Mrs. Patterson’s heart might mount and sing on a morning when the sun flashed through the twinkling leaves and all was dappled and fresh and dancing, but her weary limbs might even then tell her that wherever there was matter there was death. Through the dew-wet grass of Eden, blazing like emerald fire, slid the inevitable serpent, and the shudder of mortality passed across the scene.
Neither then nor later did she become indifferent to natural beauty. The Park Benjamin poem, already quoted, expressed gratitude for the “last privilege” that remained after all else was gone—the capacity to apprehend the beauty spread above and around and beneath her. And after her discovery of Christian Science she wrote:
To take all earth’s beauty into one gulp of vacuity and label beauty nothing, is ignorantly to caricature God’s creation, which is unjust to human sense and to the divine realism. In our immature sense of spiritual things, let us say of the beauties of the sensuous universe: “I love your promise; and shall know, some time, the spiritual reality and substance of form, light, and color, of what I now through you discern dimly; and knowing this, I shall be satisfied.”50
But before she could reach the point of discrimination represented by that statement, she had to see deeply into the wild and savage, even the demonic, in physical nature.51 And here her own body served her as ● ● ●
50 Mary Baker Eddy, Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896 (Boston: Christian Science Board of Directors, 1924), p. 87. Early in life she marked a passage in Pope’s “Essay on Man” (in the Lindley Murray Reader) to which she returned again and again in later years:
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;
That, chang’d through all, and yet in all the same;
Great in the earth, as in th’ etherial frame;
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent.
[Publisher’s note: This marked copy of the Reader has not been located.] In these lines Pope’s deism lapsed clearly into pantheism, but the interpretation Mrs. Eddy gave to them in her writings was far from pantheistic. God was never in physical appearances, however beautiful. The nature in which He manifested Himself was wholly spiritual, always outside matter. This left material appearances as merely imperfect symbols of spiritual realities.
51 Cf. Thoreau’s treatment of the wild and savage in the chapter on “Higher Laws” in Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854) and Melville’s suggestive passage on the demonic in Moby Dick:
Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey—why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness—why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any goring of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?
No: but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851), pp. 215–216.