Metonymies We Read By:
Rhetoric, Truth and the Eucharist in Milton's Areopagitica

John D. Schaeffer

In November 1644 John Milton published his Areopagit ica. Written as a response to the Long Parliament's bill calling for every publication to be approved and licensed by government agents, Areopagitica has become a locus classicus in the literature against censorship. ¹ Quotations from it adorn hundreds of buildings, especially libraries. The one quotation which has been most reproduced is the one that begins "As good almost kill a man as kill a good book," and Stanley Fish reminds us that the catalogue room of the New York Public Library is adorned with "A goode Booke is the pretious life blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life" (1987: 235). Few indeed are studies of freedom of the press which do not cite Milton's stately cadences. ² The comparison of a book to a person is so commonplace that we hardly notice it.

Strictly speaking, the personification of books is not a metaphor but a metonymy. The container, the book, is equated with the contained, the words, the thought, the style--in short the "content." This content, however, is generally thought of as indicating the presence of some person. This presence has been recognized in American copyright law, libel and slander law, and even in tax and inheritance law. A book has the same responsibilities for civil behavior as a living person, and it is endowed with certain rights analogous to those of a living person.

While Milton's Areopagitica may not have been the first text to articulate this metonymy, it certainly is one of the most prominent instances of its use. I suggest that Areopagitica is a crucial text in the development of our ideas of freedom and censorship, not because the text had any overt political effects (it was ignored in its own time), nor because it presents a coherent defense of freedom of the press, but because its figurative language has entered public consciousness more deeply than the work's argument.

Interpretations of Areopagitica's argument differ widely if not wildly. During the first half of the twentieth century, Areopagitica was deemed an unqualified endorsement of freedom of the press (Ould), or a piece of Miltonic pragmatism, an attempt to cover all the censorship bases while offending no one (Sirluck), or a seriously endorsement of a free press (Kendall; Illo).

Later critics argued that the style of the work is responsible for the ambiguity of its argument. Stanley Fish has argued that the work is another example of seventeenth-century "self-consuming" prose, while Francis Barker claimed that Milton substitutes an internal, bourgeois censorship for an external state censorship. William Kolbrenner says the central tension in Areopag itica is between public and private utterance, while Vin cent Blasi claims that much of Milton's perceived liberalism is really grounded in his commitment to the ideals of the Reformation rather than a commitment to political freedom. These critics focus on the work's argument, and the disparity of their conclusions indicates how problematic that argument is. None, however, addresses the figurative language of the work. Those who do seem to find it problematic.

Nigel Smith, Christopher Kendrick, and Lana Cable have called attention to the images of books as men and of reading as eating in Areopagitica. Smith interprets those images as contradictory, establishing a "crisis of production and consumption which remains unresolved in the imagistic subtext of the tract" (110). Kendrick conceptualizes and contextualizes the ethical ambiguity of Areopag itica within a frame of social determination (2). Part of that ambiguity, he says, is expressed in Milton's use of figures which Kendrick tries to explicate as anti-discursive, running parallel to but not supporting the work's argument (34). Finally, Lana Cable argues that Areopagitica has no ruling metaphor but only an interactive principle that challenges every metaphor, every thesis (137).

All this criticism aims to escape a very sticky problem: Milton presents two different ideas of truth: incremental-consensual and adversarial. At some points in Areopagitica Milton considers truth a consensus that is being built incrementally, and at other points he considers it to be the secure possession of one party or side and in need of defense against the error and malice of opposing sides or parties. Nor does one escape this dilemma by positing a consensual truth emerging somewhere in the future out of the constant arguments and controversies of every period. This view would imply a sort of humanist skepticism that does not fit what we know about Milton. In fact, Thomas O. Sloane has argued that Milton's idea of argument marks the end of humanist skepticism that began with the Renaissance rediscovery of Quintilian and Cicero.

To say that Areopagitica holds for a consensus emerging from dispute is to fantasize a purely intellectual process that was alien to Milton. Contra professor Cable, I believe there is a dominant figure in the text that gives coherence to the text's contradictory ideas of truth. Contra professor [End Page 84] Kendrick, I believe that the figures Milton employs in Areopagitica constitute a coherent sub-text that has proven far more important than the work's argumentative superstructure. These figures are predominantly metonymies, hence the title of the article, but some imply other comparisons which Milton employs as metaphors. Kendrick has noted how Milton's figures are "curiously indefinite, characteristically hovering between metonymy and metaphor, or shifting from one into the other" (27). The movement to which Kendrick refers is precisely what I want to trace. I hope to show that the process of "knitting up the body of truth" was far more complex than is realized, that it depends upon the gradual creation of a shared imagination. It is not simply a gradual public acceptance of certain assumptions or conclusions. Rather it involves conceptualizing a new sensus communis, a re-constellating of the figures that underwrite the language with which we think about truth, rhetoric, and consensus.

I. The literary and theological context

Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (from which I have adapted the title of this article) and their recent Philosophy in the Flesh address the way metaphors actually function in everyday language. The metaphor that they use as the primary datum of their study also permeates Areopag itica: argument as war (3-9; 77-96). Furthermore, other metaphors which play central roles in their study play featured roles in Areopagitica: ideas as food (46-47), argu ments as buildings (77-115), and books as metonymies (35). In their later study, Lakoff and Johnson identify metonymy as the figure that enables concept formation (20-31). The similarity between the metaphors that Lakoff and Johnson study and those in Areopagitica should alert us that Lakoff and Johnson may have more to contribute to our understanding of Milton's text than has been hitherto realized. The way Lakoff and Johnson describe how complex metaphors develop into concepts suggests that there may be a way to deal with the "hovering," "indefinite," "shifting" figures to which Kendrick refers (Philosophy 60-73). ⁴

The relation of multiple metaphors to a single subject also concerned Max Black. He called attention to what he called an "archetype," not the sort used by Jungian critics but rather a "systematic repertoire of ideas by means of which a given thinker describes by analogical extension, some domain to which those ideas do not immediately and literally apply" (241).

The sophisticated analysis of metonymy and metaphor that we see in the work of Max Black and Lakoff and Johnson was anticipated by the baroque theorists of metaphor who articulated several of the insights of these modern critics.

The hallmark of baroque poetry was acuity, or Acutezze as the Italian theorists called it, that is, the use of "pointed" metaphors, metaphors which combine two very dissimilar things and aim or "point" them at a particular case or circumstance. ³ Seventeenth-century lit erary theorists such as Emanuele Tesauro (1591-1675), Balthasar Gracian (1601-1658), and Sforza Pallavicino (1607-1667) claimed that the conceit could have argumentative force derived from a proportional metaphor, one of whose terms is left unstated.

The baroque theorists compare acutezze with the way an orator might make an audience supply the missing ligamen in a proposition; that is, the theorists thought a conceit could make a case the way an enthymeme makes a case (Tagliabue 144; Conte 70). Max Black describes this sort of argument/conceit as an "analogue model" which "shares with its original not a set of features or an identical proportionality of magnitudes but more abstractly, the same structure or pattern of relationships" (223). The Eucharist serves as the archetype according to which a series of analogous relationships among books, ideas, arguments, and truth. To show this, however, it is necessary to review just what the Eucharist connoted in Milton's religious and intellectual milieu.

The meaning of the Eucharist was one of the flash points of the English Reformation as it was of the Continental Reformation. The Eucharistic controversy raged throughout Elizabethan and early Stuart England, with the Anglican establishment holding for some form of divine presence that was "real" but short of transubstantiation, while the theological left argued for a spiritual presence that could not exist outside the well-disposed recipient. It was Jeremy Taylor, Milton's contemporary, who articulated what was to be the Anglican doctrine, and his The Reall Presence (1654) illustrates the Eucharistic thinking that informs Areopagitica.

The full title of Taylor's book also states his argument: The Reall Presence and spiritual of Christ in the blessed sacrament proved against the doctrine of transubstantiation. Taylor aims to show that Christ's presence is real but spiritual as opposed to the doctrine of transubstantiation which holds that Christ's presence is real, period.

Taylor elucidates how Christ's presence in the bread becomes Christ's presence in the recipient. Both presences, he argues, are sacramental: "The symboles become changed into the body and bloud of Christ, after a Sacramental, that is, in a spiritual, real manner; so that all that worthily communicate, doe by faith receive Christ really, effectually to all the purposes of his passion: The wicked receive not Christ, but the bare symboles only"(7). [End Page 85] Taylor's doctrine equates the real with the spiritual and the spiritual with the effective. Christ is present by His effects on the recipient, and these effects depend entirely on the recipient being disposed to entertain those effects. In Book V of Paradise Lost Milton uses transubstantiation to explain how Raphael can eat:

        So down they sat,
And to their viands fell, nor seemingly
The angel, nor in mist, the common gloss
Of theologians, but with keen dispatch
Of real hunger, and concoctive heat
To transubstantiate; what redounds, transpires
Through spirits with ease . . . . (433-39)

Here physical food is transubstantiated into spiritual essence because of the spiritual nature of the recipient. As we will see, this account of spiritualized eating will form the basis of Milton's account of spiritualized reading in Areopagitica.

Milton derived the figures used in Areopagitica from Catholic and reformation debates about the Eucharist. Around the Eucharist six other figures are constellated, some metaphors, some metonymies: 1) the book as person; 2) the book as container of divinity; 3) the book as body; 4) the book as food; 5) the truth as body, and 6) reading as communion. These figures are deployed interactively; they overlap and layer themselves into a complex baroque conceit that ultimately merges the body of the text with a mystical body of readers for whom reading is an act of communion that establishes a sensus communis, a bed rock of assumptions and meaning that is common to both senses of truth.

II. The book as metonymy

The first cluster of figures in Areopagitica personifies books, making them vehicles of life and spirit. First Milton says, "it is of greatest concernment in the church and commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how Bookes demeane themselves as well as men" (492). Here begins a sequence of metonymies comparing books to human beings, each subsequent metonymy refining and extending the analogy. Milton attributes to books what the scholastics called the "principle of immanent action," that is, that they, like human beings, contain a spirit that enables them to act independently.

This spirit is explicated in the next figure, a simile. "They [books] do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them"(492). Here books contain the "efficacy and extraction of that living intellect," yet there is also a genetic metaphor, since the books have been "bred." Hence books are living beings that contain the efficacy and extraction of a living intellect. This figurative combination implies that the book is biologically active; not only was it bred but it can breed. Milton pursues this simile even further, but within a surprising classical allusion.

Books, Milton continues, "are as lively, and as vigorously productive as those fabulous Dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men"(492). This allusion to the myth of Cadmus focuses the imagery of the previous metaphors on the biological activity of books and requires that the reader supply a missing term: the books are seeds containing the potential for social action, and, like the sowing of the dragon's teeth, they can produce powerful social forces.

Milton proceeds to develop the metonymic relation between books and men in the most quoted section of Areopagitica: "As good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it self, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye" (492). Here the figure becomes baroque. A book is reason itself, reason is the image of God, the image is contained in the eye. Hence the book (Reason itself, the image of God) is reflected in the eye of the reader whose eye contains that image. The proportion is completed by the implied equivalence of "reflection" = reading. But while in this figure the book is reason, in the next figure it contains the blood of a spirit: "Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, embalm'd and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life"(493). First the book is a biologically active container of an essence of human thought, that is, Reason itself which is reflected in the eye of a reader. Now the book contains a spiritual "life-blood," a divinity preserved for an "eternal life." These terms are clearly Eucharistic, a spiritual blood which imparts eternal life. Milton now continues to trope on books as containing "life": "We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of publick men, how we spill that season'd life of man preserv'd and stor'd up in Books" (493). Once again, the book is a container, and this time its contents are life itself, both a life blood that can be spilled and a life seasoned, that is, matured with age, like timber. A little further on Milton says that the life of a book is precisely an eternal life; killing books is not "the slaying of an elementall life, but strikes at that ethereall and fift essence, the breath of reason it selfe, slaies an immortality rather than a life" (493). [End Page 86]

After making books containers of both blood and spirit, Milton proceeds to describe their content, not in terms of spirit, but in terms of the body. He accuses the papacy of producing "Catalogues, and expurging Indexes that rake through the entralls of many an old good Author"(503). In this latter image, the book is not identified with the author's spirit or lifeblood, but expressly with the internal organs of the body.

This figure incorporates the divine life of reason contained in the book back into the living body; that is, this metonymy reverses the comparison of the book to spirit or reason. Now books' contents are their authors' entrails, not their spirits. This reversal will turn out to be more subtle than the monism which Kendrick attributes to Milton's discussion in Areopagitica. Kendrick asserts that Milton holds for an absolute unity of body and soul which dissolves the separation between theological and ethical modes of thought (2). The imagery of Areopagitica, how ever, is not monistic but Eucharistic, as Milton at this stage of the argument reverses the spiritual imagery of the book to a very materialistic physical imagery; body and soul are juxtaposed in the imagery, but not united. But the book as a human body, its contents the soul or spirit, recurs, but in another new form, as Milton continues his attack on parliamentary licensing.

Milton refers to books as children; their publication as birth: "Till then Books were ever as freely admitted into the world as any other birth. The issue of the brain was no more stifl'd then the issue of the womb" (505). At this point the book is a human body, but an infant's. The birth imagery echoes that of the Cadmus myth invoked some paragraphs earlier. But now, rather than spring up armed men, books are children and judged before birth. Milton argues that censorship is justified only after a book has had bad effects in the public life. Like Augustine's doctrine that unbaptized children go to hell, prior restraint violates one's sense of justice; the contents of the book, its soul, are judged before there is any evidence of harm or sin.

This passage marks the end of Milton's use of the body and the soul as metaphors for books. He has developed the matter/spirit dichotomy and exploited it within two different contexts, as both the seed of armed men (its social effect) and as a pre-judged infant (prior restraint). But more importantly, Eucharistic imagery transcended the dichotomy, to make the printed book a kind of sacrament which signified and contained the divine presence in human reason which is reflected within its pages, and as such, beyond the jurisdiction of human institutions.

The divine presence contained in the book has been expressed in a number of metaphors: life-blood, fifth essence, spirit, elixir, seed, reason, the image of God in the eye, etc. One vehicle of comparison, however, is noticeably absent; books are not compared to voices. The content is not identified with the voice of the author. Instead of oral/auditory metaphors, Milton's are visual or tactile. The basic metonymy of book as container precludes regarding the content as anything so evanescent as the voice.

The absence of auditory metaphors for books is all the more remarkable because Milton cast Areopagitica as a classical oration and referred to it in the text as an utterance. Indeed it was its utterance itself which confounded the Licensing Act. So we have a text which presents itself as auditory but regards other publications as somehow reified, incarnating some sort of physicality (the author's body) or some sort of abstraction (the image of God, Reason) but not the orality with which it signifies itself. Orality did not have connotations that Milton exploited, but Eucharistic metaphors did, and Milton now produces a startling, baroque turn. The book itself becomes the Eucharist.

III. The book as Eucharist

After using metaphors equating books with men and human bodies, and metonymies equating the content of books with reason and thus with God, Milton abruptly turns to a more physical metaphor, books as food. Lana Cable and Nigel Smith addressed the carnal and food imagery of Areopagitica, but they did not relate those images to the Eucharist. Books are Eucharistic for Milton not just because they are consumed but because their spiritual contents, human reason as image of divinity, enter the mind of the reader through the body by means of their materiality, paper, print, etc. However, there is a major difference between Milton's metaphor and the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.

"For books are as meats and viands are some of good, some of evill substance"(512). The word "substance" carries with it the whole theological tradition of transubstantiation, although in that system the substance of the Eucharist, Christ's body, can only be good. Thus "substance" here refers to the books' content that is judged by its effects. Milton then manages to make evil books good by encapsulating the metonymy within a scriptural allusion, viz., the passage in Acts 10:10-16 in which Peter dreams that he is commanded by God to slay and eat a variety of unclean animals. Peter objects and is told by the Lord that whatever He commands him [End Page 87] cannot be unclean. Peter interprets the vision to mean that the gentiles are to be accepted into full membership with the Jewish Christians. Milton explicates the allusion:

Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomack differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unappliable to occasions of evill. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. (512)

Here Milton qualifies the comparison of books to food in a way that follows Taylor's teachings about the Eucharist. Taylor asserted that not only the efficacy of the sacrament but even its meaning depended entirely on the state of the recipient's soul. The Catholic doctrine asserted that the sacrament worked ex opere operato, that is, that it was the substance of Christ's body regardless of the state of the recipient's soul. Milton, however, is regarding books as Eucharistic according to Taylor's sacramentarianism which held that Christ's presence in the Eucharist depended on the disposition of the recipient. The consuming of books, even evil ones, can only have a good effect on a well-disposed soul, while reading even good books will have no effect, or an evil effect, on a soul bent on evil.

Milton continues the Eucharistic metaphor in another scriptural allusion. Arguing that God gives every person liberty to eat and develop rules of temperance according to individual preference, he says "that Omer which was every mans daily portion of Manna, is computed to have bin more than might have well suffic'd the heartiest feeder thrice as many meals"(513). The manna sent by God to the Hebrews in the desert had been interpreted since patristic times as prefiguring the Eucharist. But Milton reinforces Taylor's and the other Reformers' doctrine by juxtaposing this allusion with Jesus' words about the Jewish dietary laws: "For those actions which enter into a man, rather than issue out of him, and therefore defile not, God uses not to captivat under a perpetuall childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his own chooser"(513-14). According to this analogy, ideas "enter into" a reader like food and cannot defile. Thus Milton again argues from an analogy with the Christian dispensation of Jewish dietary laws; Jesus gives to readers the same freedom to choose what enters their minds that he gave to his followers to choose what entered their stomachs.

Milton extends the identification of books with food when he comes to consider error. Error is a "bait" (514) and error and falsity are infections and poisons. According to Roman doctrine, while the Eucharist, like the other sacraments, works ex opere operato, the disposi tion of the recipient is not completely irrelevant. The grace of the sacrament is only available to those already in the state of grace. Receiving communion while in the state of sin was considered a sacrilege, damning the unrepentant to deepest hell. To such souls the Eucharist was poison, making them "guilty of the body and blood of the Lord" in St. Paul's words (I Cor, 11:27). After this section, however, Milton refocuses on the book rather than its consumption.

IV. Truth as body

In the concluding sections of Areopagitica Milton addresses the relation of censorship to truth. He confronts directly the issue that has obscured his treatment until this point: the fact that he regards truth as both tentative, incomplete, and to be sought, and also certain, complete, and to be defended. In short, Milton must confront the contradiction between religious truth possessed by individual, literate Christians, and rhetorical truth, a truth conceived as provisional and adversarial and inhabiting a public arena. ⁵ Milton first oscillates between these two poles, using Eucharistic metonymies for the former concept, war metaphors for the latter. Milton compares truth to a fountain of water and a dismembered body, a woman in a beleaguered city and a temple, and finally a tree or plant. ⁶

First Milton cites Scripture directly, saying "Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetuall progression, they sick'n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition" (543). Milton continues the water metaphor when he says "More than if som enemy at sea should stop up all our hav'ns and ports and creeks, it [licensing] hinders and retards the importation of our richest Marchandize, Truth" (548). Here truth is not the water but "Marchandize" while water is the conduit for that merchandise. This metaphor supports Kendrick's claim that Milton commodifies truth in the form of books, but Kendrick adds that, on the one hand, Milton opposes licensing because it interrupts the free flow of the market, and on the other hand denies that books are commodities and that to regulate them as if they were is unnatural, even impossible (57-58). Kendrick finds these two arguments contradictory; the former asserts commodification to argue for free exchange, the latter denies commodification to argue against licensing. In the final section of Areopagitica, however, Milton refocuses his [End Page 88] Eucharistic figures to renegotiate and ultimately transcend this contradiction.

The most prominent and telling of these figures is that of the dismembered body. First, says Milton speaking of Christ, "Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on"(549). But then he adds "strait arose a wicked race of deceivers . . . who took the virgin Truth, hewd her lovely form into a thousand peeces, and scatter'd them to the four winds . . . "(549). This passage echoes a commonplace of Protestant polemics, that the Roman doctrine of the Real Presence "multiplied and scattered" the body of Christ to every church and tabernacle, an impossible doctrine to believe. Milton proceeds to trope on the figure, turning the feminine image of truth into a male body when he says that Christians searching for the truth were like the sad Isis looking up and down to find the limbs of the missing Osiris.

In his The Worthy Communicant (1660) Taylor describes the social effects of receiving communion in terms that parallel Milton's account of how reading reassembles "the body of truth." Taylor states: "My purpose is . . . to gather together into an union al those several portions of truth, & differing apprehensions of mysteriousnesses and various methods of rules of preparation, & seemingly opposed Doctrinnnes by which even good men stand at distance and are afraid of each other"(10). To find the common ground of a shared truth is what Taylor thinks is the purpose of the Eucharist, and it is what Milton thinks is the purpose of unlicensed printing: to unite Christians into one body.

Lest one would think that licensing would serve the cause of unity better than unrestricted debate, Milton distinguishes between unity and unanimity: "They [those who demand unanimity] are the troublers, they are the dividers of unity, who neglect and permit not others to unite those disserver'd peeces which are yet wanting to the body of Truth" (550-51). Milton explains this search for truth with another metaphor: "To be still searching what we know not, by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body is homogeneal and proportional), this is the golden rule in Theology as well as in arithmetic"(551). This passage indicates that Milton envisions the search for truth as incremental, but this incremental view immediately gives way to the adversarial view of truth rooted in the rhetorical tradition, but Milton's figures resonate with scriptural images of the Eucharist.

After imagining truth as a body, Milton then imagines it as living in the city of London where there are writers and scholars as well as armorers and anvils (554). The search for truth has become a search for weapons with which to defend truth. Milton twins the adversarial and the incremental by comparing truth to the temple in Jerusalem: "as if, while the Temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars, there should be a sort of irrationall men who could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be built" (555). Here Milton says the truth is "built up" by controversy, but the metaphor of the temple also continues the Eucharistic theme. In John 2:19-22 Jesus specifically compares his body to the temple in Jerusalem which, he says, even if destroyed he will raise up in three days.

Milton now employs another scriptural image that traditionally has been associated with the Eucharist: Christ's own metaphor of himself as the vine and the apostles as the branches, the central image in the so-called Eucharistic discourse in John's Gospel(John 15-16). Milton says "Fool! he [the adversary] sees not the firm root, out of which we all grow, though into branches: nor will beware untill he see our small divided maniples cutting through at every angle of his ill-united and unwieldly brigade"(556). Here Milton specifically compares the reformers to the branches united in Christ, just as Christ compared himself to a vine and his apostles to branches in John 15:5. Milton, however, gives the figure a very military, and baroque turn; "maniples" are also units of a Roman legion.

Milton finally combines the body and rhetoric itself in another baroque amplification which focuses all the previous imagery: he compares the beleaguered city of London to a human body:

For as in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous not only to vital but to rationall faculties, and those in the acutest, and the pertest operations of wit and suttlety, it argues in what good plight and constitution the body is, so when the cheerfulnesse of the people is so sprightly up, as that it has, not only wherewith to guard well its own freedom and safety, but to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of controversie, and new invention, it betok'ns us not degenerated nor drooping to fatall decay, but casting off the old and wrincl'd skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again. . . . (557)

This passage constitutes the focal point of a grand conceit uniting the corporeal incremental metaphor, people united in one body, with the adversarial metaphor, truth as a beleaguered [End Page 89] city, and implying a third term as a focal point, the common metaphor for rhetoric, discourse as a human body. This metaphor, a commonplace even in Roman rhetoric, compares discourse to a body, and style or wit to its blood and life. Here at the conclusion of Areopagitica Milton focuses on the image of the body the lines of imagery for community, the truth, and the text. Religious truth, the body of the believers, is metaphorically twinned with rhetorical truth, the body of the text. Texts contain the life-blood of the spirit and are so many parts of the body of truth, and the community of readers is knit together in truth by partaking of the spirit in books. The body of the text circulates with the life-blood of the spirit, and this spirit circulates in the mystical body of the community of readers who eventually give sense to this body a sensus communis in a "real but spiritual" sense as Taylor would have it.

Kendrick misses the point of Milton's conceit when he claims that Milton contradicts himself on the commodity status of books. The "marchandize" is truth which is contained in the books, and the books are momentarily compared to ships which ply the waters and ports which parliamentary licensing would obstruct. This single metaphor cannot really be made to bear up against Milton's continuous Eucharistic imagery which aims to both humanize and spiritualize books--not commodify them. Books are an object of consumption only in a Eucharistic, almost religious sense, and Milton returns to that analogy again at the conclusion of Areopagitica.

Milton again develops the comparison of reading to eat ing. "His [Christ's] doctrine is, that he who eats or eats not, regards a day, or regards it not, may doe either to the Lord" (563). By arguing once again that restricting printing is analogous to Jewish dietary laws, Milton asserts the equivalence of reading and eating, book and body, content and divinity. Milton's final metonymy here replicates the Eucharistic imagery employed throughout the text and brings it to bear on the paradox that has animated the whole oration: that consensual truth emerges from reading adversarial writing. The well-disposed soul receives an image of the writer's reason embodied in the written text; the reader ingests that image and its body, the rhetorical performance that is the written text, and incorporates it. If that image is one of truth, then it is an image of reason itself, God. If it is not, then well-disposed readers will judge its shortcomings and it will help refine the truth of which they already have a grasp. In either case, reading builds communion by building together the truth in the minds of readers who form then a kind of mystical body, each incorporating part of the whole truth which will never exist in its entirety until the end of time. This process depends upon readers participating in the process of controversy; it is not a matter of one side or another emerging as victorious, nor is it a process of continual revision as Fish would have it. It is an image of "incorporate truth" developing among a body of readers who have communicated with, that is, consumed, the spirit of truth contained in the bodies of texts. The ambivalence of the Eucharist, which both is and contains the body of Christ, reflects the ambivalence which Kendrick finds in the figures Milton uses. They, like the Eucharist, constantly slip from metonymy to metaphor and back again. Indeed the imagery Milton uses for books and reading replicates this slippage. Sometimes books are containers, sometimes they are men themselves; sometimes reading is consuming the contents of books, sometimes it is the knitting up of a body itself. The process of knitting up the body of truth is as mysterious as the transformation of the bread into Christ's body, spiritual but real.

The underlying Eucharistic imagery of Areopagitica presents a more coherent case for unlicensed printing than the work's surface arguments do. It presents a theory of reading that requires that readers make the final judgment on the truth or falsity of texts because the purpose of reading is two-fold: to create a body of truth, a constantly emerging "corpus" of texts, and to create a consensus among believers analogous to the Catholic doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ. The state cannot be permitted to adjudicate the truth by prior restraint. The way Milton uses Taylor's version of the Eucharist as an analogy for the relation of truth to reading suggests that, for Milton, reading and writing have become a secular sacrament, carrying the responsibility of creating an ever-growing body of truth by rhetorical, rather than ritual, performance. Milton conceptualizes a potential unity, a future consensus, in the face of the religious and political dissension all around him. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Milton is not calling for a coherent world view grounded in a particular version of Christian faith. He is calling for a struggle to reunite the body of truth into a consensus which he himself cannot articulate or describe.

While Milton cannot give an account of that consensus, the consensus, whatever it is, will be the truth. Stanley Fish has argued that Areopagitica finally calls for a continual process of discovery, that there is for Milton no ultimate truth in which any Christian can rest. He says the "wars of truth" are "the process of endless and proliferating interpretations whose goal is not the clarification of truth, but the making of us into members of her incorporate body" (Driving 246). That truth has an "incorporate body" made up of many different readers reflects exactly the Eucharistic subtext of Areopagitica. Fish argues that for Milton [End Page 90] truth has many shapes, and Fish concludes "if she has more shapes than one, then she has no shape" ( Driving 245). But for Milton truth does have a shape: the shape of a human body, an image derived from the Christian tradition of the Eucharist and the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ.

Milton's success in Areopagitica depends not on the effec tiveness of his argument, nor on whether the work can accommodate our own post-modernist paradigms, but on the way it successfully altered our concepts of reading, printing, and censorship. Those concepts are not drawn from the work's argument, even though we like to think of freedom of the press as a unique contribution of Enlightenment rationality. Rather those concepts are drawn from religious metaphors, indeed the most profound religious symbol of Christianity. Milton's imagery, and the central metonymy around which the whole work is focused, have permeated our consciousness. His images have indeed created a new imaginative consensus. That they have done so may not be due so much to Milton's arguments, but the to depth, antiquity, and religious roots of those images.

Northern Illinois University

Notes

1. For a discussion of the licensing controversy, see Siebert 186-202.

2. A survey of the WestLaw database reveals ten citations of Areopagitica between January 1996 and June 1997 in articles published in law journals.

3. For a discussion of the role of the conceit and acutezze in baroque rhetoric, see Tagliabue 139-44. For a more general discussion of wit in the baroque, see Mazzeo 47-50. Milton wrote his Italian poetry before he went to Italy. His sonnets are in the Petrarchan style that was known and practiced all over Europe. But when he went to Naples in 1638-39, Milton met Giovani Baptista Manso, who had been the friend and patron of Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) and Giambattista Marino (1569-1625). The latter had created a style of poetry called "Marinismo" that featured the most elaborate, far-fetched, and condensed metaphors of the baroque school. Milton later wrote a Latin poem entitled Manso in honor of his new friend, and although that poem certainly does not employ baroque conceits, Milton certainly must have heard about Marinismo, which was still influential in Italy (Parker 1: 173-76). For studies of Italian influence on Milton see DiCesare and Prince.

4. Milton claims that the very publication of Areopagitica (unlicensed) accomplishes the freedom of expression for which it calls, as he says by the very sound of this which I shall utter (487). Speech act theory would describe this as an illocution, a statement that performs an action as well as communicates. Christian theology would view this statement as a claim that Areopagitica works sacramentally, ex opere operato, that the printing of the work, its utterance, does what it says. As we shall see, by figuring Areopagitica as vocal, Milton excludes it from the figures he uses to characterize printed works.

5. Balachandra Rajan calls attention to the two kinds of truth operating in Milton's argument, but he describes them as synchronic and diachronic (95-97). I think that religious and rhetorical are truer to Milton's own intellectual milieu and provided more critical leverage in opening up Areopagitica's metaphoric subtext.

6. Milton's concept of truth may have been influenced by Robert Greville's (Lord Brooke) The Nature of Truth (1641). In Areopagitica Milton praises Brooke by name for his writ ings on church government, but he certainly knew of Brooke's philosophical treatise which continually compares truth to a fountain, light, and a body. Brooke espoused a simplified form of Platonic idealism and denied any distinction between the soul, the understanding as a faculty, or the object of the understanding. Similarly he denied any distinction between understanding and will and between substance and accident:

If you follow this rule [denial of all distinctions between mental faculties], and see all things in the glasse of Unity, you will not lose all Arts and Sciences in the Wood of Divisions and Subdivisions in infinitam; you shall be more substantiall, than to make Substance and Accidents Two; neither will it ever happen, that you maintaine transubstantiation, by affirming that Accidents can haere in nullo subiecto. (164)

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