The Committee on Publications of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, has recently offered us a commentary on Dr. Julius Silberger, Jr. ‘s article on Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the religion, which appeared in our December 1980 issue:

“One thing on which Mrs. Eddy’s admirers and critics agree is that she was a ‘remarkable’ woman. The fact that she founded a major American religious movement in an age and at an age when she might have been expected, in her own ironic words, to be a little old lady in a lace cap, justifies at least that much of a generalization.

“But remarkable people are more often than not complex. And when their lives are as long as Mrs. Eddy’s was (she lived from 1821 to 1910) they often change in remarkable ways, becoming virtually several different people in the course of their evolving experience. This makes it all the more necessary to avoid winding the threads of such a life onto the single spool of one’s own interests and assumptions.

“As a practicing psychiatrist, Dr. Silberger naturally tries to account for Mrs. Eddy’s life and motivation in terms of psychological factors of professional interest to him. Such a sketch expectably conveys the impression of a woman driven by personal and emotional needs against the background of nineteenth-century American social conditions. But it is important to remember that these conditions included strong religious influences—especially in rural New England where the Puritan spirit was still very much alive during Mrs. Eddy’s youth. The evidence bearing on her religious motivation is both plentiful and essential.

“One need not be a believer in her teaching or even in Christianity itself to see that realism in biography does not, cannot, exclude the religious dimension of human life. That was the attitude of the facile iconoclasm in biographical writing which flourished a half-century or more ago (the period, incidentally, when there first appeared the ‘debunking’ accounts of Mrs. Eddy’s life upon which later psychobiographers have drawn). But an interdisciplinary approach generally opts for some understanding of the fuller dimensions of the subject.

“With an insight into the human spirit born of his own experience as a survivor of Auschwitz, psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl has written, ‘… humanity has demonstrated ad nauseam in recent years that it has instincts, drives. Today it appears more important to remind man that he has a spirit, that he is a spiritual being.’ Frankl is not speaking of preoccupation with religion in the conventional sense but of that profound concern with the meaning of life which is an irreducible part of the human spirit.

“Mrs. Eddy’s wrestlings with this question simply cannot be excluded from any meaningful account of her life and struggles. The problem of evil presented itself to her in girlhood in terms of the stark Calvinist doctrine of predestination, against which she rebelled with all the force of her youthful