John Milton's Areopagitica: Week 1

"As good almost kill a man as kill a good book"

[The master title page of Index Librorum Prohibitorum, 1564,printed in Venice, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

The setting for Areopagitica is the midst of the English Civil Wars, conducted by those loyal to the monarchy on one side and those loyal to Parliament (and therefore, the people, more or less) on the other, namely the Puritans. King Charles I believed in the divine right of kings and the traditional powers of the monarchy. These did not square well with more modern encroaching ideas such as representative government, religious liberty, and liberty of conscience. Puritans took such notions seriously, however, and in the end, the war brought King Charles’ execution by beheading by the parliamentarians, led by Oliver Cromwell, in 1649.

In 1637, King Charles had decreed that all printed material produced by the printing press had to be licensed. Imagine having to get a license from the government before printing anything? It is unimaginable to most of us today. But remember that the printing press was still a relatively new technology, particularly on a widespread scale, so the ability to mass-produce reading material and to therefore spread different ideas was also new. Think about all the ways social media platforms juggle freedom and responsibility, individual rights and social obligations. A lot is being made up as we go along because these are new frontiers. (Politics and hunger for power are not new, however.)

The printing press allowed for widespread and vigorous debate on political and religious questions because it allowed opinions and ideas to be more easily disseminated. (Hello, Twitter and TikTok!) In fact, the seventeenth century “pamphlet wars” played a huge role in informing, dividing, and polarizing people—and in developing some of the wars.

Puritans like Milton, who were fighting the political and religious powers-that-be had the most to gain from the freedom to disseminate ideas. And the monarchy had the most to lose. But in 1643, Parliament passed its own ordinance that would require printed material to be licensed.

Milton was dismayed. He wrote Areopagitica to appeal to his fellow Puritans and party members to resist the censorious stance they had themselves fought against in the monarchy.

Milton’s argument for a free press is a cornerstone of the modern concept of freedom of speech and America’s First Amendment. More specifically, it addresses the principle in American law now called “prior restraint.” (Heh.) This refers to prohibition before the fact rather than accountability afterward. (You don’t need a license to publish libel beforehand but you might get in trouble afterward. Hmm. Or maybe not.) Clearly, Areopagitica has supreme historical importance.

But it’s also an important literary text, too, which is why I want to read and discuss it here in our study together. It is a literary text because it is written in such an artful way that the language rises to the level of a great book. But it is also literary because of what it conveys about the nature of literature as a means of advancing truth and contributing to human understanding.

So let us begin.

The subtitle states that the work is “a speech” of Milton given to Parliament. It was not a speech and was not meant to be. Calling it “a speech” is a rhetorical device. First, it helps us to “hear” it as a speech as we read it, to imagine it being delivered by its impassioned author, and to therefore understand it as a work connected to the world of public debate. The work does, in fact, follow the form of classical rhetoric. Second, Milton means, of course, to allude to the classical context of oration: Areopagitica refers to the ancient assembly in Athens, the Aereopagus, wherein such public debate took place. It is also the place mentioned in Acts 17 where Paul walks and talks among the Greek philosophers and statesmen gathered there.

The first few pages are an introduction by the speaker of himself to his audience. Then he makes clear his purpose: he asks them to judge “over again that Order which ye have ordained to regulate printing:—that no book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth printed, unless the same be first approved and licensed by such, or at least one of such, as shall be thereto appointed.”

Then he summarizes what he will cover in this “homily”:

… first the inventors of it to be those whom ye will be loath to own; next what is to be thought in general of reading, whatever sort the books be; and that this Order avails nothing to the suppressing of scandalous, seditious, and libellous books, which were mainly intended to be suppressed. Last, that it will be primely to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop of truth, not only by disexercising and blunting our abilities in what we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in religious and civil wisdom.

In other words, Milton intends to show that:

1.      those who “invented” licensing and censorship are not exactly aligned with Puritan ways of thinking and being

2.      the licensing order will not be effective in suppressing what it intends to suppress

3.      such licensing will only discourage learning and stymie truth in the long run: it will blunt what we already know and understand and hinder further discovery (this is the most powerful part of the treatise!)

This briefly outlines the course of the argument that will follow.

Milton then begins to develop his argument that censorship goes against Puritan doctrine and theology.

Drawing on the concept of imago dei, Milton draws links between man being made in God’s image, and books being made in man’s, and therefore, God’s image:

I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors. For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

Just as human life that is lost cannot be brought back, Milton writes, so too might a truth contained in a book that has been suppressed never be recovered:

Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.

While some heretical books were destroyed in ancient Greece and Rome, Milton argues, those societies didn’t use licensing: “The books of those whom they took to be grand heretics were examined, refuted, and condemned in the general Councils; and not till then were prohibited, or burnt, by authority of the emperor.”

Rather, it was the Catholic Church, Milton says, that first used licensing. (Ah! Here are the folks that Puritans do not want to be like!) Milton says of the popes that “their last invention was to ordain that no book, pamphlet, or paper should be printed (as if St. Peter had bequeathed them the keys of the press also out of Paradise) unless it were approved and licensed under the hands of two or three glutton friars.”¹ (Note the sharp, satirical tone that runs throughout the essay, especially in the context of Milton’s decided anti-Catholic views.)

Of course, Milton concedes, just because “the inventors were bad” does not mean the thing invented can’t be good.

But licensing is bad, Milton argues. And that is because the benefits of reading—even reading bad books—are so great as can be seen across history and in the Bible itself.

Read on … and we will pick up there next week.

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”²

1. Here is an article on the history of the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books

2. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. By Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.