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GATHERING THE SCATTERED BODY OF MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA

Renascence, Winter 2005 by Rovira, James

It is the willful disregard of history that is the object of critique in the pages that follow. (Fish, No Such Thing ix)

MODERN scholarship of Milton's Areopagitica is understandably perplexed on some points. The tone of Milton's panegyric on freedom of speech resonates with current sensibilities on a number of levels, serving as an almost primal articulation of the reasons for freedom of speech. But at the same time, Milton's freedom of speech is freedom of speech with one notable exception: Catholics. At this point Milton sounds like the dinner guest whose faux pas lets slip that he is secretly a bigot even while complaining about other bigots. To make matters worse, Milton himself served as state censor not many years after writing the Areopagitica, a move that makes plausible the idea that Milton wasn't so much concerned for freedom of speech in general, but for freedom of speech for himself. So critics, like dinner guests, choose to respond in a number of ways: some taking offense at the comment, others explaining it away, still others changing the subject.

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One particularly fruitful, though terribly wrong, response was published by Stanley Fish in 1991: "Truth and Indeterminacy: Driving from the Letter in Milton's Areopagitica" This response is, essentially, a spectacular change of subject in our dinner conversation since Fish argues that Milton didn't care about freedom of speech at all while writing what is possibly the most significant document in favor of freedom of speech. Admittedly, I refer to Fish's essay as a colossal misunderstanding with some ambivalence, but a misunderstanding it is - of Milton and even of Fish's own goals for the article, which asserts that historical context is all important while managing to ignore it almost completely. But consistent with the rest of Fish's work, even his failures are engaging, and in responding to them much light can be shed upon one of Milton's most debated prose works. More interesting than any provisional answers to the questions raised by these debates, however, is the analysis prompted by Fish's own reading of the text.

IN the opening of "Driving from the Letter in Milton's Areopagitica" Fish briefly describes the readings of Areopagitica that have dominated Milton scholarship until the writing of his article. According to Fish, a substantial body of criticism depicts Milton as "the apostle of unrestrained freedom" and the Areopagitica as "a basic text supporting the ethic of disinterested inquiry" ("Driving" 234). Fish lists W.R. Matthews, Willmore Kendall, John Illo, Ernest Sirluck (in a limited way), and then, of course, himself as among the few who have been able to see clearly the limitations Milton places upon freedom of expression within the Areopagitica. Had Abbe Blum's The Author's Authority not been published simultaneously with Fish's essay, Blum may have made Fish's list as well for asking, "How are we to read a tract which encodes much greater freedom and recognition for an author (aside from a Catholic) and at the same time grants the state's right to exercise corporal punishment on the offending author's product?" (77).

Scholarship since the publication of Fish's article acknowledges the tract's limited support of freedom of expression. Vincent Blasé in his "Milton's Areopagitica and the Modern First Amendment" argues that the "Areopagitica cannot rightly be employed to make the secular case for the freedom of speech" (9), largely because Milton's arguments "are so much a function of its religious underpinnings that the secular counterpart must be considered a separate notion that can draw no sustenance from Milton's thought" (7). Similarly, Chulho Lee in Korea's Milton Studies journal effectively describes the religious underpinnings of Milton's Areopagitica in "The Fallacy of secularizing Milton's Areopagitica" but can only assume, rather than demonstrate, why Milton's arguments have no possible secular counterparts. Since much of western philosophy since Kant has been a secularization of European Protestantism it seems that virtually any religiously constructed argument can have a secular counterpart: M.H. Abrams's brief intellectual history in Natural Supernaturalism is a concise illustration of this fact.

So it seems reasonable that even a religiously constructed argument for freedom of speech and of the press could find wider application and, accordingly, Blasé in closing does affirm that some messages of "Milton's dated polemic remain timeless" (12). It is these secularizations of Milton's argument that raise expectations for religious tolerance from Milton that are ultimately defeated. This being said, while Stephen Dobranski convincingly criticizes Fish for describing a body of scholarly opinion which "does not in fact exist" (147), it seems reasonable to assert previous criticism of the Areopagitica was more univocal about Milton's support of a free press in the past than in the present. Fish is overstating his case, but not without a cause. So I think Milton's qualifications upon free speech have been recently exaggerated, and possibly the greatest exaggeration of all is found in Stanley Fish's own "Driving from the Letter."

GATHERING THE SCATTERED BODY OF MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA

Renascence, Winter 2005 by Rovira, James

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