The Conflicted Puritan Inheritance of John Bunyan's Political Writings.

In his study of the Italian Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt suggested that a heightened sense of the individual demarcates modern from medieval times. Difficult life under despotic rulers forced medieval persons who had previously looked to race or nation for self-understanding to turn to "inward resources" instead, and they eventually came to think of themselves in individual rather than collective terms. (1) A definite political corollary of the new individualism in Europe was the growing call, especially by the time of the Enlightenment, for toleration and freedom of conscience in the public sphere. Perhaps the quintessential example was John Locke, who said that because all persons must construct their lives individually without the foundation of innate ideas, they should also have civil liberties conducive to their doing so. Since the highly introspective writings of John Bunyan (who was Locke's slightly older contemporary) both reflected and furthered the individualist ethos of his era, one might naturally assume that Bunyan may have petitioned the state to permit free exercise of conscience to religious nonconformists like himself. However, as Christopher Hill pointed out, "Unlike Levellers, Cromwell, and Locke, Bunyan contributed nothing to the theory of toleration, proclaimed no principles of natural right." (2) I believe that Bunyan's failure to construct a systematic theory of toleration and free exercise of conscience--remarkable enough from someone whose legacy is "the great seventeenthcentury religious writer and contender for religious conscience" (3)--was not a result of neglect but rather indecision based on the conflicted Puritan heritage on the relationship between church and state which the Baptist Bunyan inherited.