Professor John Rogers:
Let's begin.
We looked last time at Saint
Peter's declamatory speech in
"Lycidas," and we spent a
lot of time on it.
We looked at its relation to
the new career that John Milton
ended up assuming in the late
1630s: this new career as a
polemical writer of political
prose.
Milton becomes increasingly in
this period -- and this is the
period of the English
Revolution.
What is the English Revolution,
you ask?
Well, that's a good question
and there are still innumerable,
often competing answers to that
question.
It seems to be more or less --
this is one way of framing an
answer -- it seems more or less
to be a Puritan Revolution.
Middle-class Puritans like John
Milton find themselves upholding
the authority of Parliament over
the authority of King Charles
and over the authority of the
official Church of England.
That's the roughest possible
sketch of what the English
Revolution is.We find
ourselves in today's reading,
Areopagitica,
in the middle of the
English Revolution,
sometimes called the Puritan
Revolution.
It's in this period that Milton
increasingly begins to adopt,
or assume, Saint Peter's
confident and denunciatory
rhetoric.
He adopts it as his own,
Milton does.
He writes a series of treatises
in support of -- this is really
out there, and he alienates a
lot of his natural,
organic base with these actions
-- Milton writes a series of
treatises in support of the
right to divorce,
divorce for reasons for
incompatibility,
and he continues to assist the
Puritan left,
the progressive movement,
in overthrowing the
hierarchical structure of the
Church of England.
The bishops,
also called prelates --
those church officials
essentially appointed by
Archbishop William Laud,
whom we looked at last time --
were replaced in the early 1640s
by means of the success of the
Puritan revolutionaries and were
replaced by presbyters:
ministers who were chosen by
individual congregations.
Milton was able to think of
this new form of church
government as the most
reasonable form of church
government because it seemed to
be the product of individual
choices.
It seemed to be the product of
individual decisions made by the
rational, churchgoing English
public.By the time we get to
1644,
this is the year that
Areopagitica appears,
we're well into the English
Revolution.
This is the year in which we
have two dominant groups in the
new revolutionary Parliament.
You have the conservative,
Anglican royalists.
They've already been ousted.
They're no longer a central
component of the political
scene.
You have left the Presbyterians
and the Independents,
and at this point the
Presbyterians are in firm
control.
Now as with most political
groups who suddenly find
themselves -- and this is just
an ancient piece of wisdom that
I'm sharing with you,
but it's something obviously
that you will have heard before
-- as with most political groups
who suddenly find themselves in
possession of a measure of
power,
the ideas and values of the
Presbyterians,
who had of course started out
as radicals,
were beginning to harden into
something like a new orthodoxy
with this new aggregation of
political power.
They began laboring to suppress
and laboring to stamp out forces
that opposed them,
whether those forces were on
the right or on the left.Now
of course, the presbyters had
seized control in the first
place because they disapproved
of the tactics of suppression
and intervention that had been
deployed by the bishops,
or the prelates,
of the old church.
But the new Presbyterian Party
soon developed its own methods
of employing state power to
control and regulate the church.
This is just a general
historical irony that surely at
some point besets all
revolutionary movements,
and it's an irony that
particularly appalled John
Milton.
It's in recognition of what we
can think of as this
time-honored historical irony
that Milton writes such a
memorable line,
a wonderful line,
in his sonnet on the new
Presbyterian regime.
It's the poem of the "…
New Forcers of
Conscience…"
which ends with that line,
you'll remember:
"New Presbyter is but Old
Priest writ Large."
The Revolution has essentially
become a revolution in name
only.
Priests, these are the bishops
of the old system,
have changed their name to
presbyters,
 perhaps,
and they look like
revolutionaries,
but they're manipulative,
controlling actions haven't
essentially changed at all.
And for the Presbyterian Party
in 1644, it turns out there are
in fact a number of factions to
control and to manipulate and to
regulate.
