Milton and the Spiritual Reader

Reading and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England

David Ainsworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9780415962513
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135896089
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Milton and the Spiritual Reader considers how John Milton's later works demonstrate the intensive struggle of spiritual reading. Milton presents his own rigorous process of reading in order to instruct his readers how to advance their spiritual knowledge. Recent studies of Milton's readers neglect this spiritual dimension and focus on politics. Since Milton considers the individual soul at least as important as the body politic, Ainsworth focuses on uncovering the spiritual characteristics of the reader Milton tries to shape through his texts. He also examines Milton's reading practices without postulating the existence of some ideal or universal reader, and without assuming a gullible or easily manipulated reader. Milton does not simply hope for a fit audience, but writes to nurture fit readers. His works offer models of strenuous and suspicious close reading, subjecting all authors except God to the utmost of scrutiny. Milton presents Biblical interpretation as an interior struggle, a contention not between reader and text, but within that reader's individual understanding of scripture. Ainsworth's study rethinks the basic relationship between reading and religion in seventeenth-century England, and concludes that for Milton and his contemporaries, distinguishing divine truths in worldly texts required a spiritually guided form of close reading.

Chapter One
“Thou art sufficient to judge aright”

Spiritual Reading in Areopagitica

In Areopagitica, Milton most fully and richly discusses reading, spirituality, and truth in relation to the book itself. The tremendous explosion of print materials during the early 1640s demanded some form of response, and Milton’s asserts the liberty to read all texts while coupling that reading to an imperative for critical interpretation.¹ In his tract, Milton argues against Parliament’s Licensing Order of 1643, which itself responded to the printing boom by reinstating a system of government oversight and approval over the printed word. While those with the power to grant licenses had changed, from the court of Star Chamber established by Charles to officials appointed by the Long Parliament, the basic objective remained the same: to constrain and contain revolutionary and radical ideas in order to promote stability. For Milton, this particular form of stability was synonymous with servility.

Milton’s arguments in Areopagitica lay the foundations of the spiritual reading he demonstrates directly in other texts, and thus form the foundation of my own project. That said, Milton’s focus on the book, on the occasion for reading and not on the act of reading itself, means that he does not emphasize the details of the process of spiritual reading. Because Milton believes that spiritual reading both requires readerly fitness and helps to produce it, Areopagitica focuses on convincing Parliament in 1644 that any book can occasion that fitness, an emphasis on active reading which remains somewhat vague about how that reading works. However, Milton avoids discussing the full implications of his strenuous and radical mode of reading lest he turn the Presbyterians in Parliament against his argument. While he does not fear taking controversial positions, he concentrates on criticizing censorship and establishing the virtues of free reading, and not on the exact procedure which he believes godly readers should employ.

Milton presents the conflict between good and evil in the fallen world as a call to arms to good Protestants, a call to exercise themselves through confrontation and struggle with evil, and he locates that struggle within the spiritual reader who wrestles with books:

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 warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. (YP 2, 515, emphasis mine)

Milton likens purifying trial both to combat and to a race. Central to both metaphors is the activity which “a fugitive and cloister’d vertue” avoids. Fitness and exercise produce and maintain an athletic prowess vital to both warfare and the race for the “immortall garland,” and fitness comes from strenuous effort and purifying confrontation with “what is contrary.” Furthermore, interpretation forms the ground for that combat, and books provide a means for interpretative exercise. The struggle against vice, then, is a struggle to read and interpret while overcoming the “impurity” which readers bring into the world.

Milton advocates an active and critical mode of reading, one which can purify the self, but not without great effort. And books provide both an object for this struggle and a means by which we may educate ourselves in the ways of virtue and truth, either by extracting them from the text we read or by defending those qualities against textual attack. Indeed, Milton declares Spenser “a better teacher then Scotus or Aquinas” (YP 2, 516) because his poetry can show us ways to triumph in our internal struggle between vice and virtue: it illustrates for us how temperance requires knowledge and demonstrates the process of struggle and discernment for our consideration.² Poetry’s power lies in its ability to describe and define without circumscribing or dictating; poetry preserves and protects an interpretative freedom that many prose works restrict. Liberty of interpretation, then, facilitates the kind of active reading which provides exercise and trial.

