The Puritantical context of Arthur Dent
The first text we are staging as part of Early Modern Dialogues in Performance is an example of an early modern religious dialogue, one of the most widespread forms of the dialogue genre in the period. Religious publishing in general was big business in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and religious dialogues in particular were used for didactic purposes (teaching a particular point of doctrine), devotional purposes (fostering personal piety and religious practices such as prayer), apologetic purposes (arguing for the truth of a particular viewpoint), and polemical purposes (attacking the theology of opposing groups). [1]
From a literary point of view, some of these dialogues are more interesting than others. Some feature characters who personify abstract entities such as Death or the Church or are simply mouthpieces spouting arguments or Bible verses with little characterisation. [2] Others, however, combine their religious message with a degree of realism that shows us something of everyday life in the early modern period. [3]
Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven falls into this second category. It is a religious dialogue that begins when two neighbours on their way to sell a cow (Asunetus the ‘ignorant man’ and Antilegon the ‘caviller’) decide to take a break to discuss matters of religion with the minister Theologus and the ‘honest man’ Philagathus. What follows is a discussion that ranges over the signs of salvation and damnation in a way that sheds light on social issues such as alehouse culture and the ‘racking of rents’ by unscrupulous landlords, as well as the competing religious views of the zealously ‘godly’ of Puritan persuasion, the comfortably conformist, and the sophisticated sceptic. It thus provides material of interest not only for readers primarily interested in religion, but also for those interested in other aspects of the social and economic history of the period.
Dent’s dialogue was a bestseller of its day, reaching 25 editions by 1640. [4] Its author was an Essex clergyman who served as curate of Danbury and then parish minister of South Shoebury. [5] Dent got into some trouble with his local archdeacon for nonconformity, that is, not complying with all of the ritual practices required by the established Church, such as using the sign of the cross in baptism and wearing the white surplice clergy were required to wear. This suggests that Dent was a minister of a broadly Puritan persuasion, from a wing of the Church that thought that the Church of England had not finished the work of the Protestant Reformation, and so retained some elements of the medieval Catholic Church that Puritans deemed unbiblical. However, Dent later seemed to stay out of trouble and was appointed to a position of responsibility training less able clergy in the Rochford deanery.
This evidence suggests that Dent was among those that historian Peter Lake has labelled ‘moderate Puritans’, Puritans who tried not to rock the boat too much on matters of ritual practice and church government in order to keep their platform within the established Church to pursue what they saw as the more urgent priorities of preaching and bringing the message of salvation to their parishioners. [6]
This was part of a pastoral approach known as ‘practical divinity’ that sought to apply Protestant Reformed theology to the experience of ordinary people in order to help to know how to be saved, how to know that they were saved (assurance of salvation), and how to live a godly life. Dent’s literary career fits in with this evangelistic and pastoral agenda of the moderate Puritan ‘physicians of the soul’. Among his other popular works were A Sermon of Repentance, preached in 1582 and reprinted at least twenty-two times up to 1638, and his final apocalyptic biblical commentary, The Ruine of Rome, or, An Exposition upon the Whole Revelation, which was in the process of being printed when Dent died of the fever in January 1603.
Some Readings of Dent’s Dialogue
In modern scholarship, The Plain Man’s Pathway is one of those texts that is more often cited in passing than studied in depth. There are a few exceptions to this, however. Elizabeth Hudson’s 1993 article situates Dent’s writing both in the context of his ‘moderate Puritan’ pastoral agenda of bringing his readers to conversion and in the socio-economic conditions of conflict with Spain and famine at home.[7]
Stuart Sim’s 1988 article and sections of his 1990 book Negotiations with Paradox focus on the paradoxical logic of Calvinism found in Dent’s text and its implications for storytelling.[8] Sim relates the binary divisions in Calvinist theology between the elect destined for salvation and the reprobate destined for destruction to modern structuralist theory that sees narratives as structured around binaries:
Sim links Dent’s expansive lists of signs of salvation and damnation to ‘structuralist analysis’ in which ‘codes can be uncovered within codes’, [10] and draws out some of the apparent contradictions of Calvinist predestination evidenced in Dent’s dialogue:
In typically paradoxical style, the Calvinist considers doubt a sign of election and certainty a sign of reprobation – at the pre-conversion stage, 5that is. At the post-conversion stage, certainty is transformed into a positive sign. Asunetos can venture to suggest that ‘for all that, a man cannot be certaine’; Theologus will insist that he can. [11]
The task Theologus and Philagathus set themselves is to examine Asunetos and Antilegon as to their conduct, and to establish the likelihood of their being candidates for elections. Their objective will be to divide to the two neighbourrs- Asunetos the merelyg ignorant from Antilegon the dangerously caviling – and to place the former, the ‘plain man’ of the title, on the ‘pathway to heaven’. [9]
In passages among those omitted from the performance of The Plain Man’s Pathway on this website for time reasons, Theologus defends and Antilegon attacks a Calvinist version of predestination. Many of Antilegon’s arguments against the apparent injustice of predestination are not particularly atheistic – rather they are the kind of objections that might be raised by the then newly emerging Arminian strand of Protestantism and that would be shared by many devout Christians today (for example, that it is unjust for God to condemn individuals before they are even born). However, in seeing the status of Antilegon and Asunetus within the text as static, Sim downplays the crucial distinction between predestination as a prior eternal state and conversion as something that takes place in time, allowing for some narrative movement as Asunetus moves from one spiritual state to another.
