Modern Religious Cults and Movements Part 9

A book is to be studied also in the light of its history; the time and place and purpose of its composition, as far as these are known, must be considered; no changes made in the text save through critical emendation, nor any translations offered not supported by accepted texts, nor any liberties be taken with grammatical constructions. By such plain tests as these Mrs. Eddy's use of the Scriptures will not bear examination. She violates all recognized canons of Biblical interpretation on almost every page.[42]

[Footnote 42: This is a brief--and a Christian Scientist may protest--a summary dismissal of the claim of "Science and Health" to be a "key to the Scriptures." But nothing is gained--save of the unnecessary lengthening of this chapter--in going into a detailed examination of her method and conclusions. She has insight, imagination, boundless allegorical resource, but the whole Bible beneath her touch becomes a plastic material to be subdued to her peculiar purpose by omissions, read-in meanings and the substantial and constant disregard of plain meanings. To the student the whole matter is important only as revealing the confusion of the popular mind which receives such a method as authoritative.]

Her method is wholly allegorical and the results achieved are conditioned only by the ingenuity of the commentator. It would require a body of citation from the pages of "Science and Health," not possible here, to follow through Mrs. Eddy's peculiar exegesis. One needs only to open the book at random for outstanding ill.u.s.trations. For example, Genesis 1:6, "And G.o.d said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters." The word "firmament" has its own well established connotation gathered from a careful study of all its uses. We can no more understand the earlier chapters of Genesis without an understanding of Hebrew cosmogony than we can understand Dante without a knowledge of medieval cosmogony. But, given this knowledge which is the common possession of all sound scholarship, we can at least understand what the pa.s.sage means, even though we have long left behind us the nave conception of the vaulted skies to which it refers.

All this is a commonplace not worth repeating at the cost of the white paper upon which it is printed, save as the ignoring of it leads to such an interpretation of the pa.s.sage as that which Mrs. Eddy offers: "spiritual understanding by which human conception material mind is separated from Truth is the firmament. The Divine Mind, not matter, creates all ident.i.ties and they are forms of Mind, the ideas of Spirit apparent only as Mind, never as mindless matter nor the so-called material senses" (page 505). Comment is not only difficult but impossible in the face of a method like this. If such an interpretation were an exception it might seem the unfair use of a hypercritical temper to quote this particular expression of Mrs. Eddy's mind. But her whole treatment of Scripture suffers from the same method.

Everything means something else. The Ark is "the idea, or reflection of truth, proved to be as immortal as its Principle." Babel is "self-destroying error"; baptism is "submergence in Spirit"; Canaan is "a sensuous belief"; Dan (Jacob's son) is "animal magnetism"; the dove is "a symbol of divine Science"; the earth is "a type of eternity and immortality"; the river Euphrates is "divine Science encompa.s.sing the universe and man"; evening "the mistiness of mortal thought"; flesh "an error, a physical belief"; Ham (Noah's son) is "corporeal belief"; Jerusalem "mortal belief and knowledge obtained from the five corporeal senses"; night, "darkness; doubt; fear"; a Pharisee, "corporeal and sensuous belief"; river is "a channel of thought"; a rock is "a spiritual foundation"; sheep are "innocence"; a sword "the idea of Truth."[43]

[Footnote 43: Glossary, p. 579--pa.s.sim.]

Mrs. Eddy does not hesitate to make such textual modifications of pa.s.sages as suit her purpose and even when she is not dealing with her texts in such ways as these, she is constantly citing for her proofs pa.s.sages which cannot by any recognized canon of interpretation possibly be made to mean what she says they mean. Beneath her touch simple things become vague, the Psalms lose their haunting beauty, even the Lord's Prayer takes a form which we may reverently believe the author of it would not recognize.

"Our Father: Mother G.o.d, all harmonious, Adorable One, Thy kingdom is come; Thou art ever present. Enable us to know--as in heaven, so on earth--G.o.d is omnipotent, supreme. Give us grace for to-day; feed the famished affections; and love is reflected in love; and G.o.d leadeth us not into temptation, but delivereth us from sin, disease and death. For G.o.d is Infinite, all Power, all Life, Truth, Love, over all and All."

_Its Conception of G.o.d_

It was quite as inevitable that she should undertake to fit her speculations into the fabric of the theology in which she and most of her followers had been trained, as that she should try to secure for her speculation the weight of the authority of the Bible. She would have to take for her point of departure the centrality of Christ, the outstanding Christian doctrines, markedly the Incarnation and the Atonement and she would need somehow to dispose of the Sacraments. All this is inevitably implied in the persistent designation of her whole system as a Christian system.

