Mary Baker Eddy: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The final edition of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures runs to seven hundred pages. The bulk of it comprises fourteen chapters: (I) “Prayer,” (II) “Atonement and Eucharist,” (III) “Marriage,” (IV) “Christian Science versus Spiritualism,” (V) “Animal Magnetism Unmasked,” (VI) “Science, Theology, Medicine,” (VII) “Physiology,” (VIII) “Footsteps of Truth,” (IX) “Creation,” (X) “Science of Being,” (XI) “Some Objections Answered,” (XII) “Christian Science Practice,” (XIII) “Teaching Christian Science,” and (XIV) “Recapitulation.” The “Key to the Scriptures,” added to the sixth and subsequent editions of the book, consists of three additional chapters, “Genesis,” “The Apocalypse,” and a “Glossary,” in which Eddy provides definitions of her terms. A final section, “Fruitage,” reproduces accounts of healings published in the Christian Science periodicals. Much of the book contains marginal notes written by Eddy, providing a gloss on the text.

Readers of the entire volume will find that while there is no narrative progression, the constant repetition and reiteration of core beliefs seems to serve another function, inducing a sense of immersion in Christian Science rhetoric. For those who practice the religion, this seems to aid in “knowing the Truth,” the practice of mentally aligning one’s thought with Christian Scientific beliefs.

Science and Health serves as a guide for Christian Scientists in every area of their lives, offering advice on marriage, morality, and health. Most devout Scientists study selections from it every day, as directed by the church’s printed Lesson Sermon, published quarterly; the Lesson Sermon provides actual page and line numbers for daily study. Christian Science “practitioners”—trained and recognized by the church for their ability to pray and facilitate healings—study the textbook assiduously, recommending relevant parts to their patients.

The excerpts from Chapters I, VII, XII, XIV, and XVII presented here are key passages in Science and Health, in which Eddy instructs Christian Scientists in the correct method of prayer, warns them away from “drugs and hygiene,” and provides definitions of “Mind,” “intelligence,” “error,” and “man.” The “scientific statement of being,” which occurs in “Recapitulation,” is considered the definitive statement of Christian Science. Generations of students have memorized it, and it is read from the podium at every church service and Sunday school service. Eddy’s marginal notes, which appear throughout the text of Science and Health, have been omitted in these excerpts.

Chapter I: Prayer

Christian Science prayer, Eddy asserts in this passage from the first chapter, is no “mere … pleading” with God, nor is it a rote repetition of formulaic prayers established long ago. While not naming any particular sect, Eddy contrasts her method of prayer with types promoted by established Christian denominations. Directly petitioning God to provide a desired outcome, or praising him relentlessly, she argues, is “lip-service.” Rather, prayer is an “understanding” of the true nature of God and the human being, motivated not by a desire for a certain outcome but by an unselfish and constant “watching, and working” to keep hold of that understanding.

She makes strong claims for this form of prayer. Only “spiritual understanding,” she argues, can reform sin and heal sickness. Here she lays out the mechanism by which healing and reformation take place: God is defined as perfect “love,” “intelligence,” and “infinite Mind,” and it is the Christian Scientist’s responsibility to mirror that “source.” She also establishes herself as leader and revelator, in terms repeated throughout the textbook. The second sentence of her first chapter makes the argument that, regardless of what others may offer, “I speak from experience.”

The comparison of prayer to solving a mathematics problem is a critical characterization, but readers should realize that Eddy’s conception of math and science is uniquely her own. Perfection exists, she argues, and Scientists must comprehend the mathematical “rule” establishing that truth and then “work out the solution.” Working through that problem is the way to arrive at “the demonstration of Truth,” or healing. Another key concept arrives when Eddy refers to the concept of reflection: God is the perfect origin, and human beings must understand that their nature is to reflect perfection. Such understanding, goes the argument, will enable the Christian Scientist to annihilate sin, sickness, and, ultimately, mortality—as reflected in Eddy’s revision of that central Christian prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, from “deliver us from evil” to “delivereth us from sin, disease, and death.”

