Areopagitica Summary & Analysis

Milton begins with a quote from The Suppliants, a play by Greek tragedian, Euripides. “This is true liberty when free-born men / Having to advise the public may speak free,” Milton quotes. “What can be juster in a state than this?”

Milton addresses “the High Court of Parliament” directly. The reason for his polemic, he claims, is “no other than the joy and gratulation which it brings to all who wish and promote their country’s liberty.” He considers his speech a “certain testimony, if not a trophy,” to ensure that “complaints are freely heard, deeply considered and speedily reformed.” Only with free speech, Milton says, “is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained,” and this is what “wise men look for.”

England has “already in good part arrived” at liberty, Milton writes, and from such “a steep disadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into our principles as was beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery.” England’s liberty is “attributed first” to God and secondly to the “faithful guidance and undaunted wisdom” of Parliament.

However, Milton states, praise is “courtship and flattery” without “three principal things.” Number one, that which is praised must be “solidly worth praise.” Secondly, one must ensure to the best of their abilities “that such things are truly and really in those persons to whom they are ascribed.” Lastly, one who praises must show “that such his actual persuasion is of whom he writes.” Only then, Milton claims, can one “demonstrate that he flatters not.” Furthermore, it is only “he who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears not to declare as freely what might be done better, gives ye the best covenant of his fidelity.” This “would fare better with truth, with learning, and the commonwealth,” Milton says to Parliament, “than one of your published orders.”

Milton preemptively “defends” himself from those who will “accuse [him] of being new or insolent,” but it is “much better” to “imitate the old and elegant humanity of Greece, than the barbaric pride of a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness,” he says. Milton directly references Isocrates, an influential Greek orator from the fifth century B.C.E. “I could name him who from his private house wrote that discourse to the parliament of Athens, that persuades them to change the form of democracy which was then established.” Such “honour” was given “to men who professed the study of wisdom and eloquence,” Milton says. 

According to Milton, Parliament’s Licensing Order of 1643 mandates “that no book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth printed, unless the same be first approved and licensed by such.” Part of this law “preserves justly every man’s copy to himself,” and this provision “I touch not,” Milton writes. However, the practice of pre-publication licensing—which Milton thought had “died with [its] brother ‘quadragesimal’ and ‘matrimonial’ when the prelates expired”—is where the problem lies.

First, writes Milton, “the inventors” of [censorship] are “those whom [Parliament] will be loath to own”—the Roman Catholic Church—and the order does “nothing to the suppressing of scandalous, seditious and libellous books, which were mainly intended to be suppressed.” Milton asserts that the pre-publication licensing of books will be to the detriment of learning and the pursuit of truth, not only because it limits access to what “we know already,” but because it limits “the discovery that might be yet further made both in religious and civil wisdom.”

Milton does not deny that it is important to keep a “vigilant eye on how books demean themselves as well as men,” for books can be “malefactors” as well. “Books are not absolutely dead things,” Milton argues, and they “contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that was whose progeny they are.” But caution must be used in sorting the good from the bad. Milton claims it is “as good almost kill a man as kill a good book.” 

History illustrates what ancient societies have done against censorship, right up to “the very time that this project of licensing crept out of the Inquisition,” catching even “some of our presbyters,” Milton writes. In Athens, Greece, “the magistrate” cared only about books that were “either blasphemous and atheistical, or libellous.” For example, the books of Protagoras were ordered to “be burnt” by “the judges of Areopagus,” and Protagoras himself was “banished” when he claimed not to know “whether there were gods, or whether not.”

“We do not read,” Milton writes, that Epicurus, “the libertine school of Cyrene,” or the words of the Cynics were “ever questioned by the laws.” While the acting of many plays was outlawed in Greece, reading the same plays was not, and even Plato “commended the reading of Aristophanes” to Dionysius. In Lacedaemon, Lycurgus encouraged the reading of Homer and Thales “to prepare and mollify the Spartan surliness” and “plant among them law and civility.” There was “no licensing of books among them,” Milton says. “Thus much may give us light after what sort of books were prohibited among the Greeks.”   

