Areopagitica

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AREOPAGITICA


A SPEECH FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTING TO THE PARLIAMENT OF
ENGLAND

This is true liberty, when free-born men,
Having to advise the public, may speak free,
Which he who can, and will, deserves high praise;
Who neither can, nor will, may hold his peace:
What can be juster in a state than this?

Euripid. Hicetid.


They, who to states and governors of the Commonwealth direct their
speech, High Court of Parliament, or, wanting such access in a private
condition, write that which they foresee may advance the public good;
I suppose them, as at the beginning of no mean endeavour, not a little
altered and moved inwardly in their minds: some with doubt of what will
be the success, others with fear of what will be the censure; some with
hope, others with confidence of what they have to speak. And me perhaps
each of these dispositions, as the subject was whereon I entered,
may have at other times variously affected; and likely might in these
foremost expressions now also disclose which of them swayed most, but
that the very attempt of this address thus made, and the thought of whom
it hath recourse to, hath got the power within me to a passion, far more
welcome than incidental to a preface.

Which though I stay not to confess ere any ask, I shall be blameless, if
it be no other than the joy and gratulation which it brings to all who
wish and promote their country's liberty; whereof this whole discourse
proposed will be a certain testimony, if not a trophy. For this is not
the liberty which we can hope, that no grievance ever should arise
in the Commonwealth--that let no man in this world expect; but when
complaints are freely heard, deeply considered and speedily reformed,
then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained that wise men look
for. To which if I now manifest by the very sound of this which I shall
utter, that we are already in good part arrived, and yet from such
a steep disadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into our
principles as was beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery, it will be
attributed first, as is most due, to the strong assistance of God our
deliverer, next to your faithful guidance and undaunted wisdom, Lords
and Commons of England. Neither is it in God's esteem the diminution
of his glory, when honourable things are spoken of good men and worthy
magistrates; which if I now first should begin to do, after so fair a
progress of your laudable deeds, and such a long obligement upon the
whole realm to your indefatigable virtues, I might be justly reckoned
among the tardiest, and the unwillingest of them that praise ye.

Nevertheless there being three principal things, without which all
praising is but courtship and flattery: First, when that only is praised
which is solidly worth praise: next, when greatest likelihoods are
brought that such things are truly and really in those persons to whom
they are ascribed: the other, when he who praises, by showing that such
his actual persuasion is of whom he writes, can demonstrate that he
flatters not; the former two of these I have heretofore endeavoured,
rescuing the employment from him who went about to impair your merits
with a trivial and malignant encomium; the latter as belonging chiefly
to mine own acquittal, that whom I so extolled I did not flatter, hath
been reserved opportunely to this occasion.

For he who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fears not to
declare as freely what might be done better, gives ye the best covenant
of his fidelity; and that his loyalest affection and his hope waits on
your proceedings. His highest praising is not flattery, and his plainest
advice is a kind of praising. For though I should affirm and hold by
argument, that it would fare better with truth, with learning and the
Commonwealth, if one of your published Orders, which I should name, were
called in; yet at the same time it could not but much redound to the
lustre of your mild and equal government, whenas private persons are
hereby animated to think ye better pleased with public advice, than
other statists have been delighted heretofore with public flattery. And
men will then see what difference there is between the magnanimity of a
triennial Parliament, and that jealous haughtiness of prelates and cabin
counsellors that usurped of late, whenas they shall observe ye in the
midst of your victories and successes more gently brooking written
exceptions against a voted Order than other courts, which had produced
nothing worth memory but the weak ostentation of wealth, would have
endured the least signified dislike at any sudden proclamation.

