Areopagitica: notes on the text

He starts out by addressing the audience: Parliament. He sets them up by appealing to their sense of self-worth. For example: wise rulers listen to complaints freely, and to be truly wise, Parliament should be worth praise (not subject to flattery); thus, wise Parliament should accept without censure this complaint against its ordinance and honor the request that they reconsider the ordinance, even if this complaint seems to criticise rather than flatter.

Imitate the "elegant humanity of Greece" and listen to critical orations.

Improve over previous administration and the Greeks: "how far you excel them, be assured, Lords and Commons, there can no greater testimony appear than when your prudent spirit acknowledges and obeys the voice of reason from what quarter soever it be heard speaking; and renders ye as willing to repeal any act of your own setting forth, as any set forth by your predecessors"

Summary of argument vs. licensing

1. "the inventers of it to be those whom you will be loth to own" (Catholics)

2. "this Order avails nothing to the suppressing of scandalous, seditious, and libellous books, which were mainly intended to be suppressed"

3. "It will be primely to the discouragement of all learning and the stop of truth"

Philosophical premise: Censorship is the murder of ideas.

Historical context

Greek and Latin history gives many examples of free speech; there are also examples in the early Church.

Then the CATHOLICS (boo! hiss!) instituted censorship: "their last invention was to ordain that no book, pamphlet, or paper should be printed (as if St. Peter 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"

Guilt by association: "We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity, or church, nor by any statute left us by our ancestors elder or later; nor from the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad; but from the most antichristian council and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever inquired" (the Catholic Inquisition of the counter-reformation). If you say even the devil can invent something useful, he points out that "best and wisest commonwealths through all ages and occasions have forborne to use it. . . " and it has been used to "hinder the first approach of reformation."

Thus: what history shows us is: Those vs. Freedom are vs. books

Vision from God to Dionysius Alexandrinus "Read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright and to examine each matter."; Paul to the Thessalonians: "Prove all things, hold fast that which is good."

"God uses not to captivate under a perpetual childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his own chooser."

We must know good AND evil; "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." " . . . that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary."

Conclusion: "Since therefore, the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason?"

ANSWER TO OBJECTIONS:

1) You say infection might spread--but even the Bible itself can be misread--do you ban that too? Or the classic writers who arent Christian? Or books of controversy--from which we learn how to support OUR faith through objection? "Those books . . . cannot be suppressed without the fall of learning and of all ability in disputation" And how do we trust that the LICENSERS are free from infection, if we can't examine for ourselves what they've seen?

2) You say "we must not expose ourselves to temptations without necessity"--But I say that "such books are not temptations nor vanities, but useful drugs and materials wherewith to temper and compose effective and strong medicine" against such temptations/infections.

3) You say Plato imposed censorship in his ideal republic. But I say that he never really meant this to be real, since he knew that couldn't work; books alone aren't the source of corruption, and you'd have to "regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man" in order to remove ALL possible sources of corruption

Thus, we NEED TO USE REASON. "Many there be that complain of divine providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions [puppet shows]. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which is of force. God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence." If you remove the choice of sin, you remove the choice of virtue.

Recapitulation: you'll be like the Catholics; you'll screw it up by using unqualified censors; and it'll hurt learning and understanding.

So it not only does no good, it'll actually do harm.

You will end up reducing everything to orthodoxy, which will mean there can be no movement forward. "I had . . been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was"-but now you'll end up stopping us in our tracks, as the great thinkers of Europe have been stopped; you will impose "a second tyranny over learning"

You will cause heresy--the same blind belief that you have always condemned in the Catholic church. "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." (the ultimate logic of the idea of the Priesthood of the Individual Believer).

We're just starting to put things together properly---don't stop us now! "He who thinks we are to pitch our tent here, and have attained the utmost prospect of reformation that the mortal glass wherein we contemplate can show is, til we come to beatific vision, that man by this very opinion declares that he is yet far short of truth" We've got to keep learning. To learn, there must be disputation. "Were 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."

Again, don't be like the Catholics in forbidding unorthodox thinking: "forgo this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men."

Peroration (inspirational conclusion): "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle . . . . 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"

"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

(Milton DOES say that evil speech should be punished, but not that it shouldn't be heard.)