CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

In the late 1860s Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) founded a movement that became a new religion—Christian Science. Drawing on secular practices of mesmerism and mental healing, Eddy organized a church based on the actions of Jesus Christ. For example, Christian Scientists emphasize biblical passages such as Matthew 10:1, which proclaims that Jesus gave his disciples "authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal every disease and every infirmity." Christian Science unites medicine and religion in a practice of healing as an act of belief. As the new religion evolved, Scientists came to believe that they could bring Christianity to its final stage, in which Eddy would figure as divine mother, successor to Christ. Christian Science grew in both membership and influence through Reconstruction and the Progressive Era. The church has endured into the twenty-first century and, with Mormonism, is one of the two most influential religions founded in the United States in the nineteenth century.

Christian Science reflects the popularized idealism of the nineteenth century. Essential to its faith is the understanding that illness results from error. Material reality is mere appearance, arising from sinful thought and condition. The body is illusion and there is no death. The erroneous claims of illness should thus be met, to use the terminology of Christian Science, by demonstrations of faith through prayer. While Christian faith healing has been practiced for many centuries, Eddy made the case for a new revelation and built a powerful medico-religious organization on her assertion.

BIOGRAPHY IN CULTURAL CONTEXT

Throughout her life Eddy displayed symptoms that doctors in the nineteenth century would have diagnosed as hysteria or neurasthenia—nervous disorders that disrupted sleep and digestion and that caused prostration and tantrums. Even as an adult, Eddy had to be carried to bed and rocked to sleep. As Willa Cather (1873–1947) documents in The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1909), a collection of articles that Cather ghostwrote for a journalist from Rochester, New York, named Georgine Milmine, disruption was a constant feature of Eddy's life. Eddy tried many of the nineteenth-century's popular therapeutic practices: phrenology, spiritualism, mesmerism, Sylvester Graham's diet, homeopathy, and hydropathy. She became a patient and student of the influential mental healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866) and worked often with his manuscripts. Quimby understood mental healing to be a science and, in his writings, connected the practice to Christianity. In 1866, shortly after Quimby's death, Eddy injured herself by falling on an icy sidewalk in Lynn, Massachusetts. For comfort she read the Bible and discovered that she felt better. She later claimed the experience as a miracle. The moment was also fortunately timed. Eddy's second husband, Daniel Patterson, soon deserted her, and she needed to earn a living. Later, when she was accused of plagiarizing from Quimby, Eddy insisted on her moment of revelation. By 1870 she had written The Science of Man, by Which the Sick Are Healed; or, Questions and Answers in Moral Science and had developed a business: she trained students to be religious healers, charging them for their instruction and also claiming a percentage of their earnings.

The religion, its church, and the business of education and publishing grew rapidly. Brilliant in business, Eddy understood management, public relations, and legal strategy. The enterprise of Christian Science enjoyed visible success in a period of financial empire building; Eddy became a prominent and controversial self-made woman. As her organization grew, Eddy controlled it through a highly centralized command structure, with particular attention paid to the language of church communications, the education and certification of healers, and the management of information.

Successful as she was, to the end of her life Eddy was obsessed by the threat of mesmerism. If one could heal through prayer, one could also torment. In Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures (1875), the primary text of Christian Science, a chapter entitled "Animal Magnetism Unmasked" explains the distinction: "Christian Science goes to the bottom of mental action, and reveals the theodicy which indicates the rightness of all divine action, as the emanation of divine Mind, and the consequent wrongness of the opposite so-called action, —evil, occultism, necromancy, mesmerism, animal magnetism, hypnotism" (Eddy, p. 104). Certain that she was pursued by mesmerists, Eddy moved frequently and finally went into seclusion. Her flock, numbering thousands, continued to revere and worship her as the church continued to grow.

The phenomenal growth of the church can be seen as a complex reaction to modernization. Having been organized at the moment when medicine was itself professionalizing, as modern science entered a period of expansion alongside industrial capitalism, Christian Science moved to the center of cultural debate. Since its founding, the church has prompted controversy regarding its relationship with modern medicine and medical ethics, freedom of religion, the power of mind, and the separation of church and state. As concerns about public hygiene grew through the Progressive Era, Christian Science became a target of litigation over healthcare, particularly of children. Whenever children died through absent treatment or failure to vaccinate, Christian Scientists were taken to court. The new religion also drew large numbers of women in a period when women of the middle class began to move in increasing numbers into the paid workforce. Many women made a living by their practice as healers at a time when medical schools largely excluded them.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE IN PRINT

In 1875 Eddy published the first edition of Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, a book that had sold more than nine million copies by the time the 1994 edition appeared. In 1879 she established the church that became the Church of Christ, Scientist. In 1883 the monthly Journal of Christian Science began publication. Each number opened with a "crashing editorial," including accounts of "demonstrations," or successful healings (Cather and Milmine, p. 318). In 1908 the Christian Science Monitor became the international journal of the church. In a century of publication, the Monitor has earned a reputation for the quality and independence of its reporting. As Eddy founded it, the Monitor was devoted to self-defense and propaganda. Yet by the 1950s its style had changed. In the opinion of Charles S. Braden in Christian Science Today: Power, Policy, Practice (1958), the Monitor became "the greatest contribution the Scientists have made to modern American life" (Braden, p. 70). This achievement demands a heavy subsidy. The church Manual requires all Scientists to subscribe to the Monitor and to seek other subscribers and member advertisers. Just as the rejection of modern medicine has been advantageous to the church in many respects, the rejection of commercial advertising has preserved the independence and thereby improved the reputation of the Monitor.

