Calling
it "Trumpology "a politico article was the first to reveal what those
that the closest thing President Trump ever had to a religious faith was the "new
thought" of Norman Vincent Peale. Since few
are familiar with the history of Vincent Peale's new thought we went about to
trace it to its beginnings. Plus as we shall see underneath early on already
there were criticism of Vincent Peale's method.
Norman
Vincent Peale and the origins of Trumpology.
Throughout
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Americans
scooped up dozens of titles promoting the New Thought ethos: If you feel it, it
will come true. There was Charles Benjamin Newcomb’s 1897 “All’s Right With the
World,” which instructed readers not to wish for betterment but to summon it
through force of will. (“I am well.” “I am opulent.” “I have everything.” I do
right.” “I know.”) There was William Walter Atkinson’s 1901 “Thought-Force in
Business and Everyday Life.” (“Anything is yours, if you only want it hard
enough. Just think of it. ANYTHING. Try it. Try it in earnest and you will
succeed. It is the operation of a mighty Law.”) Capitalists like Napoleon Hill
advised readers to “Think and Grow Rich” (1937). And Christians, including
Quimby’s onetime patient Mary Baker Eddy, sought to blend that faith with New
Thought practice, as Eddy did in establishing Christian Science.
Similar
with Vincent Peale. Positive thinking, he argued, didn’t need to be constrained
by reality. Rather, Peale told
his readers to “make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it 10
percent.” But since few are familiar with the history of Vincent Peale's new
thought we went about to trace it to its beginnings.
"Confident living rights every wrong; / Dynamic power helps me be
strong. / Confident living comforts my heart; / From such a blessing I can't
depart." "Confident living fulfills my way, / Opens my channels
without delay." So runs the refrain and part of one verse of a favorite
hymn in Unity churches. Others like groups-Divine Science, Religious Science,
and Unity-all thrived through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first,
bringing their versions of "It is done unto you as you
believe"-confident living, to pragmatically tuned metaphysical believers
and practitioners.
A strong example of the facile networking that characterized New Thought
from its beginnings, Divine Science could boast a series of founders-the three
Coloradobased Brooks sisters, Alethea Brooks Small, Fannie Brooks James, and,
foremost, Nona Lovell Brooks (1862-1945), as well as Malinda Cramer
(1844-1906), who gave the movement its name. In 1885 in San Francisco, Cramer,
who had been an invalid for twenty-five years, gave up on doctors and
determined to get well on her own. After that, according to her own report, she
had a felt experience of the omnipresence of God and experienced, too, a sense
that she herself was in God. She got well and by 1887 began teaching and also
attended a class offered by Emma Curtis Hopkins in the Bay City. Cramer had
likewise formed an association with a former Mary Baker Eddy student named
Miranda Rice, so she must have been aware of Eddy's teaching.
The same year that Cramer took the Hopkins class, in Pueblo, Colorado,
two of the Brooks sisters-Nona and Alethea-became students of Kate Bingham, a
teacher who had returned from Chicago, where, she claimed, she had been healed
by Hopkins. Bingham's classes, too (and not surprisingly in light of the
Hopkins connection), stressed the omnipresence of God. Nona Brooks, who had a
troubling throat condition unresponsive to medical treatment, took the Bingham
classes and in the course of one of them claimed an experience of white light
and sheer presence that left her instantly and completely healed. Meanwhile,
the third sister, Fannie Brooks James, studied under Mabel MacCoy, a former
Chicago Hopkins student who had first sent Bingham to her teacher there.
Immersed in Hopkins teaching and teachers, the three at the same time moved
away from the denials of the reality of the material order characteristic of
Christian Science and Hopkins-style New Thought, affirming the creation as an
expression of God that shared in the divine substance. When Cramer traveled to
Denver to teach New Thought classes, Nona Brooks attended, and the two women
felt a connection. The name Divine Science came from Cramer, and the Brooks
sisters received permission to use it for their teaching. The two streams
converged. To the Statement of Being found in one form or another in both
Christian Science and New Thought groups (there is no reality but God), Divine
Science added the Law of Expression - an agency-oriented formula that stressed
the act of the creator as manifested in creation. The shift was subtle, but it
suggests once again the preoccupation with energy that Trine had signaled and
that marked the twentieth-century-and-continuing version of metaphysics so
strongly.
In 1892, Nona Brooks formed the International Divine Science Federation,
and in 1898 the Divine Science College was incorporated in Denver. With
networking intrinsic to its style and with Brooks a prominent speaker at New
Thought conventions, by 1922 Divine Science had become part of the
International New Thought Alliance. By then, too, its churches were flourishing
in West Coast cities and also in midwestern locations like Illinois, Kansas,
Missouri, and Ohio, while, in the East, Boston, New York, and Washington, D.G,
all became sites for Divine Science churches. The relatively independent
congregations in the movement became more formally organized in 1957 with the
creation of the Divine Science Federation International. Meanwhile, Divine
Science publications kept coming. In former Irish Catholic and Jesuit-trained
Emmet Fox (1886-1951), with his metaphysical readings of the Bible and his
"Golden Key" of reflecting on God instead of present difficulty, the
movement produced one of the most well-known New Thought authors of the
Depression years.
By contrast to Divine Science, the roots of Religious Science lay in the
experience and teaching of one man. Ernest Holmes (1887-1960), however, in his
combinativeness thoroughly reflected the New Thought desire for synthesis that
Divine Science also hinted. Holmes, like a series of metaphysical religious
leaders before him, did not come to his task equipped with professional
training. He never went to college, although his brother Fenwicke Holmes
graduated from Colby College in Maine, went on to Hartford Theological
Seminary, and became a Congregationalist minister on the West Coast. Fenwicke
Holmes, however, would eventually leave the ministry to work with his brother,
and it was Ernest Holmes who took the lead in the movement that became
Religious Science. Important here, from early on he was apparently an
insatiable reader. J. Stillson Judah detailed a series of authors whom Holmes
knew, including Emerson and especially his classic essay
"Self-Reliance." The future Religious Science founder was familiar
with Eddy's Science and Health, had read New Thought authors like the affective
Hopkins and Cady and the more noetic Christopher D. Larson and Orison Swett
Marden, and was drawn as well to the "Hindu" mysticism of Swami Ramacharaka.
By 1915, he had turned his attention to Hermetic materials, the Bhagavad Gita,
and even the Persian Zend-Avesta. He was also seeking to synthesize these
widely different materials with an AngloAmerican literary tradition of
reflection that included Emerson, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, and Robert
Browning. Most of all, he found himself attracted to the English metaphysical
writer Thomas Troward (1847-1916), with his triadic understanding of body,
conscious mind, and spirit as the stuff of human existence. For Troward and for
Holmes, spirit represented both the Universal Mind (God) and the subjective, or
unconscious, mind of humans. This subjective mind mediated God's creative
power, and it responded to suggestions from the conscious mind to manifest
health or illness. Indeed, there was a mechanical quality to the divine
operation in this activity, since Universal Mind produced a form in the
objective world to match each idea - in Troward's conscious application of what
he saw as the Swedenborgian law of correspondences.1
A concise history of origin and
development of the New Thought movement
Around the same time American
Spiritualism was born, Mary Baker Glover's crisply titled Science and
Health appeared in print.2 A work of over 450 pages, it was the culmination of
a decade of metaphysical reflection and writing by a woman in her mid-fifties
who counted herself thoroughly Christian. Indeed, she wrote it after she
claimed a spiritual discovery that would radically reorient religion and
spiritual practice for the Christian churches. Known more familiarly as Mary
Baker Eddy (1821-191O)-the name she assumed after her marriage to Asa Gilbert
Eddy in 1877-the author brought far less cosmopolitanism than did Olcott to a
work that would go through a plethora of editions until the familiar 1906
version became the standard text.3 Science and Health stood beside the Bible
for Christian Scientists, and it became the scripture that was canonically read
in Christian Science services everywhere. Eddy herself would look back on the
work in her later years in ways that hinted of the kind of
"channeled" text that numerous spiritualists, as well as Helena P.
Blavatsky, claimed to produce. When Eddy wrote it, she declared, she had
"consulted no other authors and read no other book but the Bible for three
years." Still more, as she said, "it was not myself, but the power of
Truth and love, infinitely above me, which dictated 'Science and Health with
Key to the Scriptures.”4
lf Eddy had begun Christian Science in mid-life, she continued to
preside over the fortunes of her religious foundation with a success that could
be estimated by the imposing Boston Mother Church dedicated at the end of 1894.
These times of abundance and fulfillment, however, had been preceded by a
personal life more bleak and compromised. Born in Bow, New Hampshire, Mary
Morse Baker had grown up in the shadow of the Congregational church with its
Puritan past and was formally admitted to membership at twelve, even though she
could not affirm her pastor's old-school doctrine of predestination. She would
continue to affirm her connection to this Congregational world, and, in fact,
the language of sin was woven in and out of her writings throughout her life.
Arguably, she never gave up Calvinism when she embraced metaphysics. As earlier
proto-metaphysical and metaphysical practice already demonstrates, commitments
to mind and correspondence could encompass Christian categories. Now, in what
would become Baker Eddy's Christian Science, we test the limits of such combinativeness.
A youthful Baker married Colonel George Washington Glover of Charleston,
South Carolina, in 1843, lived with him in the South for a year, and then, when
he succumbed to yellow fever, returned to New England and gave birth to a son.
Glover was chronically ill, and her family was, for various reasons,
unsupportive in helping to care for the boisterous child. When he was
five-after her recently widowed father remarried-the little boy, George Jr.,
was sent away to live with a now-married former family servant with whom Glover
herself had a warm relationship. She apparently agreed to the plan reluctantly.
Her second marriage, with the philandering dentist Daniel Patterson, ended in
divorce in 1873, but she had gone back to the surname Glover well before that.5
Hard times dogged Eddy (to use the familiar surname) as she moved from
one shabby boardinghouse to the next, living with people below her social
station because of the paucity of her means. Here she experienced the spiritual
seeker culture of her age in a readily available world of mesmerism and
spiritualism. Meanwhile, she continued to be plagued with ill health-probably
mostly what George Beard would by the 1880s label "American
nervousness," or neurasthenia.6 Eddy's physical complaints brought her to
homeopathy, hydropathy (water cure), and mesmerism and eventually to the
reformed magnetic medicine of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866), a
well-known mental healer practicing in Portland, Maine. The teaching and
practice of Quimby, placed beside the authoritative message of Congregatjonal
Calvinism, became a major influence that helped to catalyze Eddy's own
combinative system in Christian Science after his death in 1866.
One of the marquis de Puysegur's pupils, Charles Poyen, established an
itinerant mesmerist practice in New England. Poyen remained in North America
until 1840, and taught literally hundreds of people the techniques of
mesmerism. Some American mesmerists followed paths reminiscent of the German
proto-spiritualists. Thus, among the starting points of spiritualism sensu
stricto were the Swedenborgian spirit messages received in the 1840s by the
American cobbler Andrew Jackson Davies when under mesmeric trance. Others
developed mesmerism into a uniquely American family of religious traditions.
Quimby one of Poyen's many apprentices eschewed the ballast of metaphysical and
cosmological speculation that had been part and parcel of much European
mesmerism. He expressed his theories in a vague theistic language, religious
enough to be acceptable to a churched country such as the USA, yet not specific
enough in doctrinal contents to offend the members of any particular creed.
