Modern Religious Cults and Movements Part 8

Mortal mind is that side of us which accepts our entanglement in the facts and forces of the world order and upon mortal mind so vaguely conceived Mrs. Eddy throws the whole burden of responsibility for all the unhappy aspects of experience and conditioning circ.u.mstances. She gives it a surprising range of creative power. It has created everything Mrs. Eddy does not like or believe in. In other words, there is not one reality but two, one the reality of well-being, the other the reality of unhappiness and suffering, but according to Mrs. Eddy the first reality is the only real reality, the second is an unreal reality which we ourselves create through false beliefs and which we may escape at any moment by simply s.h.i.+fting the center of our creative idealism.

Mrs. Eddy makes what she means by mortal mind reasonably clear through endless repet.i.tion and some a.n.a.lysis, but she never for a moment accounts for its existence. It is no creation of what she calls the divine Mind; indeed she says in substance that G.o.d is not conscious of it at all; it lies entirely outside the range of His knowledge. (Page 243.)

G.o.d is Good. Since He is good He cannot have created nor be responsible for, nor even recognize pain, sorrow or suffering. "The Divine Mind cannot suffer" (page 108, also page 335), "is not responsible for physical and moral disasters" (page 119). G.o.d did not create matter (the Father mind is not the father of matter) (page 257), for matter means pain and death, nor do such things as these belong in any way to the order of the Divine Mind. They have no admitted reality in Mrs. Eddy's scheme of a true idealism. Man is "G.o.d's spiritual idea" and since he belongs by right to an order in which there is neither sin nor sorrow nor death, such things as these have no reality for him save as he admits them. What really admits them is mortal mind, the agent of another system of Belief in which humanity has in some way, which is never really explained, become entangled, and we may apparently escape from the one order to the other simply by a change in our beliefs. For all the shadowed side of life has reality only as we accept or believe in it; directly we cease to believe in it or deny it it ceases to be.

It is, as near as one can make out, a myth, an illusion, whose beginnings are lost in obscurity and which, for the want of the revelation vouchsafed through her, has been continued from age to age by the untaught or the misled. For example, a.r.s.enic is not a poison, so we are told again and again. It is only a poison because people think it is;[36] it began to be a poison only because people thought it was, it continues to be a poison only because the majority of people think it is now and, such is the subtle and far-reaching influence of mind upon mind, it will continue to be a poison as long as any one continues to believe it to be. Directly we all believe that a.r.s.enic is not a poison it will be no poison. Poisons, that is, are the creation of mortal mind.

Pain is pain only through the same mistaken belief in the reality of it.

"By universal consent mortal belief has const.i.tuted itself a law to bind mortals to sickness, sin and death." And so on at great length and almost endless repet.i.tion.

[Footnote 36: Page 178.]

_The Essential Limitations of Mrs. Eddy's System_

Since matter conditions us who were born to be unconditioned and since matter is apparently the root of so many ills, the seat of so many pains, matter goes with the rest. Mrs. Eddy is not always consistent in her consideration of matter; sometimes she confines herself to saying that there is neither sensation nor life in matter--which may be true enough save as matter both affords the material for sensation and conditions its forms, which is an immense qualification,--but again and again she calls matter an illusion. Consistently the laws of physics and chemistry should disappear with the laws of hygiene and medicine, but Mrs. Eddy does not go so far as that though it would be difficult to find a logical stopping place once you have taken this line. Mortal mind is apparently the source of all these illusions.

Mrs. Eddy's disposal of matter, along with her constant return to its misleading mastery in experience is an outstanding aspect of her book.

The writer is inclined to believe that Mrs. Eddy's formula: "There is ... no matter in life and no life in matter," is an echo of Tyndall's famous utterance--made about the time she was working with her system--that he found "in matter the promise and potency of all life."

There is surprisingly little reference in "Science and Health" to philosophic or scientific sources. Cutter's physiology is quoted in some editions--an old textbook which the writer remembers to have found among his mother's school books. There are a few references to popular astronomy, but in general for Mrs. Eddy modern science does not exist except in the most general way as the erroneous expression of error and always with a small "s" as against the capital "S" of her own system.

