John Milton's Areopagitica: Week 4

"A man may be a heretic in the truth"

[By Edmund Marriner Gill - http://www.markmurray.com/view_image.html?image_no=587, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3823070]

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”¹

First, I want to welcome my new subscribers! There have been quite a few of you over the past few weeks, and I am so grateful and honored that you would join me here. Some of you have also chosen to be paid supporters and I cannot express how helpful that is to me. It is what allows me to be in this “classroom” here at The Priory when I no longer have an institutional home. There aren’t many perks that come with those few monthly dollars but there are some: you have the opportunity to comment and participate in the little community of conversation we have here; you allow this classroom to be open and free to anyone who wants to read any posts (I really do want this class to be available to all, and so far that is continuing to be possible); and finally you have my deepest gratitude (for whatever that’s worth!).

Now, let’s continue our exploration of John Milton’s Areopagitica!

Milton has been advancing his argument by first arguing against the practice of requiring all printed material to be licensed by the government is based on the teaching of both history and the Bible. Then he goes on to argue that even if the idea had merit, it wouldn’t work practically. One very of these practical reasons is that licensing requires a licenser, and a licenser would have to be highly qualified, and the very characteristics that would make him so qualified would be the very ones that would not be able to endure the work:

It cannot be denied but that he who is made judge to sit upon the birth or death of books, whether they may be wafted into this world or not, had need to be a man above the common measure, both studious, learned, and judicious; there may be else no mean mistakes in the censure of what is passable or not; which is also no mean injury. If he be of such worth as behooves him, there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing journey-work, a greater loss of time levied upon his head, than to be made the perpetual reader of unchosen books and pamphlets, ofttimes huge volumes. There is no book that is acceptable unless at certain seasons; but to be enjoined the reading of that at all times, and in a hand scarce legible, whereof three pages would not down at any time in the fairest print, is an imposition which I cannot believe how he that values time and his own studies, or is but of a sensible nostril, should be able to endure.²

Milton then moves to the main part of his argument. After arguing that licensing should not be done, and cannot be done well practically, he argues based on the positive harm licensing will do, saying, “I lastly proceed from the no good it can do, to the manifest hurt it causes, in being first the greatest discouragement and affront that can be offered to learning, and to learned men.”³

The harm licensing does, ultimately, is to truth. Truth is not a tangible, static thing, Milton argues. “Truth and understanding are not,” Milton explains, “such wares as to be monopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards. We must not think to make a staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark and licence it like our broadcloth and our woolpacks.”⁴ Truth is rather something dynamic, living, moving, flowing.

Remember that for Milton truth is not just an idea or ideal, but is at the heart of religious faith. Always at the back of his arguments is his Protestant/Puritan position that it is the believer’s task to seek out and further understand the truth of faith, religion, and God—and not to rely solely on the church or any authority in the church (or out) for one’s faith, belief, or understanding (which is how he understands the Catholic view of papal authority). Thus Milton argues:

Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.⁵

This, dear readers, is one of my favorite lines in the work, one I return to again and again.

For Milton, the Protestant Reformation was, among other things, an advance toward the ongoing search for truth.

There is yet behind of what I purposed to lay open, the incredible loss and detriment that this plot of licensing puts us to; more than if some enemy at sea should stop up all our havens and ports and creeks, it hinders and retards the importation of our richest merchandise, truth; nay, it was first established and put in practice by Antichristian malice and mystery on set purpose to extinguish, if it were possible, the light of Reformation, and to settle falsehood … ⁶

Milton concedes that the Reformation—and with it, the constant, continuing search for truth and greater understanding of it, inevitably results in divisions, sects, and denominations. But this is not necessarily bad, he argues:

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care of their religion into their own hands again. A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and some grain of charity might win all these diligences to join, and unite in one general and brotherly search after truth; could we but forgo this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men.⁷

Division that develops in the course of earnest seeking after truth is cause for rejoicing, Milton says. It is an opportunity to cultivate virtue, the virtues of prudence, forbearance, charity, diligence, and brotherliness.