Professor John Rogers:
The new Presbyterian
orthodoxy soon [laughs]
developed its own methods of
employing state power to
control,
to regulate,
and to manipulate the church.
That's where we get this
rousing line,
"New Presbyter is but Old
Priest writ Large."
I had mentioned the various
factions in Parliament that the
Presbyterian Party had to
confront: the Independents who
are to the left of the
Presbyterians.
We can count John Milton as a
supporter of the Independents.
The Independents resented the
new authoritarianism of the
Presbyterians,
and they supported,
or at least they tolerated,
a new phenomenon -- a
relatively new phenomenon on the
English cultural landscape.
This is the freedom of the
printing press.
It's a freedom that,
of course, Parliament had
pushed for, but now that they've
got it there is some misgiving.
From 1641 to 1643,
there had been an unprecedented
explosion of printing and
publishing in England.
Every conceivable Protestant
sect was publishing treatises of
theological speculation and
publishing treatises of
religious propaganda at an
extraordinary rate.
It's really a remarkable thing
that happens in the
mid-century.Religious
propaganda of course -- and this
is always the case --
unregulated religious propaganda
only breeds more unregulated
religious propaganda and more
religious division.
By the end of the period there
was an unprecedented number of
new religious groups.
Some of these groups born at
this moment still exist.
We still have the Quakers,
we have the Baptists,
but there are,
of course, many groups thriving
in the 1640s that have
absolutely faded from the
religious scene:
the Ranters,
the Familists,
and the Muggletonians.
These are churches of almost
every imaginable stripe,
and they're springing up and,
from a mainstream perspective,
they're quickly eroding the
authority of the Church of
England.
It was becoming absolutely
impossible, in fact,
or at least much,
much harder,
to claim that there was a
single expression of religious
truth to which the English
nation could consensually
subscribe.
And suddenly there are dozens
and dozens of competing
expressions of religious truth,
and so you have a new
proliferation of new religions
and new religious ideas that
comes about as the immediate
product of the freedom of the
press.
It's in this decade,
in fact, that we have the first
newspapers.
The printed word begins to take
on -- assumes a political and a
cultural importance that it had
never had before.The
proliferation of religious texts
and the proliferation of
religious sects produced what
was widely seen to be a
potentially anarchic political
situation in the early 1640s.
It's in response to what was
deemed to be the chaotic
condition of English religious
culture that the
Presbyterian-led Parliament
issued in 1643 the Licensing
Act.
The Presbyterians needed to
halt the endless generation of
dangerous religious propaganda
and continued what they felt on
some level was the continued
metastasis of Protestant sects.
This is a recurring rhetoric,
this notion that there is a
cancer in the body politic.
Parliament enacts through this
legislation a mechanism for the
state control of the press.
Books now have to be licensed.
They have to be preapproved by
the state before they can
actually be published.In the
controversies that are leading
up to the Licensing Act,
one of the authors most
frequently mentioned as posing a
special threat to the well-being
of the English nation is our
very own Milton.
The treatises that he had
written in favor of the right to
divorce for reasons of
incompatibility in the earlier
1640s had scandalized his
contemporaries and had
especially scandalized his
Puritan contemporaries on the
left.
Milton was particularly singled
out as one of these dangerous
new voices that had to be
stopped.
In a sermon that was preached
to Parliament in August of 1644
by Herbert Palmer,
it's Milton whose name is cited
as one of the as one of those
figures most dangerous to the
state.Now my guess is that
maybe not all of you but some of
you will have heard about,
or perhaps actually have read
snippets from,
today's reading:
this amazing treatise,
long before you got to it last
night, Areopagitica.
This is without question
one of the English language's
most powerful and most rousing
expressions of the freedom of
the press and actually of a kind
of libertarian philosophy in
general.
The argumentative logic of
Areopagitica rests on a
distinction between external
compulsion,
on the one hand,
and internal discipline on the
other, internal discipline
looking something like an
internalization of the
discipline and the authority of
the monarch.
