Christian Science as a Philosophy : Part 5

Modern Religious Cults and Movements
by Gaius Glenn Atkins

(Page 10 of 17)

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." 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.

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, substitute the science of today 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 massive 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 therefore 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 assert the supremacy of soul over the material with which it is so intimately associated, 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 association 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 obedience empower us.

They condition our happiness as well as our unhappiness 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. 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.

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 asserting that it is an error to assert that we really err or that we really believe error to be real, and with a process therefore begun there is indeed no end, nor at any stage in this process is there consistency." All this is subtle enough, but if we are to make our world by thinking and unthinking it, all this is not escapably true.

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."

Copyright 1923 by Fleming H. Revell Company