CHAPTER TWELVE John Milton

Mention John Milton’s Areopagitica to a gathering of civil libertarians and eyes will mist, lips quiver, and knees bend. Milton is the patronal apostle of modern American liberalism, Areopagitica his Epistle to the new Ro­mans.

What we run some risk of not realizing—though the Founding Fathers certainly did—are the full implications of the historical context in which Milton wrote and to which Areopagitica was his most memorable contribu­tion. Milton has suffered mightily at the hands of the English Department post-modernists who have so thoroughly “deconstructed” his works and the politically correct critics who have reduced him to the negligible sta­tus of just one more dead white European male poet. But there are great truths, objective facts, about John Milton that must be weighed if we are to appreciate that multifaceted mind and spirit in a tumultuous age remote to our own and its concerns.

One such truth is that the apocalyptic poet who transports us, some­times against our will though never against our better judgment, with Par­adise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671), the two epics and the tragedy of his later years, is not absent but only hidden in his polemical prose works. Another truth is that while Milton produced virtually no poetry in the 1640’s and 1650’s, his polemical prose works did not constitute merely misapplied genius and misspent energy. In fact, we must appreciate how far his polemical prose works gave spirit and texture to his later poetry even while the “active phase of the mass movement” (as Eric Hoffer put it) that called them into being and made of Milton an ar­chetypical “true believer” prevented him from turning his creative powers to verse. Hoffer wrote:

Milton, who in 1640 was a poet of great promise, with a draft of Paradise Lost in his pocket, spent twenty sterile years of pamphlet writing while he was up to his neck in the “sea of noises and hoarse disputes” which was the Puritan Revolution.¹

Hoffer failed to give the devil his due. Perhaps only after twenty years in the wilderness of civil strife and spiritual disorder revealing Hobbes’s state of nature could Milton have achieved the irenic comprehension he gives Samson:

All is best, though we oft doubt,

What th’ unsearchable dispose

Of highest wisdom brings about,

And ever best found in the close..............

Of true experience from this great event

With peace and consolation hath dismiss’d,

And calm of mind all passion spent.²

Without the polemical prose that he wrote, a Nahum-like exaltation of God’s unerring wrath directed at the enemies of His people and God’s promise of safety to them in their fidelity, Milton might not have found for himself Job’s patience in the darkness of his growing blindness. Nor might he have proven able to accept the fulfillment of paradise regained in expec­tation of Paul’s crown for the course run:

“Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d?”

I fondly ask; But Patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need

Either man's work or his own gifts.

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best, his State

Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o'er Land and Ocean without rest:

They also serve who only stand and wait.”³

Milton the revolutionary did not know how to merely stand and wait.

It was in his polemical tracts, especiallyAreopagitica, that Milton evolved a dynamic and a dialectic for change with which he sought not only to re­form a corrupted polity but also to reconstitute a shattered ethos, the great matter of his greatest poetic visions. David Loewenstein makes the point:

No other revolutionary prose work of Milton's, I think, shows a more resilient capacity to embrace social conflict as the essential element of the historical pro- cess—a fact that seems especially striking when we consider that Areopagitica (despite its rhetoric of warfare) is so much less abusive and emotionally vehe­ment than Milton's other polemical tracts. The drama of history for Milton is al­ways dynamic, yet here he has highlighted its regenerative consequences: when some momentous historical change is about to occur, Milton writes towards the end of Areopagitica, “God shakes a Kingdome with strong and healthfull com­motions to a generall reforming.”⁴

Milton was the child of a revolution that began as a spontaneous gener­alized phenomenon, reactive to events, political stimuli, ideological pres­sures, and the surprising accidents of opportunity occurring in the twelve months that led to the convocation of the Long Parliament on November 4, 1640.

John Milton (1608-1674) had embraced poesy in childhood and turned all his learning, heavy in the languages ancient and modern to becoming a poet. He achieved recognition while still at Cambridge, for his ode “On the Morning of Christ's Nativity” (1629) and a poem “On Shakespeare” (1630). He spent the years from 1632 to 1637 living in his father's house in a Buck­inghamshire village twenty miles northwest of London.

Milton returned home in 1639 to watch the nation slide into division, disorder, something like anarchy, and finally revolution. His Puritan senti­ments were more advanced than those of the presbyterian persuasion who took up the cross against “prelacy”—that is, bishops, Anglican no less than Roman—when their Scots co-religionists rebelled against the imposition of a new order of worship at the hands of that prelate of prelates, Wil­liam Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. By 1640 Milton was already an In­dependent (congregationalist), well along toward sounding that cynical aphorism of congregationalists, that new presbyter was but old priest writ large. His tracts against prelacy, addressed to the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly of presbyterian divines in 1641-1642, were violent and vitriolic. These writings also denied the better angel of Milton's nature, which embraced reason and would seek persuasion in religious discourse and intellectual intercourse.