We have the compelling,
official authority of the new
state licenser,
and Milton pits that external
state of power against the
powers of reason and against the
powers of conscience that,
of course, were seen to govern
human action from within -- an
internalized authority.
It's, of course,
not just John Milton who's
authorized to determine his own
actions.
Everyone, according to the
logic of Areopagitica,
everyone has the potential
to assume the inner authority of
conscience and self-discipline.
Everyone has potentially a
licenser within himself,
and so there's no need --
there's no logical need for a
state licenser.There are
some passages in Areopagitica
that I would be remiss to
overlook,
so I'm going to ask you to turn
to page 739 in the Hughes.
Milton's arguing that
there's no authority that can
rightfully exist outside of the
conscience of the individual.
Even religious truths,
which, of course,
are the most potent forms of
knowledge that we have -- even
religious truths have to be
subjected to the final arbiter,
who is the individual's
conscience and the individual's
power of reason.
Milton is taking the argument
at so many points in
Areopagitica as far as he
can possibly go.
This is page 739: 
A man may be a heretic in
the truth [Milton writes];
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.
Think of that,
"though his belief be true."
Expand in your minds the
implications,
the possible consequences of
this.
Any belief is heresy if you
haven't managed to determine
that belief for yourself,
if you haven't managed to
determine that belief on the
basis of your own conscience or
through the powers of your own
faculty of reason.
You can be a heretic in the
truth if you accept a belief,
however true that belief turns
out to be at the end of time,
when we enter the pearly gates
and we finally get the last
word.
You're a heretic because you've
accepted that belief only
because it's been handed to you
by an external authority,
an external authority like a
pastor or a bishop or a member
of the state assembly or a
lecturer in the English
department for that matter.
It is your obligation,
Milton argues in this
remarkable treatise,
to determine for yourself what
will constitute truth.
All truths have to be acquired
directly by the
individual.It's perfectly
impossible,
I think, to imagine a stronger
statement than this of the
authority that Milton gives,
the intellectual
self-possession that he
ascribes, to the individual.
I think you can see why
Areopagitica has been
memorialized for centuries now
as one of the central
precursors, well,
to a number of things.
One of them would be the
eighteenth-century
enlightenment.
It's subsequently seen as one
of the precursors of the First
Amendment to the American
Constitution.
It's here in Areopagitica
that we find one of the
first expressions of the idea
that an individual's freedom to
read and the individual's
freedom to write is more
important,
it outweighs in value,
the state's right to limit the
individual's freedom to read and
the individual's freedom to
write.
Whatever danger a particular
text may pose to the state is
outweighed by the greater harm
of the official elimination of
that text or by the greater harm
of the punishment of the
author.In light of what we
have to concede is the
extraordinary achievement of
Areopagitica,
 and in light of its
reputation as one of the
foundational texts for the
principle of the freedom of
speech,
readers have been puzzled --
and they have been rightly
puzzled -- by the fact that
nowhere in Areopagitica
does Milton explicitly
denounce censorship.
Milton doesn't denounce
censorship at all,
although it comes up.
In fact, he even claims -- and
he does this explicitly in
Areopagitica and you
might have caught this -- he
even claims to be in favor of
censorship in a number of cases.
Milton's argument in this
treatise is directed exclusively
at licensing.
Licensing differs from
censorship in some important
ways.
Indulge me in making this
important distinction.
We know what censorship is.
Censorship is the banning of
books that have been published
and that have been deemed by the
state authorities to be
dangerous or harmful in some
way.
Censorship would involve the
burning of books,
the prohibition of any further
editions of those books,
or perhaps even a punishment --
by imprisonment,
say -- of the author,
or maybe the printer or the
publisher of the books.
That's censorship,
utterly
straightforward.Licensing,
on the other hand,
is an action that precedes
censorship.
