SOURCE: "The Dusky Genius of Mary Baker Eddy," in Ball State University Forum, Vol. XIV, No. 3, Summer, 1973, pp. 38-43.

[In the following essay, Sowd examines the culture and theoretical background from which Christian Science came.]

For Mark Twain, Mary Baker Eddy was "the most daring and masculine and masterful woman that has appeared on the earth in centuries," and he wrote of her: "Closely examined, painstakingly studied, she is easily the most interesting person on the planet, and in several ways as easily the most extraordinary woman that was ever born upon it."

But, contrary to what is most often asserted by her biographers, Mrs. Eddy did not operate in some sort of cultural vacuum; like Thoreau, she was truly "born in the nick of time," and if she was extraordinary, it is precisely because she managed so perfectly to embody the peculiar concerns of the age and place in which she found herself.

"The dusky genius of Mrs. Eddy was," according to Van Wyck Brooks, "a sign of the times, a portent of the race, the place, the moment; for only a time of declining vitality, only a region at ebbtide could have given birth to the cult of Christian Science."

"In the year 1866," Mary Baker Eddy reflects in her religious textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "I discovered the Christ Science or divine laws of Life, Truth, and Love, and named my discovery Christian Science." The date is not without significance: the doctrines of Transcendentalism which, greatly exaggerated, were to form the basis of Mrs. Eddy's theology, had been formally introduced exactly thirty years earlier with the publication of Emerson's Nature in 1836; and, perhaps more important, the Civil War had just ended and much of the brightness of that hopeful current of idealism which the Transcendentalists had tried to channel into the mainstream of American life had been sadly tarnished in its sudden and awful confrontation with the realities of war.

In his study of the culture from which Christian Science emerged, Robert Peel makes this analysis:

There was little in the world of 1866 to suggest that Transcendentalism's failures were really successes. More and more, during two decades, that early idealism had been gathered into a single channel, the antislavery crusade; and when the Civil War was over and freedom's battle was won, men saw what base and sordid purposes their idealism had led to. The cynical reaction that always follows war set in. A sort of moral exhaustion marked the postwar years. Materialism roared ahead. Ostentation and bad taste were rampant.

The old ideals, the old myths, somehow just did not fit the new realities of postwar America. There were, in effect, two Americas: the one existing in the mind, made up of preconceived notions of what should be, and the other evident in the everyday experience of practical life—the reality mat actually was. "Just as Sunday was divided from the days of the week," explains Malcolm Cowley, American practical life was divorced from the life of the mind:

Practical life… had become a hard, dirty scramble in which the only justifiable aim was to get ahead, be successful, make money, but meanwhile the life of the mind was supposed to be kept as spotless and fragrant with lavender as a white Sunday dress.

This tendency to keep the life of the mind aloof and innocent, "spotless and fragrant," was termed by George Santayana the "Genteel Tradition": "The American Will," he said, "inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition."

While the American Will was settling the West and building cities, political machines, and industrial empires, the American Intellect was still back in New England, detached and going nowhere. "Boston could still fancy itself the Hub of the Universe, though its culture grew increasingly genteel and bloodless and unrelated to the vulgar vitality of the age." It was in the stale atmosphere of this "region at ebb-tide," this "sphere of the American woman," that Mary Baker Eddy found comfort and created the religion that would make the life of the mind sacred and insure the preservation of its innocence.

"The connection may have been tenuous," writes Van Wyck Brooks, "but still it existed between this new religion and Emerson's doctrines, which denied the reality of matter, or seemed to deny it, while they taught the omnipotence of mind:"

Had not Emerson said, "Never name sickness"? Was it not his idea that, since man was divine, evil could scarcely have any real existence? Alcott had shown an active interest in Mary Baker Glover—Mrs. Eddy, as she was known in Boston,—for whom pain, disease, old age and death were "errors." Alcott had been struck by her Science and Health and had visited her classes in Lynn and lectured before them. There was a deep relation between the Concord point of view and the mind-cure that was raging through New England.…

This is Brook's perceptive analysis of the lineage from which Christian Science was evolved; and in his American Renaissance, F. O. Matthiessen similarly observes that "From the weaker aspects of Emerson's thought, the rocking chair of Mrs. Eddy … is only just around the corner."

Mrs. Eddy seems to have been clearly aware of an affinity between her religion and what she termed "the philosophy of a great and good man, for such was Ralph Waldo Emerson." Shortly before his death, "she realized her long-held desire to meet the Sage of Concord." Emerson had been ailing and Mrs. Eddy, though uninvited, felt certain that he would receive her warmly as a kindred spirit, recognizing his own early ideas mirrored in her theology and, probably, humbly thanking her for reworking, perfecting, and attempting to popularize them. "I saw Emerson," she writes, "some months before his demise; went for the purpose of healing him." A noble purpose indeed, but the Sage would have nothing to do with the seeress. His flat rejection, however, was not to discourage Mrs. Eddy; undaunted, she later attributed her failure to his lack of vision: "… he was as far from accepting Christian Science," she says, "as a man can be who is a strict moralist."

