Cable 1995

Milton is "perpetually contriving with language to invent Truth while at the same time demonstrating that Truth lies ever beyond the powers of mortal invention" (4)

• "creative truth-seeking as necessarily, and by definition, an iconoclastic activity" (4)

"Through the ruling metaphor of the book that is our life, the iconoclastic activity of Areopagitica's imagery provides a model for the individual imaginative progressivism that is required for our own independent self-authorship." (7)

"The Image of God in the Eye: Areopagitica's Truth

search for truth -- "this activity is a transformative and re-creative impetus that depends on affective indeterminacy, that anarchic element in the imaginative process that links writer to reader through metaphor's iconoclasm." (118)

• truth as process and activity rather than objective that can be had/found

"To use images rightly is to have recourse to them, not depend on them. Should we depend on Areopagitica's images, expecting analysis of the images themselves to yield light, they will disappoint us. As instruments of analysis, they serve the flow of ideas about truth; their presence makes no guarantee for a truth of their own." (124)

"The books-as-nourishment metaphor in and of itself neither provides insight nor offers answers. Rather, it facilitates an exploratory and analytical process that requires us ultimately to make our own determinations regarding food for the mind." (125)

"To institutionalize truth is to contradict the vital principle on which he believes truth depends; it is to nail truth down, to convert it into a mere sign of itself, like a crucifix" (134)

"The society of readers and writers that Milton envisions in his portrait of London is markedly a collective of individuals. These are individuals engaged in the common eterprise of reform, but they are necessarily sequestered in their activities, separated fro mone another by the processes they are engaged in, processes which must be carried out, not in public, but in the private arena of the imagination." (135)