According to the 1643 Licensing
Order against which Milton is
directing this treatise,
Areopagitica,
a book has to be sent to
the licensing office for
approval before it can be
published.
The licensing agent reads the
book and determines whether or
not to print it at all or
license it to appear in print.
This isn't simply a distinction
without a difference.
Milton places an enormous
amount of weight on this
distinction.
Censorship only comes into play
once a text has actually been in
circulation for a while,
only after a number of readers
have found a published text to
pose a threat.
Only after that point can a
text actually be censored.
The book has to be tested.
It has to be tried by the
public, by a reading public,
before it can be censored.
It's censorship by consensus
almost.
And the truth of whether a book
should or should not be censored
is something that's come about
through the diligent effort of a
group,
rather than a single arbitrary
judge like the state
licenser.Milton devotes a
lot of time in Areopagitica
to making a number of
attempts to distinguish
licensing from censorship.
You can see him actually making
this distinction.
What I am interested in here,
and I think what a lot of
readers are interested in when
they approach Areopagitica,
is why this treatise,
which does in fact permit the
practice of censorship -- why it
can so easily be read as an
argument against censorship.
In fact this treatise is often
described, or maybe even most
commonly described,
as the Western tradition's
greatest argument against
censorship.
Obviously, there's something
going on in this text that has
produced this confusion,
or we could think of it as a
misreading.
This is of some interest to us,
so turn to the left-hand column
of page 720 in the Hughes
edition. This is where
Milton speaks of the importance
of censoring dangerous books.
Milton explains that the
Licensing Order of 1643 is
ineffective, it's useless
because,
and I'm quoting here,
"rder avails nothing to the
suppressing of scandalous,
seditious, and libellous books,
which were mainly intended to
be suppressed."
Milton's striking such a
strange authoritarian note here
that it's easy to skip over it.
It seems unaccommodatable
almost.
Look at the next paragraph: 
I deny not,
but that it is of greatest
concernment in the church and
the commonwealth,
to have a vigilant eye how
books demean themselves as well
as men;
and thereafter to confine,
imprison, and do sharpest
justice on them as
malefactors.
Now we know,
of course, that this is an
argument for censorship,
not an argument for licensing,
because the punishment of the
books and the implicit
punishment of the men who write
those books occurs after their
appearance in print.
Milton then goes on to explain
-- and I want you to look
closely at this -- Milton goes
on to explain why books need to
be brought to justice,
why books need to be punished
essentially, like criminals in
Milton's personifying rhetoric.
So Milton continues: 
For books are not
absolutely dead things,
but do contain a potency of
life in them to be as active as
that soul was whose progeny they
are;
nay, they do preserve as in a
vial the purest efficacy and
extraction of that living
intellect that bred them.
Okay. Let me stop there.
The ostensible purpose of this
sentence at this point,
as I take it,
in Milton's argument is to
explain the importance of
censorship;
but surely this sentence has an
entirely different effect on us
as readers, a different effect
than the syntax or the logic of
this sentence may demand.
The scandalous,
seditious and libelous books
that need to be brought to
justice in this remarkable
sentence are suddenly revealed
to have a soul.
However dangerous books are,
in a lot of ways these books
look like good Christians.
In fact, they're better than
good Christians because books
are the purest,
the most rarified extract of
the originary goodness of the
author: an absolutely unfallen,
perfect creation.It's
important to understand that
clearly something very strange
has happened here.
This sentence,
which by the logic of the
argument should be demonstrating
to us the importance of bringing
bad books to justice,
seems to be doing something
else.
In making this point,
Milton has just made us,
I think, almost utterly
unwilling to effect this justice
that he himself has called for.
Which of us would want to
punish the purest efficacy of a
living intellect?
It doesn't make sense.
In the simplest possible terms,
you could say that Milton's
sentence, Milton's argument here
in this paragraph,
has gotten away from him.
