Blanquerna and the Pilgrim's Progress' Compared
نویسنده
چکیده
The following remarks are intended more as a tribute than as a critical assessment : it is hoped to show that one can have an admiration for both writers and that their novels belong together as representing the use of profane imaginative forms for the same exalted purpose. Liull and Bunyan are, in fact, brethern (although neither would identify himself with the particular theological tenets of the other), for the DominicanFranciscan and the Puritan-Baptist show how illusory are the divisions of time, place and cultural traditions, when one is considering the ideas and ideals of the religious visionary.' The great Majorcan gave up his restless dissipation for a life of equally restless travel and study as a religious, while the tinker of Bedfordshire anc. former Cromwellian soldier renounced the peace and comfort of his humble trade for a life of imprisonment, suffering and ceaseless energy as preacher and writer, only to die, like Llull, worn out, and, in his own way, a martyr (indeed, Bunyan is well deserving of the name of Blessed if such were a Protestant custom). The court poet of Palma and Montpellier became the teacher, scholar and voluminous writer-propagandist, while the reader of romances found his rich imagination fully employed in sermons and allegories, fantasies and exhortations. Both men tell of their spiritual development (in the Libre de contemplaci6 and in Grace Abounding), and each of them found that his most mature literary achievement drew much strength and inspiration from experience of the world he had given up but never forgotten. With such obvious parallels in their lives, it would be very easy to overargue a similarity that is, however, all the more striking for the contradictions
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Few people are familiar these days with the Table (or Tablet) of Cebes, a once renowned literary work of ancient Greece. In the past few centuries this pagan Pilgrim's Progress has only rarely appeared in print, and then usually tucked in at the end of Epictetus, to make a thin book a bit thicker. The obscurity in which it languishes does not, however, seem entirely unmerited, and to those who ...
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