The ethics of rhetoric

by Richard M. Weaver

Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he had ascended, and his apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made after the body of Osiris, went up and down gathering limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not found them all, lords and commons, nor ever shall do, till her master’s second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mold them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection. Suffer not these licensing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continue to do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyred saint.[135]

And here is Milton’s defense of the intellectually free community, rendered in a military metaphor.

First, when a city shall be as it were besieged and blocked about, her navigable river infested, inroads and incursions round, defiance and battle oft rumored to be marching up, even to her walls and suburb trenches; that then the people, or the greater part, more than at other times, wholly taken up with the study of highest and most important matters to be reformed, should be disputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, even to a rarity and admiration, things not before discoursed or written of, argues first a singular good will, contentedness, and confidence in your prudent foresight, and safe government, lords and commons; and from thence derives itself to a gallant bravery and well grounded contempt of their enemies, as if there were no small number of as great spirits among us, as was his who, when Rome was nigh besieged by Hannibal, being in the city, bought that piece of ground at no cheap rate, whereupon Hannibal himself encamped his own regiment.[136]

Milton’s concept of church government according to Scripture is thus presented in The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty:

Did God take such delight in measuring out the pillars, arches, and doors of a material temple? Was he so punctual and circumspect in lavers, altars and sacrifices soon after to be abrogated, lest any of these should have been made contrary to his mind? Is not a far more perfect work, more agreeable to his perfections, in the most perfect state of the church militant, the new alliance to God to man? Should not he rather now by his own prescribed discipline have cast his line and level upon the soul of man, which is his rational temple, and, by the divine square and compass thereof, form and regenerate in us the lovely shapes of virtues and graces, the sooner to edify and accomplish that immortal stature of Christ’s body, which is his church, in all her glorious lineaments and proportions?[137]

What we are especially called upon to note in these examples is the boldness of figuration, by which the concept survives the pressure of many, and sometimes rather concrete, tests of correspondence, as the analogy enlarges. The author’s faith in the figure as an organizing principle is likely evidence that he sees the world as form, the more of which can be drawn out the better. To a later day, any figure carried beyond modest length runs the danger of turning into an ironic commentary upon its analogue, but to Milton, as to the seventeenth century generally, it was a window to look through. Now quite literally the conceit is a concept, and we have found it to be another organizing medium of this intellectual prose, and a second proof that some texture of thought precedes the mere linguistic expression, and holds itself superior to it.

While the primacy of the concept is responsible for these formal features of style, we must look elsewhere for the source of its vigor. Certainly another reason that Milton is a taxing author to read is the restless energy that permeates his substance. He never allows the reader to remain inert, and this is because there were few things toward which Milton himself was indifferent. One revelation of the active mind is the zeal and completeness with which it sorts things according to some scale of values; and judged by that standard Milton’s mind is active in the extreme. To approach this a little more systematically, what one discovers with one’s first reading of the prose is that Milton is constantly attentive to the degrees of things, and his range of valuations, extending from those things which can be described only through his elegant curses to those which require the language of religious or poetic eulogy, is very great. Indeed, “things indifferent,” to employ a phrase used by Milton himself, play a very small part in his writing, which rather tends to be juridical in the highest measure. And the vitality contributed by this awareness of difference he increased by widening the gulf between the bad and the good. These contrarieties are managed in various ways: sometimes they are made up of single nouns of opposed meaning; sometimes of other parts of speech or of phrases; but always it would take a dull reader to miss the opposed valuations. A sentence from The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce will afford some good examples.

Hence it is, that error supports custom, custom countenances error: and these two between them would persecute and chase away all truth and solid wisdom out of human life, were it not that God, rather than man, once in many ages calls together the prudent and religious counsels of men, deputed to repress the encroachments, and to work off the inveterate blots and obscurities wrought upon our minds by the subtle insinuating of error and custom; who, with the numerous and vulgar train of their followers, make it their chief design to envy and cry down the industry of free reasoning, under the terms of humor and innovation; as if the womb of teeming truth were to be closed up, if she presume to bring forth aught that sorts not with their unchewed notions and suppositions.[138]

The vigor of this passage arises from a continuing series of contrasts, comprising the following: error and custom with truth and solid wisdom; God with man; prudent and religious counsels with encroachments and also with inveterate blots and obscurities; subtle insinuating of error and custom with industry of free reasoning; and womb of teeming truth with unchewed notions and suppositions.