Nor does she show any knowledge of other philosophic idealisms nor any acquaintance with any solution of the problems she was facing save the commonplaces of evangelical orthodoxy. "Science and Health" knows nothing also of any medical science save the empirical methods of the medical science of 1860 and 1870.

But she cannot have been wholly uninfluenced--being a woman of an alert mind--by the controversy which, in the seventies and eighties, was raging about a pretty cra.s.s and literal materialism, and her writings probably reflect--with a good deal of indirection--that controversy.

Here is a possible key to a good many things which are otherwise puzzling enough. She is, in her own fas.h.i.+on, the defender of an idealistic interpretation of reality and experience. Now all idealistic systems have had to dispose of matter in some way. In general idealists find in matter only the reflection in consciousness of the material which sense experience supplies, and since the raw material is in every way so different from the mental reflection, the idealist may defend his position plausibly in a.s.suming matter to be, in its phenomenal aspects, really the creation of thought. But he must account for the persistency of it and the consistency of experience so conditioned. He does this by a.s.suming the whole interrelated order to be held, as it were, in solution, in some larger system of thought which really supplies for us our environment and if he be both devout and consistent he calls this the thought G.o.d.[37] In this way he solves his problem--at least to his own satisfaction--and even supplies a basis for Theistic faith. But he does not deny the working reality of his so-called material experiences nor does he, like Mrs. Eddy, accept one aspect of this experience and deny the other. This is philosophically impossible.

[Footnote 37: So Royce in "The World and the Individual."]

A thoroughgoing theistic monism must find in matter some aspect or other of the self-revelation of G.o.d. It may be hard pressed to discover just how the psychical is "stepped down" to the physical. (That is the essential difficulty in all Creationism.) But something must be a.s.sumed to get a going concern in any department of thought and there is much in that resolution of matter into force and force into always more tenuous and imponderable forms--which is the tendency of modern science--to render this a.s.sumption less difficult to the rational imagination than perhaps any other we are asked to make. When the final elements in matter have become electrons and the electron is conceived as a strain in a magnetic field and thus the

"Cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which is inherent,"

become the projection into sensibly apprehended form of the flux of an infinite and eternal energy, it is not hard to define that energy in terms of a divine will. Indeed it is hard not to do just that. But there is no place in such a resolution as this for the conclusions of "Science and Health."

Or we may accept in one form or another a dualism in which the practical mind is generally content to rest. According to this point of view we have to do with a reality which may be known under two aspects.

It is the chemical action and interaction of elements--and the mind which measures and combines them; it is the physical action and interaction of force--and the mind which directs the process.

Biologically "the living creature gives an account of itself in two ways. It can know itself as something extended and intricately built up, burning away, moving, throbbing; it can also know itself as the seat of sensation, perceptions, feelings, wishes, thoughts. But there is not one process, thinking, and another process, cerebral metabolism (vital processes in nerve-cells); there is a psycho-physical life--a reality which we know under two aspects. Cerebral control and mental activity are, on this view, different aspects of one natural occurrence. What we have to do with is the unified life of a psycho-physical being, a body-mind or mind-body."[38] In short there is no philosophy or science outside the covers of her own book to which Mrs. Eddy may turn for support and though this does not prove the case against her--she might be right and the whole disciplined thought of her time be wrong--this latter supposition is so improbable as to rule it out of court.

[Footnote 38: J.A. Thomson, "The Outline of Science," p. 548.]

The materialism against which she contends has ceased to exist. The matter which she denies does not exist in the sense of her denial. There was, even when she was writing, a line of which she was apparently wholly ignorant which has since been immensely developed, and of all this there is naturally no reflection at all in her work. It is more hopelessly out of touch with the laborious and strongly established conclusions of modern thought in every field than the first chapters of Genesis for there one may, at least, subst.i.tute the science of to-day for the science of 3,000 years ago and still retain the enduring insights of the faith then voiced, but there is no possible accommodation of "Science and Health" to either the science or the philosophy of the twentieth century. It must be left to a consistent Christian Scientist to reconcile his gospel with the freer movements of the world of which he is still a citizen--though perhaps this also might be urged against a deal of contemporaneous Christian faith--but it is all an arresting testimony to the power of the human mind to organize itself in compartments between which there is no communication.

