As a coda to his defense of freedom of the press and Congregationalism, Milton in Areopagitica mentions the exceptions to his tolerationist policy: "I mean not tolerated popery and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided first that all charitable and compassionate means be used to win and to regain the weak and the misled..."(1)

Stanley Fish, in support of his daunting idea that freedom of speech is neither possible nor desirable, makes Milton his precedent, paraphrasing him as follows: "Now you understand of course that when I speak of toleration and free expression I don't mean Catholics. Them we extirpate."(2)

This is unfair. Milton proposed to extirpate an it, "popery"; Fish has him proposing to extirpate a them, "Catholics." That word extirpate has nuances I shall go into, but suffice it to say now that, used as Fish uses it, it means mass-murder; as Milton uses it, it need not mean any such thing. And by subtractional misrepresentation (see that title in this website), Fish leaves out the part of the sentence containing the words "charitable" and "compassionate," and the kindly characterization of the papists, or some of them, as "weak" and "misled." Had Fish left these words in, no one would have accepted his paraphrase, for their inclusion in a proposal to murder a whole population would be grotesque. Such ghastly euphemisms abounded in the language of the Inquisition: the word Inquisition itself; the phrase relaxed to the secular arm (burnt at the stake) ; relapsed (held for a trial whose only possible outcome was a death sentence); and for a heretic escaping from prison, terming the escape "evidence that... the inconstant soul had reverted to its former errors, as otherwise the loving and wholesome discipline of the benignant Mother Church would not be spurned." (3)But it would be unlike Milton to wallow in hypocrisy, a sin he abhorred,(4) and to avoid which he laid his life on the line by publishing the Ready and Easy Way.

If Milton really suggested killing every Catholic in England, we should have to make the paltry excuse that he was of his age. Pius V, the pope who excommunicated Queen Elizabeth, received from the historian Leopold von Ranke (a Catholic) the tribute of a cry of horror:

...how strange a contradiction! the religion of meekness and humility is made the implacable persecutor of innocence and piety!...despatching...military forces in aid of the French Catholics, he accompanied this with the monstrous and unheard-of injunction to their leader, Count Santafiore, to "take no Huguenot prisoner, but instantly to kill everyone that should fall into his hands." (5)

The Spanish massacres in the Netherlands were legalized in 1568 by a sentence of the Inquisition decreeing the death of the entire Dutch population: 3,000,000 people.After 20,000 had been killed in the St. Bartholomew's Eve Massacre, 1572, the pope received the news with joy, declared a holiday and ordered all the bells in Rome to be rung; he had a commemorative medal struck and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to paint a mural.

Milton believed the plan to murder king, lords and commons with barrels of gunpowder in 1605 to have come directlyfrom the Vatican, and taunted the pope as a subhuman creature: "Was this the kind of attempt you made to bestow heaven upon James, you beast in ambush on the Seven Hills?" (6)

The Protestants retaliated with various deeds of hate such as Oliver Cromwell's response when the papist defenders of the citadel of Drogheda had proved unexpectedly obstinate. Regardless whether or not they were trying to surrender,he ordered everyone inside the citadel (3500 people) put to the sword, and some who had taken refuge in a church steeple to be killed with fire. In the ensuing carnage a man was bludgeoned to death with a wooden leg that had been detached from him. The historian S.R. Gardiner excuses Cromwell's behavior as resulting from a rage of a habitual kind,"the slumbering wrath which lay coiling about his heart."(7) The behavior of Protestant armies and tribunals recalls Pangloss's justification of the murder of Cunegonde: "her body was ripped open by the Bulgarian soldiers, after they had subjected her to as much cruelty as a damsel could survive... but we have had our revenge, for the Abares have done the very same thing in a neighboring barony, which belonged to a Bulgarian lord."(8)

Milton's response, in his most famous sonnet,to a massacre is instructive. Catholic troops under the Duke of Savoy had in 1655, attacked a community, ur-Protestant by religion but, by this time, they having immigrated from France three centuries before, in nationality as Italian as the troops who were massacring them. These had driven the ur-Protestants into the Alps where many had died of cold, and had thrown the others over cliffs or in Milton's phrase "rolled Mother with infant down the rocks." If the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church, this atrocity should supply enough to convert the whole population of Italy ("all th'Italian fields") to Protestantism; and Milton might be expected to exhort them to overthrow the pope. Instead he bids them, as soon as possible ("early") to emigrate ("fly") to Protestant lands; a true bloodless revolution.

