The 100 best
nonfiction books: No 95 – Areopagitica by John Milton (1644)
Today
Milton is remembered as a great poet. But this fiery attack on censorship and
call for a free press reveals a brilliant English radical
John Milton: ‘A fiery pamphleteer in an age of religious and political
argument.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock
The Guardian, Monday 27 November 2017 05.45 GMT
Throughout
England and Europe, the 17th century was notable for its violence, instability
and profound social upheavals. On the continent, a whole generation became
traumatised by the thirty years’ war. In England, the
civil war divided the country and executed a king. There are some moments when,
as is happening again now, the forces of history seem to be on the march. In
England, several writers (notably Browne, Burton, Hobbes and Marvell) who lived through these
dangerous times produced work that is clearly influenced by the experience of
chaos, conflict and revolution.
John Milton is perhaps most
notable of these. Born the son of a scrivener in Cheapside, London, in 1608,
and educated at Cambridge, he devoted many years in mid-life to the politics of
the Commonwealth, was arrested during the Restoration, but was released, had
blindness in old age, and died in 1674.
Milton
today is remembered as the author of Lycidas, Paradise Lost, and Paradise
Regained – a supremely great English poet. To his contemporaries, however,
he was pre-eminently a rhetorical writer – a fiery pamphleteer in an age of
religious and political argument, whose tireless defence of divorce,
progressive education, regicide and the Commonwealth marked him out as a
natural, and brilliant, English radical.
For
Milton himself, his gifts were complementary. He said he could write with his
left hand (prose) or his right hand (poetry). To understand him better, and to
locate him in the England of the civil war and subsequent Restoration, his
readers need to reconcile these two parts of his genius, the polemical master
as much as the subtle lyricist. Milton’s Areopagitica is the mature text
that displays both parts of his creative imagination at full pitch, and adds
another dimension to our appreciation of his poetry – in the words of one
critic “a monument to the ideal of free speech”. As Milton himself writes: “A
good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured
up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
Subtitled
“A speech of Mr John Milton for the liberty of the unlicensed printing, to the
Parliament of England”, the title of Areopagitica pays deliberate homage
to the Areopagiticus of the famous Greek orator Isocrates. Like all his
contemporaries, notably Sir Thomas Browne (No 93 in this series), Milton
believed that referencing the classics was one way of guaranteeing the
permanence of his prose.
The exercise of freedom for
Milton was a moral and dynamic right: free citizens must always strive to earn
their freedom
Milton
was writing in response to parliament’s licensing order of 14 June 1643, a
repressive measure that had shockingly re-established the press restrictions of
the hated Stuart dynasty. His attack on censorship and call for a free press
asserted the ideals of liberty and free speech in a tour de force of English
prose that’s at once fierce and poetic: “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.”
For
Milton, as for all great libertarians, true freedom is indivisible, a point
that he argues with polemical brilliance.
Areopagitica
opens with a survey of press licensing, satirically linking the practice to the
Spanish Inquisition. Why, he asks, should the common reader not be free to
judge for themselves between a good and bad book? Is it not the condition of
virtue to recognise evil and resist it? In a celebrated passage, he writes that
he has no time for “a fugitive and cloistered virtue”. The exercise of freedom
for Milton was a moral and dynamic right: free citizens must always strive to
earn their freedom. For Milton, it was this “struggle” that bestowed value on
the individual’s place in society, a theme that links the ethical position of
all his writing, poetry as much as prose. Any regulation of reading, he
continues, broadening the argument against the licensing of the press, should
logically include all recreations.
“If
we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all
recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man… And who shall silence
all the airs and madrigals, that whisper softness in chambers?”
This
passage is an apt reminder that the cultural changes wrought by the Puritan
revolution did not eliminate a lingering attachment to a courtly style that
would survive (just) into the 18th century. Milton’s work is expressive of a
society in transition.
For
Milton, as for any progressive intelligence, the concept of truth was always
complicated and various, a concept that must be assembled through argument and
analysis – the free exercise of thought and opinion. He cites the example of
Galileo, whom he had met in his villa outside Florence, “grown old, a prisoner
to the Inquisition”, as an example of free thought wrongfully restricted. (Both
Milton and Hobbes – No 94 in this series – had benefited
from the experience of meeting Galileo.)
Areopagitica
builds over some 40 pages (in my Penguin edition) to a rousing appeal to “the
Lords and Commons” to consider “what Nation it is we are”. Milton’s answer is
both patriotic and inspiring: “A nation not slow and dull, but of a quick,
ingenious and piercing spirit… methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant
nation rousing herself after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks.”
His
optimism, however, is freighted with anxiety at the prospect of a breakdown
between rival political and religious interests. He concludes that there can be
no limits to tolerance. Freedom must be unlimited, and without restriction –
inalienable and indivisible: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to
argue freely, according to conscience, above all liberties.”
A Signature Sentence
“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.”
Three To Compare
John Locke: Letters on
Toleration (1689-92)
John
Stuart Mill: On Liberty (1859)
George Orwell: Politics and the English
Language (1946)
• Areopagitica
and Other Writings by John Milton is published by Penguin Classics
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