The synthesis of Swedenborgianism, mesmerism and spiritualism seemed to pave the way to a spiritual science that would in time provide a key not only to the mysteries of life after death but to the meaning of everything. It was this expectation that provided an impetus for new brands of 'scientific' Christianity, especially in the United States. In America there was already a strong tradition of self-governing religious communities dating back to the nation's Puritan origins and enshrined in the Constitution. As the country's boundaries expanded and immigrants poured in, this tradition was enormously enriched and complicated by the influence of diverse European ideologies.
These new sects tended to fall into two types, one devoted to restoring the purity of Christian doctrine, the other to embodying will of a charismatic individual whose personal revelation constituted the 'science' on which the sect was based. Sometimes --in Mormonism -- the two factors coincided and a powerful teacher managed to create a new church out of a personality cult embodied a doctrine. Whatever the outcome, the two things requisite were a nan (or woman) and a vision.
Christian Science belongs to the first type. Having suffered a good deal in early life from personal unhappiness and persistent ill-health--largely psychosomatic in origin, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) experimented unsuccessfully with homoeopathy. She was treated by Phineas Quimby, a healer whose methods were based on mesmerism. Though Quimby effected some sort of cure, it was only a partial success, and when Eddy fell ill again after Quimby's death, she cured herself by reading about the healing miracles of Jesus in Matthew's Gospel. This experience heralded the discovery of Christian Science, described in Eddy's 1875 book Science and Health - significantly retitled Science and Health and A key to the Scriptures in later editions. The First Church of Christ Scientist was founded to teach the doctrines of Science and Health in 1879.
Eddy, whose teaching follows Swedenborg at many points, rejected the Calvinism of her upbringing in favour of belief in a benevolent god. She taught that illness is error, arising from the mind's radical misunderstanding of reality, and that evil is unreal because God neither creates nor recognises it. The universe is a harmony of forces, and within that harmony only spirit has full existence. The apparent reality of the material world is simply an illusion induced in us by the strength of our carnal desires. Healing therefore requires the renunciation of these desires and submission to divine grace. Salvation requires constant vigilance against the encroachments of our mortal state if we are to make ourselves worthy of Christ. This we can do at any time, if we have the will. Like Swedenborg, Eddy believed that the kingdom of heaven is not a destination in the hereafter but an immediate spiritual possibility for all individuals who can overcome their tendency to identify the real with the material.
Mary Baker Eddy was an ascetic: a reformer for whom purity of doctrine was so important that she was forced to set up her own church in order to preserve it. That church still survives with almost 350,000 members. Although its founder is venerated, the Church of Christ Scientist owes its success almost entirely to its teaching. If forceful and independent, Eddy was no charismatic. At the other end of the spectrum is Mary Baker Eddy's near contemporary Thomas Lake Harris (1823-1906), whose teaching and style of life are strongly reminiscent of H. J. Prince. Harris's personality cult was so strong that the community he founded could not survive his death.
Born in England, Harris grew up in America, where he became an independent preacher in the Universalist Church (which taught the salvation of all believers) and then a disciple of the medium Andrew Jackson Davis. Davis was a Swedenborgian, but he was less interested in that austere master's mysticism than in his theory of divine bisexuality. According to Davis's version of this theory, the male attributes of God the Father and the female attributes of Mother Nature can both be found in the spiritual constitution of all human beings. Harris, who had been left desolate by the early deaths of both his mother and his wife, found consolation in a doctrine that allowed him to locate within himself the female love for which he longed, but he soon repudiated Davis when it turned out that his teacher was preaching bisexual theory as a cover for all-too-heterosexual practice.
Abandoning both Davis and the Universalist Church, Harris tried an experiment in communal living. In 1850 he and a colleague led a hundred followers into retreat on a ten-thousand-acre estate in Virginia. There they awaited the Day of Judgement as predicted by twelve apostles, with whom all the members of the group aimed to be in direct communion. A man of imperious temper reckoned without the sturdy independence of his flock, Harris decided to reinforce his own authority by insisting that in future he would mediate between the settlers and the apostles, but his followers revolted against this undemocratic usurpation of their rights and the community collapsed.
By the mid-1850s Harris had married again and established his Swedenborgian church in New York, where the congregation included Henry James, father of William and Henry Junior, and Horace Greeley, utopian socialist and patron of the Fox sisters. Harris elaborated a new theology which was legitimated, he claimed, by direct revelation from God on the model of Sweden's visions in the 1740s. Harris explained to his followers that, although it was given to Swedenborg to open the gates of heaven in Arcana Coelestia of 1757, it had been left to Harris to explain the meaning of that seminal work, which he proceeded to do at enormous length in his own Arcana of Christianity, written exactly hundred years after Swedenborg's book and published in 1858. Varying the tripartite distinction between material, spiritual and divine, Harris explained that Swedenborg had given only the 'celestial' meaning of the scriptures: Harris would now provide their 'spiritual' interpretation.
Spiritual interpretation entailed a number of curious consequences, including the description of life on other planets; the that Harris was the 'pivotal' man on whom the salvation of the human race depended; the belief that synchronised breathing is key to grace (which may derive from the cabbalistic notion that Creation is a process of divine inhalation and exhalation); a bisexual God, and the analysis of history in terms of three great crises or turning-points - the Flood, the Incarnation, and the appearance of himself. The seeds of all these ideas can be found in Swedenborg, though Harris gives them a Princian twist by boldly himself at the centre of the cosmic drama.
But it was the doctrine of counterparts which was to make Harris notorious. This doctrine, which was Harris's version of the Key, derives from Davis's Swedenborgian notion of male and female principles uniting in Man. By the time he produced the Arcana, Harris's grief over the loss of his mother and first wife had been dispelled by an encounter with what he called his Lily Queen or Queen Lily of the Conjugial (sic), an immortal spiritual bride with whom he lived in his sleep at night, no doubt to the surprise of his second worldly bride, Emily Waters. Having found his own counterpart, Harris (like Prince) was eager to help his followers to a similar discovery. This required them to be taken into Harris's close embrace. The force which then flowed out of him produced in them a vision of Christ's love from which emerged their own Lily Queen-- or rather, Lily King: for the followers Harris embraced were always female.
In 1861 Harris founded another community, the Brotherhood of the New Life, known to its inmates as 'The Use'. After trying other sites, Harris established the Use at Brocton, on the shores of Lake Erie, and this time he made sure of sole and absolute control. Setting himself up in a mansion called Vinecliff on the shores of the lake, he led the life of a country gentleman together with a few selected women -- including Jane Waring, whose money was used to finance the operation, and a Mrs Requa, whom Harris favoured as the nearest earthly equivalent to his celestial counterpart. Everyone at Brocton was given a new name. Harris now called himself Faithful, though members of the community addressed him as Father. Mrs Requa's sobriquet was Golden Rose, presumably in respectful tribute to the Lily Queen. The second Mrs Harris lived apart from her husband, under close supervision; not surprisingly, she was said to be easily upset. The rest of the community -including Mr Requa, a bankrupt millionaire who soon died -- slept in sheds and barns, and everybody but Harris, Miss Waring and Golden Rose joined in the hard physical labour necessary to running the place. Even Mrs Harris was deputed to weed the larch plantations.
The community was in reality a badly run farm whose workers were given religious instruction when Harris was in the mood, and their spiritual progress was made dependent on the performance of unpleasant tasks, which conveniently took the form of agricultural labour. Harris believed that pride must be humbled and old habits off before the essential self and its true counterpart could be discovered, and he preached the familiar Victorian doctrine of the will and subduing the body in order to renew the spirit. He did not work on the land himself.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)