🛂Passport to Milton's "Areopagitica"

Was John Milton a defender of free speech or Oliver Cromwell's censor?

John Milton (1608-1674), English poet and author

In hindsight, I regret that my Great Books reading group chose Areopagitica as our introduction to the seventeenth-century poet and polemicist John Milton. Our selection of Milton’s prose treatise was determined by the Year 2 syllabus of Mortimer Adler’s 10-Year Reading Plan. Adler assigns his more renowned work—the epic poem Paradise Lost—to Year 3. Thus, I fear my impression of the celebrated poet may be prematurely colored by shades of Areopagitica’s Puritanism and polemical zeal.

Let me stress that I have no objection to Milton’s spirited defense of freedom of the press—the central argument of Areopagitica—and I suspect Adler’s intent was to pair it thematically with Hobbes’ Leviathan (our April reading). Still, I would have preferred to meet Milton as the “sublime artist” rather than the “noisome dissident” in my first encounter.

Thomas Hobbes and the Birth of Political Realism

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A Brief Biography

John Milton was born on December 9, 1608, in Cheapside, London, during the heyday of Shakespeare’s theatrical career. His father, a scrivener (legal copyist), and his mother, the daughter of a merchant tailor, raised six children—of whom Milton was the third.

Theirs was a devout Puritan family but not necessarily puritanical: a Renaissance spirit of music and poetry flourished in their home. Religion was a serious matter, however. Milton’s paternal grandfather was once fined as a Roman Catholic during the English Reformation, and he disowned Milton’s father for abandoning the Catholic Church. (One wonders if this painful family legacy contributed to Milton’s lifelong hostility toward the Catholic Church?)

The family’s success in real estate afforded the young Milton a superb education. He studied under private Puritan tutors and then at St. Paul’s School in London. At sixteen, he entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1628 and a master’s in 1632. He then retired to his father’s country estate near Windsor for six years of intensive private study in classical languages and the composition of pastoral poetry.

From 1638 to 1639, Milton toured the Continent, spending most of his time in Italy, where he met Galileo. Upon returning to London, he began working as a tutor and soon gained notoriety as a political writer. The tumultuous 1640s—marked by the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell’s rise to power, and the execution of Charles I—comprised some of Milton’s most turbulent and prolific years. During this time, he issued a flurry of impassioned and often controversial pamphlets attacking the episcopacy, advocating for the ability to divorce (amid his own troubled marriage to Mary Powell), and petitioning Parliament to protect freedom of the press.

It is this final cause that brings us to Areopagitica, Milton’s most enduring prose work and the subject of this essay. Paid subscribers can access a study outline here.

Liberty and Licensing: Milton’s Areopagitica

Subtitled “A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing,” Areopagitica was published in 1644 as a response to the Licensing Order of 1643, which mandated that “no book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth printed, unless the same be first approved and licensed.”¹ This order effectively reinstated some of the harshest censorship practices of the notorious Star Chamber court, including search, seizure, and pre-publication control.

Milton opposed the unpopular Order and wrote his pointedly unlicensed paper to convince Parliament “to deliver the press from the restraints with which it was encumbered.”² He constructed his argument across four principal lines of reasoning:

1. Historical Precedent

   Censorship, Milton claims, was seldom practiced in ancient republics and arose only under imperial regimes—first in Rome, then later institutionalized by the Roman Catholic Church through the Inquisition and its Index of Forbidden Books. Milton warns Parliament not to emulate these precedents.

2. Ethical Argument

   Books contain the very soul and reason of their authors: “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.”³ To suppress a book is to extinguish a voice that could enlighten future generations. Even vicious books, he argues, can instruct by sharpening readers’ discernment of error.

3. Practical Objections

   Licensing is not only odious but also ineffective. If the government’s aim is to quarantine the “infection” of vice or sedition, then it must also regulate music, theater, conversation, and every other form through which culture spreads. Such an effort is both unenforceable and absurd.

4. Educational Consequences

   Licensing inhibits the growth of learning by creating bottlenecks to publication and insulting the judgment of England’s most learned minds. Milton calls this “a second tyranny over learning.”⁴ (He doesn’t specify which was the first, but I presume he meant the Inquisition??)

By Leo von Klenze - Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1387333

The Symbolism of the Areopagus

The title Areopagitica refers to the Areopagus, the council of Athenian elders which assembled atop the hill of Ares (Mars) to debate matters of justice and public policy.⁵ Milton borrowed the title from a speech by the Athenian orator Isocrates (436-338 BC) who spoke out against the moral failings of Athenian democracy.

