Likely inspired by the anti-republican wave that followed the French Revolution, Milton’s resurrectionists tore away pieces of his jawbone, his teeth, and his remaining locks of hair, possibly selling them on as souvenirs. The poet William Cowper was so outraged that he wrote “Stanzas on the late indecent liberties taken with the remains of the great Milton”. To say that these vandals were “taking liberties” is something of an understatement.

St Giles Cripplegate is a small gothic church, one of the few medieval churches lucky enough to survive both the Great Fire of London and the Blitz. It is located at the heart of the Barbican, whose charmless brutalist architecture makes for quite the incongruous backdrop. Few people visit the church today, even though John Bunyan was a parishioner, Oliver Cromwell was married here, and Shakespeare lived just around the corner. It is one of the city’s many overlooked gems.

When I was teaching English Literature at the City of London School for Girls, one of the key texts was Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Given its author was buried less than 30 metres from my classroom, I would take my students to the church as part of their course. They would be able to see the nondescript plaque on the floor by the altar which simply reads: “Near this spot was buried John Milton author of Paradise Lost born 1608 — died 1674”. This is quite the contrast to the elaborate marble memorial in Westminster Abbey erected in 1737, with a likeness of the poet sculpted by John Michael Rysbrack.

That the author of the most significant epic poem in the English language should have been condemned to such an ignominious end is a reminder that the fate of heretics is rarely pleasant. Milton was a free-thinker whose worldview was grounded in reason. At a time when the divine right of kings was rarely contested, Milton considered it unreasonable that a man should be king on the basis of an accident of birth. He believed in meritocracy, which is partly what drew him to Cromwell.

Milton had his inconsistencies. He was a profoundly religious man, but nonetheless wrote extensively about the right to divorce. Most remarkably, his puritanical strain was at odds with his eschewal of the Calvinist notion of predestination. For Milton, free will was an essential aspect of our humanity. The fall of man depicted in Paradise Lost is meaningless unless Adam and Eve have chosen freely to partake of the forbidden fruit.

But Milton’s commitment to individual liberty is most keenly expressed in his Areopagitica (1644), a counterblast to the Licensing Order of June 1643, which decreed that all printed texts be passed before a censor in advance of publication. Often cited as a defence of press freedom, the text carries resonance for us at a time when liberalism and free speech is increasingly under threat. Rarely has the case been made with greater elegance and clarity. “Give me the liberty,” he writes, “to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties”.

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Of course, Milton’s conceptualisation of “liberty” differs significantly from ours. His was a specifically Christian notion of liberty, predicated on this idea of virtuous self-regulation. He was at pains to distinguish between what he called “licence”, the freedom to do whatever one desires, and “liberty”, by which the faithful man is called to purge those passions and temptations that enslave the soul. “Licence”, Milton contends, is no freedom at all, but an indulgence that amounts to a form of self-imposed tyranny.

Amid all this, Milton is adamant that we are not the merest marionettes, guided by divine providence, but individual agents with responsibility and choice. The act of censorship, he argues, deprives us of our right to determine for ourselves how best to conduct our lives. He makes the case that censorship might begin with good intentions, but that subjective judgement will always blur the line between the heretical and the distasteful. As he puts it in Areopagitica, censors do not “stay in matters heretical” but “any subject that is not to their palate”.

We see evidence of this in today’s “hate speech” laws, which vary markedly from country to country. In 2012, the European Court of Human Rights concluded that there “is no universally accepted definition of the expression ‘hate speech’” and a manual published by Unesco in 2015 accepted that “the possibility of reaching a universally shared definition seems unlikely”. With the concept of “hate” remaining forever nebulous, how can any government possibly hope to legislate against it?

Last week, the Irish government passed the Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences Bill, with the minister for justice Helen McEntee uttering the usual shibboleth that “hate speech is not about free speech”. The Government claims that the Bill will “protect genuine freedom of expression”, a justification reminiscent of Scotland’s former justice secretary Humza Yousaf, who asserted that the SNP’s recent Hate Crime and Public Order Bill “does not undermine free speech”, but rather “protects it”. It’s anyone’s guess how a Bill that could see those guilty of “insulting” behaviour imprisoned for seven years, and criminalises statements uttered in the privacy of citizens’ own homes, could in any way be considered a “protection” of civil liberties.

