These are from the only 3 RS I know of that analyze in detail the primary sources about CS metaphysics. They're Peel 1988, Gottschalk 1973, Gottschalk 2006 (tons in the last one, as it turns out).
SUMMARY - METAPHYS IN CS IS:
- Christian: understood “only in the long tradition of Christian healing and New Testament interpretation,” as its founder and adherents understand it (Peel 1988, 2).
- Used in a classical or traditional sense: “that which treats of the existence of God, His essence, relations, and attributes” (Gottschalk 1973, 34)
- Pragmatic: not abstract or “speculative in character, but…a way of working out and communicating the practical significance of Biblical revelation” (Gottschalk 1973, 34)
- Practice-based: “meaningful only when put into practice” (Gottschalk 1973, 217)
- Scriptural: “a making explicit of permanent spiritual truth that had been implicit in the Scriptures all along” (Gottschalk 2006, 3)
- An explication of Eddy’s unorthodox ontology: “Is God “cause” and matter “effect”? Protestant, Catholic, and Judaic theology in almost all their forms say yes. The crux of Eddy’s metaphysics lies in her insistence that truly biblical religion says no” (Gottschalk 2006, 166)
- One with its theological emphasis on God’s supreme allness: “the metaphysics and theology that empower Christian Science healing proceed from the biblical impulse to worship, magnify, and glorify the one God” (Gottschalk 2006, 320)
- Way to grasp reality of God’s sovereignty in it’s fullness: "Far from questioning the reality of this God, Eddy came to believe that through her discovery of Christian Science, she had grasped the reality of his sovereignty in its fullness. “In this new departure of metaphysics,” she wrote of her teaching, “God is regarded more as absolute, supreme; … God’s fatherliness as Life, Truth, and Love, makes His sovereignty glorious.” (Gottschalk 2006, 70-71)
- Unorthodox departure from traditional Christian metaphysics: “She saw the healing ministry of Christian Science as helping to rouse Christians to the great promise of restoring the power of the original Gospel. What blocked the fuller realization of this promise, in her view, was what might be called the hidden metaphysics of traditional Christianity. Christian teaching in nearly all its forms held to the virtually axiomatic assumption that God was the creator of matter and finitude, and thereby the ultimate source of the suffering and death that human beings must endure. But the belief that man is physical, finite, and mortal, Eddy emphasized, is exactly what had been challenged and reversed by Jesus’ resurrection, which she fully accepted as a literal historical fact.” (Gottschalk 2006, 160)
- Not philosophical speculation in the Christian orthodox or Hindu manner: “she called ‘the cardinal point of the difference in my metaphysical system … that by knowing the unreality of disease, sin, and death, you demonstrate the allness of God.’” Gottschalk comments, “It is hard to quarrel with the uniqueness of Christian Science as defined by Eddy in these terms. Minus her consistent and radical assertion of the demonstrability of the unreality of evil in the light of the absolute reality of God, Christian Science might well be accounted a derivative or variant of some other system of thought. The “cardinal point” in her metaphysical system, however, is not one that Quimby advanced, nor is it consistent with the underlying metaphysics of Christian orthodoxy, or coordinate with the substance and implications of Hindu cosmology” [i.e. the cyclical nature of creation and destruction]. (Gottschalk 2006, 75-76)
- Not New Thought or New Age cosmology (human mind cures): New Thought “emphasis differed sharply from Eddy’s conviction that the human mind, far from being a potentially curative agent, was the cause of disease rather than its cure. From Eddy’s standpoint, this was no metaphysical nicety but a matter of preserving the very identity of Christian Science. In her estimation, mind-curers made wholesale use of her language, often called themselves Christian Scientists, but turned her teaching on its head.”(Gottschalk 2006, 95-96)
- Not the metaphys of Hindu cosmology (mind/spirit real, all we perceive is illusion): “If she were simply stating that mind or spirit is ultimately real and that all we perceive now is a form of illusion, her teaching might indeed have been classed within the framework of, say, Hindu cosmology. But for her, the denial of the reality of matter as a consequence of the primacy and infinitude of Spirit did not wipe out the reality of nature and the meaning of present experience.” (Gottschalk 2006, 165)
FULL SOURCE QUOTATIONS USED FOR THE ABOVE SUMMARY ("K" is for Kindle page, "P" is for paper book page; random numbers in the middle of sentences are footnote numbers)
Peel, Health and Medicine in the Christian Science Tradition (Crossroad, 1988)
Peel positions Christian Science as a metaphysic in the classical and modern tradition (e.g. Aquinas and Edwards, Tillich 16) and as fundamentally understandable “only in the long tradition of Christian healing and New Testament interpretation,” as its founder and adherents understand it (2).
