Monday Messiah: Mary Baker Eddy, Unchristian Nonscientist

“Christian Science”—which George Bernard Shaw aptly described as neither Christian nor Science—was founded by the female prophet Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), aka Mary Morse Baker Glover Patterson Eddy. But the story starts with her mentor, who was influential in the genesis of both the New Thought movement and Christian Science: a Massachusetts watchmaker, philosopher, mesmerist, inventor and healer, with the wonderful name of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866).

Quimby had developed a healing technique which he called, obviously, the “Quimby System,” and which sounds a little like a primitive form of pious psychotherapy. It boiled down to the belief that there was no such thing as disease: all ills were all in the mind, and could therefore be cured by right thinking, with a hefty dose of bible-thumping. He does not seem to have been particularly charismatic, however, and it was left to others to pick up his ideas and run with them.

One of his patients and sort-of disciples was the nervous and delicate Mrs. Patterson—Mary Baker Eddy in a previous marriage. She was apparently prey to all sorts of ills in early life: as a child, prone to visions and voices; as an adult, neurotic and emotionally unstable, given to what were then called “hysterical” illnesses, and too much an invalid to care for her one child, whom she essentially gave away. Christian Science biographers make a great deal of her suffering and saintly character, but an outsider may pick up disturbing echoes of a self-serving hypochondria, and behaviour typical of borderline personality disorder.

Her association with Quimby began in 1862 and continued to 1866, during which he healed her frequently. An enthusiastic and humbly grateful disciple, according to her preserved letters to him, she began to give public lectures disseminating his system, and doing some healing off her own bat. Then, just before Quimby died in 1866, Mrs. Patterson had what could be called an apotheosis, a transfiguring experience. According to what she wrote and said at the time, she had a nasty fall on the ice, the effects of which were healed by the magical Quimby System. However, by a few years later, her narrative was very different. Now, the story went that the fall had been nearly fatal, and her injuries were such that her life was despaired of. She was dying; the doctors could do nothing for her—which was news to the doctor who attended her, when he was interviewed a few years later. But here is how she reported what happened then:

“On the third day thereafter, I called for my Bible, and opened it at Matthew ix. 2 [the healing of the man with palsy]. As I read, the healing Truth dawned upon my sense; and the result was that I rose, dressed myself, and ever after was in better health than I had before enjoyed.”

This detail would also surprise her doctor of the time, who continued for some time treating her for a number of ailments. At any rate, that was her account of the “invention” of Christian Science, as a revelation straight from God, a miraculous origin story. Note the nice little detail that it was on the third day she rose again.

What had happened—though of course Christian Science writers put a very different spin on it—was that Quimby died a couple of weeks after Mrs. Patterson’s accident, leaving Mrs. Patterson in possession of his privately circulated paper Questions and Answers, which she gradually rewrote as her own. Unlike Quimby, she was a forceful, messianic personality. By 1875, she had pushed Quimby pretty much out of the memory her developing cult, adapting his ideas and plagiarizing his manuscript to produce her own holy writ: Science And Health, With Key To The Scriptures.

By then, she had also divorced Dr.Patterson and married Mr. Mary Baker Eddy—or, rather, sewing-machine salesman Asa Gilbert Eddy. Reading between the lines of her hagiographies, we can again see the messianic character at work, the familiar pattern of behaviours: absolute dictatorship, a raging temper when crossed, a dark descent into paranoia, assiduous milking of the faithful for financial contributions, a tendency to demonize and especially to sue her perceived enemies, and to excommunicate critics and rivals. The tendency to rewrite history, to construct a miraculous origin myth, is also accounted for: in this case, the assertion that Phineas P. Quimby had been a near-illiterate bumpkin, and had nothing to do with Mrs. Eddy’s astonishing discovery of the true secret of life. Further, she showed a classic tendency to claim miracle cures where there was no possibility of verifying or falsifying her claims

