Disableme’s Weblog

As you read please feel free to share with us what God has put on your heart.

I suggest you read the article below before reading the book to help explain how to read an allegory.

How to Read an Allegory: Pilgrim’s Progress

by Rick Saenz

Pilgrim’s Progress can be difficult for the modern reader, but not for the reasons you might expect. It’s not the language; sure, it’s a bit archaic, but approach it with a willing attitude and within the first few pages you’ll be reading fluently. It’s not the setting; Christian is journeying through a mythical landscape, one you’ve encountered in many a fairy tale. It’s not the period; the author makes no knowing references to persons, places, or events that were current only to the 17 th century mind. No, it’s because John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress as an allegory, a literary form that was historically popular but is almost unknown to the modern reader.

Allegory makes heavy use of symbolism, which in itself is not problematic to moderns. However, the use of symbolism in allegory is direct and transparent; characters, places, and events are concrete expressions of abstract ideas, and the correspondence of story element to idea is intended to be obvious to the reader. The characters Obstinate and Pliable are, well, obstinate and pliable, meant to illustrate the dangers of those characteristics; Christian’s encounter with Giant Despair at Doubting Castle is an illustration of how doubt and despair can pose major threats to the Christian in his journey. Aside from their literary value, the story elements in Pilgrim’s Progress are meant to be instructive, and instruction is just about the last thing a modern reader finds palatable in his fiction.

This isn’t to say that allegory cannot be of literary interest to a modern. In fact, one of the most well-known modern allegories is George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a fable that is rich, evocative, and heartbreaking even for readers who have no knowledge of the Russian revolution, much less that this pig represents Trotsky, that one Stalin, and the other one Lenin. One of C.S. Lewis’ favorites of his own books was Pilgrim’s Regress, covering the same basic ground as Pilgrim’s Progress but with special attention to the dangers and difficulties faced by a post-Enlightenment pilgrim. And one of the greatest poems, Dante’s Divine Comedy, is yet another allegorical account of a Christian pilgrimage. All these are acknowledged to be excellent literature as well as excellent allegories.

Perhaps we moderns are able to take instruction from fiction, just not on the scale that an allegory operates. When allegory is reduced to a bite-sized nugget, we end up with a fable, still a popular form for conveying abstract truth in the form of a moral. Thousands of years after Aesop wrote them, we are still instructing our children by telling them his tales about the escapades of ants and grasshoppers, foxes and sour grapes, lions and mice.

Reducing the scale even further, we find allegory in its most concentrated form, the parable. And it is in considering the parable that we can begin to understand why in the right hands allegory becomes such a powerful tool for instruction. It’s no surprise that the Lord Jesus was the allegorist par excellence, but what continually surprises is the depth and resonance that Christians find in the parables he told. How often do we return to them and find new angles for meditation? The good Samaritan, the prodigal son, the rich man and Lazarus, the laborers in the vineyard, the wheat and the tares, the pearl of great price, all of these exist in our minds with richness, clarity, and complexity—and yet when you look at them on the page, they are the sketchiest of sketches, hardly begun before they are complete. How can so little say so much?

The answer is that we have moved into the realm of poetry, an art which depends on circumstances and chararcters carefully chosen and carefully described, so as to lead the reader to flesh out a tale with his own memories, his own knowledge, his own understanding. The tale of the prodigal son resonates with us because we know the prodigal and his waywardness, the father and his joy, and the elder brother and his resentment—in fact, we have been each of them, and experienced their feelings. And so we are prepared to be instructed when our Lord presents us with these characters, a situation—and then uses it to astonish us as he shows us how a father should respond, as indeed our heavenly Father has responded to our own waywardness. And so we are able to meditate at length on this tiny tale, as we consider the many differences between the proper response and our own inclinations.

As R.C. increasingly points out, a poetic vision underlies all of Scripture. For example, the church is described as the bride of Christ precisely because the image of a bride is evocative for us, and we are meant to ponder how our corporate relationship with Christ should become more like that of a good wife to her husband. And so we are encouraged to search the Scriptures for descriptions of good wives. Which tells us that passages such as Proverbs 31 should be considered allegorically as well as literally, used to help us understand how to become the church that Jesus would have us be.

Though we can never approach God’s excellence in his use of allegory to instruct and edify, we will benefit greatly both by accustoming ourselves to drinking deep from such instruction, and by recognizing its power and value wherever it is encountered, in Scripture or elsewhere. And there is no better place to embark on such a project than by committing yourself to spend some quality time with that greatest of Christian allegories outside the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress. Approach it not as an entertainment, but as a world to be inhabited. Get to know Christian, Pliable, Obstinate, Faithful, Hopeful, Mr. Worldly Wise, Giant Despair, Talkative, and all the rest. Hear their wisdom, laugh at their foolishness, shrink from the temptations presented by Vanity Fair, learn from their experiences as they traverse the Delectable Mountains and the Valley of Humiliation, rejoice as Christian crosses the River of Death and is received into the Celestial City. Think long and hard about how each of these characters, locales, and situations characterizes your own Christian walk—and be instructed by them.