In Rome, Cato the Censor despised Carneades and Critolaus and “moved it in the Senate to dismiss them speedily, and to banish all such Attic babblers out of Italy.” However, “Scipio and others of the noblest senators withstood him and his old Sabine austerity,” Milton says. During this time, Naevius “filled the city with all the borrowed scenes of Menander” and Naevius “was quickly cast into prison for his unbridled pen.” Libelous books “were burnt” in Rome, “and the makers punished by Augustus.” Books that “were impiously written against their esteemed gods” were met with “like severity,” but outside of “these two points, how the world went in books, the magistrate kept no reckoning,” Milton argues to Parliament. 

Then, Milton says, the “emperors” became “Christians.” Books they believed to be heretical “were examined, refuted and condemned in the general councils,” and only then were books “prohibited or burnt by authority of the emperor.” Early councils identified books that “were not commendable,” but they passed no laws, and they left books “to each one’s conscience to read or to lay by.” This continued until “after the year 800,” when Padre Paolo became “the great unmasker of the Trentine Council.” Then, the popes of Rome began to “extend their dominion over men’s eyes, […] burning and prohibiting what they fancied not.”

During the time of Martin V, when Wyclif and Hus were “growing terrible,” they “drove the papal court to a stricter policy of prohibiting.” This continued, and the Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition “together brought forth or perfected those catalogues and expurging indexes that rake through the entrails of many an old good author.” The Roman Catholic Church was not only concerned with heretical books, but any book that did not suit their tastes. No books could then be published unless “approved and licensed under the hands of two or three glutton friars.”

Pre-publication licensing, Milton claims, cannot be found in “any ancient state, or policy, or church.” Licensing can be found only in “the most antichristian council, and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever enquired.” Up to that point, books were “freely admitted into the world as any other birth.” There was not an “envious Juno” waiting “over the nativity of any man’s intellectual offspring.” Only when a book “proved a monster” was it “justly burnt, or sunk into the sea,” Milton says. 

“But some will say,” Milton writes, even though the inventors of pre-publication licensing were bad, the thing itself may be good. Maybe, says Milton, the “best and wisest” societies throughout history have prohibited pre-publication licensing, and only the “falsest seducers and oppressors of men were the first who took it up” for the expressed purpose of hindering the Protestant Reformation. Finding “good use out of such an invention” will surely be impossible, and it therefore should “be held a dangerous and suspicious fruit,” Milton asserts.  

About the year 240 C.E., Dionysius Alexandrinus was “a person of great name in the church for piety and learning,” and he wanted to guard himself “against heretics” by being well versed in their books. He had a “vision” of God that told him the following: “Read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright, and to examine each matter.” Dionysius Alexandrinus read as many books as he could, to do as the apostle Paul said to the Thessalonians: “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.” Dionysius may have “added another remarkable saying of the same author,” Milton writes. “’To the pure all things are pure,’ not only meats and drinks, but all kinds of knowledge.” According to Milton, neither knowledge nor books can “defile” if the individual’s morals and “conscience” cannot be “defiled.”

“Wholesome meats” to a spoiled stomach are no different than “unwholesome meats,” Milton says, and “best books to a naughty mind” are not useless either. “Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment,” but “bad books” are different. Bad books can serve “to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate,” Milton maintains. All books and “all opinions, yea, errors, known, read and collated” are useful in “the speedy attainment of what is truest.” Thus, when God enlarged “the universal diet of man’s body, saving every the rules of temperance,” he gave man the ability to “exercise his own leading capacity.” God did not place man “under a perpetual childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his own chooser,” Milton claims.

According to Solomon, Milton says, too much reading “is a weariness to the flesh,” but he did not say it is “unlawful.” Had God intended “to limit us herein,” it would have been useful had he explicitly said what is “unlawful” and what is simply “wearisome.” In this world, good and evil “grow up together almost inseparably,” Milton claims. The “knowledge of good” is “involved and interwoven” with the “knowledge of evil,” and they are impossible to separate. The knowledge of good and evil was born as “two twins cleaving together,” both “from the rind of one apple tasted.” This is the “doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.” 