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Those responsible for such misguided legislation ought to read their Milton. Their intentions may be compassionate, but the dangers of limiting the scope of individual conscience ought to be clear by now. In any case, isn’t hate an inevitable human feeling, and should law enforcement agencies really be attempting to audit our emotions? And what if the person making the decision about what constitutes “hate” is wrong? As Juvenal has it, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

History does not look fondly on the hubris of those who appoint themselves as arbiters of permissible speech and thought; their authority is only ever contingent on the wisdom of their time. “How shall the licencers themselves be confided in,” writes Milton, “unless we can confer upon them, or they assume to themselves above all others in the land, the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness?” John Stuart Mill made a similar point in On Liberty (1859). “All silencing of discussion,” he wrote, “is an assumption of infallibility”.

Milton reminds us to retain our trust in humanity’s capacity for reason. We have convinced ourselves that we exist in an age of “fake news”, but the concept is hardly unprecedented. Milton saw the struggle between Truth and Falsehood as perpetual, and envisaged them as antagonists on a battlefield. “Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” It isn’t so much that “fake news” is unique to the digital age, but rather that we appear to have lost our faith in our ability to make the stronger case.

It is Milton’s contention that we are far better placed to know and overcome evil if we are acquainted with its essence, and censorship deprives us of this opportunity. Censorship, he maintains, is tantamount to a repudiation of the human spirit. This is why he reserves particular scorn for the destruction of books. We have learnt to laugh off the antics of activists who burn copies of J.K. Rowling’s novels and post the footage online, but, to Milton, this is akin to a form of homicide, “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”. The man who burns a book, he tells us, “slays an immortality rather than a life”.

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And yet, Milton leaves himself wide open to accusations of hypocrisy. Areopagitica is a polemic against licensers and the way in which they stymie the possibility of individual choice, but he was to become a censor for the Commonwealth five years after its publication. He was an elitist whose emphasis on liberty certainly did not extend to Catholics. His final written work, the polemical tract Of True Religion (1673), railed against the “growth of popery” and exhorted the public to “beware the growth of this Romish weed”.

While this may strike us inconsistent, to Milton it was the logical progression of his principles. Milton perceived the Catholic Church to be a weapon against freedom, a belief that was surely consolidated by his tour of Europe in the late 1630s. Milton claimed to have met the ageing Galileo in Florence, who at the time was under house arrest by the Inquisition; he had fallen foul of the “hate speech” laws of the Holy See.

I recently spoke on Milton at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, where only the week before protesters had attempted to silence the journalist Helen Joyce. The master of the college had hardly helped matters, by emailing all students and staff in advance to smear her work as “offensive, insulting and hateful”. This seems very much at odds with the college’s statement on freedom of speech: “An active speaker programme is fundamental to the academic and other activities of the College and Fellows, staff and students are encouraged to invite a wide range of speakers and to engage critically but courteously with them.”

Of course, disparities between an institution’s official statements and its actual behaviour are nothing new, particularly when there has been a degree of ideological capture. Nonetheless, there is cause for optimism. The treatment of Helen Joyce has backfired, with a number of influential college alumni now considering withdrawing donations. Professor Arif Ahmed, who organised the talks by Helen Joyce and myself, has no intention of surrendering to pressure from above. And next week, the Cambridge Union will be hosting UnHerd‘s Kathleen Stock, whose gender-critical views saw her subjected to a campaign of harassment at Sussex.

For all these little victories, culture warriors will no doubt persist in their efforts to see the Overton Window narrowed to the dimensions of a porthole. This is why the sentiments of Milton strike us as more potent than ever. His defence of free speech will always retain its power where the free exchange of ideas is assailed by increasingly shrill demands to conform.

Sometimes, the derision is deserved; in the English-speaking world, the new “liberal” mania for political and ideological purity is causing ancient liberties to be sacrificed in the name of new “rights”. And the pursuit of liberal individualism is thought to be in conflict with ideas of community. These apparent failings of the liberal idea are leading some to gather together under the banner of “post-liberal”.

