The Eddy-Hopkins Paradigm:

           A ‘Metaphysical Look’ at Their Historic Relationship

 

           

 

           John K. Simmons

          Western Illinois University

 

            In her noteworthy quest to establish Emma Curtis Hopkins as the founder of New Thought, Gail M. Harley revisits the varying perspectives on the falling out between Mary Baker Eddy and Emma Curtis Hopkins.1  Hopkins’ departure from the Christian Science establishment is, indeed, a critical event in the development of New Thought because this gifted and inspired mystic went on to teach a veritable Who’s Who of New Thought leaders, including Annie Rix Militz of Homes of Truth, Malinda Cramer of Divine Science, Charles Fillmore of Unity School of Christianity and Ernest Holmes of Religious Science.2 

Historians plumping the depths of early New Thought history are not entirely sure what prompted the break-up between Eddy and Hopkins; reasons range from financial disagreements, to Hopkins’ eclectic attitude towards religious truth, to Eddy’s own paranoia regarding suspected enemies out to steal her metaphysical revelations and take credit for them.  From an academic perspective, all of the above are plausible, and likely a multi-fragranced ill wind blew the two highly charged personalities apart.

Historical scholarship, however, can be limited by its own self-imposed, Newtonian hermeneutical framework. Characters are identified in any historical drama, events are analyzed, then logical assumptions are made and conclusions drawn in explaining past events.  Understandably, historians using this time-honor methodology would chronicle the rich but short and seemingly dysfunctional relationship between these two talented metaphysical teachers using an interpretive framework that focuses on unique personalities with disparate agendas. Eddy and Hopkins meet, learn from each other, disagree over differences on the how and why of religious life, then go their separate ways.  Building on a well- established scholarly foundation, Harley accurately summarizes the series of events that comprise the Eddy-Hopkins relationship, and, accordingly finds Hopkins to be “the forgotten founder of New Thought.” 

However, when considering the same events - the complex set of interactions embodied in the Eddy-Hopkins relationship - but applying a more quantum metaphysical perspective to shape historical facts, one arrives at an interpretive variation on the oft-played Hopkins-Eddy concerto.3  Could it be that Eddy and Hopkins are personifications of two inevitable stages in the process of spiritual transformation integral to all authentic metaphysical growth?   From this perspective, Mary Baker Eddy and Emma Curtis Hopkins are not two different people who briefly meet on life’s journey, exchange ideas, then go their separate ways.  The Eddy-Hopkins relationship is, from the metaphysical perspective, a paradigm for spiritual transformation that plays out on both the personal and institutional levels.     

            Simply put, Eddy was an apocalyptic prophet.  Hopkins was a mystic.  Can the unitive certainty characteristic of authentic mystical revelation ever be achieved without passing through the transformative fires of apocalyptic dualism?  Hopkins reached the alpha and omega of the metaphysical worldview – she erased the boundary between the sacred and the profane, realized, then apparently embodied not-twoness.  For Hopkins – and this transformation probably began while she was under the tutelage of Eddy – nirvana and samsara become one.  Eddy, on the other hand, for reasons that are beyond the methodology of “standard” historical analysis, remained in a decidedly dualistic world.  Setting aside for the moment any judgment regarding the spiritual efficacy of these two women, can a pattern be determined which may be a perennial pattern characteristic of all authentic spiritual evolution?  What we are seeing in the relationship between Eddy and Hopkins is the personal and institutional unfoldment of a well-traveled metaphysical transformation – from ego to allness. 

            The Eddy-Hopkins paradigm embodies and presents the three primary stages in the process of spiritual transformation: 1) the intuitional stage during which the ego begins to intuit and long for the eternally perfect oneness of Being; 2) a decidedly apocalyptic dualistic stage – complete with suffering and sacrifice – during which the ego is “reprogrammed” to perceive allness; 3) the unitive stage in which ego consciousness no longer defines reality but is a perceptual conduit for what the 19^th century metaphysicians referred to as Divine Mind.  In exploring the Eddy-Hopkins paradigm, we will find that “Christian Science” has always been the necessary “stage two” in the journey towards “New” Thought.  The road to New Thought travels through Christian Science precisely because the perceptual paradise characteristic of allness necessitates an apocalyptic eschaton.4  Thus, Mary Baker Eddy and Emma Curtis Hopkins are inextricably linked in the transformative process.  