A “true warfaring Christian,” Milton attests, can “distinguish” and “abstain” from that which is evil and “prefer that which is truly better.” In this way, one’s virtue is tested. “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue,” Milton claims, “that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race.” One is “purified” by “trial.” To reject vice and embrace good is “pure” virtue; but to never be tempted in the first place “is but a blank virtue.” Thus, knowledge of “vice” is “necessary to the constituting of human virtue,” Milton argues, and “this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.”  

It is often feared what “infection” might “spread” from bad books, but what of the Bible, Milton asks. The Bible “oft times relates blasphemy not nicely,” and it “describes the carnal sense of wicked men not inelegantly.” Will that be censored as well? Milton maintains that the feared “infection” from bad books is more “dangerous to the learned than to the ignorant,” because books “cannot be suppressed without the fall of learning.”  Milton points out that “evil manners” can be learned from nearly anywhere, least of all from a book.

Parliament’s Licensing Order “conduces noting to the end for which was framed,” Milton argues. Furthermore, if printing is to be regulated to remove evil from the world, “we must regulate all recreations and pastimes.” There can be no music, and dancers must be licensed to guarantee “that no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth but what by [Parliament’s] allowance shall be thought honest.” What of books already written and for sale, Milton asks? “Who shall prohibit them?” And “household gluttony”; who will be the censors “of our daily rioting?” Most importantly, who will “forbid and separate all idle resort, all evil company?” These things can introduce one to evil just as easily as a book, Milton contends.

It “will not mend our condition,” Milton writes, “to sequester out of the world into Atlantick and Eutopian polities, which never can be drawn into use.” Virtue is “but a name” if each action either good or evil is “under pittance, and prescription, and compulsion.” When God gave Adam reason, “he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing.” Without reason, he is “a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions.” God made Adam free and “set before him a provoking object,” thereby testing his virtue and morality.  

One cannot “remove sin by removing the matter of sin,” Milton claims. One can “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.” To banish sin is to banish virtue as well, Milton claims, “for the matter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them both alike.” Thus, it is to the detriment of virtue that sin is removed from the world. “A dram of well-doing should be preferred before many times as much the forcible hinderance of evil-doing,” Milton says.

Furthermore, “whatever thing we hear or see, sitting, walking, travelling, or conversing may be fitly called our book,” Milton maintains. As Parliament wishes only to prohibit books, Milton argues, “it appears that this order hitherto is far insufficient to the end which it intends.” Plus, all foreign books must be held until they can be reviewed, and a catalogue of “frequently offending” printers must be kept. If this order is not to be “deficient, ye must reform it perfectly according to the model of Trent and Seville, which I know ye abhor to do,” Milton says.  

Parliament’s Licensing Order will also “miss the end it seeks” because of the “quality” which “ought to be in every licenser.” Anyone “who is made judge to sit upon the birth or death of books” must be “a man above common measure,” Milton says. They must be “studious, learned and judicious,” and make no mistakes, which is surely impossible. There “cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing” type of work, Milton claims, than to be the “perpetual reader of unchosen books.” In fact, those who are now employed to do so, “by all evident signs wish themselves well rid of it,” and “no man of worth” wishes to take up such a profession.

Parliament’s Licensing Order is “the greatest discouragement and affront that can be offered to learning and to learned men,” Milton laments. There is no benefit to being “a man” instead “a boy at school, if we have only escaped the ferular, to come under the fescue of an imprimatur.” When one writes, they use “reason and deliberation,” and usually “consult and confer” with “judicious friends” and previous writings. Years of study and work are put into writing, only to have it rejected by “the hasty view of an unleasured licenser,” one who is perhaps “younger,” or “inferior in judgement,” or “one who never knew the labour of book-writing.” How can one “teach with authority” or “be a doctor in his book as he ought to be,” if all that is written is “under the correction of his patriarchal licenser?” Milton asks. 

“Who shall warrant me [the licenser’s] judgement?” Milton wonders. He knows the answer is “the state,” but Milton doesn’t like this answer. “The state shall be my governors,” Milton proclaims, “but not my critics.” The state could make a “mistake” in choosing a licenser just as easily as a licenser can be “mistaken in an author.” And, as Sir Francis Bacon said, “such authorized books are but the language of the times.” It is regrettable, Milton claims, that any author, living or dead, must “come to their hands for license to be printed, or reprinted.” No amount of fame will pardon an author from Parliament’s “dash,” and “the sense of that great man shall to all posterity be lost” due to the “rashness of a perfunctory licenser.”

