Five-minute digest
Areopagitica
Summary
Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England was published in London in November 1644, deliberately without a licence, a printer's name or registration with the Stationers' Company. It is written as an oration addressed to the Lords and Commons, though it was never delivered. Its title recalls the Areopagiticus of the Athenian orator Isocrates, a written speech urging the Athenian assembly to restore the authority of the ancient council of the Areopagus. Milton's target was Parliament's Licensing Order of June 1643, which required every book to be approved by an official licenser before printing. The library text is the complete pamphlet from Project Gutenberg. Milton opens by praising Parliament for welcoming public advice and states that he will argue in four parts. First, licensing was invented by those Parliament would least wish to imitate. He surveys how Athens and Rome punished only blasphemous or libellous books after publication, how the early councils merely declared which books to avoid, and how prior licensing grew under the medieval papacy, the Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition, with their indexes of prohibited books and their stacked imprimaturs. Second, he asks what is to be thought of reading in general. Moses, Daniel and Paul learned from pagan books; God left the diet of the mind, like the diet of the body, to each mature person's temperance. Since the fall, good and evil grow up together in the field of this world, and virtue that has never met evil is no virtue at all. Here Milton praises Spenser for leading his knight of temperance through the cave of Mammon so that he might see and know and yet abstain. Third, licensing will not achieve its aim. Bad books can be read in manuscript or imported, and a consistent licenser would also have to regulate music, dancing, dress and conversation. Fourth, licensing discourages learning, insults the scholar and the nation, and stops the discovery of truth. Milton recalls visiting Galileo, aged and under house arrest by the Inquisition, and pictures Truth hewn into pieces like the body of Osiris, its fragments still being gathered by her friends. England, he says, is a nation chosen to lead the Reformation, and London a city of free inquiry. He asks for the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, while allowing that Roman Catholicism and open impiety would not be tolerated and that books may still be punished after publication. He closes by asking Parliament to recall the Order.
Top Lessons
Virtue must be tested to be real
Milton's central moral claim is that goodness which has never faced temptation is untried innocence, not virtue. Since the fall, good is known alongside evil, and the Christian is a warfaring soldier who must see vice, understand it, and still choose the better. Shielding adults from every bad book cannot make them good.
Truth is found by many hands over time
The myth of Osiris pictures truth scattered in pieces, to be gathered by patient searchers until Christ's return. Milton thinks the Reformation is still unfinished and that new light will come through argument, writing and study. A licenser who fixes what may be printed stops the search before it is done.
Judge books after they appear, not before
Milton does not deny that the state may burn or punish books that prove blasphemous or libellous. His objection is to prior restraint, the requirement that every book pass a licenser before it can be born. His history argues that ancient and early Christian authorities punished after publication and that licensing came later.
A nation that reads and argues is a strong nation
Milton praises England's quick and ingenious spirit and London's busy pens as signs of a nation rousing itself. Free inquiry, in his view, is part of a people's vigour and calling, not a danger to its order.
Verified Quotes
“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.”
“a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
“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.”
“that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.”
“Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on”
“Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks”
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
“Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
Medical Lens
Areopagitica is not a medical work, but it reasons through the dietetics of its age. Milton compares reading to eating: wholesome meats do little good to a vitiated stomach, bad meats breed little nourishment even in the healthiest concoction (the Galenic term for digestion), and God, having enlarged the diet of the body under the rule of temperance, left the diet of the mind to each grown person. Books are said to preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of the mind that bred them, an image from the still-room and the apothecary's distillation. These analogies show how naturally the physiology of nourishment and the virtue of temperance were linked in seventeenth-century moral argument.
- Part one, on the nature of books
Books compared to a vial holding the distilled efficacy and extraction of a living intellect.
- Part two, on reading
Wholesome and unwholesome meats, the vitiated stomach and healthy concoction, and God's leaving the diet of body and mind to temperance.