If I should thus far presume upon the meek demeanour of your civil and
gentle greatness, Lords and Commons, as what your published Order hath
directly said, that to gainsay, I might defend myself with ease, if any
should accuse me of being new or insolent, did they but know how much
better I find ye esteem it to imitate the old and elegant humanity of
Greece, than the barbaric pride of a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness.
And out of those ages, to whose polite wisdom and letters we owe that we
are not yet Goths and Jutlanders, I could name him who from his private
house wrote that discourse to the Parliament of Athens, that persuades
them to change the form of democracy which was then established. Such
honour was done in those days to men who professed the study of wisdom
and eloquence, not only in their own country, but in other lands, that
cities and signiories heard them gladly, and with great respect, if they
had aught in public to admonish the state. Thus did Dion Prusaeus, a
stranger and a private orator, counsel the Rhodians against a former
edict; and I abound with other like examples, which to set here would be
superfluous.

But if from the industry of a life wholly dedicated to studious labours,
and those natural endowments haply not the worst for two and fifty
degrees of northern latitude, so much must be derogated, as to count me
not equal to any of those who had this privilege, I would obtain to be
thought not so inferior, as yourselves are superior to the most of them
who received their counsel: and how far you excel them, be assured,
Lords and Commons, there can no greater testimony appear, than when
your prudent spirit acknowledges and obeys the voice of reason from what
quarter soever it be heard speaking; and renders ye as willing to
repeal any Act of your own setting forth, as any set forth by your
predecessors.

If ye be thus resolved, as it were injury to think ye were not, I know
not what should withhold me from presenting ye with a fit instance
wherein to show both that love of truth which ye eminently profess, and
that uprightness of your judgment which is not wont to be partial to
yourselves; by judging over again that Order which ye have ordained to
regulate printing:--that no book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth
printed, unless the same be first approved and licensed by such, or at
least one of such, as shall be thereto appointed. For that part which
preserves justly every man's copy to himself, or provides for the poor,
I touch not, only wish they be not made pretences to abuse and persecute
honest and painful men, who offend not in either of these particulars.
But that other clause of licensing books, which we thought had died with
his brother quadragesimal and matrimonial when the prelates expired, I
shall now attend with such a homily, as shall lay before ye, first the
inventors of it to be those whom ye will be loath to own; next what is
to be thought in general of reading, whatever sort the books be;
and that this Order avails nothing to the suppressing of scandalous,
seditious, and libellous books, which were mainly intended to be
suppressed. Last, that it will be primely to the discouragement of all
learning, and the stop of truth, not only by disexercising and blunting
our abilities in what we know already, but by hindering and cropping
the discovery that might be yet further made both in religious and civil
wisdom.

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.
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.

We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living
labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved
and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus
committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole
impression, a kind of massacre; whereof the execution ends not in the
slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth
essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than
a life. But lest I should be condemned of introducing license, while I
oppose licensing, I refuse not the pains to be so much historical,
as will serve to show what hath been done by ancient and famous
commonwealths against this disorder, till the very time that this
project of licensing crept out of the Inquisition, was catched up by our
prelates, and hath caught some of our presbyters.

In Athens, where books and wits were ever busier than in any other part
of Greece, I find but only two sorts of writings which the magistrate
cared to take notice of; those either blasphemous and atheistical, or
libellous. Thus the books of Protagoras were by the judges of Areopagus
commanded to be burnt, and himself banished the territory for a
discourse begun with his confessing not to know WHETHER THERE WERE GODS,
OR WHETHER NOT. And against defaming, it was decreed that none should
be traduced by name, as was the manner of Vetus Comoedia, whereby we may
guess how they censured libelling. And this course was quick enough, as
Cicero writes, to quell both the desperate wits of other atheists,
and the open way of defaming, as the event showed. Of other sects and
opinions, though tending to voluptuousness, and the denying of divine
Providence, they took no heed.

Therefore we do not read that either Epicurus, or that libertine school
of Cyrene, or what the Cynic impudence uttered, was ever questioned
by the laws. Neither is it recorded that the writings of those old
comedians were suppressed, though the acting of them were forbid; and
that Plato commended the reading of Aristophanes, the loosest of them
all, to his royal scholar Dionysius, is commonly known, and may be
excused, if holy Chrysostom, as is reported, nightly studied so much the
same author and had the art to cleanse a scurrilous vehemence into the
style of a rousing sermon.

