A philosophical manifesto in illuminated printing that declares the unity of all faiths through the universal human imagination
What the Work Is
All Religions are One is a series of philosophical aphorisms by the English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake, written in 1788. It is among the earliest of Blake’s illuminated manuscripts, representing his first successful attempt to combine image and text through the technique of relief etching. The work consists of ten small plates, each roughly 5.4 by 4 centimeters, with each aphorism appearing on a separate plate. The only surviving complete copy, known as Copy A, was printed in 1795 and is now held at the Huntington Library, with the title page residing in the Geoffrey Keynes Collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum.
What the Book Is About
The central concern of All Religions are One is the concept of the “Poetic Genius,” a term roughly analogous to the imagination. Blake argues that this Poetic Genius is the supreme faculty of humanity, greater than reason, and that it constitutes “the true man.” From this premise, Blake develops a radical theological argument: because all human beings share the same outward form, they likewise share the same Poetic Genius; and because all religions and philosophies derive from this universal faculty, all religions must ultimately be one. The work thus replaces traditional concepts of divinity with the imagination itself, positioning the Poetic Genius as the source from which all spiritual and philosophical systems flow.
Key Ideas and Themes
The Poetic Genius serves as the foundational concept of the work, supplanting conventional theological belief. Blake asserts that the body or outward form of humanity is derived from the Poetic Genius, just as the forms of all things derive from their own genius—what the ancients called an angel, spirit, or demon. This universal faculty is common to all people, and from it spring all philosophies, adapted to the weaknesses of each individual. Religions, likewise, are merely expressions of the Poetic Genius, with each nation receiving it differently—a phenomenon Blake identifies with what is everywhere called the Spirit of Prophecy. Even the Jewish and Christian Testaments are described as an original derivation from the Poetic Genius.
The work is often interpreted as Blake’s earliest engagement with deism and dualism. Critics have read it as a refutation of the rational empiricism of eighteenth-century natural religion, which sought evidence of God’s existence in the material world. Blake’s alternative is the imaginative faculty itself. As one scholar puts it, the work is a “mockery of rationalism and an insistence on Man’s potential infinitude.” The series has been described as “a rather abstract dialogue with conventional theology,” and Blake’s theory of religious unity has been characterized as a “visionary tolerance” set against the “rational tolerance” of deism, which holds that all religions are equally unsuccessful attempts to solve an insoluble mystery.
The work also represents a decisive philosophical move: the dethroning of reason from its ancient place as the supreme faculty of humanity, replaced by the imagination. Blake’s argument asserts the primacy of the poetic imagination over all metaphysical and moral systems. In this sense, the tractate is part of Blake’s lifelong quarrel with the philosophy of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, whose empirical approach he despised from an early age. Blake saw the school of Bacon and Locke as the foundation of natural religion, and he manipulated the syncretic mythology of his day—drawing on the work of Jacob Bryant, Paul Henri Mallet, and other founders of comparative religious study—to argue for the existence of a universal and supra-rational Poetic Genius expressing itself through the shared forms of all religions.
Structure and Approach
The work comprises ten plates, with each paragraph on a separate plate except the final one, which contains both the last principal statement and a short concluding paragraph. The images are not necessarily literal depictions of the text; the philosophical propositions offer little visual imagery or named objects, and the designs maintain a relative independence from the accompanying text, with links that are thematic and metaphoric rather than direct and literal.
The plates themselves show evidence of Blake’s experimental process. In numerous cases, the acid appears to have eaten away too much of the relief, requiring Blake to go over sections with ink and wash. Several plates bear evidence of rudimentary color printing, a technique Blake was exploring in the 1790s, and may represent his first attempts at this method. The plates also feature examples of white line engraving, where Blake cut into the acid-resistant stop-out to create tiny furrows that would be eaten away by the acid, producing a streak effect in the final print. The black ink framing lines drawn around each design were likely added later, possibly in 1818, just before Blake gave the plates to his friend John Linnell.