            In order to have a better understanding of the apocalyptic stage in this triune process, key concepts such as ego-consciousness and allness need clarification. Human religious activity represents the often-desperate attempt to symbolically bridge the cognitive, perceptual chasm between the unitive sense of being a part of everything that exists and the harsh dualistic “reality” of apartness.  On the journey across the bridge from apart to a part, religions function rather like computer programs for meaning used by humans to interpret, best they can, the information stored on the hard drive of Being.  However, as long as ego-consciousness is factored into the information exchange, the picture of Being from the apart side of the chasm is always distorted, at least to some degree. The ego cannot know “God” because, ultimately, there is no apartness; just a false-dualism set up by the ego.  Ego makes God in its own image, and institutional religions provide the variegated symbolic trappings for seemingly endless expressions of human divinity.  The ego tricks the dutifully religious into idolatry; the worship of a book instead of the message; bowing down to a concept rather than standing before the light of wisdom that empowers the idea; dogma refracting divinity in a desperate attempt to ease existential despair. 

To expand the computer-analogy, ego-consciousness functions as a “virus” in life’s information exchanges.  Most of the world’s great religious traditions have recognized that the tendency for human beings to pull apart from the totality of being and live in a world of their own selfish making is a fundamental causative force behind existential pain and suffering.  For example, Christianity and Judaism refer to the state in which a human functions in ego consciousness – living the self-centered life or life apart – as sin.  In Islam, shirk is the act of putting any personal need, desire, material object or objective about the primary spiritual goal of total submission to Allah.  Tanha, for Buddhists, means to cling, desire, separate or pull apart from the totality of being.  Buddhists view the notion of ego-consciousness defined as an autonomous, separate self apart from the whole, as an illusion that is the root cause of suffering in the world.  The Hopi Indians refer to the same state as koyaanisqatsi or life out of balance.  Of course, when the chasm between apart and a part is bridged, the work of “religion” is finished.  In many ways, reaching this “religious eschaton” is the story of the Eddy-Hopkins paradigm.       

            To paraphrase one enlightened spiritual thinker from ancient Palestine, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the ego to enter the domain of the metaphysical truth.  Consequently, the ego, whether it is conceived of as moral mind, error, malicious animal magnetism, Satan or the Devil, must go.  Apocalypticism is the time-honored analogical tale of the ego’s destruction; Mary Baker Eddy is the apocalyptress in the Eddy-Hopkins paradigm.5  She personifies stage two in the process of spiritual transformation.  Hopkins, the mystic, represents stage three, the unitive stage.  But it is only after her encounter with Eddy’s apocalyptic metaphysics that Hopkins is able to fully articulate the allness of metaphysical reality, embody it, and pass it on to future New Thought leaders. 

            Harley captures this transition in her recovery of a telling letter Hopkins wrote to Myrtle Fillmore dated December 5, 1894.  Hopkins’ growing mystical inclination has begun to turn her away from the daily grind of running a seminary.  She writes, “Sometimes my dauntless divinity shines even though my bones and skin are like glass, as if the sea of glass mingled with fire were taking place in my body.” 6  What ego she possessed is literally being burned away by mystical awareness. By 1924, when Ernest Holmes, founder of Religious Science studied with her, Hopkins not only fully embodied allness, she was able to awaken mystical consciousness in spiritually adept people.   Harley clearly establishes Ernest Holmes’ mystical encounter with Hopkins.7  However, a more detailed account of this teacher-student relationship can be found in Fenwicke L. Holmes’ biography of his brother’s life.   The following passage from that account is particularly revealing regarding Hopkins’ ability to pass on mystical consciousness to others, as if by contagion:

