Areopagitica is a polemic, or an aggressive written argument, published by John Milton in 1644. Just two years before Milton wrote Areopagitica, King Charles’s Star Chamber Decree, which was responsible for the widespread censorship of speech and writing, was abolished. For a short time, censorship was nearly nonexistent in England and publications of every type began to rise. To suppress royalist propaganda and police radical ideas, Parliament passed the Licensing Order of 1643, which introduced several ordinances for printing regulation, including pre-publication licensing and the registration of all authors, printers, and publishers. Milton himself had been censored for some his more controversial writings, and he vehemently disagreed with Parliament’s Licensing Order. Areopagitica, which Milton published without registration, is his argument against Parliament’s printing regulations and the repressive influence of the Roman Catholic Church, and he traces a historical account of censorship through the ages. The type of sweeping censorship imposed by Parliament, Milton argues, is a relatively recent phenomenon with roots in the Catholic Church and is the mark of a truly oppressive society. Though Milton is not wholly against censorship in all contexts, he believes that censoring books generally infringes on the individual’s liberties and ability to “reason,” and is a direct offense against God.
Milton provides ancient Greece and Rome as examples of societies that respected individual thought and censored minimally, in contrast with 17th century England. Milton claims that Plato, a highly influential Greek philosopher, “commended the reading of Aristophanes the loosest of them all, to his royal scholar Dionysus.” Aristophanes was a Greek playwright and comic whose play, The Clouds, was accused by Plato of contributing to the trial and execution of Socrates, a fellow Greek philosopher and Plato’s teacher. Regardless of how he must have personally felt about Aristophanes, Plato still praised the study of his work rather than calling for its censorship. Lycurgus, the lawgiver who established many of the institutions of ancient Spartan society, encouraged the reading of Homer and Thales—both poets from Ionia, a region near the ancient city of Troy—to “mollify Spartan surliness” and “plant among them law and civility.” Homer is credited with writing the epic poem, the Iliad, a telling of the Trojan War, which began after the Prince of Troy ran off with the wife of the king of Sparta. Ancient Spartans no doubt had much animosity toward those associated with Troy, yet their writings were still widely accepted and read. Milton also references Cato the Censor, a Roman senator who sought to stifle the spread of Greek culture in Rome and called “to banish all such Attic babblers out of Italy.” Essentially, Cato wanted to censor Greek influence and writing, which he considered pagan, “but Scipio and other of the noblest senators withstood him.” In ancient Greece and Rome, Milton argues, there were but “two sorts of writings which the magistrate cared to take notice of: those either blasphemous and atheistical, or libellous.” In short, only books that were considered sacrilegious or defamatory were censored, a point Milton appears to agree with, as opposed to the heavily regulated publishing laws of his own contemporary period.
According to Milton, the type of censorship imposed by Parliament in 1643 was not seen until “after the year 800,” when “the popes of Rome” (the Roman Catholic Church), began heavily censoring books and ideas. This, in his view, violates an individual’s ability to “reason,” and therefore to distinguish good from evil, a “gift” from God that should not be limited through the suppression and censorship of books. Milton mentions Jan Hus, a Czech theologian and predecessor to the Protestant Reformation, “who first drove the papal court to a stricter policy of prohibiting.” Hus favored ecclesiastical reform and was burned at the stake in 1415 for heresy against the Catholic Church, a precedent which Milton implies to have encouraged general censorship in Europe. Milton also refers to the Council of Trent, a council held in northern Italy from 1545-1563 that responded to the growing threat of Protestantism against the Catholic Church. Out of the Council of Trent came the Index of Prohibited Books, which identified books Catholics were forbidden to read. Milton claims that the Spanish Inquisition (a judicial institution formed to identify heretics of the Catholic Church) and the Council of Trent “together brought forth, or perfected, those catalogues and expurging indexes that rake through the entrails of many an old good author.” The Spanish Inquisition also identified prohibited books and is a prime example of the intolerance and censorship Milton opposes in Areopagitica. Milton repeatedly argues that one’s ability to reason and freely choose between good and evil is a sacred gift handed down by way of God’s divine authority and no one, including the British Parliament, has the authority to take that gift away. Milton implies that Parliament defies God’s plan and authority through the suppression and censorship of books. Eliminating the freedom to choose between good and bad, as is done through censorship, diminishes one’s moral fortitude, Milton contends, and in doing so makes one an “artificial” Christian—one who is only holy in theory, not in practice.
