Man in White Meets Woman in Black
How the most famous man in America became obsessed with America's most famous woman
WHEN THE DISCOVERER AND FOUNDER OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE, Mary Baker Eddy, published her radical new book Science and Health in 1875, it didn’t take long for the most celebrated humorist in America to make her his new favorite hobby.
Mark Twain fundamentally agreed with Mary Baker Eddy that the mind had the power to heal, and by all appearances he seemed primed to celebrate Christian Science for giving that power greater currency.
The problem was, you could never really predict what was going to come out of his mouth to the press — whether it was an insult or a compliment seemed to depend on which way the wind was blowing that day.
Twain’s sometimes amusingly unhealthy fascination with Eddy was largely one-sided — she rarely responded to his ceaseless “shots across the bow.” But she must have privately delighted in the fact that one of the most famous men in the world was at least making the effort to understand the principles behind her spiritual discoveries.
Most of Twain’s brazen criticisms of Eddy were not directed at her divine revelations, but at her character.
He once called her a “remorseless tyrant” and a “brass god with clay legs.” He was convinced she was only motivated by money, accusing her of being a “Christian for revenue only.”
But then, almost negating everything before it, he’d say things like: “It is thirteen-hundred years since the world has produced anyone who could reach up to Mrs. Eddy’s waist belt. In several ways she is the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary.”
Though he would never admit to it publicly, his acidity was, at least in part, no doubt fueled by the fact that she was not only a female, but a female of power, and doing things only a male was supposed to be able to do.
He also must have felt like he was looking in the mirror. As different as they appeared on the surface, they actually shared a lot in common:
They both had humble beginnings, starting from nothing; both rose high in society by their own efforts and talents; both understood and also suffered from the power of the press; and they were both charismatic, witty, and temperamental.
Twain’s eldest daughter Clara once described her father as, “a cyclonic warrior one moment; Lilly of the Valley the next.” And no doubt those who knew Mrs. Eddy would never have denied her propensity for capriciousness.
Twain suffered greatly in his final years — in 1894 he filed for bankruptcy after failed investments in the Paige Typesetter, Fredonia Watch Company, and other ventures that resulted in significant financial losses.
His home life was in shambles: his wife Livy was in slow decline from Tuberculosis, and two of his three daughters, Jean and Susy, had died.
In an ironic way he needed the woman he criticized most.
Part of Twain saw “The Thinker’s Religion” as holding the key to the peace he couldn’t seem to find. He’d found no doctor or medicine that could heal his ailing wife — or any of his own persistent afflictions — so he must have held a glint of hope that the curative power of divine Science would somehow rescue him from his demise. But his pride and cynical nature would never allow him to fully give himself to it… which must have secretly tortured him.
His real gripes seemed to be more with God in general:
“They tell me that God is all powerful, and that He can do everything,” Twain wrote once. “Then I think of the miners down there in Pennsylvania working for a pittance in the dark. I think of the cruelties, oppressions, injustices everywhere and according to this, God is responsible for all of them. Why, I’d rather have Satan any day than that kind of God.”
“If God is what people say, there can be no one in the universe so unhappy as He; for He sees unceasingly myriads of His creatures suffering unspeakable miseries — and besides this foresees how they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives."
Despite his indignation, Mrs. Eddy’s bold spiritual claims intrigued him enough to fuel a collection of essays he called, Christian Science. In it, he spent as much time attacking the religion as he did lauding it.
Here are a few of his more hopeful musings:
“Remember it’s principal great offer: to rid the world of pain and disease. Can it do so? In large measure, yes. How much of the pain and disease in the world is created by the imaginations of the sufferers, and then kept alive by those same imaginations? Four-fifths? Not anything short of that, I should think. Can Christian Science banish the four-fifths? I think so. Can any other organized force do it? None that I know of. Would this be a new world when that is accomplished? And a pleasanter one — for us well people, as well as for those fussy and fretting sick ones? I think so.”
“For the thing back of it is wholly gracious and beautiful: the power, through loving mercifulness and compassion, to heal fleshly ills and pains and griefs, all with a word, with a touch of the hand! This power was given by the Saviour to the Disciples, and to all the converted. All — every one. Any Christian who was in earnest and not a make-believe, not a policy-Christian, not a Christian for revenue only, had that healing power and could cure with it any disease or any hurt or damage possible to human flesh and bone. These things are true, or they are not. If they were true seventeen and eighteen and nineteen centuries ago, it would be difficult to satisfactorily explain why or how or by what argument that power should be non-existent in Christians now.”
“When it lays its hand upon a soldier who has suffered thirty years of helpless torture and makes him whole in body and mind, it has restored to life a subject who had essentially died ten deaths a year for thirty years, and each of them a long and painful one.”
“That great birth, the healing of body and mind by the inpouring of the Spirit of God — the central and dominant idea of Christian Science that when this idea came she would not doubt that it was an inspiration direct from Heaven.”
“I must rest a little, now. To sit here and painstakingly spin out a scheme which imagines Mrs. Eddy working her mind on a plane above commercialism; imagines her thinking, philosophizing, discovering majestic things; and even imagines her dealing in sincerities — to be frank, I find it a large contract. But I have begun it. And i will go through with it.”
After Twain passed away in 1910, his eldest and only surviving daughter, Clara Clemens, moved to California and became a Christian Scientist.
She wrote a book called Awake to a Perfect Day, where she shares her personal transformation from Science, and her father’s complex relationship with its discoverer and founder.
“Mary Baker Eddy was wholly and unceasingly imbued with the sense of Spirit as the sole governing force in the universe. She now saw the fading, vanishing forms of material objects as unreal and without substance. The Word of God was the only reality, the source of all creation behind the appearance.”
She interestingly notes in the book that many of her father’s grumblings about Mrs. Eddy in public were largely for show, and that behind closed doors he expressed a lot more admiration for her.
Who could fault America’s greatest showman for not being able to resist a good old fashioned communal Mary Baker Eddy thrashing once in awhile?
As fault-finding as Twain could be of Eddy, his frequent favorability towards Christian Science gave the common critic, who otherwise might have written her off, a justification for a second look. If Mrs. Eddy was living rent-free in the likes of Mark Twain’s head, there must have been something good about her.
Both iconoclasts left in the same year: 1910. Though they never met in person on earth, one can’t help but imagine them up there having a spirited tea, finally able to sit back and enjoy the best parts of each other with no reporters in sight.
For a much deeper dive into this fascinating duo, check out these two books: 1999’s Mary Baker Eddy, and 2010’s Mark Twain: Man in White.
Additionally, here’s a cool short film actor Val Kilmer made in 2012 called “Mary Baker Eddy & Mark Twain.”
“The divine Love, which made harmless the poisonous viper, which delivered men from the boiling oil, from the fiery furnace, from the jaws of the lion, can heal the sick in every age and triumph over sin and death.” Mary Baker Eddy