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John Milton, Areopagitica (1644)1 1 Primary Source 7.6 – 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 passages below, Milton ridicules the institution of prior censorship instituted by the papacy in the Reformation era. He also argues that God has showered temptations upon us, because he wants us to learn self-discipline. He then suggests that England could have been the epicenter of the Reformation if only the Church had not crushed the early English movement toward reform. Finally, he reasons that the only religious doctrines and institutions that should be repressed are those of the Catholic Church, which he considers intolerant of all other branches of Christianity. 1 John Milton, Areopagitica, ed. John W. Hales (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1875), 10–12, 2–27, 28, 45, 53– 55. 2 For the full text online, click here. For a freely accessible audio recording, click here. After which time2 the Popes of Rome, engrossing what they pleased of political rule into their own hands, extended their dominion over men's eyes, as they had before over their judgments, burning and prohibiting to be read what they fancied not; yet sparing in their censures, and the books not many which they so dealt with: till Martin V,3 by his bull, not only prohibited, but was the first that excommunicated the reading of heretical books; for about that time Wickliffe4 and Huss,5 growing terrible, were they who first drove the Papal Court to a stricter policy of prohibiting. Which course Leo X6 and his successors followed, until the Council of Trent7 and the Spanish Inquisition engendering together brought forth, or perfected, those Catalogues and expurging Indexes, that rake through the entrails of many an old good author, with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb. Nor did they stay in matters heretical, but any subject that was not to their palate, they either condemned in a Prohibition, or had it straight into the new purgatory of an index. To fill up the measure of encroachment, their last invention was to ordain that no book, pamphlet, or paper should be printed (as if St. Peter8 had bequeathed them the keys of the press also out of Paradise) unless it were approved and licensed under the hands of two or three glutton friars. For example: Let the Chancellor Cini be pleased to see if in this present work be contained aught that may withstand the printing. VINCENT RABBATTA, Vicar of Florence. I have seen this present work, and find nothing athwart the Catholic faith and good manners: in witness whereof I have given, etc. NICOLO GINI, Chancellor of Florence. Attending the precedent relation, it is allowed that this present work of Davanzati may be printed. VINCENT RABBATTA, etc. It may be printed, July 15. FRIAR SIMON MOMPEI D'AMELIA, Chancellor of the Holy Office in Florence. 2 That is, after the year 800 when Pope Leo III (r. 795–816) crowned Charlemagne. 3 Martin V was pope from 1417 to 1431; his election ended the Western Schism. 4 John Wycliffe (c. 1320–84) was an English philosopher, theologian, and lay preacher who translated the Bible into English. 5 Jan Hus (c. 1369–1415) was a Czech priest, philosopher, religious reformer, and follower of John Wycliffe. 6 Leo X (r. 1513–21) was a leading Renaissance pope who augmented papal power on the eve of the Reformation and excommunicated Martin Luther in 1521. 7 An ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, which met between 1545 and 1563 to decide Catholic doctrine and policy in the context of the Reformation. 8 An original apostle of Christ and the first bishop of Rome. 3 Sure they have a conceit, if he of the bottomless pit had not long since broke prison, that this quadruple exorcism would bar him down. I fear their next design will be to get into their custody the licensing of that which they say Claudius intended,9 but went not through with. Vouchsafe to see another of their forms, the Roman stamp: Imprimatur,10 If it seem good to the reverend Master of the Holy Palace. BELCASTRO, Vicegerent. Imprimatur, Friar Nicolo Rodolphi, Master of the Holy Palace. Sometimes five Imprimaturs are seen together dialogue-wise in the piazza of one title-page, complimenting and ducking each to other with their shaven11 reverences, whether the author, who stands by in perplexity at the foot of his epistle, shall to the press or to the sponge. These are the pretty responsories, these are the dear antiphonies, that so bewitched of late our prelates and their chaplains with the goodly echo they made; and besotted us to the gay imitation of a lordly Imprimatur, one from Lambeth House,12 another from the west end of Paul's;13 so apishly Romanizing, that the word of command still was set down in Latin; as if the learned grammatical pen that wrote it would cast no ink without Latin; or perhaps, as they thought, because no vulgar tongue was worthy to express the pure conceit of an Imprimatur, but rather, as I hope, for that our English, the language of men ever famous and foremost in the achievements of liberty, will not easily find servile letters enough to spell such a dictatory presumption English. They are not skilful considerers of human things, who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin; for, besides that it is a huge heap increasing under the very act of diminishing, though some part of it may for a time be withdrawn from some persons, it cannot from all, in such a universal thing as books are; and when this is done, yet the sin remains entire. Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewel left, ye cannot bereave him of his covetousness. 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 hither 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, 9 Here Milton cites from Suetonius’s Life of Claudius, in which he recounts how the emperor had considered issuing an edict permitting quietly farting at the royal table in case of need. 10 Latin for “let it be printed.” 11 A reference to the obligation of monks to have shaven heads. 12 The London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury on the River Thames 13 St Paul's Cathedral, the seat of the Bishop of London.
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