'Mary Baker Eddy' (born 'Mary Morse Baker'
July 16,
1821–
December 3,
1910) founded the
Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879 and was the author of its fundamental doctrinal textbook, ''Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures''. She took the name 'Mary Baker Glover' from her first marriage and was also known as 'Mary Baker Glover Eddy' or 'Mary Baker G. Eddy' from her third marriage.
Life
Childhood
Mary Baker Eddy, the youngest of the six children of Abigail and Mark Baker, was born in
Bow, New Hampshire.
[1] Although she was raised a
Congregationalist, she rejected teachings such as
predestination and original sin. She suffered chronic illness and developed a strong interest in the biblical accounts of early Christian healing.
In her autobiography, Eddy relates that as a child she heard God calling her. "One day, when my cousin, Mehitable Huntoon, was visiting us, and I sat in a little chair by her side, in the same room with grandmother,--the call again came, so loud that Mehitable heard it though I had ceased to notice it. Greatly surprised, my cousin turned to me and said, "Your mother is calling you!" but I answered not, till again the same call was thrice repeated." Finally, after speaking with her mother, the child Mary responded to the voice with the phrase from Samuel "Speak Lord, for Thy servant heareth."
[2].
Early marriages
On
December 10 1843, she married George Washington Glover. He died on
June 27 1844, a little over two months before the birth of their only child, George Washington Glover. Because of her persistent ill health, the now Mrs. Patterson lost custody of her only natural son, George Glover, who was put into the care of neighbors who moved out to the Prairie territories. The loss of her only child aggravated her symptoms and plunged her into a deep depression. She wrote a heart-wrenching poem about this loss. Promised reunion with her son by a suitor, Mrs. Glover married Dr. Daniel Patterson, an itinerant dentist, on
June 21,
1853. The failure of Patterson to make good on his promises of reunification with her far-distant son plunged the now Mrs. Patterson into even more deep despair. Her health made even worse by disappointment, Mrs. Patterson was ready to try anything to bring relief to her sufferings.
Persistent ill health
A fragile child, Eddy suffered intensely from a number of physical complaints. The exact nature of these illnesses, and their psychosomatic or hysterical (as it was called at that time) nature is still a subject of debate. Mrs. Patterson's letters from this time, now at the
Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity in
Boston, MA, portray her sufferings and search for relief.
Study with Phineas Quimby and his influence
Motivated by a desire to help others and herself find relief from suffering, in the 1850s and 1860s, Mary explored
homeopathy and other alternative healing methods popular in the United States at that time.
In October 1862 she became a patient of
Phineas Quimby, a magnetic healer from
Maine. She benefited temporarily by his treatment, and his beliefs greatly influenced her. The extent of Quimby's influence on Eddy has been one disputed aspect of her life. Originally, Eddy gave Quimby much credit for his hypnotic treatments of her nervous and physical conditions and initially thought his brand of mesmerism entirely benign. From Quimby, Eddy was first exposed to the effects of unseen mental influences and beliefs on sick patients, those of the patient himself, as well of those around him and of those who were attempting, by medical or other non-medical means, and especially by hypnotism or suggestive thought control/influence.
While Quimby had his own notions on the nature of these unseen forces, which Eddy accepted early on, she would later draw decidedly different opinions on the nature of thought on the body and reject any form of hypnotism.
After being helped by Quimby, Eddy wrote the following defense of him in the Portland (Maine) Evening Courier in the fall of 1862.
"now I can see dimly at first, and only as trees walking, the great principle which underlies Dr. Quimby's faith and works; and just in proportion to my light perception of truth is my recovery. This truth which he opposes to the error of giving intelligence to matter and placing pain where it never placed itself, if received understandingly, changes the currents of the system to their normal action; and the mechanism of the body goes on undisturbed. That this is a science capable of demonstration becomes clear to the minds of those patients who reason upon the process of their cure.
On the day following the publication of the above article her article was criticized by a rival newspaper, the Portland Advertiser. The then Mary Baker Patterson wrote a second article, replying to the criticism. In it appeared the following paragraph, referring to Quimby and his doctrine:
"P. P. Quimby stands upon the plane of wisdom with his truth. Christ healed the sick, but not by jugglery or with drugs…. P. P. Quimby rolls away the stone from the sepulchre of error, and health is the resurrection."
