After a frustrating rehearsal one day, violinist Mischa Elman and his wife were leaving Carnegie Hall by the backstage entrance when they were approached by two tourists looking for the hall’s entrance. Seeing Elman’s violin case, they asked, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Without looking up, Elman replied, “Practice.”1 Other versions of this story (there are many) ramp up the punch line to “Practice, practice, practice!”
Whether this urban legend is true or not, it conveys the powerful truth that most accomplishments in life require the tedium of time and effort. This is true of expertise in one’s craft, proficiency in a new language, and the depth of a good friendship, as it is for most other things. The secret ingredient to most success is diligence.
The word diligence comes from a Latin word that once meant “to single out, value highly, esteem, prize, love.” From this meaning, diligence later came to mean “attentiveness” or “carefulness.” This evolution in meaning is logical since one usually renders care and attention to things one values and esteems. From this intermediate meaning, it is a short skip to our current sense of diligence as “steady, persistent effort.”2
THE MOST BORING VIRTUE
Diligence is the most humble, perhaps even the most boring, of virtues. Diligence is so humdrum that it doesn’t get nearly as much attention in moral philosophy as the other virtues. Some of its near cousins, such as perseverance and constancy, get more coverage, but neither of these mean quite the same thing. On the other hand, the Bible mentions diligence a considerable number of times (particularly in the King James translation). And as with all the virtues, diligence is not virtuous unless it is put toward a virtuous end. Persistence in planning a robbery or harassing strangers on the internet isn’t a virtue any more than loyalty is virtuous when it’s given to a mobster or a Klansman.
Diligence must also, like other virtues, represent a mean between an extreme of excess and an extreme of deficiency. It’s easy to see how insufficient diligence is a vice, but an excess of effort is also a vice. Such excess could take various forms. One form might be the workaholic. Working too hard at one good thing (e.g., a job) while neglecting other important things (e.g., family) is a vice. Perfectionism is another example of caring to a detrimental degree. Another form of excessive effort might manifest as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Too much care and attention given to social media notifications might be another example of excessive care and attention that constitutes a vice. (Guilty!)
In the Bible, diligence is often presented in contrast to its opposite, sloth. For example, Proverbs 12:24 says, “The hand of the diligent shall bear rule: but the slothful shall be under tribute” (KJV). Sloth has received considerable examination by moral philosophers, so to understand the virtue of diligence, it’s helpful to examine its opposing vice of deficiency.
Sloth is commonly thought of as laziness, but it’s much more than that. (We saw in chapter 6 that sloth opposes magnanimity, for example.) Sloth involves not only a lack of effort but also a lack of care. In fact, the Greek word for sloth, acedia, literally means “without care” or “careless.” It’s similar to a word we use more commonly today, apathy. One of the seven deadly sins, sloth was nicknamed by the early monks as the “noonday devil,” after that sense of dullness or languor that commonly sets in at midday. (College professors find this languor most prevalent in their classes right after lunch.)
Just as the original meaning of diligent connoted desire, the slothful person is, in contrast, without appetite or desire. Such a condition clearly goes against both our design and the one who designed us. Aquinas considered sloth to be “an oppressive sorrow,” which “so weighs upon man’s mind, that he wants to do nothing.” Sloth refers not only to “a certain weariness of work” but also to “a sluggishness of the mind which neglects to begin good.” This is why Aquinas defined sloth as “sorrow for spiritual good.”3 It is a mortal sin in “robbing us of our appetite for God, our zest for God, our interest and enjoyment in God. Sloth stops us from seeking God, and that means we do not find him.”4 Paradoxically, then, the busiest people can be the most slothful. Frenetic activity can be what most effectively keeps us from what we are supposed to be doing, particularly seeking God and his righteousness. Being busy is easier than being good. This is why sloth’s being “a sin of omission, not commission,” by one way of thinking, “makes it deadlier.”5
It’s a tough thing to balance, giving just the right amount of care and attention to a task, not more or less than is warranted, not only in terms of the task itself but more so in how that task fits into the larger picture of one’s life. A diligent approach to reading means one thing for the seminary student, another for the man with heavy work responsibilities and five children at home. For the former, diligence in reading might mean reading two books a week; for the latter, a few pages a night. Likewise, diligence in a sport looks very different on the part of a professional player than it does for a young child. Such differences point out the strength of virtue ethics over rules or outcome-based approaches. Human excellence varies from person to person, whereas rules do not.
