One Simple Idea (7 page)
Authors: Mitch Horowitz
Indeed, in the fall of 1862 in Quimby’s household in Portland, Maine, Eddy seemed to embark on the mission of her life. But the manner in which Eddy carried out that mission, shaping its theology and structure, was largely—and brilliantly—her own. In the years following Quimby’s death in early 1866, Eddy arduously, and with vision and intellect, codified Christian Science theology into her
Science and Health
. Followers considered it a revelatory work. Some observers, including Mark Twain, remarked on what they considered suspicious embellishments as the book passed through a series of revisions until its final edition in 1907. To critics, such changes suggested that the supposedly inspired text benefited from the hands of unseen writers and editors. But this kind of argument showed rigidity on the part of detractors more than it revealed concealed footsteps by Eddy, who was forthright about embarking on a continued refinement of her vision.
*4
Is there evidence that Eddy devised portions of
Science and Health
from
Quimby’s unpublished notes, to which she would have been privy as a student? As foreshadowed in Horatio Dresser’s 1900 letters, a source no less august than the
New York Times
seemed to believe so. Six years before Eddy’s death, in a withering, unsigned two-page spread published in July 1904, the
Times
depicted Mrs. Eddy as an ambitious student who picked over Quimby’s writings. The article included side-by-side columns of text that appeared to reveal an echo of Quimby’s notebook writings in the work of Eddy.
For her part, Eddy stuck to a version of events that depicted her not as a protégé but as a burgeoning teacher, even while under Quimby’s care. “I re-arranged a few of his short essays,” Eddy had written in 1888, “and gave him also some of my own writings which remained among his papers, and have been spoken of by persons unfamiliar with the facts as his own.” Eddy’s claim that some of her writings got integrated with Quimby’s evoked indignation among partisans. Yet a review of Quimby papers shows that Eddy’s claim that her writing, and that of others, got sorted in with Quimby’s may have merit.
Quimby’s son and executor, George—no friend to Eddy’s memory—acknowledged that Eddy had spent personal time with Quimby, “sitting in his room, talking with him, reading his Mss., and copying some of them, writing some herself and reading them to him for criticism.” A review of transcribed Quimby manuscripts shows that in 1868 Eddy had added a preface to the Quimby manuscript called “Questions and Answers,” which she and a few other students circulated among themselves. The
New York Times
, in its two-column comparison of similarities between the Quimby and Eddy writings, erroneously included this Eddy passage in the Quimby column, crediting it to him and further muddying the waters about who wrote what. In the experimental atmosphere of Quimby’s Portland circle, his unpublished manuscripts were copied and passed around, discussed and amended, dictated, revised, and recirculated. While the vast preponderance of Quimby’s material is original to him, a portion grew out of collaborative efforts at clarification and refinement, with the occasional commingling of notes.
Eddy was a woman of literary skill and verve, a force of thought and originality whose publishing, theological, and educational institutions were already carefully formulated by the early twentieth century. Quimby, for all his prescience and originality, produced many pages of sometimes ponderous concepts, which were amassed into folios that remained unread decades after his death, and even in their edited versions are rarely penetrated today.
Quimby was a great Yankee mystic and foresightful healer—a thinker who set the stage for New England’s mid-nineteenth-century renaissance of mental experimentation. He possessed a seminal, early understanding of the subconscious mind, which he fitfully sought to articulate. But Quimby was not the covert founder of Christian Science, nor was he the sole progenitor of mental healing. He was, rather, an instigator, a heroic experimenter, and a figure capable of inspiring intellects more disciplined than his own, among them Mary Baker Eddy, Warren Felt Evans, and Horatio Dresser.
From the ferment of these relationships emerged the philosophy of positive thinking. Swelling beyond the borders of the New England mental-healing scene, positive thinking would soon take on new names, such as New Thought and Unity, under which it entered American households. As its influence grew, however, the philosophy sometimes conflicted with the aims of the pioneers themselves.
*1
There were subtle but important differences between Franklin’s ethical literature and that of the Puritans. While the Puritans believed that man’s improvement was a matter of salvation and service to God, Franklin encouraged material success and the advancement up society’s ladder.