This quote stands in contrast to what she would later write in Science and Health, "Glory be to God, and peace to the struggling hearts! Christ hath rolled away the stone from the door of human hope and faith, and through the revelation and demonstration of life in God, hath elevated them to possible at-one-ment with the spiritual idea of man and his divine Principle, Love."
It is important to understand that the Quimby Manuscripts were not written by Phineas Quimby, himself. The modern scholarship and research of
Gillian Gill has demonstrated that Quimby was functionally illiterate. The manuscripts are actually George's attempts to reconstruct his father's teachings. Nevertheless, the above letter by Eddy published in the Portland Courier and recounted by George Quimby, is recognized as authentic. See
Gillian Gill and
Robert Peel Eddy biographies (footnotes to soon follow).
Distinguishing between Eddy and Quimby
Gillian Gill, writes "I am now firmly convinced, having weighed all the evidence I could find in published and archival sources, that Mrs. Eddy's most famous biographer-critics -- Peabody, Milmine, Dakin, Bates and Dittemore, and Gardner -- have flouted the evidence and shown willful bias in accusing Mrs. Eddy of owing her theory of healing to Quimby and of plagiarizing his unpublished work."
[3]
After her fall in Lynn, Eddy spent 3 years studying the Bible, convinced that the prayer that healed her was identical to the system of prayer used by Christ Jesus. She used terms such as "Science", "Health", "error", "shadow", "belief", "Christ", and many others used by Quimby, but also found in the Bible. She felt that as she relied on the Bible to guide her, she found a purer meaning. The conclusions she found from her study and continued healing practice were diametrically opposed to the teachings of Quimby. Eddy eventually rejected many of Quimby's conclusions on the dynamics of human disease, suffering, healing, redemption, God and Christ.
Through her study of the Bible, Eddy rejected Quimby's notion of a dualism between matter and spirit. She wrote in
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error." (S&H 468: 10-12)
Eddy found that while at first hypnotism seemed to benefit the patient, it later created more problems than the original sickness. Ultimately she rejected any form of hypnotism or mesmerism, stating "The hypnotizer employs one error to destroy another. If he heals sickness through a belief, and a belief originally caused the sickness, it is a case of the greater error overcoming the lesser. This greater error thereafter occupies the ground, leaving the case worse than before it was grasped by the stronger error." (S&H 104:22-28)
She borrowed some of Quimby's terms and drew on lessons learned from her association with Quimby. Eddy, however, saw her association with Quimby as formative not determinative. Eddy's use of these terms and her teaching are, however, considered by her defenders to be distinct from Quimbyism. Quimby's son, George, disputed the concept that what Eddy ultimately called "Christian Science" was a some mere copy of what his father taught. He considered it as an almost monstrous distortion of what would come to be known as Quimbyism. As George Quimby's manuscripts, allegedly by his father demonstrated, Eddy's ultimate conclusions were quite distinct from his father's.
Phineas Quimby died in January 1866. In 1873, Eddy divorced Patterson for
adultery that he readily admitted. In 1877 she married
Asa Gilbert Eddy, who died in 1882.
1866 injury, healing and study leads to Christian Science
After a severe fall in
Lynn, Massachusetts allegedly caused a major spinal injury in February 1866, Eddy reported that she turned to the
Bible and recovered unexpectedly. Although she filed a claim for money from the city for her injury on the grounds that she was ‘still suffering from the effects of that fall’, she later withdrew the lawsuit.
[4].
She devoted the next three years of her life to biblical study and what she considered the discovery of
Christian Science. In her autobiography Retrospection and Introspection, Eddy writes "I then withdrew from society about three years,--to ponder my mission, to search the Scriptures, to find the Science of Mind that should take the things of God and show them to the creature, and reveal the great curative Principle, --Deity."
[5].
Convinced by her own study of the Bible, especially Genesis 1, and through experimentation, Eddy claimed to have found healing power through a higher sense of God as Spirit and man as God's spiritual "image and likeness". She became convinced that illness could be healed through an awakened thought brought about by a clearer perception of God. She eventually called this spiritual perception the operation of the Christ Truth on human consciousness.