_Experience and Life_

Beyond all this is the fact of which "Science and Health" takes no account--the conditioning of conscious life and working experience by its material environment however conceived. This is true of every phase of life and all our later emphasis upon the power of the mind in one direction and another to escape this conditioning scarcely affects the ma.s.sive reality of it. Christian Science makes no attempt at all to escape this--save in the region of physical health--or else it provides an alibi in the phrase, "I have not demonstrated in that region yet."

But it does not thus escape the limitation imposed upon us all and if we may dare for a moment to be dogmatic, it never will. At the best we live in a give and take and if, through discipline and widening knowledge, we may push back a little the frontiers which limit us, and a.s.sert the supremacy of soul over the material with which it is so intimately a.s.sociated, we do even this slowly and at great cost and always in conformity with the laws of the matter we master.

There is a body of evidence here which can no more be ignored than gravitation, and we best dispose of a.s.sociation of personality with the material fabric of the body and the world of which it is a part, not by denying their mutual interdependence but by discovering therein the laws and methods of an infinite wisdom. Here are ministries through which we come to consciousness of ourselves, here are materials upon which we exercise our power, here are realities which hold us fast to normal and intelligible lives, here are masters whose rule is kind and servants whose obediences empower us. They condition our happinesses as well as our unhappinesses and supply for us the strings of that harp of the senses upon which the music of life is played. Life really gains its spiritual content through the action and interaction of the aspiring self upon its environment--whether that environment be intimate as the protest of a disturbed bodily cell or remote as Orion and the Pleiades.[39] The very words which Mrs. Eddy uses would be idle if this were not so and though a thoroughgoing defender of her system may read into its lines a permission for all this, the fundamentals of her system deny it.

[Footnote 39: "And I am inclined to think that the error of forgetting that spirit in order to be real or that principles, whether of morality, religion or knowledge, must be exemplified in temporal facts, is a no less disastrous error than that of the sciences which have not learned that the natural, when all the meaning of it is set free, blossoms into the spiritual like the tree into flower. Religion and philosophy and science also have yet to learn more fully that all which can possibly concern man, occupy his intelligence or engage his will, lies at the point of intersection of the natural and spiritual."--"A Faith that Enquires," p. 27.]

Christian Science breaks down both philosophically and practically just here. It is none the less a dualism because it denies that it is. It confronts not one but two ranges of reality; it gains nothing by making mortal mind the villain in the play. It is compelled to admit the existence of the reality which it denies, even in the fact of denying it. What we deny exists for us--we could not otherwise deny it. Royce has put all this clearly, strongly, finally. "The mystic first denies that evil is real. He is asked why, then, evil seems to exist. He replies that this is our finite error. The finite error itself hereupon becomes, as the source of all our woes, an evil. But no evil is real, hence no error can be real, hence we do not really err even if we suppose that evil is real. Here we return to our starting point and could only hope to escape by a.s.serting that it is an error to a.s.sert that we really err or that we really believe error to be real, and with a process thus begun there is indeed no end, nor at any stage in this process is there consistency."[40] All this is subtle enough, but if we are to make our world by thinking and unthinking it, all this is unescapably true.

[Footnote 40: "The World and the Individual," Vol. II, p. 394.]

When, moreover, you have reduced one range of experience to illusion there is absolutely nothing to save the rest. If evil is error and error evil and the belief that evil is an illusion is itself an illusion what is there to guarantee the reality of good? The sword with which Mrs.

Eddy cut the knot of the problem of evil is two-edged. If the optimist denies evil for the sake of good and points for proof to the solid coherency of the happier side of life, the pessimist may as justly deny good for the sake of evil and point for proof to the solid coherency of the sadder side of life; he will have no trouble in finding his facts.