At the close of this critical chapter, Eddy offers her gloss on each line of the Lord’s Prayer. Her “spiritual interpretation,” as the Manual of the Mother Church (the governing document of the Christian Science Church) defines it, is recited at every Sunday service. It notably redefines “Our Father” as “Our Father-Mother God,” asserting a matriarchal power in balance with the traditional patriarchal nature of the Almighty. Most important, it rephrases the Christian’s fervent hope for the future—“Thy kingdom come”—as an established fact of the present, “Thy kingdom is come.” Again, the crucial term know arises, as it will throughout Science and Health , used in the sense of “understand”: “Enable us to know,—as in heaven, so on earth,—God is omnipotent, supreme.”

Chapter VII: Physiology

Perhaps the most far-reaching and controversial passage of Science and Health in its effects on the lives of the faithful occurs in the chapter “Physiology.” The doctrine of “radical reliance” expressed in this section asserts that Christian Scientists can never hope to heal if they serve two masters: One must choose between “Spirit and matter,” or between “Truth and error.” If Scientists attempt to heal through the practice of “divine Science” while at the same time clinging to a “false belief” in material means—which Eddy identifies as “drugs and hygiene”—then true healing can never occur. There is only one way to achieve healing, she argues: Renounce mortal mind and completely embrace the power of “God’s law, the law of Mind.” She continues the theme of the mathematical equation that appears in the book’s first pages: “An error in the premise must appear in the conclusion.”

Eddy again alludes to her personal experience in treating illness, claiming to have “discerned disease in the human mind” months before it appeared physically. She describes the appearance of symptoms as “mental chemicalization,” a sign that the patient’s outlook is shifting from “a material to a spiritual basis.” She interprets such symptoms, however serious, as a positive sign. She asserts that an outbreak of distress may signal a healing on the horizon, despite the fact that the patient himself may be doubtful. Chemicalization, she writes, is one more piece of evidence that all sickness is mental in origin and can thus be treated or healed only by mental means.

She urges the faithful to resist any suggestion that drugs can heal. Such beliefs are actually an attempt by mortal mind to frustrate healing. The type of argument offered here has become the template for the “treatment” offered by Christian Science practitioners, which takes the form of a discussion or argument refuting the power of mortal mind and asserting the primacy of the spiritual. The resistance to “material” means is a standard position taken by church-sanctioned practitioners. By demanding that her followers practice “radical reliance” on the divine Mind and depend solely on Christian Science, eschewing recourse to other means, Eddy ensured that Scientists would come into conflict with a society that increasingly relied on material healing methods and with a medical system that could increasingly prove—through double-blind studies and other scientific methods—the utility of drugs and surgery.

Chapter XII: Christian Science Practice

In her illustration of “mental treatment,” Eddy identifies fear as a primary causative factor of disease, and she urges students and practitioners to silently repudiate their own fears and those of the patient. Removal of fear, she argues, will result in healing. She counsels healers to convince themselves of a successful outcome in order to produce it. Diseases, she explains, are only to be named “mentally,” but not audibly: To say the name of a complaint out loud is to give it power over you. Instantaneous healing, on the other hand, is promised to those capable of driving away the fear of and belief in disease.

Most important, key passages of this chapter take up the treatment of young children and infants. Parents, Eddy writes, must meet a child’s needs by correcting their own thought. She cautions against paying attention to the “physical wants or conditions” of children, suggesting that only Mind controls the “stomach, bowels, and food, the temperature of children and of men.” If parents hold incorrect or “unwise” views as to their children’s health, she suggests, they can cause or prolong illness in their offspring. Parents, she writes, should not bathe their children excessively or give them drugs or pay attention to their digestion. To believe in disease, she writes, is to cause it, both in oneself and in one’s children: Only by vanquishing it mentally can Scientists “prevent disease or … cure it.”

