With Bleeding Footsteps: Mary Baker Eddy's Path to Religious Leadership Robert David Thomas Knopf 309 pp. $27.50 Review by the Reverend Peter J. Gomes Featured in BBR March 1995 It was a fall on the icy streets of Lynn, Massachusetts, on February l, l866, that turned Mary Baker Eddy from a sickly New England woman given to mediocre verse and the pursuit of cures for her persistent ailments, into the Founder of Christian Science, and one of the most fascinating women America has produced and the world has seen. That fall, for Christian Science an imprecise combination of the orthodox Christian notions of epiphany and pentecost, together with the favorable fall of Sir Isaac Newton's fall of the apple, turns the biblical notion of The Fall on its head. Instead of a departure from grace, a loss of intimacy between the divine and the human, and the introduction of sin, sickness and death, Eddy's fall in Lynn introduced her to a superior rational understanding of the divine-human relationship, and the principles of healing which transcended theology and science. She writes, "My immediate recovery from the effects of an injury caused by an accident, an injury that neither medicine nor surgery could reach, was the falling apple that led me to the discovery of how to be well myself, and how to make others so." From that discovery arose a host of publications, chief of which is Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures; and the Boston-based world-wide Christian Science Church with its Vatican-like headquarters, the Christian Science Publishing Society with its flagship newspaper The Christian Science Monitor. Abundant accounts of healings also arose under the auspices of Christian Science, and quite naturally, myth and lore grew around the person of the founder, Mary Morse Baker Glover Patterson Eddy, the l75th anniversary of whose birth will occur in l996. Visitors to Boston can hardly miss the imposing presence of the Mother Church, by far the most impressive pile of ecclesiastical stone in the city. Visitors to Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge nearly always ask to see Eddy's tomb at Halcyon Lake, and most of them have heard the story that there is a telephone within the tomb, presumably for some form of communication beyond the grave. America has long been fascinated with Eddy, and she is not easy to ignore. Feminist historians argue that our initial fascination with her stems from the fact that she was a woman out of place. It was not to be expected in l9th-century post-Civil War America that a major religious movement would be founded by a woman who had neither money nor the support of a powerful family, and who herself had no formal education beyond her own reading of the Bible. She was out of place as a woman who built a powerful and enduring institution. She was out of place as a woman who, in an age where women's mental capacities were thought to be significantly inferior to those of men, founded a religion not of feeling and emotion but literally of mind over matter. And she was out of place as a woman who had a strong sense of authority and power, a head for business, and no small ego in spiritual matters. She was independent, autocratic, and, above all, successful, and for that, by many, she could be neither forgiven nor ignored. If one's success is judged by the enemies one attracts, then Eddy was very successful indeed, for no less a cultural icon than Mark Twain devoted a whole book to debunking her and her movement. Twain thought her capable of governing a vast railroad system, but of her writings, "they exhibit no depth, no analytical quality, no thought above school-composition size, and but juvenile ability in handling thoughts of even the most modest magnitude." Harold Bloom, writing in our own time in his The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation, in the spirit of Twain called Eddy's prose style "one of the great ordeals of the American Religion." Bloom describes her as "a figure of heroic pathos, [who] willed herself into religious history without much intellect or knowledge to aid her." Her poetry reminds Bloom of the sulfuric observation of Oscar Wilde, that "all bad poetry is sincere." Yet despite his jaundiced view toward Eddy and her "dwindling movement," as Bloom puts it, he cannot quite dismiss her and asks, "Was Eddy a religious genius? The question is wholly sincere on my part, and is a legitimate concern of the religious criticism that I seek to develop. What after all was it, is it, that gave and gives Christian Science the dignity of its evident permanence as a sect?" A healthy contribution to an answer to Bloom's question is to be found in Robert David Thomas's study of Eddy, With Bleeding Footsteps: Mary Baker Eddy's Path to Religious Leadership. Thomas's ambition is to provide something of a map to the mind of Eddy, from her formative days in rural New Hampshire, to her closing days as something of a semi-deity, her after-life in a world-wide movement to whom she was Mother. This is intellectual history with