She also decided that "Bronson Alcott is far in advance of him,"—a judgment prompted no doubt by Alcott's greater tolerance of her. Alcott, the dreamer's dreamer, whom Thoreau had apostrophized as "Great Thinker! Great Expecter!" had offered sympathy and encouragement to both Emerson and Thoreau when they had needed it most, and similarly he had tried to cheer up Mrs. Eddy. Just as she had gone to Emerson, Mrs. Eddy had taken it upon herself to mail a copy of her newly-published Science and Health to Alcott; these overtures would seem to suggest that she was trying to become accepted by the Transcendentalists who, she knew, would be at least somewhat familiar with her ideas.

Alcott graciously read the book and, in a letter reminiscent of Emerson's memorable greeting to Whitman upon the appearance of Leaves of Grass, he wrote to her in 1876:

In times like ours, so sunk in sensualism, I hail with joy any voice speaking an assured word for God and Immortality. And my joy is heightened the more when I find the blessed words are of woman's divinings.

He offered further encouragement by visiting her at her home in nearby Lynn and attending several of her classes in Christian Science (mainly, it seems, to voice his own opinions). Alcott's interest was just what Mrs. Eddy needed; she later wrote of him:

After the publication of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, his athletic mind, scholarly and serene, was the first to bedew my hope with a drop of humanity. When the press and pulpit cannonaded this book, he introduced himself to the author by saying, "I have come to comfort you." Then eloquently paraphrasing it, and prophesying its prosperity, his conversation with a beauty all its own reassured me.

Yet Alcott, like Emerson, remained unconverted; Mary Baker Eddy began to realize that perhaps he was not so far in advance of Emerson after all! In the absence of any disparaging final estimate of Alcott's shortsightedness as Mrs. Eddy had made of Emerson's, Robert Peel (himself a Christian Scientist and former editorial writer for the Christian Science Monitor) has provided his own:

Mrs. Eddy's attempt to reach through to Alcott at a point of crucial understanding had met with placid incomprehension.… For all his open-mindedness, this was too bold a leap for Alcott to take.… It was evident, by the time he had paid his last visit to Mrs. Eddy, that Alcott has missed the essential logic of her position.

Peel does admit that when they finally severed their relationship Mrs. Eddy "had now faded in Alcott's eyes to a genial fanatic" (the implication being of course, that there was something wrong with Alcott's eyes!). "Perhaps," he concludes, "Alcott may safely be left halfway between Emerson and Mrs. Eddy."

But while Mrs. Eddy's personal relations with the Transcendentalists were rather pathetic and unfruitful, the ideological parallel between her religion and their philosophy is a more serious matter. Paul Elmer More characterizes Christian Science as "a diluted and stale product of Emersonianism:" "There is a story," he says, "that when Emerson was visiting Carlyle, the gruff Scotchman, who certainly believed heartily in evil and damnation, carried his guest to the slums of London and pointed out to him one horrible sight after another:"

"And do you believe in the deil, noo?" he would say; and always Emerson would shake his head in gentle denial.

"The story," More concludes, "is at least ben trovato; it sets forth clearly the facile optimism out of which Christian Science was to spring:"

Such a creed, when professed by one who spoke with the noble accent and from the deep insight of an Emerson, was a radiant possession for seeking humanity forever; it is folly and inner deception when repeated parrot-like by men and women with no mental training and, visibly to all the world, with no warrant of spiritual experience.

Although optimism was an attitude expressed by Transcendentalists and Christian Scientists alike, the optimism of Mrs. Eddy and her followers was basically shallow and desperate—if for no other reason than simply that, immediately after the Civil War, there was just not much to be optimistic about. In Malcolm Cowley's view, high optimism was one of the chief characteristics of the Genteel Tradition into which Christian Science emerged; and in an apt description of the period, Robert Peel writes: "The wrong people were optimistic for the wrong reasons." Where Emerson had denied evil and had been optimistic that men could perfect their souls, Mary Baker Eddy denied sickness and was optimistic that she and her disciples might get through life with no pain or discomfort whatsoever. (Mrs. Eddy's emphasis is suggested by the title she chose for her textbook: Science and Health.) Christian Science offered an escape, with all the solemnity of a religion, from the insecurity and chaos of postwar America. "The prevailing religion," according to Van Wyck Brooks, "was comfort, with accessories … mind-cure and easygoing optimism.… Mrs. Eddy's world was a world of lonely people who had lost their vital interests and were bored and ailing." The religion she offered them "presupposed hysteria as the normal condition; for health," says Brooks, "is the centre of religion only for the sick." Christian Science indeed "answered a deep, insistent need of the population." The answer it provided was a sort of cure by denial: the world and all its problems, the evils engendered by a rapidly-growing industrial society, all sin and sickness, all nastiness, ultimately even all death (it was piously believed), could be overcome—i.e., made to go away—by simply pretending that these things were nonexistent; and in this hope was the essence of Christian Science optimism.