Most diagnostic of all, while she claimed to reject deification or the formation of a personality cult, she also presented herself as the Second Coming of Christ, the prophesied female messiah who would bring about the millennium by destroying the old world. But she would not destroy it through the usual bloodshed and fire and roasting of unbelievers, which was at least a refreshing change. She would destroy the old world by spreading the truth until everyone was a right-thinking Christian Scientist: that is, the old allegedly evil world would end when everybody realized that the world, the body, the universe itself, were nothing more than illusions of the divine mind, and that all apparent illness, evil and sin were just errors. Once you grasped the fact that there was no reality except your mind and the mind of God, then bingo—you could make your reality be anything you wanted. If your body was an illusion, then so was your cancer. Even death was a big booboo on the part of the mind. Or, as she put it herself, death is:

“An illusion, the lie of life in matter; the un-real and untrue; the opposite of Life. Matter has no life, hence it has no real existence. Mind is immortal. The flesh, warring against Spirit; that which frets itself free from one belief only to be fettered by another, until every belief of life where Life is not yields to eternal Life. Any material evidence of death is false, for it contradicts the spiritual facts of being.”

But of course, there were problems. She was sick frequently, was known to take morphine, had a lot of dental work done, and had to wear glasses. Various close relatives died of cancer, without her doing anything to heal them except tell them to read her book. And her husband Asa died of a coronary thrombosis about six years after they were married. How to square failures like that with her triumphant teachings? Well, there were some features of her version of reality that enabled her to cover awkward facts like those.

The first, on the face of it, was a positive thing: distance healing, or “absent treatment”. A Christian Science practitioner did not have to be in the same room, or even the same city, as a patient. Treatment consisted of prayers and a mental effort to cure the error which the patient was feeling as an illness. No examination or laying on of hands was required.

But the flip side of that, the negative side, was that error could be contagious. Even hearing about somebody else’s illness could be enough to plant the thought in your own mind strongly enough to cause you to fall into the same error. Therefore, even now, there is provision for the children of Christian Scientists to be excused from health class at the request of their parents, who fear that even hearing about things like hygiene and disease prevention will cause their children to “fall into error,” as will going to a doctor for a diagnosis or a checkup.

But that was not the worst. There was also a doctrine called, variously, malicious animal magnetism (MAM), malicious mesmerism, or mental malpractice. According to this, somebody who wished you ill could do exactly that: from a distance, project evil influences into your mind that would cause you to fall into error and get sick. To guard against this required constant vigilance and much prayer; and Mrs. Eddy, as she became more powerful and more paranoid (another messianic trait cropping up) was certain that this was happening to her. Squadrons of prayer warriors were activated to ward off the effects of her foes’ evil thoughts, particularly the thought-attacks of apostate ex-devotees and the Catholic church, her special bogeymen. This also made for an atmosphere of suspicion within the church: Mrs. Eddy claimed to be able to tell telepathically when any of her flock was committing MAM, and could always find a scapegoat to accuse if things went wrong.

As for what happened to poor Asa Eddy, his widow was convinced that some of her disaffected ex-disciples had murdered him by arsenic poisoning. She demanded an autopsy. But when the autopsy turned up no trace of arsenic poisoning, she insisted her diagnosis was still correct, but it was a case of MENTAL MALPRACTICE, where someone who wished her ill had poisoned her dear husband from a distance with mental arsenic. The same explanation was used for her own illnesses and poor eyesight. These principles could be used to protect her claims from being falsified.

The Church of Christ, Scientist survived when Mary Baker Eddy fell into the ultimate error—that is, when she died—and it survived the power struggles that followed, to become a recognized and routinized church. But it has been declining for decades; the only time we really hear of it is when some unfortunate child of Christian Scientist parents is denied medical attention, and dies of a treatable condition. This is not a new thing, by the way, but has dogged the Church of Christ Scientist from its earliest days. Deaths were blamed on the deceased themselves by this messiah of healing; it was not her fault, she would say, if people could not stop wallowing in error. Mrs. Eddy, it has to be said, lived to the ripe old age of 90, which might be taken as validation of her principles. But then, she took no chances. When she was sick, she went to a doctor.