More recently, Christopher Haigh has used Dent’s characters to structure his 2007 book The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570–1640. Haigh’s book is not primarily a study of Dent’s text, but uses Dent as a jumping off point to group different attitudes to religion in early modern England. Haigh finds real individuals in the archives resembling Dent’s four characters (plus a fifth character from another dialogue by George Gifford to represent ‘the Papist’, i.e. Roman Catholics) in the attitudes and practices revealed by the records of church courts.
Strikingly, real individuals corresponding to all of Dent’s character types got into trouble in the church courts on occasion. Zealous ministers like Theologus got into trouble for refusing communion to parishioners that they deemed ungodly or lacking true faith. Those of Puritan or nonconformist leanings like Philagathus fell foul of the authorities for refusing to kneel for communion or for ‘sermon gadding’ in search of godly preaching away from their local parish church. The complacently conformist or ignorant like Asunetus could be held to account for their lack of knowledge of the church’s catechism (a summary of doctrine in question and answer form), and the irreligious such as Antilegon could be punished for falling asleep in church. As balances of power shifted at local and national levels, all of these broad groups could and did use the courts against one another.
Haigh does not divide these groups of people into the starkly binary categories of regenerate and unregenerate into which Dent puts them, and he seems particularly sympathetic to Asenetus:
Asunetus and his kind were religious people, in a conventional, undemanding kind of way. They were not godly, but by their own lights they were God-fearing.
For so long as I do as I would be done to, and say nobody no harm nor do nobody no harm, God will have mercy on my soul. And I doubt not but my good deeds shall weigh against my evil deeds, and that I shall make even with God at my latter end. For, I thank God for it, I have always lived in his fear and served him with a true intent. Therefore I know that so long as I keep his Commandments and live as my neighbours do, and as a Christian man ought to do, he will not damn my soul.
That was not Calvinism – it wasn’t much like Protestantism. But it was a religion that made men and women try to be good. It may even have saved their souls. [12] Haigh’s is a creative, insightful and readable study, but it has its limitations as an account of early modern religion and as a guide to Dent’s dialogue. Haigh’s court-based methodology ensures a focus on points of tension and controversy rather than on sources that would reveal blurred boundaries and coexistence between those of different religious persuasions and temperaments. Like Sim, Haigh also treats these groups too much as static identities – as Antoinina Bevan Zlatar points out, Haigh downplays the motif of conversion by which members of one group could move to another
Haigh’s is a creative, insightful and readable study, but it has its limitations as an account of early modern religion and as a guide to Dent’s dialogue. Haigh’s court-based methodology ensures a focus on points of tension and controversy rather than on sources that would reveal blurred boundaries and coexistence between those of different religious persuasions and temperaments. Like Sim, Haigh also treats these groups too much as static identities – as Antoinina Bevan Zlatar points out, Haigh downplays the motif of conversion by which members of one group could move to another.[13]
The Pilgrim and the Hitchhiker: Dent’s Literary Successors
Dent has at least one claim to fame in literary history, and possibly a second. The more certain of these is his impact on John Bunyan, the Dissenting tinker preacher imprisoned for twelve years after the Restoration of Charles II who is best known as the author of the allegorical journey narrative The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; Second Part 1684), one of the most widely circulated and translated works of world literature after the Bible. The Pilgrim’s Progress transposes Dent’s mode of expounding doctrine through dialogue into a fantastical landscape of giants, dragons and flaming mountains, as the protagonists Christian and Christiana make their way from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.