Claiming to have first healed herself and others, and having learned from these experiences, Eddy developed a principle of healing that she asserted could be explained in writing. She became convinced that this healing method was based on scientific principles and could also be taught to others. This positive rule of healing, she taught, resulted from a new understanding of God as infinite Spirit beyond the limitations of the material senses.
No one knows how much or if Eddy influenced some of the great social and political movements of her day including
abolition, the Wellness health movement, and women's suffrage movement.
Mark Twain published a satire of Eddy's discovery entitled
Christian Science. He said of her in another writing, however, "When we do not know a person -- and also when we do-- we have to judge the size and nature of his achievements as compared with the achievements of others in his special line of business--there is no other way. Measured by this standard, it is thirteen hundred years since the world has produced anyone who could reach up to Mrs. Eddy's waistbelt. In several ways she is the most interesting woman that ever lived and the most extraordinary."
[6]
Publishing her discovery
In 1875, after several years of testing the effectiveness of her healing method, Eddy published her discovery in a book entitled "Science and Health" (years later retitled ''
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures''), which she called the textbook of Christian Science. The first publication run was one thousand copies, which she self-published. In it she claimed "In the year 1866, I discovered the Christ Science or divine laws of Life, Truth, and Love, and named my discovery Christian Science" (p. 107). During these years she taught what she considered the science of "primitive Christianity" to hundreds of people. Many of her students became healers themselves. The last 100 pages of Science and Health (chapter entitled "Fruitage") contains testimonies of people who claimed to have been healed by reading her book.
Building a church
Eddy devoted the rest of her life to the establishment of the church, writing its bylaws, "The
Manual of The Mother Church," and revising "Science and Health." While Eddy was a highly controversial religious leader, author, and lecturer, thousands of people flocked to her teachings. She was supported by the approximately 800 students she had taught at her
Massachusetts Metaphysical College in
Boston, Massachusetts between the years 1882 and 1889. These students spread across the country practicing healing in accordance with Eddy's teachings. Eddy authorized these students to list themselves as
Christian Science Practitioners in the church's periodical, the ''
Christian Science Journal''.
In 1908, at the age of 87, Eddy founded ''
The Christian Science Monitor'', a daily
newspaper which continues to be published today. She also founded the ''Christian Science Journal'' in 1883, a monthly magazine aimed at the church's members and, in 1898, the ''
Christian Science Sentinel'', a weekly religious periodical written for a more general audience, and the ''
Herald of Christian Science'', a religious magazine with editions in non-English languages, for children, and in
English-Braille. She died
December 3,
1910 and was buried at
Mount Auburn Cemetery in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In 1921, on the 100th anniversary of Eddy's birth, a 100-ton, eleven-foot granite
pyramid was dedicated on the site of her birthplace in Bow, New Hampshire. A gift from the
Freemasons, it was later dynamited by order of the church's board of directors. Also demolished was Eddy's former home in Pleasant View, as the board feared that it was becoming a place of
pilgrimage. Although Eddy allowed personal praise in her lifetime for various reasons, including for publicity and fundraising, the church shuns both the
cult of personality and religious
reliquaries.
Eddy Biographies, pro and con and in between
★ A well footnoted (scholarly) biography which eventually became the church-authorized biography of Eddy is
Robert Peel's trilogy ''Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery'', ''Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial'', and ''Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority''. (1966–1971)
★ A more recent single volume is another originally independent, but now church-authorized and still controversial, 1999 work by a non-Christian Scientist, Gillian Gill (ISBN 0-7382-0227-4). Gill's work included a review of numerous other Eddy biographies over the years. She also uncovered fairly convincing evidence that Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, from whom critics have long-claimed Eddy stole all her ideas, could not possibly have been the "author" of the his so-called "''Quimby Manuscripts''" as
Horatio Dressor, the son of two of Quimby's students, claimed. Gill wrote that Quimby's actual manuscripts, in his own almost illegible handwriting, indicated that for all intents and purposes Quimby was functionally illiterate and could not write a single cogent English paragraph let alone the alleged Manuscripts. She also uncovered materials that demonstrated that Dresser intentionally left out all manuscripts that would have demonstrated the independence of Eddy's ideas from Quimby's.