Quimby took a practice that reeked of mysticism and transformed it into an
eminently practical recipe for health, happiness and prosperity. The reason for
such a radical change in mesmerism could be sought in the particular
individualism of early nineteenth century American society, a mode of thinking
and living that not only reworked an esoteric praxis into a recipe for living,
but also remolded Old World Protestantism into prosperity thinking and Oriental
philosophies into transcendentalism.
A number of Quimby's former patients founded their own religious
movements, collectively known as harmonial religions. They fall into two broad
categories, Christian Science on the one hand and the various New Thought
denominations on the other. If Quimby was only vaguely theistic, the harmonial
religions were all the more inspired by Scripture. In several harmonial
religions, and especially in Christian Science, the roots in American mesmerism
are all but hidden under a christianized theology, based on scriptural
interpretation. Harmonial religions, although of great intrinsic interest, fall
outside the scope of the present study, except in one important respect.
Throughout the development of post-theosophical esotericism, rituals and
doctrines with roots in American harmonial religion have been reincorporated
into a more explicitly Esoteric framework. Books by late twentieth-century writers
such as Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra and Shakti Gawain as well as the channeled A
Course in Miracles are among the true bestsellers of the New Age movement. They
employ discursive strategies foreign to most harmonial religions which,
generally speaking, attempted to find a scriptural rationale for their
doctrines. Nevertheless, the doctrines themselves all lean heavily on elements
borrowed from the harmonial religions.
Eddy worked with Quimby not merely as a patient-for whom the
"medicine" was in large part effective - but also as a student
transcribing notes of conversations with him, reading his own notes and
sometimes "correcting" them, and acting increasingly as an
intellectual colleague to her mentor. Moreover, as a Quimby patient-student, Eddy
was hardly alone. Among the others who participated in the loose Quimby
community were major early leaders in the New Thought movement. Remembering the
well-known mental healer's relationship with the others, his son George Quimby
recalled that his father would "talk hours and hours, week in and week out
... listening and asking questions. After these talks he would put on paper in
the shape of an essay or conversation what subject his talk had covered."
Eddy, as George Quimby wrote, actively participated, even as she pursued a
one-on-one intellectual relationship with the doctor, and her own thinking
apparently intermingled with his.7
Who was this Portland healer whose thriving practice had attracted Eddy,
the ailing neurasthenic patient, and who became a major intellectual and
spiritual influence on her life? An autodidact like Eddy herself, Quimby was
making clocks in Belfast, Maine, when he attended the above mentioned, Charles
Poyen's lectures in 1838.
Attracted to the medical applications of animal magnetism, he partnered
with the youthful Lucius Burkmar in an itinerating stage demonstration of
clairvoyance in healing. In performances that took place as the pair traveled
the lyceum circuit, Quimby mesmerized Burkmar, Burkmar "read" the
disease that afflicted an inquiring audience member, and then Burkmar
prescribed the remedy that would heal the illness. As the process worked - even
on Quimby himself-he raised critical questions about it and eventually became
convinced that the true agent of healing success was the power of suggestion
and the belief it fostered within each subject. Quimby had arrived, in an
incipient way, at the notion of the power of mind. In the process, he also
became confident that he, too, possessed clairvoyant powers. Subsequently
parting ways with Burkmar, he began a practice that increasingly departed from
its magnetic beginnings with compelling religious and theological questions
Robert Peel noted that he attended Unitarian and Universalist churches.8
And Quimby surely knew the Bible, as his writings reveal. Meanwhile, his
religious liberalism links him to the harmonial philosophy of Andrew Jackson
Davis and other spiritualists, and some of his ideas can also be linked to
those of Emanuel Swedenborg and of the American Transcendentalists. In the
American culture of Quimby's era, as we have already seen, mesmerism blended
with spiritualism into a viable way to think and act, to make sense of basic
problems of human life in a kind of armchair philosophy that was also a
pragmatic set of principles for action. Quimby's writings, rough and opaque
though they often are, record his perceptions of this nineteenth-century
thought world as he constructed his own. Whatever his knowledge of Davis (and
there is no evidence, of which I am aware, that he ever directly read the
well-known spiritualist), Quimby was intimately acquainted with spiritualism in
its phenomenal form. Ervin Seale's complete edition of Quimby's writings,
published only as recently as 1988, makes Quimby's familiarity with a
spiritualist discourse community abundantly clear. (Seale's work overturned the
partial, sanitized 1921 edition by Horatio Dresser-son of New Thought leaders
Julius and Annetta Dresserwhich left out Quimby's spiritualism and idealized
his materialism.)9
The man who emerges from the Seale edition attended seances frequently
and could influence the phenomena that occurred in the circles. "I profess
to be a medium myself and am admitted to be so by the spiritualists
themselves," he owned in one essay and, in another, related an account of
a seance at which he proved himself to be a "healing medium." He had
become a medium, he claimed, but-like the Blavatsky of a decade or more
later-he enjoyed a freedom not experienced by others. "I retained my own
consciousness and at the same time took the feelings of my patient," he
declared.62 Yet this Quimby-on such close terms with spiritualists and their
seances and so thoroughly familiar, too, with the details of mesmeric practice-admitted
the phenomena but, again like Blavatsky, thoroughly disputed their cause and
conditions. For him, however, what generated mesmeric success and spiritualist
manifestation were not "elementals" or "elementaries" but
simple human belief and opinion.
Mesmerism and spiritualism were "phenomena without any
wisdom," and a spirit was "the shadow of a person's belief or
imagination." A person could not "give a fair account of the
phenomena of Spiritualism" because the "experiments" were
"governed by ... belief and must be so." Quimby wasted no words in
pronouncing "ghosts and spirits" to be "the invention of man's
superstition." "So long as people think about the dead," he
stated flatly, "so long there will be spirits, for thought is spirit, and
that is all the spirits there are." How did the production of spirits
work, and what was the mechanism of spiritualist activity? Quimby's answer lay
in the generic "power of creating ideas and making them so dense that they
could be seen by a subject that was mesmerized." This was the state that;
in his single-source explanation, embraced "all the phenomena of
spiritualism, disease, religion and everything that affect [ ed] the
mind." Nor did mesmerism and spiritualism essentially differ. "The
word 'mesmerism,'" Quimby wrote, "embraces all the phenomena that
ever were claimed by any intelligent spiritualists." Clearly, the
"other world" was "in the mind." "The idea that any
physical demonstration" came "from the dead" was to him
"totally absurd." 10
Still, Quimby had bought into the spiritualist universe enough to
reiterate the materialist explanation for mesmeric and similar phenomena that
had been popularized by Davis and others. "Spirit" was "only
matter in a rarefied form, and thought, reason and knowledge" were
"the same." "Mind" was "the name of a spiritual
substance that can be changed" and was, in fact, "spiritual
matter." "Thought" was "also matter, but not the same
matter;' just as the earth was not "the same matter as the seed which is
put into it." Moreover, Quimby echoed the spiritualist seer in further
ways. J. Stillson Judah decades ago pointed to parallels between Davis's and
Quimby's etiology of disease in the discords of the human spirit and their
perception of an "atmosphere" surrounding a human subject that could
be affected, for good or ill, by another. He noticed, too, their mutual
identification of God with Wisdom and a series of other similar (often
Swedenborgian and Hermetic) beliefs regarding divine and human nature and human
destiny.11
Regarding "spiritual matter;' so pervasive was Quimby's
identification between cognitive phenomena and the material realm that it is
easy to read him as a thoroughgoing materialist, given his immersion in the
language world of mesmerism and spiritualism. Yet this conclusion fails to
notice the rather bold departure that Quimby made from mesmeric-spiritualist
canons and ideas-a departure that his patient-student Mary Baker Eddy was to
take and transform in terms of Calvinist Christianity to create Christian Science.
In Quimby's reconstruction of the received cosmology, he combined the
materialism of his sources with an idealism that at least one
mid-twentieth-century scholar linked to Transcendentalism. Quimby's knowledge
of the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists was no doubt
tenuous and secondhand at best, but major newspapers habitually summarized
Emerson's lyceum lectures, and idealist views were clearly there for the
taking.65 Beyond that, a generalized Swedenborgianism could be argued in tandem
with these ideas. Judah, for example, pointed to the essentially Swedenborgian
views that Quimby held regarding what he termed the "natural" and the
"spiritual man," and his preference for an analogical, or
allegorical, reading of scripture in the tradition of Swedenborg.12
Whatever Quimby's sources, his writings demonstrate though going
preoccupation with a wisdom that transcended the material world of mind and
mesmeric play. Alternately cast, this wisdom operated as a metaphysical
"solid" that suffused the world, like a ghost of the mesmeric fluidic
ether but always elusively nonmaterial. Set in this cosmological situation, two
kinds of humans inhabited the earth-the "natural man," caught in the
error of a materialist mind and its attendant phenomena, and the
"scientific man," who saw past the performance into the space of
wisdom. Quimby argued for the wisdom world: Calling the power that governed the
material mind "spirit," the Portland physician yet recognized "a
Wisdom superior to the word mind, for I always apply the word mind to matter
but never apply it to the First Cause."13
Still more, although Quimby was thoroughly anticlerical and opposed to
orthodox Christianity, his familiarity with Christian scripture meant that his
writings were filled with metaphysicalized biblical references to contend for
his view. Indeed, in his private papers, he betrayed a kind of messianism in
which he identified himself with the biblical Christ, at the same time
typically separating Christ, as identical to Science, from sole attachment to
the historical Jesus. "Jesus never tried to teach anything different from
what I am teaching and doing every day," he testified. His statement of
his own case is crucial for understanding the new production that became Eddy's
Christian Science: "Now I stand as one that has risen from the dead or
error into the light of truth, not that the dead or my error has risen with me,
but I have shaken off the old man or my religious garment and put on the new
man that is Christ or Science, and I fight these errors and show that they are
all the makings of our own mind. As I stand outside of all religious belief,
how do I stand alongside of my followers? I know that I, this wisdom, can go
and impress a person at a distance. The world may not believe it, but to the
world it is just such a belief as the belief in spirits; but to me it is a fact
and this is what I shall show."14
Nor were Quimby's allusions to the higher wisdom, as Robert Peel argued
problematically, "recurrent elements of spiritual idealism which
contradict the author's basic position." 15 A clear hierarchy of error and
truth, in fact, ran through all of Quimby's writings. Mind, with its beliefs
and opinions, existed as part of a material order of error; wisdom rose above
it; somehow Quimby-despite the morass in which all other mortals seemingly
found themselves-lived as a "scientific man" in a realm beyond.
Quimby, like Jesus, inhabited the wisdom world, and Eddy had discovered the
connection. This was so much so that in late 1862 her enthusiasm for her new
healer-teacher embarrassed him publicly, when letters that she wrote to the
Portland Courier in the first blush of her healing experience appeared in
print. Quimby stood "upon the plane of wisdom with his truth," she
proclaimed in the second of these, and he healed "as never man healed
since Christ." "P. P. Quimby," she exulted, "rolls
away the stone from the sepulchre of error, and health is the
resurrection."16
Mary Baker Eddy's relationship with Quimby ended abruptly in January
1866 when the doctor died. Bereft of both doctor and mentor (her father Mark
Baker had also died three months before), she poured out her feelings in
"Lines on the Death of Dr. P. P. Quimby, who healed with the truth that
Christ taught, in contradistinction to all isms." The poem was published
in the Lynn (Massachusetts) Weekly Reporter almost a month later. Meanwhile,
less than two weeks after Quimby's death, Eddy fell on ice on her way to a
meeting, experienced injuries that caused severe head and neck pain with
possible spinal dislocation, and three days later, in the midst of pain that
her homeopathic physician could not assuage, read a New Testament passage. An
account of one of the healing miracles of Jesus, the narrative, she later
claimed, triggered an intense experiential state of awareness. Eddy, according
to her own report and denominational tradition, had "discovered"
Christian Science.17
If so, what she took away cognitively from the experience, at least as
she later constructed it, linked the wisdom discourse of Quimby to the
orthodoxy of her Congregational Christian past. Now, though, instead of
immersion in the world of error that pervaded most of Quimby's writings, a felt
sense of God as the only reality became the key to her healing and all healing.