The chapter headings in "Science and Health" and the sequence of chapters are the key to the movement of her mind; they are determined by her a.s.sociation of interests. Marriage is on the same level with Prayer, Atonement and the Eucharist, and Animal Magnetism with Science, Theology and Medicine. It is hard to know where to begin in so confused a region.

She is handicapped, to begin with, by the rigidity of her idealism and actually by her limitation both of the power and personality of G.o.d.

This statement would probably be as sharply contradicted by Mrs. Eddy's apologists as anything in this study, but it is not hastily made.

Philosophically He is for Mrs. Eddy only an exalted ideality into relation with which we may think ourselves by a change in our system of belief. Actually, as we shall see, this conception yields to emotional and devotional needs--it is bound to--but in theory it is unyielding.

Now the accepted Christian conception of G.o.d is entirely different. Both the Old and New Testaments conceive a G.o.d who is lovingly and justly conscious of all our need, who is constantly drawing near to us in manifold appeals and approaches and who has, above all, in the Incarnation made a supreme and saving approach to humanity. He is no more rigid than love is rigid; His att.i.tude toward us, His children, changes as the att.i.tude of a father toward the changing tempers of a child. Now all this may be true or it may be only the dream of our strangely sensitive personalities, but whether it be true or not, it is the Christian conception and any denial of this or any radically different subst.i.tution for it cannot call itself Christian save as it writes into the word Christian connotations to which it has heretofore been utterly strange.

_Mrs. Eddy's Interpretation of Jesus Christ_

Mrs. Eddy begins, therefore, with the handicap of a philosophy which can be adjusted to Christian theology only through fundamental modifications of that theology. It is hard to systematize the result. Mrs. Eddy distinguishes between Jesus and Christ. Her conception of Jesus is reasonably clear whether it be historically true or not, but her conception of the Christ is vague and fluctuating. Jesus was apparently the first Christian Scientist, antic.i.p.ating, though not completely, its philosophy and demonstrating its practices. His teachings are so interpreted as to be made to yield a Christian Science content. When He urged the commandment: "Thou shalt have no other G.o.ds before me" what He really meant was, "Thou shalt have no belief of Life as mortal; thou shalt not know evil, for there is one Life."[44] "He proved by His deeds that Christian Science destroys sickness, sin and death. Our Master taught no mere theory, doctrine or belief; it was the divine Principle of all real being which He taught and practiced."[45] "He taught His followers the healing power of Truth and Love"[46] and "the proofs of Truth, Life and Love which Jesus gave by casting out error and healing the sick, completed His earthly mission."[47] "The truth taught by Jesus the elders scoffed at because it demanded more than they were willing to practice."[48] They, therefore, crucified Him and He seemed to die, but He did not. Apparently He was not dead when He was entombed and His three days in the tomb gave Him "a refuge from His foes, a place in which to solve the great problem of being." In other words He demonstrated His own healing in the tomb. "He met and mastered, on the basis of Christian Science, the power of mind over matter, all the claims of medicine, surgery and hygiene. He took no drugs to allay inflammation; He did not depend upon food or pure air to resuscitate wasted energies; He did not require the skill of a surgeon to heal the torn palms and bind up the wounded side and lacerated feet, that He might use those hands to remove the napkin and winding sheet and that He might employ His feet as before."[49]

[Footnote 44: Page 19. All citations from last edition.]

[Footnote 45: Page 26.]

[Footnote 46: Page 31.]

[Footnote 47: Page 41.]

[Footnote 48: Page 41.]

[Footnote 49: Page 44.]

"His disciples believed Jesus to be dead while He was hidden in the sepulchre, whereas He was alive, demonstrating within the narrow tomb the power of the spirit to overrule mortal, material sense." His ascension was a final demonstration in which He "rose above the physical knowledge of His disciples and the material senses saw Him no more." He attained this perfection of demonstration only gradually and He left behind Him an incomplete revelation which was to wait for its full illumination for the coming of Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science. Perhaps more justly He left behind Him, according to Mrs. Eddy and her followers, a body of teaching which could not be clearly understood until she came to complete the revelation. At any rate, Christian Science is really His second coming.

_Christian Science His Second Coming_

In an advertis.e.m.e.nt printed in the New York _Tribune_ on January 23, 1921, Augusta E. Stetson says: "Christ in Christian Science is come to the understanding of those who looked for His reappearing." And if certain sentences which follow mean anything, they mean that, in the thought of Mrs. Eddy's followers, she completes what Jesus began and fulfills the prophecy of His reappearing. "Her earthly experience runs parallel with that of her Master; understood in a small degree only by the few who faintly see and accept the truth, she stood during her earthly mission and now stands on the mount of spiritual illumination toward whose heights no feet but those of the blessed Master have so directly toiled, first in agony and finally, like Jesus Christ the masculine representative of the Fatherhood of G.o.d, she as the feminine representative of the motherhood of G.o.d, will appear in triumphant demonstration of divine power and glory as the combined ideal man in G.o.d's image and likeness."