And if yee thinke that soundnesse of reason, or what force of argument soever, will bring them [bishops] to an ingenuous silence, yee think that which will never be. But if ye take that course which Erasmus was wont to say Luther tooke against the Pope and Monks, if yee denounce warre against their Miters and their bellies,... [they] will soone be dumbe, and the Divine right of Episcopacy forthwith expiring, will put us no more to trouble with tedious antiquities and disputes.⁵

This was a far cry from his prayerful peroration in Areopagitica, raised on “those neighboring differences, or rather indifferences... whether in some point of doctrine or of discipline, which though they may be many, yet need not interrupt the unity of Spirit, if we could but find among us the bond of peace”⁶ Such an irenic sentiment would have been sufficiently adiaphoris- tic to satisfy Richard Hooker.

In fact, Areopagitica stands in greater distinction to the anti-prelatical tracts preceding it than to the anti-monarchical tracts that succeed it. Fol­lowing that bewildering and harrowing moment outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall, January 30, 1649, when the crowd who had come to watch Charles Stuart die groaned as the king was beheaded, Milton sought to prevent the new cult of Charles the Martyr from taking root. He wrote two pamphlets, one of them long enough and detailed enough to be a book. Eikonoklastes (1649) was a sustained response to Eikon Basilike, a work pub­lished after Charles's death, and purportedly of the king's own composition, which was intended to justify the king's actions during his rule and at his disastrous fall. Eikonoklastes taxed Charles with intellectual softness: “Kings most commonly, though strong in Legions, are but weak at Arguments; as they who ever have accustom'd from the Cradle to use thir will onley as thir right hand, thir reason alwayes as thir left.”⁷ Yet all Milton's wit, bril­liance, partisanship, and learning could not carry the day for an argument even worse than the argument for King Charles.

The other pamphlet was three-score pages of overblown rhetoric, a hodgepodge of spurious history lightly reinforced by a stringing together of the most fanatical advocates of insurrection and tyrannicide. The title of the pamphlet is the message: The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Proving that it is Lawfull, and hath been held so through all Ages, for any, who have the Power, to call to account a Tyrant, or wicked KING, and after due conviction, to depose, and put him to death; if the ordinary MAGISTRATE have neglected, or deny^,d to doe it. And that they, who of late so much blame Deposing, are the Men that did it themselves. Most of the authorities whom Milton cited were clerics of the unsettled and unsettling Age of Reformation, minds and souls unworthy of the author's attention and superfluous to the argument of the moment.⁸ The tract was not, however, negligible as political theory, for it argued boldly that the power of kings and magistrates is derived from “the People, to the Common good of them all, in whom the power yet remaines fundamentally, and cannot be tak'n from them, without a violation of thir natural birthright.”⁹ Such an argument would undergird Locke's theory and, indeed, the legal fundamentalism of American constitutionalism.

Milton's specific task—to justify the judicial murder of Charles I—was clearly distasteful to him. The tone of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates is not at all sanguinary. Charles's cadaver is not dishonored. Milton was at pains to advocate a better polity, not simply to decry a worse. The Tenure lends credence to John Aubrey's unusually complimentary conclusion that whatever Milton “wrote against Monarchie was out of no animosity to the King's person, or owt of any faction or interest, but out of a pure Zeale to the Liberty of Mankind, which he thought would be greater under a free state than under a Monarchiall government.”¹⁰ That same “Zeale to the Lib­erty of Mankind” drove Milton in 1644 to publish Areopagitica.

To understand what compelled a loyal son of the Revolution to chal­lenge a critical policy of the revolutionary regime requires a backward glance beyond the Order for Regulating Printing decreed by both Houses of Parliament on June 14, 1643, which was the immediate object of Milton's attack. The preamble of the Order referred to orders recently made by both Houses pending passage of a bill for an Act of Parliament (which was not now possible because the king's consent could not be obtained). By this bill the Company of Stationers had attempted to suppress

the late great Abuses and frequent Disorders in printing many false, forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous, and unlicensed Papers, Pamphlets and Books, to the great Defamation of Religion and Government.¹¹