Active spiritual reading needs liberty in order to flourish, and Milton presents such reading as a moral imperative. He explains this imperative of reading in terms of vice and virtue:

Since therefore the knowledge and survay of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human vertue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with lesse danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity then by reading all manner of tractats, and hearing all manner of reason? (YP 2, 517)

Here, Milton presents the benefit of what he terms “promiscuous” reading. Any worldly text, which includes all books save the Bible, must partake of both the vice of the fallen world and of its fallen author.³ Therefore, no worldly text can be free of vice or error, and all such texts must be vigorously surveyed and scanned by their readers, in order to detect vice and error, and thus develop a greater understanding of virtue and confirm the truth. Since all human readers are fallen, we can only hope to succeed at such a task through the support of the Holy Spirit, which operates within all believers. Milton alludes to this support in discussing the vital need for liberty: “liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; this is that which hath rarify’d and enlightn’d our spirits like the influence of heav’n” (YP 2, 559). And he emphasizes the work of that same spirit in the writing process when discussing the danger that a deceased author’s work might be censored “if there be found in his book one sentence of a ventrous edge, utter’d in the height of zeal, and who knows whether it might not be the dictat of a divine Spirit” (YP 2, 534).⁴ As Milton repeatedly stresses, spiritual reading requires a willingness to withstand “dust and heat.” Spiritual reading can be right reading only because of the spirit within, but only a strenuous effort at reading allows readers contact with that spirit. Like salvation, true spiritual reading depends upon God but remains conditional. A believer must repent before being saved, but the act of repentance does not itself cause salvation; similarly, a reader must become fit in order to perform godly reading, but that fitness alone does not guarantee it.

If Milton’s spiritual reader actively scans error to confirm the truth, then the nature of that truth must shape the process of spiritual reading which uncovers it within a text. Areopagitica establishes Milton’s understanding of truth, in part to justify the continued availability of false texts, but more broadly, to demonstrate the difficulty in determining truth and the need for a contention between competing claims of truth which will provide between them the inspiration for a more advanced understanding of it. Again, the exercise of discernment, the mark of a fit reader, requires the free expression of dissenting or differing understandings of truth, and readers require discernment in order to choose between them.⁵

Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compar’d in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetuall progression, they sick’n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretick in the truth; and if he beleeve things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determins, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie. (YP 2, 543)

In this passage, Milton relates the strenuous process of spiritual reading to the flow of the waters of the fountain of truth. Like fitness, knowledge and faith are not possessions which one can claim and cling to. They are not products, but continuing processes. Truth likewise is a process (except perhaps for God himself) and can become heretical if treated as an idol, as something created through human agency and presented to others by one human, whether a prelate or a Presbyterian member of the Westminster Assembly.⁶ Truth flows from within, but more importantly, from a constant testing and exercise on the part of the true believer. Further, unheretical belief depends upon the process of discovering and confirming the truth; those people who hold true beliefs reached through uncritical or servile procedures—like the Prelatical compulsion and ritual Milton derides in his antiprelatical tracts—become “heretick[s] in the truth.” According to Milton’s argument, any belief accepted passively or uncritically is heretical.⁷

Milton also famously compares truth to Osiris, declaring that “truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master,” only to be hewn “into a thousand peeces” and “scatter’d … to the four winds” (YP 2, 549). Spiritual readers hunt for truth within texts, gathering up her pieces, and their hunt, that process of reassembling the truth, will not complete itself until Christ returns.⁸ Though Milton’s language does not refer directly to books and reading here, the implication remains clear: “Suffer not these licencing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyr’d Saint” (YP 2, 549–50). The book is the “place of opportunity” in this example, and licensing would interfere with the search for truth within books which constitutes the main object of spiritual reading.

