Suicide and the Keys of Escape in Bunyan and Donne

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 10; p. 46
• Main Author: Johnson, Galen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2001
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Bunyan, John (1628-88); Donne, John (1572-1631); English literature
• ISSN: 0954-0970

Perhaps Firmin even had Bunyan in mind when he wrote, 'We have heard of him, who when he saw a Toad, stood weeping, because God had made him a Man.'30 Ten years before Firmin's Treatise, Bunyan revealed in Grace Abounding: 'Now again I blessed the condition of the Dogge and Toad, and counted the estate of every thing that God had made far better then this dreadfull state of mine, and such as my companions was: yea, gladly would I have been in the condition of Dog or Horse, for I knew they had no Soul to perish under the everlasting weights of Hell for sin, as mine was like to do.31 Bald believes Bunyan and Donne's envy of animals proves their common malady as one of 'the sick soul,' evoking William James's chapter in The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which James concludes, 'Envy of the placid beasts seems to be a very widespread affection in this type of sadness.'32 Although Bunyan did not have relatives who were executed for their faith as had Donne, he nonetheless thought of himself as an heir of the spiritual 'family' described in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, and his record of his defense before his sentencing reads very similarly to the trials which condemned Foxe's martyrs to their deaths.33 In Grace Abounding, Bunyan's desire, 'Yet now I cried, Let me die; now death was lovely and beautiful in my sight; for I saw we shall never live indeed till we be gone to the other World' was similar to Donne's wish in a 1608 letter, 'I would not that death should take me asleep.'34 It was possibly even Bunyan's 'death wish' that led some to accuse him of identification with that same zealous group whose preoccupation with martyrdom so affected Donne: 'It began ... to be rumored up and down among the People, that I was ... a Jesuit.'35 Bunyan further shared Donne's apprehensions over providing for his family, fearing that his blind daughter Mary might have to become a beggar during his imprisonment.36 The evidence supports the contention that the life circumstances of Donne when he wrote Biathanatos and Bunyan when he wrote Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress were quite similar. [...]this is the primary reason why Donne believed that the majority of Christians to his day had largely considered suicide to be 'necessarily damnable': 'They misaffirme, that this Act allwayes proceeds from desperation, and so they load it with all those comminations, with which, from Scriptures, Fathers, Histories, that common place aboundes.'46 But it is possible, said Donne, that a person might commit suicide for 'a greater good.'47 For instance, even St. Augustine, who questioned the choice of some Christian women to drown themselves to avoid rape because he believed that bodily violence does not taint one's spiritual purity, admitted that Samson's suicide in the Philistine temple was by divine permission to wipe out Israel's enemies.48 Donne also believed that it was better to kill oneself than to cause scandal to others, such as by submitting to forced idolatry. Bunyan's intention is to demonstrate that deliverance from despair comes not through self-exertion but from the objective promise of Christ - something which Bunyan knew from experience to be an exceptionally difficult lesson to learn. [...]it is not scholastic argument but the fear of shaming the Christ whose name he bears which Christian discovers as the key of promise. Recall that in Grace Abounding, Bunyan committed himself to jail to avoid the shame he would experience otherwise: both shame before God ('if I forsook him and his ways, for fear of any trouble that should come to me or mine, then I should . . . falsifie my profession') and shame before others (4I had also another consideration, and that was, The dread of the torments of Hell, which I was sure they must partake of, that for fear of the Cross do shrink from their profession of Christ, his Word and Laws, before the sons of men').58 When Bunyan wrote his sequel to The Pilgrim's Progress in 1684, although the public debate about despair and suicide in general and Biathanatos in particular continued, Bunyan declared the power of despair to be objectively finished.