Symbolically, Areopagitica warns of the political danger of overreach and the “head becoming too large for the body”—in other words, with the rise of tyranny. Though Milton is careful not to impugn the integrity of England’s legislative body, he worries that Parliament’s attempt to restrict the free press, ostensibly to prevent sedition and heresy, may usher in a regime even more oppressive than the one it overthrew.

Freedom and the Formation of Character

While the 1643 Licensing Order is now lapsed and obsolete, Milton's deeper question remains a universal concern: How much evil should a free society tolerate in order to preserve liberty?

That this question still animates public discourse today suggests why Adler may have included Areopagitica on his reading list. Whose responsibility is it to safeguard the public from vice and corruption? Is it the role of the government? The Church? An amorphous mob of “cancel culture” critics??

Milton believed—and I generally agree—that trying to impose a good society through force or regulatory coercion is a doomed project. Virtue isn’t cultivated in the absence of immorality or temptations, but in our conscious personal struggle against them. What Milton defends above all is the freedom to choose:

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.⁶

Milton calls out as foolish those who would “imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin.”⁷ Having said that, Milton does not advocate for complete tolerance of publications, believing that atheism, libel, and obscenity ought not be condoned.⁸

A Few Reservations

As I said at the outset, I would have preferred to read Milton’s poetry first. Though I found his arguments in Areopagitica persuasive, his rhetoric is occasionally marred by invective—especially against the Catholic Church and episcopal structures. For example, he refers to church leaders as “falsest seducers and oppressors of men” and “a wicked race of deceivers.” Even while advocating toleration—“that many be tolerated, rather than all be compelled”—he hastens to clarify, “I mean not tolerated popery and open superstition.”⁹

Milton’s sweeping condemnations suggest an inability to imagine the Church as a source of holiness or moral authority. Add to this the overblown rhetoric that some have called his “piously patriotic confidence in England’s destiny”¹⁰ and you begin to sense the bias of Milton’s political vision:

Now once again…God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, even to the reforming of reformation itself. What does he then but reveal himself…as his manner is, first to his Englishman?…Behold now this vast city, a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection.¹¹

To which I could only respond: Bleh. 😑

The Ironic Postscript

Ironically, just five years later, Milton would join the very machinery of state censorship he once so eloquently denounced. Appointed in 1649 as Secretary for Foreign Tongues under the new Council of State, he became a public defender of the English Commonwealth and Cromwell’s Protectorate. In that role, he helped suppress Royalist publications and justified England’s regicide of Charles I.

As historian Will Durant dryly observed:

The man who had written the most eloquent appeal ever made for freedom of the press was now looking at censorship from the view of the ruling power.¹²

Like his contemporary Thomas Hobbes, Milton also engaged in the early modern equivalent of “Twitter wars”—extended, often vitriolic pamphlet battles with his political and ecclesiastical enemies. These scathing personal attacks could run to hundreds of pages and were anything but restrained. Here’s a snatch of one such dressing down of Claude Saumaise, a famous French classical scholar:

"O you venal and fee-taking agent!…O the sneak and turncoat! You, silliest of blockheads, are worthy of the fool’s staff itself…”¹³

The Enduring Challenge of Liberty

On the whole, Areopagitica is a worthwhile read for contemplating the inevitable tensions that arise in a political order striving to uphold freedom of speech, individual autonomy, and the common good—especially when these appear to be in opposition. Milton’s belief that freedom is the necessary condition for the formation of virtue and a just society still speaks powerfully today, even if his political blind spots and temperamental outbursts make us look askance at his character.

Study Outline of John Milton’s Areopagitica for paid subscribers available below.

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1. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003) 719.

2. Ibid, 831.

3. Ibid, 720.

4. Ibid, 738.

5. Christian readers will recognize the Areopagus from St. Paul’s famous “Mars Hill Sermon” in Acts 17:22-31.

6. Milton, Complete Poems, 733.

7. Ibid.

8. Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Louis XIV: A History of European Civilization in the Period of Pascal, Moliere, Cromwell, Milton, Peter the Great, Newton, and Spinoza , 1648-1715, vol. 8, The Story of Civilization (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963) 226.

9. Milton, Complete Poems, 747.

10. Ibid, 743, footnote 236.

11. Ibid, 743.

12. Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Louis XIV, 227.

13. David Masson, Life of John Milton, vol. IV, New York, 1946. Quoted in Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Louis XIV, 228.