There's a sense in which you
can see this happening all the
time in Areopagitica.
It's as if a gap has opened
up, a gap between the official
argument of the treatise -- and
that's an argument that permits
censorship -- and the rhetorical
figures or the metaphors,
Milton's elaborately construed
language, which he uses to
illustrate that argument.
The metaphors,
or the rhetorical world of the
treatise, seem so often to be
against censorship.
It's fairly easy to see that,
at least in this case,
Milton's rhetoric and his
imagery begin to undo,
begin to unravel,
the logic of the argument.
It's a process of undoing and
undermining that really eats
away at the argument,
we could argue,
throughout the entirety of
Areopagitica.I'm
willing to bet that some of you
had noted in your reading last
night,
or whenever you did your
reading, perhaps you actually
underlined the sentence that
we've just looked like.
You underlined it perhaps
because you were convinced that
this was Milton's wonderful and
liberatory,
progressive celebration of the
absolute inviolability of the
written word.
If you did that,
on some level,
I think, you were absolutely
right, even though you were
utterly misconstruing the logic
of the [laughs]
argument.
One of the most remarkable
things about this text is that
it's invariably the soaring,
libertarian rhetoric that we
end up noting,
that we end up remembering,
and that sticks with
us.Turn to page 741 in the
Hughes. This is where
Milton gives us his celebrated
narrative of the history of
truth.
This is one of those highly and
elaborately rhetorically
ornamented passages.
So in Milton's argument against
licensing, Milton explains the
importance of the coexistence --
and it's very moving,
it's an argument for diversity
-- the coexistence of so many
conflicting opinions and
beliefs.
As I've suggested before,
his more conservative
contemporaries were appalled by
the proliferation of religious
sects in mid-seventeenth-century
England.
It would have been perfectly
reasonable for them,
his opponents,
to assume that only one set of
religious beliefs could actually
represent the truth,
that there was only one
possible manifestation of divine
truth.
One has roommates,
one has parents,
in our own day and age,
who of course share such a
belief in the absolute
singularity of the truth.
Sometimes one has parents
[laughs]or roommates who not
only believe that there is a
single truth but,
of course, that they are
themselves in possession of it.
It's just this limited and,
for Milton, restrained,
or constrained and reductive,
notion of a single truth that
he devotes so much of
Areopagitica to
attacking.
So this is page 741: 
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 straight 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,
[the wicked deceivers]
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.
I'll stop there.
With this utterly original
fable about the fragmentation of
what we think of as religious
truth, Milton goes out of his
way -- this is remarkable.
He's actually enacting,
and he's enacting it
rhetorically,
the fragmentation of religious
culture in seventeenth-century
England.One of the most
intriguing aspects of this
amazing passage is the fact that
the fragmentation that Milton is
describing,
and on some level even
enacting, is something that he
seems to be celebrating here.
With the ascent of Christ,
the lovely form of the virgin
Truth is hewed into a thousand
pieces and scattered to the four
winds.
The violence of this action,
of course, we can't deny,
but it gets more complicated
than that.
The Eyptian goddess Isis seeks
out the mangled body of her
lover, Osiris,
because of her powerful
affection for him and because of
her desire presumably to see him
whole again.
There's also though,
I think, a hint here that part
of the pleasure behind Isis'
search involves the process of
reassembling her lover,
the process of gathering him up
limb by limb -- the act of
gathering.
Present participles in general
in Areopagitica being
probably the most important form
of speech,
the act of gathering him may be
more pleasurable,
more desirable,
than actually having him fully
reconstituted.
It's likewise,
I think, part of our pleasure
in this crazy world of disparate
and confusing truths -- if we
imagine ourselves in the
seventeenth century -- it's part
of our pleasure to read,
to sort out,
and to reassemble the various
manifestations of truth.
That's our common project here,
in fact, in an English
department, say.
The sad friends of Truth in
this fable have gone up and
down, gathering up Truth 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.