“Henceforth,” Milton proclaims, “let no man care to learn, or care to be more than worldly wise,” for the “only pleasant life” will be the “ignorant and slothful” life of “a common steadfast dunce.” Pre-publication censorship, to Milton, “seems an undervaluing and vilifying of the whole nation.” He asserts that “truth and understanding” are not “wares” to be “monopolized and traded in by tickets and statutes and standards.” Knowledge cannot be “marked and licensed” like “broad cloth” and “woolpacks.” To punish “the whole nation,” including those who have done nothing wrong is “a disparagement.” After all, Milton says, “debtors and delinquents” are free to roam “without a keeper but inoffensive books must not stir forth without a visible jailor in their title.”

It is a “sick and weak estate of faith and discretion,” Milton says, to be allowed only that which comes “through the pipe of a licenser.” This is not done out of “care or love,” he claims, because in “those popish places where the laity are most hated and despised the same strictness is used over them,” and sin continues to “break in faster at other doors which cannot be shut.”

It should “discourage the ministers,” Milton argues, that “such a low conceit” is given to their efforts that their followers are “not thought fit to be turned loose to three sheets of paper without a licenser.” This assumes that all the “sermons” and “lectures preached” are not “armour enough against one single” book without the influence of licenser. 

Milton claims to have visited other countries “where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes.” He has sat with “learned men” who considered him lucky to have been “born in such a place as they supposed England was,” and they did nothing but complain about censorship and the state of learning. Censorship “had damped the glory of Italian wits” and only “flattery and fustian” has been written since. Milton had the honor of meeting Galileo when Galileo was an “old” man and “prisoner to the Inquisition.” Little did Milton know that he would soon hear the same complaints from “learned men at home.”

Milton’s speech therefore is not “the disburdening of a particular fancy, but the common grievance” of all those who have studied hard to “advance truth.” If the time has come that we are so fearful “and so suspicious of all men,” Milton says, that we “fear each book” before knowing what’s inside, and the state can “silence us from reading, except what they please,” it can only be assumed that it is “a second tyranny over learning,” and it will “put out of controversy that bishops and presbyters are the same to us both name and thing,” Milton writes. 

According to Milton, “faith and knowledge thrives by exercise,” just like one’s “limbs and complexion.” In scripture, truth is compared “to a streaming fountain.” If the water does not flow “in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.” In this way, “a man my be a heretic in the truth” if “he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason.” His “belief” may “be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresy,” Milton says. 

Milton believes that there is no “burden” many “would gladlier post off to another, than the charge and care of their religion.” A rich man, “addicted to his pleasure and to his profits,” might consider religion “a traffic so entangled” that he finds it impossible to manage. In cases such as this, Milton says, men find someone else to manage their religious affairs for them, and then religion is no longer “within” them but becomes “a dividual movable” that “goes and comes.” His religion may “walk abroad at eight,” and leave “his kind entertainer in the shop trading all day without his religion,” Milton warns.

There is nothing “more fair,” Milton asserts, “than when a man judicious, learned, and of a conscience” can “openly by writing publish to the world what his opinion is.” Christ “preached in public,” Milton notes, but “writing is more public than preaching; and more easy to refutation, if need be.” England is deprived this freedom by Parliament’s Licensing Order, Milton claims.

Most importantly, however, Parliament’s Licensing Order “hinders and retards the importation of our richest merchandise: truth.” Milton contends that pre-publication licensing “was first established and put in practice by antichristian malice” “set on purpose to extinguish, if it were possible, the light of reformation.” However, those who believe “we are to pitch our tent here, and have attained the utmost prospect of reformation,” are very far from the “truth,” he says. 

According to Milton, when truth came “into the world with her divine master,” she “was a perfect shape.” Yet when God rose, so did a “wicked race of deceivers” who “took the virgin truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds.” Since then, “the sad friends of truth” have imitated the “careful search that Isis made for the mangled body Osiris” and tried to gather up the truth. “We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons,” Milton writes, “nor shall ever do, till her master’s second coming.”

