1 Primary Source 10.3 – Milton JOHN MILTON, AREOPAGITICA (1644)1 John Milton (1608–74) is widely considered the greatest writer in English after Shakespeare. A private tutor, an excellent school in London, seven years at Cambridge University, and six years of self-directed study made him an extraordinarily learned man with fluency in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian; vast knowledge of modern writing; and intimate familiarity with the literature and thought of ancient Greece and Rome, of late antiquity, and of the Middle Ages. From an early age, he believed himself destined to contribute a great creative work, something that would do credit to the gifts with which the Lord had endowed him. A deeply believing Christian and an unwavering advocate of religious, civil, and political liberty, he devoted those gifts for twenty years to the service of the Puritan and Republican causes. During this era, he penned Areopagitica, probably the greatest polemical defense of the freedom of the press ever written. Following the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, Milton had to withdraw from political life. Seven years later, he published his masterwork, Paradise Lost, an epic poem recounting the Biblical story of the Fall of Man in over 10,000 lines of blank verse. In Areopagitica, Milton deploys impassioned arguments, vast historical knowledge, extraordinary erudition, and powerful logic to demand the abrogation of a law of 1643 authorizing twenty licensors, or censors, in England to approve or reject book and pamphlet manuscripts before publication, a general policy (not always strictly enforced) dating to the mid-1500s but abolished in 1641 by the Long Parliament. There followed a brief explosion of pamphlet publishing—from 22 in 1640 to 1,966 in 1642. Milton argues that policies of prior censorship had never existed in any ancient or medieval society before the Catholic Inquisition, that stifling the free exchange of ideas would stunt intellectual development, that ideas should be rejected only after they have been carefully assessed by society, that truth will always prevail against falsity, that evil ideas test and fortify our discipline and ability to resist temptation, that a society cannot remain free and vigorous without a robust sphere of public disputation, that distinguishing truth from falsity is the duty of citizens and not government, and finally that a handful of censors cannot possibly be trusted to judge what is right for an entire society. Milton’s powerful arguments did not convince Parliament to overturn the law of 1643, and prior censorship was ended in England only in 1695, yet the pamphlet exerted a formidable impact on many subsequent political thinkers, including the Founders of the American Republic. In the excerpts below, Milton urges the leaders of Parliament to carry forward the political transformation of England, begun in their struggle against King Charles I (r. 1625- 40) known as the English Civil War (1642–51). For the full text online, click here. For a freely accessible audio recording, click here. 1 John Milton, Areopagitica, ed. John W. Hales (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1875), 44–45, 46–47, 49–50, 51–52. 2 Lords and Commons of England,2 consider what nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to. Therefore the studies of learning in her deepest sciences have been so ancient and so eminent among us, that writers of good antiquity and ablest judgment have been persuaded that even the school of Pythagoras3 and the Persian wisdom4 took beginning from the old philosophy of this island. And that wise and civil Roman, Julius Agricola,5 who governed once here for Caesar, preferred the natural wits of Britain before the laboured studies of the French. Nor is it for nothing that the grave and frugal Transylvanian6 sends out yearly from as far as the mountainous borders of Russia, and beyond the Hercynian wilderness,7 not their youth, but their staid men, to learn our language and our theologic arts. Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of Heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us. Why else was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her, as out of Sion,8 should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europe? And had it not been the obstinate perverseness of our prelates9 against the divine and admirable spirit of Wickliff,10 to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Huss11 and Jerome,12 no nor the name of Luther or of Calvin,13 had been ever known: the glory of reforming all our neighbours had been completely ours. But now, as our obdurate clergy have with violence demeaned the matter, we are become hitherto the latest and the backwardest scholars, of whom God offered to have made us the teachers. Now once again by all concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and solemnly express their thoughts, God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, even to the reforming of Reformation itself: what does he then but reveal himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first to his Englishmen? I say, as his manner is, first to us, though we mark not the method of his counsels, and are unworthy. Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of, 2 The pamphlet was written as though addressed to the two Houses of Parliament. 3 Milton is referring to the belief in metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls. Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570–c. 495 B.C.) held this view, as did ancient inhabitants of France and the British Isles, the Druids. 4 The ancient Persians were thought to have invented magic. 5 Julius Agricola was the proconsul of Britain from 78-85 A.D. 6 Transylvania, now part of Romania, was for a brief time staunchly Protestant. 7 A mountainous region of central and southern Germany. 8 Zion, the name of a mountain near Jerusalem, was often synonymous with that holiest city in Judaism and Christianity. 9 Bishops. 10 John Wycliffe (c. 1320–84) was an English philosopher, theologian, and lay preacher who translated the Bible into English. 11 Jan Hus (c. 1369–1415) was a Czech priest, philosopher, religious reformer, and follower of John Wycliffe. 12 Jerome of Prague (1379–1416) was a Czech church reformer and a leading follower of Jan Hus. 13 Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Jean Calvin (1509–64) were the two greatest leaders of the Reformation. 3 we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care of their religion into their own hands again. A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another,14 and some grain of charity might win all these diligences to join, and unite in one general and brotherly search after truth; could we but forgo this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men. I doubt not, if some great and worthy stranger should come among us, wise to discern the mould and temper of a people, and how to govern it, observing the high hopes and aims, the diligent alacrity of our extended thoughts and reasonings in the pursuance of truth and freedom, but that he would cry out as Pyrrhus did,15 admiring the Roman docility and courage: If such were my Epirots, I would not despair the greatest design that could be attempted, to make a Church or kingdom happy. What would ye do then? should ye suppress all this flowery crop of knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily in this city? Should ye set an oligarchy of twenty engrossers16 over it, to bring a famine upon our minds again, when we shall know nothing but what is measured to us by their bushel? Believe it, Lords and Commons, they who counsel ye to such a suppressing do as good as bid ye suppress yourselves; and I will soon show how. If it be desired to know the immediate cause of all this free writing and free speaking, there cannot be assigned a truer than your own mild and free and humane government. It is the liberty, Lords and Commons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchased us, liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; this is that which hath rarefied and enlightened our spirits like the influence of heaven; this is that which hath enfranchised, enlarged and lifted up our apprehensions, degrees above themselves. Ye cannot make us now less capable, less knowing, less eagerly pursuing of the truth, unless ye first make yourselves, that made us so, less the lovers, less the founders of our true liberty. We can grow ignorant again, brutish, formal and slavish, as ye found us; but you then must first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary and tyrannous, as they were from whom ye have freed us.