That other leading city of Greece, Lacedaemon, considering that Lycurgus
their lawgiver was so addicted to elegant learning, as to have been the
first that brought out of Ionia the scattered works of Homer, and sent
the poet Thales from Crete to prepare and mollify the Spartan surliness
with his smooth songs and odes, the better to plant among them law and
civility, it is to be wondered how museless and unbookish they were,
minding nought but the feats of war. There needed no licensing of books
among them, for they disliked all but their own laconic apophthegms, and
took a slight occasion to chase Archilochus out of their city, perhaps
for composing in a higher strain than their own soldierly ballads and
roundels could reach to. Or if it were for his broad verses, they were
not therein so cautious but they were as dissolute in their promiscuous
conversing; whence Euripides affirms in Andromache, that their women
were all unchaste. Thus much may give us light after what sort of books
were prohibited among the Greeks.

The Romans also, for many ages trained up only to a military roughness
resembling most the Lacedaemonian guise, knew of learning little but
what their twelve Tables, and the Pontific College with their augurs
and flamens taught them in religion and law; so unacquainted with other
learning, that when Carneades and Critolaus, with the Stoic Diogenes,
coming ambassadors to Rome, took thereby occasion to give the city a
taste of their philosophy, they were suspected for seducers by no less
a man than Cato the Censor, who moved it in the Senate to dismiss them
speedily, and to banish all such Attic babblers out of Italy. But Scipio
and others of the noblest senators withstood him and his old Sabine
austerity; honoured and admired the men; and the censor himself at
last, in his old age, fell to the study of that whereof before he was
so scrupulous. And yet at the same time Naevius and Plautus, the first
Latin comedians, had filled the city with all the borrowed scenes of
Menander and Philemon. Then began to be considered there also what was
to be done to libellous books and authors; for Naevius was quickly cast
into prison for his unbridled pen, and released by the tribunes upon
his recantation; we read also that libels were burnt, and the makers
punished by Augustus. The like severity, no doubt, was used, if aught
were impiously written against their esteemed gods. Except in these two
points, how the world went in books, the magistrate kept no reckoning.

And therefore Lucretius without impeachment versifies his Epicurism to
Memmius, and had the honour to be set forth the second time by Cicero,
so great a father of the Commonwealth; although himself disputes against
that opinion in his own writings. Nor was the satirical sharpness or
naked plainness of Lucilius, or Catullus, or Flaccus, by any order
prohibited. And for matters of state, the story of Titus Livius, though
it extolled that part which Pompey held, was not therefore suppressed by
Octavius Caesar of the other faction. But that Naso was by him banished
in his old age, for the wanton poems of his youth, was but a mere covert
of state over some secret cause: and besides, the books were neither
banished nor called in. From hence we shall meet with little else but
tyranny in the Roman empire, that we may not marvel, if not so often bad
as good books were silenced. I shall therefore deem to have been large
enough, in producing what among the ancients was punishable to write;
save only which, all other arguments were free to treat on.

By this time the emperors were become Christians, whose discipline in
this point I do not find to have been more severe than what was formerly
in practice. The books of those whom they took to be grand heretics were
examined, refuted, and condemned in the general Councils; and not till
then were prohibited, or burnt, by authority of the emperor. As for the
writings of heathen authors, unless they were plain invectives against
Christianity, as those of Porphyrius and Proclus, they met with no
interdict that can be cited, till about the year 400, in a Carthaginian
Council, wherein bishops themselves were forbid to read the books of
Gentiles, but heresies they might read: while others long before them,
on the contrary, scrupled more the books of heretics than of Gentiles.
And that the primitive Councils and bishops were wont only to declare
what books were not commendable, passing no further, but leaving it to
each one's conscience to read or to lay by, till after the year 800,
is observed already by Padre Paolo, the great unmasker of the Trentine
Council.

