody a severity and intolerance that reflects Bunyan's Calvinism, and a suggestion of revenge in Emanuel's treatment of the conquered Diabolus, chained to the wheels of the chariot in which Emanuel rides in triumph through Mansoul.⁹ Bunyan conveys a mood of “terrour and dread,” in the words of his captains, using images of violence and impending violence to suggest the scope of the wrath of God directed against the resisting sinner. Yet one should distinguish between the majority of the inhabitants of Mansoul, granted mercy when they finally do submit, and the unrepentant and unpardoned Diabolus and his followers.

Diabolus, represented as a tyrant in his governance of Mansoul, constitutes one version of a figure that assumes a large importance in Bunyan's writings, the persecutor or enemy of the godly. Persecutors in Bunyan's work, as in the tradition of Christian martyrdom that he absorbed from the Bible and from John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, typically rage against the godly out of an apparent hatred of their claims to truth and goodness and the potential for subversion of custom and established authority that these claims represent. We see an instance of this rage in the attitudes of judge and jury in the trial of Christian and Faithful in Vanity Fair and the ferocity of the punishments inflicted upon the body of Faithful. Christian escapes, we are informed, because “he that over-rules all things, having the power of their rage in his own hand, so wrought it” (PP, 97), but we get no promise or foreshadowing of God's punishment of persecutors here, only an affirmation of Faithful's spiritual triumph in his translation to heaven and in Christian's memorializing song. The thrust of the episode is to show that Christians must be prepared to suffer persecution, and to resist even “unto blood” as Evangelist warns they should be. The balance of power appears to shift in the second part, in Great-heart's decisive victories over the giants, whose prominent role reflects the renewed persecution of Nonconformists and elevated fears of Catholicism at the time Bunyan wrote. As critics have noted, Great-heart's heroism is a measure of Bunyan's increased sense of the importance and effectiveness of the Nonconformist pastor, especially in offering spiritual guidance to the weaker members of the church, but it also suggests a need to represent the vengeance of God against the enemies of the church.

Great-heart's interventions, against a series of enemies who threaten or impede pilgrims (Grim with his lions, Maul, Slay-good, the monster in the woods outside Vanity Fair), can be read allegorically as a deliverance from fear, chiefly of persecution, whether this is local persecution under the penal laws used against Nonconformists or the broader persecution represented by the history of the Catholic Church as this was understood by Protestants. These deliverances reinforce the emphasis on assurance that characterizes the second part. Yet the violence and bloodiness of the victories also suggest a delight in the prospect of vengeance for the oppression of the true church. Great-heart is a vehicle for the wrath of God, which Bunyan believed would overwhelm the rage of persecutors so prominent in the history of the true church. When Great-heart tells Slay-good that he has come “to revenge the Blood of Pilgrims” (209) and then displays his head as a “Terror” to those tempted to imitate him, he enacts a kind of decisive justice that Bunyan could not reasonably expect to see in this life. By rendering it allegorically, he could indulge in a form of prophecy, or perhaps wish fulfillment, that would have been assuring to his readers. Such readers could exult in these bloody victories over evil in God's name, as they presumably did in reading about the violent conquests of St. George and other heroes of faith in The Seven Champions of Christendom.

Most critics would agree that Bunyan preferred what he called “patient enduring” to any kind of action against the state (“Keep company with holy, and quiet, and peaceable men” [MW, 10: 78, 79]) and distanced himself from those who advocated violent resistance. In his unfinished Exposition on the Ten First Chapters of Genesis he views persecutors as the “brood of Cain” and predicts that they will be punished, but, as W. R. Owens has noted, insists that vengeance be left to God (MW, 12: xlv-xlvii). In Seasonable Counsel in particular Bunyan argues that Christians should bear suffering with patience and understand that it is sent for the trial and strengthening of their faith, developing what Richard Greaves has characterized as an ethic of suffering.¹⁰ I have argued elsewhere for the pervasiveness of Bunyan's use of the language and the attitudes associated with Protestant martyrdom as a way of dramatizing the ideal of Christian suffering. I want to argue here, however, for more attention to what could be regarded as the other side of Bunyan's advocacy of suffering: a confidence, even exultation, in a divine justice that will ensure that those who inflict the suffering will be punished.

