“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645tract draws upon and contributes to the lively controversy about religious toleration
in 1644. Unlike Roger Williams who proposed complete religious toleration, for
Milton the sticking point was Roman Catholicism: “I mean not tolerated Popery,
and open superstition, which as it extirpats all religions and civil supremacies, so it
self should be extirpat” (565). In the divided Europe of the Thirty Years War, he
cannot imagine Catholics who are not a political threat to England; also, by placing
papal authority above the individual conscience, Catholicism denies the free exer-
cise of choice that Milton sees as the cornerstone of all religion and ethics. His
tolerationist argument would protect everyone’s liberty of conscience and most
Protestant religious practice, but not the open practice of “popish” idolatry or “that
which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or maners” (565) – a phrase
that retains some role for the magistrate in religious matters. It might refer to Ranter
doctrine and sexual practices, and perhaps to the Antinomian Familists’ supposed
promotion of sexual promiscuity. Behind this reservation of power to the magis-
trates might lie the rabbinic concept of natural law as embodied in the so-called
Noachide laws imposed by God on all humankind and thought to include prohibi-
tions on blasphemy and idolatry.^122
The title, alluding to the written oration presented by Isocrates to the Ecclesia or
popular assembly of Athens on the subject of the powers exercised by the Areopa-
gus, the Court of the Wise,^123 identifies Milton’s tract as a deliberative oration. He
self-consciously takes on the role of the Greek orator Isocrates, “who from his
private house wrote that discourse to the Parlament of Athens, that perswades them
to change the forme of Democraty which was then establisht” (489). Addressing his
tract to the “High Court of Parlament,” Milton offers to advise them as to “what
might be done better” to advance the public good and promote liberty (486–8),
making here his most overt and artful claim to the role of citizen–adviser to the
state. His terms import the ethos of Athenian democracy, hinting that London has
become a new Athens, a center of vibrant political and cultural life; in Milton’s
“speech” we hear echoes of Pericles’s funeral oration celebrating Athenian democ-
racy. But Milton expects his literate reader to recognize that his proposals for re-
form stand in direct opposition to those of Isocrates and Plato because they are
based on a different ethics and politics. Isocrates proposed that the Areopagus re-
form Athenian morals by reinstating censorship over citizens’ activities, and Plato
proposed in the Republic and the Laws to banish most literature lest it corrupt a
virtuous citizenry. Milton insists that only reading of all kinds, forcing the continu-
ous, free, and active choice between good and evil, will allow the good to advance
in virtue and truth to vanquish error, thereby producing rational citizens with a
developed Protestant conscience and a classical sense of civic duty. Milton may be
the first to address directly the issue of how to construct a liberty-loving republican
citizenry who will support radical reform. Areopagitica validates and defends the
emerging public sphere, the marketplace of ideas open to ordinary citizens, that was
being created in revolutionary England by the deluge of pamphlets and newsbooks.^124