Bunyan records his encounter with Dent’s work in his 1666 spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, recalling that The Plain Man’s Pathway was one of two pious books that his first wife brought as her dowry. Bunyan writes:
Presently after this, I changed my condition into a married state, and my mercy was, to light upon a Wife whose Father was counted godly: this Woman and I, though we came together as poor as poor might be, (not having so much houshold-stuff as a Dish or Spoon betwixt us both), yet this she had for her part, The Plain Mans Path-way to Heaven, and The Practice of Piety, which her Father had left her when he died. In these two Books I should sometimes read with her, wherein I also found some things that were somewhat pleasing to me: (but all this while I met with no conviction.) She also would be often telling of me what a godly man her Father was, and how he would reprove and correct Vice, both in his house, and amongst his neighbours; what a strict and holy life he lived in his day, both in word and deed.[14]
Bunyan’s father-in-law sounds a bit like Dent’s Philagathus, and may not have made himself popular with his neighbours by his reproving of vice. Bunyan’s biographers often note with frustration that he does not tell us the name of his first wife – evidently this is not an important enough detail for Bunyan’s account of his own spiritual awakening.[15] What is important for Bunyan are the names of the two books she brought with her – The Practice of Piety (original publication date unknown; second edition 1612) by Welsh bishop Lewis Bayly, and Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway. As well as stirring some desires for piety in the young Bunyan (though not yet the ‘conviction’ of sin that both Dent and Bunyan see as necessary to true conversion), one can trace the influence of Dent in Bunyan’s own later allegorical fictions.[16]
There are echoes of Dent’s Asenetus in the character of Ignorance in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Ignorance, like Asunetus, believes that he will get into the heavenly city because of his good neighbourliness: ‘I know my Lords will, and I have been a good Liver, I pay every man his own; I Pray, Fast, pay Tithes, and give Alms, and have left my Countrey, for whither I am going.’ [17] Ignorance is denied the happy ending of conversion given to Asenetus, and is instead cast into hell from the gates of heaven where he expects admittance.[18] There are also parallels between Dent’s Antilegon and Bunyan’s Worldly Wiseman, who offers a means ‘to cure those that are somewhat crazed in their wits with their burdens’ of guilt by an easier and more socially respectable means than that of the narrow path of conversion.[19]
There are close verbal parallels between Bunyan and Dent too. In his denunciation of the sin of covetousness, Dent’s Theologus complains of ‘gripple muck-rakers [who] had as leeve part with their bloud, as their goods’ and of ‘carnall worldlings, and muckish minded men’ who ‘mind earthly things’.[20] Dent’s phrasing here perhaps informs the image in The Second Part of the Pilgrim’s Progress of ‘a man that could look no way but downwards, with a Muckrake in his hand’, who refuses to look at the heavenly crown held out for him above his head because his ‘Carnal mind’ prefers the ‘Straws and Sticks’ of earthly riches.[21]
The social critiques found in The Plain Man’s Pathway find closer parallels in a less widely read allegorical fiction by Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), the story of an ungodly shopkeeper on the way to hell whose more realistic mode of writing provides a more direct portrait of seventeenth-century England than the fantastic landscape of The Pilgrim’s Progress. For instance, in Dent’s dialogue, Asunetus agrees with Theologus that their society is consumed by sinful pride, and offers the evidence of trends in female fashion:
And what say you then to painting of faces, laying open of naked breastes, dying of haire, wearing of periwigs, and other haire, coronets and topgallants? And what say you to our artificiall women, which will be better then God hath made them? They like not his handy-worke, they will mend it, and have other complexion, other faces, other haire, other bones, other brests, and other bellies then God made them.[22]
In Mr Badman, Bunyan’s mouthpiece Mr Wiseman (the voice of true godly wisdom, unlike Mr Worldly Wiseman in The Pilgrim’s Progress), makes a very similar complaint eighty years on from Dent’s dialogue:
But what can be the end of those that are proud, in the decking of themselves after their antick manner? why are they for going with their Bulls-foretops, with their naked shoulders, and Paps hanging out like a Cows bag? why are they for painting their faces, for stretching out their necks, and for putting of themselves into all the Formalities which proud Fancy leads them to? [23]
Dent’s dialogue has a further claim to fame that may appeal more to today’s readers, but has a less certain provenance. This is that the name Arthur Dent is the name given to the main character in Douglas Adams’s sci-fi comedy series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (radio series 1978; first novel 1979). Adams’s Dent is the last surviving human after Earth is demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass. The Dent of The Hitchhiker’s Guide is a comically ironic everyman adrift in a cosmos lacking the clear providential purpose of The Plain Man’s Pathway or The Pilgrim’s Progress – the answer to the meaning of ‘life, the universe and everything’, we are told, is ‘42’. In such a cosmos, eternal salvation is not in view, and even a nice cup of tea is hard to find.
