Peel's dual perspective

Earlier in the month I got somewhat bogged down over a passage on page 49 of Robert Peel's Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial where he writes about “her ‘absolute’ metaphysics and her ‘relative’ psychology".*

I searched for the derivation etc. of psychology, took in Mrs. Eddy’s definitions of the term, and noted the definitions of ontology and theodicy.

The fog of it all was cleared through this sentence from the current Bible Lesson in the Christian Science Quarterly:

If God, the All-in-all, be the creator of the spiritual universe, including man, then everything entitled to a classification as truth, or Science, must be comprised in a knowledge or understanding of God, for there can be nothing beyond illimitable divinity.” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, p. 127:4).

Further clarification came from an article titled “True Psychology” by Nathan Talbot, a one-time editor of the Christian Science periodicals. See Christian Science Sentinel 31^st May, 1975.

Through it all, I discovered that the numbering system for the end-notes in the 1^st edition of Peel’s book differs from the numbering system adopted for the footnotes which appear in this new, 2^nd edition. I feel sure this is explained somewhere but I couldn’t find it in this book. Perhaps it appears in the previous book Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery.**

Speaking of author Robert Peel in the Foreword to the 2^nd edition, Thomas Johnsen says,

A devoted Christian Scientist, he brought to his work the insights of this dual perspective, concerned not only with representing the theology of Christian Science correctly but also committed to addressing fully the skeptical questions raised by thoughtful outsiders. (Trial, p. xi-xii)

Now back to my current reading of the text. On p. 64 Peel had a gem for me about Mrs. Eddy’s use of the terms “mortal mind” and “divine Mind”. Commenting on the publication of the 2^nd (“Ark”) edition of Science and Health in 1878, Peel writes:

For the first time she clearly and repeatedly defined God as Mind, as well as Soul, Spirit, Life, Truth, Love, and Principle. As a correlative step she began to substitute the term “mortal mind” for “personal sense,” though not abandoning the latter phrase altogether. Previously she had tended to use “mind” in a neutral sense which permitted it to be identified either with spiritual reality or with material appearances. Now she drew a clear distinction between “divine Mind” and “mortal mind,” not merely as two modes of thinking (a true and a false) but as two antithetical starting points (an infinite intelligence and a self-destructive ignorance).   [My underlining.]

Joyce Voysey

*Ed. Here is the whole paragraph –

               It has sometimes been said that Mrs. Eddy ruled Satan out of her metaphysics only to let him back through the doctrine of “aggressive mental suggestion” or “malicious animal magnetism.” It would be more exact to draw a distinction between her “absolute” metaphysics and her “relative” psychology". In the realm of absolute Truth, evil was absolutely powerless; in the human situation it had only as much power as belief gave it, in somewhat the same way that a mathematical error had power to produce wrong results only so long as it remained undetected and uncorrected.

**Ed. This might be helpful: The Publisher’s Note (pp. vii – ix) explains that the “first edition’s placement of these notes in a back section rendered them invisible to some readers and difficult to locate for those wishing to engage with their rich content. … The substantive material contained in the notes has been left in place… Additions deemed useful for the current edition are enclosed in brackets; these consist chiefly of new citations not found in the original.”