After which time the Popes of Rome, engrossing what they pleased of
political rule into their own hands, extended their dominion over men's
eyes, as they had before over their judgments, burning and prohibiting
to be read what they fancied not; yet sparing in their censures, and the
books not many which they so dealt with: till Martin V., by his bull,
not only prohibited, but was the first that excommunicated the reading
of heretical books; for about that time Wickliffe and Huss, growing
terrible, were they who first drove the Papal Court to a stricter policy
of prohibiting. Which course Leo X. and his successors followed, until
the Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition engendering together
brought forth, or perfected, those Catalogues and expurging Indexes,
that rake through the entrails of many an old good author, with a
violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb. Nor did they stay
in matters heretical, but any subject that was not to their palate,
they either condemned in a Prohibition, or had it straight into the new
purgatory of an index.

To fill up the measure of encroachment, their last invention was to
ordain that no book, pamphlet, or paper should be printed (as if St.
Peter had bequeathed them the keys of the press also out of Paradise)
unless it were approved and licensed under the hands of two or three
glutton friars. For example:

Let the Chancellor Cini be pleased to see if in this present
work be contained aught that may withstand the printing.

VINCENT RABBATTA, Vicar of Florence.


I have seen this present work, and find nothing athwart the
Catholic faith and good manners: in witness whereof I
have given, etc.

NICOLO GINI, Chancellor of Florence.


Attending the precedent relation, it is allowed that this
present work of Davanzati may be printed.

VINCENT RABBATTA, etc.


It may be printed, July 15.

FRIAR SIMON MOMPEI D'AMELIA,
Chancellor of the Holy Office in Florence.

Sure they have a conceit, if he of the bottomless pit had not long since
broke prison, that this quadruple exorcism would bar him down. I fear
their next design will be to get into their custody the licensing
of that which they say Claudius intended, but went not through with.
Vouchsafe to see another of their forms, the Roman stamp:

Imprimatur, If it seem good to the reverend Master of the
Holy Palace.

BELCASTRO, Vicegerent.


Imprimatur, Friar Nicolo Rodolphi, Master of the Holy Palace.

Sometimes five Imprimaturs are seen together dialogue-wise in the piazza
of one title-page, complimenting and ducking each to other with their
shaven reverences, whether the author, who stands by in perplexity at
the foot of his epistle, shall to the press or to the sponge. These
are the pretty responsories, these are the dear antiphonies, that so
bewitched of late our prelates and their chaplains with the goodly echo
they made; and besotted us to the gay imitation of a lordly Imprimatur,
one from Lambeth House, another from the west end of Paul's; so apishly
Romanizing, that the word of command still was set down in Latin; as
if the learned grammatical pen that wrote it would cast no ink without
Latin; or perhaps, as they thought, because no vulgar tongue was worthy
to express the pure conceit of an Imprimatur, but rather, as I hope, for
that our English, the language of men ever famous and foremost in the
achievements of liberty, will not easily find servile letters enow to
spell such a dictatory presumption English.

And thus ye have the inventors and the original of book-licensing ripped
up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not, that can
be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity or church; nor by any
statute left us by our ancestors elder or later; nor from the modern
custom of any reformed city or church abroad, but from the most
anti-christian council and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever
inquired. Till then books were ever as freely admitted into the world
as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifled than the
issue of the womb: no envious Juno sat cross-legged over the nativity
of any man's intellectual offspring; but if it proved a monster, who
denies, but that it was justly burnt, or sunk into the sea? But that a
book, in worse condition than a peccant soul, should be to stand before
a jury ere it be born to the world, and undergo yet in darkness the
judgment of Radamanth and his colleagues, ere it can pass the ferry
backward into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious
iniquity, provoked and troubled at the first entrance of Reformation,
sought out new limbos and new hells wherein they might include our books
also within the number of their damned. And this was the rare morsel
so officiously snatched up, and so ill-favouredly imitated by our
inquisiturient bishops, and the attendant minorites their chaplains.
That ye like not now these most certain authors of this licensing order,
and that all sinister intention was far distant from your thoughts, when
ye were importuned the passing it, all men who know the integrity of
your actions, and how ye honour truth, will clear ye readily.