Douglas Adams consistently denied that he had any knowledge of his character’s seventeenth-century namesake, but yet the parallels between The Plain Man’s Pathway and The Hitchhiker’s Guide seem too fitting to be entirely coincidental. Perhaps the answer, as suggested by Adams’s biographer M. J. Simpson, is to be found in Adams’s unconscious memory. [24] Simpson records that, while in Cambridge over the summer of 1976 to direct the Footlights comedy show A Kick in the Stalls, Adams stayed at the house of the noted historian of Tudor and Stuart England H. C. (Harry) Porter. Porter recalls:
I used to lecture on seventeenth-century English writers before I retired […] I had in this house about the time Douglas was staying here a book of sermons by a writer called Arthur Dent. It was an original seventeenth-century book, lent to me by Maurice Hussey. I’ve no idea whether Douglas saw it. It just happened to be lying around here.[25]
The coincidence seems too good to be accidental, but I will leave it to you to decide.
Bibliography
[1] See especially Antoinina Bevan Zlatar, Reformation Fictions: Polemical Protestant Dialogues in Elizabethan England (Oxford University Press, 2011). On religious publishing culture more generally, see, for instance, Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2011).
[2] E.g. William Perkins, ‘The First Epistle of John, in Forme of a Dialogue’, in A Case of Conscience, the greatest that ever was: how a man may know, whether he be the childe of God or no in Workes of that famous and worthie minister of Christ in the Universitie of Cambridge, M. W. Perkins, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1608–9), I:421–28.
[3] E.g. William Perkins, A Fruitful Dialogue Between the Christian and the Worldling Concerning the Ende of the World, in Workes, III:465–77, in which the characters walk together and discuss recent food shortages as well as biblical prophecy.
[4] Christopher Haigh, The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570–1640 (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 1.
[5] Biographical details taken from Brett Usher, ‘Dent, Arthur, 1552/3–1603’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online (ODNB).
[6] Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge University Press, 1982).
[7] Elizabeth K. Hudson, ‘The Plaine Mans Pastor: Arthur Dent and the Cultivation of Popular Piety in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Albion, 25:1 (Spring 1993), 23–36.
[8] Stuart Sim, ‘“For some it driveth to dispaire’: Calvinist Soteriology and Character Models in Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven’, English Studies, 69:3 (June 1988), 238–48; Stuart Sim, Negotiations with Paradox: Narrative Practice and Narrative Form in Bunyan and Defoe (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), esp. pp. 31–43.
[9] Sim, Negotiations with Paradox, p. 33.
[10] Sim, Negotiations with Paradox, p. 35.
[11] Sim, Negotiations with Paradox, pp. 36–37.
[12] Haigh, Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven, p. 78.
[13] Zlatar, Reformation Fictions, pp. 2–3.
[14] John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 8.
[15] For instance, Richard L. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 30–31.
[16] On Bunyan’s reading of Dent and its influence on him, see Roger Pooley, ‘Bunyan’s Reading’, in The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan, ed. Michael Davies and W. R. Owens (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 105–8.
[17] John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress: From this World to that which is to Come, ed. James Blanton Wharey, rev. Roger Sharrock (Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 123–4.
[18] Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, pp. 162–3.
[19] Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 19.
[20] Arthur Dent, The plaine mans path-way to heaven. Wherein every man may clearly see, whether he shall be saved or damned. Set forth dialogue wise, for the better understanding of the simple (London, 1601), pp. 97 and 72. The italicised words are a biblical citation from Philippians 3:19, as indicated by a marginal note.
[21] Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, pp. 199–200.
[22] Dent, Plain Mans Path-way, pp. 46–47.
[23] John Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, ed. Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 125.
[24] M. J. Simpson, Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams (Boston: Justin Charles, 2003), pp. 92–94.
[25] Cited in Simpson, Hitchhiker, p. 93. This does not exactly establish that Adams saw a copy of The Plain Man’s Pathway, as Simpson infers, since The Plain Man’s Pathway is not a ‘book of sermons’ as such. However, it does establish that Adams had the possibility of seeing some writing by Dent, and it is possible that Porter’s memory is imprecise regarding the particular work by Dent’s he had in the house, or incomplete regarding any conversation this book with Adams about Dent in which The Plain Man’s Pathway may well have come up.