Stationers and printers who were not members of the Company had set up printing presses “in corners” and produced works “in such multitudes, that no Industry could be sufficient to discover or bring to Punishment all the several abounding Delinquents.” This had infringed the copyright of the Company and had been done for revenge against those Company members who had informed against clandestine publishers, all of which was “to the great Prejudice of the said Company of Stationers and Agents, and to their Discouragement in this Publick Service.” Henceforth, no work was to be printed, bound, stitched, or offered for sale unless it was allowed by signature of such as either or both Houses should appoint for licensing and was entered into the register of the Company. The Company's officers and the officials of both Houses of Parliament were given powers of search and seizure for written works, supplies, and presses, as well as the power to arrest unlicensed publishers. Provision was made for the examination and punishment of offenders by either House. A writ of assistance to other of­ficers civil and military was provided. The order concluded with the names or offices of licensers for different types of literature.

In almost all these details, there was nothing novel. The Order reiter­ated, albeit more briefly, what had long been the provisions of orders of the king in Council and decrees of the High Court of Star Chamber controlling printing by licensing, enforcing the monopoly powers of the Company of Stationers, and maintaining its accustomed practices in registering copy­right. For some decades all or most of these provisions had obtained. The state sought to halt dissemination of seditious, schismatic, scandalous, and morally subversive printed matter. Such objectionable materials in fact fell mostly under the category “schismatic,” clandestine books on controversial political and religious issues. A few underground presses had operated in England, fitfully and always in peril; most dangerous books were printed in the Continent and smuggled into England, finding their way to a dwin­dling coterie of Roman Catholic recusants and a sullen, growing crowd of disgruntled Puritans. Most of these printed Puritan pamphlets displayed more vigor against the bishops than other “Romish remnants” in the An­glican Establishment.

The entire apparatus of control was expanded and forcefully tightened during the “Personal Rule” of Charles I in the 1630’s. The immediate cause for the crackdown was an agitator, irrepressible in every sense of the word, who suffered from the inimitable distinction of falling afoul of every re­gime from that against which he published the first of some 200 books and pamphlets in 1627 until his death in 1669, royalist and parliamentary and military and royalist again, and being imprisoned by every one of them save the last: William Prynne, barrister of Lincoln’s Inn. The last regime was the monarchy of Charles II, which Prynne had played a large role in restoring in 1660, but under which he was no more able to keep his mouth shut or his inkwell closed than under any of the others. That most astute of Stuart monarchs, deservedly remembered for saying he did not intend to go upon his travels again, appointed Prynne Keeper of the Tower Records, which gave a worthy outlet for his archival passions and moved him to make a substantial contribution to English history instead of simply railing at the regime.¹² Prynne died of old age, a fact remarkable in itself, since he had twice lost his ears for sedition, the second time with enough shock and loss of blood to have killed him, and been imprisoned “in perpetuity” from 1634 to 1640 (latterly in damp and insalubrious prisons) and again from 1650 to 1653.

In 1634, Prynne was tried and sentenced in Star Chamber, along with a binder-bookseller called Sparks and a clerical licenser, the Reverend Thom­as Buckner, for publishing a seditious libel against stage plays and masques, Histrio-Mastiκ: the Player's Scourge (1633). This acidulous bombard assailed the king and his queen (the French Roman Catholic, Henrietta Maria) and the royal court for allowing and participating in masques. It seemed to asperse the morality of ladies who performed in masques (which meant the queen), and appeared to threaten the king by making approving references to advocates of tyrannicide. If the Attorney General’s case turned more on innuendo than upon explicit sedition, the libel was clear enough and the overall effect of the diatribe was to contemn the State and the Church. Buckner's offense was in having licensed the book without thoroughly reading it, before or after Prynne made additions and changes in manu­script. Sparks was condemned for selling the book despite the fact that he had been

warned not to goe on to print this booke, least it might cost him his eares. And when it was printed, hee perswades chapmen to buy it. It will sell well; hee shewes the perticular passages that woulde make the booke sell well, and buy it (saith hee) for shortlie it wilbee called in. Where, is to bee noted, that the callinge in of a booke is an excellent profitt to the seller.¹³

Being banned-in-Boston is not a modern phenomenon: and here is a clear indication of how voracious a readership there was for the age's yellow lit­erature. Prynne suffered the loss of his ears, exposure in the pillory, and imprisonment, as well as being assessed a fine of £5,000. The other two offenders were treated more leniently. They were fined, and Sparks saved his ears.

