Books: Bunyan Revisited

JOURNEY INTO SELF (301 pp.)—M. Esther Harding—Longmans, Green ($5).

John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is a great Protestant allegory. It is also an allegory of Everyman, and many men have tried to adapt it and make it their own. Antinomians tried to make it even more Calvinist than Bunyan himself. Tractarian scribes, trying to bring the Anglican Church closer to Roman Catholic practices, rewrote it to take out the Reformation sting. A Roman Catholic version appeared with the head of the Virgin Mary (the worship of whom was heresy to Baptist Bunyan) on the title page. Now Dr. Harding, a leader of the Jung school in the U.S., reinterprets the 278-year-old parable in terms of modern psychology.

Bunyan thought that he was writing only the story of a man named Christian who surmounts the countless snares and obstacles of the Devil in his long journey from mortal ills to God’s Promised Land. In reality, according to Author Harding, Christian’s journey “is an expression of the archetypal pattern of the search for wholeness common to all humanity . . . the journey everyone undertakes when he embarks on a psychological analysis.”

In Dr. Harding’s book the helpful Interpreter becomes the wise analyst. The all-too-literal Hell that Christian fears, she reads as psychosis. When, at the sight of the Cross, Christian is finally freed of his burden of sin, Dr. Harding explains that, actually, he “had found the right inner attitude.” Giant Despair, who imprisons Christian in Doubting-Castle, and his sadistic wife, who urges him to torture and beat his prisoners, “represent the power of parents over against the weakness of the child.” Christian’s ultimate goal, Heaven, is revealed as merely the “wholeness of the psyche,” presumably achieved after a successful depth analysis.

Dr. Harding insists that everything Bunyan wrote is grist for the analyst, and especially his slips of the pen. since they are not accidents, but the certain results of subconscious desires. Example: Bunyan wrote of the “straight and narrow” path (instead of the Biblical spelling, strait). This means, says Analyst Harding, that Bunyan was subconsciously rebellious against the strait and narrow path of Puritanism, perhaps even the very practice of Christianity itself.