Even as Eddy brought the unorthodox Quimby to the orthodoxy of her past, the
Calvinism of her religious construction was noticeable. At least part of the
attraction of the Quimby theology for Eddy was its predication of wisdom as an
unchanging and transcendent reality. Whatever Eddy's connections to
spiritualism-and, as we shall see, they were many-the theological immanence
that spiritualism proclaimed was for her in the end untenable.
Eddy did, to be sure, teach what might be called a Christian version of
final union with an Oversoul become God. In the first edition of her textbook
Science and Health, for example, she wrote that "we are never Spirit until
we are God; there are no individual 'spirits.''' She went on to exhort that
"until we find Life Soul, and not sense, we are not sinless, harmonious,
or undying. We become Spirit only as we reach being in God; not through death
or any change of matter, but mind, do we reach Spirit, lose sin and death, and
gain man's immortality." But the journey was decidedly one to a
transcendental state and order. The published 1876 edition of Eddy's teaching
pamphlet Science of Man, for example, declared that "Intelligence"
was "circumference and not centre" and that "Soul and Spirit"
were "neither in man nor matter." Similarly, the standard edition of
Science and Health from 1906 affirmed "God as not in man but as reflected
by man" and warned against "false estimates of soul as dwelling in
sense and of mind as dwelling in matter." In her "new departure of
metaphysics," Eddy elsewhere told followers, God was "regarded
more as absolute, supreme;' while "God's fatherliness as Life, Truth, and
Love" made "His sovereignty glorious." In practical terms,
testimonies of healing the sick through Christian Science treatment would be
the means to glorify God and scale "the pinnacle of praise."18 Thus
the Eddy who rejected the predestinarian views of her childhood church still
exalted the supreme majesty of God in ways that proclaimed the underlying
Calvinism of her past.
Christian Science scholar Stephen Gottschalk notes these connections in
his theological study of Eddy's place in American religious culture, and he
notices as well the essential Calvinism of the metaphysical dualism she
propounded. "In Christian Science as in Calvinism," Gottschalk
observes, "one is clearly confronted with the Pauline antithesis of the
Spirit and the flesh." It is arguable, too, that the warfare model that
permeates so much of Eddy's writing reinscribes Calvinism with its traditional
narratives of the battle between good and evil, between God and the devil, in
the life of the soul. In fact, any sustained contact with the corpus of Eddy's
writings reveals the periodic invocation of "sin" as a habitual way
to distinguish reprehensible states of mind and life. We have already seen her
identifying the loss of "sin" in "Life Soul" in the first
edition of Science and Health. Later, both in the Manual of the Mother Church
(1895) and in the standard (1906) edition of Science and Health, Scientists and
seekers could find among the six "Tenets" of the Mother Church one
that acknowledged "God's forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin and
the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as unreal." "Rule out
of me all sin;' the Church Manual asked Scientists to pray daily.18
Ostensibly committed to the unreality of sin and evil, Eddy's
writings-with their warfare mentality that equaled or amplified Quimby's
polemical stancehid a Calvinist devil lurking beneath the metaphysical surface,
an evil that displayed a very tangible presence. Toward the end of Eddy's life,
that presence took the form of a heightened personal fear of "malicious
animal magnetism" ("M.A.M."), as prayer workers stationed
outside her door through the night contended against claimed magnetic
onslaughts. But much earlier, it is hard not to detect a palpable sense of evil
that preoccupied her. Her contentious relationships with students and former
students were cast by Eddy in terms that invited, for her, a felt sense of sin
(of others toward her) and the presence of Satan, even if the name itself was
banished to the outer darkness of theological incorrectness. On paper, sin was
"the lying supposition that life, substance, and intelligence are both
material and spiritual, and yet are separate from God." But Eddy herself
allowed that sin was "concrete" as well as "abstract," and
in many life situations the concreteness was manifest. Sin was a
"delusion" and a "lie," but even if she told her followers
not to fear it, she acted as though she feared it herself.19
More than that, in the consistent Christian Science language of
"mortal mind" that Eddy created it is hard not to read a
transliterated script for sin and, indeed, for the old Calvinist theology of
the total depravity of humankind. Eddy herself was uneasy about the term,
calling it a "solecism in language" that involved "an improper
use of the word mind." However, she was willing to live with the "old
and imperfect" in her "new tongue." In this context, mortal mind
meant "the flesh opposed to Spirit, the human mind and evil in
contradistinction to the divine Mind, or Truth and good." Still further,
her "Scientific Translation of Mortal Mind" announced its "first
degree" to be "depravity," identifying depravity with the
physical realm of "evil beliefs, passions and appetites, fear, depraved
will, self-justification, pride, envy, deceit, hatred, revenge, sin, sickness,
disease, death." Eddy was adamant in her insistence that, seen from and in
the divine Mind, evil itself was unreal and that, therefore, mortal mind was
mind existing in a state of error. Still for all that, the language of
recrimination that she cast upon it, with its emotional tone of repugnance and
rebuke, suggests that she was making something out of this nothing in her act of
warfare against it. As Ann Braude has stated, Eddy "had no doubt that the
mortal, human aspects of each person reflected the total depravity of Adam's
legacy;' and she was "preoccupied with fighting the dangerous temporal
effect of the belief in evil."20
Eddy also feared a lifestyle that emphasized ease, relaxation, and
pleasure, this expressed in tones that suggest the Calvinist ethos that shaped
her. In the spring of 1906, for example, she wrote to the young John Lathrop,
who formerly served as household staff, telling him of her sorrow "over
the ease of Christian Scientists." She lamented that they were habituated
in the "pleasures" of "sense." "Which drives out
quickest the tenant you wish to get out of your house, the pleasant hours he
enjoys in it or its unpleasantness?" she asked rhetorically. A few years
later, toward the very end of her life, her household staff, who had typically
observed a Puritan rigor, began to relax in ways that distressed her. Staff
Scientists were less vigilant in protecting her against M.A.M., and they read
the Boston newspapers, played golf, went for auto rides, and stopped sometimes
at libraries in the neighborhood. On one late-summer occasion, recounts Stephen
Gottschalk, Eddy looked out of her window as two staff members threw a ball
back and forth and another attempted to walk on his hands. She endured, as
Gottschalk quotes from Calvin Frye's diary, "a very disturbed night and a
fear she could not live !"21
The perils of flesh and spirit, however, deferred to the presence of
spirits when Mary Glover's first edition of Science and Health appeared in
print in 1875. Published nine years after Quimby's death, the work displayed a
woman who now spoke with an authority of her own and a sense of knowledge
gained through hard-won experience. The text likewise displayed a woman at
pains to separate herself from mesmeric and mediumistic phenomena, so that the
new warfare of the spirit that Eddy waged was clearly directed against
spiritualism and its magnetic culture. Like her former mentor Phineas Quimby
and like the founders of Theosophy, she saw in mesmerism "unmitigated
humbug," and her estimate of spiritualism was equally denunciatory. In the
three-page preface to her ambitious first edition, Eddy (then Glover) singled
out mesmerism for direct rebuke. "Some shockingly false claims" had
already been made regarding the work in which she was engaged.
"Mesmerism" was one, she stated flatly, and her denial was total.
"Hitherto we have never in a single instance of our discovery or practice
found the slightest resemblance between mesmerism and the science of
Life."22
If Eddy seemed defensive, she had reason to be. In her Quimby years, she
had surely traveled in mesmeric and spiritualist circles, and even as she took
her first steps in Lynn as a practitioner of what became Christian Science many
who were close to her thought of her as a medium. Her early advertisement of
her new system of healing through "Moral Science" in the spiritualist
Banner of Light in 1868 no doubt helped to fuel the assumption, and so, no
doubt, did her outsider stance toward conventional medical methods.23 That
acknowledged, the vehemence of her condemnation of mesmerism and spiritualism
was still startling. Eddy, by virtue of her emotional engagement, ended up affirming
what she denied. Matter became real and so did mesmeric influence and spirit
contact with it when she fought them so strenuously. From another point of
view, Beryl Satter has suggested that Eddy's "healing process bore a
family resemblance to mesmeric or hypnotic healing," 24 and although the
divine Mind that healed and mortal minds caught in the morass of error were
profoundly different in her system (and so not exactly comparable), still the
ghost of resemblance was there.
"Mesmerism," she told students, was "a belief
constituting mortal mind," and "error" was "all there is to
it, which is the very antipode of science, the immortal mind."
"Mesmerism" was "a direct appeal to personal sense ...
predicated on the supposition that Life is in matter, and a nervo-vital fluid
at that." It was "error and belief in conflict" and "one
error at war with another"; it was "personal sense giving the lie to
its own statements, denying the pains but admitting the pleasures of sense."
Why was it so dangerous? The answer lay in its proximity to Spirit, its ability
to function as a lying proxy for the truth. "Electricity," she wrote,
"is the last boundary between personal sense and Soul, and although it
stands at the threshold of Spirit it cannot enter into it, but the nearer
matter approaches mind the more potent it becomes, to produce supposed good or
evil; the lightning is fierce, and the electric telegram swift." Eddy's
argument, in fact, replicated the theoretical model of homeopathy in which
infinitesimal doses were more potent than gross ones. Homeopaths believed that
the same substance that caused the symptoms of a given disease in a well person
would cure the disease in a patient who was suffering from it. The key,
however, was the "potentization" of remedies by increasingly radical
dilutions to the point that, physically speaking, not even a trace of the
original substance remained. Now, in Eddy's warning model, not only homeopathy
but also the assorted healing modalities that kept it company achieved
heightened power with the increased dilution of their physicality. "The
more ethereal matter becomes according to accepted theories, the more powerful
it is; e.g., the homoeopathic drugs, steam, and electricity, until possessing
less and less materiality, it passes into essence, and is admitted mortal mind;
not Intelligence, but belief, not Truth, but error."25
Siding with the mentalists and not the fluidic theorists regarding
mesmeric and related electrical phenomena, she declared electricity to be
"not a vital fluid; but an element of mind, the higher link between the
grosser strata of mind, named matter, and the more rarified called mind."
Rarefied or gross, the danger in the magnetic world and its environs was
ubiquitous. Thus phrenology fared no better in Eddy's estimate, making an
individual "a thief or Christian, according to the development of bumps on
the cranium." "To measure our capacities by the size or weight of our
brains, and limit our strength to the use of a muscle;' she admonished, "holds
Life at the mercy of organization, and makes matter the status of man."
Taking aim at the health reform movement of the era, which bowed "to
flesh-brush, flannel, bath, diet, exercise, air, etc.;' she declared
"physiology" to be "anti-Christian." Meanwhile, not only magnetism
but also "mediumship" and "galvanism" were "the right
hands of humbug;' and mediumship by itself was an "imposition" and a
"catch-penny fraud."26
In Eddy's reading, mesmerism and mediumship were clearly intertwined,
lumped together as, for practical purposes, they had functioned in the
spiritualist community in which she had sometimes, if warily, participated.