Freedom of all persons whatever to read and expound the Bible is advocated in the Preface to De Doctrina Christiana , where Milton also calls it "disgusting" to defend the Christian religion with violence. (9)

Professor Fish is right about one thing: Milton wanted to subject the Catholics to some sort of discrimination, which the poet mentions in a sentence both late in his oration and in itself obscure, perfunctory and curt. Ernest Sirluck, in his magnificent essay, the Preface to Areopagitica in the Yale Prose, explains the obscurity and curtness. (10) Sirluck shows that Areopagitica is just what it purports to be, a speech to Parliament persuading them to repeal the 1643 Licensing Act. Sirluck found dozens of pamphlets defining the position of many special-interest groups in the toleration controversy, ranging from the authoritarian Presbyterian party that had passed the Licensing Act; through the moderate Independents who desired a degree of freedom for individual congregations within a permissive centralized church government in other respects like the Presbyterians'; to the lunatic fringe of ultra-tolerationism represented by the Catholics, who sought toleration for themselves notwithstanding their extirpation of all civil supremacies. Milton's problem was [1] to isolate and discredit the first group [2] to appeal to as many subgroups as possible in the second [3]to avoid the alienation of the second that would result if he threatened to unleash the third. All these are obvious political moves; so both the existence, and the perfunctory quality, of the "I mean not tolerated popery" sentence can be explained by saying that Milton walked the walk and talked the talk.

The Roman Catholic church was the only one in the world that could, in theory, abolish any government in Europe and substitute another of its choosing. It had done so on occasion: the pope had excommunicated Henry II of England and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa; he had expelled Frederick from Sicily and given the island to Charles of Anjou. This power was so extravagant as to frighten many Catholics. When Pius V, of take-no-Huguenot- prisoners fame, excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, he in effect encouraged any Catholic monarch to possess and rule a decapitated England. Philip II of Spain and Charles IX of France were each alarmed by the prospect that the other might accept the invitation. Both forbade the reading of the bull in their dominions. Philip mentioned in a letter to the pope, as if hurt, that the bull's failure to mention Spain seemed to favor France, but "the king of Spain would never allow France to set foot in England"; he also wrote Elizabeth, expressing his displeasure at the pope's aggressive bull,(11) though he himself became aggressive eighteen years later by sending the Armada against her. So the phrase extirpates all civil supremacies reads abolishes every government in the world.This supplies a rational basis for some sort of discrimination, for no such power existed in fact, in theory, or in aspiration in any other church but Rome. As Sirluck points out, every church in some sense refuses toleration to all the others, but the divided political loyalties of the Catholics set them apart from all. The approach of the Armada in 1588 led to such fears, that the country would soon be in the jaws of the Inquisition,that the mother of Thomas Hobbes gave premature birth to the philosopher. As the 17th Century advanced, fears of Catholicism became more and more vain until in 1678 the Popish Plot swelled like a bubble and burst in the derision of Absalom and Achitophel. But earlier in the century the fears were better justified.

When fears that Catholics would act as a fifth column to an invading army from Ireland or France had died out, there remained one reason why all other churches might abhor the Catholics: transubstantiation. Only the Catholics adored God Himself in the form of a physical object in defiance of his express command. Yet even that reason dwindled in importance, perhaps as cooler heads saw the Lutheran consubstantiation and Anglican real presence as little, if at all, different.

