Under Construction @ Keele 2018 Vol. IV (II) | Page 14

6
inclined to fear and obey what they consider a material body more than they do a spiritual
God.” 17 Eddy’s thoroughgoing idealism also had consequences for the nature of the human
body, in that she denied the existence of a material body, instead asserting the sole existence
of Spirit. It might be thought - wrongly, in my view - that these ultimately amount to the same
thing. Although Berkeley asserted that what exists is Ideal, which entails a denial of the
existence of matter on the grounds that ideas of mind-independent material things could not
even be conceived, Berkeley was only denying the nature of what appear to be material
objects, never the fact of their existence; he would not, for example, deny the reality of illness.
Christian Science, as the limiting case of profound idealism, denies the existence not
only of matter, but also sickness and death. As God is infinitely good and God is everything,
man is in reality part of the Divine consciousness and therefore perfect. Man, therefore, cannot
sin; sin and evil are the consequence of an error of belief, as they are unreal. Christ, it follows,
did not come to save mankind from sin, but to save us from the belief in sin. 18 The
nonexistence of sin necessarily changes the meaning of hell, which becomes the suffering
resulting from errors such as the belief in sin and death. Eddy's world view thus fits precisely
within the idealist paradigm, in that she completely rejected the physicalist concepts in favour
of these idealist forms. Based on her specific version of reality, it is therefore impossible to
interpret her as anything other than an idealist. Fundamentally, by denying the supposed
evidence of our senses, and recasting them as false cognitions, Eddy was able to redefine the
common sense understanding of reality described earlier as 'error'. 19
Many of the early critics of Christian Science appreciated that the conceptual
framework at the centre of Eddy’s work was attempting to be a very much more radical form
of idealism, albeit while claiming it to be incoherent or absurd. Wolcott, for example, pointed
out that Berkeley ‘never reduces idealism to absurdity attempting to apply it to the affairs of
everyday life, and the conclusions of universal experience.’ 20 Other critics within Eddy’s
lifetime included C.F. Winbigler, L.A. Lambert, J.W. Conley, B.Cox and T.J.Campbell, whose
observations were, respectively, that Christian Science was a fallacy, irrational, incoherent,
needed to be ‘exposed’ or was delusional. 21
Berkeley, of course, in explaining his own form of idealism had stated that “I do not
argue against the existence of any one thing that we can comprehend either of sensation or
Eddy, Science and Health, 214.
Eddy, Science and Health, 38, 289, 430, 497.
19 Eddy, Science and Health, 13.
20 Peter Clark Wolcott, What is Christian Science? (New York: Revell,1896),15.
21 Charles F. Winbigler, Christian Science and Kindred Subjects: Their Facts and Fallacies (Washington
D.C., 1906), 42; L.A. Lambert, Christian Science Before the Bar of Reason (1908), 135; J.W. Conley,
‘The Inherent Difficulties of Christian Science’ in Searchlights on Christian Science (Chicago, 1899),
56; Benjamin Cox, Christian Science Exposed (Little Rock: Arkansas, 1909), 7; Thomas .J. Campbell,
The Delusion of Christian Science (The Catholic Mind, 1906), 492.
17
18