Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910)

Birth at Bow and a Congregationalist family

Mary Morse Baker was born on 16 July 1821 on a farm at Bow, New Hampshire, the youngest of the six children of Mark Baker, a farmer, and his wife Abigail Barnard Ambrose Baker^[7]. On 26 July 1838, at seventeen, she was received into the Congregationalist Church of Tilton (New Hampshire), a rigorous Calvinist confession whose tenets she would challenge very early, notably predestination^[8]. Her formal schooling was repeatedly interrupted by fragile health; she compensated with abundant personal reading and an early practice of writing in prose and verse^[9].

Fragile health and a precocious mystical imagination

All her childhood and youth were punctuated by nervous crises, back pains and fainting fits which her biographers — sympathetic as well as critical — describe as chronic and disabling, treated according to the usage of the time with morphine and hypnosis^[10]. This lasting frailty shaped very early in her a personal quest for healing which would become, forty years later, the very centre of her doctrine.

George Washington Glover (1843-1844): an early widowhood

In December 1843, Mary Baker married George Washington Glover, a building contractor. He died of yellow fever in June 1844 at Wilmington (North Carolina), three months before the birth of their son, George Washington Glover II, born on 12 September 1844^[11]. Widowed at twenty-two after only six months of marriage, she returned to live with her parents in New Hampshire^[12]. As her health continued to decline, she entrusted her son, around 1851, to the family's former nurse — a separation that would prove lasting and painful, the boy growing up far from his mother^[13]. In November 1849, her mother Abigail died; three weeks later, her fiancé of the moment, John Bartlett, died in turn^[14].

Daniel Patterson (1853-1873): a second marriage broken

In 1853, she married Daniel Patterson, an itinerant dentist whose professional and personal instability soon proved problematic^[15]. Patterson abandoned her in 1866, after four years spent lodging with various host families; she formally divorced him in 1873 on grounds of desertion and infidelity^[16].

Asa Gilbert Eddy (1877-1882) and "malicious animal magnetism"

On 1 January 1877, in the parlour of her house at Lynn, she married her pupil Asa Gilbert Eddy, who brought her, according to her Church's official biography, "unfailing support"^[17]. He died of heart disease on 3 June 1882, shortly after their move to Boston^[18]. Yet Mrs. Eddy rejected this natural explanation: on the very day of his death, she summoned the Boston Globe to her home to declare that her husband had been the victim of a "mental assassination" perpetrated by enemies in Boston who "had sworn to harm them"^[19]. The doctor, Dr Rufus Noyes, nevertheless showed her the deceased's failing heart and pointed out its organic lesions to her; she continued all the same to maintain that her husband had died of "mental arsenic"^[20]. She named this invisible cause "malicious animal magnetism" (M.A.M.) — a central concept of her theodicy, since Christian Science, denying the existence of a personal devil, still had to explain where felt evil comes from; the historian of religions Catherine Albanese discerns in it the persistence of a Calvinist devil beneath the metaphysical surface^[21].

The Catholic priest Msgr George Rutler notes the profound irony of this episode: far from confronting the reality of death, Mrs. Eddy rationalised it through a metaphysical abstraction amounting, in his view, to a genuine "Manichaean dualism" — refusing to the very end to admit that her husband, like every man, had simply died^[22].

The mesmerist of Portland (1862-1866)

On 14 October 1861, Daniel Patterson wrote to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a mental healer and former clockmaker of Portland (Maine) famed for his techniques of mental suggestion inherited from mesmerism, to request treatment on his wife's behalf^[23]. Mary Patterson (the future Eddy) met him in person in October 1862 and became his assiduous disciple until his death on 16 January 1866^[24]. Quimby had each of his pupils copy out his manuscripts as a teaching method; Mrs. Eddy kept all her life a copy annotated in her own hand of a text summarising his doctrine, entitled Extracts from P. P. Quimby's Writings^[25].

The controversy of the "Quimby manuscripts"

A facsimile of this document, compared column by column with passages from Science and Health, appeared in the New York Times of 10 July 1904, fuelling a charge of plagiarism that would pursue Mrs. Eddy all her life and which she never acknowledged^[26]. Quimby's original manuscripts would not be published until 1921 by Horatio Dresser — fifty-five years after their author's death, by which time Christian Science was already firmly established^[27]. Historians remain divided over the true extent of this borrowing. The biographer Gillian Gill concludes that the evidence for a massive Quimbyan foundation of Eddy's theology of healing is "not only weak but largely rigged"^[28], while the historian of religions J. Gordon Melton acknowledges that "Eddy certainly shared some ideas with Quimby" but that "she differed from him on key points, notably healing techniques", adding that "she did not share Quimby's hostility toward the Bible and Christianity"^[29]. Whatever the exact share of borrowing, the documented and undisputed fact remains: it was by studying for four years, alongside Quimby, a theory of healing by the mind that Mrs. Eddy worked out the core of what would become her own doctrine.