In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, Sir William Blackstone wrote that papists would enjoy equality

provided their separation [from the Anglicans] was founded only upon difference of opinion in religion, and their principles did not also extend to a subversion of the civil government. If once they could be brought to renounce the supremacy of the pope, they might quietly enjoy their seven sacraments, their purgatory, and auricular confession; their worship of reliques and images; nay even their transubstantiation. But while they acknowledge a foreign power, superior to the sovereignty of the kingdom, they cannot complain if the laws of that kingdom will not treat them upon the footing of good subjects.(12)

In this manner Blackstone embraces freedom of religion, implying that no religious doctrine whatever can justify discrimination; and Milton, too, when he implies that the only reason for extirpating popery is its potential for overthrowing the government, anticipates this espousal of freedom.

With one qualification; the one contained in the word open in "open superstition."

The phrase "popery and open superstition" might seem to refer to two different things, except that the adverb clause continues with a singular pronoun and verb: it extirpates all religions, not they extirpate...

In fact, popery and open superstition is a hendiadys, the rhetorical trope of calling one thing by two names. As examples of this trope the Bible has:

his charge and his statutes (Deut.11:1)

children...and the fruit of the womb (Psalm 127:3)

congregation and assembly (Proverbs 5: 14)

Shakespeare has:

the pales and forts of reason (HamletI.iv.32)

the natural gates and alleys of the body (I.v.74)

the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind (II.i.37)

the dark backward and abysm of time (Tempest I.ii.61)

... among many others.

So popery, the belief that the pope can depose the monarch of England, is forbidden only to the extent that it is open. Both Charles II and James II issued decrees tolerating Catholics, but Charles only allowed them to meet privately, while James, to the horror of Anglicans and dissenters, permitted them to "build and decorate temples, and even walk in procession along Fleet Street with crosses, images and censers."(13)

As a form of bloodless repression, compelling a forbidden sect to meet in private appealed to compromising, "liberal" as we put it today, and above all, non-violent minds. It exercised at least a faint attraction over the victims themselves. Amsterdam banned Catholicism in 1578, after which the papists huddled in homes and warehouses. Inside the Jewish ghetto, they created a chapel disguised as a synagogue, the Moses- and Aaronchurch to outsiders, the church of St. Anthony of Padua to themselves, whose external appearance referred in no way to Catholicism or christendom.Catholics met there till the 19th Century; today it is a tourist attraction with a website, and holds cultural events but, wishing to preserve something of its religious character, no shows or dances.

Sectaries freed from the oppression of meeting privately could afterwards remember it with nostalgia. Until James II's Declaration of Indulgence, mentioned above, English dissenters met in homes and warehouses to hear sermons that seethed with anti-papist loathing. When they met publicly after the Declaration, the dissenters had to show more deference to the king's religion. They rebelled; Daniel DeFoe and John Bunyan, their two outstanding writers, urged them not to accept a toleration that included papists. Macaulay in his History of England records the dissenters' frustration.(14) Thus in a rare and limited sense, one religious group augments the freedom of another by repressing it, and it is the existentialists rather than the old-fashioned liberals who grasp the mystery of freedom: every one of us wants the whole earth to himself.

There now remains the question what extirpatemeans.

Stirps in Latin is stem as of a tree or other woody plant, and this stem-in-both-senses-of-the-word controlled the meaning of the word through the Classical Era and much of the Middle Ages,so that it meant to pull or dig up plants by the roots or clear land by so doing. As for example:

Quintus Curtius Rufus, Life of Alexander the Great:Lucos non caedunt modo, sed exstirpant (They do not merely cut down the groves but pull them up by the roots).

Columella, On Farming: exstirpanda vineta (vineyards to be rooted up)

Silvestris ager decrescente luna utilissime exstirpatur(A field can be advantageously cleared in the waning of the moon).

Pliny,Natural History: harundineto exstirpato (by rooting up the reed-bed)

Calpurnius Flaccus, Declamationes: Antiquas arbores exstirpant ut novas inserant (They pull up old trees to plant new).

Martial, EpigramsExstirpa...pilos de corpore toto (Pull out all your body hair).

John Foxe, Acts and Monuments: To extirpe and pluck the same (wild cockle) by the roots

.