p. 99 Re: the upsurge of spiritual healing among 20th century Christians: “Christian Scientists have welcomed this upsurge of active dedication to an element of Christianity so close to their own hearts. But they recognize that the radical spirituality of their metaphysical position, with the ontological unreality of matter as its corollary, still puts them in a unique position.”
Gottschalk, The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (California, 1973)
p. 34 For Mrs. Eddy, however, metaphysics meant divine metaphysics, which she defined as “that which treats of the existence of God, His essence, relations, and attributes.
92 She never thought of her metaphysics as speculative in character, but saw it as a way of working out and communicating the practical significance of Biblical revelation, which she accepted as given in the first place. The metaphysics of Christian Science, then, signified for Mrs. Eddy the elucidation of the conditions which make the demonstration of divine power an immediate possibility
p. 217 “The proof of what you apprehend, in the simplest definite and absolute form of healing,” she once admonished her followers, “can alone answer this question of how much you understand of Christian Science Mind-healing.” Metaphysics, Mrs. Eddy insisted, could be meaningful only when put into practice. Mere belief in metaphysical abstractions seemed to her quite meaningless.
p. 281 Christian Science, therefore, is best understood, not as an abstract metaphysical or theological system, but with reference to what it claims to make possible. Mrs. Eddy’s most metaphysical statements are intended to be understood as pointing to demonstrable conditions of experience. Actually, she never intended to construct a metaphysical system as such. Rather, metaphysics for her was a mode of communication by which the practical significance of Christian revelation could be pointed out.
Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone (Indiana, 2006)
There's a ton on CS metaphys in this source. The first section of notes below looks at what her metaphysics is and where it is rooted. The second section looks at how it relates to religious experience but it not explicitly religious by itself. The last section compares it with other systems.
WHAT IS IT
As permanent spiritual truth, not just personal religious views K182 P 3 The metaphysics and theology of Christian Science were therefore far from being merely a statement of her personal religious views. But they were, for her, a making explicit of permanent spiritual truth that had been implicit in the Scriptures all along—a rediscovery, as she saw it, of the continuing truth and undiminished power of biblical revelation that traditional Christianity had largely failed to discern and act upon.
Metaphysics and theology of CS proceed from biblical impulse to worship and glorify God K 6596 P 320 Eddy saw healing as less a therapy than an act of worship. In her writings, the metaphysics and theology that empower Christian Science healing proceed from the biblical impulse to worship, magnify, and glorify the one God. This spirit is emphasized throughout her works.
