Eddy, Mary Baker

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EDDY, MARY BAKER

EDDY, MARY BAKER (1821–1910), the American discoverer of Christian Science, founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, "to commemorate the word and works" of Christ Jesus and "to reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing" (Eddy, 1895, p. 17). The subject of vehement attack by the popular press and male theologians of her day, and of staunch defense by proponents of her teaching, Eddy remains a controversial figure.

Prayer, biblical readings, and religious discussion were prominent features of her rural New England upbringing, and Baptist, Methodist, and Congregational clergy frequented the family home. As a child, Eddy rebelled against the stern Calvinism of her father's religion, preferring the more loving deity of her mother's teaching. Despite her reservations about the doctrine of predestination, Eddy joined the Congregational Church and remained a member until she founded her own religious organization.

In the late twentieth century, feminist scholars turned to Eddy's life and leadership, hoping to find in her a model of empowerment for women. Eddy was not, however, primarily interested in political freedom but in a liberation theology that freed people from the "bondage of sickness and sin" (Eddy, 1875, p. 368).

Critics sought to dismiss Eddy by accusing her of being a hysterical female in the stereotypical nineteenth-century mode. This accusation failed to take into account an ancient precedent that may be more relevant in Eddy's case. In the second and third centuries ce Christian women were accused of hysteria by an emerging male religious hierarchy as a means of marginalizing women's religious authority. The accusation is particularly notable in patriarchal dismissal of female theologians who, like Eddy, functioned without deference to male authority. This precedent provides a historical antecedent, and not just a cultural one, for the opposition Eddy's teachings attracted.

Early Life

Eddy was born in Bow, New Hampshire, the youngest of the six children of Mark Baker and Abigail Ambrose Baker. Her formal education was sporadic, and she was often kept home from school due to illness. In her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection, she wrote that her father was "taught to believe" her brain was too large for her body (Eddy, 1891, p. 10). Even though her schooling was uneven, she spent several terms at academies for young women.

Eddy was a keen learner and an avid reader, and throughout her life she kept scrapbooks of writings that had attracted her. In Science and Health she praised observation, invention, study, and original thought as "academics of the right sort" (Eddy, 1875, p. 195). Typically, what interested her were the ways thought was expanded through learning, rather than learning as mere acquisition of facts.

Marriage and Motherhood

Eddy's first marriage, in 1843, was to George Washington Glover. He died of yellow fever the following year, however. The pregnant widow returned to New England from her home in South Carolina, and eventually her young son was put in the care of a family retainer. Eddy was not reunited with him until he was grown and a parent himself.

In 1853, in the hope of providing a home for her son, Eddy married Daniel Patterson. He, however, was unwilling to have the boy. An itinerant dentist, Patterson was frequently absent from home, and in 1866 he abandoned his wife permanently. It was not until 1873 that Eddy applied for and was granted a divorce.

During these years Eddy suffered various illnesses that often kept her bedridden. She sought relief through a variety of alternative medical methods, including allopathy, homeopathy, and hydropathy. In 1862 she traveled to the Portland, Maine, clinic of Dr. Phineas P. Quimby, a magnetic healer. The extent of Quimby's influence on Eddy's thought is one of the more controversial aspects of her life.

After Eddy had become well known, Quimby's son and several of the doctor's associates claimed she had misrepresented Quimby's teaching as her own. Eddy acknowledged she had edited Quimby's notes but denied that he was her source for Christian Science. In fact, Quimby's techniques were based on mesmerism, while Eddy's practice was firmly rooted in the Christianity that had always been her strength.

Eddy's faith was tested after Quimby's death when in 1866 she suffered internal injuries following a fall on an icy path. Eddy later recalled that she turned to her Bible and read an account of one of Jesus' healings recorded in the Gospels. Subsequently she spoke of her instant recovery as a transformative experience in which she glimpsed "Life in and of Spirit" (Eddy, 1896, p. 24). The fall on the ice has assumed mythic importance in the history of Christian Science. Although the homeopathic physician who was called to Eddy's bedside later claimed it was his treatment that healed her, Eddy insisted it was her glimpse of a spiritual reality that effected the physical healing. The discovery of Christian Science is dated from this event.

Eddy's third marriage was to Asa Gilbert Eddy in 1877. Their brief union ended with his death in 1882. Gilbert Eddy was one of his wife's early followers and the first to publicly advertise as a Christian Science healer.

