. . . no one identifies poetry with prophecy or expresses the responsibility of the creative artist to God for his genius more clearly than Milton. Milton’s “liberty” is practically the same thing as Blake’s imagination . . . Liberty for Milton is the total release of the whole man, and his main effort in defining it is to break down the partitions in which the timid and cautious attempt to keep its various aspects separate. That is, the “Christian liberty” of the theologians is not a different thing from political liberty; and the “liberty to know and utter” inevitably expands into the liberty to love.
It is in Areopagitica that Milton is nearest to Blake . . . It was undoubtedly a major influence in forming Blake’s doctrine that the Christian Church cannot exist outside the arts because the secondary Word of God which unites us to the primary Word or Person of Christ is a book and not a ceremony. Milton also shows that the impulse to destroy art by censorship makes general morality a criterion which the creative imagination must meet. But moral virtue of this kind is founded on the fallen state of man; it is the forbidden knowledge of good and evil, the tree of death which lost man Paradise, and therefore it can never give man back a vision of Paradise. The more one pursues moral virtue, the more obviously one becomes engaged in a pursuit of death. “The laziness of a licensing church” detests everything that has any exuberance; and its ultimate aim is the legalized “blank virtue” of the Pharisee, which Jesus saw for what it was, the “excremental whiteness” of the outside of a tomb.
For general truth does not exist. Truth exists only in the total form which the mind makes of reality, hence no doctrine which a man assents to because he is told to do so can be true for him. . . .
The greatness of Areopagitica is that it speaks for liberty, not tolerance: it is not the plea of a nervous intellectual who hopes that a brutal majority will at least leave him alone, but a demand for the release of creative power and a vision of an imaginative culture in which the genius is not an intellectual so much as a prophet and seer. The release of creative genius is the only social problem that matters, for such a release is not the granting of extra privileges to a small class, but the unbinding of a Titan in man who will soon begin to tear down the sun and moon and enter Paradise. The creative impulse in man is God in man; the work of art, or the good book, is an image of God, and to kill it is to put out the perceiving eye of God. God has nothing to do with routine morality and invariable truth: he is a joyous God for whom too much is enough and exuberance beauty, a God who gave every Israelite in the desert three times as much manna as he could possibly eat. No one can really speak for liberty without passing through revolution to apocalypse . . .