DEMONSTRATIONS OF FAITH

The following letter from October 1887 was selected by Cather as one of the "demonstrations" reported in the Journal of Christian Science. The account raises the question of the dog's consciousness, implying that the dog imagined the snakebite. The notice also describes what Christian Scientists would call a right use of faith, the opposite of malicious animal magnetism or mesmerism.

Dog and Rattlesnake

DEAR JOURNAL: Our dog was bitten by a rattlesnake on the tongue a short time ago, and the verdict, as is usual in such cases, was death; but through the understanding of God's promise that we shall handle serpents and not be harmed, if we but believe, I was able to demonstrate over the belief in four days. The dog is now as well as ever.

Mrs. M. E. Darnell

Cather and Milmine, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science, p. 320.

LITERARY RESPONSES

Among responses of professional writers to Christian Science, three examples of durable literary interest—Mark Twain's, Willa Cather's, and Harold Frederic's—may suggest a broader general opinion. Commentators outside the church tend to be skeptical of the effects and the profit motive of Christian Science, even as they may question the claims of professional medicine. The fact that Scientists, many of them women, earned money while denying the effect of material medicine and the very existence of the material world—notwithstanding the wealth of the church and the opulence of its buildings—struck many observers as blatant hypocrisy. The diatribe by Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) is the best known of anti–Christian Science writings, typical in its argument but exceptional, like other works of protest by Twain, for its comedy. Originally written as journalism pieces for Cosmopolitan in 1899 and North American Review in 1902 and 1903, Twain's writings on the religion were later collected in Christian Science (1907): "Its god," Twain wrote of Christian Science, "is Mrs. Eddy first, then the Dollar. Not a spiritual Dollar, but a real one. From end to end of the Christian-Science literature not a single (material) thing in the world is conceded to be real, except the Dollar" (p. 68). Moreover, Twain argued, Christian Science posed a threat to modern democracy and the Christian world. Antidemocratic, anti-intellectual, and widely popular, it was a movement as powerful as what he called Mohammedanism, a cult Twain thought was destroying the ancient intellectual traditions of the East.

Twain's Christian Science opens with a tale of calamity, a fall from a cliff in the Alps. With broken arms and legs and "one thing or another" (p. 3) Twain suffers under care of a bony and grim healer from Boston. Declaiming on the illusion of pain, the healer accidentally steps on the cat. The cat yowls. The ensuing conversation exploits the illogic: the cat must have imagined the pain but cannot imagine pain, having no imagination. The healer denies it all: "Peace!" she cries at last. "The cat feels nothing, the Christian feels nothing" (p. 11). In the end, Twain is cured by a horse doctor.

Turning to Eddy's "verbal chaos" (p. 116), Twain argues that Eddy could not have written Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures. The English is simply too good. Juxtaposing passages from Science and Health with Eddy's poetry and other "offenses against third-class English," Twain's aim is to "pierce through the cloud" (p. 238) of Eddy's language. From her autobiography, for example, Twain makes fun of Eddy's ambiguous prose: "Many pale cripples went into the Church leaning on crutches who came out carrying them on their shoulders" (p. 119). Twain also raises the issue of plagiarism—that Eddy lifted her more accomplished prose from others. While such allegations had circulated since the early days of the movement, in Twain's hands the argument was both influential and funny. Among those who reacted was Eddy herself. Twain reproduces her remarks in the book as "a friend's duty to straighten such things out" (p. 331).

"Environment," Twain argues, "is the chief thing to be considered when one is proposing to predict the future of Christian Science" (p. 93). Cather seems to have largely agreed. She approached her subject through investigative journalism and psychobiography. Both writers present Eddy's notorious illogic as a key to her success, Twain using satire and Cather epigram: "Only one idea had ever come very close to Mrs. Glover [Eddy]," Cather wrote, "and neither things present nor things to come could separate her from it. . . . Others of his pupils lost themselves in Quimby's philosophy, but Mrs. Glover lost Quimby in herself " (p. 133).

Cather never publicly acknowledged authorship of The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science. Letters discovered after her death confirmed her association with the book and the articles that preceded it in McClure's (January 1907–June 1908). Her first extended work, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy documents Cather's early technique. From the patchy structure—pieces of interviews and extracts of depositions held loosely by narrative and analysis—emerges a portrait of a vindictive, charismatic self-promoter:

To-day some of these who have long been accounted as enemies by Mrs. Eddy, and whom she has anathematised in print and discredited on the witness-stand, still declare that what they got from her was beyond equivalent in gold or silver. . . . One of the students who was closest to [Eddy] at that time says that to him the world outside her little circle seemed like a madhouse. (Pp. 155–156)

Insightful and arresting, these character sketches predict Cather's later work. Equally arresting is her sympathetic reading of Christian Science.