Metaphysics as spiritual sense- inherent to all, allows expectation biblical events would be experienced K 2703 P 127 Jonathan Edwards expanded the significance of typology so as to see the universe itself as a means of “God’s communication of himself—and thereby of his glory—to the understanding and will of his creatures.” Edwards saw the phenomena and events of the natural world as forerunners or “types” of the unfolding process of redemptive history, including “the coming of the new heaven and the new earth,” but also the future punishment of the unredeemed in hell. Thus the progressive state of the world, manifested in the growth of a plant or of a fetus in the womb, is analogous to and expresses the “unfolding of the work of redemption.” Edwards’s focus in his lengthy notes on typology is on how the physical world “shadows forth” spiritual things. But he also sees these spiritual things as including the living experience of humanity understood in the context of redemptive history.12 It was this understanding of typology that Eddy inherited from the Edwardsian tradition, then generalized and broadened in her own way. Like her Puritan forebears, she repeatedly spoke of biblical events as “types.” But more than this, she believed that biblical figures, narratives, and teachings—although representing different levels of inspiration—point to enduring spiritual truths and patterns of experience made explicit in Christian Science. Indeed, the final chapter in Science and Health entitled “Glossary” consists of twenty pages of 125 mostly biblical terms, wherein Eddy indicates what she sees as the metaphysical or spiritual sense of their meaning. In so doing, she may well have reflected the broadly disseminated influence of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose Dictionary of Correspondences also explained what he believed to be the inner spiritual meaning of Scripture. At a more fundamental level, however, the “Glossary” reflects Eddy’s immersion in the Puritan typological tradition. At six different points in the chapter, she speaks of these definitions in explicitly typological terms, writing, for example, of Japhet, Noah’s son, as “a type of spiritual peace” and of Moses as “a type of moral law and the demonstration thereof.”13 Just as she held that what Edwards had called spiritual sense—the capacity to apprehend the things of God directly—is inherent in every individual, not just in the elect, so she believed that biblical events could be taken as foreshadowing what all practicing Christians could and would experience in whatever era they lived.
AS PART OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, SUPPORTIVE OF
Metaphysics as supportive of truly biblical religion K 3477 P 166 Yet traditional Christian theology, as she saw it, perpetuated that limitation instead of challenging it. In “One Cause and Effect,” Eddy asked if the power and reality of God could be combined with belief in the power and reality of matter. Is God “cause” and matter “effect”? Protestant, Catholic, and Judaic theology in almost all their forms say yes. The crux of Eddy’s metaphysics lies in her insistence that truly biblical religion says no: “That there is but one God or Life, one cause and one effect, is the multum in parvo of Christian Science; and to my understanding it is the heart of Christianity, the religion that Jesus taught and demonstrated.
Metaphysics to support communication of spiritual meaning discovered in Bible K 3531 p 169 She used metaphysical and theological concepts to communicate the spiritual meaning she believed she had discovered in the Bible. Her intent in so doing was to make as intelligible as possible how individuals today could experience and demonstrate God’s total sovereignty in daily life. Thus, in Eddy’s view, she was not offering the world a new theory, but was articulating an empowering spiritual truth of major proportions.
Way to grasp reality of God’s sovereignty in it’s fullness K 1557 P 70-71 Far from questioning the reality of this God, Eddy came to believe that through her discovery of Christian Science, she had grasped the reality of his sovereignty in its fullness. “In this new departure of metaphysics,” she wrote of her teaching, “God is regarded more as absolute, supreme; … God’s fatherliness as Life, Truth, and Love, makes His sovereignty glorious.”
Metaphysics leads to, but does not facilitate genuine spiritual experience K 2309 P 108 On many occasions, Eddy expressed concern that the genuine spiritual experience not be submerged in metaphysical abstractions.
COMPARED TO OTHERS Compared to traditional Christian metaphysics K160 P 2 She saw the healing ministry of Christian Science as helping to rouse Christians to the great promise of restoring the power of the original Gospel. What blocked the fuller realization of this promise, in her view, was what might be called the hidden metaphysics of traditional Christianity. Christian teaching in nearly all its forms held to the virtually axiomatic assumption that God was the creator of matter and finitude, and thereby the ultimate source of the suffering and death that human beings must endure. But the belief that man is physical, finite, and mortal, Eddy emphasized, is exactly what had been challenged and reversed by Jesus’ resurrection, which she fully accepted as a literal historical fact.