But the problem is not that liberalism has passed its sell-by date; rather, it has lost its moorings.

These can be traced back to the emergence of British Liberalism with the Glorious Revolution and the 1689 Bill of Rights — which enshrined many of the liberties that Parliament and the people had fought for during the previous century.

The Liberalism of 1689 was grounded, in particular, in the Christian (and more specifically) Protestant faith, born of the fight to produce an English translation of the Bible and to defend freedom of conscience.  There was much intolerance and more than a few beheadings along the way — William Tyndale died for the cause of publishing his translation — but the settlement of 1689 required and established a new understanding of tolerance and freedom.

In all the great struggles of the 17th century, the calls for freedom were inseparable from the deep Christian faith of the protagonists, whether we are talking about the Parliamentarians, the Levellers or Oliver Cromwell himself. John Milton, driven and defined by his faith, wrote what is probably the foundational text in defence of free speech Areopagitica at the peak of the Civil War. It contained an impassioned argument against the introduction of the new Licensing Order (1643), which required government approval for any published work. All these calls were anchored in a shared understanding of meaning, knowledge and virtue. Meaning came from God, knowledge from the Bible and virtue from following the teachings of the Old and New Testaments.

The importance of liberalism’s moorings were not lost on the American Founding Fathers, who shared the same inheritance. In First Principles, Thomas Ricks describes how dedicated they were to assessing the problem of “virtue” — of determining that their new Republic would be anchored in a shared understanding of morality so that civil society and freedom would be able to flourish. Adams and Jefferson looked as much to Ancient Rome for these virtues as they did to the Christian faith, but in practice American society was grounded overwhelmingly in the shared values of Christianity.

De Tocqueville understood this better than most. In Democracy in America, he plants the character of “Anglo-American civilisation” firmly in two elements: “the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty”. For him, religion and liberty were kindred spirits. In America, they were indeed kindred, arriving together with the pilgrims. But in England, religion was the parent of liberty rather than sibling. And in both cases, the flourishing of liberty would depend on the stability and strength of her Christian moorings.

In 19th-century Britain, Classical Liberalism carried all before it in the pursuit of great causes — widening the democratic franchise, opening the economy to free trade, educational reform, laying the foundations of the welfare state, eradicating the global slave trade. But just as it seemed to be all-conquering, its roots were being poisoned.

That poison stemmed from the Enlightenment itself. A new, anthropocentric way of thinking arrived in the 18th century, bringing with it an alternative understanding of human nature, a new theory of human knowledge and a new calculus of virtue. While Enlightenment Liberalism was aligned with the Christian worldview on certain principles of freedom, the two traditions diverge in key ways – and it is this divergence that is now proving toxic to liberalism as we know it.

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Traditional British liberalism rests on the Judaeo-Christian understanding that we are all, in moral terms, fallen creatures. The writings and speeches of the great heroes of liberty in the 16th and 17th centuries came with a deep sense of humility, of mankind’s brokenness and of the Fall.

Somewhere amid the arrogance of the Enlightenment, we lost this sense of fallenness. Ayn Rand embodies the new way of thinking with her theories of rational egoism and “the virtue of selfishness”. Encouraged, no doubt, by evidence of technological progress, she assumed moral progress would move in lockstep with technology. She has many modern disciples, wittingly or unwittingly, especially in California, with its strapline of “move fast and break things”. Her Libertarianism is very different from traditional British Liberalism, despite the tendency of many to confuse the two, because of her different assumptions about human fallibility (or lack of, in her case), and about virtue.

Allied to the Enlightenment sense of human perfectibility and rationality is the belief in Progress. The origins of this go all the way back to Thomas Macaulay and the Whig interpretation of history. But Macaulay saw progress essentially in political terms – in the extension of the franchise and other associated political freedoms such as freedom of conscience and freedom of the press. Sadly, the creed of Progress has now been pushed into every walk of life, ignoring the lessons of history and defying any biblical understanding of human nature. For Progressives, humankind’s moral progress is on a perpetual upward curve in parallel with technological progress. The history of the 20th century does not give much support to this conceit — it would be fairer to say that technology simply amplifies the expression of our moral fallibility.

