The Courage of John Bunyan’s Great-heart: A Journey Through Faith and Fear
John Bunyan’s famous line about Mr. Great-heart and the lion comes from “The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II,” published in 1684, roughly a decade after the completion of the original work that had captivated English readers since 1678. To understand this particular quote, one must first situate it within the remarkable narrative universe Bunyan created—a allegorical landscape populated by pilgrims, monsters, and symbolic obstacles that represented the spiritual challenges faced by Christian believers. In Part II, Great-heart emerges as a guide figure leading a group of pilgrims (primarily the wife and children of the original pilgrim, Christian) on their journey toward the Celestial City. The lion in question is actually one of Bunyan’s most potent symbols: a creature representing fear itself, particularly the fear that prevents people from pursuing their spiritual and moral paths. The casual confidence with which Bunyan presents Great-heart’s fearlessness—not through bravado or aggressive confrontation, but simply through recognized strength and purpose—exemplifies the author’s understanding of how genuine courage operates in the human heart and mind.
John Bunyan’s life was a dramatic arc of persecution, imprisonment, introspection, and literary genius that few seventeenth-century figures could match. Born in 1628 in the village of Elstow, Bedfordshire, Bunyan came from a humble tinker’s family and received minimal formal education, a fact that makes his later literary accomplishments all the more astounding. As a young man, he experienced a profoundly turbulent spiritual journey, initially living what he considered a dissolute life before undergoing a dramatic evangelical conversion around 1653. This conversion led him to join a Nonconformist congregation in Bedford—churches that rejected the authority of the Church of England and refused to comply with its liturgical practices. When the Restoration brought King Charles II to power in 1660, the political and religious climate shifted violently against dissenters, and Bunyan’s refusal to stop preaching to his unauthorized congregation led to his arrest in 1660. What followed was an astonishing twelve-year imprisonment, during which he was offered freedom multiple times if only he would cease his unauthorized preaching—offers he steadfastly refused, demonstrating a literal embodiment of the very courage he would later describe in his literary works.
During those years of captivity in Bedford jail, Bunyan experienced what might be described as a crucible that refined both his faith and his art. Rather than descending into bitterness or despair, he used his imprisonment productively, engaging in spiritual meditation, prayer, and—crucially—writing. He authored several theological treatises and began sketching out the narrative framework that would become “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” The isolation and suffering of imprisonment gave him a visceral understanding of the psychological and spiritual struggles of his intended audience—ordinary people facing genuine obstacles to living according to their conscience. When he was finally released in 1672, following a brief period of relaxed enforcement, Bunyan emerged not merely as a survivor but as a man who had been fundamentally transformed by his trial. He eventually became one of the most influential religious figures of his era, serving as pastor of the Bedford meeting house and producing a remarkable body of works that blended sophisticated theological thinking with accessible, vivid narrative storytelling. His ministry during the latter decades of the seventeenth century drew crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands, and his books were read across the English-speaking world.
What many contemporary readers don’t realize is that Bunyan was almost entirely self-taught as a writer and theologian. He had no university education and no formal training in the classical languages or literature that dominated educated circles in Restoration England. Yet through voracious reading, spiritual discipline, and what can only be described as an extraordinary natural gift for narrative and character, he created works that would rival those of university-educated contemporaries. “The Pilgrim’s Progress” is often categorized as a children’s book in modern times, but this classification would have puzzled Bunyan and his contemporaries—it was deliberately written as an allegory that could be read simultaneously on multiple levels, offering spiritual instruction for adults while remaining entertainingly comprehensible to younger readers. Another lesser-known fact is that Bunyan was remarkably prolific: he wrote or co-authored more than sixty works during his lifetime, though many have since been lost or forgotten. He also had a complex relationship with his own past that he didn’t shy away from documenting; his spiritual autobiography, “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners,” is a remarkably candid exploration of doubt, temptation, and psychological struggle that anticipates much later psychological literature. Additionally, Bunyan was a skilled songwriter and poet, gifts that are often overshadowed by his fame as a prose writer.
The specific context of Great-heart’s fearlessness in confronting the lion becomes richer when we understand Bunyan’s personal relationship to fear and courage. The lion that Great-heart faces is not merely symbolic of abstract danger but represents a very concrete obstacle: it literally guards the pathway that the pilgrims must take to continue their journey. In Bunyan’s own experience, both literally in his imprisonment and spiritually in his wrestling with doubt and demonic temptation (a theme that haunts “Grace Abounding”), he had encountered his own lions—moments where fear might justifiably have prevented him from moving forward. The genius of Bunyan’s formulation is