ABSTRACT
John Milton is particularly struck by Christ’s habit of breaking the external and he compares Christ’s actions with the gnomic form of his precepts, and finds that both have the advantage of preventing his followers from too easily identifying the way of virtue with a portable and mechanical rule. It has been some time since John Illo pointed out that Milton’s Areopagitica has almost always been read as a classic liberal plea for “complete liberty.” “The preponderance of English scholarship,” Illo writes, “has drawn Milton into its own liberal centre, which claims a Western and ultimately an Attic heritage of universal freedom.” Like the moment of mortality, the moment of the Areopagitica is situated between two absent unities, one always and already lost, the other to be realized only in the absorption of those consciousnesses that now yearn for it.