Compared to philosophy; as means to express implications of new experience and understanding of God K 1649 P 75 Even the term “metaphysics,” however, she employed in her own way that differs from its largely neo-Platonic use by Alcott and other exponents of various forms of philosophic idealism. For her, metaphysics became a means of expressing the implications of the new experience and enlarged understanding of God that she believed her teaching was opening to humanity. The metaphysics she taught, wrote Eddy, is “far from dry and abstract.” It “treats of the existence of God, His essence, relations, and attributes.”73 If one experiences the reality and goodness of God as infinite Spirit and Love, then, Eddy believed, hatred, sin, and all material limitation must have a correspondingly diminished reality.
Differerent from philosophical speculation/Christian Orthodox; as knowing God as infinite, without opposite, allows demonstration of allness of God/experience of God K 1662 P 75-6 For her, this conclusion was not the result of philosophical speculation. It was based on the experience of God’s reality that was open to all. One could come to no other conclusion, she insisted, if one is willing to accept without qualification what she saw as the core truth of scriptural revelation: that God is infinite Spirit, without an opposite and without limits. In the light of this truth, she maintained, matter and all forms of evil must be seen as having no ontological reality. Hence what she called “the cardinal point of the difference in my metaphysical system … that by knowing the unreality of disease, sin, and death, you demonstrate the allness of God.”75 It is hard to quarrel with the uniqueness of Christian Science as defined by Eddy in these terms. Minus her consistent and radical assertion of the demonstrability of the unreality of evil in the light of the absolute reality of God, Christian Science might well be accounted a derivative or variant of some other system of thought. The “cardinal point” in her metaphysical system, however, is not one that Quimby advanced, nor is it consistent with the underlying metaphysics of Christian orthodoxy, or coordinate with the substance and implications of Hindu cosmology. [ie cyclical nature of creation and destruction]
Compared to New Age thought (human mind is beneficient) K 2050 P 95-96 Hopkins, more than any other figure, became the link between the mental healing movements of the 1880s and New Thought. New Thought, along with an attenuated form of theosophy, in turn fed into the later forms of alternative spirituality collectively known as the New Age that emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century. In almost all their forms, these movements emphasized the positive therapeutic effects of the beneficent power and energy of the human mind and its potential rapport with the divine. This emphasis differed sharply from Eddy’s conviction that the human mind, far from being a potentially curative agent, was the cause of disease rather than its cure. From Eddy’s standpoint, this was no metaphysical nicety but a matter of preserving the very identity of Christian Science. In her estimation, mind-curers made wholesale use of her language, often called themselves Christian Scientists, but turned her teaching on its head. Both mind-cure and New Thought reiterated the fundamental concept that the human mind is in harmonious rapport with the divine. But they often did so in language largely adapted from Christian Science—with the notable and revealing exception of terms Eddy employed revolving around the Christian concept of sin. Specifically, they rejected her insistence that the human or mortal mind is not natively congruent with, but in fundamental opposition to, the Mind that is God. Defending the Christianity of Christian Science in Tremont Temple, Eddy averred that its healing practice “is not one mind acting upon another mind…. It is Christ come to destroy the power of the flesh…. It is not one mortal thought transmitted to another’s thought, from the human mind that holds within itself all evil.”13
Compared with Hindu cosmology (mind/spirit real, all we perceive is illusion) K 3465 P 165 If she were simply stating that mind or spirit is ultimately real and that all we perceive now is a form of illusion, her teaching might indeed have been classed within the framework of, say, Hindu cosmology. But for her, the denial of the reality of matter as a consequence of the primacy and infinitude of Spirit did not wipe out the reality of nature and the meaning of present experience. She used an ordinary object to ask an extraordinary question: “Is a stone spiritual?” “To erring material sense,” she wrote, “No!” But to a more accurate spiritual perception, she continued, the only actual existence of a stone, as “a small manifestation of Mind,” is spiritual. “Take away the mortal sense of substance, and the stone itself would disappear, only to reappear in the spiritual sense thereof.” She then reached the bottom line of her metaphysics: “The only logical conclusion is that all is Mind and its manifestation, from the rolling of worlds, in the most subtle ether, to a potato-patch.”48Ath271 (talk) 19:23, 12 July 2014 (UTC)