Surely these last two sentences
come as a surprise:
"we have not yet found them
all…
nor ever shall do."
We'll never find Truth in her
entirety, at least not until the
Second Coming,
and who knows when that will
be?
I think that for Milton,
in this passage the fact that
we never shall do is just as
well,
because it's the labor of
reading, it's the labor of
researching, and it's the labor
of assemblage,
rather than the actual finished
product, that motivates and
spurs the Miltonic
individual.Milton wants us
to get us to feel the excitement
as we read a passage like this,
and the language that he uses
in this passage is itself a kind
of demonstration of the pleasure
of the process of intellectual
assemblage,
of intellectual collation,
of various diverse ideas.
As readers, it's our duty,
it's our obligation,
to sort out and to reassemble.
As we read this passage,
we sort out Christian myths
from Egyptian myths,
or let's say we sort out from
what with Milton be Christian
truth from Egyptian myths.
The fact that they're put on
the same plane here suggests
that both perhaps are either
truths or both perhaps are
myths.
We sort out the similar
confusion of gender roles,
which is truly remarkable,
as we balance the masculine
Christ with the feminine Truth
with which the masculine Christ
is identified here.
We have to balance the
mysteriously female Isis' search
for her lover Osiris.
There are so many entities in
this passage that seem to be
mysteriously conjoined in some
kind of hermaphroditic unity.
We have to image the relation
of the female Osiris with the
implicitly male reader's search
for his lost lover,
which is the feminine Truth.
Milton's infusing this passage
with a powerful sense of -- I
don't know, what can we call it?
-- of gender nonconformity and
cultural relativity.
Christianity emerges from this
passage as just one truth out of
many, and it's almost as if we
are being given our choice as
readers -- we're being given our
choice of which set of myths is
the most attractive,
the most believable.
Maybe ultimately here,
we're being given a choice as
to which set of myths is the
most desirable.Now,
as I mentioned,
the official purpose of the
tract is the political subject
of licensing.
Milton's responding to an
immediate set of historical
circumstances.
He wants to explain the
usefulness, the value,
and, in fact,
the beauty of religious
controversy;
but when you read an intensely
poetic, highly ornamented
passage like the one that we've
just looked at,
I think you can see why Milton
was so interested in this
contemporary problem of
religious diversity in the first
place.
Contradictions and
inconsistencies in contemporary
religious society are so much
like,
or at least look so much like,
the contradictions and
inconsistencies that we find in
a work of literature,
that we find in a poem.
And Milton's defense of
controversy seems in a lot of
ways continually to be slipping
in to something like a defense
of poetry,
or certainly a defense of his
own poetic practice.
One of the structural elements
that lends Areopagitica
its curious power is a
carefully crafted network of
images that Milton has employed
to structure the thing.
I'm thinking particularly of
the images describing the
activity of reading.One of
the central images here is the
image of eating.
Reading is continually being
described in terms of eating and
digestion.
We have already encountered on
some level the importance of the
figure of eating to John Milton.
Think of Comus.
The lady's refusal to drink
of Comus' cup was just the first
of Milton's attempts to bring
the action of ingestion to the
very center of a literary work.
Paradise Lost will be
filled with the activity of
eating.
Milton devotes more than a few
lines -- and it's shocking -- to
the process whereby the heavenly
angels not only eat food but
they also digest it;
and Milton lets us know,
whether we want to know or not,
how those angels actually
excrete the food they have taken
in.
But the most central act of
eating, of course,
in Milton's great epic
obviously has nothing to do with
angels.
It's the eating of the
forbidden fruit by Adam and Eve.
It's because this action of
eating is so absolutely central
to the plot of Paradise Lost
that we are obliged to spend
-- let's spend the rest of our
time here focusing on Milton's
consideration in this treatise,
in the Areopagitica of
1644, of the problem that we
will find haunting Paradise
Lost: the problem of
the eating of the fruit,
and the problem of God's
prohibition -- God's censorship
-- of the fruit of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil.
