Professor John Rogers:
Let's begin. We looked last time at Saint
Peter's declamatory speech in "Lycidas," and we spent a
lot of time on it. We looked at its relation to
the new career that John Milton ended up assuming in the late
1630s: this new career as a polemical writer of political
prose. Milton becomes increasingly in
this period -- and this is the period of the English
Revolution. What is the English Revolution,
you ask? Well, that's a good question
and there are still innumerable, often competing answers to that
question. It seems to be more or less --
this is one way of framing an answer -- it seems more or less
to be a Puritan Revolution. Middle-class Puritans like John
Milton find themselves upholding the authority of Parliament over
the authority of King Charles and over the authority of the
official Church of England. That's the roughest possible
sketch of what the English Revolution is.We find
ourselves in today's reading, Areopagitica,
in the middle of the English Revolution,
sometimes called the Puritan Revolution.
It's in this period that Milton increasingly begins to adopt,
or assume, Saint Peter's confident and denunciatory
rhetoric. He adopts it as his own,
Milton does. He writes a series of treatises
in support of -- this is really out there, and he alienates a
lot of his natural, organic base with these actions
-- Milton writes a series of treatises in support of the
right to divorce, divorce for reasons for
incompatibility, and he continues to assist the
Puritan left, the progressive movement,
in overthrowing the hierarchical structure of the
Church of England. The bishops,
also called prelates -- those church officials
essentially appointed by Archbishop William Laud,
whom we looked at last time -- were replaced in the early 1640s
by means of the success of the Puritan revolutionaries and were
replaced by presbyters: ministers who were chosen by
individual congregations. Milton was able to think of
this new form of church government as the most
reasonable form of church government because it seemed to
be the product of individual choices.
It seemed to be the product of individual decisions made by the
rational, churchgoing English public.By the time we get to
1644, this is the year that
Areopagitica appears, we're well into the English
Revolution. This is the year in which we
have two dominant groups in the new revolutionary Parliament.
You have the conservative, Anglican royalists.
They've already been ousted. They're no longer a central
component of the political scene.
You have left the Presbyterians and the Independents,
and at this point the Presbyterians are in firm
control. Now as with most political
groups who suddenly find themselves -- and this is just
an ancient piece of wisdom that I'm sharing with you,
but it's something obviously that you will have heard before
-- as with most political groups who suddenly find themselves in
possession of a measure of power,
the ideas and values of the Presbyterians,
who had of course started out as radicals,
were beginning to harden into something like a new orthodoxy
with this new aggregation of political power.
They began laboring to suppress and laboring to stamp out forces
that opposed them, whether those forces were on
the right or on the left.Now of course, the presbyters had
seized control in the first place because they disapproved
of the tactics of suppression and intervention that had been
deployed by the bishops, or the prelates,
of the old church. But the new Presbyterian Party
soon developed its own methods of employing state power to
control and regulate the church. This is just a general
historical irony that surely at some point besets all
revolutionary movements, and it's an irony that
particularly appalled John Milton.
It's in recognition of what we can think of as this
time-honored historical irony that Milton writes such a
memorable line, a wonderful line,
in his sonnet on the new Presbyterian regime.
It's the poem of the "… New Forcers of
Conscience…" which ends with that line,
you'll remember: "New Presbyter is but Old
Priest writ Large." The Revolution has essentially
become a revolution in name only.
Priests, these are the bishops of the old system,
have changed their name to presbyters,
perhaps, and they look like
revolutionaries, but they're manipulative,
controlling actions haven't essentially changed at all.
And for the Presbyterian Party in 1644, it turns out there are
in fact a number of factions to control and to manipulate and to
regulate. Professor John Rogers:
The new Presbyterian orthodoxy soon [laughs]
developed its own methods of employing state power to
control, to regulate,
and to manipulate the church. That's where we get this
rousing line, "New Presbyter is but Old
Priest writ Large." I had mentioned the various
factions in Parliament that the Presbyterian Party had to
confront: the Independents who are to the left of the
Presbyterians. We can count John Milton as a
supporter of the Independents. The Independents resented the
new authoritarianism of the Presbyterians,
and they supported, or at least they tolerated,
a new phenomenon -- a relatively new phenomenon on the
English cultural landscape. This is the freedom of the
printing press. It's a freedom that,
of course, Parliament had pushed for, but now that they've
got it there is some misgiving. From 1641 to 1643,
there had been an unprecedented explosion of printing and
publishing in England. Every conceivable Protestant
sect was publishing treatises of theological speculation and
publishing treatises of religious propaganda at an
extraordinary rate. It's really a remarkable thing
that happens in the mid-century.Religious
propaganda of course -- and this is always the case --
unregulated religious propaganda only breeds more unregulated
religious propaganda and more religious division.