The accident of 1 February 1866 at Lynn

On 1 February 1866, Mary Patterson slipped on an icy pavement at Lynn (Massachusetts) and injured herself seriously^[30]. Dr Alvin M. Cushing, a homeopathic physician of Lynn called to her bedside, diagnosed concussion and a possible spinal dislocation^[31]. According to the account she herself would later give, taken up today by her Church, she recovered as early as 3 February 1866, two days after the accident, upon reading a Gospel healing narrative — that of the paralytic in Matthew 9^[32]. On 14 February 1866, in a letter to Julius Dresser (a pupil of Quimby), she explicitly attributed her relapse to Quimby's recent death, revealing how far her thinking remained at that date dependent on the Quimbyan framework^[33].

A healing contested from the outset

This founding narrative was never confirmed by her attending physician. In 1908, approached by opponents of the movement linked to the New York World newspaper, Dr Cushing signed a deposition stating that he had never judged the injury serious, nor ever heard of any miraculous healing^[34]. The Church of Christ, Scientist in turn gathered several depositions from neighbours at Lynn and Swampscott contradicting this late version from Cushing^[35] — but the disagreement between the contemporary medical source of the facts and the Foundress's later narrative remains, to this day, documented without having been settled.

Writing Science and Health (1872-1875)

After several years of intensive study of the Scriptures and of writing personal notes from 1867 on, Mrs. Eddy stopped teaching in 1872 to devote herself entirely to writing her book^[36]. She completed the manuscript in the spring of 1875 in an attic room of her house at 8 Broad Street, Lynn, and published Science and Health in October 1875 in a run of a thousand copies, at the expense of the Christian Scientist Publishing Company which she had herself founded^[37]. The work, later retitled Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, would go through dozens of revisions until shortly before her death and remains, with the Bible, the sole reference text read at her Church's services^[38].

Lynn, then Boston: an organisation quick to take shape

In April 1879, Mrs. Eddy organised the Church of Christ (Scientist) at Lynn with a dozen members^[39]. The movement was reorganised in 1892 in the definitive form of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, known as the "Mother Church", whose Boston edifice was completed in 1894^[40]. In January 1881, she obtained the state charter of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, where she personally trained some eight hundred pupils between 1882 and 1889 at a fee of three hundred dollars each — her last class, in March 1889, numbering sixty-five students before the college closed the same year^[41].

The instruments of diffusion

Mrs. Eddy then multiplied the organs for diffusing her doctrine: The Christian Science Journal (monthly, 1883), the Christian Science Publishing Society (1898), the Christian Science Sentinel (weekly), the Herald of Christian Science (multilingual editions), and finally, at the age of eighty-seven, the daily The Christian Science Monitor, launched in 1908^[42]. This newspaper, whose stated vocation went beyond mere religious propaganda, would win seven Pulitzer Prizes between 1950 and 2002, before seeing its print circulation fall from two hundred and twenty thousand copies in 1970 to fifty-two thousand in 2008, then switching in 2009 to an essentially digital distribution^[43].

Founding chronology

A necessary simplification before the distinctions

To understand Christian Science, one must first grasp a simple idea on which everything else is built: Mrs. Eddy teaches that only Spirit truly exists, and that everything seeming material — a body, a disease, a pain, death itself — is but an erroneous belief, a kind of collective dream she calls "mortal mind". Healing, in this system, therefore consists not in treating a genuinely sick body, but in correcting a false thought about a body which, in truth, cannot be sick since it is not genuinely matter. This picture helps one enter the system; it does not replace a precise examination of her own texts, to which direct reference must now be made.

God, the one infinite Spirit

The glossary of Science and Health defines God as: "The great I Am; the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-acting, all-loving, and eternal; Principle; Mind; Soul; Spirit; Life; Truth; Love; Substance; Intelligence"^[44]. This accumulation of attributes aims to dissolve every distinction between God and his attributes: God is not merely living, he is Life; he is not merely true, he is Truth. Mind receives a strictly identical definition: "The only 'I,' or 'Us'; the only Spirit, Soul, Principle, Substance, Life, Truth, Love, the one God"^[45]. There is therefore, in this system, strictly no difference between God, Spirit, Mind and Soul: all these words denote one and the same reality, infinite and exclusively spiritual.