Christian Science was the product of a proximity to Transcendentalism that was both ideological and geographical. Yet while both movements originated in New England, what really separated them was the passage of time; the post-war New England of Mary Baker Eddy was a far cry from what it had been in the early days of Transcendentalism. "In nineteenth-century New England," writes Robert Peel, "the brief flare of Transcendentalism seemed to promise the advent of a new Golden Age. Instead it was succeeded by a tawdry Gilded Age in which idealism appeared to be swallowed up by materialism." Christian Science was, essentially, a form of Transcendentalism readymade for this Gilded Age. To keep from being swallowed up it had to stick its neck out farther than Emerson's doctrines had gone—so far, indeed, that it appeared not a little ridiculous: in desperation, it denied everything material, from the existence of the human body to the hallowed Nature of the Transcendentalists. But if Mrs. Eddy's ideals seemed to be higher up in the clouds, her practical vision remained very much fixed on goals that were less lofty. She offered, not to all men a key to their souls, as Emerson had tried to do, but to her followers alone a means for escaping discomfort. "In religion," says Van Wyck Brooks, the "springtime faith" of Transcendentalism, "with its feeling of a world to create and redeem, yields to the conception of religion as hygiene in the valetudinarian Mrs. Eddy."

Because she aimed lower, she naturally managed to hit the target more often: her religious enterprise was popularly received and became immensely successful. By 1903, Paul Elmer More was able to report that "Mrs. Eddy now numbers her disciples by the million—many of them educated and thoughtful people," and Mrs. Eddy herself could boast in a press release that her Science and Health, which sold for three dollars (out of which—according to Mark Twain—"the average profit to her on these books, above cost of manufacture, is all of seven hundred per cent!"), "is already in its two hundred and seventy-fourth edition of one thousand copies each. I am rated," she said, "in the National Magazine (1903) as 'standing the eighth in a list of twenty-two of the fore-most living authors.'" As Van Wyck Brooks notes in his discussion of this phenomenal success: "The faith-healer had won the day, and invalids frequented practitioners who silently thought benevolent things about them. The miracles of mind-cure were naturally numerous.…"

They were not, however, free of charge; Mrs. Eddy's was truly a gilded rather than golden idealism, and she and her practitioners made a handsome living on their income from patients. Mark Twain describes a fictional encounter with a Christian Science practitioner:

Mrs. Fuller brought in an itemized bill for a crate of broken bones mended in two hundred and thirty-four places—one dollar per fracture.

"Nothing exists but Mind?"

"Nothing," she answered. "All else is substanceless, all else is imaginary."

I gave her an imaginary check, and now she is suing me for substantial dollars. It looks inconsistent.

The practice was indeed inconsistent, and this inconsistency is indicative of what had happened to idealism in post-war America; it had tainted, gone sour and become commercialized, so that now it was a highly profitable business. Mrs. Eddy was able to charge $300 for a series of twelve lectures at her Massachusetts Metaphysical College, with none but the slightest misgivings: "When God impelled me to set a price on my instruction in Christian Science Mind-healing," she later reflected, "I shrank from asking it, but was finally led, by a strange providence, to accept this fee.…" "Mrs. Eddy's rising fortunes showed," according to Brooks, "how far these border-line activities, which were neither religion nor science but partook of both, answered a deep, insistent need of the population. It was riddled with nervous dis-orders. It was also bored."

While Mrs. Eddy was able to infuse some novelty into that bored life of the mind which New Englanders cherished so much, at the same time she pulled those who followed her even farther away from their practical lives and left them more detached from reality than ever. In the midst of the Genteel Tradition, Mrs. Eddy's religion was ultragenteel—not merely putting the life of the mind first, but actually denying the existence of any other life.

Today Mrs. Eddy's church is governed by the same set of thirty-five "Church By-Laws" she concocted and published as the Manual of the Mother Church in 1895. These "Laws" are final and absolutely unamendable; the organization of the Christian Science Church exists for the sole purpose of carrying them out to the letter. In an accurate description of this institution, Mark Twain lists what he calls the "Main Parts of the Machine:"

A Supreme Church. At Boston.

Branch Churches. All over the world.

One Pastor for the whole of them: to wit, her book, Science and Health. Term of the book's office—forever.

In every C. S. pulpit, two "Readers," a man and a woman. No talkers, no preachers, in any Church—readers only. Readers of the Bible and her books—no others. No commentators allowed to write or print.

A Church Service. She has framed it—for all the C. S. Churches—selected its readings, its prayers, and the hymns to be used, and has appointed the order of procedure. No changes permitted.

A C. S. Book-Publishing House. For books approved by her. No others permitted.

Twain was not exaggerating; all of this exists today in exactly the same form in which Mrs. Eddy created it (and as he described it—with the exception that since she is no longer alive, books published by the Publishing Society are now approved by Trustees who pass judgment strictly according to the explicit terms of her will). It is a rigid, authoritarian, conservative structure, which bears witness to Mrs. Eddy's dusky genius as Founder and Leader. Like some sort of inviolable time capsule, it stands today as a living monument to the extraordinary woman Mark Twain loved to hate, and—perhaps more important—to the Genteel Tradition that she so perfectly represented.