            Just what Mrs. Hopkins taught him (Ernest Holmes), just how the voice of spirit spoke through her, is hard to delineate.  It is difficult to put the intangible into words, to open the door to reality so as to give at least a glimpse of its unspeakable beauty.  Mysticism is perhaps the most difficult of all metaphysical themes, for it involves an experience rarely realized and never adequately expressed in words – the realization of identity with absolute being, or the here and now experience of “union with God.”  The value of the teaching of Emma Curtis Hopkins, Ernest felt, was the fact that she had not only experienced the consciousness of the mystic herself but imparted spiritual conviction in such a way as to awaken a corresponding consciousness in her students.8

 

Looking back in history from Hopkins’ encounter with Holmes to her time with Eddy, how might we reconstruct the Eddy-Hopkins paradigm from a more metaphysical perspective? Again, Harley’s book makes a substantial contribution to New Thought scholarship by chronicling the working relationship between Eddy and Hopkins.9  After a healing encounter with Christian Science in 1881, Hopkins enrolled in Eddy’s primary course on December 27, 1883, initiating a relationship that appeared to be rich and promising.  In fact, upon completion of the class in January 1884, she had nothing but effusive praise for Eddy and Christian Science, adding in a letter, “I lay my whole life and all my talents, little or great, to this work.”10

            Eddy quickly recognized that Hopkins was an apt pupil and requested that she move in with the elite group of students residing at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College.  By February 1884 she was listed as a Christian Science practitioner in Eddy’s newly created Christian Science Journal and, with Eddy’s departure on a Midwest lecture tour, Hopkins was asked to take over as editor of the Journal in April of that year.

            Under Hopkins’ editorial direction, the Journal was enlarged, vastly improved, and made into a monthly publication.  Her articles demonstrated Hopkins’ commitment to praising Eddy as the discoverer of Christian Science and defending the uniqueness of the movement, no doubt, in response to the outside attacks of plagiarism, particular claims made by Julius Dresser that Eddy’s “unique revelation” was, in fact, the work of Phineas P. Quimby.11  Observing Eddy’s day-to-day struggles brought Hopkins to an awareness that charges of plagiarism and other forms of personal and institutional harassment suffered by Eddy are part of the price that must be paid if one is to become a conduit for eternal truth.  In an article published in the September 1885 Journal, Hopkins recognizes the apocalyptic stage in Eddy’s own spiritual transformation and points to Eddy’s “life of cleansing sorrow” as a prerequisite for all authentic teachers of metaphysics:

            No student (I speak from knowledge of facts) has ever yet been qualified to teach Christian Science except rudimentarily…but she whose life of cleansing sorrow left her the fit transparency for revelations straight from the Infinite Source, teaches the science of God and His creation in all its divine completeness.  No member of a class at the college ever left till he had ascended the full height of his understanding, borne thither by the strong pinions of our leader’s inspiration.12

 

At this critical juncture in the story, the investigator needs to move through the “cracks in history” and sense what Hopkins gleaned from her daily encounters with Eddy.  From a more “quantum” perspective, Hopkins realized that no one can fully understand much less teach metaphysical truth – the allness of Being – until one has passed through the same transformative “valley of the shadow of death” through which her leader, Mary Baker Eddy, had passed.  How interesting that a month later, October 1885, Hopkins is abruptly dismissed as Journal editor and by November 1885 has formally resigned from the Christian Science Association.13  What did Hopkins learn from Eddy that transformed her into the “founder of New Thought?”  Would Eddy really have let Hopkins go simply over a financial disagreement?   To answer these important questions, it is necessary to review Eddy’s own apocalyptic struggle as it played out on the interpersonal and institutional levels.       

For Eddy, the period from approximately 1875 to the turn of the century was spent building what would become a centrally controlled religious organization without rival in the rigidity of its constraints upon branch churches and members.  And it is in Eddy’s outward flow of creative energy – the building of the religious institution known as Christian Science that her embrace of an apocalyptic eschatology is most evident.  Christian Science intuits a unitive worldview yet expresses it in dualistic terminology.  This opens the door for a dualistic, apocalyptic dimension to enter a worldview – metaphysics – which otherwise is grounded in the oneness of Being. Once established as a “way of seeing the world,” apocalypticism clears a space for would-be New Thought advocates to do “battle” with the ego.  A classic example of this odd unitive/dualistic phenomenon is found in the “Scientific Statement of Being,” recited at the end of every Sunday service in Christian Science churches around the world:

 

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.14

 

God is all, yet “matter” becomes the indicator of “not-God.”  How, then, can matter not at least appear to have ontological status as a false-dualism?   For Eddy, God is all, yet there is something “out there,” as pernicious as any cloven-hoofed, horned devil tormenting her world.    Eddy described this “no thing” as malicious animal magnetism, a concept she acquired during her metaphysical study with the popular New England mesmerist and healer, Phineas P. Quimby.   M.A.M, as Eddy referred to this false dualism in her worldview, may be one of the most confusing concepts in Christians Science, but it is extremely important as a key element in the apocalyptic stage of metaphysical transformation.  M.A.M. functions rather like an Armageddon hologram, hovering over the field of Being, inviting the spiritual travel to engage the ego in final, eschatological battle. Eddy’s convoluted thinking on M.A.M. reveals a false-dualism; false but effective in identifying and combating ego-consciousness.  On one hand, it appears to be a very real evil force, which can affect just about anything on earth for ill.  Yet Eddy describes M.A.M. as powerless:

Animal magnetism has no scientific foundation, for God governs all that is real, harmonious, and eternal, and His power is neither animal nor human.  Its basis being a belief and this belief animal, in Science animal magnetism, mesmerism, or hypnotism is a mere negation, possessing neither intelligence, power, nor reality, and in a sense it is an unreal concept of the so-called mortal mind.15

 

            Probably from her strict Calvinist upbringing, Eddy retained an intense, often suffocating, awareness of evil – not as a reality in God’s perfect creation – but as a definite and dangerous presence in moral mind, the perceptual error which was the collective consciousness of all human beings who had not yet attained her realization of humanity as the perfect, ever-unfolding reflection of Divine Mind.  Though M.A.M. had no ontological presence in Divine Mind, in Eddy’s apocalyptic world, it clattered about like a bus from Hell, driven by the anti-Christ, and hauling all the demons mentioned in Revelation! 16  Bryan Wilson, the sociologist, labeled this conflict with the reality of evil as “a type of institutional paranoia” and the externalization of Eddy’s “own inner conflicts, elevated…to cosmic significance.”17 

To be sure, the externalization of Eddy’s “institutional paranoia” made for some well-documented public spectacles.  As the metaphysical apocalyptress, Eddy was ready and willing to do battle for the ground of Being.  After an ideological breakup with her first formal student, Richard Kennedy, Eddy began to believe that he was using M.A.M. to attack her as she worked tirelessly towards her life goal of establishing a true Christian Science practice.  Georgine Milmine describes Eddy’s “adverse treatment” against Kennedy’s use of M.A.M.:

 

            Mrs. Eddy talked of Kennedy continually, and often in her lectures she wandered away from her subject, forgot that her students were there to be instructed in the power of universal love, and would devote half the lesson hour to bitter invective against Kennedy

and this treachery…not only did he rob her of her students and set the mind of men against her, she declared, but he pursued her mind ‘as hound pursues its prey,’ causing her torment, sleeplessness, and unrest…Unless some means were found of protecting her against Kennedy, she must sink under his persecution and her mission be unfulfilled.  In this extremity she implored her students to save her by treating against Kennedy and his power.18

 

Apparently, Eddy would have her students stand in a circle outside her bedroom door, and one faithful student would say to the other, “Now all of you unite yourselves in thought on Kennedy; that he cannot heal the sick, that he must leave off calling on Mrs. Glover (Eddy) mentally, that he shall be driven out of practice and leave the town, etc.”19             Resurrecting this oft-told account of Eddy’s obsession with M.A.M. is not meant to belittle this remarkable woman or question the validity of Christian Science teaching.  On the contrary, it is impossible to understand, or more accurately, experience the metaphysical eschaton described by Eddy unless one first travels through an apocalyptic struggle similar to what she experienced.   Part of Eddy’s apocalyptic battle was against the duplicity (read, “twoness/lie”) of ego consciousness.  For Eddy, the only Ego in the universe is the “Self” of God.  She was extremely firm on this issue, writing in Science and Health that, “The one Ego, the one Mind or Spirit called God, is infinite individuality, which supplies all form and comeliness and which reflects reality and divinity in individual spiritual man and things.”20  God is the source of human consciousness, and the tendency to perceive oneself as being apart from that source creates the ethical nightmare she ultimately dismisses as error.  Notice the unitive tone, not only in the previous passage from Science and Health but also in the following call for “emancipatory spirituality” circa 1875:

