Attending publishing conferences over the years as the Publisher’s Agent for Mary Baker Eddy’s writings has led to some interesting conversations. As I’m surrounded by publishers, literary agents, and authors—all scrambling for networking contacts and increased marketing and sales opportunities—conversations others initiate with me often end up being brief. The individual will ask, “How many authors do you represent?” “One,” I say. “Huh. What do you publish?” “On behalf of our governing board, I publish the core texts of the Christian Science Church.” (“Huh.”) And my newfound friend usually spots someone else to talk to over my shoulder.
Over my years in this job, the dearness of this unique situation—one that’s perceived as odd by other publishers—has grown and deepened in my thought. My office has the privilege of publishing and distributing Mary Baker Eddy’s writings, as print books and digitally, to a global audience. We are responsible for only one author. (We also publish the Bible, of course, but as the text is licensed to the Church by the perpetual copyright-holder in the United Kingdom, our Bible publishing is more akin to that of a distributor.)
Publishing the works of a single author, and publishing those same books for over one hundred years, is a rare task in today’s business world. But what I’ve learned, over and over again, is that Mary Baker Eddy’s writings are continually fresh for the receptive reader; additionally, our focus on a single author and on publishing her books enables us to appreciate even more her unique and timeless contributions as an author and editor, reader, poet, listener, teacher, and leader.
A major contributor to the freshness and accessibility of her works is the incredible range of her voice, her writing style. She moves fluidly from prose to poetry and back again. She often directly quotes as well as alludes to Scriptures. Her tone is revelatory and insistent when defining and declaring the divine law; she’s also gentle and thoughtful with her reader. She’s funny. And always, even when writing letters to enemies, she’s gracious and kind. At times direct, at other times almost girlish in her humility, she continually reaches a wide range of readers over the decades because her thought, expressed in her still-contemporary writing style, is so broad.
Largely taught by family, friends, and her own study, she became a remarkably educated woman. However, she was always clear that her understanding of Christian Science as the laws of God far surpassed human learning—as she wrote in her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection: “After my discovery of Christian Science, most of the knowledge I had gleaned from schoolbooks vanished like a dream.
“Learning was so illumined, that grammar was eclipsed. Etymology was divine history, voicing the idea of God in man’s origin and signification. Syntax was spiritual order and unity. Prosody, the song of angels, and no earthly or inglorious theme” (p. 10).
This plays out in her writings. Again and again, she bent or broke grammar and punctuation rules to serve a metaphysical point. One of the best-known examples of this can be found in the chapter “Recapitulation” in her primary work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which is the textbook of Christian Science:
“Question.—Is there more than one God or Principle?
“Answer.—There is not. Principle and its idea is one, and this one is God, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Being, and His reflection is man and the universe” (pp. 465–466).
If she had followed the grammatical rule, and stated that “Principle and its idea ‘are’ one,” she would have undermined a foundational point in Christian Science, that of the oneness and inseparability of God and man.
An example of stretched punctuation rules to serve a point can be found in the textbook in the first phrase of the sixth tenet of Christian Science: “And we solemnly promise to watch, and pray for that Mind to be in us which was also in Christ Jesus; to do unto others as we would have them do unto us; and to be merciful, just, and pure” (p. 497). She didn’t write, “watch and pray.” She wrote, “watch, and pray ….” First we watch (comma, pause), then we pray. That’s a meaningful comma!
What I’ve learned, over and over again, is that Mary Baker Eddy’s writings are continually fresh for the receptive reader.
The following passage in Science and Health always makes me chuckle (and I’ve experienced more than one healing from studying it). What better way to break the dream of mesmerism than to address it candidly, reasonably, and with a touch of humor as she does here? “Disease has no intelligence with which to move itself about or to change itself from one form to another. If disease moves, mind, not matter, moves it; therefore be sure that you move it off” (p. 419).
One of the maids in Mrs. Eddy’s household observed the great care she gave her writing, noting specifically the context that led to the creation of this sentence in the textbook: “Christian Scientists, be a law to yourselves that mental malpractice cannot harm you either when asleep or when awake” (p. 442). In We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, Expanded Edition, Volume I, it is recorded that Martha Wilcox had this to say about that sentence: “She wrote almost constantly for three days. She consulted the dictionary, the grammar, studied synonyms and antonyms, and when she had finished, she had these two lines to add to Science and Health. I marveled at her perseverance and the time she consumed in writing two lines. But she had worked out a scientific statement for Christian Science students that would stand through the ages. After writing for three days, she gave us two lines, but who of us can estimate the value of these two lines?” (p. 475).
Something else I’ve come to appreciate about Mrs. Eddy as author is the tremendous variety in her register (the range of informality to formality in writing). She uses formal, legalistic language (see the allegory of the trial in Science and Health, pages 430 to 442). In Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896 she uses Latin and Greek terms, saying, for example: “Scholastic dogma has made men blind. Christ’s logos [Greek for reason] gives sight to these blind, ears to these deaf, feet to these lame,—physically, morally, spiritually” (p. 362). In the same work, she also included tender, loving letters to her churches and followers. In an essay titled “The New Birth,” which was first published in an 1883 edition of the Journal, she wrote, “Now, dear reader, pause for a moment with me, earnestly to contemplate this new-born spiritual altitude; for this statement demands demonstration” (p. 16). And, just as relevant today, in her writings Mrs. Eddy is often addressing each of us as “dear reader ….” Who doesn’t need to be reminded of our dearness to God?
It’s this sense of “dear” that I’m most left with as I study Mrs. Eddy’s writings. As direct as she was, with her call in Miscellaneous Writings to “… doff your lavender-kid zeal …” (p. 177), among other such instructions, she was most of all loving. Her unique writing style is due to her great sense of love—love for God, love for mankind, and love for the church she founded. This love reaches and touches the heart of all receptive readers, and will continue to do so for centuries.
