John Milton (1608-1674) was born into a Puritan family,
he supported Cromwell’s government and in 1649 he was appointed Secretary for
Foreign Languages (he had studied Latin, Greek, and Italian).
After the fall of Charles I, censorship had been
abolished, but it had been soon reintroduced after a number of libels and
pamphlets were published, whose content was disturbing also for the Puritans.
The Licensing Act, 1643, restored preventive censorship (that is, before) the book was published.
Milton’s argumentations were not accepted at that
time, but they would become part of the reflection on the human rights later.
Note on the title – "… Areopagitikos [was] a speech written by the Athenian orator Isocrates in the
5th century BC. (The Areopagus is a hill in Athens, the site of
real and legendary tribunals, and was the name of a council whose power
Isocrates hoped to restore)". From: http://tinyurl.com/b4cajc
Reading from: Areopagitica,
1644
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 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. I know they 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 [1]. And yet, on the other hand, unless
wariness be used, 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. Many a man
lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a
master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. ‘Tis
true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and
revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the
want of which whole nations fare the worse. […]
As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdom can
there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? 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. […]
Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in
this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning
of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less
danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of
tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may
be had of books promiscuously read.
[1] Reference to a Greek myth in which the teeth of a dead
dragon, planted in the ground, give birth to great warriors.