Matter: "mythology" and "mortal belief"

From this premise follows the most radical thesis of Christian Science. The glossary defines matter thus: "Mythology; mortality; another name for mortal mind; a material belief, viz., that Intelligence, Substance, and Life belong to non-intelligence and mortality"^[46]. The system's most famous formula, read at the close of Sunday services since 1896 under the name of the "Scientific Statement of Being", sums up this position in one sentence:

"There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all." — Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, chapter XIV, "Recapitulation"^[47]

The human body itself, within this framework, has only an illusory existence: flesh is defined as "an error of physical belief; a supposition that life, substance, and intelligence are in matter; an illusion"^[48].

Sin, disease and death: "errors of mortal mind"

The logical consequence of this metaphysics: disease is not a real evil affecting a real body, but a false belief which need only be corrected by spiritual understanding. A frequently cited example from Science and Health states it bluntly: "Sickness is a growth of error, springing from a seed of thought — either your own thought or another's"^[49]. Death itself receives, in the glossary, a definition which purely and simply abolishes its reality: "An illusion, the lie of life in matter; the unreal and untrue; the opposite of Life"^[50]. As for moral evil, Christian Science refuses to see in it the work of a personal being: the Devil is defined as "Evil; a lie; error; neither corporeality nor mind; the opposite of Truth; a belief in sin, sickness, and death"^[51].

A Christology which separates Jesus from the Christ

A decisive doctrinal point for the Catholic assessment to follow: Mrs. Eddy clearly distinguishes the historical man Jesus from the "Christ", whom she conceives as an impersonal divine manifestation rather than as his own incarnate divine person. The glossary thus defines the Christ: "The divine manifestation of God, which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error"^[52] — a formula the movement's doctrine glosses as an impersonal "Divine Principle", distinct from the historical person of Jesus. Jesus, for his part, is defined as "the highest human corporeal concept of the divine idea, rebuking and destroying error and bringing to light man's immortality"^[53]. This distinction between the man Jesus, a mere human concept of the divine idea, and the Christ, the impersonal divine manifestation made present through him, structures the whole soteriology of Christian Science — and rejoins, as will be seen, an ancient christological error already condemned by the first Christian generation.

Cross and resurrection reinterpreted: the Six Tenets

This whole doctrine is condensed in the six Tenets of the Mother Church, professed at every Sunday service since the publication of the Church Manual in 1895:

"1. As adherents of Truth, we take the inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life. 2. We acknowledge and adore one supreme and infinite God. We acknowledge His Son, one Christ; the Holy Ghost or divine Comforter; and man in God's image and likeness. 3. We acknowledge God's forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin and the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as unreal. But the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts. 4. We acknowledge Jesus' atonement as the evidence of divine, efficacious Love, unfolding man's unity with God through Christ Jesus the Way-shower; and we acknowledge that man is saved through Christ, through Truth, Life, and Love as demonstrated by the Galilean Prophet in healing the sick and overcoming sin and death. 5. We acknowledge that the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection served to uplift faith to understand eternal Life, even the allness of Soul, Spirit, and the nothingness of matter. 6. And we solemnly promise to watch, and pray for that Mind to be in us which was also in Christ Jesus; to do unto others as we would have them do unto us; and to be merciful, just, and pure." — Mary Baker Eddy, Manual of The Mother Church, article VIII, section 4, "Tenets of The Mother Church"^[54]

The fifth tenet deserves particular attention: the cross and the resurrection are not confessed there as the real means by which Christ repairs the sin of the world and triumphs bodily over death, but as pedagogical events meant to "uplift faith" toward a higher truth — that of the "nothingness of matter". It is precisely this point which Catholic theology cannot receive, as will be shown below.

The following table sets side by side, term by term, the definitions of the Science and Health glossary and the corresponding teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in order to locate the doctrinal gap precisely.

The New York World campaign and the McClure's Magazine investigation

On 28 October 1906, Joseph Pulitzer's New York World — the newspaper that gave its name to "yellow journalism" — published on its front page a resounding attack presenting Mrs. Eddy, then aged eighty-five, as senile, dying of a hidden ailment, and the prisoner of an entourage squandering her fortune^[61]. A competing series, equally hostile, appeared simultaneously in McClure's Magazine from December 1906 to June 1908, signed Georgine Milmine with the editorial collaboration — long kept anonymous — of the novelist Willa Cather^[62]. The archives of the New Hampshire Historical Society show that those behind the legal proceeding that followed and the McClure's journalists directly exchanged their sources^[63].

