A Teacher
Mary Baker Eddy
Matter unreal, Spirit is all
The transmission
Mary Baker Eddy was born in 1821 in Bow, New Hampshire, into a devout Congregationalist family, and spent much of her early life in poor health and financial precarity.
In 1862, chronically ill, she sought treatment from Phineas Quimby in Portland and experienced marked relief, becoming for a time his enthusiastic student and defender.
After Quimby’s death in 1866, and following her own recovery from a serious fall that she interpreted as a spiritual healing, Eddy began to formulate a distinctly theological system that she insisted was a divine revelation rather than a borrowing from Quimby—a claim that became the subject of lasting historical controversy.
In 1875 she published Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the textbook of what she named Christian Science, and in 1879 founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston. Where Quimby’s framework was practical and quasi-clinical, Eddy built a rigorous, absolutist metaphysics: matter, disease, and evil are unreal, and only Spirit (God) truly exists, so healing is the mental recognition of this truth.
A formidable institution-builder, she established a church, a college, and the Christian Science Monitor, creating the most organized and enduring of the nineteenth-century mind-healing movements before her death in 1910.
What they gave
Absolute idealism applied to healing: Pushes mental causation to its limit—matter and disease are declared wholly unreal, leaving Spirit as the only reality and healing as the correction of false belief in matter.
- Systematic metaphysical theology: Transforms Quimby’s practical method into a closed, scripture-based doctrinal system with its own textbook and trained practitioners.
- Institutionalization: Builds the first durable mind-healing church, demonstrating that metaphysical healing could sustain a large, organized movement.
- The reality/unreality dichotomy: Bequeaths to New Thought the influential (and contested) distinction between the “real” spiritual realm and the “illusory” material one.
In their words
There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all.
Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Phineas Quimby (her direct healer and early teacher, though she later minimized the debt); the Bible and Christian theology; the Calvinist religious culture of her upbringing.
- Taught / Influenced: the worldwide Christian Science movement; Emma Curtis Hopkins (her one-time editor, who trained many New Thought leaders); the broader New Thought movement, which defined itself partly in reaction to Eddy’s dogmatism.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Their Practices 1
Essential Works
- Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures1875
- Retrospection and Introspection1891
- Miscellaneous Writings 1883-18961896