And, indeed, there are not wanting intimations in "Science and Health"

which give to Mrs. Eddy a certainty in this region which Jesus Himself did not possess. He falters where she firmly trod. No need to dwell upon the significant omissions which such an interpretation of the historic Jesus as this demands. The immensely laborious and painstaking scholarship which has sought, perplexedly enough it must be confessed, to discover behind the Gospel narratives the fundamental facts and realities of His life, is entirely ignored. Mrs. Eddy has no place for the social aspects of the teachings of Christ, indeed His whole system of ethic could be "blacked out"; as far as her teaching is concerned it would make absolutely no difference.

Mrs. Eddy distinguishes, in theory at least though there is no consistency in her use of terms, between Jesus and the Christ. "Jesus is the human man, and Christ is the divine idea; hence the duality of Jesus, the Christ" (page 473). "Jesus is the name of the man who, more than all other men, has presented Christ, the true idea of G.o.d, healing the sick and the sinning and destroying the power of death" (page 473).

"In an age of ecclesiastical despotism, Jesus introduced the teaching and practice of Christianity ... but to reach His example and test its unerring Science according to His rule, ... a better understanding of G.o.d as divine Principle, Love, rather than personality or the man Jesus, is required" (page 473).

It is difficult enough to know just what this means, but as one stands far enough back from it all it seems to reduce Jesus historically to the first outstanding Christian Science teacher and healer. "Jesus established what He said by demonstration, thus making His acts of higher importance than His words. He proved what He taught. This is the Science of Christianity. Jesus _proved_ the Principle, which heals the sick and casts out error, to be divine" (page 473). He is, therefore, historically of chiefest value as the demonstrator of Christian Science, the full philosophy of which apparently awaited a later revelation.

"Christ is the ideal Truth, that comes to heal sickness and sin through Christian Science, and attributes all power to G.o.d" (page 473). "He unveiled the Christ, the spiritual idea of divine Love" (page 38). The Christ of Christian Science, then, is an ideal Truth, a spiritual idea, apparently an abstraction. But Mrs. Eddy is not consistent in her use of these two names. On one page Christ is "the spiritual idea of divine Love"; on the next page "we need Christ and Him crucified" (page 39), though how an ideal truth or a spiritual idea could possibly be crucified we are not told. In many of her pa.s.sages Mrs. Eddy uses the familiar phrase, Jesus Christ, in apparently its ordinary connotations.

_The Incarnation: Christian Theology and Christian Science Belong Really to Different Regions_

The Incarnation is disposed of in the same vague way. "Those instructed in Christian Science have reached the glorious perception that G.o.d is the only author of man. The virgin mother conceived this idea of G.o.d and gave to her ideal the name of Jesus."[50] "The illumination of Mary's spiritual sense put to silence material law and its order of generation, and brought forth her child by the revelation of Truth. The Holy Ghost, or divine Spirit, overshadowed the pure sense of the Virgin-mother with the full recognition that being is Spirit."[51] "Jesus was the offspring of Mary's self-conscious communion with G.o.d."[52] Now all this is neither honest supernaturalism nor the honest acceptance of the normal methods of birth. It is certainly not the equivalent of the Gospel account whether the Gospel account be accepted or rejected. To use a phrase which has come into use since "Science and Health" was written, this is a "smoke screen" under cover of which Mrs. Eddy escapes the necessity of either accepting or denying the testimony of the Gospels.

[Footnote 50: Page 29.]

[Footnote 51: Page 29.]

[Footnote 52: Page 30.]

Something of this, one must confess, one may find in not a little religious teaching old and new, but it is doubtful if there is anywhere so outstanding an instance of what one may call the smoke screen method in the consideration of the Incarnation, as in the pa.s.sages just quoted.

As a matter of fact all this is simply the attempt to fit the idealistic dualism, which is the real philosophic basis of Christian Science and which, in so far as it is capable of explanation at all, can be as easily explained in two pages as two hundred, into the theology in which Mrs. Eddy was nurtured and which was a background common to both herself and her disciples. Christian Science would carry far less weight in the race it is running if it frankly cut itself clear of a theology with which it has fundamentally no affinity. This indoctrination of an idealistic dualism with a content of Christian theology probably heightens the appeal of the system to those who are most at home in a new faith as they discover there the familiar phrases of their older faith, but it weakens the fundamental Christian Science apologetic. I think, however, we ought justly to recognize this as simply an inevitable aspect in the transition of Christian Science from the orthodox faith and experience of historic Christianity to a faith and experience of its own.