The "Next Friends Suit" and the competency examination (1907)

In March 1907, distant relatives of Mrs. Eddy, funded by the New York World, brought a legal action — the "Next Friends Suit" — aimed at having her declared incapable of managing her own affairs and placing her person and fortune under guardianship^[64]. In August 1907, a judge and two court-appointed experts, including a psychiatrist, questioned her in person at her home in Pleasant View, Concord (New Hampshire): they unanimously concluded that she was of full mental competence, and the proceeding collapsed^[65].

Mark Twain's ambivalent judgment

Among the most famous commentators of the time, the writer Mark Twain devoted to Mrs. Eddy a whole collection of essays, published in 1907 under the title Christian Science. His judgment, mordantly ironic, remains profoundly ambivalent:

"She is the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary." — Mark Twain, Christian Science, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1907^[66]

But elsewhere, in the same work, he describes her in altogether harsher terms, calling her "grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees — money, power, glory — vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, pitiless [...] illiterate, shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably selfish"^[67]. This apparent contradiction reflects less an inconsistency of judgment in Twain than an observation shared by many of his contemporaries: Mrs. Eddy inspired both genuine fascination at her extraordinary journey and profound distrust of the means of her ascent.

The Christian Science Monitor and death (1910)

In 1908, at eighty-seven, Mrs. Eddy founded The Christian Science Monitor, a daily which would earn a journalistic reputation far exceeding her Church's circle^[68]. She died of pneumonia on 3 December 1910, aged eighty-nine, in her house at 400 Beacon Street, Chestnut Hill (Newton, Massachusetts) — a circumstance several Catholic commentators would note as a bitter irony in light of her own doctrine on the unreality of death and disease^[69]. She was buried on 8 December 1910 at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge (Massachusetts)^[70].

The movement's demographic collapse

The Church founded by Mrs. Eddy reached its American demographic peak in 1936, with 268,915 members recorded. The decline that followed was continuous and severe:

In 2015, the Church counted no more than 1,249 certified practitioners worldwide^[75]. Christian Science churches, whose number had kept growing until around 1960, have since closed in growing numbers^[76].

The courts confront faith healing alone: the Twitchell case

The gravest consequence of the doctrine — the refusal of all medical recourse in the name of the unreality of disease — produced dramas documented before the American courts. The most resounding case concerns Robyn Twitchell, aged two, who died in 1986 of peritonitis following an intestinal obstruction which medical experts described as "readily curable"^[77]. His parents, David and Ginger Twitchell, practising Christian Scientists, were prosecuted in 1988 and convicted in 1990 of involuntary manslaughter, before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts overturned their conviction in 1993 on a technical procedural ground — without calling the medical findings of fact into question^[78].

Further documented tragedies and the religious exemption

Beyond these emblematic cases, researchers and journalists document that about a dozen children die each year in the United States of highly treatable conditions when their parents resort to faith healing alone rather than medicine^[82]. In 2016, thirty-four American states still maintained a religious exemption specifically shielding Christian Scientist parents from prosecution for medical neglect of their children^[83]. The Church replies today that its members remain free to choose medical recourse, while acknowledging that some faithful who made that choice report having been shunned by their community^[84].

What can sincerely be recognised

An honest Catholic reading of Mary Baker Eddy's life cannot stop at a curt condemnation. Her quest for healing was born of real and prolonged suffering, in a 19th-century American medical context where the available treatments — bleeding, mercury, opiates administered without discernment — could be as dangerous as the ills they claimed to cure^[85]. Her insistence on the power of hope and faith in the healing process touches, without precisely knowing it, on a reality well studied today by medicine itself — the influence of the psychic state on certain physiological processes — even if Christian Science draws from it a radically excessive metaphysical conclusion by purely and simply denying the reality of matter. Her claim to a full-fledged female ministry, in a Protestant America still largely closed to women's preaching, joins on this precise point that of her contemporary Catherine Booth. Finally, her Church produced, with the Christian Science Monitor, a journalism of recognised quality far exceeding the strictly religious framework of its foundation.

A denied matter against the goodness of creation

The point where Christian Science departs most radically from the Catholic faith concerns the very status of matter. The creation narrative affirms, at each of its stages, the intrinsic goodness of all that God has made:

"God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good." — Genesis 1:31^[86]

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that God created, in one and the same free act, "both spiritual and corporeal creatures"^[87], and explicitly warns against dualist and Manichaean conceptions which posit two eternal principles in struggle — Good and Evil, Light and Darkness — and judge the material world evil in itself, the product of a fall, and therefore to be rejected or overcome^[88]. Yet it is very precisely this structure which Christian Science reproduces when it defines matter as "mythology" and "mortal belief"^[89]: it does not merely deny disease or death, it denies the very goodness of the corporeal creation willed by God — albeit, unlike ancient dualism, by asserting that this matter does not even exist, rather than by declaring it evil. The practical result nevertheless converges: in both cases, the body ceases to be a gift to be received and cared for according to the order willed by the Creator.