Bunyan could urge his readers to “suffer with Abel, until your Righteous Blood be spilt,” patiently enduring the violence of “wicked and blood-thirsty Men,” because he was confident that “our Blood will cry from the ground against them” (MW, 12: 173, 172). He tended to associate various kinds of suffering with martyrdom, as a means of dramatizing and giving greater significance to this suffering, and would have seen the powerful cry of Abel's innocent blood as anticipating that of Christian martyrs “slain for the word of God,” shown in Revelation 6:9-10 as crying with a “loud voice” from under the altar: “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” In his commentary on Genesis Bunyan offers repeated assurances that the cry of blood will be answered:

O the Cries of Blood are strong cries … that never cease to make a noise, untill they have procured Vengeance from the hands of the Lord of Sabbath.

(166)

The Voice of Blood is a very killing voice, and will one day speak with such Thunder and terror in the Consciences of all the brood of Cain, that their pain and burthen will be for ever unsupportable.

(167)

The notion of a “killing voice” speaking with thunder invests the persecuted with a sense of agency, as if this voice not only calls forth the vengeance but itself embodies the power of divine wrath to terrify and punish.¹¹ At the same time that Bunyan counsels suffering patiently, and leaving acts of vengeance to God, he takes satisfaction in the prospect that the violence historically inflicted upon the followers of the true church will be redirected against persecutors. If he needed to imagine violence against himself to establish the urgency and intensity of his spiritual struggle, he also needed to believe that violence would be returned upon the heads of persecutors, in a validation of God's authority and power.

In his commentary on Genesis Bunyan displaces the violence to be suffered by persecutors to an indefinite future, “one day,” and he typically expresses it by invoking the apocalyptic imagery of Scripture, notably in the posthumous Of Antichrist, and His Ruine. Like so many Protestants, he found in Old Testament prophecies of “the day of the Lord's vengeance” and in Revelation the destruction of Rome and of all persecutors of the true church, although unlike some he avoided fixing dates for the return of Christ or working out scriptural keys to historical events.¹² By counseling obedience to kings and representing them as the agents of the destruction of Antichrist, Bunyan made it clear that Christians should trust to God and not seek their own means of deliverance from affliction. Yet it is significant that Bunyan could counsel political moderation, and dwell on the necessary trials of the suffering church, while enthusiastically embracing biblical language showing the wrath of God unleashed against Antichrist. Thus he can anticipate the destruction of the ordinances of Antichrist, including civil laws under which Nonconformists suffer in England, by “the Spirit of his Mouth, and the Brightness of his Coming,” drawing upon the resonant language of 2 Thessalonians (7-8). Or invoke Old Testament representations of divine wrath to suggest the character of God's revenge: “I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh” (Deut. 32:42; MW, 13: 43, 453). Of Antichrist, in particular, reveals Bunyan's strong attraction to this scriptural rhetoric of violence.

Bunyan was not unique, certainly, in his ability to reconcile a Pauline theology of suffering with prophecies of divine vengeance. The New Testament provided a model, and various kinds of Protestant writing, from Foxe's martyrology to commentaries on Revelation, offered more immediate examples. What seems more remarkable is the way Bunyan incorporates violence against evil in his imaginative works while embracing the ideal of patient suffering. One should recognize that such suffering does not have to be passive or wholly submissive. Faithful can accept the role of martyr and yet give aggressive testimony of God's truth before an abusive judge, defying the authority that empowers him. Even less obviously combative stances such as the one Bunyan reports adopting in A Relation of My Imprisonment embody a form of aggression. In declaring his willingness to “lie down and to suffer what they shall do unto me” (GA, [Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners] 125), Bunyan chose to give his testimony by remaining in prison, thereby challenging the civil authority under which he was held and providing an example of resistance to those who might be tempted to conform. By adopting a posture of readiness to suffer for a superior truth, that the Pauline injunction to go forth and preach the gospel should take precedence over a law restricting preaching, he was boldly claiming the spiritual high ground. One can see a more subtle kind of defiance in William Penn's parting remarks to the court after being sentenced to Newgate for speaking at an illegal gathering: “I scorn that Religion that is not worth Suffering for. … Thy Religion persecutes, and mine forgives: and I desire my God to forgive all you that are concerned with my commitment, and I leave you all in perfect Charity, wishing your everlasting salvation.”¹³ One could call this aggressive forgiveness. Penn opposes the stance of Christ, which he imitates here, to that of a judge determined to stamp out conventicles, as a way of asserting that God's truth cannot be defeated by secular power. Faithful, the Bunyan of A Relation, and Penn all practice a kind of bold speaking, authorized by the example of the apostles before their accusers, that has the effect of opposing one kind of power to another, an assumed spiritual power to the visible authority of law and the courts.