Milton relies on the anti-Catholic sentiments of the Protestant Parliament and characterizes censorship as a uniquely Catholic creation. He calls Parliament’s printing regulations an “authentic Spanish policy of licensing books,” and implies that these laws make Parliament no better than the Catholic Church. While Milton argues against censorship in Areopagitica, he supports the complete suppression and eradication of the Roman Catholic Church—which he considers to be particularly oppressive and cruel—an opinion that was also overwhelmingly held by members of Parliament. He “who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image,” Milton writes, “but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.” Plainly put, Milton implies that to censor books and kill reason is to kill God Himself, a message that must have been particularly impactful for Milton’s religiously devout audience to hear.
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Religion, Censorship, and Reason Quotes in Areopagitica
Which though I stay not to confess ere any ask, I shall be blameless, if it be no other than the joy and gratulation which it brings to all who wish and promote their country’s liberty; whereof this whole discourse proposed will be a certain testimony, if not a trophy. For this is not the liberty which we can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the commonwealth, that let no man in this world expect; but when complaints are freely heard, deeply considered and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained, that wise men look for. To which if I now manifest by the very sound of this which I shall utter, that we are already in good part arrived, and yet from such a steep disadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into our principles as was beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery, it will be attributed first, as is most due, to the strong assistance of God our deliverer, next to your faithful guidance and undaunted wisdom. Lords and Commons of England.
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.
By judging over again that order which ye have ordained to regulate printing: ‘That no book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth printed, unless the same be first approved and licensed by such’, or at least one of such as shall be thereto appointed. For that part which preserves justly every man’s copy to himself, or provides for the poor, I touch not, only wish they be not made pretences to abuse and persecute honest and painful men, who offend not in either of these particulars. But that other clause of licensing books, which we thought had died with his brother ‘quadragesimal’ and ‘matrimonial’ when the prelates expired, I shall now attend with such a homily, as shall lay before ye, first the inventors of it to be those whom ye will be loath to own; […].
And yet on the other hand unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
Therefore we do not read that either Epicurus, or that libertine school of Cyrene, or what the Cynic impudence uttered, was ever questioned by the laws. Neither is it recorded that the writings of those old comedians were suppressed, though the acting of them were forbid; and that Plato commended the reading of Aristophanes the loosest of them all, to his royal scholar Dionysius, is commonly known, and may be excused, if holy Chrysostom as is reported nightly studied so much the same author, and had the art to cleanse a scurrilous vehemence into the style of a rousing sermon. That other leading city of Greece, Lacedaemon, considering that Lycurgus their lawgiver was so addicted to elegant learning as to have been the first that brought out of Ionia the scattered works of Homer, and sent the poet Thales from Crete to prepare and mollify the Spartan surliness with his smooth songs and odes, the better to plant among them law and civility, it is to be wondered how museless and unbookish they were, minding nought but the feats of war.
We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity, or church, nor by any statute left us by our ancestors elder or later; nor from the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad; but from the most antichristian council, and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever enquired. Till then books were ever as freely admitted into the world as any other birth: the issue of the brain was no more stifled than the issue of the womb: no envious Juno sat cross-legged over the nativity of any man’s intellectual offspring; but if it proved a monster, who denies, but that it was justly burnt, or sunk into the sea
I conceive therefore, that when God did enlarge the universal diet of man’s body, saving ever the rules of temperance, he then also, as before, left arbitrary the dieting and repasting of our minds, as wherein every mature man might have to exercise his own leading capacity. How great a virtue is temperance, how much of moment through the whole life of man? Yet God commits the managing so great a trust, without particular law or prescription, wholly to the demeanour of every grown man. […] God uses not to captivate under a perpetual childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his own chooser; there were but little work left for preaching, if law and compulsion should grow so fast upon those things which heretofore were governed only by exhortation.
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?
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.
When God gave him 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
Banish all objects of lust, shut up all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste, that came not thither 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. 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.
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.
Not that I can think well of every light separation, or that all in a church is to be expected ‘gold and silver and precious stones’; it is not possible for man to sever the wheat from the tares, the good fish from the other fry; that must be the angel’s ministry at the end of mortal things. Yet if all cannot be of one mind, as who looks they should be? This doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled, I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and regain the weak and the misled.