Moreover, she had been called a spirit medium, not a mesmerist, and so she
experienced mediumship as an especially potent enemy against which she needed
to contend. "We have investigated the phenomenon called mediumship both to
convince yourself of its nature and cause, and to be able to explain it;' she
told the student readers of Science and Health, although she expressed some
reservations about her ability to do the second. Her critique, though, was
undeterred, and it was trenchant. The Rochester rapping’s "inaugurated a
mockery destructive to order and good morals." Likewise, the
"mischievous link between mind and matter, called planchette, uttering its
many falsehoods," was "a prototype of the poor work some people make
of the passage from their old natures up to a better man." Eddy did not
deny the sincerity of many involved in the seances, enjoining readers to
"make due distinction between mediums hip and the individual" and
affirming that there were "undoubtedly noble purposes in the hearts of
noble women and men who believe themselves mediums." But like the (later
co-founders of the Theosophical Society in New York), Madame Blavatsky and Colonel
Olcott at the (ironically named) Eddy farm, she pointed to the loss of mastery
that accompanied mediumistic work. Mediumship, she warned, was a "belief
of individualized 'spirits,' also that they do much for you, the result of
which is you are capable of doing less for yourself."27
Eddy bristled angrily at mediumistic claims. Mediumship presupposed that
"one man" was "Spirit," and that he controlled
"another man" that was "matter." It taught that
"bodies which return to dust or new bodies called 'spirits'" were
"experiencing the old sensations, and desires material, and mesmerizing
earthly mortals." It taught, too, that "shadow" was
"tangible to touch" and that it produced "electricity" and
similar phenomena. She found these conclusions to be "ridiculous."
The spirit manifestations were the "result of tricks or belief, proceeding
from the so-called mind of man, and not the mind of God." Mediumship
itself overlooked "the impossibility for a sensual mind to become spirit,
or to possess a spiritual body after what we term death," something that
science revealed as "more inconsistent than for stygian darkness to emit a
sun-beam." "To admit the so-called dead and living commune
together," Eddy asserted categorically, was "to decide the unfitness
of both for their separate positions." "Mediumship assigns to their
dead a condition worse than blighted buds or mortal mildew, even a poor
purgatory where one's chances for something narrow into nothing, or they must
return to the old stand-points of matter." Its foundations lay in
"secretiveness, jugglery, credulity, superstition and belief."
Because of its mystical ambience, it could "do more harm than
drugs."28
As warrior of the spirit, Eddy with her pungency equaled or exceeded the
contentiousness of Quimby, making a similar case but making it now out of a
heterodox Calvinism instead of her mentor's heterodox liberal Christianity. And
like the unsystematic short pieces left by Quimby, her more systematic work
pointed beyond the language of argument to a lived engagement with powerful
ideas. The center of Eddy's work was practice, and the center of her healing
practice was argument. In the language game that was her metaphysical system,
the practitioner argued against the error that was matter, against the mortal mind
of the patient-client in its mesmerized "Adam-dream" - until the
healer broke through to Truth and Principle. The absolutism of Eddy's stance
was uncompromising. The false belief in matter condemned people to the
scenarios of illness and pain that they experienced. The healing role of the
Christian Science practitioner was meant not so much to provide compassionate
care as to demonstrate Truth in an ideal order that reduced the physical to the
nothing that it was, an order that, in short, proved the claims of the
Christian gospel as Eddy herself understood them. Like the utterly sovereign,
utterly transcendent God of Calvinism, like the God out of the whirlwind in the
book of Job, Truth brooked no compromise and demonstrated its reality by
vanquishing the appearance of disease and disorder. Christian Science healing
existed not to enhance matter and materially based humanity. It existed only to
advance the Truth, the Principle, of God.
There was, of course, a cutting irony in Eddy's adamant antimaterialism-an
antimaterialism that Stephen Gottschalk in recent work has noticed so clearly
when juxtaposed to the early wealth of the Christian Science Mother Church and
the rising status of its mostly female practitioners.29 But a facile coupling
of the material success of the movement to the basic Eddy theology does not
stand up to scrutiny when the founder's essentially Calvinist heterodoxy is
understood. Still more, the easy identification of Christian Science as a
species of what Sydney Ahlstrom called "harmonial religion" is
problematic. Although the term has obscured more than it reveals even for New
Thought, in the case of Christian Science it misreads the evidence on almost
all counts. For Ahlstrom, "harmonial" religion signified "those
forms of piety and belief in which spiritual composure, physical health, and
even economic well-being" were "understood to flow from a person's
rapport with the cosmos." But with human lives mired in sickness, sin, and
death-the triadic legacy of mortal mind-Eddy's system taught no harmony at all
for the material realm but instead total and uncompromising war. Moreover, when
a "saved" Christian Scientist lived out of Truth and Principle,
seeing evil for the nothing that it was, there was quite literally nothing with
which to harmonize. One lived in Truth, or one did not. One could simply not
harmonize nonexistence with Principle. Eddy's antimaterialist "scientific
statement of being;' in the familiar 1906 edition, brought home the point:
"There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is
infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is
immortal Truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter
is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness.
Therefore, man is not material; he is spiritual."30
Christian Scientists did, of course, at times speak colloquially, as
other Christians did, about getting into harmony with God. Eddy herself had
taught that sickness, sin, and death were "inharmonies" and had
pronounced all past, present, and future existence to be "God, and the
idea of God, harmonious and eternal." "Harmonious action," she
wrote, "proceeds from Principle; that is, from Soul; in harmony has no Principle."
She had suggested in Science and Health, too, that the discovery of "Life
Soul" would make one harmonious. Moreover, at the very core of a formulaic
healing event lay an intense realization on the part of a Science practitioner
of the unreality of the patient's particular plight or illness and the divine
perfection that instead was and had been ever present. Such realizations could
be couched in the language of harmony. But perusal of Christian Science
literature reveals no preference for the term or the discourse of harmony, and,
still more, Christian Science healers were accustomed to describing their
healing work not only as "treatment" but also, and quite typically,
as "argument." When they healed, they spoke of "demonstrating
over" illness in a metaphor that evokes science and contest at once. As
Stephen Gottschalk notes, "the aims and theological standpoint of
Christian Science and of harmonialism differ so markedly that the two cannot be
assumed to represent the same tendency." Pointing as well to the pain and
suffering that characterized Eddy's personal life, he found the harmonial
ascription especially inappropriate. Eddy needed to be saved, to be born again;
and she felt in her "discovery" of Christian Science that her new
birth in the spirit had happened.31
Yet if Eddy was a decided antimaterialist, and if she fought fiercely
against the lingering shadows of mesmerism and spiritualism, the connections
between her new "Truth" and these former partners would not go away.
In the case of mesmerism, we know that early Christian Science practice
included some rubbing or touching of the afflicted area of a patient's body in
the style of mesmerists (and, imitating them, spiritualist healers). This
essentially followed Quimby's practice growing out of his earlier healing
technique in animal magnetism, and he had typically employed water as a medium
for the work. Eddy herself acknowledged that when she started teaching she had
"permitted students to manipulate the head, ignorant that it could do
harm, or hinder the power of mind." According to report, she at first
actively instructed students to rub and touch-not for the patent efficacy of
these gestures but, as Quimby did, because of the belief that they fostered in
the patient: ''As we believe and others believe we get nearer to them by
contact and now you would rub out a belief, and this belief is located in the
brain." Like a doctor's poultice applied for pain, so the healer should
place her "hands where the belief is to rub it out forever."32 Added
to this, we have already seen Eddy's demonstrated fear, stronger as she aged,
of malicious animal magnetism.
In the case of spiritualism, Ann Braude has pointedly noticed the
overlap between Eddy's theologically driven healing method and the discursive
world of the spiritualist community. Aside from the shared social context in
which both flourished and the similarity of the needs that drew converts to both
spiritualism and Science, the denial of evil in Christian Science from one
perspective made the movement look like spiritualism because of its overt
rejection of this major Calvinist category. Likewise, both spiritualism and
Christian Science exalted science to deific proportions; both opposed
orthodoxies in medicine as well as religion; and both encouraged egalitarianism
by promoting women as leaders and by supporting lay ability to function as
healers. In other words, in both systems the patient could easily take charge,
and each system thus operated on a more or less level playing field. Moreover,
as Braude argues, the "most significant" agreement came with the
belief that there was "no change at death." True the lack of change
existed, for spiritualists, as a function of the continuing material existence
of spirit bodies after the change called death and, for Scientists, in the fact
that there were never any real material bodies anyway. Even so, an underlying
model of permanence and denial of death's edge characterized both movements.33
The language of the "Father-Mother God," the "Christ
Principle," and God as Principle was, as we have already seen, part of the
rhetorical world of spiritualism. Beyond that, Eddy's early Christian Science
followers seemed to move easily in and out of the spiritualist community. Were
the new practitioners mostly women (in the ranks as well as leaders, as we will
see) - former spirit mediums? Did they transpose their performances from
spirits to Spirit in the same manner that the women whom Ann Braude has studied
left trance mediumship on public stages for feminist speeches in their own
names? Except for a few cases, no clear answers can be given. But the questions
hang there for the asking. Braude has, for example, identified the combinative
thrust of the Boston periodical The Soul in the 1880s, a periodical at home in
both spiritualist and Christian Science circles. At least one medium and her
husband-the later well-known Swartses-attended a Christian Science course taught
by Eddy, even as the husband tried to teach what he learned from Eddy in
spiritualist contexts. Beyond this, there was the over-protest of Eddy's
relentless attack on spiritualism- "mesmerism, manipulation, or
mediumship" as "the right hand of humbug, either a delusion or a
fraud." As Braude observes, Eddy's preoccupation with separating Science
from spiritualism suggests "that she viewed Spiritualism as the religion
with which her own faith could be most easily confused."34
Still, like Blavatsky and Olcott-from whom she strenuously separated
herself as well- Eddy recognized clairvoyance as fact and thought that
spiritual manifestations involved mind reading on the medium's part. However,
unlike Theosophists, who looked to elementals for the production of phenomena,
she thought that materializations were the products of the mediumistic mind.
Yet she did not think that, in theory, spirit communication was impossible.
Rather, the reality of spirit communication needed to be demonstrated outside
of matter since, by definition, matter was irrevocably yoked to appearance and
unreality. Spirits, in the plural, were "supposed mixtures of
Intelligence and matter" that, "science" revealed, could not
"affinitive or dwell together." But Spirit itself, in the singular, was
a thoroughly different case: there was "no Intelligence, no Life, no
Substance, no Truth, no Love but the Spiritual." Eddy recognized, too, the
existence of trance states and the power they gave to otherwise reticent
speakers.35 Finally, like the spiritualists, in her own way she supported and
promoted feminism even if she had difficulties yielding authority to talented
individual women who came to her.
