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Americans have always been besotted with the power of the individual. This preoccupation has taken many forms—political, social, and religious—but one form has survived virtually intact, changing only the superficial spots of its rhetoric: the notion that everyone has the power to heal himself of whatever physical, fiscal, or spiritual ills ail him. It appears in both religious and secular movements. Virtually all these movements proclaim their distinctiveness and rely on the anecdotal testimonials of their believers to support their claims. Recently published books with titles like Remarkable Recovery, Perfect Health, and Spontaneous Healing,
The Christian Science Church, founded by Eddy in 1879, recently re-issued Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures in a paperback trade edition designed to be sold in bookstores (previously the book was sold through the Church’s own Reading Rooms) and hired a publicist to develop a mass-market campaign to take advantage of this latest craze for mind-over-matter miracles. In this campaign, the Church, which has been searching over the past decade for ways to bolster its dwindling membership, has portrayed the book as “non-denominational,” although Eddy herself proclaimed it, along with the Bible, the only “pastor” of her Church. Adopting the ad-speak with which publishers have heralded their own alternative medicine titles, the Church’s advertisements for this new edition, run in national newspapers, do not mention Christian Science. The ad that ran in Publishers Weekly read “Spirit, Mind, Health, there are no limits.” Some Christian Scientists have been shocked at the temerity the Church has shown in introducing a Publisher’s Note and an index to Eddy’s inviolable text; this is, after all, a religion whose faithful have preserved the horsehair rocking chair in which Eddy revised her book, as well as nearly every New England house in which she composed it. But The New York Times’s recent headline—“Alternative Medicine’s Rise Cheers Christian Scientists”—does not seem inaccurate given the Church’s claim that sales of Science and Health rose 25 percent in 1993.
It is not a long leap from Anne Hutchinson, who believed that the saved Christian was actually inhabited by the spirit of the Holy Ghost, to Mary Baker Eddy and her belief in the all-inclusive Divine Mind. Eddy’s doctrine that man is a perfect manifestation of a perfect God is a strange amalgam of Calvinist perfectionism (Jonathan Edwards’s “seeing the perfect idea of a thing”), Ben Franklin’s pragmatism, the Transcendentalists’ rejection of “the illusions of sense,” and Emersonian self-reliance. As F.O. Matthiessen wrote in American Renaissance: “From the weaker aspects of Emerson’s thought, the rocking chair of Mary Baker Eddy…is only just around the corner.”
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This Issue
July 11, 1996
This Issue
July 11, 1996
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1
Written by, respectively, Caryle Hirshberg and Marc Ian Barasch, Deepak Chopra, and Andrew Weil.
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2
Wendy Kaminer makes this point in I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional (Addison-Wesley, 1992).
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They also, controversially, and in some cases, illegally, refuse to obtain medical care for their children. The Supreme Court recently let stand a Minnesota Court of Appeals ruling that upheld compensatory damages of one and a half million dollars against a Christian Scientist mother, stepfather, practitioner, and nurse who let an eleven-year-old boy, Ian Lundman, die of diabetes in 1989. The Christian Science Church has defended this mother, as it defends all Christian Scientists who face criminal or civil charges involving medical neglect of children, a puzzling position given that Mary Baker Eddy was rather liberal about accepting medical care for herself. In 1903, after having a doctor diagnose her kidney stones and administer morphine for her pain, she added this passage to Science and Health:”If from an injury or from any cause, a Christian Scientist were seized with pain so violent that he could not treat himself mentally,—and the Scientists had failed to relieve him,—the sufferer could call a surgeon, who would give him a hypodermic injection .” If a hypodermic injection had been available for Ian Lundman, as it was for the founder of his religion, he would be alive today.
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This same doctor seems to have introduced Mary to mesmerism, a pseudo-scientific cure conceived by the Austrian Franz Anton Mesmer in the late eighteenth century and popularized in the United States by the 1837 volume Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England, by Charles Poyen. The concept of mesmerism, or animal magnetism, was to exert a powerful hold on Eddy throughout her life. Despite Eddy’s ill health, it is interesting to note that she was the longest-lived member of her entire family, surviving to the age of ninety.
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See Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (Free Press, 1992).
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Here, Mary equates Quimby with Jesus and herself with the blind man he healed:
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He gave this in an affidavit to Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine when they were preparing their biography of Eddy.
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During the Nixon administration, the Christian Science Church, through the influence of H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, both Christian Scientists, succeeded in shepherding through Congress a special bill extending the copyright of the first edition of Science and Health for an additional seventy-five years. This enabled the Church to prevent apostate Christian Science groups from reprinting the first edition for some years, but the act was eventually overturned by an appeals court. The first edition of Science and Health is now back in print.
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Boston Post, June 4, 1882.
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10
It followed on the heels of the first hagiography of Eddy, The Life of Mary Baker Eddy by Sibyl Wilbur, originally published in 1908 and subsequently acquired and published by the Church.
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This statement can be found in two privately printed collections of Eddy’s teachings as presented to and preserved by her household workers:Mary Baker Eddy:Her Spiritual Footsteps, by Gilbert C. Carpenter and Gilbert C. Carpenter, Jr. and Course in Divinity and General Collectanea. It also appears in Christian Science After 1910, by Andrew W. Hartsook (Bookmark, 1993).
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