Seen as a curious half-truth development made possible by a whole group of forces in action at the end of the nineteenth century, Christian Science is reasonably intelligible, but as a system of doctrine built upon the hitherto accepted bases of Christian fact and teaching, it is not intelligible at all and the long controversy between the Christian theologian and the Christian Science lecturer would best be ended by recognizing that they have so little in common as to make attack and counter-attack a movement in two different dimensions. The one thing which they have in common is a certain set of words and phrases, but these words and phrases have such entirely different meanings on the one side and the other as to make the use of them hopelessly misleading.

_The Atonement. The Cross of Christian Science and the Cross of Theology_

There are pa.s.sing references to the Cross in "Science and Health," but the word is used generally in a figurative and sentimental way. Mrs.

Eddy's cross is simply the pain of being misunderstood and criticised in the preaching and practice of Christian Science, though indeed the Cross of Jesus was also the outcome of hostilities and misunderstandings and a final and terribly fierce method of criticism. One feels that mainly she is thinking of her own cross as a misunderstood and abused woman and for such suggestion she prefers the Cup as a figure to the Cross. As for the Atonement "every pang of repentance and suffering, every effort for reform, every good thought and deed will help us to understand Jesus'

Atonement for sin and aid its efficacy."[53] "Wisdom and Love require many sacrifices of self to save us from sin." All this seems to be in line with the moral theory of the atonement until we see that in such a line as this there is no recognition of the fact that again and again we suffer and that largely for others, and when she adds that "Its [the atonement] scientific explanation is that suffering is an error of sinful sense which Truth destroys, and that eventually both sin and suffering will fall at the feet of everlasting love" (page 23), those pa.s.sages cancel one another, for if suffering be "an error of sinful sense" it is hard to see how any pang of it can help us to understand Jesus' atonement unless His suffering be also "an error of sinful sense," and this is to reduce the atonement to a like error.

[Footnote 53: Page 19.]

In another connection Mrs. Eddy finds the efficacy of the Crucifixion "in the practical affection and goodness it demonstrated for mankind."

But this turns out to be nothing more than that the Crucifixion offers Christ a needed opportunity for the instruction of His disciples to triumph over the grave. But since in another connection we are told He never died at all (chapter Atonement and Eucharist, paragraph "Jesus in the tomb") even this dissolves into unreality. Moreover the "eternal Christ in His spiritual selfhood never suffered."[54] Whichever road she takes here Mrs. Eddy reaches an impa.s.se. It ought to be said, in justice to Mrs. Eddy, that her treatment of the atonement reflects the difficulty she found in the theology in which she had been trained as a girl and that there are many true insights in her contentions. She was at least seeking a vital and constructive interpretation and doubtless her observations, confused as they are, have been for her followers a real way out of a real difficulty. Here, as in so many other regions, "Science and Health" is best understood by its backgrounds.

[Footnote 54: A curious and far-off echo of early Docetism which also in its own way reduced Christ's suffering to a simple seeming to suffer.]

As a matter of fact there is in Christian Science absolutely no soil in which to plant the Cross as the Cross is understood in Christian theology. There is no place in Christian Science for vicarious atonement, whether by G.o.d or man; there is little place in Christian Science for redemptive suffering; there is a rather narrow region in which suffering may be considered as instructive, a guide, perhaps, to lead us out of unhappy or shadowed regions into the regions of physical and, maybe, spiritual and moral well-being, and to quench the love of sin.[55] Mrs. Eddy sometimes speaks of Christ as the Saviour but if her system be pressed to a logical conclusion she must empty the word of all the a.s.sociations which it has. .h.i.therto had and make it simply the equivalent of a teacher or demonstrator.

[Footnote 55: Page 36. But this is to recognize the reality of suffering. Mrs. Eddy is here on the threshold of a great truth--that suffering is an aspect of education--but she goes no further.]

_Sin an Error of Mortal Mind_

Sin along with sickness and death are the projections of mortal error, the creations of mortal mind; sin, sickness and death are to be cla.s.sified as effects of error. Christ came "to destroy the belief of sin." All this is to root sin simply in the mind. No intimation at all here of the part which a perverted will may play in the entanglements of life; no intimation of the immense force of the emotional side of life; no intimation here of the immense part which sheer selfishness plays.