Christian Science

Prior to her fall, Eddy's life had been fairly conventional. In nineteenth-century America, men held legal, financial, and decision-making power over women's lives. Women, especially genteel women, were daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, widows—and Eddy was all of these. Even in religion women were denied a public voice in worship and were expected to assent to the beliefs of their male relatives. In preaching a theology that promoted biblical authority over clerical teaching, and in founding a church, Eddy threatened established patriarchal positions and subsequently suffered legal, verbal, and even physical consequences.

Following her recovery, Eddy committed herself to a deep study of the Bible, spending the next several years seeking the spiritual significance of biblical accounts of healing. She searched for the "primitive Christianity" of Jesus and the early Christians in the period before the institutional church darkened its hue (Eddy, 1875, p. 139). This was her concept of evangelical religion. She wrote extensive exegetical notes, particularly reflecting on the books of Genesis and Revelation. Revisions of these books, and the addition of a glossary containing her interpretation of the spiritual meaning of selected terms mainly drawn from these two books, later formed the basis of her class teaching and the "Key to the Scriptures" section of the Christian Science textbook. As her radical ideas developed and she began to broadcast them, she found herself at odds with family and friends.

Over the next few years Eddy moved from boardinghouse to boardinghouse. She had little in the way of financial resources and made her living through modest literary contributions and eventually by taking students, to whom she began to teach her theology of healing. Her teaching was reinforced by her own healing practice. During this period she began writing her major work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the first edition of which was published in 1875. The book went through eight major revisions and over two hundred lesser versions before Eddy's death.

Initially Eddy hoped her ideas would be adopted by existing churches. When this did not happen, she organized her own church in 1879, only to abandon its charter in 1889. In 1892 she reorganized the church and named it the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts. Although Eddy herself preached both from the pulpit and in public halls, she decreed in 1895 that there would be no ordained clergy in her church. Instead she "ordained" the Bible and Science and Health as its pastor. Worship services consisted of readings from the Bible and "correlative passages" from her book. The readers, one man and one woman, were elected for a stipulated term from the lay membership.

In addition to Sunday and midweek worship, Eddy provided for lecturers who visited communities by invitation. Both women and men could be called to this position. She developed a highly centralized government for her church, delegating daily oversight to a board of directors. Both men and women were eligible to serve in this capacity, although female directors remained in the minority. Eddy also set up a structure for theological education, the teachers of which could be either men or women. Most notable, however, was the prominence of females in the public practice of what Eddy called Christian healing.

During the remainder of her life Eddy faced repeated internal dissension from followers wishing to supplement or supplant her teaching with their own. Most of these left Christian Science, and several of the women eventually became religious leaders in their own right, particularly in the New Thought movement. Eddy was convinced that the glimpse of spiritual reality she had experienced in 1866 and its subsequent refinement was divinely inspired and, as such, could not be modified by anyone else. Neither the church government she formed nor the denominational textbook she wrote can be revised. Her final achievement was the founding of an international newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, in 1908.

At a time when many women lived domestically centered lives, Eddy's talent for organization and for conducting business, skills nineteenth-century society usually associated with men, attracted hostility and opposition. Followers defected and opponents criticized the control she maintained. At the same time, others found healing through the teachings of Christian Science.

Theological Teachings

As a child Eddy was immersed in the thought and language of the Bible. Her mature writings are replete with biblical allusions and citations. Her reading of the Bible, though, was often unconventional, and both nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators criticized her theology as abstruse, uninformed, even heterodox.

In her spiritual interpretation of the Lord's Prayer, first published in 1891, Eddy defined God as Father and Mother. In 1900 she changed the designation to Father-Mother. Eddy was not the first female theologian to identify God in this way. Julian of Norwich (1342–after 1416) and the Shaker Mother Ann Lee (1736–1784) had described God as Mother, and there are biblical precedents as well. Hannah Whitall Smith, a contemporary of Eddy and a member of the Holiness movement in Philadelphia, also likened God to a Mother. However, there is no evidence that Eddy drew on any of these for her own interpretation.

From the third through the fifteenth editions of Science and Health, Eddy used the feminine pronoun for God in her chapter "Creation," reverting to the masculine pronoun in 1886. She also consistently employed nongendered terminology for God, referring to the deity as Life, Truth, Love, Spirit, Soul, Mind, and Principle.

