John Milton's Areopagitica: Week 3

The benefit of books promiscuously read

[Depiction by Giulio Romano of the first labour of Venus in the chamber of Cupid and Psyche in the Palazzo Te]

Now that we’ve had a few weeks of setting up the background, let us merrily move along in our reading of Areopagitica. This week I simply want to quote some key passages that are, I think, clear and powerful enough that I need not add much commentary.

Milton develops his argument against prior restraint through licensing by discussing the reality of good and evil existing together in the fallen world. Good and evil are intermingled, in fact, and we can know good only by distinguishing it from evil. This is no easy task:

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.¹ It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.²

Indeed, in our fallen human state, discerning good from evil is not only necessary for wisdom but also the mark of the true Christian:

As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian.³

Moreover, Milton continues, as he builds his argument, virtue is constituted by choosing goodness over evil. Virtue contrasts with innocence, which Milton characterizes as a state in which one is protected or sheltered from evil, making the choice of evil not even an option. Innocence sees no evil; virtue sees it and rejects it. Notice below the sly way in which the Puritan Milton invokes imagery associated with Catholicism to paint a picture of less mature virtue (a “cloister” is a walkway from a convent or monastery that leads to a garden or yard outside).

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.⁴

“Excremental whiteness” is an arresting phrase. It describes purity or innocence that exists because all evil has been obstructed or filtered out beforehand (excreted) as opposed to virtue that is developed by choosing good in the presence of evil.

Having established that knowledge of evil is necessary to both knowledge of the good and the cultivation of virtue, Milton then argues that the best way to “know” evil is vicariously—reading about it and considering reasonable arguments (even if they are wrong). In other words, you don’t have to live it in order to test it. After all, Milton notes wryly, “evil manners are as perfectly learnt without books a thousand other ways.”⁵ 

Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.⁶

And here, at last, we have the phrase that I have long adopted for myself in advocating for “promiscuous reading.” “Promiscuous” simply means mixed, not selective, indiscriminate mingling, and so forth. (Its current association is a result of dropping the adverb from the phrase “sexually promiscuous.” There are actually many ways to be promiscuous, but we moderns think only of one.)

Now Milton—a foremost advocate of religious liberty and freedom of conscience—offers words that our current day Christian Nationalists ought to read and heed:

When God gave him [man] reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is of force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?

They are not skilful considerers of human things, who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin; for, besides that it is a huge heap increasing under the very act of diminishing, though some part of it may for a time be withdrawn from some persons, it cannot from all, in such a universal thing as books are; and when this is done, yet the sin remains entire. Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewel left, ye cannot bereave him of his covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised in any hermitage,⁷ ye cannot make them chaste, that came not hither so; such great care and wisdom is required to the right managing of this point. Suppose we could expel sin by this means; look how much we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue: for the matter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them both alike.⁸

You cannot remove sin by removing the object of sin.

To summarize Milton’s argument thus far: in this fallen world we know evil by its contrast to good, we develop wisdom in distinguishing between the two, and virtue by choosing one over the other. Learning all this vicariously (by reading books) is better than doing it in real life. And in allowing this process of learning, knowing, and choosing, he argues in this next passage, we are imitating God:

This justifies the high providence of God, who, though he command us temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us, even to a profuseness, all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety. Why should we then affect a rigour contrary to the manner of God and of nature, by abridging or scanting those means, which books freely permitted are, both to the trial of virtue and the exercise of truth? It would be better done, to learn that the law must needs be frivolous, which goes to restrain things, uncertainly and yet equally working to good and to evil. And were I the chooser, a dream of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil-doing. For God sure esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person more than the restraint of ten vicious.⁹

Wow. That’s a thought to sit with.

Obviously, there are limitations and counterarguments to Milton’s argument. There were then and some of these seem even more pronounced in this year of our Lord 2024. We will get there in this series. So think about Milton’s arguments and ask how well they accommodate or fail to accommodate today’s fake news, deep fake videos, viral clickbait, false narratives, political spin, and disinformation campaigns.

But as always, we must make sure we understand an argument before we try to counter it. I’m still working on the first and the second! I hope you, dear readers, are doing so with me.

A NOTE ABOUT BOOK NOTES:

I plan to continue posting about new and interesting books in future posts. But having focused so intensely on my mother during the final weeks of her life (and now the details that have attended her death), I have had no head space for all the glorious specimens in my book piles. This is a season of taking one thing at a time and some things not at all.

Speaking of my mother, here is her obituary. I know many of my beloved readers were praying for her and for us. I cannot begin to tell you the prayers that were answered. I thank you deeply and sincerely.

Also, here is a photo of my dog Eva (a Weimaraner) keeping vigil with me at mom’s bedside on a recent day. Those two adored one another. Even when my mother was no longer communicating with us in those last days, she still would put her hand on Eva’s soft, searching head as Eva stood by her bed.

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”¹⁰¹¹

1. This is a reference to a part of the myth of Psyche when Aphrodite gives Psyche a number of tests in order for Psyche to gain forgiveness for marrying Aphrodite’s son. The first test requires Psyche to separate out seeds mixed together, an impossible task for Psyche if not for the ants that come along and help her. Milton’s point is simply that good and evil are confusingly mixed in this fallen world.

2. (Note: I am copying and pasting the text of the work from the online version. But I am noting the pages in the print version to give readers a better idea of where in the text the quotes occur. But there are differences in spelling and spacing between these two versions.) Milton, John. Areopagitica and Other Political Writings. (Liberty Fund: 1999), 17.

3. Ibid, 17.

4. Ibid, 17-18.

5. Ibid, 20.

6. Ibid, 18.

7. Here Milton takes a couple more swipes at the Catholics.

8. Ibid, 23-24.

9. Ibid, 24.

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

11. I love how this quote from Weil that I include each week as the theme of these newsletters is about “unmixed” attention—non-promiscuous—focused, centered, whole.