John Evelyn, Kalendarium Hortense: Pluck up strawberry runners, extirpate the tall stalks

Or by a bold metaphor, a human being forcibly removed from his home, the place where he has roots (as Prospero and Miranda have roots in Milan), can have his condition characterized by this word:

...This king of Naples...

Should presently extirpate me and mine

Out of the dukedom... (Tempest I. ii. 343-348)

Macbeth bids the physician "Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow" (V. iii. 52), expressing the notion that any longstanding habit of mind, like his wife's obsession with Duncan's murder, as it were takes root and cannot be pulled out,or not without great difficulty; and hence the metaphoric and abstract sense of extirpate, having for object a word such as passion, hate, or even pity(in the case of someone deliberately hardening himself for crime):

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations:Perturbationes...quae nos exstirpandas putamus... esse dicunt... utiliter a natura data (They say that passions which we think should be rooted out are given by nature for our advantage).

On Friendship: ex eius animo exstirpatam humanitatem (having rooted out pity from his mind)

Seneca, On Anger: Vitia ex naturalibus causis nata exstirpari et funditus tolli (Vices resulting from natural causes to be rooted out and utterly removed).

Apuleius, Apology: Odia vetera funditus extirpavi (I have uprooted ancient hatreds to the bottom). (15)

So as the word exstirpare descended from the classical world to the Middle Ages, its meanings were predominantly harmless or good; it meant a farming operation to clear fields for cultivation, or self-discipline to rid the mind of a bad habit.

Then in 1252--in "the scholastic grossness of barbarous ages," as Milton would say (16)-- a papal bull empowering the Inquisition is entitled Ad exstirpanda (For rooting out). The metaphor this time is that heresy in the field of the church is a plant to be not merely cut down but torn up by the roots. Pope Innocent IV asserts the principle, already established by his predecessor Innocent III, that the church is really a state and hence that heresy can be treated as a crime against the state and punished with death. The bull specifies torture as the means to be used to obtain confessions, but all enthusiasts of human rights will be relieved to learn that the torture is to be citra membri diminutionem et mortis periculum, "without disabling the arms and legs of the accused or killing him." Provision is made for the state officers of countries in which the Inquisition operates if they fail to burn alive persons it has "relaxed to the secular arm";at the same time, provision is made for the state to receive part of the deceased heretic's goods, thus creating a profit motive rewarding their cooperation.The organization called into existence by that exstirpanda had by 1621, according to Robert Burton, become "that fourth fury" (17). Its attempt to wipe out the entire population of the Netherlands has been noted. The word extirpatewas, after the 13th century, subjected to the linguistic rule that it is the hearer and not the speaker who gives value to a word. The dread and horror of what the Inquisition was doing attached themselves to the bland word with which they had denominated it as in later times befel such words as pacify, concentration camp, ethnic cleansing, collateral damage.

Milton, History of Britain: Agricola, a Roman general, hunted the Ordovices, a British tribe,"up and down through difficult places, almost to the final extirpating of that whole nation."

Gilbert Burnet, 1699: The Jews were to fall under an utter Extirpation.

Gouverneur Morris, 1794: It will become on both sides a war of extirpation.

J.A. Allen, 1877:The extirpation of the buffalo.

Leo F. Steltin, Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin, Hendrickson Publishing Co., Peabody, Mass., n.d.:"exstirpo, -are: tear to pieces..."

Steltin's guess as to the meaning of the word is wild and probably shows that by the 21st century few people know what exstirpomeans, but all know it means something ghastly

So Milton's proposed policy for the Catholics is that, as for those who are willing to keep their meetings private, they are to be left strictly alone; as for those who insist on publicity, their popery, i.e., their conviction that the pope can depose the English monarch, must be uprooted from their minds. But Professor Fish's contention raises the question:how is this to be done? By friendly persuasion, by "charitable and compassionate means," by terroristic use of torture and mass executions?

Since there is a pre-Inquisition meaning (beneficent) and a post-Inquisition meaning (terroristic) to exstirpo, exstirpare,it is worth noting that to Milton, as to all humanists, the changes that took place in the Latin language after the fall of the Roman empire were ignorant, barbarous, abhorrent.