★ See also Stephen Gottschalk, ''Rolling Away the Stone, Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism'', (ISBN 0-253-34673-8) for a new account of her founding the church and relations to critics such as
Mark Twain. (Indiana University Press: 2006)
★ ''Mary Baker Eddy, Speaking for Herself'' (ISBN 0-87952-275-5)
★ Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine ''The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science'' (1993) began as a famous magazine series 1907–08 and critical book in 1909.
★ Doris and Moris Grekel also wrote three-part non church-authorized biography on Eddy, ''The Discovery of the Science of Man: (1821–1888)'', (ISBN 1-893107-23-X), ''The Founding of Christian Science: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy 1888–1900'', (ISBN 1-893107-24-8), and ''The Forever Leader: (1901–1910)'' (ISBN 0-9645803-8-1). This biography was aimed at serious students of Christian Science as opposed to the general public.
★ Former Church treasurer and clerk, John V. Dittemore teamed up with Ernest Sutherland Bates, in 1932, to write a biography, ''Mary Baker Eddy - The Truth and the Tradition''. Most of the prose was written by Bates and Dittemore would later distance himself from the book. It has some genuinely distinct information including a list of Eddy's students taught at the
Massachusetts Metaphysical College.
★ The famous novelist
Stefan Zweig wrote a biography ''Mary Baker Eddy''
★
Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind, , Edwin Franden, Dakin, Charles Scribner's Sons, ,
★ Martin Gardner, ''The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy'', Prometheus Books, 1993.
Works
★ ''Science And Health, With Key To The Scriptures'' - 1875, revised through 1910
★ ''Miscellaneous Writings''
★ ''Retrospection and Introspection''
★ ''Unity of Good''
★ ''Pulpit and Press''
★ ''Rudimental Divine Science''
★ ''No and Yes''
★ ''Christian Science versus Pantheism''
★ ''Message to The Mother Church, 1900''
★ ''Message to The Mother Church, 1901''
★ ''Message to The Mother Church, 1902''
★ ''Christian Healing''
★ ''The People's Idea of God''
★ ''The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany''
★ ''The Manual of The Mother Church''
Notes
1. Longyear Historical Foundation - Short Biographical Sketch on Mary Baker Eddy
2. Retrospection and Introspection
3. Mary Baker Eddy by Gillian Gill
4.
5. Mary Baker Eddy, First Church of Christ, Scientist. Retrospection and Introspection
6. Mary Baker Eddy by Gillian Gill pg.xi
See also
★
Mary Baker Eddy Historic House
★
Dupee Estate-Mary Baker Eddy Home at
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
★
Massachusetts Metaphysical College with a complete list of students of Eddy
★
Septimus J. Hanna student of Eddy and vice-president of the
Massachusetts Metaphysical College
★
William R. Rathvon student of Eddy, early Christian Scientist and lone person to leave an audio recording of his hearing Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address at the age of nine.
★
Bliss Knapp a child when the church was in its formative years. Later, he was a teacher and also lectured for 21 years. His father was one of the first Directors of The Mother Church. Knapp's Book, ''The Destiny of the Mother Church,'' which was rejected by the Church but privately published, was quite controversial, and Knapp's opinions of Eddy remain controversial to this day in the Christian Science Church.
External links
★
The Mary Baker Eddy Library
★
The Longyear Museum
★
★
National Women's Hall of Fame (Inducted in 1995)
★
First Church of Christ, Scientist
★
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby
★
Phineas Quimby's son George's controversial "Quimby Manuscripts" attributed to Phineas but not written by him per modern scholarship. Note. Non-Christian Science historian, Gillian Gill, discovered and demonstrated that the Quimby Manuscripts deliberately left out any letters or documents repudiating son George's claim of the 100% derivative nature of Eddy's works. She also demonstrated by Phineas Quimby's handwriting samples found in the Harvard University Library that the alleged author of the Quimby Manuscripts, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, was functionally illiterate.
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