In 1636, having managed even in prison to get hold of books and writ­ing materials, Prynne loosed an attack on bishops, singling out de innuendo William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, in A Divine Tragedy Lately Acted. He was sentenced in Star Chamber for that seditious libel, on June 14, 1637, in company with two other Puritan authors, John Bastwick, M.D., and the Reverend Henry Burton, who had committed the same offense in their works. They were punished with enormous fines (£5,000 each), perpetual imprisonment, in the Channel Islands, without “pen, inke, and paper and to have noe bookes allowed them to read in but bookes of devotion and the Bible,” pillory, and the loss of their ears.¹⁴ For Prynne the last punishment meant three mutilating hacks by the hangman, blows that finally removed what was left of his ears, and being branded on the forehead with the let­ters “S.L.” for seditious libeler. Following close on these exemplary punish­ments came a decree of Star Chamber, on July 11, 1637. This reaffirmed earlier decrees and orders that licensed printing. Containing thirty-three articles and additional explanatory provisions for the licensing procedure, the decree was intended to ensure that every printed work would bear cer­tification that it contained nothing

contrary to Christian Faith, and the Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of England, nor against the State or Government, nor contrary to good life, or good manners, or otherwise as the nature and subject of the work shall re- quire.¹⁵

Enforcement and punishment were explicitly confided to Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission for Causes Ecclesiastical, in both of which Archbishop Laud had come to play a leading, sometimes dominant, role. The decree was publicly proclaimed at the last sitting of Star Chamber in Trinity Term, when all the judges of the common law courts, some jus­tices of the peace, and a large crowd of notables were present in court, and it was printed for wide distribution.

So long as the king's Personal Rule maintained civil order from 1629 to 1640, acting with increasing rigor against seditious and criminally libelous publications in Star Chamber and against blasphemous, heterodox, and schismatic works in the Court of High Commission for Causes Ecclesi­astical, repression worked. But this changed abruptly with the staggering events of the summer and fall of 1640. A Scots army invaded England in the name of the Covenant, a religious pledge that was equally a political movement. The English militia, the only force the king had to defend his southern kingdom against his northern, disintegrated into mutinous deser­tion. The king was forced to convene Parliament: first the abortive Short Parliament, in April 1640, and then in November 1640 a parliament that the king could not control: the Long Parliament, which showed an implacable interest in destroying the king's most loyal ministers, reversing the policies of the personal rule, and cleansing the Anglican Church of its “Arminian Prelacy and corrupt Popish remnants.”

The licensing system, like almost every other institution in Church and state, simply ceased to function. Indeed, among the first acts of the Parlia­ment was to vacate the sentence against Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton and to bring about their triumphal return from prison exile in the early weeks of the Parliament—in effect, the symbolic crash of licensing. A genuine revolu­tionary ethos produced a sudden, furious, overwhelming flood of ephem­eral literature, at best polemical, in the main inflammatory, treasonous at worst. Peer, squire, philosopher, cleric, lawyer, poet, artisan, autodidact, and madman—all sorts and conditions of men (and a few women, one sus­pects) — all galloped into print, unhampered, unlicensed, and probably in more cases than the giddy authors would admit, unread. After almost two centuries, the great promise of Gutenberg's movable type was fully realized, and the modern age of print, in all its facets (including journalism), was born. The only comparable cultural revolutions came in the wake of the inventions of the twentieth century, with the work of Guglielmo Marconi and Lee De Forest in the first decades of the century and that of Steve Woz­niak, Steve Jobs and those who developed the Internet in the years before the new millennium.

Parliament’s fears were those of any regime in the best of times, mag­nified by self-doubt about its legitimacy, especially after it took up arms against the king in mid-1642. There was a growing recognition that forces beyond Parliament’s control had been unleashed and that increasingly radi­cal solutions were being demanded from below. The published literature between 1640 and 1644 reflected this radicalism. Englishmen began talking revolutionary talk even before they had thought revolutionary thoughts. While some would in time recoil from the violence and destruction they had advocated blindly ignorant of the real life (and death) consequences of their chatter and posturing, the damage had been done.

The achievements of the first year of the Long Parliament (1640-1641) in dismantling the “Personal Rule” and beginning what Puritans called a “reform” of the Church of England, under presbyterian auspices—most of these changes made in conjunction with a reluctant but necessarily compli­ant king—fueled the demand for further radical reform. The political rheto­ric of the multiplying ephemeral literature began to reveal programmatic and agenda-driven revolutionary ideas. Much of this stuff was printed ser­mons, those highly strung, seemingly interminable expositions of mean­dering scriptural pedanticism given high liturgical function in Reformed Protestantism.