Given all of this, the Christian Science that Eddy shaped in her mature
years reconstituted spiritualism, turning it inside out to craft a monistic
system based on nonmaterial spirit and inverting its liberalism in her
lingering Calvinism. Her reconstitution achieved manifest success, shaping its
metaphysics to a new and Christian organization that demonstrates the extent to
which metaphysical combinativeness could reach. The formerly self-effacing Eddy
spoke and acted with decisive authority as a new religious leader, and she made
and unmade institutions in the service of her cause. The roster of her doings
and undoings quickly tells the story. She established the Christian Scientists'
Association in 1876 and restructured it into the Church of Christ, Scientist in
1879. By 1882, she founded the state-chartered Massachusetts Medical College in
Boston and, by 1886, the National Christian Science Association. In these years
of rapid growth and development, she encouraged graduates of the college to
create regional institutes that would spread Christian Science throughout the
nation. In the states of Iowa and Illinois alone, according to Rennie
Schoepflin, sixteen institutes arose on the Eddy model in the 1880s and the
189os. But in 1889, with divisiveness in church governance and increasing
independence among former students, she dissolved the Christian Science Association,
closed her college, and disbanded the Church of Christ, Scientist, all in moves
to centralize and to regain control. Several months later, in 1890, she
requested that the National Christian Scientist Association adjourn for a
three-year period. Then, in 1892, she reorganized the Boston church, founding
the "Mother Church" so that Scientists from all across the country
would need to apply for membership therein to remain within the institution.36
Organization proceeded apace with Eddy's publication, in 1895, of the
Manual of the Mother Church, legislating governance matters in detail, and with
the creation, in 1898, of the main administrative units that would promote her
teaching. So tightly did she organize governance that Stephen Gottschalk could
remark, "Perhaps the most amazing thing about Mrs. Eddy's death was the
fact that it had so little apparent effect on the movement."37 At the same
time, Eddy had committed her faith to the printed word as a major means to
disseminate her new reading of the Christian gospels. From early on,
practitioners and patients alike were urged to read Science and Health. Less
than a decade later (in 1884), the first number of the Journal of Christian
Science appeared (called the Christian Science Journal from 1885), with Eddy
herself as editor until she turned the journal over to other promising women,
like Emma Curtis Hopkins, who was soon fired and went on to become a prominent
New Thought leader. In addition, Eddy created, in 1898, the Christian Science
Weekly, subsequently renamed the Christian Science Sentinel, and the same year,
too, established the Christian Science Publishing Society. When the well-known
Christian Science Monitor was founded in 1908 to provide a Christian Science
perspective on national and international news, it came under the aegis of the
publishing society, as did numerous other promotional materials for the church
and for Christian Science theology.
Eddy left Boston, where she had lived at the center of her movement for
seven years, and in 1882 took up residence more reclusively near Concord, New
Hampshire. Later, in 1908, she moved to Chestnut Hill, not far from Boston,
where she ended her days. During her senior years, she oversaw a thriving
movement that attracted increasing numbers of followers and received
considerable notice in the press and public mind, some favorable and some
decidedly less so. In Lynn, where Eddy had gathered her earliest class of
students, they came mostly from the working class. But as the movement took
off, this profile began to change. Stephen Gottschalk, who has pointed to
occupation as an indicator of class status, notes-summarizing a Harvard
doctoral dissertation-that by the year of Eddy's death Christian Scientists
largely came from the middle class, a situation that Gottschalk sees as mostly
"consistent" from 1900 to 1950.38 Most had come, too, as believing
Protestant Christians, although they had their quarrels with orthodoxy.
Meanwhile, as the prominence of female leadership already suggests, many more
women than men joined the movement. By the last decade of the nineteenth
century, five times as many woman practitioners could be counted as men. By the
next decade, in 1906, Christian Science membership was 72-4 percent female, at
a time when all denominations together averaged 56,9 percent women in their
ranks. The pattern apparently continued through the twentieth century, since in
the 1970s the ratio of women to men within the denomination was eight to one.39
Arguably, a new form of mediumship had arisen in their midst, as women mediated
no longer the spirits from the second or further spheres but instead what
Scientists claimed was Spirit itself-Principle, Truth, God, and (when gender
references were made) Eddy's Father-Mother God. Without their "realization"
as practitioners of each patient's "true" state, the Truth-and
healing-would not be manifested in particular human lives. So the women put up
shingles, placed advertisements, and collected set fees-professionalizing their
healing work as the seance mediums had earlier professionalized their
services.40
Nor did the women shun the mission field. They roamed widely as
itinerant teachers, bridging the gap between domestic and public spaces and
garnering a swiftly building membership for Christian Science. Rennie
Schoepflin has cited statistics, for example, showing a net gain of an
astounding 2,50 percent in Christian Science membership between 1890 and 1906,
when 40,011 Scientists were claimed. Although Eddy banned the publication of
membership figures after 1908, the number of practitioners continued to grow in
the early twentieth century, with 5,394 globally in 1913 and 10,775 in 1934.41
Like the earlier mediums who spoke in public when the spirits prompted,
Christian Science women apparently felt compelled by their sense of Truth to
spread a public gospel. The complex motivations of their missionary impulse
point, once again, to the combinative milieu in which American metaphysical
religion arose and flourished. In that milieu, too, despite all of Eddy's efforts
to build an ecclesial edifice unmoved by religious change and reconstruction,
the religious work that was Christian Science repeatedly exhibited the
combinations and recombination’s that were continually remaking metaphysics.
To some extent, Eddy's very claims to uniqueness (even if partially
correct), and to permanence and impermeability, brought change to her door. As
the standard narrative of the discovery of Christian Science took shape in her
remembered past and its public reconstruction, the gradualism of her early
healing practice gave way before Eddy's testimony to a startling single moment
of Truth. The mentorship of Quimby dissolved before the direct visitation of
Spirit. Others, however, did not forget. Quimby's former patient-students Warren
Felt Evans, Julius Dresser, and Annetia Seabury Dresser either indirectly
(Evans) or directly (the Dressers) challenged Eddy's erasure of the Quimby
legacy, even as the legacy continued to function in a rising
"mind-cure" movement. At the same time, disenchanted Christian
Scientists left Eddy when their views conflicted with her vision or their
persons with her personality. They believed that they found in the growing
mental healing movement a kinder, gentler, and more expansive version of what
they had learned in Eddy's world. Healers shared their skills and news with
clients who, in turn, became other healers, other sharers. The term
"Christian Science" was invoked freely, used in a generic sense as a
description of the new vision and healing practice. Numerous periodicals showed
what was happening (Gary Ward Materra discovered some 117 in existence by
1905), and so did popular books and monographs (Materra found 744 booklength
works for the same period). A networking movement had begun and was spreading fast.42
It was not until the 1890S that a clear New Thought identity would be
posited, and that would occur in the context of Eddy's copyright on the term
"Christian Science" in the early part of the decade and at least
partially because of it,98 But the rift between Eddy's Christian Science and
this developing "mental science" or generic Christian Science
movement existed already in the tensile structure of Quimby's thought, held
together, as it was, by his ability to contain paradox and anomaly in a persuasive
metaphorical quasi system. Certainly his "wisdom" transcending the
error-ridden minds of his patients and their sickness affirmed the ideal order
that Eddy later promoted as Spirit, Substance, Intelligence, Truth, and the
like. But, as we have also seen, Quimby saw wisdom not only as transcendent but
also as a solid or even fluidic substance pervading all reality, much in the
manner of the old magnetic fluid. He was facile enough mostly to avoid the
terms fluid and ether, but nonetheless their presence remained in the
characteristics that he attributed to wisdom.43 Even as Eddy became an
absolutist of the ideal, Quimby straddled both worlds-affirming a wisdom beyond
sense and matter and yet introducing sensate concepts as palpable, lived
metaphors for the experience of wisdom. Nowhere can this be seen more than in
Quimby's homegrown speculations on smell and its relationship to a wisdom
transcending the senses yet within them. Quimby smelled wisdom, and he smelled
sickness. He thought of the odors that he absorbed as so many particles of the
divine in a kind of etheric atmosphere surrounding a subject,lOo And he linked
their diffusion as mediumistic bearers of knowledge, or wisdom, to words and
language, which also functioned as mediumistic bearers of the same.
In so doing, Quimby hinted once more of his debt to spiritualism and,
especially, to Andrew Jackson Davis. In his speculations on magnetism, Davis
had taught that each human soul was encircled by an "atmosphere" that
was "an emanation from the individual, just as flowers exhale their
fragrance." Moreover, he had posited, because of the emanation, "a
favorable or unfavorable influence" that one person could have over
another (this last a source, perhaps, of Eddy's later notion of M.A.M.). In his
turn, Quimby pushed the metaphor and materialized it further. He likened the
"brain or intellect" to a rose, and he thought that intelligence came
through its smells as they emanated. Again, each belief, for Quimby, contained
"matter or ideas which throw off an odor like a rose." In fact,
humans typically threw off "two odors: one matter and the other
wisdom." Matter, identified with the human mind (not wisdom), produced an
odor that was like a "polished mirror," with fear reflected in it as
"the image of the belief." Wisdom was wise because it could "see
the image in the mirror, held there by its fear." Quimby was the case in
point, for it was his "wisdom" that disturbed his patient's reflected
"opinion," deadening the mirror "till the image or disease"
had disappeared. Mostly, in the terms of the analogy, Quimby focused on the
smell of matter and its manifestation as illness in the life of a patient.
"The mind is under the direction of a power independent of itself,"
he explained, "and when the mind or thought is formed into an idea, the
idea throws off an odor that contains the cause and effect." The odor was
"the trouble called disease," and-unlike the doctors who knew nothing
about it-Quimby himself smelled the "spiritual life of the idea" that
was error. From there he could launch his healing work to banish it.44
This was because Quimby could also smell wisdom - a different odor -
which his ailing patients were unable to detect, even though the smell of
wisdom could, at least theoretically, come to them. "As a rose imparts to
every living creature its odor, so man become impregnated with wisdom, assumes
an identity and sets up for himself;' he argued. This wisdom might be called
the "first cause" and might be construed, too, to exude an
"essence" that pervaded "all space." Yet, in a distinction
that was crucial for Quimby, the sense of smell and the other senses belonged
not to the "natural man" but to his "scientific"
counterpart. Such a "scientific man" - Quimby himself-knew odor to be
the most potent of the senses, conveying knowledge of good (as in savory food)
and of danger, for smell was an "atmosphere" that surrounded an
object or subject. Thus-and this was where he was headed-the common atmosphere
of humans in similar states of fear (in the presence of danger) led to "a
sort oflanguage, so that language was invented for the safety of the
race." Quimby, in short, had arrived at the idea that "the sense of
smell was the foundation of language" and at the overarching conviction
that from the material process came the higher wisdom. "Forming thought
into things or ideas became a sense;' and the process was
"spiritual."45
Moreover, if the sense of smell was, indeed, the "foundation of
language;' it was also itself a language. Humans, like roses, threw off odors;
odors enabled Quimby to diagnose erroneous states of mind being manifested as
diseases; odors also conveyed character. Still further, distance was no factor
in intuiting smells and odors. Situated in wisdom, he claimed, "my senses
could be affected ... when my body was at a distance of many miles from the
patient. This led me to a new discovery, and I found my senses were not in my
body but that my body was in my senses, and my knowledge located my senses just
according to my wisdom."46 Quimby's thinking on these matters was often
circular, muddled, and less than clear. But through his sometimes strained
efforts to explain he was laying the groundwork for later New Thought
theologies of immanence and panentheism. Profoundly different from the
hauntingly Calvinist transcendent God of Eddy, with an ultimate divine
alterity, the New Thought deity would beckon as the God within and the God who,
like a superconscious etheric fluid, permeated all things.
