Lecture: Milton's Athletic Speech

Time line for the introduction of Print

1456: Gutenberg, using movable type for the first time, prints the Latin Bible in Germany

1521: as a leader of the Protestant Reformation Luther starts to translate the Bible into German

1545-1563 : Pope convenes the Council of Trent and the Inquisition à the first systematic Religious censorship

1603-1625: In England James I requires the licensing of books

1642-1649: Puritan Parliament vs. Charles I in Civil war. Now there are two governments in England, and a defacto liberty of the press.

By 1644 Parliament had won some military victories and ruled in London. Though Parliament had fought the monarch’s licensing law, it imposed its own licensing law in 1643. It is this law that provokes Milton into writing and printing Areopagitica: a Speech of Mr. John Milton For the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, To the Parlament of England. Of course, he did so without the legally required license.

 

 

Pro-Censorship; or The Bad Logic of Licensing

          1: the reader is vulnerable, susceptible and must be protected

          2: books are like food or drugs à consuming them can be good or bad for you; the goal of the censors is to keep print culture as "pure" as possible

3: this prophylactic print media policy is based upon an essentially negative interpretation of virtue: one does good by not doing evil

          4: the licensing system works by delegating to a few—the 20 licensers—the task of filtering out evil, error, etc.à authors and scholars are thereby rendered infantile, minors, etc.

          5: it is assumed that "we" (the Parliament) who appoint the licensing board know what truth is, what evil is…; we censors can therefore determine what others should print

 

  

 

 

 

The Test of Virtue

One 5-sentence paragraph of prose, recast as a poem in 5 stanzas.

1: states main thesis and context of the test: the state of man

      As therefore the state of man now is,

What wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear,

Without the knowledge of evil?

2: the definition of the ‘true’ Christian

      He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures,

And yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better,

He is the true wayfaring Christian.

3: Milton’s contrast of a cloistered and athletic Virtue

      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.

4: virtue emerges from this test

      Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather:

That which purifies is trail, and trial is by what is contrary.

5: Milton distinguishes between a blank and genuine (because tested) virtue

      That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil,

And knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it,

Is but a blank virtue, not a pure;

Her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness;

Which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser

(whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas)

Describing true temperance under the person of Guion,

Brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon and the bower of bliss,

That he might see, and know, and yet abstain.

 

Analogy: Truth is like (mythical) Osiris (it exists, but its body is scattered):

1) Absence of truth to all mortals entails a skepticism about any particular claim to Truth

+ 2) But belief that Truth exists, means one sets about finding it in the future

= 3) Tolerance of the many different ways of articulating truth

 

 

Pro-Censorship; or The Bad Logic of Licensing

Anti-Censorship: the Good Logic of Ending Licensing:
the reader is vulnerable, susceptible and must be protected The reader is hardy, active, and discriminating.
books are like food or drugs à consuming them can be good or bad for you; the goal of the censors is to keep print culture as "pure" as possible Books are neither good or bad for you, but a complex compound of good and evil in books gives centrality to the way one readsà the actively virtuous reader can benefit from the evil book
this prophylactic print media policy is based upon an essentially negative interpretation of virtue: one does good by not doing evil one cannot discover one's own nature or virtue without exposure, exercise and testing
the licensing system works by delegating to a few—the 20 licensers—the task of filtering out evil, error, etc.à authors and scholars are thereby rendered infantile, minors, etc. by banning censorship, each author and reader becomes their own censor
it is assumed that "we" (the Parliament) who appoint the licensing board know what truth is, what evil is…; we censors can therefore determine what others should print since Truth is scattered and uncertain, and always a work in progress, we should be skeptical of any particular version of Truth, and a wide variety of speech and writing should be tolerated