Cather presents Eddy's biography through a report on the appeal of the new religion to people at the edges of the modernizing world. As westward movement and urbanization reduced the population of her native New England, Eddy "gave people the feeling that a great deal was happening" (p. 123). She attracted followers by her affected speech and behavior, "an interesting figure in a humdrum New England village" (p. 122). Cather also followed the movement of Christian Science on the frontier. She read widely in the Christian Science Journal from the 1880s. How, she asked, could a loving mother in Pierre, North Dakota, watch her baby die as a healer treated him for animal magnetism? "The sufferings of the baby," Cather writes, "and the terrible fortitude of the mother sound like a passage from the earlier and harsher chapters of religious history, which so often make us wonder whether there is anything else in the world that can be quite so cruel as the service of an ideal" (p. 324). Yet these were "not ignorant or colourless people. . . . they loved each other and their children" (p. 326). Cather found that Christian Science gave people an ideal they could grasp in a world otherwise transitory and impoverished. It was, Cather maintained—as source after source proved to her—an ignorant and entirely understandable "revolt from orthodoxy" (p. 337). Eddy's obsession with malicious animal magnetism found its way through the journal into the "conduct and affections" of people around the country and abroad (p. 322). Her "teachings brought the promise of material benefits to a practical people, and the appeal of seeming newness to a people whose mental recreation was a feverish pursuit of novelty" (p. 375). Demanding conditions in the western United States increased the popularity of Christian Science: "This religion had a message of cheer for the rugged materialist as well as for the morbid invalid. It exalted health and self-satisfaction and material prosperity high among the moral virtues—indeed, they were the evidences of right living, the manifestations of a man's 'at-oneness' with God" (p. 375).

To Christian Scientists, the book was incendiary. The church took extraordinary steps to stop its publication. Failing that, they bought and destroyed large numbers of copies and, according to story, succeeded in keeping reviews out of the press. The book all but disappeared until 1993, when the University of Nebraska Press republished it.

Cather had no illusions about orthodox allopathic medicine. Like Twain, she could cite the failings of doctors. Patients did not always respond to medical treatment, and many died under medical care. The emotional value and effect of belief on physical wellbeing was likewise undeniable. Though neither Twain nor Cather refers to the work of William James (1846–1910) or Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), an awareness of the new field of psychology, as the mind cure of the nineteenth century evolved into the psychoanalysis of the twentieth, is implicit in both studies.

Rational skeptics who distrusted doctors might find an alternative in Christian Science. In the literary world, the best-known exemplar of such a view was the novelist and New York Times correspondent Harold Frederic (1856–1898), author of The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896). Frederic served as exemplar not through his writing but through the example of his life. In 1898, following a stroke, Frederic died in London while under care of Christian Scientists. He had long been an informed critic of modern medicine and modernization itself. There is no evidence that Frederic believed in Christian Science. Rather, he appears to have chosen the treatment as an act of selfdetermination. Frederic's death was a transatlantic sensation, resembling a witch hunt. This happened in part because Frederic was a popular writer and journalist and in part because the press discovered he had led a double life, with wife and children in one household and mistress and children in another. While the manslaughter case against his mistress, Kate Lyon, and the healer never went to trial, the international coverage following Frederic's death was, in Cather's opinion, a boon to Christian Science. The news "brought the new cult to the attention of thousands of people for the first time" (p. 447). For her part, Eddy thought the death of Harold Frederic had severely damaged the church. According to Ernest Sutherland Bates and John V. Dittemore in Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition (1932), she told her healers to stay away from such dubious cases in the future.

Professional medicine would strenuously disagree with the alternative that Frederic chose. As William Lloyd Garrison, son of the renowned abolitionist, wrote in a letter in 1908, the opposition mounted by physicians against Christian Science on grounds that Scientists were not doctors and should not be paid for their services was selfish and hypocritical: "The medical faculty is very jealous and narrow towards all not of their fellowship" (Albertine, p. 63). The highly publicized Frederic case was but one of several that arrayed the forces of modernization and professional medicine against both skeptics and Christian Scientists. Controversy over Christian Science recurred episodically throughout the twentieth century, centering often on high-profile trials. With the New Age movement and the rise of interest in spiritual healing, the debate over Christian Science and alternative approaches to health has extended into the twenty-first century.

See alsoThe Damnation of Theron Ware

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Cather, Willa, and Georgine Milmine. The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science. 1909. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

Eddy, Mary Baker. Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures. 1875. Boston: First Church of Christ, Scientist, 1994.

Twain, Mark. Christian Science. 1907. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Secondary Works

Albertine, Susan. "'With Their Tongues Doom Men to Death': Christian Science and the Case of Harold Frederic." American Literary Realism 1870–1910 21, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 52–66.

Bates, Ernest Sutherland, and John V. Dittemore. Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition. New York: Knopf, 1932.

Braden, Charles S. Christian Science Today: Power, Policy, Practice. Dallas, Tex.: Southern Methodist University Press, 1958.

Schoepflin, Rennie B. Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Susan Albertine