It was Warren Felt Evans (1817-1889), Quimby's other major theological
student alongside Eddy, who would articulate - much further and more clearly
than Quimby-the possibilities and powers of the resident God. At the same time,
like his doctor-teacher, Evans protected the twofold nature of divinity, Mind
transcendent and Mind within. Son of a Vermont farming family, Evans attended
Chester Academy, spent a year at Middlebury College, and then transferred, in
1838, to Dartmouth in New Hampshire. He never graduated, since midway through
his junior year he felt a calling to the Methodist ministry. According to
Charles Braden, he held, at various times, eleven different positions for the
denomination. Then, in 1864, he joined the Swedenborgian Church of the New
Jerusalem, and the profound and abiding influence of Swedenborg became apparent
in his subsequent writings. The break from his Methodist past and his move in
an unorthodox spiritual direction were probably at some level stressful, for he
experienced both serious and chronic "nervous" disease. Close to the
time he officially became a Swedenborgian, his physical condition brought him
to Quimby's Portland door. Like Eddy, Evans was healed, became a Quimby
student, and also felt a calling to be a healer himself. He began a mental
healing practice in Claremont, New Hampshire, but by 1867 had moved to the
Boston area, where, with his wife M. Charlotte Tinker, he spent over twenty
years practicing and teaching. Unlike Eddy and other mental healing
professionals, he charged no fees and accepted only free will offerings. He also
apparently read copiously and wrote a series of widely influential books on
mental healing in a religious context.47 If we track the changes from the
earliest to the latest of these works, we gain a sense of the shifting
discourse community of American metaphysics as it transitioned from
high-century phrenomagnetic and Swedenborgian seance spiritualism to the
theosophizing world of the late 1870s and 1880s.
The earliest of Evans's six mental healing books (he had previously
written four short works on aspects of Swedenborgian theology) appeared in 1869
and the latest in 1886, together revealing a disciplined, ordering mind and a
facility in argument and exposition. Evans was bibliographically responsible in
ways that signal a professionalism and attention to detail not found in
earlier, and especially vernacular, authors. Often, but not always, he
parenthetically cited sources of quotations, giving an author's surname, a
short title, and the page or pages. Aside from the general sophistication of
these works and their at-homeness in both religious and scientific worlds of
contemporary discourse, they were cast in a decidedly different tone from the
work of either Quimby or Eddy. Instead of polemicism and battle, in Evans
readers could find affirmation and a kind of irenic catholicity that
consciously combined sources in an almost theosophical style.
The first of the mental healing books, The Mental-Cure, disclosed an
Evans who was a thorough Swedenborgian and also comfortable in a spiritualist
milieu that resonated with the harmonial theology of Davis. Mind was an
"immaterial substance," but matter was also a substance, one
associated with the sense experience of resistance and force. All humans were
"incarnations of the Divinity," love was supreme, and the good lay
within, with "great futurities ... hidden in the mysterious depths of our
inner being."48 A combined Swedenborgian-spiritualist millennialism
pervaded the text with its noticeable allusions to a coming (uppercase)
"New Age" (of the Holy Spirit), which was "now in the order of
Providence dawning upon the world." Meanwhile, its easy assumptions
regarding the real existence of spirits, its familiar references to the
"Seeress of Prevorst" its citation of the ubiquitous spiritualist Samuel B. Brittan, and its
doctrine of spiritual spheres pointed in the same Swedenborgian-spiritualist
direction. So did its understanding of death as a "transition to a higher
life" and "normal process in development." References to Gall
and to phrenology as well as magnetic allusions indicated Evans's familiarity
with spiritualist discourse, and there was the by now well-recognized caveat
regarding magnetic power and peril ("a power that can be turned to good
account, or perverted to evil"). Still more, in the Swedenborgian reading
that Evans gave to "modern spiritualism," we can see the easy
conflation that he and so many others were making between the sources out of
which they built their world. Expounding on the "Swedish philosopher"
and his doctrine of spiritual influx, Evans saw inspiration and "the
commerce of our spirits with the heavens above" as "the normal state
of the human mind." In that context, what was "called modern
spiritualism" was "only an instinctive reaction of the general mind
against the unnatural condition it has been in for centuries."49
The plan of Evan's work was generally speaking Swedenborgian, and he was
hardly bashful about acknowledging his debt, for he quoted Swedenborg
frequently and in admiring terms (Braden, in fact, found seventeen
references).50 Always though, Evans focused his account on the phenomenon of
illness. Bodily dysfunction signaled spiritual dysfunction, and the way to
correct the body lay in correction of the spirit.
Nor was there a conceptual gap between the two in the Swedenborgian
universe that Evans inhabited. Citing the authority of his Swedish mentor as
well as the New Testament Paul, Evans declared for the existence of a
"spiritual body" bridging the gap between the "curious and
wonderful" external body and the mind. The spiritual body functioned as
one among innumerable "intermediates, through which influx descend[ed]
from the higher to the lower" - part of a pattern in all creation.
Compounded of "a substance intermediate between pure spirit and
matter," it was for Evans "a sort of tertium quid," literally, a
"third thing" that, for many in the developing New Thought movement,
would seriously alter the orthodox anthropology of human body and soul. Here
the (inner or interior) spiritual body became the harbinger of a series of
multiplying bodily spheres that traced a path from gross matter to highest
spirit. The spiritual body became, too, the harbinger of the energy pathways
that traced the same route; and, already in Evans, the roadmap was ready.
"This inner form," he reported, "is the prior seat of all
diseased disturbances in the body." For Blavatsky and the theosophical
movement, the spiritual body (significantly, close to her "astral"
body of less than a decade after Evans's book) would later be subsumed into a
series of clairvoyantly visible bodies manifested with each human frame. For
many in the New Thought movement, more abstractly, it would-in a transformed
version - become part of the triad of body, soul, and spirit.51
Where was Phineas Quimby in The Mental-Cure? He was there as a kind of
ghost among the spirits: Evans could apparently find no methodologically viable
way to acknowledge his debt. (In Mental Medicine, Evans's second book on mental
healing-published in 1872-he did acknowledge Quimby briefly.) Yet between the
lines, as it were, Evans had surely inscribed his former mentor. In the
magnetic-spiritualist and, specifically, Davis harmonial tradition, he had
affirmed that "every material body" was "surrounded by an
atmosphere generated by a subtle emanation of its own substance." He had
gone on to declare that "the air enveloping the globe we inhabit" was
"charged with the minute particles proceeding from the various objects of
nature." But Evans's explanation of the emanation in terms of the
olfactory sense, his specific use of a rose as an example, and his
identification of a spiritual cause for smells and of something analogous
"in the world of the mind" all smacked of Quimby-a Quimby easily
conflated with Swedenborg as Evans's text progressed. Evans emulated Quimby
also (and no doubt without direct control) in the quasi-shamanic quality of his
sometime relationships with patients. Reflecting on his experiences with absent
healing (a familiar Quimby technique), he owned that he had on occasion
"been sensibly affected with their diseased state both of mind and
body." "Once," he divulged, "where the patient was
troubled with almost perpetual nausea, it occasioned vomiting in us."
Still, as Braden noted, citing Mental Medicine of 1872, Evans thought that the
effects of client illness on the healer were fleeting and easily dismissed -a
"few minutes of tranquil sleep" would do it.52
For all his intellectual expansiveness, with Swedenborg and like Quimby,
Evans always returned to Christian moorings to explain and affirm what was
happening. According to John Teahan, well before Evans met Quimby-and fifteen
years before the inaugural publication of the Glover (Eddy) book Science and
Health - Evans had used the term "Christian Science" in print in his
short work The Happy Islaqds. But more than Quimby, the early Evans evinced a
clear orthodoxy regarding the person of Jesus- he was the "one and only
God made flesh, and dwelling among us." Jesus healed by moving from cause
to effect, in a model that Evans and other mental healers should copy,
discarding the glib Baconianism of their culture for a compelling (Christian)
alternative. In a particularly cogent statement that drew a line between
scientific and general cultural orthodoxy, on the one hand, and the new
metaphysical faith, on the other, Evans declared for principle (read
"Cause," "Truth;' "Mind;' "Intelligence;' and so
forth). "We hold to the heresy," he announced, "that principles
come before facts in the true order of mental growth, and the knowledge of
things in their causes, is of more worth than a recognition of effects. This we
acknowledge is not the Baconian method of philosophizing."53
Yet just as the spiritual body bridged the world of pure spirit and the
material realm of the body, Evans-with a strong pragmatism-saw a bridge between
principles and facts, between causes of illness and their unpleasant effects.
The bridge, as a chapter title announced, was the "sanative power of
words." Words functioned as "one of the principal mediums through
which mind acts upon mind." They could be written or spoken, but either
way they potentially could contain "the vital force of the soul."
Evans went on for pages celebrating the blessings and wonders of words,
proclaiming within them "a greater power ... than men are aware of"
and telling of their creative power even as he cited German Romantic
philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel's Philosophy of History (translated in 1835)
to support his views. For Evans, the case par excellence was Jesus, who "employed
certain formulas or expressive sentences into which he concentrated and
converged his whole mental force, and made them the means of transmitting
spiritual life to the disordered mind." The moral of his story was clear;
a physician's words "oftentimes" accomplished more than "his
medical prescriptions." Evans had arrived at the doorstep of New Thought
affirmation and affirmative prayer. 54
By the time he published his third healing book, Soul and Body, in 1876,
Evans was familiarly evoking his goals for the "restoration of the
phrenopathic method of healing practised by Jesus, the Christ, and his
primitive disciples." If the neologism phrenopathy hints of former
Methodist minister and latter-day spiritualist La Roy Sunderland's "pathetism,"
it signals, too, a continuing comfort in the older spiritualist discourse
community. In a work that aimed to be "scientifically religious, without
being offensively theological," Evans had already raised his
Swedenborgian-banner on the title page of the volume, quoting from Swedenborg's
Arcana Coelestia (on correspondences) to set the tone. Still, the easy
allusions of the volume suggest that Evans was immersing himself increasingly
in the Hermetic tradition that supported, if mostly covertly,
"modern" spiritualism. He acclaimed "John Baptist Van [Jan
Baptista van] Helmont;' the seventeenth century Flemish physician and scientist
who was also a speculative mystic. He knew Jacob Boehme, and he linked his
notion of the "spiritual body" to the "perisprit" of the
French spiritualist theorist and mystic Allan Kardec (Hippolyte Leon Denizard
Rivail), whose Book of the Spirits (1858) he had apparently read. He linked his
"spiritual body" as well to the "nerve-projected form" of
Justinus Kerner, whose work had brought the Seeress of Prevorst to public
notice.ll2 Yet arguably, there was nothing here that a widely read spiritualist
would not cite or invoke, and the discourse world of Evans was yet conjoined to
the older spiritualist community.
It was Evans's next book, The Divine Law of Cure (1881), that marked his
entry into an expanded theoretical discourse to ground his metaphysical healing
practice-at this juncture, however, solely in terms of the West. Now Evans was
reading the Hermetic legacy in idealist terms more absolute and encompassing,
grounding his increasingly philosophical idealism in the philosophy of the
Continent and of England. Evans's new cast of characters included Bishop George
Berkeley, whose subjective idealism taught that matter did not exist independent
of perception and that the apparent existence of matter was a function of the
divine Mind. The new cast likewise included the German idealist philosophers
Georg W. F. Hegel, Friedrich von Schelling, Johann Fichte, and Friedrich
Jacobi, as well as the French eclectic philosopher Victor Cousin and the
English Romantic poet and synthetic theorist of language Samuel Taylor
Coleridge - all, significantly, beloved of the New England
Transcendentalists.ll3 Still, though, the idealism that Evans taught was a fudging
idealism, one that could yet speak to the spiritual materialism of Davis and
his sympathizers. Unlike the categorical denial of matter that had been spread
abroad by Eddy, Evans's statement did not deny the actuality of bodily
existence but instead asserted its contingency: It always and ever lived from
the mind. Idealists, he told readers, did not deny "the reality of
external things" but only that they had "any reality independent of
mind." "The world of matter with all it contains," he attested,
was "bound up in an indissoluble unity with the world of mind, and in fact
exists in it." It followed that bodily properties were "only
modifications of our minds." They were "reducible to feelings or
sensations in the soul."55 Enter Evans's phrenopathic mental healing
method to reap the pragmatic benefits of the philosophic situation. Unthought
pain was unfelt pain; and disease, without wrong thought, was as nothing.
