Mary Baker Eddy

Mary Baker Eddy (born July 16, 1821, Bow, near Concord, New Hampshire, U.S.—died December 3, 1910, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts) was a Christian religious reformer and founder of the religious denomination known as Christian Science.

Her spiritual quest

Mary Baker Eddy’s family background and life until her “discovery” of Christian Science in 1866 greatly influenced her interest in religious reform. She was born to devout Congregationalists at a time when Puritan piety was a real, though residual, force in the religious life of New England. She struggled with serious illness from childhood, grieved over the death of a favourite brother when she was 20, became a widow at 22 after only a half year of marriage to George Glover, and in 1849 lost both her mother and her fiancé within three weeks of each other. Her marriage in 1853 to Daniel Patterson eventually broke down, ending in divorce 20 years later after he deserted her. In 1856 she was plunged into virtual invalidism after Patterson and her father conspired to separate her from her only child, a 12-year-old son from her first marriage. She would not see her son again for nearly 25 years, and they met only a few times thereafter.

Her understanding of her personal and physical misfortunes was greatly shaped by her Congregationalist upbringing. Her proclivity for religion was evident early on, and study of the Bible was the bedrock of her religious life. She was especially influenced by ministers in the “New Light” tradition of Jonathan Edwards, which emphasized the heart’s outflowing response to God’s majesty and love.

Yet, as a teenager, she rebelled with others of her generation against the stark predestinarian Calvinism of what she called her father’s “relentless theology.” But whereas most Protestants who rejected Calvinism gravitated toward belief in a benign God, Eddy needed something more. Although she too believed in a benign God, she continued to ask how the reality of a God of love could possibly be reconciled with the existence of a world filled with so much misery and pain. She thus found herself confronting perhaps the most basic problem undermining Christian faith in her time.

The process of “discovery”

Eddy’s spiritual quest took an unusual direction during the 1850s with the new medical system of homeopathy. Losing faith in medical systems based on materialistic premises, she hit on what some today would call the placebo effect. Her conviction that the cause of disease was rooted in the human mind and that it was in no sense God’s will was confirmed by her contact from 1862 to 1865 with Phineas P. Quimby of Maine, a pioneer in what would today be called suggestive therapeutics. The degree of Quimby’s influence on her has been controversial, but, as his own son affirmed, her intensely religious preoccupations remained distinct from the essentially secular cast of Quimby’s thought. Though personally loyal to Quimby, she soon recognized that his healing method was based in mesmerism, or mental suggestion, rather than in the biblical Christianity to which she was so firmly bound.

Injured in a severe fall shortly after Quimby’s death in early 1866, she turned, as she later recalled, to a Gospel account of healing and experienced a moment of spiritual illumination and discovery that brought not only immediate recovery but a new direction to her life. “That short experience,” she later wrote, “included a glimpse of the great fact that I have since tried to make plain to others, namely, Life in and of Spirit; this Life being the sole reality of existence. I learned that mortal thought evolves a subjective state which it names matter, thereby shutting out the true sense of Spirit.”

While the precise extent of her injuries is unclear, the transforming effect of the experience is beyond dispute. From 1866 on, she gained increasing conviction that she had made a spiritual discovery of overwhelming authority and power. The next nine years of scriptural study, healing work, and teaching climaxed in 1875 with the publication of her major work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which she regarded as spiritually inspired. And it was in this major work that Eddy eventually included the basic tenets of the church:

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe

• 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.

Although the first edition of Science and Health contained the essential structure of her teachings, Eddy continued to refine her statement of Christian Science in the years to come. For the rest of her life she continued to revise this “textbook” of Christian Science as the definitive statement of her teaching. In 1883 she added the words “with Key to the Scriptures” to the book’s title to emphasize her contention that Science and Health did not stand alone but opened the way to the continuing power and truth of biblical revelation, especially the life and work of Jesus Christ.