To grasp the reality and order of being in its Science, you must begin by reckoning God as the divine Principle of all that really is.  Spirit, Life, Truth, Love, combine as one, - and are the Scriptural names for God.  All substance, intelligence, wisdom, being, immortality, cause, and effect belong to God.  These are His attributes, the eternal manifestations of the infinite divine Principle, Love.  No wisdom is wise but His wisdom; no truth is true, no love is lovely, no life is Life but the divine; no good is, but the good God bestows.21 

 

The quest for metaphysical perfection begins and ends with Eddy’s apocalyptic eschaton.  When ego consciousness – whether it is described as illusion, M.A.M., mortal mind, error, maya, etc. – is destroyed through apocalyptic transformation, nothing exists but God’s perfection which is made manifest in His/Her creation, including human kind.  The unveiling of this aberrant node of ego perception calls for an apocalyptic end to the old way of perceiving reality and the beginning of a new, transformed way of being, a “new heaven and a new earth.”  Thus, metaphysical teachers like Eddy, can, at the same time, define reality in unitive terms, sensing the oneness, unity, interconnectedness, and perfection of Being; and be possessed by a decidedly dualistic ontology, calling for an all out battle against the evils of ego consciousness metaphorized into any form from Satan to M.A.M.   The end result of this struggle is Hopkins’ “high mysticism.”   

While this struggle is internalized for most people on the spiritual journey, prophetic leaders like Eddy, in that they are institutionalizing their vision in an alternative religious movement, very often act out their apocalyptic drama in the public arena. So-called “objective historians” have focused on her emotional excesses and institutional blunders, but most have missed the importance of Eddy’s suffering.22  Not Hopkins.  Hopkins came to Christian Science, passed through that stage of spiritual transformation, and moved on to the unitive stage.  Outwardly, financial or theological disagreements may have contributed to the Eddy/Hopkins break-up, but primarily she left because she learned what she needed to learn, and then graduated.

Traveling through the same historical events but interpreting them from a metaphysical point of view, Eddy’s apocalyptic battle with the ego not only clears the way for Hopkins mystical insights.  It delineates the important difference between the early Mind Cure movement and the authentic unitive insight that came later, through Hopkins’ teaching, insight gleaned from her association with Eddy which inspired the very best expressions of New Thought.  The Eddy-Hopkins paradigm, as a perennial model for spiritual transformation, finds efficacy in Eddy’s apocalyptic struggle to rid metaphysics of two pernicious obstacles to allness: ontological dualism and personal agency.  “One Mind and Its infinite manifestation” is more than a Christian Science creed.  It is the sine qua non of the metaphysical worldview.  To get “there,” Eddy’s Christian Science provides the all-important stage two in the process of spiritual transformation.  It offers the budding metaphysician the opportunity to face dualism head on and work out a path towards wholeness. 

Stage two in the process – the apocalyptic stage - is critical because without it, the spiritually inclined are left with “Mind Cure.”  Put simply, the difference between “Mind Cure” and New Thought is Christian Science, and the debate surrounding this difference takes the historian back to the Quimby controversy.   As noted by Stephen Gottschalk, the resolution of the Quimby dispute lies at neither of the extreme positions taken by the Dressers or Christian Science apologists.  He writes:

It lies in a clarification of a fundamental issue which has often been obscured in the course of the debate: the differing religious characters of Christian Science and of Quimby’s thought.  Christian Science is a religious teaching and only incidentally a healing method.  Quimbyism was a healing method and only incidentally a religious teaching.23

 

