Summary (Value of Reading and Impossibility of Good Censorship)
The first section of "Areopagitica" argues that only corrupt and tyrannical societies have instituted censorship laws. The next makes an argument based on the nature of those laws, rather than their history. First, Milton speaks to the value of reading. Then, he argues that censorship laws are inherently ineffectual.
To testify to the value of reading, Milton first turns to the Bible. He points out that both Moses and Daniel from the Old Testament, and Paul, the New Testament writer, were all learned men. Paul especially “thought it no defilement to insert into Holy Scripture the sentences of three Greek poets,” even though those poets were not Christians. He does briefly reference the story of Saint Jerome, who dreamed that an angel reprimanded him for spending too much time with Greek literature, when he could be studying the Bible. However, Milton argues that given the example set by Paul, Jerome must have been mistaken.
He argues that a more valuable example can be found in the vision of Eusebius, who God instructed to “read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright and to examine each matter.” Eusebius knew this was the word of God, because it agreed with Paul’s teachings in the Bible. Milton uses this example to compare books to food, noting that some are good and some are bad. Yet while bad foods make us sick, we are equally able to read good and bad books, because God leaves it up to us to decide what to trust.
Milton argues that good and evil are always entangled in this world. That’s why, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve tasted good and evil in a single fruit. In the “fallen world,” or the world after mankind was expelled from Paradise, that’s always how it will be. Indeed, to be truly virtuous, someone needs to know vice, and yet resist it. Because we come into the world already polluted by original sin, there’s no point in trying to preserve our original innocence. Instead, we must come to virtue through trial. The safest way to learn about evil without practicing it is to be exposed through books.
Milton then responds to three arguments in favor of censorship. First, he responds to the contention that evil books might infect readers. Milton responds that then all books about religious controversy, even the Bible, would have to be banned, because they depict the heresies they condemn. He then contends that these books will always be most dangerous to the learned, but the licensor, a learned man, will always read them. Furthermore, it is more likely that the common people will be corrupted by evil ideas passed on to them by learned men, than by reading difficult books directly.
To sum up, Milton stresses that the most dangerous books “cannot be suppressed without the fall of learning”; that regardless of the law, the learned will still be able to access them and pass their ideas on to the common people; that there are numerous other ways to access evil ideas without books; and that it is impossible to prevent the spread of evil ideas without free learning and discussion.
From here, Milton shifts to considering the impossibility of finding the right men to act as licensors. He notes that the people must be able to trust the licensors to be entirely incorruptible and infallible, because they alone will decide which ideas are good and which are bad. Furthermore, it’s impossible for one person to judge the value of a book, because a wise man will be able to learn even from a shallow text, while a foolish man will not learn even from sacred Scripture.
The next two arguments for censorship are that we should not expose ourselves to temptation, or waste our time with silly things. To these two contentions, Milton responds that to the right man, even evil or idle texts can be useful as ways to know the enemy and develop their own abilities to resist dangerous ideas. Foolish men might be led astray, but here Milton stresses that no law could prevent this.
First, he argues that to really ban temptation, censorship would be far from enough. We would need to ban everything people enjoy—for example, we would need to regulate all music, to make sure it is sufficiently morally instructive. We would need to regulate pubs, to prevent gluttony, and garments, to prevent frivolous dressing. We would need to regulate conversations, and we would need to regulate who spent time with whom, to prevent evil company. Rather than entertaining dreams of an impossible utopia, Milton argues, Parliament needs to face the world as it is, and create policies that respond to reality.
Furthermore, if they were able to create a society that forced good behavior, what virtue would there be in doing well? Indeed, sin is not merely a product of external factors: a greedy man will still be greedy if he is stripped of his wealth. Milton describes this state of affairs as part of God’s wisdom. The existence of evil in the world makes true virtue possible.
From here, Milton returns to the ineffectuality of hypothetical licensing laws. He stresses again that ideas can spread without books: after all, Christianity spread even before the Bible was written. Also, again, every licensor would have to be an extraordinary person. He points out that these wise men would certainly be bored to tears by having to read so many bad books, just to decide what’s worth reading. He points out that this is already having an effect, as the current licensors are reluctant to read the many books submitted to them, making it extremely difficult to obtain a license. Eventually, given how unsatisfying the work is, the only men willing to work as licensors will either be ignorant and power-hungry, or motivated purely by money. Therefore, the law is truly doomed to fail.
Analysis
Milton’s argument for the ineffectuality of censorship laws hinges on his assessment of the world as an inherently flawed place, where evil is inescapable. This might seem like a pretty pessimistic outlook, but his argument makes it something positive, optimistically seeing unique value in the relationship between sin and virtue in the contemporary world.
To make sense of this idea, we need to take a brief detour into Christian theology and the idea of the fall. In the Biblical story of creation, Adam and Eve are expelled from paradise after they disobey God and taste the fruit of good and evil. As punishment, God makes them mortal. In the original context, this is a pretty straightforward story meant to explain the existence of evil in a world made by a good God. However, Christian theology makes the story more complicated by introducing the idea of the “happy fall.”
In Christianity, all people are born with “original sin,” or the stain of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. Milton alludes to this idea in “Areopagitica” when he states that men are not born innocent, but rather must work to purify themselves. However, original sin isn’t the end of the story. For Christians, Christ’s death wins forgiveness of original sin, redeeming Adam and Eve’s mistake, and guaranteeing virtuous people eternal life in heaven. Hence the “happy fall”—ultimately, Adam and Eve’s “fall” from grace led to the happiness of Christ’s resurrection and salvation.
Milton’s most famous work, the epic Paradise Lost, tells the story of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace. The story is also clearly important to “Areopagitica,” especially in this second section. However, rather than focusing on life after death, here Milton is thinking about what the fall means for life in this world. In one of the most beautiful sentences in the essay, he writes, “it was from the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world.” By arguing that since the fall, good and evil are inextricably intertwined, Milton can defend evil books as containing some good.
He thus uses the idea of the fall to make a surprisingly optimistic point. Rather than focusing on good being polluted by evil, and hence seeing all books as corrupted, Milton argues that the entanglement of good and evil makes all reading valuable, because good might be found everywhere. He explicitly presents this reality as part of divine wisdom. He writes that when God gave Adam reason, “he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing…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…herein consisted his [Adam’s] merit.” Milton is casting a society with free speech as a society akin to paradise, because both give men the freedom to choose virtue. Conversely, he casts a society with strict censorship as fundamentally unnatural and counter to God’s plan.
That’s a pretty radical move. For centuries, mainstream Christians had either lamented the fallen state of the world, and urged people to look towards the afterlife rather than seeking to improve their worldly situation, or believed that the right government could build a paradise on earth. Milton instead looks the world’s imperfection in the face, and asks what laws would be best given that reality. Rather than the better of two evils, he presents that state of affairs as desirable. Being able to choose virtue makes virtue meaningful. A world with evil ideas is actually a world that most closely resembles God’s plan for how society should be organized.