Enlightenment liberals also built their own theories of morality, independent of a god, starting with Benthamite Utilitarianism, and extending all the way to John Rawls. Morality became a mathematical calculus, shorn of compassion or community, let alone repentance and forgiveness. According to Jeremy Bentham, “nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do.” No reference to morality here, just pain and pleasure. One of Bentham’s disciples, William Jevons, even went as far as to develop a “felicific calculus” whereby all pain and pleasure could be quantified.

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Enlightenment thinkers also developed their own theories of knowledge. One built on the empiricism of Hume and Adam Smith, the other built on the Rationalism of Descartes and Rousseau. The former, with its inherent modesty, is compatible with the Christian understanding of human fallibility, the latter is not.

Hayek describes the two schools of epistemology in The Constitution of Liberty. He warned that the latter, which he called the French tradition of liberty, with its “flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason” could lead to “totalitarian democracy”. His warnings were all too well-founded and it is the Rationalist version of epistemology which has taken particular hold with today’s cult of science.

Belief in the power of science has never been stronger. It has climaxed amid Covid, with politicians increasingly wrapping themselves in “the science” to justify ever more stringent intrusions on our freedom. Scientism, in the wrong hands, can become dangerous. And the worst hands are those of politicians and civil servants too easily tempted to use the authority of “experts” to infringe on our liberties.

This type of politician, Matt Hancock being the best example, fails to understand the limitations of science, fails to understand the nature of risk and uncertainty and fails to understand the difference between observable historical evidence and predictions of an uncertain and hypothetical future.

These different understandings of the theory of knowledge, of meaning and of virtue have led  to a corruption of liberalism at its source.

What we are seeing today being enacted in the name of liberalism is not liberal at all. Instead, let’s call it by the name which its proponents are prepared to use — progressivism. This is the creed which unites Tony Blair, Nick Clegg, most of the US Democratic Party, most of the British Labour Party and the New York Times. These are not traditional Liberals in any understanding of the term. They are Progressives. They believe humankind is on a permanent upward path of progress. They believe in the rule of experts and in the authority of “the science”.

So where do genuine classical liberals go, faced with the corruption of the creed? Ironically, the attacks on our most ancient freedoms such as freedom of speech, conscience and assembly, make it more important than ever to assert the foundational understanding of liberty. “Classical liberals” need to unite and stand up for their tradition. It has never been so relevant.

Meanwhile, to those who do embrace the term “post-liberal”, and believe it applies to our new era, I would just say this: be careful what you wish for.

The whole story evoked The Exorcist, which came out a few years before I was born and was considered the ne plus ultra of shocking content into my tween years in the nineties. But even setting aside the fact that the other “side” seems to have won, Nobell’s story evoked less shock than nostalgia.

In 2021, even the idea of a priest as the main protagonist in a battle between good and evil feels, well, very 1973. These days, while there’s plenty of Satanist imagery about, overtly anti-Christian symbols seem either banal (Lil Nas selling Satan trainers) or just naff (WitchTok).

But if devilish imagery mostly feels a bit cringe, the Devil himself has gone mainstream. If being deliberately anti-Christian pour épater la bourgeoisie feels exhausted, for the new, post-Christian bourgeoisie Satan now reads like the good guy. And in the hands of this class, the Devil’s proverbial pride, self-regard and refusal to yield isn’t just celebrated — it’s on its way to becoming the established religion of the United States of America.

America’s Satanic Temple, founded in 2012, is still small in terms of absolute membership. But it hit the headlines last week when it announced plans to sue the government of Texas for restricting women’s ability to abort a pregnancy. In response, Salon magazine declared it the “last, best hope” for protecting abortion rights in the state. The Satanic Temple has an impressive track record in self-promotion via outrage, such as founding a Satanist after-school club. It goes without saying that in our febrile online political climate, the convergence of “abortion”, “ritual”, “lawsuit” and “Satan” resulted in a lot of publicity for the group.

