Catechism, 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' and the pilgrim's progress.

Q. What is the chief end of man?

A. Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.(1)

For perhaps many modern readers of English literature, this famous first question and answer from the Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1648 is among the few remembered vestiges of what in the century following the Reformation was one of the most pervasive and influential forms of writing and instruction. Although the Church from the earliest times concerned itself with the preparation of children and of converts for participation in its sacraments, it was the Reformation that forged the catechism as a distinct written genre and widely used tool of religions education.

Like the Reformation itself, catechism was European in its scope. Its beginnings and development, particularly in Germany, are well documented.(2) The word was first used as the title of a book in 1528 with the publication in Nuremberg of Andreas Althamer's Catechismus in Frag und Antwort. In this and in the massively influential Kleiner Katechismus (Small Catechism) of Martin Luther (1529), both catechism as the name of a printed thing and its association with the simple question-and-answer form became firmly established.

The impulse for Reformation catechizing flowed directly from Luther's teaching regarding the priesthood of all believers: if all are priests, all must have direct knowledge of the essentials of the faith - these essentials being defined verbally, not merely pictorially or ceremonially. And the spread of catechisms themselves resulted largely from the invention of printing not many decades before the beginning of the Reformation, as well as from the fact that catechisms, at least the most successful, were small and thus cheap and portable. Both Luther and Erasmus called their little catechisms enchiridia, and these were indeed intended to be "little books" that could be carried in the hand. Luther wanted his to be a "brief survey and precis of the entire Holy Scripture."(3) The same aim was declared by Johannes Brenz, who called his catechism "a brief compendium of the entire Holy Scripture, in which is contained all one needs to know for true and eternal salvation . . ., so that the Catechism really can be called 'a little Bible.'"(4)

It would be unfair, however, to emphasize only catechisms' function as static distillations of faith or doctrine. In spite of their potential misuse as mere instruments of rote learning, they were intended as tools that would enable a greater authenticity and dynamism of faith, faith that must continuously be exercised. What Luther says of this normative process or progress in the Christian life is of a piece with his purposes in catechizing: "the Christian life consists not in being but in becoming, not in victory but in struggle, not in justice but in being justified, not in having comprehended but in stretching [one's mind], not in purity but in being purified."(5) And this declaration may also stand, I believe, as a fit epigraph for John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, whose catechetical dimension can be seen to contribute significantly to Christian's, and perhaps also the reader's, progress. In spite of Stanley Fish's well known and in many ways brilliant thesis that "The Pilgrim's Progress is antiprogressive,"(6) I shall suggest that the process of catechizing which Bunyan writes into the heavenward journey may model a true progression, or at least serve as a vehicle for authentic spiritual advancement, even when Christian's literal progress along the road fails, as Fish has shown, consistently to mark true progress. But before presenting the evidence for progressive catechesis in The Pilgrim's Progress, I need to add a few more words about catechism's nature and its growth into the seventeenth century.

THE PROGRESS OF CATECHISM