Although applied to a goal, diligence itself isn’t measured by outcome. I’ve often told my students that effort is like a muscle. Sometimes I ask my personal trainer about how far to bend or turn in a new exercise. When she answers, “Until it hurts,” I have to chuckle because it all hurts at first! As a beginner, I found it harder to leg press 70 pounds than a more fit person would find pressing 150 pounds. The student not accustomed to studying at all will feel that cramming for thirty minutes before an exam is a lot of effort. The one who studies two hours every day for a class will in contrast not even notice an extra sixty minutes to refresh before the same exam. Diligence is subjective in this way. The relative luxury of twenty-first-century American life compared to most of human history has made us soft.
Diligence is probably both the hardest and the easiest virtue to cultivate. It’s easy in the sense that it’s inherently simple: whatever it is you are doing, keep at it with care and attention, and then keep at it some more. Care can be faked when necessary (one can answer the phone all day with a cheerful voice even if one doesn’t really feel cheerful), but the attention part can be so hard. So many things vie for our attention, many of them good and important things, like work and family and friends and fine films and good books—but of course, many of them are unimportant and negligible things, like social media and games and gossip, and the list goes on. Nevertheless, diligence consists of taking one step at a time toward the goal, not getting distracted, and not giving up. No wonder diligence is mentioned so much in the Bible.
DILIGENCE AND THE CHRISTIAN LIFE
Fittingly, diligence is the virtue at the core of one of Christianity’s greatest classics, the most popular story ever published, in fact: Pilgrim’s Progress.
For three centuries, this allegory by John Bunyan has been almost as familiar as the great stories of the Bible. Christian, encumbered by the burden of sin on his back, heeding the words of Evangelist, flees his unbelieving wife and family in the City of Destruction to journey to the Celestial City. Along the way, he must resist the temptations of mockers, pass through the narrow Wicket Gate, and overcome many obstacles by exercising the muscle of his faith before finally arriving at the city gates.
After the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress is the most read book in English. Since its first publication in 1678, it has never gone out of print. (Bunyan published a second part of the story in 1684, which narrates the pilgrimage of the family Christian left behind on his journey in the first part, but the second part was never as successful or as beloved as the first.) Countless variations of the original—children’s versions, abridged editions, annotated editions, and modernized English versions—are still being published today. Most of us know the story in one form or another (although, sadly, many who own watered-down versions are not even aware of the theological and artistic superiority of the original).
Not only is Pilgrim’s Progress the allegory of every Christian’s life, but it also reflects Bunyan’s own life—so well, in fact, that it is almost impossible to separate the story itself from the story of its author. Born in 1628, Bunyan served the parliamentary army during the English Civil War, which pitted the Puritans against the Royalists. By 1655, he had undergone a genuine conversion to Christianity and was preaching to dissenting Puritan congregations—so called because they relied on the pure Word of God and believed the established Church of England needed further purification from the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, from which it had broken under King Henry VIII in 1534. In 1649, the Puritans gained power when Oliver Cromwell’s army tried, convicted, and executed King Charles. However, when the eleven-year interregnum ended in 1660 with the restoration of the monarchy, religious tolerance of dissenters ended. The Act of Uniformity, which required both Anglican ordination and use of the Book of Common Prayer to lead worship, made Bunyan’s preaching illegal. Rather than ceasing, Bunyan surrendered to arrest and ended up experiencing one of the longest jail terms ever served by a dissenter in England.6 In jail, he was able to keep a copy of the Bible and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. There he wrote his famous spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and began the work that would become Pilgrim’s Progress. In 1672, by decree of King Charles II, Bunyan was freed along with thousands of other imprisoned nonconformists. Bunyan’s life attests to his belief that diligence is necessary to a virtuous life but is insufficient apart from the work of Christ. This is also the message of Pilgrim’s Progress.
