The Pilgrim's Progress is a book by English writer and Puritan preacher John Bunyan, first published in 1678. A Christian allegory that tells the story of a man named Christian who sets out on a journey from the City of Destruction, aiming to reach the Celestial City, which represents heaven, via the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair and Doubting Castle. Along the way, he faces various obstacles and temptations, and meets a variety of characters who help or hinder him on his journey. Using the metaphor of a journey to explore the Christian life and the struggles that believers face on their way to salvation, the book is notable for its vivid descriptions of the landscapes and characters that Christian encounters on his journey, as well as for its use of Christian symbolism and imagery. The book is considered a classic of Christian literature, that has been widely read and studied for over 300 years, and has been translated into many languages.
The image of the pilgrim had long fascinated Van Gogh. In 1875 he copied four verses from Ludwig Uhland's poem Der Pilger in the poetry album he assembled for the artist Matthijs Maris.Ga naar voetnoot13 In preparing his sermon, he may have drawn inspiration from the Dutch poet Petrus de Genestet as well (fig. 5). While Vincent was living in Paris, his father, Reverend Theodorus van Gogh, had given him a volume of De Genestet's verses, which we know he read in the autumn of 1876. De pelgrimstogt (The Pilgrimage), one of the poems he may well have read, is about a pilgrim's search for the heavenly city which an angel had promised him. As in the painting described by Van Gogh in his homily, the pilgrim catches sight of the city for the first time at sunset. Vincent made no mention of the poem in late 1876,
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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ideas of heaven and the afterlife. The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote 'that in the end language can only be related to what is experienced here, and given that the hereafter is not here, we can only infer'. Aquinas encapsulated a great human conundrum that has preoccupied writers and thinkers since ancient times: what might heaven be like. And although human language is constrained by experience, this has not stopped an outpouring of artistic, theological and literary representations of heaven. In the early Middle Ages men ascended up a ladder to heaven. In his Divine Comedy, Dante divided heaven into ten layers encompassing the planets and the stars. And the 17th century writer John Bunyan saw the journey of the soul to heaven as a spiritual struggle in his autobiography, The Pilgrim's Progress. But what exactly is heaven and where is it? How does the Protestant conception of the afterlife differ from the Catholic conception? How does one achieve salvation and what do the saved do when they get there? And, if heaven is so interesting, why has western culture been so spellbound by hell? With Valery Rees, Renaissance scholar and senior member of the Language Department at the School of Economic Science; Martin Palmer, Theologian and Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture; John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. 2ff7e9595c
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