Milton Truth

When discussing Milton’s choice not to ever offer the Truth, scholar Stanley Fish suggests Milton made this omission strategically in order to support the argument that Truth cannot be contained. While it may seem frustrating that, despite all his allusions to the Truth, Milton never seems to explicitly state what the truth must entail, Fish would argue that the reader’s inability to finish reading the Areopagitica without being able to appoint Milton as the founder of some profound truth is exactly what Milton intended. If Milton had offered a clear image of Truth, Fish suggests, “To have done so, or, rather, to claim to have done so, would have been to claim for the Areopagitica the very capacity of being the repository of what no book can contain because it can only be written in the fleshy tables of the heart” (Fish 583). Milton would be a hypocrite and his work dismissible if he had attempted to define Truth. Milton, nor anyone else, can find the correct words to identity Truth; man can only write what leads men to have Truth “written in the fleshy tables of [their] …show more content…
Yet, in order to do so, the book becomes a necessary component because they are the possessors the words which may then contribute in the search for the truth. It is true that Milton’s argument does not give the book the capacity to contain any one certain virtue, yet that does not mean the book can be discarded so freely because they cannot enclose the ambiguous value of virtue. Books in themselves could be considered virtuous because they do engage with potentially troubling ideas that must compete with each other throughout the progress of the book. These ideas must be contained to some degree if they are to be spread throughout a