a great deal of psychoanalytic theory thrown in besides-the analysis of feeling, perception, and relationships-all of which conspire to produce a process of thought greater than the sum of idea and circumstance. Those looking for institutional history or theological analysis here will be much disappointed, as I was at the outset. Nothing, however, is spared in dissecting those tangible and intangible forces of environment which inevitably contribute to the formation of personality and character. Thomas, for example, spends a great deal of time in the first third of the book on the relationship between the girl Mary Baker and her parents. Her father is the incarnation of the eroding rock of Calvinism. A Bible-reading, authoritarian, driven but not very successful farmer, reticent in feeling but firm in conviction, Mark Baker is the sturdy but unsympathetic figure with whom the weakish daughter with a will of iron must contend. The mother, Abigail, while outwardly dutiful, represents that mother-love to which the young Mary attaches enormous and increasing importance. Thomas suggests that in old age Mary Baker so annotates her memory of her mother that she almost becomes an abstraction of pure maternal virtue. Eddy saw herself as a rebellious child, and the rebellion was against the stern father figure. The mother, however, no less a Calvinist than her husband, was regarded by her daughter as the figure of comfort and consolation. On the basis of this analysis it is not difficult to see that in her mature years the nurturing mother and the authoritarian father were combined in the Eddy who was called "Mother" and ruled her church like the Pope, who was called Father. Thomas points out over and over again that Eddy's family life was fraught with tensions and difficulties. Her relationship with her parents was difficult and complex. Her relationships with her siblings ran from devotion to one of her brothers to indifference toward her sisters. She married three times: Mr. Glover died; she divorced the feckless dentist Patterson; and her marriage to Asa Gilbert Eddy was, in her own words, "a union of affection and high...purposes." She made it clear to all that it was not a "sexual union." She had a son by her first husband who was taken from her at the connivance of her relatives, as she was physically, and, Thomas would say, emotionally, unable to care for him. They would remain estranged. She adopted a son in later life, but the wholesome family life idealized by the l9th century was to elude her. In its place would be the world of her movement, where she adopted her best students and where the church was the home and family of which she was the emotional center. Christian Science has been called the most pragmatic of America's home-grown religions. It has been styled an American form of gnosticism. It is not unlike the city of its birth, itself a state of mind. Christianity has always been concerned with the relationship of the body to the spirit, and of what is seen to what is not seen. St. Paul spends a great deal of time in discussion of these relationships, including that of the transient to the permanent. The biblical miracles by which the authority of Jesus was recognized and confirmed had much to do with healing and the restoration of the body's health. His most remarkable miracle was the raising from the dead of Lazarus; and the ultimate confirmation of his own divine nature was his resurrection from the dead. St. Paul calls death "the last enemy to be destroyed," yet after the age of the biblical miracles had passed, healing and the conquest of death were qualities that would have to await the life to come. In this world of trial and tribulation, sickness and death would be the rule. The Calvinist principles which imbued much of American culture and religion in the world of the young Mary Baker taught patience and endurance under suffering, and invoked Paul's notion that suffering produced virtuous character. "What can't be cured must be endured" was as old a New England bromide as "In Adam's Fall We Sinned All." In some sense healing was contrary to nature, as nature, by virtue of the Fall-Adam's, not Eddy's-was itself fallen and death was the rule, the natural, indeed the divinely appointed end. To interfere with that was to risk the disapprobation both of God and of the people of God. In the mind of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, the single most important and formative influence in the life and thought of Eddy, this Calvinism was nonsense. Thomas says of Quimby that his "mission was to free people from Calvinism's iron grip so that they could restore their health. He did this by asserting that Calvinism was a fabrication; it had nothing to do with truth." He went on to say that "one half of the diseases arise from a false belief in the Bible." Such social and theological heresy appealed to many who in the l860's were themselves wrestling with their anxieties about Calvinism, and among these was Mary Morse Baker Glover Patterson, not yet Eddy. The relationship