Canst thou think that such a muck-heap of sin as thou art shall be lifted up to heaven?
BUNYAN1
Man crumbles to dust in the presence of God.
BUNYAN2
BUNYAN’S doctrine starts from the ‘necessity of breaking the heart in order to salvation’; ‘a broken heart therefore suiteth with the heart of God’. As early as 1658 Bunyan was speaking of spiritual death and resurrection by the Scriptures. A sense of guilt seems a necessary preliminary to the coming of grace. Bunyan might have heard this familiar doctrine in Paul Hobson’s sermon at Newport Pagnell in 1645: ‘he and he only is fit to declare truth whose spirit is crucified by the power of truth.’3 Hence Bunyan’s emphasis on the terror of judgment, of the bottomless pit. ‘Hell-fire, devouring fire, the lake of fire, eternal everlasting fire: O to make thee swim up and down in the flames of the furnace of fire!’ ‘Canst thou drink hell-fire? Will the wrath of God be a pleasant dish to thy taste?’ He agreed with John Owen that threats of the wrath to come are essential to social discipline: they form ‘the great engine of the providence of God for the preserving mankind from the outrageousness and unmeasurableness of iniquity and wickedness which would utterly ruin all human society.’4
The emphasis is on what Margaret Spufford called ‘unabashed use of fear as a lever to conversion’: she was speaking of religious chap-books. There is nothing unusual in this theological approach. In 1650 Isaac Penington, in his Ranter phase, stressed the omnipotence of God who impartially destroyed the perfect and the wicked. Thomas Goodwin’s posthumous Discussion of the Punishment of Sin in Hell (1680) started from the assumption that God is ‘an enraged enemy’. Bunyan’s emphasis on a vengeful God, and his aggravation of the sinner’s offences, are nevertheless rather horrible.5 They lead to a suggestion that the torments of hell justify the brutal sentences enforced by the law—‘those petty judgments among men, as putting in the stocks, whipping or burning in the hand.’ When in the afterlife ‘the godly think of hell, it will increase their comfort’. When an objector remarks, in words that echo the Leveller William Walwyn, ‘I cannot believe that God will be so severe as to cast away into hell fire an immortal soul for a little sin’, Bunyan replied: ‘It would be injustice to deliver those whom the Law condemneth.’ If he did, God ‘would falsify his Word’.6
Donald Davie observed that Bunyan’s scheme of salvation in The Pilgrim’s Progress, with ‘its ferocious rigour’, is ‘such as few Christians to-day—not to speak of unbelievers—can stomach’.7 True enough: but since most seventeenth-century theologians shared these traditional medieval Catholic ideas, this is hardly relevant to our purposes. Bunyan’s contemporary Lodowick Muggleton envisaged the saints feeding with joy and delight upon the eternal damnation of those less fortunate than themselves.8
It was a commonplace that Calvinist doctrines of predestination could lead to despair; there was no reason why papists should despair, Robert Burton thought. The Baptist Helwys in 1611, the anonymous author of Tyranipocrit Discovered in 1649, the astrologer John Gadbury in 1658, Joseph Alleyn in 1671, Thomas Hobbes in 1679, all agreed on that. Jeremiah Burroughs in 1648, possibly more realistically, cited sin and debt as causes of despair.9 Bunyan quoted the 1649 life of Francis Spira, in Grace Abounding, The Barren Fig-tree, The Heavenly Foot-man, and The Greatness of the Soul. Spira was notorious for relapsing from protestantism back to popery; he died in despair. The seventeeth-century equivalent was John Child, once a member of the Bedford congregation, who conformed to the Church of England in 1660 and ultimately committed suicide in despair.10 The economic crisis of the early seventeenth century may have worked together with Calvinism to induce a sense of desperation: it would be useless to speculate which was the more operative cause.
Dr Spufford noted the familiarity of this subject in religious chap-books: even children attempted suicide. She sensibly adduces falling life expectancy and the crises of civil war, fire, and plague as reasons. The congregational solidarity and mutual support of the sects may have helped those who had been terrified by fears of hell.11 Perhaps from considerations of this sort, Bunyan went out of his way to discourage sick-bed repentance. Mr. Badman’s quiet death was evidence of his sinfulness and carnal security.
John Downame devoted many pages to the anxieties caused by Satan raising doubts about election, calling, sanctification. Lewis Bayly thought ‘despair is nothing so dangerous as presumption’.12 Nehemiah Wallington made a series of attempts to kill himself in his teens, and was thought to be a suicide risk until he was in his 30s. He noted many other suicide attempts in London, some of them successful. Around 1632 William Kiffin was saved by John Goodwin from depression about the impossibility of fulfilling the Law. In a sermon published in 1652 Robert Abbott instanced a young apothecary who committed suicide from despair. In the 1640s John Rogers, Vavasor Powell, Lodowick Muggleton, and others were in a similar condition. In the case of Anna Trapnel the alternative to suicide seemed to be ‘those Familistical ranting tenents’. I listed above other representative figures who suffered from doubts and despair in the late 1640s and 1650s.13 Many Quakers suffered temptations to despair—Fox himself in the 1640s, John Gratton ‘in Oliver Cromwell’s time’, John Crook. John Burnyeat spoke of ‘the horror and terror we were in … because of the guilt of sin that was upon us’ in 1653: the Quaker message came to save them.14
Bunyan then was competing with Quakers on the one hand, and Latitudinarians on the other, in analysing the dangers of despair. He thought that both minimized the problem in a facile and superficial manner. His solution was to push through despair to an awareness of human helplessness in the face of sin and guilt, which would lead to a true conversion. It was a remedy for strong characters. Bunyan himself never thought of suicide, so far as we know. Conscious of the dangers of despair and total loss of faith, he put his confidence in the Bible as a defence. The temptation to despair in Doubting Castle results from the Pilgrim’s forgetfulness of the promises. In The Holy War Mr. Deceit recommended that—rather than tempting Mansoul to pride or to wantonness—‘if we could drive them into desperation, that might knock the nail on the head.’ Diabolus shouted ‘hell-fire’ to scare the inhabitants of Mansoul, letting loose an army of Doubters, and especially election-doubters, in the hope that ‘desperation shall thrust them down’ into the pit. The election-doubters were Diabolus’s lifeguard. But ‘we dare not despair’, the Lord Mayor of Mansoul said, ‘but will look for, wait for, and hope for deliverance still’. Despair, which might lead to atheism, was a worse fate than perishing under the enemy. Despair, Milton thought, falls on the reprobate alone.15