1 of 6
Christian Science has attracted a good deal of attention in the last decade, most of it negative. Alarming court cases have featured heart-wrenching stories of Christian Science children who died of preventable illnesses and treatable injuries while prayerful parents and practitioners looked on. Rumors of financial battles and personality conflicts at the Mother Church in the early 1990s did little to elevate Christian Science in the public eye.
Such controversy is not new to Christian Science, which has endured its naysayers ever since Mary Baker Eddy first declared herself healed after falling on the ice in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1866. In the last five years, a number of books have attempted to plumb Christian Science's colorful past and ascertain, from there, its hazy future. Gillian Gill offers fresh perspectives on the faith's unconventional founder; Caroline Fraser exorcises personal demons in an acerbic exposé; and Barbara Wilson establishes a theological and literary standard with an autobiography of her loss of faith.
Gillian Gill's Mary Baker Eddy is the best biography to date. In her preface, Gill suggests that both the hagiographic and the unflattering portrayals of Eddy "are implicitly agreed on one essential point—that she deserved no personal credit for anything important she did." Sympathizers have depicted Eddy as the vehicle for the birth of Christian Science, while detractors consider her "merely very lucky and very unscrupulous." Gill, in contrast, employs her 700-plus pages to evaluate Eddy as a leader whose "main problem was that she had an extraordinary talent for life in the public sphere but was barred from entering it."
On the surface, Eddy's rise to prominence is the quintessential Horatio Alger story, but Gill serves it up with some distinctly feminist twists. Indeed, Gill openly esteems the strength that other biographers censure, seeing Eddy's lifelong struggle against feminine dependence (especially in the forms of frequent illness and destitution) as her most remarkable quality. Eddy palpably threatened 19th-century womanly ideals. She married three times, mostly unsuccessfully, and was forced by indigence and widowhood to give up custody of her son. She refused to retreat into the private sphere of hearth and home, instead becoming one of a handful of women in American history to found a lasting religious movement. She defied the Victorian female life sequence, Gill concludes, by being "conventional in her twenties, weak in her thirties, impoverished and sick in her forties, struggling in her fifties, exercising her talents at last in her sixties, famous in her seventies, [and] formidable in her eighties."
Gill acknowledges Eddy's tendency to rewrite her own past, suggesting that Eddy thereby refused to be regarded as "the passive victim of circumstances." So, for example, Eddy exaggerated the thoroughness and speed of her healing from her famous 1866 fall on the ice. Although she later claimed she "rose from [her] bed and … commenced [her] usual avocations" on the third day after the fall, contemporaneous evidence shows her second-guessing her own healing two weeks later, and "slowly failing" in her health before her eventual full recovery.
On some points Gill is frankly critical. She considers Eddy's poetry "dreadful" and concedes that Eddy managed, through her intense demands on her closest followers, to alienate many of them. (Her craving for genuine familial affection often caused her to make poor choices in her most intimate friends, especially in the last decade of her life.) Nevertheless, Gill's biography ventures farther than any other to demonstrate that by removing herself from Boston and the day-to-day workings of the church, Eddy took great pains to discourage a "cult of personality" in Christian Science—a determination that sharply distinguished her from most of the figures who founded religious movements in the spiritual hothouse of 19th-century America.
share this page
RSS Feed