Violence, in tone and advocacy, mounted, not least in those sermons regularly preached before Parliament. On November 5, 1641, the anni­versary of the Gunpowder Plot, Cornelius Burges, D.D., preached to the Commons on the text, “Surely the rage of man shall praise thee, the rest of the rage shalt thou restraine” (Psalms 76:10). Dr. Burges, a respectable Pu­ritan divine, not a radical sectarian, was at the time prominent in the West­minster Assembly. Ultimately he would protest the execution of Charles I. Yet his 1641 exhortation concluded with imagery more appropriate to the chariot than the pulpit: “Those unnaturall Rebels that now rage so desper­ately, should be but bread for you; and all your enemies should be compelled to lick the dust of your feet.”¹⁶ In the next two years the pamphlet-rattling became more extreme and more temporally political. Incendiary pieces by Edward Bowles, Jeremiah Burroughs, and—no surprise, William Prynne— prefigured the abolition of peerage and monarchy, the deposition of the king and even his destruction, and the social “leveling” in a full and uncom­promising revolution. A recent scholar has argued that

The willingness of English pamphleteers in 1642 to contemplate the destruc­tion of the ancient constitution must be part of any explanation of why there is no parallel to the Putney debates to be found elsewhere in seventeenth century Europe, of why no other contemporary rebellion culminated in the trial and execution of a king....

This ends with the chilling observation, that whoever swung the axe which severed Charles's neck, “Bowles, Burroughs and Prynne (no matter how far their views had changed by 1649) had sharpened it.”¹⁷ Having heard Burges's address and other trumpets out of Zion, having read increasingly strident incitements to ever more radical political changes like Prynne's, the majority of the Members of Parliament, by June 1643, were thoroughly alarmed. The result was the licensing order.

Milton's attack on licensing in Areopagitica owed something to self-in­terest, but it was not self-serving. He had made abundant use of the free­dom of unhindered publication after 1640, and his five tracts against prela­cy enjoyed widespread approval inside and outside the Commons because they echoed Parliament's current condemnation of the bishops. None in authority challenged those exercises, which hurried unlicensed through the press. It was otherwise with The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Restor’d to the good of both sexes, from the Bondage of Canon Law and other Mistakes, to Christian Freedom, guided by the Rule of Charity; wherein also many places of Scripture have recovered their long-lost Meaning; reasonable to be now thought of in the Reformation intended. Here again, the title is the message. This remarkable salvo was launched in 1643, at the time Milton's seventeen-year- old bride of a few months went home to her Royalist father upon finding herself unsuited (was it a difference of temperament, intellect, or energy?) to partake in the philosophical life of a man twice her age. This remarkable tract advocated not judicial separation or annulment (the only two forms of “divorce” recognized by canon law, Anglican as well as Roman) but ac­tual dissolution of the marriage, divorce in the modern sense. Very modern indeed were the grounds on which he proposed to freely grant divorce; they were tantamount to the modern doctrine of irreconcilable differences. Whether Milton's doctrine of divorce was good for both sexes or not, it certainly offered a boon for the husband. It relieved him of much respon­sibility and at the most was only slightly conditioned by concerns for chil­dren or disagreement between the spouses. It took little account of practical problems or legal difficulties. If “Christian Freedom” was its end, the “Rule of Charity” was certainly not its means. The work's scriptural exegesis was superficial. Despite the pamphlet’s attack on canon law and its advocacy of further reformation, whatever resonance these plaints could be expected to have among the anti-prelatical fell on deaf ears because the tract was accounted scandalous to faith and morals from whatever quarter the Chris­tian approached its idea and its arguments. Hot words from divines, the reprehension of lawyers, a few instances of the work being cited to justify infidelity (in one case by a wife who left her “unsanctified” husband to take up with a preacher, of what degree of sanctification one can only guess), and the application of the undeserved pejorative tag of “Miltonists” to de­scribe a putative but largely chimerical sect of divorce advocates gave Mil­ton a notoriety he did not seek but was, characteristically, too pugnacious to avoid. He produced a second edition, unlicensed still, in early 1644, with additional material, some of it even more scandalous than that in the first, openly addressed under his name to Parliament and the Westminster As­sembly. Attacked in debate in the latter and in a sermon preached before the former in the summer of 1644, Milton stood in real danger of punishment by Parliament. Nothing happened. Parliament had more pressing concerns in conducting a strenuous and so far much less than successful war against the king, and Milton was too useful an adherent to be alienated while his propagandistic talents were still sorely needed.

