James F. Forrest: The Preceptor as Scholar and Teacher

• Published in: Bunyan studies Vol. 5; no. 5; p. 6
• Main Author: Gay, David
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Bunyan Studies 01.10.1994; Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences
• Subjects: Beckett, Samuel (1906-1989); British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Bunyan, John (1628-88); English literature; Irish literature; McCandless, David; Teachers
• ISSN: 0954-0970

Summarizing the comparison in his critical introduction to The Holy War, Jim Forrest remarks that ' although the visions of the Puritans and the Absurdists are thus separate, they are related; and much of our cultural conditioning, our habits of thought, what we read and the way we write and feel and speak, we owe to a view of life that was being formulated over tiiree and a half centuries ago'.1 If the gerundive form of 'waiting' in the title of Beckett's theatrical masterpiece Waiting for Godot implies an anxious, uncertain eternity, the adjective 'holy' in Bunyan' s The Holy War confers a beatific limit on the condition of 'absurdity' as the Puritans would understand it, rendering it a provisional, transitional state. [...]a recent comparison between the theology of Paul Tillich and the drama of Samuel Beckett bears out Jim Forrest's original contention. David McCandless argues that both Tillich and Beckett divest themselves of orthodox traditions in pursuit of an experiential conception of ultimate being, a conception in which the negative condition, or the possibility of nonbeing, becomes a precondition of the positive condition of faith itself.2 The argument could be applied to Christian's finite traumatic isolation at the beginning of The Pilgrim 's Progress when he leaves his family. [...]any reading of puritan texts - the locating of its metaphors and their referent - will be only as accurate as one's grasp of Puritan experience'.