Chapter XIV: Recapitulation

The questions and answers posed in the chapter entitled “Recapitulation” contain the core expression of Christian Science teachings. Often recited and referred to in church services, Sunday school classes, and training sessions for Christian Science practitioners and teachers, these passages are the cornerstone of the religion.

The capitalized seven synonyms for God—“Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love”—suggest that these incorporeal, bodiless abstractions stand as the perfect ideal. Eddy suggests that what human beings experience as warring, individual minds; corruptible principles; or lives truncated by mortality is a misperception based on flawed thinking. Given the frailties and flaws of human minds and material bodies, these expressions cannot reflect a perfect God, Eddy reasons; therefore, the material mind and body do not exist. “Matter,” she writes, “neither sees, hears, nor feels.” She maintains that her position is supported by irrefutable logic: “A priori reasoning shows material existence to be enigmatical.” A perfect God implies the existence of a correspondingly perfect creation, a perfect reflection, a perfect Man. As humanity grows to understand this, “Mankind will become perfect in proportion as this fact becomes apparent.”

The most concentrated form of Eddy’s argument occurs in the “scientific statement of being,” which serves a function in Christian Science churches similar to that of the Nicene Creed in conventional Christian churches. In it, matter is defined as “mortal error” or nothing, and the human body and material world are rejected. In their place, Eddy posits an ever-expanding, always perfect God, “infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation.” The human being exists only as a spiritual being; all else, including the material body and the material world, needs to be gradually redeemed. The ritualistic and repetitive language of the “statement,” with its balanced phrases, lends itself to memorization. Its “scientific” quality appears to be associated with Eddy’s repeated invocations of logic; later in the chapter, she cites “celestial evidence,” comparing humankind’s ignorance of its true nature—“divine perfection”—with humanity’s inability to perceive “the earth’s motions.”

“Error”—a term famous in Christian Science discourse—is defined as “a supposition” that matter is real and can cause pain or express intelligence or life. As Eddy muses on the “unreality” of sin and the nature of “Christ,” she makes a number of observations that put her teachings at odds with traditional Christian beliefs. She describes “Christ” as the “ideal Truth” or “divine idea” taught and practiced by Jesus, “the human man.” To Eddy, Jesus was “not God”—an opinion at odds with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Rather, he was the first human man to practice Christian Science healings, which Eddy felt were poorly understood in his day. Jesus’s healings were not, she observes, “miracles” but expressions of the true nature of “divine Principle.”

Her most stark refutation of the material world comes in answer to the question “What is man?” Eddy’s answer leaves no doubt that she holds that the entire physical world is an illusion: ”Man is not matter; he is not made up of brain, blood, bones, and other material elements. … He is not physique.” Readers should note her (not entirely consistent) use of the capital letter in insisting that “Man is spiritual and perfect. … Man is idea, the image of Love … incapable of sin, sickness, and death.” This idealized “Man” is “the real man.” The human being is altogether different: “A mortal sinner is not God’s man.” Mortal man is seen to be an impostor with satanic origins: “Mortals are the counterfeits of immortals. They are the children of the wicked one, or the one evil, which declares that man begins in dust or as a material embryo.” This illusory mortal’s fate is to be exposed and annihilated by the truth. “Mortals will disappear,” she writes, as “mortality is finally swallowed up in immortality.” This is as specific as Eddy allows herself to be on the question of what awaits our material bodies and the visible world.

Chapter XVII: Glossary

Eddy’s definitions of “God,” “Man,” and “Matter” are a constant subject of study in Christian Science practice. Here, the description of God verges on the mystical, “the great I AM” (compare Exodus 3:14). “Man” is similarly abstract, the reflection of a perfect ideal. “Matter,” on the other hand,” is dismissed as a myth, a false expression of “mortal mind” and mortality.