As Sir Leslie Stephen noted, in the case of his marital troubles and his literary reaction to them “Milton’s indignation took the form, usual to him, of seeing in his particular case the illustration of a general principle to be enunciated in the most unqualified terms.”¹⁸ The same observation is ap­plicable to Areopagitica: though it clearly struck a defensive stance for the moment and to a specific end, it was cast in such widespread generalization and universalized rhetoric that it would serve for all seasons and to any end. That is one reason why it has lasted so long and never ceased to attract.

Granted, the attraction depends little on the arrangement or the rheto­ric of Areopagitica. It is difficult to read. It is loaded with allusions that presume the reader will be familiar with Classical letters, Scripture, patris­tic commentary, medieval history and contemporary affairs, mixed with la­bored wit and leaden imagery. Its syntax is even more torturous than would be expected from a work of its genre and era. Its argument is spiral, not linear, making for repetitiousness and circularity. Worse, it also suffers from the shortcomings familiar to any lawyer with a bad case: it introduces ev­ery defense possible (plausibility aside) while completing few. A synopsis might help, though it remains uncertain whether a precis would open up all of Milton’s arguments or reveal their relative incoherence when taken as a whole. The book is like a grapnel thrown blindly in hopes that it will snag solid ground on the Areopagus. The confusion in argumentation which annoys the tract's ardent admirers and frustrates its casual readers was the product less of a lack of clarity of vision on the author's part than of his uncertainty as to what line would achieve his ends.

Areopagitica begins with a familiar revolutionary Miltonian stance, with a wholesale attack on “Popery” with its Index and Inquisition and on An­glican “Prelacy” and its licensing. Discounting ancient practices of censor­ship (which the author was at some pains to find more limited and more benign than the evidence would support), Milton identifies the advent of modern censorship as beginning with Pope Martin Vs reaction to the threat of heterodoxy raised by John Wyclif and Jan Hus at the turn of the fourteenth century. Milton lauds Protestant city-states abroad for their sin­gular absence of licensing, a point well taken, while overlooking how effec­tively Geneva, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Boston and other such theocentric Protestant polities were, able because of their small size, settled limits, and watchful magistrates, to discourage undesirable publication by controlling the number of printers and being certain of their orthodoxy. The warmth of Milton's attack is intended to warn the presbyterians of Parliament and the Westminster Assembly of the company they would keep if they did not rescind the Order of June 14, 1643.

From this point, Milton moves to an argument for the positive virtues of unlicensed printing. Citing examples ranging from Dionysius the Great, the third-century Bishop of Alexandria, to his contemporary and friend, John Selden, Milton argues that even bad books can have good effects, for God, having given man the “gift of reason,” trusts man to choose.¹⁹ Bad books can be “read” usefully, though to “practize” them would be pernicious. Milton accepts the fact and the function of Evil, that Crescit in Orbe dolus, that Evil grows in the world. As orthodox Christianity had done since the disavowal of the great early Christological heresies, he ar­gues that Evil is necessary in order for one to know Good. Good cannot be chosen if Evil is not seen and known.²⁰ He tolls Edmund Spenser (play­fully, for that worthy had founded the literary circle called “Areopagus” in Elizabeth's reign) to round out his argument. In the second book of The Faerie Queene, the Knight of Temperance, Sir Guyon, visits the Cave of Mammon, captures the epitome of Intemperance, Acrasia, and destroys her Bower of Bliss, thereby demonstrating true temperance, as the purpose of his quest and trial had been that “he might see and know, and yet abstain.”²¹ Harm done by books Milton tackles head on. That books might “spread infection” Milton dispatches with a mass of examples in support of the proposition that all human learning and religious controversy would have to be banned if “infection” was to be stopped. In fact, he argues, books are more dangerous to the learned than the ignorant, and yet, since they are essential to sustain learning, to suppress them for that reason would be “vain and impossible attempts” with nothing gained, for the ignorant would be as readily corrupted by word of mouth by the learned as by the books themselves, which can corrupt the meaner sort only if construed by the learned.²² And if corruption is so widespread among the learned, then how can Church or state rely on the licenser not to be corrupted? Juvenal's skeptical Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes? (Who keeps the keepers?) is not far from Milton' s mind. Neither is the object of the watch in the sixth book of Juvenal's Satires, the locked-up wife who seduces the guards. As to the harm that comes from being exposed to temptations without necessity and in misemploying one's time in vain things, Milton answers that such books are not temptations but materials to fashion “effective and strong med'cins,” antidotes to vanity.²³ He argues that the “ingenuity of Truth” moves faster than the “pace of method and discours can” to “overtake” it.²⁴ Truth will out, and Truth can no more be known without Falsehood than Good can be without Evil.