between Eddy and Phineas Parkhurst Quimby is a complex one, and vexed within the orthodox world of Christian Science. That she admired him, and was healed by him of her own illness, and learned much from him and his methods is well attested to, and by Eddy herself. From her point of view, he helped her to see what she later discovered for herself after her fall. To others, however, she merely appropriated as her own Quimby's techniques. In other words she was a plagiarist. That charge would prove to be the most hurtful to her and the one she spent so much of her energy combating. The notion that her truth was fraudulently obtained, or that the source of her truth, Quimby, was himself a fraud, or that the truth itself was a fraud, would be among the series of curses and maladies that would follow her like a cloud and attack her like poisoned darts. These, among other negative phenomena directed her way by her enemies, would be called Malacious Animal Magnetism, or, in a rough vernacular translation, bad vibes. She spent her life fighting M.A.M., and believed that it was a form of poison that her enemies directed against her husband Asa Gilbert Eddy, thereby causing his death on June 2, l882. Dr. Rufus K. Noyes made a medical diagnosis of organic heart disease, and believed that it was this that carried Mr. Eddy away. His wife's diagnosis was considerably different; she believed that "Gilbert was the victim of malacious mesmerism." Some might say that Eddy was paranoid. No one could deny that she was productive. In l879 she formed the Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, and she was its president. In l88l she formed the Massachusetts Metaphysical College of which she was also president, and Professor of Obstetrics, Metaphysics and Christian Science. In l883 she brought out the first issue of The Journal of Christian Science and Health. She was later to become founding pastor of the First Church, or the Mother Church of Christ, Scientist. She would found the Publishing Society, The Christian Science Monitor, and would continue to produce editions of Science and Health With Key To The Scriptures. She attracted attention: that of Mark Twain we have noted. She also attracted an almost fanatical loyalty on the part of her more enthusiastic students. To one of these, Ira Knapp, she was, as Thomas puts it, "God's messenger to this age; she was the Woman of the Apocalypse as foretold in Revelation l2, and Christian Science was nothing less than the second coming." Eddy herself would have none of this. Thomas calls her "a reluctant charismatic figure; she was never fully comfortable with the adulation of her followers, and when it was carried to excess she began to sense that her spiritual self had been overtaken temporarily by her personal needs. She would then regroup and reestablish the spiritual side of things." An example of this is her refusal to have her room in the original edifice of the Mother Church turned into a shrine called "Mother's Room." It was to be simply "Eddy's Room," and the effusive inscription in the mosaic tile was ordered removed. Thomas argues, and with great effect, I believe, that Eddy represented a form of feminism and autonomy whose radical nature threatened to undo all that was thought to be fixed and proper in the bourgeois Protestant culture of late l9th century America. Christian Science with its female leader was as foreign, and hence as dangerous, as Roman Catholicism with its cult of the Virgin Mary and its monarchical Pope. It was this threat to the American way that Twain recognized and to which he responded with such venomous ridicule. Of her success Thomas puts it simply and clearly: "In many respects," he writes, "Eddy hit the right note at the right time; she synthesized 'science' and nurturance, and she contained the anxiety by taking the process out of the body. She emphasized what many wanted to believe anyway...She succeeded in part because of the strength of her religious truth and because she provided an opportunity for different kinds of people." This book is a refreshing take on an ever-fascinating subject. Mary Baker Eddy was America's response to the Age of Anxiety. And as that age has never fully passed from our cultural life, we will always find her and her movement of significance and interest. Harold Bloom notes with a half-hint of glee the declining numbers of adherents to Christian Science; and those of us in Boston have been treated in recent years to the spectacle of the church's declining financial fortunes. Nevertheless, Eddy remains a figure of intense interest not so much for the substance of her teaching, which remains an elusive enterprise for many, but rather for what she and her movement teach us about ourselves, our fears, and our needs as a culture. Robert David Thomas has done us all a service in sharing with us his sensitive scrutiny of Mary Morse Baker Glover Patterson Eddy. The Reverend Peter J. Gomes is Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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