Upheaval in the Religious and Scientific Sectors (Blogpost 3)

Picture it, England, 1678 and you have just read John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which is an allegory of Puritan ideals that relies heavily on extended metaphors represented through characters, events, actions, etc. Not only are you able to read it, you are able to understand what Bunyan is writing about. Finally, something that you can read and understand – something that you can tell others about.

According to the Norton Anthology introduction to Bunyan and this work, “The Pilgrim’s Progress is the most popular allegory in English. It's basic metaphor – life is a journey – is simple and familiar … moreover, this is a tale of adventure” (2270). In this work, Bunyan uses allegories to the Christian lifestyle in a way that allows his readers to understand that salvation, redemption, and forgiveness of sins comes from God and from seeking Spiritual matters over worldly possessions. In the text, there are references to Biblical scriptures to help Bunyan get his point across and there are also different characters which each represent a facet of society during the time in which the text was written.

Bunyan became popular with the common-folk of England because his style of writing and approach to the process of creating a literary work was more simplistic than that of aristocratic writers. The 1600s in England was the time of rising literacy rates, meaning that the ability to read and write was no longer secluded to only those with upper-class backgrounds. Bunyan’s work played a huge role in overturning some of the dogmas that were passed down to most of the population. Before the Enlightenment period, the uneducated, lower-class individuals were not able to read the Bible for themselves but had to rely upon the priests and religious leaders’ interpretations of the scriptures. The religious leaders were manipulating the scriptures to make people believe that the way to salvation was through strict obedience to kings and monarchs and by paying their way to salvation.

In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan overturns all of this by using the allegory of a journey to emphasize to his readers that the only way to salvation is to forsake all ties to the world and to pursue a personal call of obedience to God. This was Bunyan’s purpose in writing The Pilgrim’s Progress, and therefore the work is still relevant today. While the Church of England was causing people to believe that strict adherence to man-made rules and regulations could guarantee salvation, Bunyan and other Enlightenment writers were arguing against this viewpoint.

While Bunyan was turning the religious sector upside down, Sir Isaac Newton was doing the same with the scientific sector. In A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton, he theorizes about light and colors in a way that sheds new light (pun intended) on the studies of the origin of colors during the time. Newton’s experiment, in which he used a prism to shine sunlight through to see where colors come from, allowed him to conclude that the different colors are due to the reflection of light through whatever medium it shines.

From this, Newton noted that there are some colors that are the primary colors. These colors, according to Newton, do not change, but the intermediary colors do change. The most influential conclusion that Newton comes to is that of whiteness. Newton argues that no sort of ray can make white. While many people believed that whiteness was the absence of color, Newton theorizes that white is the actual original color of light. Whiteness is “…an aggregate of rays endued with all sorts of colors” (2287). Newton’s research is still relevant today in that it explains where the colors of the rainbow are derived, the use of prisms in scientific study, and leads to further discussions based on the idea that we are all light.