Parliament’s Licensing Order stands “at every place of opportunity forbidding and disturbing” those who seek truth. “We boast our light,” Milton claims, “but if we look not wisely on the sun itself, it smites us into darkness.” The light “was given us,” not to look at, but “to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge.” If nothing else can be “looked into and reformed,” Milton asserts, then “we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zwinglius and Calvin hath beaconed up to us, that we are stark blind.” 

It is the “dividers of unity,” those who restrict and stop others from finding and uniting truth, “which are yet wanting to the body of truth.” Milton implores Parliament to remember that England is “a nation not slow and dull” but capable of reaching “any point” that “human capacity” can aspire to. English studies are “so ancient, and so eminent” that “even the school of Pythagoras and Persian wisdom took beginning from the old philosophy of this island,” Milton claims.

Moreover, Milton claims, “had it not been the obstinate perverseness of our prelates against the divine and admirable spirit of Wyclif,” perhaps neither Hus, Jerome, Luther nor Calvin would have been known. “The glory of reforming all our neighbors had been completely ours,” Milton says. And now, “God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his church, even to the reforming of the reformation itself.”   

“Where there is much desire to learn,” Milton writes, “there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in God is but knowledge in the making.” We should “rejoice” and not “lament” the disputes of educated men who take charge of their own religion and knowledge. With some “prudence” and “forbearance of one another,” England can “unite into one general and brotherly search after truth,” Milton maintains. 

Milton claims there are “many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber” of God’s house, and each piece of the building cannot be the same. Instead, “the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderate varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional arises the goodly and graceful symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure.” Therefore, Milton contends, we should be “more wise in spiritual architecture, when great reformation is expected.”  

Milton argues that Parliament cannot make England “less capable, less knowing, less eagerly pursuing of the truth” unless Parliament can also make itself “less the lovers, less the founders of [their] true liberty.” England can only grow “ignorant again, brutish, formal and slavish” if Parliament becomes that which it cannot be: “oppressive, arbitrary and tyrannous.” Parliament’s Licensing Order is an “abrogated and merciless law,” Milton claims, and is not in keeping with the liberties already established by Parliament. “Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties,” Milton implores. 

When one has labored “the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowledge” and has “drawn forth reason” and “scattered and defeated all objections in his way,” only to be caught on a “narrow bridge of licensing,” this “is but weakness and cowardice in the wars of truth.” Milton argues that truth is “strong” and “needs no policies” to make her stronger. He warns Parliament not to “bind” truth, “for then she speaks not true” and “turns herself into all shapes, except her own.” It is “not impossible,” Milton asserts, that truth “may have more shapes than one.”

Milton wonders what else “might be tolerated in peace and left to conscience” if not for “the chief stronghold of our hypocrisy to be ever judging one another.” He fears the “iron yoke of outward conformity” has “left a slavish print upon [their] necks” as if “the ghost of a linen decency” still “haunts” them. Keeping truth from truth is “the fiercest rent and disunion of all,” Milton argues, and if Parliament continues to “affect by all means a rigid external formality,” England will “soon fall again into gross conforming stupidity” that is more “degenerating of a church than many sub dichotomies of petty schisms.”

If everyone “cannot be of one mind,” Milton claims, “this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian that many be tolerated rather than compelled.” Milton does not mean to tolerate “popery and open superstition which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate,” Milton argues that when it comes to “prohibiting,” there is nothing “more likely to be prohibited than truth itself,” which is “why sects and schisms do so much abound, and true knowledge is kept at distance from us.”

When God “shakes a kingdom” and prompts a reformation, Milton says, “tis not untrue that many sectaries and false teachers are then busiest in seducing,” but God also “raised to his own work men of rare abilities, and more than common industry” to “look back and revise” what has already been taught and “gain further and go on, some new enlightened steps in the discovery of truth.” But, Milton says, if we “resolve to stop their mouths, because we fear they come with new and dangerous opinions” then we become “the persecutors.”

This “authentic Spanish policy of licensing books,” Milton claims, “will prove the most unlicensed book itself within a short while,” like the Star-Chamber Decree, which has “now fallen from the stars with Lucifer.” Milton claims to know that “errors in a good government and in a bad are equally almost incident,” and he implores Parliament to “redress willingly and speedily what hath been erred.”