A Christology which separates Jesus from the Christ

The distinction Christian Science establishes between "the person of the man Jesus" and "the Christ", an impersonal divine Principle distinct from him^[90], reproduces a structure which the first Christian generation already identified and condemned as a grave error. The apostle John writes:

"By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God; and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God." — 1 John 4:2-3^[91]

This insistence of Saint John in closely uniting the two terms — "Jesus Christ come in the flesh" — aims precisely at combating the error, later named Docetism, which dissolves or separates the man Jesus from the divine Christ, as if the latter had united himself to him only temporarily or in appearance^[92]. The Catechism, with the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, confesses on the contrary that the Word himself, the unique divine Person, "for us men and for our salvation [...] was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man"^[93] — not an impersonal principle descended upon a man distinct from himself, but God the Son himself truly become flesh, to save us by reconciling us with God, to make his love known to us, and to be our living model of holiness^[94].

A resurrection emptied of its body

The fifth Tenet of the Mother Church states it bluntly: the resurrection of Jesus served only to "uplift faith" toward "the nothingness of matter"^[95] — and the Science and Health glossary moreover defines the resurrection itself as a mere "spiritualization of thought"^[96], not as the real raising of a genuinely dead body. The Catholic Church teaches on the contrary that the body of the risen Christ is authentic and real, though clothed with the new properties of a glorious body — no longer circumscribed by space and time, but sovereignly free to manifest itself where and when it wills, even under unfamiliar features to awaken the faith of its disciples^[97]. Saint Paul had already warned that the stakes of this bodily reality are not secondary: "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain" (1 Cor 15:14). A resurrection reduced to a "spiritualization of thought" is, in this perspective, precisely no longer a resurrection — it empties it of its content while keeping its name.

A denied death which, in fact, really kills

The gravest point, on the practical and no longer merely theoretical level, concerns the documented consequences of this metaphysics on the health and life of the adherents themselves, particularly children who did not choose this doctrine for themselves. The Catechism recalls that death "is the end of man's earthly pilgrimage, of the time of grace and mercy which God offers him"^[98] — a reality to be crossed in faith, not denied by a metaphysical turn of phrase. Yet the very history of the Foundress illustrates this internal contradiction from the outset: she attributes the death of her own husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, to "malicious animal magnetism" rather than to the heart failure her doctor nevertheless shows her with his own eyes^[99]; and she herself dies, in 1910, of a perfectly real pneumonia^[100]. What Msgr Rutler calls a "Manichaean dualism"^[101] therefore does not remain a philosophical curiosity without consequence: it translated, in several documented court cases such as that of Robyn Twitchell, into the death of children suffering from perfectly curable diseases, for want of medical recourse refused in the name of the doctrinal unreality of disease^[102]. Catholic theology distinguishes here three levels of judgment: the thesis is false, since it contradicts the goodness of creation and the reality of the Incarnation and the Resurrection; it is less explanatory than the Catholic faith, which recognises the reality of suffering while giving it a redemptive meaning united to the Cross of Christ rather than denying it on principle; and it remains psychologically seductive because it promises an immediate liberation from suffering without requiring that it be gone through — a seduction whose price, in the documented cases above, proved literally mortal.

Despite its continuous demographic decline since 1936, the Church founded by Mrs. Eddy retains a cultural imprint disproportionate to its present numbers, carried notably by the journalistic reputation of the Christian Science Monitor^[103]. Its doctrine also irrigated, without institutionally merging with it, the broader American New Thought current (Phineas Quimby, then Ralph Waldo Trine), itself at the origin of contemporary personal development — Christian Science is nevertheless sharply distinguished from this movement by categorically refusing any identification with it, Mrs. Eddy regarding her own revelation as "unique and final"^[104]. She remains, in 19th-century American religious history, one of the major figures of a generation of founders of new religions — alongside Joseph Smith for Mormonism, Ellen G. White for Adventism, Charles Taze Russell for the Jehovah's Witnesses, and Helena Blavatsky for Theosophy — and, according to the National Women's Hall of Fame which inducted her in 1995, the only American woman to have founded a lasting American-based religion^[105].

• Answers to Protestantism — a Catholic synthesis of the great objections arising from the Reformation and its American offshoots.
• The miracles of Lourdes — to contrast with healings where the real body is genuinely restored, without denying the reality of matter or of disease.
• "I just believe in a higher being or energy, but I have no religion" — on the filiation between Christian Science, New Thought and contemporary spirituality without belonging.