Few stories in literature demonstrate in the protagonist the kind of diligence demanded by Christian. This emphasis on diligence is directly connected to the Calvinist theology of Bunyan’s Puritan faith. One essential tenet of that belief is known as perseverance of the saints. It expresses the idea that those whom God calls to salvation cannot lose their salvation but will persevere until the end and display the fruits of their salvation. The word persevere is no accidental term, of course. Traditional Christianity (unlike some modern iterations) emphasizes the fact that salvation does not promise ease and comfort but is more likely, as church history shows (particularly that period of history surrounding Bunyan’s lifetime), to bring suffering and trial. The virtue of diligence is necessary, therefore, to persevere. If perseverance is successfully staying afloat in the water, diligence is the treading feet that make floating possible. Perseverance is the what; diligence is the how.
The aspect of diligence as, like all virtues, a mean between two extremes is reinforced by various pairings within Pilgrim’s Progress, representative of extremes one must be diligent to navigate between. Colorful yet insightful dyads such as Obstinate and Pliable, Formalist and Hypocrisy, and Pope and Pagan offer the reader sets of vices between which the mean Christian virtue is found.
DILIGENCE THROUGH TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS
Many of Christian’s trials and tribulations are drawn directly from biblical language (such as the perilous journey through the Valley of the Shadow of Death), but many are created out of Bunyan’s imagination. It is this extraordinary combination of biblical foundation and soaring imagination (along with its solid theology) that gained the work the longevity and fame it deserves. Over and over, Christian faces obstacles in his journey that would make turning back seem to be the most reasonable course. Yet, through diligence, Christian perseveres through trials that symbolize both outer obstacles and internal temptations.
One of these outer temptations is Vanity Fair. This term, original to Bunyan, captures perfectly what the place represents both literally and symbolically: a carnival of human flesh and wickedness (carnival, of course, comes from the word carnal). Vanity Fair has become so ingrained in our cultural imagination that it became the title of a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray in the nineteenth century and of a glossy, high-end American magazine in the twentieth century. Bunyan’s version is much more terrifying: Christian’s traveling companion Faithful is martyred there, and Christian barely escapes.
Other external pressures to give up come in the form of people Christian encounters along his way who would lead him astray, such as Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Ignorance, and Talkative. Some actively attempt to dissuade Christian from his journey, while others merely distract him. But the character who symbolizes every Christian’s battle—sin itself—provides one of Bunyan’s most acclaimed depictions.
The warrior Apollyon—a fierce creature, a hybrid being with the wings of a dragon, the feet of a bear, the scales of a fish, and the mouth of a lion—confronts Christian and claims that he is lord over Christian. Apollyon attempts at first to dissuade Christian from “persisting in his way,” as Bunyan’s gloss on the text says.7 Failing this, Apollyon then employs darts and a sword against Christian. Christian resists all of these attacks, not through any particular feats of wit or strength, but rather through sheer diligence.
However, an even greater obstacle than the outer, physical obstacle Apollyon presents is an internal one. Apollyon taunts Christian for his imperfect service and devotion to Christ (an imperfection all Christians bear). The place of this conflict Bunyan aptly names the Valley of Humiliation, for Christian is truly humiliated here for his failures to his Lord. Yet because Christian’s earlier diligence has made him spiritually stronger, he is able to endure these accusations and respond with the truth: “All this is true, and much more which thou hast left out; but the Prince whom I serve and honor is merciful, and ready to forgive.”8
This scene is one of the most praised in the book, deservedly so because of Bunyan’s vivid characterization of the villain and skillful use of allegorical language. C. S. Lewis finds in it the “supreme example” of Bunyan’s incarnational approach to allegory, capturing profound spiritual truths in the language of common, everyday experience. When Christian explains to Apollyon why he has chosen to serve another master rather than him, he says that Apollyon’s wages are “such as a man could not live on.” Here, of course, as Lewis points out, Bunyan simply alters slightly the text found in Romans 6:23, which states that the wages of sin is death.9 Bunyan’s allegorical language is like poetry in casting the familiar in a new light, bringing spiritual truth down to earthly level, not simply to leave it there but to lift the reader toward the spiritual truth.
Christian has to work hard but also carefully, the essence of diligence. Even the smallest error can and does have disastrous effects. Traveling with Hopeful to the Celestial City after surviving Vanity Fair and countless other trials, Christian suggests they veer off the narrow path and walk through a meadow that appears to offer an easier way. This turns out to be a grave error. The meadow belongs to a giant named Despair who captures the pair and throws them into the dungeon of Doubting Castle. There, subjected to merciless beatings and deprivation, Christian comes the closest to giving up than he comes during his entire journey. The giant’s wife, Diffidence (an archaic term that in Bunyan’s day meant “lack of faith”), tells her husband to persuade Christian and Hopeful to kill themselves, which he tries to do. In the clutches of despair and doubt, Christian is sorely tempted to take the giant Despair’s advice, but Hopeful persuades him not to give up. Then, in my favorite moment in the story, after a time of prayer Christian suddenly realizes that all along he has had a key called Promise in his pocket and uses it to quickly free them from Doubting Castle.
