This is an outline of why Pilgrim’s Progress is better than the sequel. The sequel even features a bodyguard who as Pastor Bennett stated, is the allegorical equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger (or at least an 80’s action hero) who is armed to the teeth. It’s kind of an example of why the gospels are known worldwide, while Athanasius’s biography of Anthony the Great is not. Christ had necessarily greater challenges than Christian. Imagine liking Anthony the Great’s desert adventure more than the gospel of John. Imagine referring to only the gospel of John as authorized, like Martin Luther seems to have done. Pilgrim’s Progress is to the sequel as Moby Dick is to Caillou. Caillou goes to the Celestial City. While the narrative may be useful in a pragmatic sense, its allegorical effect is greatly diminished to the point of being almost non-existent. As if the enchantment was leaving and being replaced by realism. Pilgrim almost drowns. Twice. The second time he drowns himself to the Celestial City because both of those are totally necessary. Unless they aren’t in the next book. Going through vanity fair and being burned to death by Roman Catholics is totally necessary for all pilgrims. Unless it suddenly isn’t because the world changed. Imagine if Hopeful had just been a figment of Christian’s imagination the whole time like Tyler Durden. That would kind of detract from the meaning of the story. Unreliable narrators can do that.
For God to be glorified in the highest possible manner, suffering must exist in the world according to the best of all possible worlds theory. This is one reason that the first half of Pilgrim’s Progress is better than the second: the first half prepares people for suffering to the point of martyrdom at the hands of Roman Catholics. The second prepares you to have other people fight your battles for you. The first half prepares you to be like Daniel whose super power seemed to be self-control through fasting, individualism, and being a eunuch. The second half prepares you to follow the herd, assuming that the herd is Christian, which it may not be. While pragmatically, not everyone has the same job in an organization, in terms of the human heart being conflicted with itself, Pilgrim’s Progress is far superior. Unless of course it is possible to kill your own sin using other people. Usually this is considered legalism, but this may be unexplored conceptual territory.
I follow Charles Murray’s rule for pronouns, in which the author’s gender is used rather than the plural vagueness that strips men of individuality and places them in an amorphous collectivity. But this points out a feature of the sequel to Pilgrim’s Progress: there is no main character. There is only a group of pilgrims so that it becomes Pilgrims’ Progress, or holiday.
This is partially what I mean: the protagonist is splintered into a group of people, distributed consciousness, if you will. If the protagonist were Pilgrim’s son, then this would formally be the children’s version of Pilgrim’s progress. As it is, the title is merely an artifact. It is no longer Pilgrim’s progress. It is more like Pilgrim’s child following in his footsteps at a far more leisurely pace with the rest of his family blending in so much that he is no longer the main character. The cheems and swole doge meme works by comparing one to the other. In a way this is actually about gender, because it could be framed that Christina is the protagonist of the sequel in so far as she makes decisions, but again, she is protected by a bodyguard. It could be said that the only males in the sequel are side characters. So in that way it is about gender. both the son and the wife arguably are less virtuous than Christan because the don’t go to the valley of the shadow of death. It is generally less virtuous to follow the herd than to go against it, and the form of this meme highlights the fact that each character by itself is less than Pilgrim. In other words, the format of the meme itself does not allow for treating a family as an individual. The format of the meme only allows comparing Pilgrim with his son, whose main act is eating an apple and having a stomachache. The rest of the sons acts are mainly to agree to quasi-arranged marriages. So anyway, writing “their battles” in this meme is not an option if the format of the meme is to remain unaltered. Another way of saying this is that all of the sons’ personalities lack distinctness so that to speak of one is to speak of all of them. If this is true, there is no need to mention the plural of the one son who is merely multiplied.
Jonathan Edwards in his fifty-sixth resolution, made the resolution that he would continue to preserver despite making no progress. This is not a resolution that most people make on new year’s day, because it requires perseverance. They sometimes say that it is more preservation of the saints than perseverance, but I am cautious to deemphasize man’s responsibility given how many visceral metaphors Paul used for sanctification. In His human nature, Christ has more to do with Batman than Superman in a sense: Christ had to be punched and bleed many times to follow His father’s will. It might be that I am drawn to Batman as a symbol of self-control given the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. It might be said that perseverance is concentrated self-control as endurance is concentrated patience. Christ didn’t carry Christian to the Celestial city in Pilgrim’s Progress. He had to walk, despite how Christians may joke about being carried. He had to walk one step at a time, a reality which is heavily emphasized in the Great Divorce. This fact jumps out to me probably because I thought God wanted me to join the Army, but my feet were inadequate. Somehow the image of neither Batman nor Christ eating donuts seems real. I wonder how much leaven is in them. Neither are they men of laughters.
Awry Stoic 