Banish the thought, and you banished the disease. Here was the "grand
remedy, the long sought panacea ... the fundamental principle in the
phrenopathic cure." 56
The coming of Norman Vincent Peale and Trump
The material world as such was not totally denied in those movements, but
to them it was clear that the material world was contingent upon the mind. The
spiritual level of the world was the absolute truth, the absolute reality.
Therefore, the conclusion had to be: sickness and especially its cure lie
within the power of the human mind. The causality was pretty simple: positive
thoughts create positive circumstances and negative thoughts create negative
circumstances.57 A basic thought that will reappear in Norman Vincent Peale’s
work as well as in the prosperity gospel many times.
There were also certain traits in the Christian Science community that
laid an emphasis on wealth issues. Although it certainly was not a focus of the
movement, some businesspeople who were part of the community discovered
Christian Science also as a means to make good business decisions.58
Over the years, prosperity became a steadily increasing theme in New
Thought literature. It often occurred in connection with the thought that “the
greatest discovery of the human race was the realization that humans possessed
all the powers that formerly had been ascribed to God. This meant that each had
the ability to accomplish any purpose formed in the mind.”59 Books by Helen
Wilmans and Elizabeth Towne in the early 20th century are early examples of
prosperity literature.60 Another example is Frank Channing Haddock, who
published a socalled The Power Book series, which started in 1907. He touched
on topics like the power of affirmation and suggestion in order to achieve
personal or financial gain.61
After World War I, there was an ever-increasing outpour of literature
that could be more and more considered self-help books and were already sold in
the millions with a stronger focus on getting rich.62 Napoleon Hill’s 1937 book
Think and Grow Rich, which proclaimed that by knowing one secret, various
people like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller made a fortune. And of course,
Hill shared that secret method in his book, which was a mixture of
auto-suggestion, discipline, inspiration, persistence, but also transcendental
intuition. His book was a major success, made Hill a national celebrity, and
had sold more than 20 million copies when the author died in 1970.63
After World War II, success literature, that was often heavily
influenced by New Thought themes began to pop up all over the country. “After
World War II, it would resurface in the mainline American religious imagination
as ‘positive thinking,’ equal party psychology, business, self-help, and
metaphysics.”64 This brand of thinking
quickly also influenced the American mainstream religious and cultural
landscape and tremendously shaped the modern prosperity gospel.65 One book stood out among hundreds of
publications during this time: Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive
Thinking.
In fact, Norman Vincent Peale was specifically relevant for the
popularization of self-help culture, “[a]s a popularizer of the mentalistic
self-help tradition, Peale is without peer, past or present.”66 He also had a
significant influence on the Word of Faith movement. When he died in 1993 The
New York Times published an obituary that read: “He told Presidents and
business executives and millions of other people that a proper state of mind,
induced by simple prayer, could produce spiritual and material success on
earth, which he demonstrated by becoming a wealthy man.”67 This description
could also easily fit for the Word of Faith Movement as such.
In 1935, he began hosting a radio program, which later turned into a
television show and set the foundation of his popularity. One of his first
efforts in literature was You Can Win, which he published in 1938. The book did
not sell many copies, but it already showed some of Peale’s major themes.68 In
the preface to this book, he writes: “Life has a key, and to find that key is to
be assured of success in the business of living…. To win over the world a man
must get hold of some power in his inward or spiritual life which will never
let him down.”69
In 1945 Peale began another endeavor that helped him become publicly
known. He founded the magazine Guideposts, which still had a circulation of
almost four million copies in the early 1980s around the time of Peale’s death.
Peale’s official biographer called the magazine “(...) a sort of spiritual
newsletter for businessmen or factory workers with simple, down-to-earth
stories of religious faith in action.”70 In his autobiography Peale himself
elaborates on this, calling the premise for this magazine that “if a person
thinks positively, is of good character, works hard and practices his or her
faith (…) the sky was the limit under the American way of life.”71 This style
of writing, illustrating his thoughts and the underlying message with dozens of
personal stories, would later also be used in his work The Power of Positive
Thinking.
After World War II, two of his books finally sky-rocketed him to
nationwide fame and became best sellers. A Guide to Confident Living was
published in 1948, and his most famous work The Power of Positive Thinking in
1952. The latter had sold some 2 million copies during the presidency of Dwight
D. Eisenhower (1953-1961).224 It was also on The New York Times best-seller
list continuously for over three years, after having been additionally
popularized by Peale’s appearance on two highly-rated television shows.72
Not new Peale himself confessed that large portions of his ideas were
borrowed from New Thought philosophy.73
Trump pictured with Norman Vincent Peale
In 1953 the American magazine Newsweek put Norman Vincent Peale on the
cover of its Christmas issue. The title was “An Articulate Leader of
Christianity.”74 This shows how great his influence on American religiosity was
during this period. But of course, there was also some criticism of his unique
method.
It was criticized that by giving so much focus to God’s power, other
attributes that are important like the love of transcendence are marginalized.
Also, by giving so much power to the right prayer, God Himself actually lost
some of His freedom, seemingly having to answer only to rightful prayers for
success and healing. Equally, the attention given to succeeding and being happy
was seen as too much in line with consumerism.75
In 1955 Professor William Lee Miller of Smith College published essays
on Peale in which he touched that subject. He wondered “if Peale has not gained
his success by selling out his religion to his culture, becoming a prophet of a
civil religion in which there is no distance between the words of a preacher
and the idols and values of culture.”76
He especially criticized that in Peale’s theory, faith merely becomes a
means by which people can achieve what they desire. This occurs not in a
spiritual way or world, but in the material world, and by that it enforces what
popular culture (or the American Dream, as we will examine later) lets people
believe what they really want.77 One of the most famous critics around that
time was also theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who called the method “dubious” and
one-dimensional, among other things.78
Another branch of criticism dealt with the psychological implications
and arguments Peale’s theory made. Donald Meyer of Harvard criticized his
approach for not being “the mastery of skills or tasks, but the mastery of
fleeing and avoiding one’s own ‘negative thoughts.’”79 Psychiatrist Robert C.
Murphy rebuked the selectiveness of human emotions to which Peale subscribed.80
Trump's admitted influence by Vincent Peale
In an article on National Public Radio, Trump is quoted as saying:
“Norman Vincent Peale, the great Norman Vincent Peale, was my pastor. ... He
was so great. And what he would do is, he’d bring real-life situations,
modern-day situations, into the sermon. And you could listen to him all day
long.”81
Therefore, it is not surprising that today Donald Trump is known to
surround himself with prosperity teachers like Paula White-Cain who spoke at
his inauguration ceremony.82
A televangelist and exponent of the “health, wealth and prosperity”
movement, White-Cain preaches the “prosperity gospel”, an unorthodox approach
to Christianity that says God wants people to be rich, and that he makes them
wealthy as a sign of his blessing. So the richer you are, the more obvious it
is that God loves you, and the stronger your faith is.
White teaches that God rewards “faithful” people who invest in His
promised providence. You invest by making deposits,faith, prayers and gifts of
money, to God (the church, naturally, is the “steward” of your financial
gifts). So if you want to be healthy and wealthy, all you need to do is give,
and then believe, and all your heart’s desires will be realized. The more you
invest, the greater the likely rewards.
Like The Power of Positive Thinking shaped the church growth movement,
the “health wealth and prosperity” movements, and many other expressions of
capitalist-friendly evangelicalism and fundamentalism. The hypothesis was
simple: if you believe it enough, have the faith for it and keep saying it
enough, it will be so. Your mind and your language, if fully positive, will
ultimately reify your goal.
Its message of health and wealth speaks especially to people who dream
of a better life and who struggle with realizing that dream.
“In times of uncertainty, especially where material success is a central
cultural value, there may be a cognitive need to attempt to create wealth and
health by metaphysical means and to predict with some measure of assurance
outcomes that are uncertain to realization.”83.
The hypothesis was simple: if you believe it enough, have the faith for
it and keep saying it enough, it will be so. Your mind and your language, if
fully positive, will ultimately reify your goal.
In some respects, then, we already know how Trump’s mantra, “Make
America great again”, will pan out. The president believes in the vision. If it
doesn’t happen, it won’t be his fault: it will be yours. Not enough people have
faith; too many doubt. Blame the faithless.
1. See Judah, History and Philosophy of the Metaphysical Movements,
207-9; Braden, Spirits in Rebellion, 287-89.
2. Mary Baker Glover, Science and Health (Boston: Christian Scientist
Publishing, 1875).
3. Mary Baker G. Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
(Boston: J. Armstrong, 1906). This edition would continue to appear after
Eddy's death in 1910 with Trustees under the Will of Mary Baker G. Eddy listed
as publisher.
4. Mary Baker Eddy, The First Church of Christ Scientist and Miscellany
(1916), as quoted in Rennie B. Schoepflin, Christian Science on Trial:
Religious Healing in America (Boston: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003),
28.
5. For Eddy's theologically driven account of most of these events, see
Mary Baker Eddy, Retrospection and Introspection (1891; rpt., Boston:
First Church of Christ, Scientist, n.d.), 13-14 ("Theological
Reminiscence"), 19-21 ("Marriage and Parentage"). For a
judicious sifting of the evidence regarding the surrender of Mary Glover's son
George, see Gillian Gill, Mary Baker Eddy (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 1998),
86-9.
6. George Miller Beard, American Nervousness, Its Causes and
Consequences: A Supplementto Nervous ExhcluLUstion (Neurasthenia) (New York:
Putnam, 1881). On Eddy's involvement with spiritualism, see, for example, Gill,
Mary Baker Eddy, 152-53, 172-80.
7. The construction of Eddy's Quimby years is fraught with difficulty.
For a careful reading that still stresses differences between Eddy and Quimby,
see Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery (New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston, 1966), esp. 180-83- George Quimby is quoted in Horatio
W. Dresser, ed., "Appendix;' The Quimby Manuscripts (1921; rpt.,
Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1969), 438.
8. Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery, 162.
9. Dresser, ed., Quimby Manuscripts; Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, The
Complete Writings, ed. Ervin Seale, 3 vols. (Marina del Rey, Calif.: DeVorss,
1988), although this is still not a critical edition. On the general direction
of Dresser's changes, see Hazen, Village Enlightenment, 144-45.
10. Quimby, Complete Writings, 2: 411; 3: 251, 248.
11. Ibid., 2: 92, 144, 148, 206, 340; 3: 246, 343.
12. Ibid., 2: 142; 3: 195-96; J. Stillson Judah, The History and
Philosophy of the Metaphysical Movements in America (Philadelphia: Westminster,
1967), 150-54. For materialist readings of Quimby, see my earlier work,
Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians
to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1°7-15; and, still
more thoroughgoing, Hazen, Village Enlightenment, 113-46.
13. For a sense of this process in the case of Emerson, see, e.g.,
Willard Thorp, "Emerson on Tour," Quarterly Journal of Speech 16, no.