God's licensing?
We'll see.Turn to page 727.
This is the left-hand column.
Milton's quoting Dionysius
Alexandrinus in this passage.
He tells us that Dionysius
Alexandrinus wrote,
"'Read any books whatever come
to thy hands,
for thou art sufficient both to
judge aright and to examine each
matter.'"
Dionysius compares this command
to read everything,
to read everything you possibly
can,
to Saint Paul's command in the
Epistle to the Thessalonians,
which is: "Prove all things.
Hold fast to that which is
good."
Prove here means "to
test, to try all things."
Paul's making a claim here for
the individual's -- this is
certainly how Milton was able to
read it -- a claim for the
individual's capacity to make a
moral judgment after some period
of trial,
or after some period of
experimentation.
Milton elaborates on this claim
that we should read and prove
anything we want,
for we are sufficient to judge
aright.He's moving on here:
…
[H]e might have added [Milton
tells us]
another remarkable saying of
the same author:
"To the pure,
all things are pure";
not only meats and drinks,
but all kind of knowledge
whether of good or evil;
the knowledge cannot defile,
nor consequently the books,
if the will and conscience be
not defiled.
For books are as meat and
viands are -- some of good,
some of evil substance,
and yet God,
in that unapocryphal vision,
said without exception,
"Rise, Peter,
kill and eat," leaving the
choice to each man's
discretion.
We should be able to read
whatever we want,
just as we should be able to
eat whatever we want.
Milton's language -- the image
here is of this [laughs]-- it's
kind of a combined gastronomic
and literary freedom.
This is the freedom of the
smorgasbord,
of the public
library/smorgasbord,
or Atticus [bookstore and
café]
for that matter,
a place where you can eat and
read -- although not in the same
-- actually,
[laughs]they don't let you eat
around the books.
You get my point though.
We should be able to try all
things, to prove all things,
and then decide whether or not
we actually like it,
whether it brings us some sort
of pleasure or wisdom.
This array of choices is more
than just a luxury for Milton.
It's absolutely constitutive of
the ideal of freedom,
of our freedom;
because if we don't try
everything, if we don't give
ourselves an opportunity to
decide for ourselves,
then, of course,
someone will invariably be
making those decisions for
us.It shouldn't be difficult
to see a kind of problem that is
beginning to arise in Milton's
text here.
I suggested just a minute ago
that one of the relevant stories
that is always lying behind
Milton's discussion of human
choice is the story from the
Book of Genesis about Adam and
Eve's choice to eat the
forbidden fruit.
And so much of Areopagitica
involves Milton's bringing
together competing images and
traditions and arguments.
As we've already seen,
he interweaves Christian
figures with pagan figures.
He positions pro-censorship
argument alongside
anti-censorship rhetoric or
metaphor,
and there are dozens of moments
in which it's just these
opposites that are being asked
to coexist in some kind of
peace.
But nowhere in Areopagitica
do the conflicts seem so
pronounced, or so painful,
or make us wince so much as the
tension that arises between the
Genesis story of Adam and Eve --
God knows why Milton feels
compelled to bring this story up
-- the tension between the story
of Adam and Eve and Milton's own
impassioned argument against
licensing.As I've just
noted,
Milton quotes Paul's dictum
that "to the pure,
all things are pure."
If you're pure,
not only are meats and viands
pure (meats and drinks),
but all kinds of knowledge,
whether of good and evil.
You just have to extend for a
little bit this Pauline
philosophy of freedom to the
situation of the unfallen Eden
of Adam and Eve to see a kind of
[laughs]
logical trouble that Milton is
getting himself in to.
The Genesis story of God's
peremptory prohibition of the
fruit from the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil is
the strongest analogy that I can
think of to the licenser's
peremptory prohibition of a
book.