John Colet, founder of the school where Milton first learned Latin, included this sentence among its statutes

All barbary, all corruption, all abusion which ignorant blind fools brought in, and with the same distayned and poisoned the very true Latin tongue which Caesar and Cicero and Sallust in olden times used--all such filthiness I utterly banish out of my school.

Hence it became a game to Milton, when an English word came from a Latin one with a different sense, vanished since the Middle Ages, to use it in that sense. All Miltonists will recognize:

fall'n such a pernicioushighth (PLI.282; nex, violent death, +per-intensive, hence pernicies, disaster, destruction)

Brooks...with mazy error under pendant shades (PL IV, 237, 239; errare, to wander; error, wandering about)

charm of earliest Birds (IV, 642; carmen, song)

on our Front (IX, 330; frons, frontis, forehead)

Needs must the serpent now his capital bruise

Expect (PL XII, 383; caput, head, whence capitalis).

So, inasmuch as Areopagiticais throughout stilus altus or lofty utterance,a certain presumption exists that Milton used the word extirpate in its best, because earliest sense, meaning that the papists, on their own initiative, should pluck from the memory their rooted popery.

But more evidence is wanted, and it comes in Milton's last pamphlet, Of True Religion(1673), subtitled what best means may be us'd against the growth of POPERY.(18) As to whether the papists' political activities are dangerous, Milton is agnostic: "I submit it to the consideration of all Magistrates" (p.172). The ban on Catholicism, whatever form it takes, must not interfere with chapels serving embassy staffs from Catholic countries, "privileg'd by the Law of Nations" (p.173). "...are we to punish them by corporal punishment, or fines in their Estates, upon account of their Religion? I suppose it stands not with the clemency of the Gospel, more than what appertains to the security of the State..."(p.173)

So any further Guy Fawkeses are to be prosecuted criminally like the first one, but for the rest, I suppose we should leave them unpunished. Towards the end of the era of St. Bartholomew's Eve, the Duke of Alva's campaigns, Cromwell's conquest of Ireland, and so much more, there is something effete about that I suppose, a weariness, a note of oh-who-cares. Its paradoxical effect at this point in the pamphlet is to hone the reader's curiosity. All right, no corporal punishment or fines. So, how do we extirpate popery, exactly?

"...first we must remove their Idolatry, and all the furniture thereof, whether Idols, or the Mass..." (p.173) In other words, all pictures and statues of saints, crucifixes, chalices, ciboriums, vestments, altar cloths, candlestics in popish chapels must be seized; the loss of the pictures and statues will be no great hardship as the papists "themselves confess...that they hold not their Images necessary to salvation"(pp.173-4). A strange argument; if the Catholics said their images were necessary to salvation,would that oblige the Protestants to let them have these images? This extirpation begins to lose its focus.

The idea of taking away Catholic paraphernalia seems arbitrary and idiosyncratic, but is not. Milton says that Christians degenerated into p apists "as if they could make God earthly and fleshly, because they could not make themselves heavenly, and Spirituall...they bedeck't [their bodies] not in robes of pure innocency, but of pure Linnen..."(Of Reformation in Englandin Yale Prose, I, 520-521.) Hence, remove the utensils and you extirpate the faith. When Elizabeth, in 1571, as a riposte to Pius V's excommunication of her, forbade importation into England of papal bulls, she also forbade the importation, wearing, and use of "tokens...crosses, pictures, beads"--on pain of death.

Arguing with papists is useless because they employ "wiles and fallacies" (p. 174). So, apart from seizing the superstitious furniture, what can Protestants do against the growth of popery? (1) read the Bible (2) abstain from unseemly bickering among Protestant sects (3)refrain from "Pride, Luxury,Drunkenness, Whoredom, Cursing, Swearing, bold and open Atheism" (p.178).

