Charles Fillmore

Charles Fillmore was a real estate dealer in Kansas City, lame from a childhood skating accident that had left one leg shorter than the other, and thoroughly unconvinced by the lecture that changed his wife's life. He investigated. He read the mental healing literature, sat in on the classes, and eventually concluded that the thing worked and that he had better find out why, which is a characteristic sequence for him.

What he then built was less a church than a service industry for a teaching. A magazine, Modern Thought, appeared in 1889 and became Unity. A correspondence course followed, then a publishing house, then Daily Word, a devotional booklet that reached a very large circulation, then a campus at what is now Unity Village outside Kansas City. Silent Unity, his wife's prayer ministry, was staffed and organised. Throughout, he insisted that Unity was not a denomination but a way of reading Christianity available to anyone, and that its students should stay in whatever church they already had.

That position became harder to hold as ministers were trained and congregations chartered, and Unity today functions as a denomination while continuing to describe itself in the older terms. The tension is inherited directly from him.

Fillmore's distinctive contribution to New Thought theology is a method of reading scripture in which nothing in the text refers primarily to history. Every person, place and tribe in the Bible stands for something in the individual reader: a faculty, a state of consciousness, a habit of thought. The twelve disciples become twelve powers of the human being, faith, strength, judgement, love and the rest, each located and each capable of development. Egypt is bondage to materiality; Jerusalem is a state of peace within.

He set this out at length in the Metaphysical Bible Dictionary, which works through the proper names of the Old and New Testaments and assigns each one its inner meaning. The approach is not new in kind, since allegorical reading is as old as Philo and Origen, but the thoroughness is unusual, and it gave Unity a way of keeping Christian scripture at the centre while detaching almost every claim in it from historical assertion.

He read very widely outside Christianity, in Theosophy, in Hindu material, and in spiritualist literature, and some of his conclusions were eccentric even by the standards of his movement: he expected for a long period that the body could be regenerated indefinitely and death avoided. He was writing and lecturing into his nineties and died in 1948.