*2
Evans coined the term
New Age
, in its modern spiritual-therapeutic sense, in his 1864 work
The New Age and Its Messenger
. The “Messenger,” in this case, was Swedenborg.
*3
The book’s references to a “positive mental force” gave the movement some of its hallmark language. References to a “Positive Mind” had also appeared earlier in the work of a medium and spiritual writer from New York’s Hudson Valley, Andrew Jackson Davis, known as the “Poughkeepsie Seer.” In 1847, Davis described the universe as the product of the “active energies of the Divine Positive Mind.”
*4
Contemporary readers who approach
Science and Health
will find, contrary to commonly held views, not a turgid, difficult-to-get-through tome but, rather, a book of surprisingly sprightly passages that often anticipate present-day concepts in the uses of prayer and meditation for health.
“to redeem defeat by new thought”
The day is plastic to you.
—Emma Curtis Hopkins, 1888
In 1884, a Manchester, New Hampshire, housewife in her early thirties left behind her husband and young son to move to Boston to devote herself to Mrs. Eddy, as followers called the Christian Science founder.
The housewife’s motives were at once evident and inscrutable. She had heard Eddy speak at a neighbor’s home in October 1883 and was enthralled with her Christian Science philosophy. The younger woman’s religious and intellectual interest intensified later that year when she
traveled to Boston to take a class with Eddy. By August 1884, she resolved to leave her husband and nine-year-old son in order to join Eddy and the Christian Science fold in Boston. Though she hinted at abuse in her debt-ridden marriage to a high-school English teacher, all she wrote to Eddy was, “I am happily married to a young man … and have one sweet little son.” Whatever the true nature of her home life, her passion was for Christian Science alone.
This was Emma Curtis Hopkins. A mystic, a suffragist, and a brilliant student of Christian Science, she seemed fated to become one of Eddy’s most trusted companions. Instead, she became a source of Eddy’s ire—and later her competitor and scourge. The split between the Christian Science founder and her onetime student formed the opening of a chrysalis from which emerged a new and greatly popular strain of mind-power philosophy that went under the name New Thought.
Emma Curtis Hopkins first encountered Mrs. Eddy in the fall of 1883 when the healer was visiting Manchester and staying at the home of one of her local students. Eddy’s hostess prevailed upon her to deliver a short discourse on Christian Science to a group of visiting neighbors. Emma was among them. For her, hearing Eddy was like an intellectual parting of the Red Sea.
She was enthralled with Eddy’s idea of a Divine Mind infusing all of life. By December, Hopkins wrote to Eddy saying that the same neighbor who had hosted her had cured Hopkins of “a late serious illness” using Christian Science methods. Hopkins told the Christian Science founder that she wanted to dedicate herself to her efforts. “I lay my whole life and all my talents, little or great, to this work,” she wrote Eddy on January 14, 1884.
Before Hopkins left her home to join Eddy in the late summer of 1884, Eddy granted the erudite younger woman the visible and valued position of editor of the church’s house organ, the
Journal of Christian Science
(renamed the
Christian Science Journal
in April 1885). Hopkins became the first person other than Eddy to hold that title. She was also given a place to live in the women’s dormitory of Eddy’s Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston. Hopkins asked only that Eddy not reveal that her job as the
Journal
’s editor paid no salary, so that her family wouldn’t have further cause to question her judgment in uprooting herself. “I must go to Boston without letting anybody (my relatives, I mean) know that I go as editor of a paper without salary,” she wrote to Eddy on August 16, 1884. For Hopkins the move meant a chance to study at the feet of the master, and that was everything she wanted.
She assumed editorship in September 1884, but by October 1885, little more than a year later and without any obvious warning, Hopkins found herself dismissed from the
Journal
and expelled from her room at the Metaphysical College’s women’s dormitory. All support was pulled out from under her—without even a clear explanation as to why. In an undated letter to Eddy, Hopkins complained: “I received a peremptory message from Dr. Frye [Eddy’s secretary] to vacate my room at the college, accompanied by a notification from Mrs. Crosse that my services were no longer necessary on the
Journal
in view of the lack of funds.”