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But how did we get to a point where an online magazine with 10 million monthly readers is hailing Satanists as last-ditch heroes? The truth is that our modern sympathy for the devil has deep roots. And Americans in particular are highly susceptible.

Perhaps Milton is to blame; Cromwell’s chief propagandist is famous for creating the most sympathetic Satan in literary history. In Milton’s 1663 Biblical epic Paradise Lost, Satan both longs for the Heaven he’s renounced, but stubbornly refuses to be ruled, declaring: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven”.

This matters, because Milton wrestled with core questions of law, authority and personal freedom that roiled at the heart of the Protestant Reformation. And the Reformation was foundational to the modern West (and especially to America). And tracing the history of that rebellion brings us, today, to the startling conclusion that post-Christian America is an increasingly Satanist regime.

Paradise Lost was written against a backdrop of religious ferment. Following Martin Luther’s 1517 rejection of the constraining, legalistic force of Catholic law, Civil War England was a chaos of competing sects. For in seeking to free Christians from a Church reformers claimed was rigid and corrupt, the Protestants opened themselves up to the possibility that all laws, rules and constraints might be replaced by faith. A great deal of early Protestant turmoil was driven by people arguing over what, if any, limits there should be to the rebellion against doctrine.

Some took it to extremes. One of Luther’s colleagues, Johann Agricola, preached in 1525 that even the Ten Commandments belong “in the courthouse, not the pulpit”. “To the gallows with Moses!” he declared. Luther was having none of it, dubbing this extreme rejection of legalism as “antinomian” heresy, meaning opposition to “nomos”, or law.

Laurence Clarkson, an antinomian contemporary of Milton, even wrote in one 1640 pamphlet that sin is fake news: “sin hath its conception only in the imagination; therefore; so long as the act was in God, or nakedly produced by God, it was as holy as God”.

As they say today: believe in yourself, and you can do anything. Though Milton painted such extreme rejections of authority and rules as — literally — Satanic, the appealingly anti-heroic nature of his Satan suggests he had mixed feelings. He wasn’t the last writer to be thus ambivalent. A century on, the antinomian celebration of self-expression accelerated in the Romantic era.

The engraver and poet William Blake declared in his 1790 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that “no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments… Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules”. Meanwhile, of course, across the pond Milton’s republicanism was a key influence in shaping the American rebellion against government from the Old World.

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Fast forward another century on, and it’s not such a big step from thinking God’s grace gives you the freedom to do what you want, to dispensing with the God bit. The occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) pursued a doctrine of individual will unconstrained by law or stuffy morality. He called himself “The Beast 666”, experimented with sex and drugs and in 1923 was expelled from Sicily after an associate died in mysterious circumstances, reportedly after drinking the blood of a sacrificed cat.

We tend to think of such deliberately shocking behaviour as the essence of “Satanism”. But Crowley’s core legacy was stripping the last remnants of Christianity from antinomian rebellion. His most famous dictum, written in The Book of the Law (1909), was: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

He wasn’t the only one. Already in 1882, Friedrich Nietszche declared God dead and the human will to power as the only real source of good. In America, meanwhile, the individualist celebration of mankind became ever less Christian. Though she disavowed him later, the American writer Ayn Rand (1905-1982), called Nietzsche her “favourite philosopher” in the 1930s. Rand’s doctrine, Objectivism, argues selfishness is both noble and good: “It’s the hardest thing in the world – to do what we want,” argues one character in Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead, “And it takes the greatest kind of courage”.

Both Crowley and Rand pursued the liberation of individual will from taboo, custom, law and even (as practitioners of ceremonial magic hoped) reality itself. These influences fused again in 1966 California, with Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Lavey drew on both Rand and Crowley to reject all collectivist constraints on individual behaviour and emphasise the primacy of individual desire. “There is a beast in man,” he declared, “that should be exercised, not exorcised.”

LaVey, a former carnival worker, took a highly theatrical approach to exercising that beast, incorporating dark ceremonies and all the props you’d expect to find in a horror-movie depiction of Satanism (or indeed in quite a lot of heavy metal). But if he was still rebelling against Christianity, the core Satanist philosophy of radical, godless freedom took less provocative form elsewhere in 1966 California in, for example, the “self-actualisation” promoted by Abraham Maslow, at the Esalen Institute.