Such examples illustrate the inherent tension between an ideal of testifying to the truth before a hostile audience and an ethic of suffering that enjoins one to “take thy affliction with meekness and patience,” as Bunyan urges in Seasonable Counsel (MW, 10: 97). This tension is particularly apparent in the case of Faithful, whose last reported words are a denunciation of the ruling class of Vanity Fair as “more fit for a being in Hell, then in this Town and Countrey” (95). It is much less apparent in a work of practical divinity such as Seasonable Counsel, in which Bunyan was concerned to advise his readers how to suffer in a period of intensified persecution and to assure them that they could endure. The “holy boldness” he advocates there is a boldness in facing suffering and trusting God. The way “to imbolden thy face against the faces of thine enemies,” he advises, is to be willing to accept any amount of suffering; one can thus assure a “quiet conscience” and provoke God to “appear for thy rescue, or to revenge thy blood when thou art gone” (MW, 10: 98). One of Bunyan's emphases in Seasonable Counsel is on the need to avoid a desire for revenge. Revenge is “of the flesh”; it proceeds from the “gross motions of an angry mind” (MW, 10: 100, 101). The implication here, as in Bunyan's commentary on Genesis, is that vengeance should be left to God.

Yet in the imaginative works Bunyan often seems to appropriate vengeance to himself, as narrator, acting on behalf of a justice we are encouraged to read as divine. In the cases of Sloth and Timorous, to which Mercy reacts so vigorously, we see the punishments but not the agency by which they are administered. And, interestingly, such justice as Sloth and Timorous and their companions receive takes the form of punishments that mimic those of a judicial system whose victims were frequently Nonconformists in the period in which Bunyan wrote. It is as though Bunyan appropriated the machinery of a system he would have seen as repressive in many of its workings to show, not without irony, how it would be replaced by the superior justice of God. I want to conclude by examining another episode that resembles the one with which I began, in the sense that it offers an instance of violence being turned against the wicked, in this case against those who could be considered persecutors or enemies of God on one allegorical level. This is the trial, actually two trials, of the Diabolonians in The Holy War.

In the trial scenes of The Holy War, as in the trial of Christian and Faithful in Vanity Fair, Bunyan showed himself a master of the kind of allegorical trial popularized by such writers as Richard Bernard (in The Isle of Man) and Richard Overton (in The Araignement of Mr. Persecution).¹⁴ Something interesting happens, however, when we move from the trial in Vanity Fair, in which Bunyan exposes the ruthlessness with which the machinery of justice was used against Restoration Nonconformists and associates this with the callousness of the ruling class (Lord Hategood the judge, and such jurors as Lord Lechery and Sir Having-Greedy), to the trials of the ungodly in The Holy War. While there are crucial differences (False-peace tries to deny his identity while Faithful frankly declares his and defies the court), the judge and jury in Mansoul are similarly relentless, now in the name of truth and righteousness. The outcome, execution, is similarly foreordained and in The Holy War takes the shocking form of crucifixion. The editors of the excellent Oxford edition of The Holy War, James Forrest and Roger Sharrock, call this a flaw and see Bunyan as betrayed by his trust in the language of the Bible, in this case the Pauline metaphor of crucifying the flesh.¹⁵ Perhaps Bunyan did miscalculate the effect of literalizing the biblical metaphor, yet the mood of The Holy War, not only in the trial scenes but in others in which the Diabolonians suffer violence, suggests that this effect is not wholly accidental. Bunyan shows an unmistakable gusto, even rough humor, in rendering the punishments and setbacks of the Diabolonians. When he describes the mutiny against the rule of Diabolus led by Understanding and Conscience, which leads to what amounts to a street brawl, he relishes the damage inflicted by the rebels: “Nor did the other side wholly escape, for there was one Mr. Rashhead, a Diabolonian, that had his brains beat out by Mr. Mind, the Lord Willbewills servant; and it made me laugh to see how old Mr. Prejudice was kickt and tumbled about in the dirt” (HW, 61). Mr. Prejudice escapes this time with “his crown soundly crackt,” but later we see him “cut down to the ground” by Captain Execution in what Bunyan describes as the “very great slaughter” that accompanies the conquest of Mansoul by Diabolus (89).