The attractive and intelligent Hopkins came to believe that she had crossed Eddy’s unwritten rule: never to make references to having your own communication with the Divine. This was something that Hopkins had fleetingly done in a September 1885
Christian Science Journal
editorial, which otherwise defended Eddy from critics. In the offending piece, “Teachers of Metaphysics,” Hopkins wrote: “I was made to know Him face to face of whom I had heard by the hearing of the ear as a name only.” It was the kind of reference, however oblique, that could make Eddy uneasy.
“You remember that it was said the article
Teachers of Metaphysics
would get me in trouble,” Hopkins wrote her friend Julia Bartlett on November 4, 1885. She went on to describe a chilling atmosphere:
Everything I said and did after that was watched and exaggerated and reported. I really was under heavy fire mentally.
If I were to report what the students said to me I could get them into trouble, but I never did, for deep under all sudden resentments, I heard the sweet chord strike in every student—worshipful, reverent love for their teacher. But they could not understand my complex way of expressing myself, nor know that I was digging for facts.
By “digging for facts,” Hopkins was apparently referring to the Eddy-Quimby controversy. And in that matter she came down squarely on Eddy’s side. “I saw all the letters said to be written by Mrs. E. to Dresser and Quimby and
not one of them
could be held as argument against her supreme originality,” Hopkins wrote Bartlett. Yet a subtler conflict simmered below her inquiries.
Hopkins was digging not only for facts but for ideas. She was apparently reading broadly in metaphysics, Eastern religions, and the occult. This, possibly more than her editorial, cut against the culture Eddy was establishing within the church. Perhaps wary of the slapdash manner in which Quimby’s manuscripts had been handled, and the confusions and controversies that later resulted, Eddy strove for order and discipline within her fold.
By the 1880s, Christian Science had become a strict church, with a liturgy composed of prayers and readings dedicated to revealing the healing power of Christ. Eddy decreed that the church’s core texts and practices would be subject to no adjustments, innovations, or outside influences. In the months following Hopkins’s arrival, Eddy made it clear that students were not to go sampling the varieties of metaphysical literature that were abounding on the New England scene, from Theosophy to mind-cure.
Yet even before Hopkins was made editor of the
Christian Science Journal
, she had been forthright about her eclectic spiritual interests—and in the
Journal
’s pages, no less. In a short article Hopkins wrote for the
Journal
in April 1884, “God’s Omnipresence,” she stated: “There is Truth in every religious system of the world, else it would find no followers.” Diffuse faiths, Hopkins argued, are “blessed evidence of the universal goodness and impartiality of God, that to every people and nation of the earth He has manifested Himself as Life, Truth, Holiness—and Health.” To drive home her point, she hailed the common truths expressed through “the Buddhist Nirvana,” “Algazel [or Al-Ghazali], a Mohammedan philosopher of the twelfth century,” Spinoza, Confucius, the Zend-Avesta of Zoroastrianism, the Chandogya Upanishad, Hebrew and pagan traditions, and the Desatir, a collection of ancient Persian sacred writings that had been popularized by late-nineteenth-century Theosophists.
At an early stage Hopkins was openly, even insistently, eclectic. This adds another layer of perplexity to her expulsion. Eddy was obviously aware of the breadth of Hopkins’s outlook—indeed, it could be argued to Eddy’s credit that Hopkins’s article proved no barrier to her being named editor. Why then the split? It may have arisen from Eddy’s growing concern to curb some of the larger personalities in the movement. These included women such as Ursula Gestefeld, an energetic student of Eddy’s and contemporary of Hopkins, who in 1888 published her own interpretation of Christian Science. Eddy deeply disapproved of the move, which led to Gestefeld’s public feud and split with the founder. Eddy would tolerate no unorthodox interpretations of Christian Science, and especially not from students setting up independent followings or experiments of their own. On this count, Eddy was unyielding. Shaped by the brunt of court battles, and by the widespread pilfering of her vocabulary, Eddy eventually copyrighted the term
Christian Science
and by the mid-1880s effectively expelled any follower—no matter how gifted—who hinted at independent directions or committed the heresy of studying work from figures in the Quimby circle, especially Warren Felt Evans.