Indeed, before the house of God can be completed, there must be much sawing and construction, he says:

Yet these are the men cried out against for schismatics and sectaries; as if, while the temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrational men who could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every piece of the building be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, that, out of many moderate varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional, arises the goodly and the graceful symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure. Let us therefore be more considerate builders, more wise in spiritual architecture, when great reformation is expected. For now the time seems come, wherein Moses the great prophet may sit in heaven rejoicing to see that memorable and glorious wish of his fulfilled, when not only our seventy elders, but all the Lord's people, are become prophets.⁸

“All the Lord’s people are become prophets,” he says. This is similar to the Protestant tenet of the priesthood of all believers. It is, in part, why there was so much wrangling in seventeenth-century pamphlets—and in twenty-first century tweets--over doctrine. In Milton’s description, we are simply building a church made of different parts and sections and rocks and timbers—all part of the “spiritual architecture.”⁹ The seeking out of truth, in this fallen world, Milton argues, cannot stop because we will not fully attain truth in this earthly life:

'Tis not denied, but gladly confessed, we are to send our thanks and vows to Heaven louder than most of nations, for that great measure of truth which we enjoy, especially in those main points between us and the Pope, with his appurtenances the prelates: but he who thinks we are to pitch our tent here, and have attained the utmost prospect of reformation that the mortal glass wherein we contemplate can show us, till we come to beatific vision, that man by this very opinion declares that he is yet far short of truth.¹⁰

In these passages, Milton lays out a vision of denominationalism and dissent that is positive. It is positive because he assumes (or at least hopes) that these things are a natural and inevitable result of imperfect people in an imperfect world seeking the truth that we will never grasp in full in this life.

I agree with Milton’s vision.

With that said, nearly 400 years later, we are facing some problems that are the polar opposite of those that Milton was tackling. One is the potential limits of free speech—which we will explore next week in our final installment on Areopagitica. Another is Protestantism run amok, a problem ever-apparent in American evangelicalism today. There is a great deal to say on that matter (in fact, I wrote a whole book on it, as have many others, most notably

Kristin Du Mez

and

Beth Allison Barr

). But one interesting problem that continues to draw my interest and attention is a theme that has been raised lately by historian Miles Smith.

Smith has posted, spoken, and written about the ways in which modern evangelicalism strays from (or never was) classical Protestantism (the kind Milton was writing about). And in a kind of horseshoe effect, evangelicalism has come to have many “little popes” as Smith put it in an essay earlier this year at Mere Orthodoxy in which he reflected on the insights he gained from reading a number of ex-vangelical memoirs.¹¹ Here’s part of what Smith wrote (you can read the whole essay here):

Fundamentally, exvangelicals seemed to have been told that a specific type of church was the true church, that true faith probably didn’t exist outside of it, and that the leaders of those churches could speak with near ex cathedra authority on any issue they deemed important. The specifics may change from church to church–some tended to be vaguely charismatic, others strict dispensationalists, and still others a kind of independent folk Calvinist. But all shared a certain exclusivity and clericalism that defined their existence. These churches and this culture were governed ostensibly by the Bible, but ultimately it was a faith defined primarily by individual pastors.

Enough of these churches led by enough of this clericalist type of minister popped up between 1970 and 2000 to build an entire subculture. In many ways, these evangelical churches proved a prominent anti-Protestant polemic correct; unmoored from the historic creeds and Protestant confessions, from church history, from any socio-cultural habits, or ecclesiastical institutional memory, ministers became little popes, and the culture they swam in created a clericalist order that squelched dissent or inquisitive dispositions among the laity. That clericalist order was not merely a religious one. It made common cause with the Republican Party through institutions like the Moral Majority and bred a theopolitical order that was post-Protestant.

If this analysis is correct—and it undoubtedly has merit—then the classically Protestant Milton must be turning over in his grave.

*BOOK NOTE

Released a couple of weeks ago, The Church in Dark Times: Understanding and Resisting the Evil that Seduced the Evangelical Movement by Mike Cosper is a fitting book considering the point made by Miles Smith above. Mike is best known these days for hosting the podcast, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. In endorsing this book, I noted that Mike here “brings to bear his extensive work uncovering some of the most troubling moments in the American church.” Not only that, but Mike is well-read in history, art, and culture, and integrates all this into this story of some dark days in the church.

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

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), 25-26.

3. Ibid, 26.

4. Ibid, 30.

5. Ibid, 34.

6. Ibid, 37.

7. Ibid, 41.

8. Ibid, 41-42.

9. In other words, semper reformanda

10. Ibid, 37-38.

11. Two of my favorite memoirs that Smith writes about in this essay are Testimony by my friend

Jon Ward

(who writes this excellent substack) and The Exvangelicals by

Sarah McCammon

, whose substack column is here.