Milton has a concept unique in the history of persection; he attacks the beam rather than the mote. The Catholics may prevail because the Protestants neglect their strongest weapon, the Bible, forbidden to Catholics. "The papist with open mouth makes much advantage of our several opinions [because]...we by our continual jangle among ourselves make them worse than they are indeed"(p.177; substitute Presbyterian for papistand you have the argument of Areopagitica). Lastly. a drinking, whoring, profane Puritan suffers from fears of damnation in middle life and converts to Catholicism to enjoy the facile reassurance of "easy Confession, easy Absolution, Pardons, Indulgences, Masses for him both quick and dead" (p.179). The papists grow stronger as the Protestants grow (morally) weaker; the way to abolish popery is to play teeter-totter with them. In the process, no one need receive so much as a scratch.

Masson in his Life of John Miltondeplores Of True Religion:

It was a very plain and simple, not to say feeble, performance.... the Miltonism of this [pamphlet] is very diluted indeed. There is no thunder whatever and very little lightning... nor anything insulting or even appreciably disrespectful to the Church or the Monarchy of the Restoration.(19)

But a demand for thunder, lightning, and insults, the staples of Milton's pamphlets before and during the Civil War, is against the Renaissance principle of decorum. A bland idea (abolishing popery without hurting a fly) needs a bland style. But if you want thunder, lightning, and insults, here is a denunciation of the pope and his followers, written five years after Of True Religion,with plenty of all three:

I must indeed do them that right, to avow, that out of an equitable consideration and recompense of so faithful a slavery [of Catholic laity to priests],they have discharged the People from all other Services and dependance, infranchised them from all duty to God or Man...their severer and more Learned Divines...have so well Instructed them in all the Arts of Circumventing their Neighbour, and of colluding with Heaven, that, were the Scholars as apt as their Teachers, there would have been long since an end of all, either true Piety, or common Honesty...

[The pope claims] That he can change the very Nature of things, making what is Just to be Unjust, and what is Viceto be Virtue.That all laws are in the Cabinet of his Breast. That he can Dispense with the New Testament. That he is Monarch of this World, and that he can dispose of Kingdoms and Empires as he pleases. (20)

This is just what England didn't need at the time; an incitement to turn the smoldering resentment against Catholics into open war, which in fact broke out later the same year in the hysteria of the Popish Plot and the execution of more than 30 Catholic priests and laymen. And what Whig hack, what bloodthirsty rabblerouser, what Calvinist fanatic wrote that thing?

Andrew Marvell.

(1)Merritt Hughes,John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose(Odyssey Press, n.p., 1957),p.747,col.2.

(2)Interview with Stanley Fish, Australian Humanities Review,Internet.

(3)Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages,New York: Macmillan, 1922, I.548.

(4)Lycidas,ll. 113-131; Comus, 690-94; "a conscience that would retch," Hughes, p.671, col.2;PL III, 681-93, etc.

(5)History of the Popes,New York; Frederick Ungar, 1966, Vol.I, p.258.

(6) Hughes tr., p. 13.

(7) S.R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate Vol.I,pp.117-118.

(8)Candide, Chap.4, in The Literature Network, Internet.

(9)De Doctrina Christiana, Yale Prose,VI,123.

(10)" Areopagitica: Rhetoric and Strategy," in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Yale U.P., New Haven, Conn., 1959: II, 170-178.

(11) Ludwig von Pastor, History of the Popes,B. Herder Book Co., St. Louis, 1929: XVIII, 218.

(12) The Avalon Project at Yale Law School, Book IV: "Of Offences Against God and Religion," Internet

(13) Macaulay, History of England (New York: John Wurtell Lovell, n.d.) II,196.

(14) II,207-210.

(15) All these quotations of exstirpare and extirpate except the one from Shakespeare are from the Oxford Latin Dictionary,Forcellini's Lexicon Totius Latinitatis, and the OED.

(16) Of Education, Hughes, p. 632, col.1

(17) Anatomy of Melancholy(New York: W.J. Widdleton, 1870),I, 80.

(18)The Works of John Milton,New York: Columbia U.P., 1932, Vol.VI, p. 164.

(19) Peter Smith, Gloucester, Mass., 1965: VI, 693.

(20) Robert W. Mchenry, Jr., Contexts 3: Absalom and Achitophel, Archon Books: n.p., 1986, p. 20.