So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that individual autonomy and self-empowerment is the central aim of the Satanic Temple’s abortion ritual, the “ceremonial affirmation of self-worth and bodily autonomy” at the heart of the group’s current Texas court case.

But this doesn’t mean you need to become a devout Satanist to embrace the belief that self-empowerment is our real purpose in life, and that guilt is an unwarranted intrusion. Aleister Crowley wrote in The Book of the Law that “Every man and woman is a star”. And from Rand to Maslow to a trillion “empowering” Pinterest memes today, a variant of this dictum is a core message of the self-help industry.

Self-help writer Julia Cameron, for example, closely echoes Ayn Rand in her 1992 bestseller The Artist’s Way when she declares: “What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do”. Elsewhere, if you want a bit more ritual with your individualism, but the heavy-metal Church of Satan vibe isn’t your thing, there’s the occultism-meets-pamper-day aesthetic of Arin Murphy-Hiscock’s 2019 The Witch’s Guide To Self-Care.

Echoing Crowley, Murphy-Hiscock tells us: “Living as your authentic self means following a very individual path”. If, for instance, you find yourself plagued by inconvenient feelings of guilt as a consequence of doing exactly what you want, Murphy-Hiscock suggests a ritual for “releasing” those feelings.

No wonder the modern Satanic Temple is now (as the Guardian suggested in 2019) hard to distinguish from the liberal “good guys”. At its core Satanism is simply the doctrine of untrammelled individualism, shorn of any link to the divine. To put it another way: Satanists are just very, very liberal.

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Milton saw Satan’s refusal to submit to any law (however ambivalently) as the sin of pride. Now, in our post-Christian world of self-actualisation, pride is no longer a sin. Rather, it’s a vital part of becoming fully yourself. As body modification micro-celebrity Farrah Flawless put it: “I do not believe in God, I don’t worship the Devil, but yes I am a Satanist which means I am my own god. I worship myself’.

Indeed, it’s so far from being a sin that sacralised self-worship now has an annual religious festival. This new, increasingly pseudo-religious summer event, simply known as “Pride Month”, may have started out as a twentieth-century campaign for gay and lesbian equality. But what began as a justified and (at root deeply Christian) campaign for equal treatment for gay and lesbian people has long since morphed into a corporate-sponsored celebration of individualism that today horrifies many gay and lesbian people.

Pinterest, the internet’s motherlode of self-help platitudes, succinctly summed up the new faith in an official post this year. As a religious holiday, Pride isn’t about gay rights; it’s where we “celebrate identity and self-expression in all its forms”. Inasmuch as Milton’s ambivalence about rebellion lives on, it’s in the now-traditional argument about whether there are any forms of individual desire still off-limits for proud celebration.

At least on the now majority post-Christian East and West coasts of America, this sacralisation of individual freedom and desire is increasingly assertive in its efforts to expunge Christianity as America’s official faith.

A less overt challenge than those posed by Aleister Crowley or Anton LaVey, but a continuation of the same argument. This time, though, the boot is on the other foot. The side with imperial institutional and military backing is the faith of self-expression, individual will and indomitable pride.

Forced into retirement by the Restoration, Milton lost not one jot of his self-importance, and decided to write Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to men”. Not many would appoint themselves emissary to a deity without invitation.

And yet I love him.

He loathed tyranny and made the case for meritocratic replacement of authoritarian kings and magistrates. He believed that intellect, rigour and reasonable debate could defeat evil. He stood up for the right of miserable married couples to divorce in pursuit of happiness – a principle we are only now enacting into law. And when critics silenced him through censorship, he fought back, writing one of history’s most compelling defences of free speech.

In Areopagitica, Milton describes himself as having “natural endowments” for “studious labours”, alongside a robust constitution that allows him to exercise this intellect even in Britain’s miserable climate. But he wasn’t an isolated thinker locked away from the world: he was a kind of jobbing philosopher who brought his intellect to bear on practical problems that came into his path.