If sickness is a dream then health is a dream as well. Once we have taken illusion for a guide there is no stopping until everything is illusion. The Eastern mystic who went this road long before Mrs. Eddy and who thought it through with a searching subtleness of which she was incapable, reached the only logical conclusion. All experience is illusion, entire detachment from action is the only wisdom, and absorption in an unconscious something which only escapes being nothing is our appointed destiny:

"We are such stuff As dreams are made of, And our little life Is rounded with a sleep."

_Sense-Testimony Cannot Be Accepted for Health and Denied for Sickness_

Christian Science, then, is not monism, it is rather a dualism; it confronts not one but two ranges of reality and it is compelled to admit the existence of the reality which it denies, even the fact of denying it, for it is a philosophical axiom that what we deny exists for us--we could not otherwise deny it. Denial is the recognition of reality just as much as affirmation. To repeat, it is this continuous interwoven process of trying to reconcile the one-sided idealism of Christian Science with the necessity of its argument and the facts of life which gives to "Science and Health" what one may call its strangely bifocal character, though indeed this is a somewhat misleading figure. One has the same experience in reading the book that one has in trying to read through gla.s.ses which are out of focus; you are always just seeing and just missing because Mrs. Eddy herself is always just seeing and just missing a really great truth.

This fundamental inconsistency penetrates the whole system even down to its practical applications. Christian Science denies the testimony of the senses as to sickness and yet accepts them as to health. It goes further than this, it accepts the testimony of the senses of other people--physicians, for example, in accepting their diagnosis. The edition of "Science and Health" published in 1918 offers in chapter eighteen a hundred pages of testimonials sent in by those who have in various ways been helped by their faith. These letters are shot through and through with a recognition of the testimony of the senses which no explanation can possibly explain away. "I was afflicted with a fibroid tumour which weighed not less than fifty pounds, attended by a continuous hemorrhage for eleven years." If the senses have any language at all, this is their language. A growth cannot be known as a fibroid tumour without sense testimony, nor its weight estimated without sense testimony, nor a continuous hemorrhage be recorded, or its cessation known without sense testimony, nor can epilepsy be diagnosed, nor bilious attacks recognized without sense testimony. On page 606 a grateful disciple bears witness to the healing of a broken arm, testimony to said healing being demonstrated by a visit to a physician's office "where they were experimenting with an X-ray machine. The doctor pointed out the place as being slightly thicker at that part, like a piece of steel that had been welded." In other words, Christian Science cannot make out its case without the recognition of the veracity of a sense testimony, whose truth its philosophy denies.

Mrs. Eddy seems to dismiss all this in one brief paragraph. "Is a man sick if the material senses indicate that he is in good health? No, for matter can make no conditions for man. And is he well if the senses say he is sick? Yes, he is well in Science, in which health is normal and disease is abnormal."[41] If Mrs. Eddy and her followers believe so specious a statement as that, to set them free from an inconsistency which is central in their whole contention, they are welcome to their belief, but the inconsistency still remains. You can go far by using words in a Pickwickian sense but there is a limit. A consistent idealism is philosophically possible, but it must be a far more inclusive and deeply reasoned idealism than Christian Science. The most thoroughgoing idealisms have accepted the testimony of the senses as a part of the necessary conduct of life as now conditioned. Anything else would reduce us to unspeakable confusion, empty experience of its content, dissolve all the contacts of life and halt us in our tracks for we cannot take a step safely without the testimony of the senses and any scheme of things which seeks to distinguish between the varying validities of sense testimony, accepting only the evidence of the senses for health and well-being and denying the dependability of whatever else they register, is simply an immense caprice which breaks down under any examination.