Obviously, Milton isn't able to
make this analogy explicit.
It would completely dash any
logical sense that
Areopagitica still
retains.
It's nonetheless always there,
this tension.
God's forbidding of the fruit
removes from Adam and Eve any
capacity for choosing and
deciding,
and you can see Milton worrying
in Areopagitica about the
uneasy relationship of his own
argument to this central text in
divine scripture.
So look at page 728 in the
Hughes. This is the
left-hand column:
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, leaped 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.
There are so many things to say
about this passage.
One thing that I'll just throw
out now is that it's a
remarkable description of the
modern world of moral
uncertainty.
Like Isis, whom we saw piecing
together the body of Osiris,
or like the sad friends of
Truth picking up the torn limbs
of that beautiful virgin,
we are left to cull out and
sort asunder the confused seeds
of good and evil.Now on one
level of this passage,
Milton's describing this modern
condition as the product of the
Fall.
It's too bad that we live in
this world.
This is the doom which Adam
fell into, this is the fallen
condition to which we've all
been consigned;
but the passage is so much more
complicated than that because
good and evil seem to have been
mixed up in the apple before the
Fall.
There was good in that
forbidden fruit as well as evil.
This is that doom which Adam
fell into: of knowing good and
evil -- that is to say,
of knowing good by evil.
Adam at the Fall didn't simply
come into a knowledge primarily
of evil.
Adam, by tasting the apple,
came into a knowledge of good,
and he was only able to know
this good by means of the
experience of the knowledge of
evil.There are a lot of
perspectives discernible or
extractable from this treatise,
Areopagitica,
from which the fallen state
seems in so many ways,
maybe in every way,
superior to its unfallen
counterpart.
We will see Milton returning to
all of these questions in
Paradise Lost.
We will even see Milton place
in the mouth of Eve the next
sentence in this passage,
or at least a paraphrased and,
of course, versified version of
this sentence.
This is when Milton tells us: 
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.
You'll find Eve in Book Nine of
Paradise Lost voicing
essentially this same sentiment
when she's explaining to Adam
why she needs to work
separately.
This is the argument that
really, of course,
puts her at risk of Satan's
temptation.
To so many readers it has
seemed that Eve is actually
quoting Milton's much earlier
writing,
Areopagitica,
in her defense,
and it has an incredibly
unsettling effect.
Evil has to be challenged.
It has to be confronted.
It has to be tasted before it
can be conquered.
It can't simply be avoided.
This is Eve's and
Areopagitica's argument.
We will never be virtuous
simply because we cloistered
ourselves or segregated
ourselves from any temptation.
Virtue is to be fought for and
raced for, not without dust and
heat.Let me conclude the
lecture by saying that it's a
startling experience and I hope
you feel some of the surprise
moving from Areopagitica,
which has to be Milton's
most important and consequential
work in prose -- moving from
that to Paradise Lost,
which is,
of course, Milton's most
important work of poetry.
We'll be doing this in one
week, and the disjunction
between the two works,
this disjunction at least with
respect to their treatment of
the Fall,
should dramatize the nature,
or just the enormity,
of a lot of the conceptual
problems and conflicts that
Milton is tackling here.
As a faithful Christian,
of course -- and I'm not going
to try to deny this -- as a
faithful Christian,
Milton believes that the Fall
is only to be lamented and that
Adam and Eve should not have
eaten the apple.
As a believing Christian,
Milton believes that the
omnipotent God had every right
to license, to prohibit,
that apple;
but it's a measure that we have
to take seriously.
It's a measure of Milton's
ambition and his intellectual
courage that enables him to set
out to justify a God who can
inflict upon his creatures such
a seemingly arbitrary act of
licensing.
The extent to which Milton
succeeds in justifying such a
God in Paradise Lost will
be,
of course, one of the questions
that we will be exploring over
the next couple of weeks.
So you will read for
Wednesday's class the first two
books of Paradise Lost.
