POSTSCRIPTS

MARY BAKER EDDY: ANOTHER VIEW

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 nature. It confronted her anew in the form of the loss and desolation that overshadowed her middle years. And through the whole first half of her life it pressed itself upon her intermittently in the physical sufferings and nervous debility to which she was so often subject. Decades of adversity forced her to consider the question in a way that far transcended the limits of her personal experience and broke radically with the conventional theology of the day.

“No less a psychologist than Gordon Allport has warned against the ‘error of the psychoanalytic theory of religion’ which locates ‘religious belief exclusively in the defensive functions of the ego. Mrs. Eddy’s real achievement was not to have made a personal ‘success’ of a life that for the first forty-five years brimmed over with disappointments. Rather, it was to have found in the Bible a transforming insight into the meaning of life that enabled her to develop a practical theology which grappled with the age-long problem of evil.

“Long before Auschwitz, acutely troubled souls had been asking, ‘Can God really be good—can there even be a God at all—when emptiness, agony, and human brutality are so often the human lot?’ The answer that Mrs. Eddy found in the life of Jesus Christ was that evil of every sort was no part of God’s creative will, no part of the true spiritual order of His universe, and that this truth understood could begin at once to lift the burden of evil from experience.

“However, she insisted that such an understanding could be incorporated into living only through radical Christian discipleship; it was, she held, a far cry from the exercise of will power, blind faith, or a manipulative mental technique. To the end of her days she counted herself (as she figuratively put it) a ‘willing disciple at the heavenly gate, waiting for the Mind of Christ.’ Her writings refer frankly to the intense struggles she went through in carrying out what she felt to be her mission, and nowhere did she claim to be humanly perfect or the equal of Jesus. Certainly it’s untrue to say that she expected not to die, whatever some of her overzealous followers may have hoped for.

“No more than the life of a Jonathan Edwards, a Mother Mary Seton, or a Martin Luther King, Jr., can Mrs. Eddy’s life be separated from the religious purpose that dominated it. Indeed, it is only by transcending their own purely personal concerns and involving themselves passionately with man’s quest for meaning that any such figures attain the status which history—sometimes reluctantly—grants them.”

BELATED MEDALS

Our “Postscripts” item on the origin of the Purple Heart medal (April/ May 1981) brought a singular response from H. B. Hersey of Placentia, California: “One of my grandfather’s fellow homesteaders and neighbors in northeast South Dakota was a Civil War veteran named Joseph W. Cotes. As a child, I would see him whenever I visited my grandfather’s homestead. I hadn’t seen him in some years when, in 1938, I was in the area, went to his farm, and was delighted to find him hale and hearty, though in his nineties. At that time he showed me what he told me was a Purple Heart medal.

“He said that it originally had been established by George Washington for valor, that its use had been discontinued, and that it had been re-established as an award for wounds. When the Army and Navy departments went through their records to determine which of their veterans to give the medal to, they found that the oldest living wounded Civil War veteran was none other than he, J. W. Cotes. ‘Were you wounded?’ I asked. ‘Oh, yes/ he said. ‘I was shot through the lung at the Battle of Shiloh. At the GAR encampment at Gettysburg battlefield President Hoover pinned the Purple Heart medal on my breast.’

“In the last paragraph of your ‘Postscript’ you state that the medal was renewed on February 22, 1933. That date was only ten days before Hoover left office. My memory after all these years tells me that Mr. Cotes said the GAR encampment at Gettysburg was in 1932. I’m not positive of that; I am positive that he said President Hoover. Did he make a slip of the tongue and mean to say President Roosevelt?

“I don’t think the last sentence of your article is quite right. In 1933 Douglas MacArthur wasn’t a promising young brigadier general. He was a four-star general, was chief of staff of the Army, and was no longer young. As chief of staff, he may have received the medal for wounds suffered during World War II but I wonder if Mr. Cotes was not the first to receive it.”

Probably not, as it turns out. We checked with the historian’s office of Gettysburg Historical Monument, which informed us that there had been no GAR encampment at Gettysburg in 1932—but there was one in 1938, when veterans of both North and South gathered at the battlefield to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the great conflict that took place there in 1863. Mr. Cotes, who died later in 1938 at the age of ninety-four, probably received the medal then, and it must have been conferred upon him by FDR, who gave the anniversary’s dedication. Reader Hersey is dead right about MacArthur, of course; in 1932 he was a good deal more than “promising” and was fifty-three.

On the subject of medals awarded after the fact, we should also mention that in October of last year the Army finally got around to the members of the Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon of the 394th Infantry Regiment, 99th Infantry Division. These eighteen men—four of whom have since died—were outnumbered by fifteen to one in a skirmish during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 but managed to hold out long enough to block a German assault that could have resulted in an early collapse of the American position near Lanzerath, Belgium. After military regulations setting a time limit on the awarding of medals had been superseded by a special act of Congress, the Army passed out three Distinguished Service Crosses, six Silver Stars, and nine Bronze Stars—making the platoon the most highly decorated of the war.

HISTORIC BUG

Hardly anyone now alive has not had a run-in of one kind or another with a malfunctioning computer—a garbled address label on a magazine, a dunning notice for a bill long paid, that sort of thing. Quite often, such mishaps are ascribed to “bugs,” those mythical insects that have inhabited the machinery of America for generations, making the term “getting the bugs out” a solidly entrenched part of the language.

But once upon a time there was a real bug in a computer—and not just any computer either: it was the Navy’s Mark II, one of the progenitors of modern computer technology. Navy Captain Grace Murray Hopper, the originator of electronic computer automatic programing and today with the Naval Data Automation Command in Washington, told the story recently in Annals of the History of Computing, a publication of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies:

“In the summer of 1945 we were building Mark II; we had to build it in an awful rush—it was wartime—out of components we could get our hands on. We were working in a World War I temporary building. It was a hot summer and there was no air-conditioning, so all the windows were open. Mark II stopped, and we were trying to get her going. We finally found the relay that had failed. Inside the relay … was a moth that had been beaten to death. … We got a pair of tweezers. Very carefully we took the moth out of the relay, put it in the logbook, and put Scotch tape over it.

“Now, Commander Howard Aiken had a habit of coming into the room and saying, ‘Are you making any numbers?’ We had to have an excuse when we weren’t making any numbers. From then on if we weren’t making any numbers, we told him that we were debugging the computer. To the best of my knowledge that’s where it started. I’m delighted to report that the first bug still exists; it is in the Naval Museum at the Naval Surface Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia.”

Indeed it is; a photograph of the ill-fated creature is shown here.

PATCHWORK PUZZLE

Joan Paterson Kerr’s “Patchwork Primitives” in our April/May 1981 issue brought an interesting response from reader John Maass, a frequent contributor to this department: “Jean Lipman’s ‘primitives’ are ingenious, but her memory may be faulty concerning the painting shown on pages 22–23. In your caption for the picture, you say that ‘the striking pattern of the painting … was inspired by a Connecticut Congregational church Jean Lipman had once driven past and photographed.’ I think it’s more likely that the pattern was inspired by a photograph I took of the (Dutch) Reformed Church in Rhinebeck, New York, in 1955. The picture appeared in my 1957 book, The Gingerbread Age, and was also reproduced in several of the reviews that followed its publication. The next time I passed the church, those interesting sectional shutters were gone, and they were never put back.”