‘I Am a Part of Infinity’ and ‘Free Creations of the Human Mind’: Einstein’s Sense of Awe

Mr. Fox’s book is dense with quotations but is light on dates and biographical context. He tells us that a “baffled cardinal of Boston” sensed a latent atheism “under the cloak of [Einstein’s] cosmic religion.” What Cardinal William O’Connell actually attacked in April 1929 was relativity, writing that “behind the cloak of the Einstein theory . . . was the ghastly spectre of atheism.” It prompted Rabbi Herbert Goldstein to send a telegram to Einstein in Germany asking if he believed in God. Einstein’s short reply in German cited Spinoza’s God, “who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world.”

Spinoza believed there exists only one substance, which is God. Everything in nature is a manifestation of God’s attributes. The theory can be called monist (in that it says all things are One) and pantheist (in its identification of God and nature). It also raises many questions, such as why the universe seems to be made of lots of different things, and whether the universe was consciously created with some particular end in view. There are numerous ways to address these questions; hence there have been many varieties of monism apart from Spinoza’s, such as those of Adi Shankara in the eighth century and Arthur Schopenhauer in the 19th. Yet as far as Mr. Fox is concerned, they are all One. Einstein was “the living embodiment of an ancient legacy that held that the human mind was at home in the universe and identical to the Infinite.”

Einstein’s message to Rabbi Goldstein was reported in the New York Times on April 25, 1929. When asked to expand on his views, the physicist sent an essay, which would be published in the Times’s Sunday magazine on Nov. 9, 1930, in which he made clear he did not believe in a personal God with influence over human affairs, or in a soul distinct from one’s body. Religion, he wrote, began with fear, then acquired a moral dimension. “But there is a third stage of religious experience,” Einstein wrote. “I shall call it cosmic religious feeling.” He described it as the desire “to experience the universe as a single significant whole.” Spotting an attention-grabbing phrase, a week later the magazine ran a symposium headlined “Professor Einstein’s ‘Cosmic Religion,’” in which eight church ministers gave their views. Most found Einstein’s essay stimulating, even if they disagreed with particular points. The following year, Einstein’s essay was published in a booklet under the title “Cosmic Religion.”

If the phrase was merely a press invention, why does Mr. Fox claim otherwise? His main source, quoted repeatedly in “I Am a Part of Infinity,” is a book by William Hermanns, an activist who visited Einstein on four occasions between 1930 and 1954 seeking support for various humanitarian projects. It was not until 1983 that Hermanns published an account of those meetings in “Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man.” The big question—which Mr. Fox never asks—is how reliable a source it is.

Hermanns—a sometime member of the German Occult Society and an advocate of faith healing—claims Einstein told him in 1930 that “we must found a cosmic religion. . . . We must change the heart of man. If something happens to me, promise that you will continue.” Styling himself Einstein’s “cosmic missionary,” Hermanns later tried to persuade the physicist that matter is an illusion and that certain Tibetan monks can “walk through walls.” On each visit he brought his own poetry for Einstein’s approval.

My guess is that Einstein regarded Hermanns as a sincere truth-seeker who deserved respect for his humanitarian efforts and polite compliments for his poetry but was not to be taken too seriously. Mr. Fox thinks differently, and makes Hermanns’s recollections central to his argument. His book will be an inspiration to people predisposed to its soothing holistic message but adds nothing useful to the vast body of Einstein literature.

Readers seeking a brief, scholarly biography of Einstein should instead try “Free Creations of the Human Mind.” Written by Diana Kormos Buchwald, the general editor and director of the Einstein Papers Project, and Michael D. Gordin, a professor of history at Princeton who has written a full-length book on Einstein’s time in Prague, it covers Einstein’s life and work in barely more than 100 pages. The authors begin with a summary of the important events in the physicist’s life, though not necessarily in chronological order. Relativity and quantum theory occupy the next two chapters. Then for the final three chapters the focus turns to themes such as Einstein’s sense of national or racial identity, his views on pacifism and his scientific philosophy. Religion is barely discussed—Einstein only wrote about it because so many people kept asking him what he thought, and his answer was always much the same. “Einstein used the word ‘God’ to characterize the order found in nature and the sense of awe its elegance inspired in him,” the authors tell us.

Einstein was a founder of quantum theory, realizing in 1905 that light could be regarded as consisting of particles. But the theory gradually developed into one based on probabilities, in which some things remain inherently uncertain. While colleagues such as Niels Bohr leaned toward philosophies that view external reality and consciousness as inextricably bound, Einstein vigorously defended the existence of an independent, objective reality that is discoverable through logical reasoning and empirical observation.

Einstein therefore rejected Arthur Schopenhauer’s notion that science deals only with appearances rather than essential being. Yet while rejecting Schopenhauer’s monism, Einstein does seem to have been influenced by Schopenhauer’s explanation of why we perceive the universe as a multitude of individual objects. Einstein’s answer was separability, the principle that things occupying different locations from one another can be regarded as independently existing. He used this to highlight what he saw as a flaw in quantum theory, which seemed to predict that separated particles will sometimes influence each other as though they are still joined. The general view is that Einstein lost and quantum theory won. The phenomenon is now called entanglement and plays a crucial role in quantum computing. Some physicists see it as lending support for monism.

The authors’ discussion of this is terse—the dense prose no doubt an inevitable consequence of trying to fit so much material into such a brief book—which is a pity given Ms. Buchwald’s and Mr. Gordin’s credentials. What they have to say about the conflicting views of Einstein and Bohr, condensed as it is, is nevertheless interesting. The physicists’ mental sparring during a series of intense meetings has become legendary—with Bohr’s counterpunches to Einstein’s thought experiments supposedly providing the knockout. Yet “this ‘Einstein-Bohr debate’ is an artifact,” according to the authors, “the result of a retrospective narrative.” They say Bohr and his colleagues “erected a version of the history of events that exaggerates the length and depth of the disagreements.”

While Bohr had a guru-like status among his followers, “Einstein himself did not have an equivalent ‘school’ or group of acolytes.” Thus Bohr’s understanding of quantum theory—known as the Copenhagen interpretation—became orthodoxy and his account of the “debate” accepted history.

The authors summarize the subsequent work that culminated in the experimental proof of entanglement, showing that, on this point at least, Einstein was indeed wrong. Yet Bohr “declared himself the winner—prematurely.” Recent work “has not put to rest all the philosophical issues raised by Einstein.” He may be down, but he’s not yet out.

Mr. Crumey is the author, most recently, of the novel “Beethoven’s Assassins.”