John Milton was a man of letters, meaning he was an intellectual who highly valued knowledge and learning, and his pursuit of knowledge through books is well-established both historically and in Areopagitica. Parliament’s Licensing Order of 1643 severely limited one’s access to books—books that were considered offensive or particularly controversial were subject to censorship or ban—and Milton argues Parliament’s Licensing Order severely limits one’s access to knowledge and learning as well. Perhaps more importantly, Milton argues, censorship “retards the importation of our richest merchandise, truth.” Like good and evil, Milton maintains that truth cannot be separated from knowledge and learning, and he further implies that absolute truth is not something that can be isolated—at least, not yet. Though Areopagitica, Milton argues that truth is ultimately subjective and underscores the danger of censorship in propagating falsehoods.
One of Milton’s overarching arguments throughout Areopagitica is that censorship hinders knowledge and learning. It encourages division among people, rather than understanding, and this is one of his primary reasons for opposing Parliament’s Licensing Order. According to Milton, Parliament’s Order, “this very opinion of theirs, that none must be heard, but whom they like, is the worst and newest opinions of all others; and is the chief cause why sects and schisms do so much abound, and true knowledge is kept at a distance from us.” Milton not only implies that censorship hinders knowledge, he also suggests that the suppression of knowledge through censorship and intolerance has led to the greater division of England itself. Milton further claims that Parliament’s censorship is “but a servitude like that imposed by the Philistines,” under which the English are “not to be allowed the sharpening of [their] own axes and coulters.” The Philistines were ancient farmers generally considered to have been uneducated, and Milton suggests that the censorship of books could result in the English leading the same uneducated existence as the Philistines. “What should ye do then,” Milton asks, “should ye suppress all this flowery crop of knowledge […], to bring a famine upon our minds again, and we shall know nothing but what is measured to us by their bushel?” Not only does censorship lessen one’s knowledge, Milton asserts, but it also controls what kind of knowledge is accessible in the first place.
Milton also maintains that censorship negatively affects the pursuit of truth, which is itself a product of knowledge and learning. Milton argues that censorship by Parliament “will be primely to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop of truth, not only by disexercising and blunting our ability in what we know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery that might be yet further made both in religion and civil wisdom.” Without learning, one cannot expect to discover truth, and therefore cannot hope to advance as a society. “Truth is compared in scripture to a streaming fountain,” Milton writes, “if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.” According to Milton, Parliament’s Licensing Order stops the free “perpetual progression” of knowledge and truth by individuals. The only truth that is circulated is the one chosen by the censors, and the rest gathers in “a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.” “Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded in by tickets and statues and standards,” Milton claims. Truth cannot be bought, sold, or forced through censorship. Rather, it must be feely discovered through knowledge and learning.
“Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on,” Milton contends. He considers truth as something again gifted to humankind by God, something that in its most natural form is “perfect.” Truth did not, however, retain its perfection. “Virgin truth,” Milton argues, has been “scattered” to “the four winds,” and is not easily picked up. “We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons,” Milton says of the pieces of truth, “nor ever shall do, till her master’s second coming.” In this way, Milton argues truth’s subjective nature. Truth can be different things to different people (absolute truth is known only by God), and humankind can only find bits and pieces of it if they are able to seek knowledge and learn freely.
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Knowledge, Learning, and Truth Quotes in Areopagitica
Nevertheless there being three principal things, without which all praising is but courtship and flattery: first, when that only is praised which is solidly worth praise: next, when greatest likelihoods are brought that such things are truly and really in those persons to whom they are ascribed: the other, when he who praises, by showing that such his actual persuasion is of whom he writes, can demonstrate that he flatters not; the former two of these I have heretofore endeavoured, rescuing the employment from him who went about to impair your merits with a trivial and malignant encomium; the latter as belonging chiefly to mine own acquittal, that whom I so extolled I did not flatter, hath been reserved opportunely to this occasion.
Lords and Commons, as what your published order hath directly said, that to gainsay, I might defend myself with ease if any should accuse me of being new or insolent, did they but know how much better I find ye esteem it to imitate the old and elegant humanity of Greece, than the barbaric pride of a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness. And out of those ages, to whose polite wisdom and letters we owe that we are not yet Goths and Jutlanders, I could name him who from his private house wrote that discourse to the parliament of Athens, that persuades them to change the form of democracy which was then established. Such honour was done in those days to men who professed the study of wisdom and eloquence, not only in their own country, but in other lands, that cities and signories heard them gladly, and with great respect, if they had aught in public to admonish the state.
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 on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil as two twins cleaving together leapt 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. As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil?
Truth and understanding are not 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 license it like our broad cloth, and our woolpacks. What is it but a servitude like that imposed by the Philistines, not to be allowed the sharpening of our own axes and coulters, but we must repair from all quarters to twenty licensing forges.
And in their name I shall for neither friend nor foe conceal what the general murmur is; that if it come to inquisitioning again, and licensing, and that we are so timorous of ourselves, and so suspicious of all men, as to fear each book, and the shaking of every leaf, before we know what the contents are, if some who but of late were little better than silenced from preaching, shall come now to silence us from reading, except what they please, it cannot be guessed what is intended by some but a second tyranny over learning: and will soon put it out of controversy that bishops and presbyters are the same to us both name and thing.
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.
Christ urged it as wherewith to justify himself, that he preached in public; yet writing is more public than preaching; and more easy to refutation, if need be, there being so many whose business and profession merely it is, to be the champions of 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; little differing from that policy wherewith the Turk upholds his Alcoran, by the prohibition of printing.
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 strait 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. 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.
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, as the old Proteus did, who spake oracles only when he was caught and bound, but then rather she turns herself into all shapes, except her own, and perhaps tunes her voice according to the time, as Micaiah did before Ahab, until she be adjured into her own likeness. Yet is it not impossible that she may have more shapes than one.
