GATHERING THE SCATTERED BODY OF MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA

Milton himself reflects this belief in Paradise Lost:

Therefore what he gives

(Whose praise be ever sung) to man in part

Spiritual, may of purest Spirits be found

No ingrateful food: and food alike those pure

Intelligential substances require

As doth your Rational; and both contain

Within them every lower facultie

Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste,

Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate,

And corporeal to incorporeal turn. (5.404-414)3

Activities sustaining the human body sustain the human mind, the seat of reason, thus turning "corporeal" food into "incorporeal" thought, the physical sustaining the spiritual, the rational. Milton didn't present the corporeal and incorporeal facets of human existence as completely separate but as part of a larger, organic whole, a whole arranged in a specific hierarchy - vegetable, then animal, then rational. It is very important to notice Milton's organicism at this point. He didn't divide up rational agents into separate physical and spiritual compartments, but saw the physical and spiritual as different parts of an indivisible whole.

Milton's claims about books in the Areopagitica, that books are a slice of the divine capacity, an expression of the author's rational soul, should be understood as firmly rooted within this philosophy of human nature. Milton believed that books also have a dual nature, just like people, a corporeal and incorporeal, and that the two together make up an organic whole. His identification of books with reason is meant to be taken as literally as his language will allow. Books are indeed "the breath of reason itself." On the other hand, Milton's use of metaphor was employed to describe the physical nature of books, the characteristics of books as objects. Metaphorically books "preserve as in a violl" what is to be literally understood as an "extraction of the living intellect that bred them." Milton does assert a dichotomy between books as objects and books as reasoning agents, but this is a dichotomy between interdependent halves, like a human body and a human soul.

So the assumptions underlying Milton's ontology of books could be restated in this way: human beings are reasoning agents (or are at least capable of being reasoning agents). Language, for Milton, was the arena in which reason paraded itself, and books are repositories of reason because they are made up of language. The scene in Paradise Lost where Adam names the animals illustrates this last point:

As thus he spake, each Bird and Beast behold,

Approaching two by two, these cowring low

With blandishment, each Bird stoop'd on his wing.

I nam'd them, as they pass'd, and understood

Thir nature, with such knowledge God endu'd

My sudden apprehension. (349-354)

Representatives of the vegetable and animal are "cowring" low as God calls them to Adam, the animals presumably bowing before a king who names them. Adam's naming of the animals represents the subordination of nature to reason, language here standing in as the vehicle of Adam's dominion over nature and the sign of his rule. This subordination of nature to language/reason reinforces the idea of a clear dichotomy between books as objects and books as reasoning agents in the Areopagitica. Books as reasoning agents are literally a slice of the image of God because they employ reason through the use of language.