Wall Street Journal Book Review: Einstein’s Sense of Awe, by Andrew Crumey (Author, Beethoven's Assassins (2024)) (Reviewing Kieran Fox (UC-San Francisco), I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein (2025); and Diana Kormos Buchwald (Einstein Papers Project) & Michael D. Gordin (Princeton), Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein (2025)):
When asked his view of religion, Albert Einstein often invoked a 17th-century Dutch philosopher. “I believe in Spinoza’s God,” Einstein told a New York rabbi in 1929. What exactly he meant by that has been debated ever since.
In “I Am a Part of Infinity,” Kieran Fox, a physician-scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, argues that Einstein’s ideas on religion “have always been approached in the wrong way.” The author claims that Einstein in fact wished to found a “cosmic religion” whose “mandate and meaning” was to remind us “that we embodied Infinity.” Spinoza, Mr. Fox suggests, was but one of many “radical geniuses who anticipated and inspired” the idea. These are bold claims—and I am not convinced. …
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 …, it covers Einstein’s life and work in barely more than 100 pages.
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