With today’s tools, it doesn’t take long to learn something about a poet’s life before stepping into his words. A little biography, a little historical background, and suddenly a poem written centuries ago becomes a conversation with someone who once wrestled with many of the same things I do.
Sometimes I stop and think, I might be the only human on earth reading this particular poem right now.
Almost certainly an exaggeration—but there is something wonderful about the thought. Someone put those words on paper hundreds of years ago, and here I am, giving them another hearing.
I have now arrived at John Milton. This is going to take a while. He is someone I plan to sit down and camp out with. I added a biography to my Kindle, settled in, and promptly wandered off the poetry trail.
then suddenly-An essay caught my attention.Written to the English Parliament in 1644.
On freedom of speech.
So much for leaving our current arguments behind.
Milton’s Areopagitica challenged Parliament’s licensing order of 1643, which generally required official approval before a work could be printed. England was in the throes of civil war, while the Thirty Years’ War continued its devastation on the European continent. These were dangerous times for arguments about religion, government, and who possessed the authority to decide what others could read.
What especially caught my attention was that Milton was challenging people whose cause he supported. He sided with Parliament against the king. Yet here he was, asking Parliament to reconsider its own restrictions.
In my paraphrase: You opposed oppression. Be careful what you do now that you possess power.
Sound familiar?
We are usually quite perceptive about the dangers of authority when someone we distrust holds it. Our vision becomes less reliable when the authority belongs to our friends.
Milton presses a question that reaches well beyond seventeenth-century printing:
Do we protect truth by controlling what people can read, or by teaching them to judge?
His argument assumes that readers have work to do. They must examine, compare, distinguish, and choose. Keeping every mistaken idea out of their reach will not produce the same wisdom as learning to recognize why an idea is mistaken.
One passage stopped me:
“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed…”
“Unbreathed” carries the sense of being unexercised or untested. Milton is questioning a virtue that has never had to face opposition—a goodness that remains safely indoors while the struggle takes place outside.
Milton argues that “cloistered virtue” is goodness kept safely in seclusion, protected from temptation and opposing ideas. Its weakness is that it has never been tested: avoiding a difficult choice does not demonstrate the ability to choose wisely. Mature virtue understands why something wrong might be attractive and still rejects it. Reading widely offers a comparatively safe way to develop that judgment. Suppressing every competing idea may therefore weaken the very goodness we hope to protect. Like an athlete who keeps a spotless uniform by never entering the race, sheltered virtue has yet to develop strength through the “dust and heat” of competition.
As an educator and a Christian, I find that challenging.
We have a responsibility to guide. Age and maturity matter. Teaching children requires judgment about what they are prepared to encounter. But preparing them for adulthood must eventually include helping them examine arguments we believe are wrong.
At some point, they will encounter those arguments without us.
Will they know how to think through them? Will they understand what they believe and why? Will they have the confidence to listen carefully without assuming that listening amounts to surrender?
I want a faith that can withstand a difficult question. That requires more of me than arranging a life in which difficult questions never get asked.
With war continuing in Ukraine and fires and chaos in Europe, Milton’s argument deserves another hearing. Fear makes control attractive. When the stakes seem enormous, allowing people to speak freely can begin to look like a luxury we cannot afford.
But those are precisely the circumstances in which I want us to examine our reasoning most carefully.
Who decides which opinions are too dangerous to hear? How do we correct the people making those decisions? And would we trust the same machinery in the hands of our opponents?
That brings me to Elon Musk and X.
I wonder where our public conversation would be had Musk not acquired Twitter in 2022. I cannot prove what would have happened otherwise. It is a question, not a conclusion. But the question matters to me because so much public discussion now passes through platforms controlled by a relatively small number of people and companies.
Musk himself is a contentious figure. Readers will bring sharply different judgments about him to this paragraph. Still, my support for freedom of expression cannot depend on liking the person who owns a platform. The principle has to apply to his critics as well.
If I welcome room for opinions that were previously unwelcome, I must also defend room for people who criticize Musk, challenge my politics, or question convictions I hold dearly. Otherwise, I have simply found a gatekeeper whose preferences happen to resemble mine.
A privately owned platform is different from Parliament licensing a printing press. The comparison has limits. Yet the concentration of power over public discussion should concern us wherever we find it.
We should also remember that permission to speak does not establish the truth of what is spoken. A false claim remains false. We still have to investigate, answer, correct, and sometimes say firmly, “That is wrong.”
Free discussion asks something demanding of its participants.
Milton himself did not apply toleration consistently. His argument excluded Roman Catholicism from the freedom he defended for others. That limitation belongs in our reading of him. A man can recognize the danger of suppression and still make an exception for the beliefs he fears most.
Perhaps that is where the circle becomes most visible.
Each generation discovers compelling reasons why its own exceptions are necessary. Each is tempted to believe that power will be safe this time because the right people possess it.
I cannot know how Milton would vote, which platform he would use, or what he would make of our daily controversies. I suspect he would frustrate anyone trying to recruit him as a reliable spokesman.
But his essay gives me a question to carry into my own affairs:
Am I willing to defend another person’s freedom to make an argument I sincerely wish nobody would believe?
I can answer it confidently in the abstract. The test comes when I recognize the person, dislike the argument, and have the power to make it disappear.
I went looking for a little poetry and found an uncomfortable examination of my own consistency.
I think I’ll camp here a while.
By the way- my time with Milton pushed out a strange little tune.... the word be invented....
Milton coined “pandemonium”! He introduced it as “Pandæmonium” in Paradise Lost (1667), naming the palace in Hell where Satan and the fallen angels assemble. The name combines roots meaning “all” and “demons”—essentially, the place of all demons.
It later became our everyday word for wild uproar, confusion, or chaos. So when we say “pandemonium broke out,” we’re borrowing from Milton’s capital of Hell!
You can read Milton’s work here: Areopagitica
To write the life of John Milton is thus to survey a century of unprecedented religious, political, social and cultural struggles, and to consider a writer enmeshed in, and fascinated by, those conflicts. Milton’s genius lies in the extraordinary power and beauty with which he wrote from within this turmoil, and indeed wrote out of his own personal struggles – which include his blindness, endured in an unforgiving, pre-industrial society. Throughout his life, he used his astounding learning to articulate and explore with passion and eloquence the great questions that troubled him and his contemporaries: What constitutes human liberty and how can it best be supported? What is the nature of good government and how can it be sustained? How can we understand the divine – and each other? How can we find the strength to bear suffering and death? In reading Milton, therefore, we not only journey to a troubled and exhilarating past, but are challenged, as Milton challenged his readers in his own century, to consider those questions, and to provide some answers of our own.
Beer, Anna. Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot (pp. 8-9). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