Milton rejects Plato's Republic as not of this world and therefore with­out prescriptive value for its real problems. Plato's lofty seriousness is belied by the philosopher's fondness for Aristophanes and his own “wanton” writ­ings, and if applied would lead to a gross error:

If we think to regulat Printing, thereby to rectifie manners, we must regulat all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightfull to man. No musick must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Dorick.²⁵

Such would be to deny passions and pleasures, which “rightly temper'd are the very ingredients of vertu.”²⁶ So Virtue, like Truth and like Good (elements of a kind of trinity of worth and worthiness), can only be seen and known by its opposite and denial. Finally, the hopelessness of trying to license printing is evident in the virtual impossibility of finding a censor of the requisite learning and judiciousness to undertake such soul-destroying work, so that the job could be filled only by those “either ignorant, imperi­ous, and remisse, or basely pecuniary.”²⁷

Most of the remainder ofAreopagitica is devoted to the harm that licens­ing will do to learning and letters. First and foremost, Milton asserts, will be the discouragement of learning. The learned man will become the infe­rior and the victim, lacking intellectual authority “under the tuition, under the corrections of his patriarchal Iicencer to blot or alter what precisely ac­cords not with the hidebound humor which he calls his judgement.”²⁸ Mil­ton argues that the state constitutes “my governours, but not my criticks,” and maintains that the effect of licensing would be to destroy originality and creativity, since the licenser is enjoined “to let passe nothing but what is vulgarly receiv'd already”²⁹ Milton praises the relative freedom of Eng­land, compared to other countries, and not least the Roman States of Italy, where Galileo had been silenced and imprisoned. If licensing be allowed to stand in England, he asserts, it would be a second prelatical tyranny, by which “Bishops and Presbyters are the same to us both name and thing,” and the parson of “a small unlearned Parish, on the sudden shall be exalted Archbishop over a large dioces of books, and yet not remove, but keep his other cure too, a mysticall pluralist,” which will make “a coventicle of every Christian meeting.”³⁰ A state governed by the rules of justice and fortitude, a Church built on the rock of faith and true knowledge cannot be so fearful. With still no settlement in religion, to restrain writing would cause doubt and discouragement.

Milton pleads earnestly with Parliament to require that the Westminster Assembly chastise no longer the learned and the literate, quoting Bacon to good effect: “The punishing of wits enhaunces their autority, and a for- bidd' n writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth that flies up in the faces of them who seeke to tread it out.” Licensing might well prove the “nursing mother to sects.”³¹ The effect of licensing would be to persuade the laity to abandon religion to the clergy, the laity becoming passive and “occasionally” religious, not living the Christian life, and the clergy becom­ing intellectually lazy because they would be without challenge. The vision of “reforming the Reformation” led by the English nation from London, “the mansion house of liberty,” will be lost if the nation gives up the process of “trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement,” where through knowledge could be made “a knowing people, a Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies.”³² Knowledge comes through “much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.”³³

Milton's celebrated metaphor of the Church as a building in which its perfection is a “gracefull symmetry” arising “out of many moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportionall,” his cer­tainty at the fulfillment of Moses' vision of the entire race become Prophets, and his vision of “a noble and puissant Nation” soaring like an eagle,³⁴ all lead to a peroration in which the Parliament is warned that if it binds writers it must first become oppressive, arbitrary, and tyrannical, in effect suppress­ing itself as much as it suppresses authors. Milton restates the strengths of Truth and urges tenderness for those who desire to live in purity by God's Ordinances as conscience directs them, even though not entirely in confor­mity. And in those words which have become the battle cry of civil libertar­ians, he declares his own preference and proclaims his own faith: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”³⁵

Milton might have ended here. That he did not is sobering. In the re­maining score of pages, he fought a kind of rearguard action, almost as if he were in retreat and was attempting to salvage what he could of his argument. Or perhaps these concluding remarks and exhortations can be read as concessions offered to political opponents in the hope of finding common ground, albeit lower ground than the high terrain he had earlier offered to take and hold. Milton hoped to persuade Parliament that while it could regulate, even suppress, printed publications, it should not do so by prepublication licensing. In modern terms, there should be no prior re­straint. From the outset, Milton had claimed no greater objective than this: Areopagitica, A Speech of Mr. John Miltonfor the Liberty of Unlicensed Print­ing, to the Parliament of England. While his arguments could be extended to advance and support as complete a freedom of speech and press as we enjoy in this country today and beyond—though it is hard to see much distance left to go—Milton had consistently conceded that there were limitations:

Impunity and remissenes, for certain are the bane of a Commonwealth, but here the great art lyes to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punish­ment, and in what things perswasion only is to work.³⁶

The perils of publication were not cloaked:

He who is not trusted with his own actions, his drift not being known to be evill, and STANDING TO THE HAZARD OF LAW AND PENALTY, has no great argument to think himself reputed in the Commonwealth wherein he was born, for other then a fool or a foreiner.³7

In allowing that “the State shall be my governours but not my criticks,” Milton accepted the responsibility of the state to regulate the press. At the end, he was explicit about those tenets and opinions to which he proposed to deny toleration and, implicitly, publication:

I mean not [to be] tolerated Popery, and open superstition, which as it extirpats all religions and civill supremacies, so it self should be extirpat,... that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or maners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw it self.³⁸

Finally, Milton commended Parliament for the order requiring that the name of the author or at least the printer of any book be registered, and graciously if Unpersuasively distinguished that order from the licensing re­quirement of the “Star-chamber decree to that purpose made in those very times when that Court did the rest of those her pious works, for which she is now fall'n from the Starres with Lucifer” Milton did not recoil from contemplating the fate of pernicious books:

Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectuall remedy, that mans prevention can use.³⁹

The Star Chamber decree referred to was, of course, that of July ιι, 1637, following the sentencing of Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton—and the burn­ing of their books by the public executioner.

Milton had appealed to the fearfulness, want of imagination, and ab­sence of charity in his “governours,” which he hoped might persuade them to grant half a loaf of press freedom. He was too skeptical not to have ap­preciated the irony of his concessions. He was also too astute an historian to have failed to realize that though, when Truth “and Falshood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and open encounter,”⁴⁰ it is difficult to ensure that the encounter is genuinely free and open. When fanaticism is open, half-truths will go unchallenged—and fanaticism has seldom been less open than it was during the rule of the New Model Army and the reign of England's “visible saints.”

Having served the English Revolution as propagandist, shortly after the execution of Charles I, Milton was appointed by the revolutionary junta, the Council of State, as its Secretary for Foreign Languages. He was re­sponsible for diplomatic exchanges in Latin and other languages and such other services as the Council directed. At least once, those services exacted an extraordinary price, of effort and mind and also of conscience. In 1650, the irrepressible William Prynne, outraged by the execution of the king and refusing to be taxed by a regime he considered illegitimate, broke with the Revolution. The Council arrested him and issued a warrant for searching chambers:

These are to will and require you forthwith to make your repaire to the studdy and chamber of William Prynne, Esquire, in Lincolns Inne or elsewhere, which you are dilligently to search for all writeings, letters or other papers or recordes belonging to the Commonwealth, and alsoe for all writeings, letters or papers by him written, or in his custody, of dangerous nature against the Common­wealth, all which you are to seize and seale up, and bring or cause to be safely brought to this Councell, that thereupon further order may be given concern­ing them; of which you are not to fayle, and for which this shall be your suf­ficient warrant. Given at the CouncelI of State at Whitehall, this 25th. day of June 1650.

Signed in the name and by order of the Councell of State appointed by authority of Parliament.

Jo: Bradshawe, President The warrant was directed

To John Milton, Esq.

Secretary to the Councell

for forreigne languages.⁴¹

Milton did not fail to do his duty, as his office and as the revolution de­manded. Enough was found to persuade the Council to keep Prynne in prison for three years.

Milton was neither friend nor admirer of Prynne. Having himself writ­ten a masque, Comus, in the 1630’s, he abhorred Histrio-Mastix. Although he agreed with Prynne in savaging prelacy, he was not in accord with Prynne’s presbyterianism. Prynne had attacked Milton hotly in print over divorce, eliciting an equally uncompromising printed response. By 1650, Milton and Prynne shared no common ground, save a tacit recognition that the Eng­lish Revolution would probably never succeed in attaining legitimacy and hence not survive.

Nonetheless, Milton’s eyes, already clouding from cataracts, would have seen no beauty in a business at which his conscience rebelled. Samson Ago- 11istes? Perhaps. Should Milton have then asked the question, “Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d?” Certainly, for his courage never failed him. He would, however, have winced at Patience’s reply. He had seen already that Revolution’s yoke is never mild, that its state is despotic rather than kingly, and that, among the thousands who at its bidding speed, too many who serve will only search and seize.