Significance and Influence
All Religions are One marks a significant milestone in Blake’s career as the earliest of his illuminated manuscripts, following his initial experiments with relief etching in the non-textual The Approach of Doom (1787). The invention of relief etching changed the nature of Blake’s expression, allowing him to combine words and designs on the same plate and to serve as artist, engraver, printer, and publisher of his own work. Blake’s method was autographic, permitting a seamless relationship between conception and execution rather than the usual divisions between invention and production embedded in eighteenth-century print technology.
The work is often paired with its companion piece, There is No Natural Religion, and scholars have debated which came first. In 1971, Geoffrey Keynes argued that All Religions are One was the earlier of the two, based on its greater technical imperfection. Most scholars have supported this view, noting that the upright roman lettering of All Religions contrasts with the easier-to-execute italic script of There is No Natural Religion, and that many individual letters lean to the left—a common problem in mirror writing that suggests Blake was still learning to overcome it.
Critics have seen the two tractates as forming a fundamental statement of intent for Blake, a kind of pre-emptive outline of his future work. They contain some of Blake’s most fundamental principles and reveal the foundation for later development in his thought and art. As an example of how Blake returned to these themes, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), he writes that the Poetic Genius was the first principle and all others merely derivative.
The work also shows the influence of contemporary thinkers. Blake was deeply impressed by J.C. Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man, which he annotated extensively, and parallels have been noted between Lavater’s aphorisms and Blake’s own. Emanuel Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell may also have influenced him; in his annotations to Swedenborg, Blake twice connects the word “Lord” with “Poetic Genius.” After its original 1795 printing, the text was not published again until 1893, in The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic and Critical, edited by W.B. Yeats and E.J. Ellis.
The ten plates of All Religions are One are notably small, each measuring roughly 5.4 by 4 centimeters. The only surviving complete copy, Copy A, is a large paper copy that was printed as part of a deluxe edition of Blake’s collected illuminated manuscripts. The title page of this copy exists in two impressions; one is held in the Geoffrey Keynes Collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum, while another impression of the title page, colour printed in brown ink and belonging to a different, unrecorded copy, is located in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The plates themselves show signs of Blake’s working process, with the acid sometimes eating away too much of the relief, requiring him to go over sections with ink and wash, often touching the text and design outlines with pen. Several plates also bear evidence of rudimentary colour printing, a technique Blake was experimenting with in the 1790s, and may represent his first attempts at this method. The plates also feature examples of white line engraving, where Blake cut into the acid-resistant stop-out to create tiny furrows that would be eaten away by the acid, producing a streak effect in the final print. The black ink framing lines drawn around each design were likely added later, possibly in 1818, just before Blake gave the plates to his friend John Linnell, and it has been suggested that these lines were added due to the discrepancy between the size of the plates and the size of the paper (each sheet is 37.8 x 27 cm.).
Provenance and Publication History
The plates of Copy A have a distinct provenance. Plates 1 and 3–10 were acquired by John Linnell sometime after 1818, with the missing title page replaced by an impression of the title page from There is No Natural Religion. These plates were sold from the Linnell estate on 15 March 1918 to Henry E. Huntington. Plate 2 was acquired by George A. Smith in 1853, and after possibly being owned by William Muir, it was sold at Sotheby’s by Sir Hickman Bacon on 21 July 1953 to Geoffrey Keynes, who donated it to the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1982. After the original 1795 printing, the text of All Religions was not published again until 1893, in The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic and Critical, edited by W.B. Yeats and E.J. Ellis.
Scholarly Debate on Dating
Until 1971, most editors tended to consider All Religions are One as later than There is No Natural Religion. For example, in his 1905 book The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals, John Sampson places No Natural Religion prior to All Religions in his “Appendix to the Prophetic Books”. However, in 1971, Geoffrey Keynes argued that All Religions are One was the earlier of the two, based on what he saw as its “greater technical imperfection.” In his 1978 book, The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake, David Bindman initially disagreed with Keynes, arguing that the imperfections in All Religions are not because of an earlier date of composition, but because of the increased complexity of the plates, with such complexity demonstrating Blake growing in confidence from the more rudimentary plates for No Natural Religion. Most scholars however support Keynes, and All Religions are One precedes There is No Natural Religion in almost all modern anthologies of Blake’s work; for example, Alicia Ostriker’s William Blake: The Complete Poems (1977), David V. Erdman’s 2nd edition of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (1982), Morris Eaves’, Robert N. Essick’s and Joseph Viscomi’s Blake’s Illuminated Books, Volume 3: The Early Illuminated Books (1993), even Bindman’s own The Complete Illuminated Books of William Blake (2003), and W.H. Stevenson’s 3rd edition of Blake: The Complete Poems (2007).