Milton’s model of truth emphasizes the internal nature of the search, but also the collective enterprise of fellow seekers. Each spiritual reader may uncover new pieces, but the assembly of “the body of Truth” requires collective enterprise: “To be still searching what we know not, by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body is homogeneal, and proportionall) this is the golden rule … and makes up the best harmony in a Church” (YP 2, 551). Harmony, then, represents the coming together of different but concordant pieces or parts of “the body of Truth” as discovered or confirmed by individual believers gathered together for that purpose. This model matches precisely the model of the Temple of the Lord which Milton presents a few pages later:

As if, while the Temple of the Lord was building, some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the ceders, there should be a sort of irrationall men who could not consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every peece of the building be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportion-all arises the goodly and the gracefull symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure. (YP 2, 555)

Here, too, Milton stresses the diversity and variety, “moderat” though it may be, which the Temple requires for its construction. Truth and the true church of God depend upon “brotherly dissimilitudes” and proportional differences. They even paradoxically achieve perfection because of them. In a fallen world, a world where truth cannot be made whole and the Temple of the Lord can only be “contiguous,” the exercise of the individual conscience in the strenuous process of spiritual reading helps to uncover truth’s pieces and build God’s church.⁹

Areopagitica’s focus on truth, and its spiritual implications, can lead critics to emphasize the effects of reading books and de-emphasize the process of reading itself. Sharon Achinstein’s analysis does acknowledge the centrality of books and reading to Areopagitica, but focuses on their political usage—books as elements of the public sphere—and thus sees Milton’s objective as creating conscientious readers who can be good citizens. She does not discuss how such readers can also be good Protestants.¹⁰ Stanley Fish’s study, conversely, focuses on how being a good Protestant may require a rejection of the book.

In How Milton Works, Stanley Fish argues against an interpretation of Areopagitica which ascribes to Milton an idolatry of the book, and in doing so he goes so far as to claim that Areopagitica argues for indifference to books, not for their importance. This argument, however, grounds itself in a subtle but significant distortion of Milton’s position, a failure to distinguish between objects and their effects which is directly relevant to my own argument. Fish examines a long paragraph from Areopagitica, about books as “not absolutely dead things” (YP 2, 492–3), and develops his argument from it by first concluding that the passage appears “unMiltonic,” and then concluding through contradiction that this passage cannot “locate value and truth in a physical object” or encourage idolatry of the book, and therefore must be a position Milton wants to demolish.¹¹ While I actually agree with the large points Fish makes through this analysis—that books help to constitute human virtue but are not its essence; that we must discover and learn truth, not be handed it; that truth within emerges from the spirit within through an intensively pedagogical process of interpretation—I do not agree with his initial characterization of the text.¹² He declares that Areopagitica “continually default[s] on its promise—the promise of separating the true from the false” without establishing that Milton ever makes this promise.¹³ Indeed, Areopagitica does not assert the vitality and importance of books in order to tempt us to an idolatry of the book before we reject it; from the outset it rejects the very promise Fish wants to ascribe to it.

In the long passage Fish reads, Milton mentions truth only once in conjunction to the “Dragons teeth” of books (YP 2, 492):

Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life. ’Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great losse; and revolutions of ages doe not oft recover the losse 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 publick men, how we spill that season’d life of man preserv’d and stor’d up in Books … (YP 2, 493)

Fish conflates this truth with the books, the living texts, Milton has been discussing, but in fact Milton employs truth as a metaphoric parallel just as he employs the lives of actual people in establishing a comparison with books. The “life” which “no age can restore” refers literally to human life and only metaphorically to the life of books, and the same relation exists between “rejected truth” and censored books. Fish’s conflation of the two is equivalent...

Table of contents

• Studies in Major Literary Authors
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One “Thou art sufficient to judge aright”
• Chapter Two Spiritual Reading in Milton’s Eikonoklastes
• Chapter Three Godly Reading in Milton’s
• Chapter Four “There plant eyes”
• Chapter Five The Reader Within
• Chapter Six Baxter, Fox, Winstanley and Miltonic Spiritual Reading
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index