SOURCE: Hawkins, Anne H. “John Bunyan: The Conflictive Paradigm.” In Archetypes of Conversion: The Autobiographies of Augustine, Bunyan, and Merton, pp. 73-99. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1985.

In the following essay, Hawkins analyzes the differences between the methods of conversion espoused by Augustine and Bunyan.

I. the Mode of Logos: the Unacceptable Self and the Problem of Evil

The “universals” of religious experience that I have been describing as archetypes and discussing in psychological terms were recognized by writers of the seventeenth century in the metaphors and language of religion. The assumption that the life of the spirit will be more or less the same for everyone is characteristic of seventeenth-century spiritual autobiography. G. A. Starr sums up this attitude as maintaining “that there are universal and recurrent elements in human affairs, particularly in vicissitudes of the soul. History repeats itself not only in man's outward, group existence...