John Milton's Areopagitica Week 5

And an idea for a Christmas gift for the literature lover in your life!

[Image credit: https://skylinehorizon.org/feature/art-censorship-is-a-slippery-slope/]

We arrive now, readers, at the end of our study of Areopagitica and to some of my favorite passages from it. I know it is a more difficult, intense (and let’s be honest, at times dry) work than most of those we’ve looked at over the past year here at The Priory. Let’s just say the “likes” for the posts in this series have been spare. But I’m committed to doing the good, less “viral” work here as my way of resisting the clickbait world out there. And enough of you have come alongside that I know I’m not writing into the wind. You are here. You are reading. (You know, Substack keeps very good records that allows me to see what percentage of my subscribers open each newsletter and how many view they get and so on, but I can’t remember the last time I looked at those stats, to be honest.) Thank you to those of you who are opening, reading, and commenting, or even just silently participating. I see you! And I appreciate you. I hope you, like me, are growing and being challenged to give at least some attention toward the truer, deeper things. (I still get into those George Lewis videos every time they cross my feed. Every time!)

But let’s move on to Milton’s moving words about the power of truth.

There is truth and then there is Truth with a capital T. As a Christian, Milton recognizes that Jesus is the Truth. In this passage he mashes up the story of Jesus (the Truth) coming into the world in the Incarnation with a story from Plutarch about the mythical Isis and Osiris. The latter is an allegory of the search for truth in which sacred writings are symbolized by the body of Osiris torn asunder by Typhon and searched for by Isis. (This melding of classical myth and biblical narrative is the essence of Paradise Lost, so passages like this let us prepare for that.) What a poignant and powerful picture Milton offers of pure Truth being betrayed and torn apart:

Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could find them.¹

Then Milton directly addresses his audience, his fellow Parliamentarians, to remind them that we still have not found all the pieces of Truth. Nor must they prevent that continued searching for all its parts through the requirement of government licensing of publications:

We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection. Suffer not these licensing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity, forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyred saint.²

And then Milton offers an exhilarating, inspiring picture of Truth and her power:

For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power. Give her but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true … ³

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.⁴

These words are why I have been such a firm advocate all my adult life of free speech. I have always believed that “truth will out,” just as Ecclesiastes 2:13 says that “wisdom surpasses foolishness as light surpasses darkness” (NASB).

Right?

Right.

The thing is that the truth might take a lot longer to come out these days. I’m not saying these days are worse than Milton’s days. But man! We have AI, disinformation, viral disinformation, algorithms, suppression of truth intentional or not, and X. Enough said.

I wonder now more than ever if Truth is in danger of being starved to death.

Now, let me be clear. I do not think censorship is the answer. And let me also be clear that true censorship is defined as Milton was understanding it: as government prohibition of free expression of ideas.

I asked on social media last week for examples of censorship, and the answers were as all over the page as I expected them to be—and then some. Answers ranged from cancel culture to self-censorship and lack of government-funded studies and the way social media algorithms elevate or suppress. Now, to be sure, the word “censor” has multiple meanings, some metaphorical. And all those meanings and examples are worth thinking about and discussing. While in most contexts censorship refers to governmental prohibitions, most definitions mention suppression of ideas that goes beyond that.

But what Milton is addressing—and what we need to understand in its own category—is the danger of government prohibiting its citizens from disseminating ideas. (Think George Orwell’s 1984⁵ or possibly some recent events in England). This is not the same as a free site funded by advertisement that you can choose to use or not use not letting you post whatever you want.⁶ I admit there are complications that can bring some gray areas to this example. Nevertheless, it is not the same as the government arresting you for sharing your opinion. I do think many of the examples people shared when I posed the question are good and important ones to consider. However, if we ignore the dangers of government censorship and focus on what we do as free citizens to one another we forget the power we have in our First Amendment guarantees. And forgetting the power of the First Amendment makes the risk of losing it greater. The First Amendment doesn’t guarantee we will be free from criticism or be popular no matter what we say.

There is so much more to say on these issues. Lacking time and space, I will close with a few questions as food for further thought and discussion:

• Are age restrictions made and enforced by the government or other authorities (such as the entertainment industry) censorship?

• Are rating systems censorship?

• Is peer pressure censorship?

• Is being mocked, trolled, made a target censorship? Is the self-censorship that might naturally follow this treatment the same as any form of censorship?

• Is publication of certain works and not others censorship?

• Is a publisher who publishes only works on subjects and in a style that fulfills their mission censoring the works they don’t publish?

• Is government funding of some research but not other research censorship?

• Is selecting some books but not others in libraries or schools censorship?

• Is including some books in school curricula but not others censorship?

• Is selecting books or media for schools and libraries based on subject and age-appropriateness censorship?

• Do private and/or religious organizations have more right to select/suppress/censor than public ones?

• Is the House Republicans’ refusal to release the Matt Gaetz ethics report censorship? (Actually, I think this is a helpful example: the government is not suppressing citizen speech here. But they are, in my opinion, derelict in their duty to us!)

With so many questions and so many definitions of “censorship,” I think it is most helpful to keep Milton’s work in mind as a model. Suppression is real, and becoming an ever more present reality and factor in our politics and our communities. But suppression is not the same, strictly speaking, as censorship (though we may use the terms interchangeably at times.) Milton was concerned about what happens to truth when the weight of the government—with its power to arrest, try, convict, imprison, execute, and simply prohibit—is used to prevent its citizens from expressing and engaging with ideas.

I have no doubt that my posts on X are being overshadowed by algorithms that favor very different kinds of content that I choose not to post. This is not censorship. It may be sad, but it’s not censorship. It is a big part of why I’m over here on Substack, though.

Thanks for joining me.

Speaking of joining me, after Christmas, I will begin our slow journey through Paradise Lost. So here’s an idea: why not buy the literature lover in your life a copy of the book AND a paid subscription to The Priory to join along in the conversation here? And did you know that group discounts for paid subscriptions are available for two or more who subscribe together? This is a much better temptation than the one we will read about in Paradise Lost, isn’t it?

I’m going to use this compact little Penguin edition for reading.

I know not everyone is thrilled about Milton, so don’t go away yet. I will punctuate the Paradise Lost posts now and then with other topics. And we’ll read some of his shorter poems between now and then to give you a taste.

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”⁷

*BOOK NOTE

Another book you might want for our reading of Paradise Lost is C. S. Lewis’s famous A Preface to Paradise Lost. And speaking of Lewis, I was delighted to receive this new book by Jeffrey Barbeau drawing from a series of lectures and conference papers on “C. S. Lewis and the Romantic Imagination” held last year. I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but this cover is gorgeous! I expect the content to be equally arresting.

1. (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), 38.

2. Ibid, 38.

3. Ibid, 46.

4. Ibid, 45.

5. You really should read this novel.

6. Free speech isn’t really free. There are many news reports of the devastating effects endured by social media moderators whose job it is to remove disturbing, disallowed, and even illegal content. In 2020, Facebook paid $52 million dollars in a settlement to moderators as compensation for the mental toll their jobs exacted. Stories about what these workers do abound. It is genuinely disturbing.

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