Christ and Christmas

James Franklin Gilman was an itinerant landscape and portrait painter when Mary Baker Eddy met him in 1892, one working artist among many in New England with no particular reason to expect his name would end up attached to a foundational moment in Christian Science history. A year later, it was.

From March through September of 1893, Gilman worked under Eddy's direct guidance to produce the eleven images that would illustrate her poem Christ and Christmas. This was not a commission handed off and collected later. Eddy directed the process closely, and by her own account she asked Gilman to seek divine guidance and inspiration for each picture rather than simply render her instructions. The two worked as collaborators on something Eddy considered inseparable from her own teaching, not decoration added to it afterward.

The finished book, published in Boston that December, proved difficult to reproduce faithfully. Gilman's drawings were soft in tone, without the sharp separation between highlight and shadow that period printing technology handled easily, and getting them onto the page in full grey scale took real technical effort from the printers who followed. The difficulty did not stop the book from going through nine editions by 1911, evidence that whatever was lost in reproduction, readers kept finding something worth returning to in what Gilman and Eddy had made together.

Mary Baker Eddy was careful about how she wanted Christ and Christmas read, and she said so directly. The eleven images she and James Gilman produced together were not meant, in her words, to refer to her own personality. They were meant to foretell, as she put it, the typical appearing of the womanhood as well as the manhood of God, our divine Father and Mother.

That sentence is doing real theological work. Christian Science holds that God is understood as both Father and Mother, not exclusively as a masculine figure in the way most of the Christian tradition around Eddy had long pictured the divine. Christ and Christmas puts that claim into images rather than only into prose, illustrating a poem with pictures Eddy directed specifically to embody a teaching about God's nature, not merely to decorate a Christmas verse.

Eddy went further still, describing the connection between the book's art and her own core teaching as more than a loose analogy. The art of Christian Science, she wrote, came through inspiration the same way its Science had. For Eddy, an illustrated poem and a doctrinal textbook were not different categories of work answering to different standards. Both, in her account, arrived by the same means, which is why she treated the pictures as carrying real doctrinal weight rather than standing outside her teaching as mere ornament.