"GOD BECOMES AS WE ARE, THAT WE MAY BE AS HE IS": FINE TRIANON PRESS LIMITED FACSIMILE EDITION OF ONE OF WILLIAM BLAKE'S FIRST ILLUMINATED BOOKS, THERE IS NO NATURAL RELIGION
BLAKE, William. There Is No Natural Religion [facsimile]. (London: The Trianon Press, for the William Blake Trust, 1971). Two volumes. Quarto and octavo, original half brown morocco, marbled boards; housed together in publisher's matching marbled slipcase. $750.
Fine Trianon Press limited edition facsimile of one of William Blake's first illuminated books, number 352 of 540 copies (from a total edition of only 616) on Arches paper, finely reproducing in color the 12 leaves of Blake's pioneering little volume. Printed for The William Blake Trust from two copies in the renowned collection of Lessing J. Rosenwald, now in the Library of Congress. With bibliographical note by Blake expert Geoffrey Keynes.
"There can be little doubt that, when Blake made the copper-blocks by his new method of deep relief etching for use in all his Illuminated Books, his first trials are represented by the series of small prints entitled All Religions Are One and There Is No Natural Religion" (Keynes, "Bibliographical Statement"). "A combination of words and pictures soon followed: All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion, both of 1788, are Blake's first 'Illuminated Books', as he called his new genre in 1793. These aphoristic tractates reject rationalist doctrines and welcome the imaginative truths of revealed religions which were, in Blake's view, one with artistic expression" (ODNB). "The two tiny tractates, There Is No Natural Religion and All Religions Are One, etched about 1788, show the impress of Boehme, their form being probably suggested by Lavater's Aphorisms. Blake was quite sure that, whatever the failings of the Established Church, the noisy rationalism of his Deistic friends and acquaintances, Paine, Priestly, Godwin, and the rest, was not the promised path to moral freedom. Accordingly he exposes their limitations in the two series of There Is No Natural Religion, concluding that 'If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic Character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.' But since man's perceptions are not, as the Deists wrongly held, limited by Sense, and his Desire is Infinite 'God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is'" (Wilson, The Life of William Blake, 47-48). This is one of 540 printed on Arches paper made to match the paper used by Blake and bound in half morocco, from a total edition of 616 copies. Bentley, Blake Books 202. Bookplate.
Fine condition.