HUMAN DILIGENCE AND GOD’S GRACE IN PARTNERSHIP
I am thankful never to have experienced the kind of despair that would tempt me to take my life, but the scene rings true for me in other ways. It captures perfectly the mysterious relationship between diligence, despair, prayer, and divine intervention at just the moment when we not only need it but are actually ready for it.
The virtue of diligence has been fairly easy for me to cultivate in my life for a couple of reasons. First, I was born to parents who instilled the practice in me through both their words and their example. Second, I am blessed in lacking any natural talents that would allow me to excel at anything without painstaking effort and practice. Everything good in my life that I have accomplished, I’ve done only through prolonged diligence. Writing books, especially, takes me to the limits of my diligence. My ideas don’t pour out like champagne from a bottle that bursts open with a pop. For me, writing is more like chipping away at stone, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, whittling away until the shape of a thought begins to emerge, then whittling away some more. In this and all other endeavors (even the study of literature, my livelihood), I have cultivated the virtue of diligence throughout my life through sheer necessity.
There’s something about those promises offered to us in the Bible. They are always there, but until life prepares us to receive them, they are just like the key Christian had in his pocket all along but didn’t remember until he was ready to use it. Diligence and providence are like human will and God’s sovereignty, two sides of the coin that is the mystery of God’s created order.
DILIGENCE AND ALLEGORY
The diligence modeled by Pilgrim’s Progress is its own sort of two-sided coin. Diligence is advanced not only in the content of the story but in its form as well. The reader must practice diligence in order to gain the greatest grasp of the work’s meaning.
Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the most exemplary allegories ever written. In simple terms, an allegory is a story that is symbolic. Allegory doesn’t just contain symbols, as many literary works do, but it is wholly symbolic. Allegory works on two levels, the literal and the symbolic. On the surface, Pilgrim’s Progress is the story of Christian’s journey from one city to a better city. The people he meets along the way function just as characters in any story do. But as an allegory, all of these characters and events have symbolic meaning, and it is, of course, the symbolic level—in this case, the Christian doctrine—that carries the real meaning of the work.
Bunyan chose the form of allegory, in part, due to Puritan objections to fiction as mere lies. Because allegory does not make up a fictional story but uses symbols that correspond directly with truth, allegory (before the existence of our modern literary categories) was not considered fiction in the way that we think of fiction today. Even so, Bunyan felt the need to justify his work through a defense of his method in a poem that serves as the story’s preface.
Allegory can be deceptively simple, and Pilgrim’s Progress is as straightforward as allegory can be. Christian is a Christian. Mr. Worldly Wise is a person who relies on worldly rather than godly wisdom. Hopeful and Faithful are characters who symbolize exactly those things. Mr. Talkative is, well, talkative. And so on. This easy correspondence can be challenging to modern readers because it seems so simple. But closer analysis reveals that diligence is required of the reader in order to see the deeper truths revealed by the allegorical mode.
One way to consider the richness of allegory is to compare it to a nonsymbolic exposition of the same truths contained in the symbol. Bunyan might have written a treatise simply stating his doctrinal view that a Christian must set his sights on eternity rather than this world, must not listen to worldly wisdom nor stray from the narrow way, and so forth. But an allegory, like all stories, shows rather than tells. In adding the layers of significance and meaning inherent in all symbols and, in fact, in language itself, allegory makes more explicit the way that all language functions. Language is indirect or mediated in a way that images and pictures are not. All language is, in a certain sense, metaphorical, and allegory simply amplifies this aspect of language. The dependence of allegory on the resonances of language to convey its layers of meaning helps to explain the difficulty of a good film adaptation of allegory. Replacing metaphorical language with literal depictions erases most of the significance of allegory, the content of which resides in the form. The same is true of all literary works, which use language as an artistic medium, not merely a form of communication.
From Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in the classical era to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in the seventeenth century, and a wide array of allegorical works throughout the medieval age in between, we see a worldview in which such layers of meaning, not only in literature but in the world itself, were both assumed and understood. As C. S. Lewis explains in The Discarded Image, this allegorical way of thinking was based on a notion of truth that transcended the modern categories of history and fiction.10 Like the parables told by Christ, allegorical stories didn’t have to be true; they pointed to truth just as Christian’s companion Hopeful points the wavering pilgrim to the truths of Scripture as they both cross the River of Death before finally entering the Celestial City.
For the Puritans, literary critic J. Paul Hunter explains, the world constituted a “book of nature” filled with emblems pointing to spiritual truth. This truth might be discovered through interpretation, based on the logic that underlies an understanding of how similitudes (such as symbols and analogies) work. Despite being iconoclasts who eschewed graven images, the Puritans inherited from the medieval worldview “mental habits of conceiving abstractions pictorially.” Interpretations arising from observations of the book of nature were seen not as creating fictions but rather as simply uncovering meanings already inhering in the world by God’s design. Such a “metaphorical mode of thinking” was prone to producing and appreciating allegory.11 Allegory depends on a thick understanding of the physical world and the language that bridges that world with the spiritual one. Whereas the modern fiction writer creates out of her imagination, the premodern allegorist translated from the book of nature.
Modern ways of thinking cultivate a flatter approach to language and stories—as well as to the world and truth—than the ancients had. This modern preference for the literal over the symbolic, metaphorical, and poetic lends itself to a fundamentalism that the Puritans would never have recognized. For the Puritans, the world, even language itself, was charged with meaning both originating in and pointing toward God. For example, it is impossible to understand the meaning of marriage apart from an understanding of how marriage is an emblem for the relationship of Christ and the church. To separate the poetic nature of marriage (as allegorical and anagogical) is to change its meaning altogether. When the ties between layers of meaning inherent in language are broken, then our own ability to know and grow in truth is hindered. Allegory employs double-minded language that requires more shrewdness in the reader (and the writer) than the literal-minded like to admit.
Even the word progress in the title Pilgrim’s Progress is suggestive of how allegory functions. Allegory operates on a built-in expectation that readers will “progress” from the literal, material level of the story to the symbolic, spiritual truth beyond. It has an explicit assumption of interpretation that is implicit in all literary writing, indeed in all writing and all use of language. In other words, allegory requires and assumes the exercise of diligence by readers.
Another sense of progress is connected to the proverbial “Puritan work ethic.” Although diligence has been considered a virtue since ancient times, it has a particular connection to the period that birthed Pilgrim’s Progress and this emphasis on the importance of work. As a result of the Enlightenment and the advances of scientific inquiry that accompanied it, the notion of progress became one of the defining concepts of the age, as seen in chapter 6 on hope. However, progress did not refer exclusively to scientific and technological advancements; it was about human progress as well. The doctrines of the Protestant Reformation—and later, Puritanism—contributed significantly to the idea that individuals can progress beyond their given condition, whether that condition is spiritual, social, or economic. The Puritan (or Protestant) work ethic is the indirect offspring of a doctrinal emphasis on the role of the individual in his or her own salvation, sanctification, and Scripture reading. The work ethic both depends on and cultivates the careful attentiveness and desire at the heart of diligence. Of course, as we saw in chapter 6 while considering the virtue of hope, even progress—and the work that achieves it—has its limits.
The most significant sense of progress in Pilgrim’s Progress is its overarching theological theme: sanctification. While there are various debates about the exact point in the story at which Christian is saved, this question misses the larger concern of the story. Bunyan wasn’t writing in a time in which the evidence of salvation was in the documentation of the exact day and hour at which one “receives Jesus in one’s heart.” Bunyan’s Calvinist belief emphasized not the moment of salvation but the work of ongoing sanctification that is evidence of salvation. Anyone can raise a hand, repeat a prayer, and go forward to the altar, but only a truly regenerated heart will bear the fruit of sanctification and persevere until the end. This is the real progress that Pilgrim’s Progress is about. Christian’s diligence in the faith is a picture of the admonition to believers in Philippians 2:12 to work out our faith in fear and trembling.
Such diligence requires care and attention, which, in turn, depend on the cultivation of godly desire. Pilgrim’s Progress is an invitation to the reader to practice diligence in both the reading and the application.