The most furious and malignant of the Diabolonians are the Bloodmen (“They must have blood, the blood of Mansoul, else they die” [230]), led by captains whose names suggest the history of persecution (they include Cain, Nimrod, and Pope). By showing captains Credence and Patience put in charge of the defense against the Bloodmen, Bunyan suggests that the best resistance to persecution is to practice the faith and patient endurance associated with martyrdom. One might expect that Bunyan would show the destroyers destroyed, in the spirit of representing divine vengeance, but Emanuel stops the killing by commanding that they be taken alive and the worst of them bound over for the day of Judgment, “the great and general Assizes” (234). The implication is that the only sufficient punishment is the ultimate one, eternal torment in hell. Overton had reserved a similar punishment for Mr. Persecution and his defenders, sentenced to be held in dungeons for the “great Assises” where they will be arraigned before the King of Kings. The spirit of vengeance that informs Overton's allegorical trial, in his case directed against the Presbyterians, resembles what one finds in The Holy War. In Overton's tract Persecution is charged with guilt for almost “all the blood of the whole earth from the blood of righteous Abell unto the blood of these present times.” The judge tells his advocate, Sir Symon Synod, that “here's no place of mercy for thee, the Vengeance of God cannot be dispensed with, thou art not in the High Commission, nor before the Assembly.”¹⁶ Foxe's Marian martyrs had responded to condemnation by predicting that their examiners would someday stand before a greater judge. Overton, and Bunyan four decades later, claimed the writer's privilege of trying their enemies in print, with an obvious delight in showing them stripped of power and subjected to an inexorable process of judgment.

In The Holy War the jurors of the liberated Mansoul recall those of Vanity Fair in their vehemence, although these pronounce their verdicts in the name of truth. At the end of the first trial Zeal for God declares “Cut them off, they have been the plague, and have sought the destruction of Mansoul” (132). The same jurors condemn the Doubters (Election-doubter, Vocation-doubter, and the rest) in the second trial, like the first presented as a trial for treason that culminates in crucifixion for the accused. The vindictive spirit of the trials extends to the hunting down and hanging of Diabolonians still lurking in the town. Clip-promise, “a notorious villain,” is made a public example by being “arraigned and judged to be first set in the Pillory, then to be whipt by all the children and servants in Mansoul, and then to be hanged till he was dead” (243). The narrative voice interrupts, in an unusual intrusion, to acknowledge that “Some may wonder at the severity of this mans punishment” and then to insist that because of the great abuse Clip-promise is capable of “all those of his name and life should be served even as he” (243). The felt need to justify such harshness suggests that Bunyan was aware of its apparent excess. He makes a similar gesture of recognizing and dismissing potential criticism in a scene that follows, in which Self-love is taken from custody and “brained” by soldiers of Self-denial. Bunyan tells us that there was some muttering over this action, which amounts to what we would call a lynching, but that Emanuel makes Self-denial “a Lord in Mansoul” for his brave act (HW, 244). Bunyan seems to defy norms of conventional justice here, as though to demonstrate that God's justice overrides them.