“Quimbyism,” or Mind Cure, remains grounded in ontological dualism and personal agency.  A separate person, an ego, uses the divine “other” as power, to affect a change in circumstances based on self-will.  Quimby foresees “many minds” rejoicing in their ability to master cosmic law and push around impersonal divine energy to ameliorate any number of existential woes – from lack to ill-health.  The “ego” is still very much in charge.  Hopkins’ mysticism, on the other hand, is clearly unitive and holds the line for the sovereignty of God as Divine Mind.  It is from Eddy, the apocalyptress, that Hopkins, the mystic, comes to her authentic sense of metaphysical truth, and justifiably, can be recognized as the “forgotten founder of New Thought.”   Eddy is the bodhisattva of metaphysical teachers, returning again and again in all her apocalyptic glory to help spiritual travelers break the bonds of attachment to ego-consciousness.    Accordingly, Christian Science should be recognized and appreciated for what it is – a critical stage on the journey towards metaphysical truth.

The spiritual dilettante may reap some rewards by affirming the oneness of all things while riding the emotional desire-coaster of ego life.  Eventually, she or he will tire of punching that “E-ticket” (E-go ticket), and strive for a higher mystical awareness.  Historians might consider following two streams of institutional development; one leading from Mind Cure to the variegated expressions of what was once called New Age and now is a kind of “do-it-yourself” spirituality; the other stream leads from Christian Science through New Thought to spiritual transformation on a global level. To be sure, it is pleasant, magical, romantic, and empowering to feel that one has the ability to harness cosmic energy and use it for anything from personal benefit to the most lofty of causes.  Welcome to the “New Age.”  However, for spiritual seekers willing and ready to sacrifice ego for allness, the Eddy-Hopkins paradigm provides a time-tested model for spiritual transformation.  Gail M. Harley is to be commended for shedding more light on the “perennial relationship” of these two remarkable women.  While Mary Baker Eddy and Emma Curtis Hopkins each played unique and clearly distinguishable roles in the formation of 19^th century metaphysical movements, the primary causal factor in the emerge of New Thought may well be the Eddy-Hopkins paradigm.

Concluding remarks/Call for Future Research

            In his article on Christian Science in The Encyclopedia of Religion, Stephen Gottschalk makes a startling observation about membership in the Christian Science movement. He writes, “As with any religious movement, the motives of those who call themselves Christian Scientists vary.  Of the 350,000-450,000 who might so identify themselves, it is likely that a majority are not formal members of the Christian Science denomination.”24  Apparently, the majority of “Christian Scientists” are no longer affiliated with the religious organization so painstakingly created by Mary Baker Eddy.

It is a fair assumption that many of these “renegade Christian Scientists” have actually used Eddy’s apocalyptic metaphysics to arrive at a unitive understanding of Being, much like the inspired teacher and writer Joel S. Goldsmith.25  Once they have moved from stage two, the apocalyptic stage, to stage three, unitive-certainty, they leave the Christian Science organization.  Having traveled through the Eddy-Hopkins paradigm, this sizable cohort of metaphysically inclined individuals is transformed into independent Christian Scientists or members of various New Thought organizations such as Unity School of Christianity or Religious Science.  This revolving door phenomenon, if triggered by the Eddy-Hopkins paradigm, invites further research on the relationship between Christian Science and New Thought and New Thought and New Age.  Some intriguing questions arise:

1.      Are New Thought advocates more mystically inclined if they have previously studied Mary Baker Eddy’s teachings and were members of the Christian Science denomination?

2.       Are former Christian Scientists more likely to embrace mysticism as expressed in New Thought or in New Age teachings?  

3.      Can the Eddy-Hopkins paradigm reveal an essential, fundamental difference between mystical awareness as expressed in New Thought or New Age, a difference that centers on the co-issues of God’s sovereignty and the essential nature of allness?

4.      Is it necessary to spend time at stage two in the process of spiritual development in order to achieve the type of mystical awareness attained by Emma Curtis Hopkins?

 

One measure of the importance of a scholarly work in any field is the degree to which it provokes new areas of inquiry.  For those interested in the study of metaphysical religion, Emma Curtis Hopkins: Forgotten Founder of New Thought more than meets the measure.