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He wrote about divorce after his wife left him. He wrote about censorship after his divorce pamphlets were banned. He wrote The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes to justify the execution of Charles I on behalf of the new regime, for which he worked. His best sonnets, too, are about trying to figure out the meaning in something that has happened in real life: losing his sight, dreaming about his wife, even turning 23 while still looking like a teenager.

We should admire that purposive approach: he made a decision, he figured out how to make the case, and then he made it. He made it with all the fervour and conviction he could muster. And he made it to everyone who he could persuade to listen. He may have been smug about the general populace, but he didn’t give up the fight because it was difficult.

It isn’t just that ‘lean in’ approach that we can learn from, but the works themselves, and in particular the Areopagitica. This 30-page diatribe against censorship offers us a helpful way to think through one of the greatest challenges of our age: how we defend freedom of speech and thought without surrendering our grip on authority, truth, or civility.

It’s not surprising that Milton’s thoughts are useful today. Many people have made the case that the early to mid-17th century is the best historical precendent for the explosion of information and argumentation in our digital age. Pamphlets were everywhere, offering a platform for a far wider range of voices to speak on matters of politics, philosophy and religion. Pamphlet wars broke out, with intemperate and vituperative denunciations of political opponents the norm rather than the exception.

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Of course the scale and speed of the pamphlet presses were nothing in comparison to social media. But the scale of change was unprecedented and unsettling – and the intemperate nature of political discourse through those 20 years was part of the pathway to the Civil War.

I don’t predict another civil war. But I don’t believe a country can go on being as angry as Britain is today, in the age of outrage. The question that haunts me is how to restrain outrage without losing the freedom of speech and thought that enables progress. Who knows which opinion, controversial today, will seem as justified in the future as Milton’s ideas on divorce do now.

Milton’s case for free speech is cogent and well-argued. He starts by defending the right of the citizen to let Parliament know his grievances, and says Parliament should have the confidence to repeal any act it passes, rather than get stuck with a mistake (a lesson our own Parliament might want to remember when it comes to Brexit). And then the prose takes flight, with all the quotes that are often used to justify absolute freedom of speech. He makes the case that argument and truth will triumph in the end.

“He who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.”

“I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks.”

“Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

But quotes never do justice to the detailed writing of philosophers. Liberty is not simple, for Milton. He is not making the case for what he calls licence – the absolute freedom to do whatever you want. He is making the case for intellectual freedom, and only in the service of the betterment of humankind. It has limits.

It must be acknowledged that one of those limits is grotesque. The biggest carve-out Milton wants from the free press is for “Popery”. Only an intellectual pygmy would try to make that case today: freedom for everyone but Catholics.

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But it is worth making the effort to understand why (alongside religious intolerance) Milton included it. He had visited Galileo in Italy, and for him, the censorship instituted by the Roman church was an egregious example of intellectual tyranny. He wanted liberty to offer no quarter to those advocating for a regime that would destroy England’s new-found freedom. That principle is one we should cleave to today, and be confident in silencing the voices of those who would overthrow our democracy.

Areopagitica also makes the basic case for traceability of speech – something we have lost today. Every book, Milton argues, should have a printer’s and author’s name. There must be a means by which both authors and publishers remain culpable for “mischievous” or “libellous” work (though he suggests the fire and the executioner to be appropriate remedies, which doesn’t feel quite appropriate for our times).

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By Giles Fraser

Fundamentally, Milton defends the freedom of the press because he believes that in the exercise of reason lies the true purpose and meaning of human existence. For him, self-control in the presence of temptation was the very definition of virtue. Remove temptation and there is no virtue.

There is a deep responsibility for all of us to bear when we accept freedom of speech and thought. It is a responsibility to strain every sinew to exercise our virtue. To respond to provocation with restraint; to face stupidity with patience; aggression with calm. Freedom of speech – in Milton’s terms – does not come with a licence to offend, but an obligation to be thoughtful. Milton teaches us to take up the hard work of persuading, engaging, and changing minds.

If it feels like a big job, console yourself. At least it’s not as difficult as justifying the ways of God to men.