By the end of the period there was an unprecedented number of
new religious groups. Some of these groups born at
this moment still exist. We still have the Quakers,
we have the Baptists, but there are,
of course, many groups thriving in the 1640s that have
absolutely faded from the religious scene:
the Ranters, the Familists,
and the Muggletonians. These are churches of almost
every imaginable stripe, and they're springing up and,
from a mainstream perspective, they're quickly eroding the
authority of the Church of England.
It was becoming absolutely impossible, in fact,
or at least much, much harder,
to claim that there was a single expression of religious
truth to which the English nation could consensually
subscribe. And suddenly there are dozens
and dozens of competing expressions of religious truth,
and so you have a new proliferation of new religions
and new religious ideas that comes about as the immediate
product of the freedom of the press.
It's in this decade, in fact, that we have the first
newspapers. The printed word begins to take
on -- assumes a political and a cultural importance that it had
never had before.The proliferation of religious texts
and the proliferation of religious sects produced what
was widely seen to be a potentially anarchic political
situation in the early 1640s. It's in response to what was
deemed to be the chaotic condition of English religious
culture that the Presbyterian-led Parliament
issued in 1643 the Licensing Act.
The Presbyterians needed to halt the endless generation of
dangerous religious propaganda and continued what they felt on
some level was the continued metastasis of Protestant sects.
This is a recurring rhetoric, this notion that there is a
cancer in the body politic. Parliament enacts through this
legislation a mechanism for the state control of the press.
Books now have to be licensed. They have to be preapproved by
the state before they can actually be published.In the
controversies that are leading up to the Licensing Act,
one of the authors most frequently mentioned as posing a
special threat to the well-being of the English nation is our
very own Milton. The treatises that he had
written in favor of the right to divorce for reasons of
incompatibility in the earlier 1640s had scandalized his
contemporaries and had especially scandalized his
Puritan contemporaries on the left.
Milton was particularly singled out as one of these dangerous
new voices that had to be stopped.
In a sermon that was preached to Parliament in August of 1644
by Herbert Palmer, it's Milton whose name is cited
as one of the as one of those figures most dangerous to the
state.Now my guess is that maybe not all of you but some of
you will have heard about, or perhaps actually have read
snippets from, today's reading:
this amazing treatise, long before you got to it last
night, Areopagitica. This is without question
one of the English language's most powerful and most rousing
expressions of the freedom of the press and actually of a kind
of libertarian philosophy in general.
The argumentative logic of Areopagitica rests on a
distinction between external compulsion,
on the one hand, and internal discipline on the
other, internal discipline looking something like an
internalization of the discipline and the authority of
the monarch. We have the compelling,
official authority of the new state licenser,
and Milton pits that external state of power against the
powers of reason and against the powers of conscience that,
of course, were seen to govern human action from within -- an
internalized authority. It's, of course,
not just John Milton who's authorized to determine his own
actions. Everyone, according to the
logic of Areopagitica, everyone has the potential
to assume the inner authority of conscience and self-discipline.
Everyone has potentially a licenser within himself,
and so there's no need -- there's no logical need for a
state licenser.There are some passages in Areopagitica
that I would be remiss to overlook,
so I'm going to ask you to turn to page 739 in the Hughes.
Milton's arguing that there's no authority that can
rightfully exist outside of the conscience of the individual.
Even religious truths, which, of course,
are the most potent forms of knowledge that we have -- even
religious truths have to be subjected to the final arbiter,
who is the individual's conscience and the individual's
power of reason. Milton is taking the argument
at so many points in Areopagitica as far as he
can possibly go. This is page 739:
A man may be a heretic in the truth [Milton writes];
and 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. Think of that,
"though his belief be true." Expand in your minds the
implications, the possible consequences of
this. Any belief is heresy if you
haven't managed to determine that belief for yourself,
if you haven't managed to determine that belief on the
basis of your own conscience or through the powers of your own
faculty of reason. You can be a heretic in the
truth if you accept a belief, however true that belief turns
out to be at the end of time, when we enter the pearly gates
and we finally get the last word.
You're a heretic because you've accepted that belief only
because it's been handed to you by an external authority,
an external authority like a pastor or a bishop or a member
of the state assembly or a lecturer in the English
department for that matter. It is your obligation,
Milton argues in this remarkable treatise,
to determine for yourself what will constitute truth.
All truths have to be acquired directly by the
individual.It's perfectly impossible,
I think, to imagine a stronger statement than this of the
authority that Milton gives, the intellectual
self-possession that he ascribes, to the individual.
I think you can see why Areopagitica has been
memorialized for centuries now as one of the central
precursors, well, to a number of things.
One of them would be the eighteenth-century
enlightenment. It's subsequently seen as one
of the precursors of the First Amendment to the American
Constitution. It's here in Areopagitica
that we find one of the first expressions of the idea
that an individual's freedom to read and the individual's
freedom to write is more important,
it outweighs in value, the state's right to limit the
individual's freedom to read and the individual's freedom to
write. Whatever danger a particular
text may pose to the state is outweighed by the greater harm
of the official elimination of that text or by the greater harm
of the punishment of the author.In light of what we
have to concede is the extraordinary achievement of
Areopagitica, and in light of its
reputation as one of the foundational texts for the
principle of the freedom of speech,
readers have been puzzled -- and they have been rightly
puzzled -- by the fact that nowhere in Areopagitica
does Milton explicitly denounce censorship.
Milton doesn't denounce censorship at all,
although it comes up. In fact, he even claims -- and
he does this explicitly in Areopagitica and you
might have caught this -- he even claims to be in favor of
censorship in a number of cases. Milton's argument in this
treatise is directed exclusively at licensing.
Licensing differs from censorship in some important
ways. Indulge me in making this
important distinction. We know what censorship is.
Censorship is the banning of books that have been published
and that have been deemed by the state authorities to be
dangerous or harmful in some way.
Censorship would involve the burning of books,
the prohibition of any further editions of those books,
or perhaps even a punishment -- by imprisonment,
say -- of the author, or maybe the printer or the
publisher of the books. That's censorship,
utterly straightforward.Licensing,
on the other hand, is an action that precedes
censorship. According to the 1643 Licensing
Order against which Milton is directing this treatise,
Areopagitica, a book has to be sent to
the licensing office for approval before it can be
published. The licensing agent reads the
book and determines whether or not to print it at all or
license it to appear in print. This isn't simply a distinction
without a difference. Milton places an enormous
amount of weight on this distinction.
Censorship only comes into play once a text has actually been in
circulation for a while, only after a number of readers
have found a published text to pose a threat.
Only after that point can a text actually be censored.
The book has to be tested. It has to be tried by the
public, by a reading public, before it can be censored.
It's censorship by consensus almost.
And the truth of whether a book should or should not be censored
is something that's come about through the diligent effort of a
group, rather than a single arbitrary
judge like the state licenser.Milton devotes a
lot of time in Areopagitica to making a number of
attempts to distinguish licensing from censorship.
You can see him actually making this distinction.
What I am interested in here, and I think what a lot of
readers are interested in when they approach Areopagitica,
is why this treatise, which does in fact permit the
practice of censorship -- why it can so easily be read as an
argument against censorship. In fact this treatise is often
described, or maybe even most commonly described,
as the Western tradition's greatest argument against
censorship. Obviously, there's something
going on in this text that has produced this confusion,
or we could think of it as a misreading.
This is of some interest to us, so turn to the left-hand column
of page 720 in the Hughes edition. This is where
Milton speaks of the importance of censoring dangerous books.
Milton explains that the Licensing Order of 1643 is
ineffective, it's useless because,
and I'm quoting here, "rder avails nothing to the
suppressing of scandalous, seditious, and libellous books,
which were mainly intended to be suppressed."
Milton's striking such a strange authoritarian note here
that it's easy to skip over it. It seems unaccommodatable
almost. Look at the next paragraph:
I deny not, but that it is of greatest
concernment in the church and the commonwealth,
to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well
as men; and thereafter to confine,
imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as
malefactors. Now we know,
of course, that this is an argument for censorship,
not an argument for licensing, because the punishment of the
books and the implicit punishment of the men who write
those books occurs after their appearance in print.
Milton then goes on to explain -- and I want you to look
closely at this -- Milton goes on to explain why books need to
be brought to justice, why books need to be punished
essentially, like criminals in Milton's personifying rhetoric. So Milton continues:
For books are not absolutely dead things,
but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as
that soul was whose progeny they are;
nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and
extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
Okay. Let me stop there. The ostensible purpose of this
sentence at this point, as I take it,
in Milton's argument is to explain the importance of
censorship; but surely this sentence has an
entirely different effect on us as readers, a different effect
than the syntax or the logic of this sentence may demand.
The scandalous, seditious and libelous books
that need to be brought to justice in this remarkable
sentence are suddenly revealed to have a soul.
However dangerous books are, in a lot of ways these books
look like good Christians. In fact, they're better than
good Christians because books are the purest,
the most rarified extract of the originary goodness of the
author: an absolutely unfallen, perfect creation.It's
important to understand that clearly something very strange
has happened here. This sentence,
which by the logic of the argument should be demonstrating
to us the importance of bringing bad books to justice,
seems to be doing something else.
In making this point, Milton has just made us,
I think, almost utterly unwilling to effect this justice
that he himself has called for. Which of us would want to
punish the purest efficacy of a living intellect?
It doesn't make sense. In the simplest possible terms,
you could say that Milton's sentence, Milton's argument here
in this paragraph, has gotten away from him.
There's a sense in which you can see this happening all the
time in Areopagitica. It's as if a gap has opened
up, a gap between the official argument of the treatise -- and
that's an argument that permits censorship -- and the rhetorical
figures or the metaphors, Milton's elaborately construed
language, which he uses to illustrate that argument.
The metaphors, or the rhetorical world of the
treatise, seem so often to be against censorship.
It's fairly easy to see that, at least in this case,
Milton's rhetoric and his imagery begin to undo,
begin to unravel, the logic of the argument.
It's a process of undoing and undermining that really eats
away at the argument, we could argue,
throughout the entirety of Areopagitica.I'm
willing to bet that some of you had noted in your reading last
night, or whenever you did your
reading, perhaps you actually underlined the sentence that
we've just looked like. You underlined it perhaps
because you were convinced that this was Milton's wonderful and
liberatory, progressive celebration of the
absolute inviolability of the written word.
If you did that, on some level,
I think, you were absolutely right, even though you were
utterly misconstruing the logic of the [laughs]
argument. One of the most remarkable
things about this text is that it's invariably the soaring,
libertarian rhetoric that we end up noting,
that we end up remembering, and that sticks with
us.Turn to page 741 in the Hughes. This is where
Milton gives us his celebrated narrative of the history of
truth. This is one of those highly and
elaborately rhetorically ornamented passages.
So in Milton's argument against licensing, Milton explains the
importance of the coexistence -- and it's very moving,
it's an argument for diversity -- the coexistence of so many
conflicting opinions and beliefs.
As I've suggested before, his more conservative
contemporaries were appalled by the proliferation of religious
sects in mid-seventeenth-century England.
It would have been perfectly reasonable for them,
his opponents, to assume that only one set of
religious beliefs could actually represent the truth,
that there was only one possible manifestation of divine
truth. One has roommates,
one has parents, in our own day and age,
who of course share such a belief in the absolute
singularity of the truth. Sometimes one has parents
[laughs]or roommates who not only believe that there is a
single truth but, of course, that they are
themselves in possession of it. It's just this limited and,
for Milton, restrained, or constrained and reductive,
notion of a single truth that he devotes so much of
Areopagitica to attacking.
So this is page 741: Truth indeed came once
into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape
most glorious to look on. But when he ascended,
and his apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose
a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the
Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators,
how they dealt with the good Osiris,
[the wicked deceivers] took the virgin Truth,
hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces,
and scattered them to the four winds.
From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth,
such as durst appear, imitating the careful search
that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris,
went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could
find them. I'll stop there.
With this utterly original fable about the fragmentation of
what we think of as religious truth, Milton goes out of his
way -- this is remarkable. He's actually enacting,
and he's enacting it rhetorically,
the fragmentation of religious culture in seventeenth-century
England.One of the most intriguing aspects of this
amazing passage is the fact that the fragmentation that Milton is
describing, and on some level even
enacting, is something that he seems to be celebrating here.
With the ascent of Christ, the lovely form of the virgin
Truth is hewed into a thousand pieces and scattered to the four
winds. The violence of this action,
of course, we can't deny, but it gets more complicated
than that. The Eyptian goddess Isis seeks
out the mangled body of her lover, Osiris,
because of her powerful affection for him and because of
her desire presumably to see him whole again.
There's also though, I think, a hint here that part
of the pleasure behind Isis' search involves the process of
reassembling her lover, the process of gathering him up
limb by limb -- the act of gathering.
Present participles in general in Areopagitica being
probably the most important form of speech,
the act of gathering him may be more pleasurable,
more desirable, than actually having him fully
reconstituted. It's likewise,
I think, part of our pleasure in this crazy world of disparate
and confusing truths -- if we imagine ourselves in the
seventeenth century -- it's part of our pleasure to read,
to sort out, and to reassemble the various
manifestations of truth. That's our common project here,
in fact, in an English department, say.
The sad friends of Truth in this fable have gone up and
down, gathering up Truth limb by limb still as they could find
them. We have not yet found
them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall do,
till her Master's second coming.
He shall bring together every joint and member,
and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness
and perfection. Surely these last two sentences
come as a surprise: "we have not yet found them
all… nor ever shall do."
We'll never find Truth in her entirety, at least not until the
Second Coming, and who knows when that will
be? I think that for Milton,
in this passage the fact that we never shall do is just as
well, because it's the labor of
reading, it's the labor of researching, and it's the labor
of assemblage, rather than the actual finished
product, that motivates and spurs the Miltonic
individual.Milton wants us to get us to feel the excitement
as we read a passage like this, and the language that he uses
in this passage is itself a kind of demonstration of the pleasure
of the process of intellectual assemblage,
of intellectual collation, of various diverse ideas.
As readers, it's our duty, it's our obligation,
to sort out and to reassemble. As we read this passage,
we sort out Christian myths from Egyptian myths,
or let's say we sort out from what with Milton be Christian
truth from Egyptian myths. The fact that they're put on
the same plane here suggests that both perhaps are either
truths or both perhaps are myths.
We sort out the similar confusion of gender roles,
which is truly remarkable, as we balance the masculine
Christ with the feminine Truth with which the masculine Christ
is identified here. We have to balance the
mysteriously female Isis' search for her lover Osiris.
There are so many entities in this passage that seem to be
mysteriously conjoined in some kind of hermaphroditic unity.
We have to image the relation of the female Osiris with the
implicitly male reader's search for his lost lover,
which is the feminine Truth. Milton's infusing this passage
with a powerful sense of -- I don't know, what can we call it?
-- of gender nonconformity and cultural relativity.
Christianity emerges from this passage as just one truth out of
many, and it's almost as if we are being given our choice as
readers -- we're being given our choice of which set of myths is
the most attractive, the most believable.
Maybe ultimately here, we're being given a choice as
to which set of myths is the most desirable.Now,
as I mentioned, the official purpose of the
tract is the political subject of licensing.
Milton's responding to an immediate set of historical
circumstances. He wants to explain the
usefulness, the value, and, in fact,
the beauty of religious controversy;
but when you read an intensely poetic, highly ornamented
passage like the one that we've just looked at,
I think you can see why Milton was so interested in this
contemporary problem of religious diversity in the first
place. Contradictions and
inconsistencies in contemporary religious society are so much
like, or at least look so much like,
the contradictions and inconsistencies that we find in
a work of literature, that we find in a poem.
And Milton's defense of controversy seems in a lot of
ways continually to be slipping in to something like a defense
of poetry, or certainly a defense of his
own poetic practice. One of the structural elements
that lends Areopagitica its curious power is a
carefully crafted network of images that Milton has employed
to structure the thing. I'm thinking particularly of
the images describing the activity of reading.One of
the central images here is the image of eating.
Reading is continually being described in terms of eating and
digestion. We have already encountered on
some level the importance of the figure of eating to John Milton.
Think of Comus. The lady's refusal to drink
of Comus' cup was just the first of Milton's attempts to bring
the action of ingestion to the very center of a literary work.
Paradise Lost will be filled with the activity of
eating. Milton devotes more than a few
lines -- and it's shocking -- to the process whereby the heavenly
angels not only eat food but they also digest it;
and Milton lets us know, whether we want to know or not,
how those angels actually excrete the food they have taken
in. But the most central act of
eating, of course, in Milton's great epic
obviously has nothing to do with angels.
It's the eating of the forbidden fruit by Adam and Eve.
It's because this action of eating is so absolutely central
to the plot of Paradise Lost that we are obliged to spend
-- let's spend the rest of our time here focusing on Milton's
consideration in this treatise, in the Areopagitica of
1644, of the problem that we will find haunting Paradise
Lost: the problem of the eating of the fruit,
and the problem of God's prohibition -- God's censorship
-- of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
God's licensing? We'll see.Turn to page 727.
This is the left-hand column. Milton's quoting Dionysius
Alexandrinus in this passage. He tells us that Dionysius
Alexandrinus wrote, "'Read any books whatever come
to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to
judge aright and to examine each matter.'"
Dionysius compares this command to read everything,
to read everything you possibly can,
to Saint Paul's command in the Epistle to the Thessalonians,
which is: "Prove all things. Hold fast to that which is
good." Prove here means "to
test, to try all things." Paul's making a claim here for
the individual's -- this is certainly how Milton was able to
read it -- a claim for the individual's capacity to make a
moral judgment after some period of trial,
or after some period of experimentation.
Milton elaborates on this claim that we should read and prove
anything we want, for we are sufficient to judge
aright.He's moving on here: …
[H]e might have added [Milton tells us]
another remarkable saying of the same author:
"To the pure, all things are pure";
not only meats and drinks, but all kind of knowledge
whether of good or evil; the knowledge cannot defile,
nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be
not defiled. For books are as meat and
viands are -- some of good, some of evil substance,
and yet God, in that unapocryphal vision,
said without exception, "Rise, Peter,
kill and eat," leaving the choice to each man's
discretion. We should be able to read
whatever we want, just as we should be able to
eat whatever we want. Milton's language -- the image
here is of this [laughs]-- it's kind of a combined gastronomic
and literary freedom. This is the freedom of the
smorgasbord, of the public
library/smorgasbord, or Atticus [bookstore and
café] for that matter,
a place where you can eat and read -- although not in the same
-- actually, [laughs]they don't let you eat
around the books. You get my point though.
We should be able to try all things, to prove all things,
and then decide whether or not we actually like it,
whether it brings us some sort of pleasure or wisdom.
This array of choices is more than just a luxury for Milton.
It's absolutely constitutive of the ideal of freedom,
of our freedom; because if we don't try
everything, if we don't give ourselves an opportunity to
decide for ourselves, then, of course,
someone will invariably be making those decisions for
us.It shouldn't be difficult to see a kind of problem that is
beginning to arise in Milton's text here.
I suggested just a minute ago that one of the relevant stories
that is always lying behind Milton's discussion of human
choice is the story from the Book of Genesis about Adam and
Eve's choice to eat the forbidden fruit.
And so much of Areopagitica involves Milton's bringing
together competing images and traditions and arguments.
As we've already seen, he interweaves Christian
figures with pagan figures. He positions pro-censorship
argument alongside anti-censorship rhetoric or
metaphor, and there are dozens of moments
in which it's just these opposites that are being asked
to coexist in some kind of peace.
But nowhere in Areopagitica do the conflicts seem so
pronounced, or so painful, or make us wince so much as the
tension that arises between the Genesis story of Adam and Eve --
God knows why Milton feels compelled to bring this story up
-- the tension between the story of Adam and Eve and Milton's own
impassioned argument against licensing.As I've just
noted, Milton quotes Paul's dictum
that "to the pure, all things are pure."
If you're pure, not only are meats and viands
pure (meats and drinks), but all kinds of knowledge,
whether of good and evil. You just have to extend for a
little bit this Pauline philosophy of freedom to the
situation of the unfallen Eden of Adam and Eve to see a kind of
[laughs] logical trouble that Milton is
getting himself in to. The Genesis story of God's
peremptory prohibition of the fruit from the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil is the strongest analogy that I can
think of to the licenser's peremptory prohibition of a
book. Obviously, Milton isn't able to
make this analogy explicit. It would completely dash any
logical sense that Areopagitica still
retains. It's nonetheless always there,
this tension. God's forbidding of the fruit
removes from Adam and Eve any capacity for choosing and
deciding, and you can see Milton worrying
in Areopagitica about the uneasy relationship of his own
argument to this central text in divine scripture.
So look at page 728 in the Hughes. This is the
left-hand column: Good and evil we know in
the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably;
and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the
knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning
resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused
seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labour to
cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.
It was from out the rind of one apple tasted,
that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving
together, leaped forth into the world.
And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing
good and evil, that is to say,
of knowing good by evil. There are so many things to say
about this passage. One thing that I'll just throw
out now is that it's a remarkable description of the
modern world of moral uncertainty.
Like Isis, whom we saw piecing together the body of Osiris,
or like the sad friends of Truth picking up the torn limbs
of that beautiful virgin, we are left to cull out and
sort asunder the confused seeds of good and evil.Now on one
level of this passage, Milton's describing this modern
condition as the product of the Fall.
It's too bad that we live in this world.
This is the doom which Adam fell into, this is the fallen
condition to which we've all been consigned;
but the passage is so much more complicated than that because
good and evil seem to have been mixed up in the apple before the
Fall. There was good in that
forbidden fruit as well as evil. This is that doom which Adam
fell into: of knowing good and evil -- that is to say,
of knowing good by evil. Adam at the Fall didn't simply
come into a knowledge primarily of evil.
Adam, by tasting the apple, came into a knowledge of good,
and he was only able to know this good by means of the
experience of the knowledge of evil.There are a lot of
perspectives discernible or extractable from this treatise,
Areopagitica, from which the fallen state
seems in so many ways, maybe in every way,
superior to its unfallen counterpart.
We will see Milton returning to all of these questions in
Paradise Lost. We will even see Milton place
in the mouth of Eve the next sentence in this passage,
or at least a paraphrased and, of course, versified version of
this sentence. This is when Milton tells us:
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. You'll find Eve in Book Nine of
Paradise Lost voicing essentially this same sentiment
when she's explaining to Adam why she needs to work
separately. This is the argument that
really, of course, puts her at risk of Satan's
temptation. To so many readers it has
seemed that Eve is actually quoting Milton's much earlier
writing, Areopagitica,
in her defense, and it has an incredibly
unsettling effect. Evil has to be challenged.
It has to be confronted. It has to be tasted before it
can be conquered. It can't simply be avoided.
This is Eve's and Areopagitica's argument.
We will never be virtuous simply because we cloistered
ourselves or segregated ourselves from any temptation.
Virtue is to be fought for and raced for, not without dust and
heat.Let me conclude the lecture by saying that it's a
startling experience and I hope you feel some of the surprise
moving from Areopagitica, which has to be Milton's
most important and consequential work in prose -- moving from
that to Paradise Lost, which is,
of course, Milton's most important work of poetry.
We'll be doing this in one week, and the disjunction
between the two works, this disjunction at least with
respect to their treatment of the Fall,
should dramatize the nature, or just the enormity,
of a lot of the conceptual problems and conflicts that
Milton is tackling here. As a faithful Christian,
of course -- and I'm not going to try to deny this -- as a
faithful Christian, Milton believes that the Fall
is only to be lamented and that Adam and Eve should not have
eaten the apple. As a believing Christian,
Milton believes that the omnipotent God had every right
to license, to prohibit, that apple;
but it's a measure that we have to take seriously.
It's a measure of Milton's ambition and his intellectual
courage that enables him to set out to justify a God who can
inflict upon his creatures such a seemingly arbitrary act of
licensing. The extent to which Milton
succeeds in justifying such a God in Paradise Lost will
be, of course, one of the questions
that we will be exploring over the next couple of weeks.
So you will read for Wednesday's class the first two
books of Paradise Lost.
