A close reading of a letter written the year before Einstein's death - and sold recently at an auction for a record price - provides a new view on his opinion of religion. A translation of the original letter (below) appears first. Click on the superscript numbers throughout the text or scroll down to see the analysis.
Princeton, January 3, 19541
Dear Mr Gutkind,2
Inspired by Brouwer’s repeated suggestion, I read a great deal in your book, and thank you very much for lending it to me ... With regard to the factual attitude to life3 and to the human community we have a great deal in common. Your personal ideal with its striving for freedom from ego-oriented desires, for making life beautiful and noble,4 with an emphasis on the purely human element ... unites us as having an “American Attitude.”
Still, without Brouwer’s suggestion I would never have gotten myself to engage intensively with your book because it is written in a language inaccessible to me. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness,5 the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. ... For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong ... have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.6
In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza7 recognized with all incision...
Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e. in our evaluation of human behavior ... I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.
With friendly thanks and best wishes,
Yours, A. Einstein
From the Desk of...
1. By the time of his death in 1955, Albert Einstein was considered an oracle, and admirers around the world sought his advice on politics, spirituality, and even physics. People today still invoke his name to argue contentious points—which is why the recent sale, in London, of an obscure Einstein letter on science and religion drew international scrutiny.
The 475-word letter was previously known to collectors and scholars. But after Bloomsbury Auctions announced the letter’s contents, it had to install extra telephone lines to accommodate bidders. By the time the gavel fell, the price had reached £207,600—just over $400,000. That’s about $800 per word, and four times the existing record for a letter in Einstein’s hand.
The buyer’s identity remains unknown, beyond the auction house saying “[he or she] has a passion for theoretical physics and all that that entails.” That’s a curious explantation, considering the letter says nothing about physics. In fact, among the failed bidders was rumored to be the biologist and professional atheist Richard Dawkins, apparently interested because the letter is an unusually stern condemnation by Einstein of religion, a condemnation hard to square with his image of a man friendly to spiritual searchers.
Dear Mr. Gutkind
2. The letter is addressed to Einstein’s friend Eric Gutkind, a philosopher at Yeshiva University in New York. Like Einstein, Gutkind fled Nazi Germany and became an American citizen.
Einstein wrote the letter in response to Gutkind’s three-hundred-page book, Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. In it, Gutkind argued that the key to humanity’s salvation at the nadir of the Cold War could be discovered in the secular, humanistic teachings of the Bible. Gutkind believed humankind could perfect itself, as long as people adhered to values of the Jewish tradition: “The soul of Israel,” he writes, “is incorruptible.”
As he makes clear, Einstein read Choose Life only because of the prodding of a mutual friend, the Dutch mathematician Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer. Brouwer also wrote philosophical tracts, which is presumably why he knew of Gutkind’s work and badgered Einstein to take it up.
Factual Attitude To Life
3. This probably refers to the philosopher’s preference for what one book reviewer called Gutkind’s ideal of a “mathematicized Einsteinian universe.” Gutkind studied Hebrew scripture and admired it, but wanted to strip out mythology and theology and concentrate on the lessons of the struggle and triumphs of the Jewish people.
This isn’t necessarily an atheistic outlook, but it does push Yahweh to one side. In this way, Choose Life resembles Thomas Jefferson’s famously doctored copy of the four Christian gospels. Jefferson, a deist, used a razor blade to excise all mention of miracles and resurrection, leaving only a record of Jesus’s deeds and ethical preaching.
Beautiful and Noble
4. Gutkind did believe that life could be “beautiful and noble.” In his book, certain phrases sound like an old-time, tent-filling evangelical preacher who wants to “prepare the world for the Kingdom of God,” and who believes that “the perfect world can be accomplished here.” One reviewer called Gutkind “a rare phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century: a genuine—which is to say radical—optimist as regards the potential of human nature.” It’s not surprising that sunny Einstein shared Gutkind’s optimism.
A Product of Human Weakness
5. Here are the passages that made the letter a prize for atheists and caused many believers to wring their hands and rend their garments.
At first, the phrases “human weakness,” “primitive legends,” and “childish superstitions” seem damning. They’re hard to reconcile with the sentiments Einstein once declared in a speech, “On Science & Religion”: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” He also insisted in that same speech, “Conflicts between religion and science in the past must all be ascribed to a misapprehension.”
However, Einstein went on to say, “I must nevertheless qualify this assertion ... with reference to the actual content of historical religions.” That is—and this was a point gleeful atheists often overlooked after the letter emerged—Einstein made a careful distinction. Although he found the practice of most religions distasteful, he believed religion could in theory enrich a life by giving a person a chance to “liberat[e] himself from the fetters of his selfish desires.” Einstein chides religion in the letter but nowhere (except, perhaps, calling the word God a “product of human weakness”) does he condemn belief itself.
Chosen?
6. This admission would have pained Gutkind, and the many people who wrote Einstein to ask this question. “By the 1950s, he’s getting twenty letters a week asking if Jews are the chosen people or is there a god,” says Walter Isaacson, author of the biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.
Isaacson warns that Einstein’s beliefs cannot be encapsulated in a few hundred words. “There’s no one letter that gives one answer. And at different stages of your life you would give different responses to different people,” he adds, depending on whether the letters came from schoolchildren or rabbis or philosophers.
However, Isaacson does believe scholars have a coherent picture of Einstein’s beliefs overall: “He debunks the notion of a personal God. But he says he hates it when the atheists enlist him because he believes there’s a spirit manifest in the harmonies of the universe.”
Limited Causality
7. Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch-Portuguese-Jewish philosopher, was a touchstone for Einstein. As a pantheist, