Milton and Political Correctness

Mary Ann McGrail

In the opening of the title essay of Persecution and the Art of Writing, Leo Strauss speculates:

We can easily imagine that a historian living in a totalitarian country, a generally respected and unsuspected member of the only party in existence, might be led by his investigations to doubt the soundness of the government-sponsored interpretation of the history of religion. Nobody would prevent him from publishing a passionate attack on what he would call the liberal view. He would of course have to state the liberal view before attacking it; he would make that statement in the quiet, unspectacular and somewhat boring manner which would seem to be but natural; he would use many technical terms, give many quotations and attach undue importance to insignificant details; he would seem to forget the holy war of mankind in the petty squabbles of pedants. Only when he reached the core of the argument would he write three or four sentences in that terse and lively style which is apt to arrest the attention of young men who love to think. That central passage would state the case of the adversaries more clearly, compellingly and mercilessly than it had ever been stated in the heyday of liberalism, for he would silently drop all the foolish excrescences of the liberal creed which were allowed to grow up during the time when liberalism had succeeded and therefore was approaching dormancy. His reasonable young reader would for the first time catch a glimpse of the forbidden fruit. The attack, the bulk of the work, would consist of virulent expansions of the most virulent utterances in the holy book or books of the ruling party. The intelligent young man who, being young, had until then been somehow attracted by those immoderate utterances, would now be merely disgusted and, after having tasted the forbidden fruit, even bored by them. Reading the book for the second and third time, he would detect in the very arrangement of the quotations from the authoritative books significant additions to those few terse statements which occur in the center of the rather short first part. [24-25]

This description of exoteric writing--that is, writing with two teachings: "a popular teaching of an edifying character, which is in the foreground; and a philosophic teaching concerning the most important subject, which is indicated only between the lines" [Strauss 36]--is the principle of reading most closely associated with Strauss and Straussians. What Strauss describes here is the practice of "writing between the lines" by authors holding heterodox views, constrained by the prejudices of their audience or the vested interests of the regimes within which they write. The term is broadly misused by both opponents and students of Strauss's work themselves and has helped to gain Straussians the mythopoetic status of hermetic school. The popular version of this theory [End Page 98] is that there are writers with secret teachings, and this occasionally lends itself to different kinds of scholarly deception and grandstanding.

Strauss, in this passage, refers to the position of a writer in a totalitarian country. This might lead a writer or critic in a liberal, democratic country to conclude wrongly that this kind of writing would not appear in a liberal society where there is no direct suppression of freedom of speech. I wish to suggest in this article that Milton's Areopagitica uses a form of exoteric writing, what Macaulay calls a "peculiar art," which addresses itself not just to the dangers of suppression of thought from above, but also to the potential dangers of suppression of thought from below. In liberal regimes, de Tocqueville located the origins of the latter, the suppression of thought from below, in what he called the tyranny of the majority. One contemporary form of this is "political correctness," an insistence that public writings and speeches be purified to conform to a particular view of what constitutes "unprejudiced" language. Geoffrey Hill has referred to these communally enforced constraints as "the thuggish stereotypes of political correctness," a phrase which conveys the paradox of a concept which is based simultaneously on a certainty about the incapacity of writers and speakers to circumvent the constantly changing obstacles which popular usage throws up, and an insistence on a language purged of stereotypes, according to academically sound strictures. As Hill's phrase suggests, this insistence is itself a kind of violence to language, pointing toward a new Newspeak.

Though it is often overlooked, Strauss himself makes clear in his work that there are very few writers capable of exoteric writing. After many readings of Milton's Areopagitica for a course I teach on literature and censorship, I concluded that Milton is one of these writers. In making the difficult and, at the time, dangerous argument for unlicensed printing, Milton does appear "to forget the holy war of mankind in the petty squabbles of pedants." The deliberate pedantry of the pamphlet (attested by the extensive annotations in all modern editions) draws general attention away from the radical nature of its essential argument. It is improbable that a writer concerned with whether St. Jerome's Lenten dreams in reading Cicero had some physical origin would, in the same context, be concerned with something so radical as insuring public space for religious and philosophical heterodoxy. Important from the contemporary viewpoint, it is possible to find in Milton's own style of exoteric writing some guidance for circumventing the obstacles confronted by contemporary writers and speakers, precisely such obstacles as "political correctness."

Areopagitica is the most famous, influential, and obscure argument for freedom of the press in English. It is also funny in the full sense of that word--humorous and odd. The immediate occasion for the pamphlet was the licensing order of 14 June 1643 and a formal demand by the Stationers' Company on 24 August for the strict enforcement of this order. The demand mentioned Milton by name and referred to his unlicensed publication on 1 August (after the licensing order had been issued) of "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce." A Presbyterian divine, Herbert Palmer, preached a sermon before Parliament on 14 August 1644 against the Divorce pamphlet and against Milton himself. Ten years later Milton said of this pamphlet, which brought on him the greatest political and religious stigma of his career: "one thing only I could wish, that I had not written it in the vernacular, for then I would not have met with vernacular readers, who are usually ignorant of their own good, and laugh at the misfortunes of others" [Complete Prose Works 610]. ¹

This is an obvious and simple way around the problem of the careless and prejudging reader, to write in a foreign language known to a smaller audience. But it is not the solution Milton chooses in Areopagitica. Very soon after the experience of the Divorce pamphlet, [End Page 99] Milton writes again in the vernacular, and on a fraught topic--freedom of the press. For biographical reasons alone one might wonder how it was that he did so and got away with it. He was so successful, in fact, that his most famous biographer, David Masson, records its "very considerable" effect and credits Milton with "increasing the general agitation for Toleration and demand for the liberty of free philosophising and free printing" in England [431]. One of Milton's earliest biographers, John Toland, records that one licenser was so convinced by Milton's writing that he resigned his post [133]. Masson cites others. The historian Macaulay, in his essay on Milton, refers to "the sublime wisdom of the Areopagitica," which he appears to consider Milton's finest and most influential prose work [59]. Even the international writers' organization PEN celebrates the anniversary of the publication of this pamphlet. Though it had no practical effect on its stated audience--Parliament--in that the order was not repealed, it gained a popular following in its time and subsequently.

From the perspective of twentieth-century liberal democracy, in which the argument over censorship has become an argument almost exclusively about pornography and obscenity, the most resonant moments of this piece are, perhaps, "as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye" [Areopagita 578]. Or "give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties" [613], and "to keep a narrow bridge of licensing where the challenger should pass, though it be valour enough in soldiership, is but weakness and cowardice in the wars of Truth" [614]. This argument is very simple and easily grasped by a contemporary reader: if you censor books, you inevitably deprive people of knowledge and truth, to which everyone should have equal access. In their historical and literary context, however, these memorable quotations appear remarkably like the "three or four sentences in that terse and lively style" to which Strauss refers in the opening quotation of this essay.

The perspective of twentieth-century liberalism causes the pamphlet to be read now consistently in light of these high, but brief, rhetorical moments, as a fervent defense of complete freedom of the press, to the exclusion of the bulk of the argument. To provide some corrective to the prejudices of a twentieth-century liberal reader, in order to recover Milton's artistry and gain insight into it, it is useful to recognize that the pamphlet begins and ends with an approbation of what members of any liberal regime would consider a severe form of censorship, one not unknown in our day:

I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the church and 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; for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as the soul was whose progeny they are; . . . [578]

There are six mentions of bookburning in the pamphlet, and the last three are approving. It is the right expression of condemnation and disgust at a bad book, to be exercised privately and publicly. In the conclusion of the pamphlet, Milton repeats that books, "if they be found mischievious and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and the most effectual remedy that man's prevention can use" [614]. The famous champion of the liberty of the press, then, appears to advocate bookburning. Is Milton to be understood as a proponent or opponent of what, in an early response to the original fatwah issued against him and the furor over The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie called "freedom of the imagination"?

There is something disconcerting in the deliberate pedantry that surrounds what is now the familiar popular argument of Areopagitica; it uses a kind of high rhetoric, the art [End Page 100] of which has been lost to modern readers. An example of this is that Milton reveals and appears to encourage two extremes of popular response to books--"promiscuous reading" on the one hand and bookburning on the other. Both alternatives are presented in such a way as to be unsatisfying to the intelligent reader. References to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the Catholic church and, in the same context, the apparent praise of the practice of burning bad books are precisely the kind of "virulent expansions of the most virulent utterances in the holy book or books of the ruling party" to which Strauss refers in the passage quoted earlier. They are designed (as is the history of licensing Milton provides) to cultivate in the reader a distaste for such practices, to encourage disgust with them by their very associations with Rome. The deliberate pedantry of the pamphlet, Milton's repetitions, his obscurities, his historical omissions, misquotations of sources, and self-contradictions may then be understood as the hallmarks of a masterpiece of English exoteric prose.

The pamphlet, as the extensive annotations in nearly all editions of Areopagitica indicate, is full of classical and biblical allusions, not of the most obvious sort. A minor example is that he refers to the Latin poet Ovid by the name Naso, used by Shakespeare's pedant Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost [4.2.123]. These allusions serve to create an obscurity, in the midst of which the apparently simple and now familiar argument is made.

The silent consensus among twentieth-century scholars about these obscurities and occasional errors ² seems to be that Milton was just overexcited by his topic or stylistically inclined to pedantic allusion--so much so that he digresses from one argument to the next. In so doing they accept Milton's invitation, at the beginning of Areopagitica, to just this kind of misreading, when he announces that the process of writing to Parliament has "got the power within me to a passion far more welcome than incidental to a preface." He describes there the emotions of those who make the most public kind of speech, political speech, who "to states and governors of the commonwealth direct their speech." They experience "doubt of what will be the success," "fear of what will be the censure," "hope," or "confidence" [578]. That is, Milton begins his pamphlet by alerting his audience to the possibility that he writes with fear and may be more cautious because of it.

The main argument is divided into four parts: (1) the history of licensing; (2) its effects on reading; (3) the ineffectiveness of licensing; (4) the damage done by it to the progress of truth. The first three arguments represent the first half of the pamphlet, the fourth argument being the longest. What is noticeable to a contemporary reader is that the various theoretical and popular modern arguments for and against censorship are absent. Milton is, for example, relatively unconcerned with "voluptuous" writing (what would now be called pornography) or with politically incendiary texts. He wishes to encourage England to the imitation of the "old and elegant humanity of Greece" [577], and appears to view what follows Greece in the history of licensing as a decline in respect for the power of the written word and a debilitation of the power of truth, eliding at this point in the argument the fact that Christian religious history, in whose course he finds himself writing, has intervened since the ancients in order to promote the Truth, as he will later state.

The title page itself poses several problems; Milton refers to Areopagitica as a "speech," but it was a speech never intended to be delivered. This is in the tradition of the oration after which it is named, "Areopagitikos" by Isocrates. Isocrates argued that the Athenian democracy had become too lax and called for a reinstitution of the oversight of morals by the council of Areopagus. Lamenting the decline of Athenian civilization, particularly its mores, Isocrates advocates stricter control of the youth, their education, and the manners of society as a whole. Isocrates's argument is for stricter imoposition of [End Page 101] the council of Areopagus's oversight. In the kind of useful inversion Milton prefers, he adopts the title of this progovernment speech and laments the possible decline of England into ignorance and vulgarity if a licensing council is permitted to operate.

Labeling the pamphlet a speech draws attention to the difference between public speaking and published writing. As he will say later, writing is "more public than preaching" [606]. This distinction becomes important when Milton gives his genealogy of licensing/censorship in the first part of his four-part argument. He praises the Parliament for preferring ancient Greece, where "[s]uch honour was done in those days to men who professed the study of wisdom and eloquence, not only in their own country, but in other lands, that cities and seigniories heard them gladly, and with great respect, if they had aught in public to admonish the state" [577].

To understand just what Milton refers to we might take the most famous admonisher of Athens, Socrates, who, Plato reports, says this in his Apology: "I go about arousing, and urging, and reproaching each one of you, constantly alighting upon you everywhere the whole day long [30e]. In explanation of why he remained a private person, Socrates says: "Do you believe that I could have lived so many years if I had been in public life and had acted as a good man should act, lending my aid to what is just and considering that of the highest importance? Far from it, men of Athens; nor could any other man" [32e]. Milton will not, however, take up the case of Socrates directly. But this is not to say that he does not take it up.

He brings up the problem of Socrates in the context of a larger, implicit argument about the dangers posed to learning by religious orthodoxy--for obvious historical reasons the trickiest aspect of the argument he sets out to make. This reintroduction of Socrates occurs in an unusual passage and indicates a dimension to Milton's thought about the problem of censorship other than the obvious one in support of the ongoing religious reformation, which would be promoted by freedom of the press. In the passage, Milton discusses a decree imposed by the Emperor Julian

forbidding Christians the study of heathen learning; for, said he, they wound us with our own weapons, and with our own arts and sciences they overcome us. And indeed the Christians are put so to their shifts by this crafty means, and so much in danger to decline into all ignorance, that the two Apollinarii were fain, as a man may say, to coin all the seven liberal sciences out of the Bible, reducing it into divers forms of orations, poems, dialogues, even to the calculating of a new Christian grammar. But, saith the historian Socrates, the providence of God provided better than the industry of Apollinarius and his son, by taking away that illiterate law with the life of him who devised it. [587]

What is curious about this passage is that it combines a reference to severe religious persecution through censorship with the name Socrates (not the philosopher but the later historian), more correctly referred to by the full name Socrates Scholasticus to avoid the confusion Milton intends here. The exclusion of classical learning in the course of religious persecution in the instance he gives is something we know Milton does not endorse, since the entire pamphlet is an imitation of a Greek oration, in which highest praise is reserved for the humanity and learning of ancient Greece. Why would he associate the name Socrates with the exclusion of classical learning? In what sense may the case of Socrates be associated with religious persecution that produces a fundamentalist sect relying only on reading of the Bible?

Milton does not directly mention the philosopher Socrates at all in Areopagitica, though he refers several times to his contemporaries Aristophanes and Protagoras and to his student Plato. Milton's history of the banishment of authors, censorship, and licensing of books is in this respect selective. In his account of the treatment of books by the [End Page 102] Athenians and Spartans, he omits any mention of the most famous instance of censorship in the ancient world--the trial and condemnation of Socrates. One could overlook this, arguing that Socrates, after all, never wrote, though his teachings were recorded by Plato. But one paragraph later, in his history of pre-Christian Rome, Milton mentions the dismissal from Rome of the Greek philosophers Carneades, Critolaus, and the Stoic Diogenes, by Cato the Censor, who viewed these "Attic babblers" [581] as a corrupting influence--not for their writings, but for their conversation. A quick and learned reader should be brought up short.

That the figure of Socrates is an important ghost behind this argument is enforced by Milton's apparent self-contradiction with regard to Aristophanes, who made the most famous attack on Socrates in The Clouds. In his first mention of the Greek playwright, he says it is "commonly known" that "Plato commended the reading of Aristophanes, the loosest of them all, to his royal scholar Dionysius, . . . and may be excused, if holy Chrysostom, as is reported, nightly studied so much the same author, and had the art to cleanse a scurrilous vehemence into the style of a rousing sermon" [579-80]. Strangely, Milton again takes up the subject of both Plato and Aristophanes in the third part of his argument (on why licensing will have no effect). Here he criticizes Plato rather than Aristophanes, and criticizes him for reading Aristophanes:

Why was he not else a lawgiver to himself, but a transgressor, and to be expelled by his own magistrates both for the wanton epigrams and dialogues which he made, and his perpetual reading of Sophron Mimus and Aristophanes, books of grossest infamy; and also for commending the latter of them, though he were the malicious libeller of his chief friends, to be read by the tyrant Dionysius, who had little need of such trash to spend his time on? [594]

The phrase at the heart of this apparent contradiction is "malicious libeller of his chief friends." Socrates refers to Aristophanes as his "libeller" in the Apology [19b]. In Milton's second treatment of the "old and elegant humanity of Greece" in this pamphlet, he invites reflection on the deficiencies of the most tolerant and learned of its cities--Athens--which executed the first philosopher. The reader is put in mind of Socrates later (in the apparently insignificant and unnecessary reference to Socrates Scholasticus), in the context of a description of the use of censorship in the religious persecution of Christians. The association of the name Socrates with a society that reads only the Bible invites the reader to compare the popular political motivations behind the execution of Socrates and the general dangers of religious intolerance in a post-Reformation England. The prosecution of Socrates and the persecution of early Christians are in this way associated with one another.

The omission of Socrates from Milton's genealogy of censorship also draws attention to the difference between speech and writing. To return to the title page, where Areopagitica is called a speech, there are perhaps some protections that written documents enjoy but speakers do not. It is also possible to write, and be understood, in a way in which it is not possible to speak or preach, which suggests that religious speech is perhaps the kind of speech most vulnerable to repression. It is this difference between speaking and writing which Milton highlights in his title. Books may be reread, checked for accuracy, puzzled over, while speeches require a kind of instant apprehension and a critical appraisal from imperfect memory. This means it may be possible to do something in writing which it is quite difficult to do in speech--to make significant errors, or omissions, to contradict oneself, for instance, in a way that guides the reader toward finding an explanation of the error, omission, or contradiction. The resolution of such apparent inconsistencies allows the reader to uncover what Strauss calls "writing between the lines." [End Page 103]

One may conclude from Milton's allusion to the Socrates problem that it is not possible, even in a tolderant society, to defend a philosopher such as Socrates publicly with success, or for a religious speaker to defend himself from charges of heresy (recall that Socrates, too, was charged with heresy, in that he was accused of introducing new gods into the city). It is also possible to conclude that there are valuable kinds of speech or writing that cannot always be easily defended, such as public religious speech.

The proximity of the name Socrates to the mention of learning that is confined only to the Bible, taken along with the ironic celebrations of bookburning, suggests that Milton held the view that religious censorship, finally, posed the greatest danger to any healthy political and religious community. The solution, despite the apparent immoderation of Milton's praise of bookburning and promiscuous reading (an immoderation designed precisely to put such practices in a bad odor), is a kind of moderation. Milton promotes such moderation by revealing the questionable antecedents and the unseemliness of the more extreme kinds of censorship, such as bookburning and licensing, and by associating these practices with the archenemy of the Reformation, Rome. At the same time, he offers the suggestion that such extreme measures are liable to adoption in even the most apparently liberal and learned societies; even in the model city, Athens, not all speech was tolerated.

There is an evident analogy between the problem of religious censorship around which Milton cautiously writes and the one example I have chosen of the constraints that emerge in contemporary liberal regimes, the modern creed of "political correctness."

As I have suggested, the straightforward reading of the pamphlet as a firm argument for freedom of the press is rightly seized on by contemporary readers as paramount, but the rhetorical context which surrounds it offers equally significant (perhaps for a contemporary audience, more significant) indications of what the real dangers to freedom of speech and publication are.

To return to the title page of the pamphlet, Milton quotes a speech by Theseus in Euripides's play The Suppliant Women. In it Theseus defends democracy from an attack on it by a Herald sent from the Argives against whom Theseus is about to wage war for the return of slain soldiers. The Herald ridicules democracy and rule by the "rabble." Theseus responds:

This is true liberty, when free-born men,
Having to advise the public, may speak free,
Which he who can, and will, deserves high praise;
Who neither can nor will, may hold his peace;
What can be juster in a state than this?

There are three levels of freedom referred to in Areopagitica: freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. To exercise freedom in the realm of thought is without obvious consequence; our continual stream of thought is as such completely private until we choose to make it public, in speech or in print. To exercise freedom of speech requires, according to Theseus, ability and will, and it carries certain dangers--Milton offers, between the lines, the example of Socrates. To exercise freedom in writing requires first the removal of external impediments, such as unlicensed printing, but more importantly, as Milton demonstrates through what Macaulay calls his "peculiar art," it requires great learning and great discretion. It even appears to require overt silence on certain points, like Milton's cagey silence on the case of Socrates.

Areopagitica is a sort of "how-to" of exoteric writing. In a sense, Milton takes the occasion of the licensing order of 1643 to lay out the problems confronting any writer, in any regime, who writes about public matters. His most important audience is, then, not the Parliament directly addressed, but the writers who will take up this challenge. It is a [End Page 104] masterpiece of English prose, full of repetitions, obscure references, omissions, and self-contradictions--all of which encourage boredom or confusion in the casual reader. While such a reader skims for phrases such as "the wars of Truth" and "as good almost kill a good man as kill a book," or closes the pamphlet in exhaustion, or frustration, Milton is writing for the demanding intellect, for the suspicious and alert reader for whom the piece becomes, as Milton describes it, "a trophy" [575]--a prize to the winner.

I have mentioned just a few of the important apparent inconsistencies in Areopagitica; there are more. In this reading of Milton's most well-known and most incompletely understood prose piece, I have tried to suggest how some writers may encourage and require an unconventional kind of reading--not just reading for sense or even close reading, but reading that requires the reader to supply arguments--to literally read between the lines, because writing publicly is always attended by possible dangers, the least of which, as the contemporary example of Salman Rushdie indicates, may be bookburning.

Milton employs the rhetorical strategies Strauss sketches roughly in Persecution and the Art of Writing. He cultivates a distaste for the kinds of religious censorship with which his contemporary audience was intimately familiar (in part by associating those practices with Rome), while fully endorsing religious orthodoxy, arguing that unlicensed printing can only further the project of the English Reformation. This essay has indicated a few of the rhetorical strategies mentioned by Strauss that Milton uses to write his way around the most dangerous kind of censorship: that imposed by accepted popular belief, in Milton's case the possible excesses that a religious extremism might produce. The strategies he used should be of interest to writers in both totalitarian and liberal regimes, precisely because there exist both obvious and less obvious constraints on free speech, as the case of Salman Rushdie and its opposite, the contemporary advocacy of "political correctness," demonstrate.

Mary Ann Mcgrail is Assistant Professor of the Humanities at Boston University. She has edited the volume Shakespeare and Plutarch (1997) and is completing a book on Hamlet entitled The Mind's Eye.

Notes

This essay is a development of an essay titled "Bookburning," which first appeared in Agenda 30.1-2 (1992).

1. See also Sonnet 11, "On the Detraction Which Followed upon My Writing Certain Treatises," and Sonnet 12, "On the Same."

2. See the miscitation of Spenser's Faerie Queene, which most editors have caught [590], where Guyon's palmer is taken into the cave of Mammon.

Works Cited

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Macaulay, Thomas Babington. Essays on Addison and Milton. Ed. H. A. Smith. Boston: Athenaeum, 1898.

Masson, David. The Life of John Milton; Narrated in Connection With the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time. Vol. 3: 1643-1649. New York: Macmillan, 1896.

Milton, John. Areopagitica and Of Education. Ed. Gordon Campbell. London: Dent, 1990.

^________. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Vol. 4, pt. 1: 1650-1655. New Haven: Yale, 1966.

Plato. Plato. Vol. 1: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Trans. H. N. Fowler. Loeb edition. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1953.

Strauss, Leo. Persecution and the Art of Writing. 1952. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.

Toland, John. "The Life of John Milton by John Toland 1698." Early Lives of Milton. Ed. Helen Darbishire. London: Constable, 1932.