If Harold Bloom or Marilynne Robinson had engineered Google, the search engine would have responded to the query with a link to the poet John Milton, who is both challenging on the subject of God and brave on the subject of free speech—and who would have been a polemical critic of our algorithmic overlords, if he had lived another four hundred years.

If we’re going to pay tribute to the idea of free expression, then we need to pause to pay obeisance to Milton’s exhilarating, timeless statement of first principles, the pamphlet Areopagitica. It appeared in 1644, long before he went blind and dictated Paradise Lost. He wrote Areopagitica in the shadow of the English Revolution, a revolution against theocracy that came to exhibit its own theocratic tendencies. It was a moment when the cracks in English society permitted the growth of dozens of religious sects, each with its own evolved doctrine, many of them—Quakers, Baptists—still with us.

Milton was a Puritan himself, but a comrade in the left wing of the movement. A left-wing Puritanism, let alone a sensualist Puritan, is admittedly hard to imagine. But Milton wrote passionately and bravely in defense of divorce on the grounds of spousal incompatibility. (An argument that he perhaps came to consider after his 16-year-old wife returned to her family, taking a three-year break from Milton.)

The English Revolution was a time when spiritual, intellectual, and rhetorical foment began to wildly accelerate towards anarchy. It was during these very years that Thomas Hobbes wrote his famous response to these chaotic conditions, the Leviathan, yearning for a heavy-handed reassertion of order. And the Parliament obliged that yearning, hoping to regain control with a little bit of old-fashioned suppression. It wanted to require the licensing of books prior to their publication. Censorship. This is what riled Milton to write the Areopagitica.

Beyond the Areopagitica’s condemnation of censorship, Milton was really defending the underlying spiritual and intellectual chaos, and the institutions that nourished it. In his lifetime, the printing press had changed everything. The machines churned out religious propaganda, designed to infuriate, which had the effect of eliciting an endless series of rebuttals. There was a national mania for newspapers. The Areopagitica paid implicit homage to the printing press and explicit homage to everything that rolled off it. He accorded books religious significance, which was really the highest compliment he could offer, since he took his religion so seriously: “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye ...”

At the core, Milton was defending something intensely private—the conscience, the freedom of each citizen to arrive at their own religious conviction. “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.” But Milton also stirringly articulated how the formation of private convictions required public spaces, public institutions—what Jürgen Habermas so famously defined as the “public sphere.”