Areopagitica: ‘The Known Rules of Antient Libertie’

Abstract

Though Milton at no point in Areopagitica attacks monarchical government directly, his position in this treatise is implicitly republican. The vocabulary of Areopagitica is full of echoes of republican discourse, with terms like “tyranny,” “slavery,” “yoke,” “servile,” “thraldom,” as well as “true liberty.” In a number of eloquent metaphorical passages, the search for truth is presented both as a sacred duty and as a communal task, performed by free individuals working independently in a common cause. The extended metaphor of “the virgin Truth,” hewed into “a thousand peeces” to be patiently reassembled “in every joynt and member,” like many passages in Areopagitica, is simultaneously classical and Christian in its allusions and its imagery. In the celebrated “fugitive and cloistered virtue” passage, anticipating the action of Paradise Lost, the reading of books is presented as one of many instances of the exercise of moral choice, “triall … by what is contrary.” Conflating Biblical and classical allusions, Milton here redefines “the rules of antient libertie” in terms of the freedom of the will, extended to Adam and Eve and their descendants by their creator, in accordance with Milton's Arminian theology.

Notes

1. Sonnet 12, “On the detraction which follow’d upon my writing certain treatises,” in John Milton, Shorter Poems, ed. Stella P. Revard (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), lines 1–4, 11–12; further quotations are from this edition. On attacks on Milton's divorce pamphlets, see Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 178–80.

2. Sonnet 11 (“A book was writ of late call’d Tetrachordon”), lines 4, 13; sonnet 12, line 4.

3. Areopagitica, epigraph, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), vol. 2, ed. Ernest Sirluck, 485; hereafter CPW.

4. On the Areopagus, see John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), 716. Milton's rhetorical strategies in Areopagitica are discussed in terms of humanism and the public sphere in Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 58–67.

5. Milton, Readie and Easie Way, in CPW, 7.425.

6. On the relationship of Areopagitica to the republican tradition, see Nigel Smith, “Areopagitica: Voicing Contexts, 1643–4,” in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 106–8, 114–18; and Lewalski, The Life of John Milton, 190–91.

7. See the commentary on the imagery of warfare in this passage in David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 42–48; and in my essay “Civil Liberty in Milton, the Levellers, and Winstanley,” Prose Studies 22 (1999): 101–20.

8. Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 173; Thomas N. Corns, “John Milton, Roger Williams, and the Limits of Toleration,” in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 72–74.

9. John Illo, “Areopagiticas Mythic and Real,” Prose Studies 11 (1988): 3–23; Stanley Fish, “Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Milton's Areopagitica,” in Re-membering Milton, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), 234–54. Cf. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen, 1984), 41–52.

10. See Ernest Sirluck's introduction, CPW, 2.178–81, quoting Jeremy Taylor, The Liberty of Prophesying (1647).

11. See Sirluck's note in CPW, 2.535. On “the case against monopolies” and metaphors of free trade in Areopagitica, see Blair Hoxby, Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 27–31, 40–47.

12. John Lilburne, Englands Birth-Right Justified (1645), 9–10, quoted in Hoxby, Mammon's Music, 47–48; on Milton's ambivalence toward tradesmen and the market, see ibid., 43–45. Robinson's Liberty of Conscience (1643) is reprinted in Tracts on Liberty, 1638–1647, ed. William Haller, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934). On Robinson, free trade, and toleration, see Haller's introduction, 1.64–73; and CPW, 2.83–84.

13. Michael Wilding, “Milton's Areopagitica: Liberty for the Sects,” in The Literature of Controversy, ed. Thomas N. Corns (London: Fred Cass, 1987), 22–27.

14. Robinson, Liberty of Conscience, 4, 41, 42. Cf. Donne, Satyre III, 55–61, with its criticism of those who assume in religion that “shee which dwels with us, is onely perfect” as like young men who, following their “Godfathers” without question, “take such Wives as their Guardians offer.”

15. Fish, “Driving from the Letter,” 244–47.

16. Wilding, “Milton's Areopagitica: Liberty for the Sects,” 13.

17. See David Loewenstein, “Toleration and the Specter of Heresy in Milton's England,” in Milton and Toleration 48–49. Texts quoted are Gangraena, part 2 (1646), 27–28; James Cranford, Haereso-Machia (1645), 14; and John Downame et al, A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ (1648), 30, 33. For a comprehensive discussion of Edwards in his historical context, see Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

18. Achsah Guibbory, Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 113.

19. A Testimony to the Truth of Jesus Christ (1648), 32.

20. The First Anniversary, 91–96, in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (Edinburgh: Longman, 2003).

21. For commentary on this passage in Areopagitica, see Wilding, “Milton's Areopagitica: Liberty for the Sects,” 16–18; Loewenstein, “Toleration and the Specter of Heresy,” 68–69; Guibbory, Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel, 118–19; and David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 134–35.

22. This passage has aroused a great deal of controversy among critics. According to H. R. Swardson in Poetry and the Fountain of Light (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962), 25, it represents “the final victory in Milton … of the Hebraic over the Hellenic.” E. M. W. Tillyard in Milton (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), 301–9, sees the passage as “autobiographical,” the result of disillusionment. Lewalski, on the other hand, argues against “regarding this passage … as testifying to some basic change in Milton's earlier humanistic attitude toward learning,” citing parallels in Milton's tract The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (1659) and in other works: Milton's Brief Epic (London: Methuen, 1966), 281–302; cf. Lewalski, Life of John Milton, 520–21. Irene Samuel in “Milton on Learning and Wisdom,” PMLA 68 (1949): 708–23, points out that the passage “should be read in context” as Jesus's response to “a wily opponent,” and that the views expressed in this passage are consistent with views Milton expresses elsewhere on “the place of studies in life.”

23. See Laura Lunger Knoppers, “Milton's The Readie and Easie Way and the English Jeremiad,” in Loewenstein and Turner, Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose, 213–25; and her essay “Milton's Late Political Prose, 1659–1660,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 317–19, 322–23.

24. On the prophetic voice in Areopagitica and other works by Milton, see Barbara K. Lewalski, “Milton and the Millennium,” in Milton and the Ends of Time, ed. Juliet Cummins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13–20.

25. On the European dimension in Milton's prose writings, see Thomas N. Corns, “Milton and the Limits of Englishness,” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton's England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 205–16.

26. Ken Simpson, Spiritual Architecture and “Paradise Regained” (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2007), 139–42, 153; on Areopagitica, see ibid., 17–25. On the invisible and visible church, see Milton, Christian Doctrine, 1.24 and 1.29, CPW, 6.449–50, 563–73; and Andrew Escobedo, “The Invisible Nation: Church, State, and Schism in Milton's England,” in Loewenstein and Stevens, Early Modern Nationalism, 173–201.