1 (February 1930): 19-34; Hubert H. Hoeltje, "Ralph Waldo Emerson in Minnesota;'
Minnesota History: A Quarterly Magazine 11, no. 2 (June 1930): 145-59; Russel
B. Nye, "Emerson in Michigan and the Northwest," Michigan
History Magazine 26, no. 2 (Spring 1942): 159-72; and Lynda Beltz,
"Emerson's Lectures in Indianapolis," Indiana Magazine of
History 60, no. 3 (September 1964): 269-80. For a similar rehearsal regarding
Henry David Thoreau, see Walter Harding, "A Check List of Thoreau's
Lectures;' Bulletin of the New York Public Library 52 (1948): 78-87. For the
Transcendentalist reading of Quimby, see Stewart W. Holmes, "Phineas
Parkhurst Quimby: Scientist of Transcendentalism;' New England Quarterly 17
(September 1944): 356-80.
14. For the Swedenborgianism, see Judah, History and Philosophy of the
Metaphysical Movements, 149-50; and, for another quick digest, see Peel, Mary
Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery, 162-63, 338 n26.
15. Quimby, Complete Writings, 3: 196; for a discussion of Quimby's
notion of wisdom, see Hazen, Village Enlightenment, 133-43.
16. Quimby, Complete Writings, 3: 371. In view of the pervasive nature
of Quimby's "wisdom" discourse and its consistency, I find it
strained at best to read the Quimby material, as Robert Peel did, in terms of
Eddy's possible interpolations as an amanuensis and editor (see Peel, Mary Baker
Eddy: The Years of Discovery, 182). Similarly, Quimby's apparent denial that he
was making himself equal to Christ seems miscast, although Charles Braden took
it at face value (see Charles S. Braden, Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and
Development of New Thought [1963; rpt., Dallas: Southern Methodist University
Press, 1984], 78).
17. Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery, 182.
18. Mary M. Patterson to the Portland Conrier, as quoted in Georgine
Milmine, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science
(1909; rpt., Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1971), 60.
19. See Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery, 195-97; see,
also, for a useful sifting of the evidence, Gill, Mary Baker Eddy, 161-65.
20. Glover, Science and Health, 435; Mary Baker Glover, The Science of
Man, By Which the Sick Are Healed, Embracing Questions and Answers in Moral
Science (1876; rpt., New York: Rare Book, n.d.), 5; Eddy, Science and Health
with Key to the Scriptures, 467, 311; Mary Baker Eddy, Miscellaneous Writings,
1883-1896 (1896; rpt., Boston: Trustees under the Will of Mary Baker G. Eddy,
1924), 234; Mary Baker Eddy, Manual of the Mother Church (Boston: First Church
of Christ, Scientist, 1895), 47, as cited and quoted in Stephen Gottschalk,
Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 320.
21. Stephen Gottschalk, The Emergence of Christian Science in American
Religious Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 48-50, 284-85,
120; Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 497; Eddy, Manual of
the Mother Church, 1516; Eddy, Manual of the Mother Church, 41, as quoted in
Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone, 196.
22. Eddy, Retrospection and Introspection, 67; Eddy, Miscellaneous
Writings, 108-9 (emphasis in original). Beryl Satter has read Eddy's
repudiation of matter/evil/sin in terms of the body, and especially the female
body with its sexual vulnerability and social subordination. In this context,
she points to an Eddy doing "apocalyptic battle, in which woman would
conquer the falsehoods of the Adam-dream." See Beryl Satter, Each Mind a
Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 67-68.
23. Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 114-15; see,
also, Gottschalk, Emergence of Christian Science, 67; Braude, Radical Spirits,
186.
24. Mary Baker Eddy to John Lathrop, 9 May 1906, as quoted in
Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone, 356; Calvin Frye Diary, 21 August 1910, as
quoted in Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone, 402 (the description of the
entire episode is taken from Gottschalk's account).
25. Glover, Science and Health, 90, 5.
26. See Schoepflin, Christian Science on Trial, 26,24,15, for her
putative spirit mediumship and for quotations from her Banner of Light
advertisement.
27. Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom, 65.
28. Glover, Science and Health, 112-13 (emphasis in original).
29. Ibid., 27, 328-29, 93, 96.
30. Ibid., 84, 92, 100, 88, 87.
31. Ibid., 71-72, 64, 65, 66, 67, 70, 74.
32. See Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone.
33. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 1019-62; Eddy, Science and Health with Key
to the Scriptures, 468.
34. Glover, Science of Man, 7, 10; Glover, Science and Health, 435. For
formulaic utterances and typical language, see, e.g., Schoepflin, Christian
Science on Trial, 55-72, 75-77; Stephen Gottschalk, "Christian Science and
Harmonialism," in Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams, eds.,
Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, 3 vols. (New York:
Scribner's, 1988), 2: 901-2.
35. Glover, Science of Man, 12; Mary Baker Eddy, as remembered in 1875
by Samuel P. Bancroft from 1870 and as quoted in Schoepflin, Christian Science
on Trial, 25.
36. Braude, Radical Spirits, 183-84.
37. Glover, Science of Man, 12; Braude, Radical Spirits, 185-86.
38. Braude, Radical Spirits, 187; Glover, Science of Man, 4-5.
39. Schoepflin, Christian Science on Trial, 47, 106; Gottschalk,
Emergence of Christian Science, 175.
40. Gottschalk, Emergence of Christian Science, 175.
41. Ibid., 257. Gottschalk based this assessment on Neal DeNood,
"The Diffusion of a System of Belief" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard
University, 1937)'
42. Gottschalk, Emergence of Christian Science, 234,244; Schoepflin,
Christian Science on Trial, 34.
43. On the business of being a Christian Science practitioner, see
Schoepflin, Christian Science on Trial, 48-52.
44. See ibid., 53.
45. For a succinct summary of this process, see Gary Ward Materra,
"Women in Early New Thought: Lives and Theology in Transition, from the
Civil War to World War I" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa
Barbara, 1997), 64-67, 110, 117.
46. On the copyrighting and its results, see Satter, Each Mind a
Kingdom, 96.
47. Hazen, Village Enlightenment, 139-41.
48. See Quimby, Complete Writings, 1: 186.
49. Andrew Jackson Davis, "What Is the Philosophy of Healing?"
in Andrew Jackson Davis, The Great Harmonia, vol. 1, The Physician (1850), 13th
ed. (Boston: Banner of Light, n.d.), Quimby, Complete Writings, 1:
160,24-41.
50. Quimby, Complete Writings, 1: 412; 2: 152-53; 3: 90, 93-95. 103.
51.Ibid., 3: 323-24.
52. See Braden, Spirits in Rebellion, 90-91; and John F. Teahan,
"Warren Felt Evans and Mental Healing: Romantic Idealism and Practical
Mysticism in Nineteenth-Century America," Church History 48, no. 1
(March 1979): 90. Evans's six books on mental healing were Rev. W[arren].
F[elt]. Evans, The Mental-Cure, Illustrating the Influence of the Mind on the
Body Both in Health and Disease, and the Psychological Method of Treatment
(Boston: H. H. and T. W. Carter, 1869); W[arren]. F[elt]. Evans, Mental
Medicine: A Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Medical Psychology (Boston:
Carter and Pettee, 1872); W[arren]. F[elt]. Evans, Soul and Body; or, The
Spiritual Science of Health and Disease (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1876);
W[arren]. F[elt]. Evans, The Divine Law of Cure (Boston: H. H. qarter, 1881);
W[arren]. F[elt]. Evans, The Primitive Mind-Cure: The Nature and Power of
Faith; or, Elementary Lessons in Christian Philosophy and Transcendental
Medicine (Bostoq: H. H. Carter and Karrick, 1885); W[arren]. F[elt]. Evans,
Esoteric Christianity and Mental Therape"4tics (Boston: H. H. Carter and
Karrick, 1886).
53. Evans, Mental-Cure, 28, 32,45, 55. Evans"Was apparently at this
date still styling himself a "Reverend" (perhaps an attempt to sell books?),
even though it was already five years since he had left the Methodist ministry.
Evans's four earlier publications, all published in Boston and none of them
explicitly focused on healing, were Divine Order in the Process of Full
Salvation (186o), The Happy Islands; or, Paradise Restored (186o), The
Celestial Dawn; or, Connection of Earth and Heaven (1862), and The New Age and
Its Messenger (1864). The "messenger" of the "New Age" (of
the Holy Spirit) was Emanuel Swedenborg.
54. For the New Age, see Evans, Mental-Cure, 57, 119, 191, 211, 258,
passim; for spirits, see, for example, ibid., 79-80, 181,288,360; for the
Seeress of Prevorst, see ibid., 133, 136,266, 357; Brittan is cited ibid., 291;
for spiritual spheres, see ibid., 70; for death, see ibid., 108; for phrenology
and magnetism, see ibid., 102, 273 passim; for modern spiritualism, see ibid.,
79-80.
55. Braden, Spirits in Rebellion, 93. Gail Thain Parker read Evans
rather superficially in terms of these Swedenborgian correspondences, focusing
only on The Mental-Cure except for some earlier attention to his New Age and
Its Messenger, ignoring the more complex aspects of Evans's work, and ignoring,
even further, the dramatic expansion of his ideas in his five subsequent mental
healing books. See Gail Thain Parker, Mind Cure in New England: From the Civil
War to World War I (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1973),49.
56. Evans, Mental-Cure, 58-59,62-63 (emphases in original).
57. Bowler, Kate. Blessed. A History of the American Prosperity Gospel.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 14.
58. Stephen Gottschalk, The Emergence of Christian Science in American
Religious Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 252-254.
59. Hudson, Winthrop. Religion in America. An Historical Account of the
Development of American Religious Life. 4th ed. New York: MacMillan, 1987, 221.
60. Haller Jr., John S. The History of New Thought. From Mind Cure to
Positive Thinking and the Prosperity Gospel. West Chester, PA: Swedenborg
Foundation Press, 2012, 222.
61. Weiss, Richard. The American Myth of Success. From Horatio Alger to
Norman Vincent Peale. New York: Basic Books, 1969. Reprinted. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Page references are to the 1988
edition, 217.
62. Haller, History of New Thought, 233-234.
63. Ibid., 238.
64. Bowler, Blessed, 36.
65. Ibid., 33-36.
66. Weiss, American Myth of Success, 224.
67. George Vecsey, “Norman Vincent Peale, Preacher of Gospel Optimism,
Dies at 95,” The New York Times, December 26, 1993,
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/26/obituaries/norman-vincent-peale-preacher-of-gospeloptimism-dies-at-95.html.
68. Ahlstrom, Religious History, 1033 and Haller, History of New
Thought, 240 and Anker, Self Help, 107.
69. Quoted in Ahlstrom, Sydney E.
A Religious History of the American People. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1972, 1033.
70. Quoted in Anker, Roy M. Self-Help and Popular Religion in Modern
American Culture. An Interpretive Guide. Westport and London: Greenwood Press,
1999, 111.
71 Quoted in Ibid., 112.
72. Ahlstrom, Religious History, 1033.
73. Anker, Self-Help, 113.
74. Ibid., 102-103.
75. Anker, Self-Help, 123.
76. Anker, Self-Help, 118.
77. Ibid., 124.
78. Ibid., 124-125.
79. Ibid., 130.
80. Lane, Christopher. Surge of Piety. Norman Vincent Peale and the
Remaking of American Religious Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016),
90.
81. Ibid., 90-91.
82.Tom Gjelten, “How Positive Thinking, Prosperity Gospel Define Donald
Trump's Faith Outlook,” All Things Considered, NPR, August 3, 2016, accessed
August 8, 2017, http://www.npr.org/2016/08/03/488513585/how-positive-thinking-prosperity-gospel-definedonald-trumps-faith-outlook
83. Gjelten, “Positve Thinking, Prosperity Gospel.”
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