But some will say, what though the inventors were bad, the thing for
all that may be good? It may so; yet if that thing be no such deep
invention, but obvious, and easy for any man to light on, and yet best
and wisest commonwealths through all ages and occasions have forborne
to use it, and falsest seducers and oppressors of men were the first who
took it up, and to no other purpose but to obstruct and hinder the first
approach of Reformation; I am of those who believe it will be a harder
alchemy than Lullius ever knew, to sublimate any good use out of such
an invention. Yet this only is what I request to gain from this reason,
that it may be held a dangerous and suspicious fruit, as certainly it
deserves, for the tree that bore it, until I can dissect one by one the
properties it has. But I have first to finish, as was propounded, what
is to be thought in general of reading books, whatever sort they be, and
whether be more the benefit or the harm that thence proceeds.

Not to insist upon the examples of Moses, Daniel, and Paul, who were
skilful in all the learning of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Greeks,
which could not probably be without reading their books of all sorts;
in Paul especially, who thought it no defilement to insert into
Holy Scripture the sentences of three Greek poets, and one of them a
tragedian; the question was notwithstanding sometimes controverted among
the primitive doctors, but with great odds on that side which affirmed
it both lawful and profitable; as was then evidently perceived, when
Julian the Apostate and subtlest enemy to our faith made a decree
forbidding Christians the study of heathen learning: for, said he, they
wound us with our own weapons, and with our own arts and sciences they
overcome us. And indeed the Christians were put so to their shifts by
this crafty means, and so much in danger to decline into all ignorance,
that the two Apollinarii were fain, as a man may say, to coin all the
seven liberal sciences out of the Bible, reducing it into divers
forms of orations, poems, dialogues, even to the calculating of a new
Christian grammar. But, saith the historian Socrates, the providence of
God provided better than the industry of Apollinarius and his son, by
taking away that illiterate law with the life of him who devised it. So
great an injury they then held it to be deprived of Hellenic learning;
and thought it a persecution more undermining, and secretly decaying the
Church, than the open cruelty of Decius or Diocletian.

And perhaps it was the same politic drift that the devil whipped St.
Jerome in a lenten dream, for reading Cicero; or else it was a phantasm
bred by the fever which had then seized him. For had an angel been his
discipliner, unless it were for dwelling too much upon Ciceronianisms,
and had chastised the reading, not the vanity, it had been plainly
partial; first to correct him for grave Cicero, and not for scurril
Plautus, whom he confesses to have been reading, not long before; next
to correct him only, and let so many more ancient fathers wax old in
those pleasant and florid studies without the lash of such a tutoring
apparition; insomuch that Basil teaches how some good use may be made
of Margites, a sportful poem, not now extant, writ by Homer; and why not
then of Morgante, an Italian romance much to the same purpose?

But if it be agreed we shall be tried by visions, there is a vision
recorded by Eusebius, far ancienter than this tale of Jerome, to the
nun Eustochium, and, besides, has nothing of a fever in it. Dionysius
Alexandrinus was about the year 240 a person of great name in the Church
for piety and learning, who had wont to avail himself much against
heretics by being conversant in their books; until a certain presbyter
laid it scrupulously to his conscience, how he durst venture himself
among those defiling volumes. The worthy man, loath to give offence,
fell into a new debate with himself what was to be thought; when
suddenly a vision sent from God (it is his own epistle that so avers it)
confirmed him in these words: READ ANY BOOKS WHATEVER COME TO THY HANDS,
FOR THOU ART SUFFICIENT BOTH TO JUDGE ARIGHT AND TO EXAMINE EACH MATTER.
To this revelation he assented the sooner, as he confesses, because it
was answerable to that of the Apostle to the Thessalonians, PROVE ALL
THINGS, HOLD FAST THAT WHICH IS GOOD. And he might have added another
remarkable saying of the same author: TO THE PURE, ALL THINGS ARE PURE;
not only meats and drinks, but all kind of knowledge whether of good or
evil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the
will and conscience be not defiled.