One early critic defended Bunyan by insisting that he was “portraying only the struggles of an elect soul against religious errors and fleshly lusts” in the trial scenes of The Holy War,¹⁷ but if this is the most obvious dimension of the allegory it is not the only one. The accused function in the narrative as enemies of God and of the godly community of the elect (in Bunyan's England and in the history of the true church) as well as participants in a psychodrama. The links that Bunyan established between these trials and that of Christian and Faithful reinforce their status as social drama. In The Holy War he delighted in showing the tables turned, with persecutors forced to experience a version of their own justice.¹⁸ Now the Diabolonians are described as “outlandish men,” as Christian and Faithful were in Vanity Fair. The aristocracy and gentry become the accused rather than the accusers. The hapless attempt of Mr. Lustings to pull rank in the dock, “I am a man of high birth, and have been used to pleasures and pastimes of greatness” (121), suggests the irony of the reversal. By introducing an informer (Diligence) telling how he spied upon a “Diabolonian Conventicle,” Bunyan uses his satiric gifts to turn a favorite tactic against the oppressors.¹⁹ Election-doubter's surprising declaration, “If I must die for my Religion … I shall die a Martyr” (240), shows him attempting to claim a spiritual victory in the manner of Faithful, but Bunyan presents his stand as a travesty of Faithful's. Election-doubter is a false martyr, condemned by the judge for overthrowing “a great Doctrine of the Gospel” and thus belying the Word.

Christopher Hill, clearly troubled by the violence unleashed in the name of God in The Holy War (he observes that Emanuel and Diabolus adopt the same policies, including purges and terror), wonders whether the trial scenes imply that Bunyan endorsed the use of espionage and death sentences against unbelievers in the godly society.²⁰ I think it more likely that he was indulging a fantasy of a world turned upside down, in which Nonconformists would no longer seem “outlandish” and in which the godly would sit in the place of a Judge Jeffreys or a Justice Kelyng and enact a justice consistent with their understanding of the Word. The trial scenes, along with others representing the punishment of the Diabolonians, show Bunyan's knack for exploiting the ironies of such a reversal. Yet his willingness to invoke violence in the name of God, in scenes that because of their lively realism have a capacity to shock that Bernard's woodenly allegorical ones do not, suggests a desire for a more immediate kind of vengeance than that promised Christian and Hopeful by the Shining Ones: “when he shall sit upon the Throne of Judgment. … you shall also have a voice in that Judgment, because they were his and your enemies” (160). Perhaps Bunyan could embody a desire for vengeance in The Holy War because he knew there was no chance of seeing it realized.

In focusing on some of Bunyan's more violent imaginings I do not mean to suggest that he was bloodthirsty, or hypocritical in advocating patient suffering and quiet obedience, rather that one should recognize the aspects of his temperament and his religion that give rise to them. Violent assaults of anxiety, or doubt, or temptation prompt violent reactions, expressed allegorically in “judgments” of characters associated with particular threats to spiritual equilibrium. The very violence of the reactions suggests the difficulty of mastering doubt and a tendency to sin. Yet Bunyan was also preoccupied with violence directed against those who suffer for truth's sake, violence seen as the external expression of demonic power, and he often blurs the line between psychological and social orders of being. Whether represented by a heresy trial (as in Vanity Fair) or by giants or by the armies of Diabolus, such external violence calls forth representations of divine vengeance against the enemies of the godly and the demonic force they are seen as embodying. While Bunyan was not as fierce in his expectations of vengeance as some (George Fox, for example, and early Quaker writers who saw themselves as caught up in the Lamb's War which they expected would transform England), he could look back with genuine yearning to the heroic period of the Marian persecution as a time when, as he put it, “Coals of burning Fire still dropped here and there upon the Heads of those that hated God” (MW, 13: 427). In his imaginative works he found a variety of ways of anticipating God's response to the “Voice of Blood,” which I believe he would have understood as the voice of suffering Christian generally and not just that of those who literally died for their faith. Perhaps his symbolic punishments of those he saw as hating God and persecuting true Christians (Lord Hategood, Giant Grim, Mr. Pityless, and the rest) should be seen as an effort to take divine justice out of the realm of apocalyptic prophecy and make it seem more immediate and credible to an audience unusually vulnerable to a sense of powerlessness; at the same time, he addresses the uncertainties that gnawed at faith by creating an imaginative world where coals of fire still fell from heaven.