[Footnote 41: Page 120. It is only fair to say that Mrs. Eddy is hampered by her own want of clear statement. The phrase (so often used in "Science and Health") "in Science" is probably in her mind equivalent to "in the ideal order" and if Mrs. Eddy had clearly seen and clearly stated what she is groping for: that the whole shadowed side of life belongs to our present world of divided powers and warring forces and unfinished enterprises, that G.o.d has something better for His children toward which we are being led through the discipline of experience and that we may therefore seek to conceive and affirm this ideal order and become its citizens in body, mind and soul, she would have escaped a perfect web of contradiction and been in line not only with the great philosophies but with historic Christian faith. But then Christian Science would not be Christian Science.]

_The Inescapable Reality of Shadowed Experience_

Evil does not cease to be because it is denied. The acceptance of sense testimony is just as necessary in the region of pain and sickness as in driving a motorcar down a crowded street and the hypothesis of a misleading mortal mind, instead of explaining everything, demands itself an explanation. What Mrs. Eddy calls mortal mind is only the registry of the dearly bought experience of the race. We began only with the power to feel, to struggle, to will and to think. We have been blind enough and stupid enough but we are, after all, not unteachable and out of our experience and our reflections we have created the whole splendid and dependable body of human knowledge. What we know about pain is itself the outcome of all the suffering of our kind. We began with no developed philosophy nor any presuppositions about anything. Experience reflects encompa.s.sing realities which we are able to escape only as we make their laws our ministers. We did not give fire the power to burn, we discovered that only in the school of the touch of flame. We did not give edged steel the power to cut, we found that out through death and bleeding wounds. We did not give to poisons their deadly power, our att.i.tude toward them is simply the outcome of our experience with them.

Conditioned as we are by those laws and forces with which this present existence of ours is in innumerable ways inextricably interwoven, our tested and sifted beliefs are only the outcome of an action and interaction of recipient or creative personality upon its environment old as human consciousness, and if in all this we have become persuaded of pain and suffering and shadowed experience, it is only because these are as real as any elements in experience can possibly be. To attempt to write them out or deny them out or juggle them out in any kind of way save in bravely meeting them and humbly being taught by them and in the full resource of disciplined power getting free from them by removing the causes which create them, is to cheat ourselves with words, lose ourselves in shadows which we mistake for light and even if in some regions we seem to succeed it is only at the cost of what is more bitter than pain and more deadly than wounds--the loss of mental and spiritual integrity. This is a price too great to pay for any mere healing.

VI

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AS A THEOLOGY

"Science and Health" is offered, among other things, as a key to the Scriptures, and along with her interpretation of both the Old and the New Testaments in terms of her peculiar philosophy Mrs. Eddy rewrites the great articles of the Christian creeds. A careful student of Mrs.

Eddy's mental processes is able in this region to understand them better than she understood them herself. She had, to begin with, an inherited reverence for the Bible as an authority for life and she shared with mult.i.tudes of others a difficulty to which reference has already been more than once made. For what one may call the typical Protestant consciousness the Bible is the final revelation of G.o.d, governing, if only we can come to understand it, both our faith and our conduct of life, but the want of a true understanding of it and, above all, the burdening of it with an inherited tradition has clouded its light for mult.i.tudes of devout souls.

_Science and Health Offered as a Key to the Scriptures_

Such as these have been almost pathetically eager to accept any interpretation, no matter how capricious, which seemed to read an intelligible meaning into its difficult pa.s.sages, or reconcile its contradictions, or make it a more practical guide in the conduct of life. Any cult or theory, therefore, which can seem to secure for itself the authority of the Bible has obtained directly an immense reinforcement in its appeal to the devout and the perplexed, and Mrs.

Eddy has taken full advantage of this. Her book is veined with Scripture references; two of her chapters are expositions of Biblical books (Genesis and Revelation); and other chapters deal with great doctrines of the Church.

_It Ignores All Recognized Canons of Biblical Interpretation.

Ill.u.s.trations_

Mrs. Eddy naturally sought the authority for her philosophy between the covers of the Scriptures. Beyond debate her teachings have carried much farther than they otherwise would, in that she claims for them a Scriptural basis, and they must be examined in that light. Now there are certain sound and universally recognized rules governing the scholarly approach to the Old and New Testaments. Words must be taken in their plain sense; they must be understood in their relation to their context.