Eddy's theological reflections in her chapter "Science, Theology, and Medicine" primarily relate to the nature of Christ and the character of Jesus. She wrote that Jesus was the highest human concept, inseparable from Christ, which she defined "as the divine idea of God outside the flesh" (Eddy, 1875, p. 482).

To a twenty-first-century reader, Eddy's use of man as a generic term sounds dated. However, she declared that masculine, feminine, and neuter genders are "human concepts," weakened by anthropomorphism (Eddy, 1875, p. 516). For Eddy, generic man was a nongendered spiritual idea, neither an "Eve or an Adam" (Eddy, 1887, p. 51). Feminist commentators operating out of a body-affirming late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century imagination have been disappointed that Eddy's teaching does not relate to female bodies any more or less than to male bodies. Her rejection of corporeality as the real embodiment of woman and man is based on her teaching that the physical condition is a misapprehension. Eddy posits, on a biblical basis, that creation was originally and is ultimately spiritual. This spiritual image of body held in thought affects physical conditions in a redemptive manner that heals the human body.

A theologian, healer, teacher, author, and publisher, Eddy continued to function as leader of her church into her ninetieth year. In the twenty-first century Eddy has been recognized for her pioneering work in the field of spiritual healing.

Bibliography

Eddy published Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston, 1875; reprint, Boston, 2000), the textbook of Christian Science. Retrospection and Introspection (Boston, 1891), Eddy's autobiography, is more of a theological statement than an account of her life. It is included in a collection, Prose Works (Boston, 1925), as is Unity of Good (Boston, 1887). Miscellaneous Writings (Boston, 1896) reprints addresses, letters, sermons, poems and articles written between 1883 and 1896. Manual of the Mother Church (Boston, 1895) specifies the governing structure of the First Church of Christ, Scientist.

Mary Farrell Bednarowski, The Religious Imagination of American Women (Bloomington, Ind., 1999), includes a short section on Eddy that considers her and the religious movement she founded as the outcome of her emphasis on a practical reciprocity between theology and healing. Bednarowski identifies several areas where, she argues, contemporary women healers owe an often unacknowledged debt to Eddy's efforts. Yvonne Caché von Fettweis and Robert Townsend Warneck, Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer (Boston, 1998), is a collection of testimonials from individuals who benefited from Eddy's healing gifts. The accounts are interspersed with biographical details and comments about events in the history of the church, and the book includes brief notes about persons cited in the text.

Martin Gardner, The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy: The Rise and Fall of Christian Science (Buffalo, N.Y., 1993), written by a person who is not an admirer of Eddy, relies heavily on material that has been published previously by other critics. Gillian Gill, Mary Baker Eddy (Radcliffe Biography Series, Reading, Mass., 1998), is a massive, heavily notated biography. Gill offers detailed analysis of Eddy's childhood and family relationships and chronicles her public life. Gill had unprecedented access to church archives, and much original material was published for the first time in this volume. She also provides a useful annotated bibliography of both the favorable and the critical literature on Eddy. Stephen Gottschalk, The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (Berkeley, Calif., 1973), includes biographical data on Eddy but is primarily a social-intellectual history of Christian Science as a cultural phenomenon. Bliss Knapp, The Destiny of the Mother Church (Boston, 1991), originally copyrighted in 1947 but not published until over forty years later, is a biography that caused profound internal church controversy. Richard A. Nenneman, Persistent Pilgrim: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Etna, N.H., 1997), offers an overview of key events in Eddy's life with particular emphasis on critical moments during the establishment of the Christian Science movement. Nenneman cites previously unpublished material from church archives.

Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy, vol. 1, The Years of Discovery ; vol. 2, The Years of Trial ; vol. 3, The Years of Authority (New York, 1966–1977), a biography written by a Christian Scientist, is a contextualized and well-documented treatment of Eddy with particular emphasis on her evolving leadership. Ann Braude, "The Perils of Passivity: Women's Leadership in Spiritualism and Christian Science," in Women's Leadership in Marginal Religions, edited by Catherine Wessinger, pp. 55–67 (Urbana, Ill., 1993), asks whether women are empowered in movements founded by women. Braude prioritizes organizational factors over theological ones when considering Eddy's relationships with potential rivals, either male or female.