Mary Baker Eddy biography

Synopsis

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