Notes

1. A Mirrour or Looking Glass for both Saints and Sinners (1671). See Badman, xix-xxvi, for a discussion of the popular tradition of judgment stories.

2. Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 171, 181, 176-78.

3. Luxon, Literal Figures, 200.

4. Michael Lieb discusses this episode and also the mutilation and execution of the regicides. See Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 76-79.

5. See John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563-1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 6. An article by Sid Sondergard that appeared at about the same time focuses on Bunyan's use of imagery of violence to express suffering, particularly that of prison experience, and to authenticate his own spiritual authority as well as demonstrate the need for Christian fortitude. See “‘This Giant Has Wounded Me as Well as Thee’: Reading Bunyan's Violence and/as Authority,” in The Witness of Time, ed. Katherine Z. Keller and Gerald J. Schiffhorst (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993), 218-37.

6. I am indebted to Michael Lieb's discussion of Milton's images of sparagmos (e.g., the dismemberment of Orpheus), which he reads as embodying Milton's fears about his poetic identity. See Milton and the Culture of Violence, passim. Bunyan's fears have to do primarily with his identity as one of the elect.

7. James Forrest and Roger Sharrock discuss the government campaign to impose new charters upon towns, which generated a sense of crisis, in the introduction to their edition. See HW, xx-xxv.

8. See, for example, Lam. 3:10; Hos. 5:14, 13:7-8; Amos 3:8.

9. See Stuart Sim, Negotiations with Paradox: Narrative Practice and Narrative Form in Bunyan and Defoe (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 100-101. Sim's general emphasis is on the consequences of predestination and, in his reading of The Holy War, on the way Bunyan avoids resolution by leaving Diabolus and some of his followers at large.

10. Richard Greaves, John Bunyan and English Nonconformity (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), chap. 10.

11. Cf. Bunyan on the victims of persecution in “Prison Meditations”: “They conquer when they thus do fall, / They kill when they do dye” (MW, 6: 50).

12. See W. R. Owens, introduction to MW, 13: xxvi-xxvii. See also Aileen M. Ross, “Paradise Regained: The Development of John Bunyan's Millenarianism,” Bunyan in England and Abroad: Papers Delivered at the John Bunyan Tercentenary Symposium (Amsterdam, 1988), ed. M. van Os and G. J. Schutte (Amsterdam: Vrije University Press, 1990), 73-89.

13. A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers, ed. Joseph Besse, 2 vols. (London, 1753), 1: 435.

14. Roger Sharrock relates Bunyan's trial scenes to the personification of virtues and vices in sermons and moralities and compares his use of false naming to instances in Bernard and Overton. See “The Trial of Vices in Puritan Fiction,” Baptist Quarterly 14 (1951): 3-12.

15. HW, xxxvii. The editors cite Gal. 5:24: “And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts.” See also Rom. 6:6, Gal. 6:14. Bunyan had a precedent of sorts in the sentence of Old-man in Bernard's The Isle of Man, condemned to be taken to the place of execution and there “be cast off with all thy deeds, and all thy members daily mortified and crucified with all thy lusts,” although Bernard's allegory is so insistent that it is difficult to imagine a literal crucifixion. The Isle of Man, 14th ed. (London, 1668), 95.

16. Richard Overton, The Araignement of Mr. Persecution (London, 1645), 6, 40.

17. Clarence Eugene Dugdale, “Bunyan's Court Scenes,” [Texas] Studies in English 5 (1941): 64-78.

18. Dugdale claims that only the Bloodmen, associated with the history of persecution, can be identified with human enemies (the Doubters are for him “abstract enemies of the soul”) and notes that Emanuel's captains are charged to capture and not kill them. “Bunyan's Court Scenes,” 77.

19. Christopher Hill sees the speech of Diligence as a witty parody of the manner of informers in testifying against Nonconformists. See A Tinker and a Poor Man: John Bunyan and His Church 1628-1688 (New York: Knopf, 1989), 248.

20. Hill, A Tinker and a Poor Man, 249.

Abbreviations

PP: John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, ed. James Wharey, rev. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960).

GA: Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

HW: The Holy War, ed. Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).

Badman: The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, ed. James F. Forrest and Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

MW: The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, 13 volumes, general editor Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976-94).