Customer Reviews

The Quimby Manuscripts

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PP Quimby was a seminal American mystic and healer who was more or less the father of the New Thought movement, an ecumenical movement in 19th and 20th century Christianity that promoted(s) the idea of an omnipresent and universally accesable deity. The key characteristic of this teaching is that you and I have access to real and practical spirituality at every moment and that we can move closer to healing and well being through the use of our own mind and imagination.

Mary Baker Eddy was one of Quimby's patients and the founder of Christian Science, a Christian denomination that is very centered around spiritual healing.

If you peruse the other reviews of this text you will note a controversy with two sides holding forth. The controversy stems from the following: Quimby put forth religious ideas that were open to all, didn't need a church, and were radically personal and anti-denominational. Mary Baker Eddy created a church after studying with him which embraced an orthodoxy using very similar ideas to those which Quimby used. Quimby's later admirers accused her of appropriating his ideas to create a legalistic, theocratic institution which lost the liberating spirit of what he taught.

This text, for Quimby followers, is evidence of her misuse of his work. They site it as proof that she drew her theology from his teaching and used it to further her own ends. For Eddy followers, "The Quimby Manuscripts" does not function as proof and some even go so far as to say the text is an elaborate literary contrivance created to vindicate the folks who had a bone to pick with her. It is true that the author (Horatio Dresser) was in contention with Eddy and her followers but it is also true that Eddy almost certainly gained much of her insight from Quimby's visionary nature if not from the letter of his words. After all, he was both her Physician and her mentor.

Having written all of this, I will offer my own opinion in three parts:

A) Horatio Dresser knew Quimby's ideas as well as or better than anybody and the ideas are good and truthful. This book is an excellent resource for anybody interested in some of the root concepts behind what has become New Thought metaphysics. I believe that Dresser was a good, sincere and highly intelligent man and that he communicated important ideas to the world.

B) If you are a true student of healing and truth, whatever your particular path, it is worthless and destructive to engage in sectarian bickering. If there is one God that loves everybody, as taught by both Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy, than to quibble over interpretation, theology or authorship is an exercise in time wasting which could be better spent in personal practice of study, prayer, meditation, service or just day to day living.

C) I personally don't care for Churches or religious systems but I have met wonderful people from Christian Science. I say, if it works to make a person better, more power to them. But whether you like to go to a Church of some kind or prefer not to, why waste energy yammering about which system or teacher is "Right?" Isn't that what Jesus (not to mention countless other masters from other belief systems) warned against over and over again?

Now the world can read what Eddy "borrowed" from Quimby years before her so called discovery of Christian Science. By no means a "Divine Revelation". Even Quimby called his system christian science and science of health. A definite read for anyone who believes Eddy "discovered" Christian Science.

That Quimby was substantially the author of these manuscripts is highly suspect. They were contrived and published 46 years after his death by Dresser who was intent on discrediting Eddy by embellishing "copies" of Quimby's notes into a manuscript that would to appear to preclude Eddy's concepts. Yet there is almost no original material in Quimby's own handwriting to authenticate these manuscripts.

Noted scholar and Radcliffe biographer, Gillian Gill has exposed the dubious nature of these manuscripts and shown how overblown the Quimby-Eddy association is in the most recent biography on Eddy, "Mary Baker Eddy, 1998".

She writes: "Even Horatio Dresser in his book "The Quimby Manuscripts" could adduce from the large collection of Quimby papers only a few pages of a single, highly contentious, document that Dresser identifies as written in Quimby's own handwriting. The rest of P.P. Quimby autographs are personal letters or drafts that eloquently testify to his incapacity to spell simple words, or write a simple, declarative sentence. Thus there is no documentary proof that Quimby ever committed to paper the vast majority of text ascribed to him... "

Gill was the first biographer to have unusually broad access to archival material on Eddy and Quimby. Regarding the Quimby issue she concludes:

"I am now firmly convinced, having weighed all the evidence I could find in published and archival sources, that Mrs. Eddy's most famous biographer-critics... have flouted the evidence and shown willful bias in accusing Mrs. Eddy of owing her theory of healing to Quimby and of plagiarizing his unpublished work (p.120)...Already in November 1862 she was focusing on the triangular relationship among patient, healer, and God as the key to cure, and this idea was not something she learned from Quimby but, if anything, something she brought to him."

Elsewhere, Gill writes, "As I shall show ...evidence that Mary Baker Eddy's healing theology was based to any large extent on the Quimby manuscripts is not only weak but largely rigged.(p.146)"

In any case, I will add, a cursory perusal of Eddy's primary book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures will show how substantially divergent their ideas are.