Further evidence for Keynes’s hypothesis is discussed by Eaves, Essick and Viscomi, who, in counterpoint to Bindman, see the style of No Natural Religion as more confident than that of All Religions. They especially cite the use of upright roman lettering in All Religions contrasted with the italic, cursive writing on several plates of No Natural Religion; “this style was easier to execute since it required fewer independent strokes. And since the resulting dense matrix of lines provided better support for the inking dabber, italic permitted a shallower etch.” Blake introduced italic script on plate a3 of No Natural Religion, a script which he would use throughout the 1790s. Other evidence for an earlier dating of All Religions is that many of the individual letters themselves lean to the left, unlike in No Natural Religion. This was a common problem in mirror writing, and its presence in All Religions but not No Natural Religion suggests Blake was only learning how to overcome it as he worked.
The Technique of Relief Etching
Blake’s invention of relief etching was a response to the division of labour in eighteenth-century print technology, where one person would create a design, another engrave it, another print it, and another publish it. During his training as a professional copy engraver with James Basire during the 1770s, the most common method of engraving was stippling, and all traditional methods of engraving and etching were intaglio, meaning the design’s outline was traced with a needle through an acid-resistant ‘ground’ which had been poured over the copperplate. Frustrated with this method, Blake seems to have begun thinking about a new method of publishing at least as early as 1784, as in that year a rough description of what would become relief etching appears in his unpublished satire, An Island in the Moon. Around the same time, George Cumberland had been experimenting with a method to allow him to reproduce handwriting via an etched plate, and Blake incorporated Cumberland’s method into his own relief etching; treating the text as handwritten script rather than mechanical letterpress, and thus allowing him to make it a component of the image.
Blake’s great innovation in relief etching was to print from the relief, or raised, parts of the plate rather than the intaglio, or incised, parts. He wrote and drew directly onto the plate with an acid-resistant material known as a stop-out, then poured acid about a quarter of an inch deep, causing the exposed parts of the plate to melt away, leaving the design and/or text in relief, like a modern rubber stamp. The major disadvantage was that text had to be written backwards as whatever was on the plate would print in reverse when pressed onto the paper. The dominant theory as to how Blake solved this problem is simply that he wrote in reverse. Another theory, suggested by David Bindman, is that Blake wrote his (acid-resistant) text on a sheet of paper the correct way around, and then pressed the paper onto the plate, thus reversing the text and producing the same result as if had he written it backwards in the first place. Blake could also colour the plates themselves in coloured inks before pressing them or tint them with watercolours after printing, making every page of every book a unique piece of art. Blake himself referred to relief etching as “printing in the infernal method, by means of corrosives […] melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.” A contemporary description of the method was provided by Blake’s friend, J.T. Smith; “writing his poetry, and drawing his marginal subjects of embellishments in outline upon the copper-plate with an impervious liquid, and then eating the plain parts or lights away with aquafortis considerably below them so that the outlines were left as Stereotype.” Relief etching was the same basic method used for woodcutting, and copper relief etching had been practised in the early eighteenth century by Elisha Kirkall, but Blake was the first to use such a method to create both words and designs mixed together on the same plate. A major advantage of relief etching was that Blake could print the material himself, as the pressure needed for printing was constant, unlike in intaglio printing, and considerably less pressure was required. Blake’s new method was autographic; “it permitted – indeed promoted – a seamless relationship between conception and execution rather than the usual divisions between invention and production embedded in eighteenth-century print technology, and its economic and social distinctions among authors, printers, artists and engravers. Like drawings and manuscripts, Blake’s relief etchings were created by the direct and positive action of the author/artist’s hand without intervening processes.” Blake served as artist, engraver, printer and publisher.
The Author
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake has become a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. What he called his “prophetic works” were said by the 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form “what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the [English] language”. While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich collection of works, which embraced the imagination as “the body of God”, or “human existence itself”.
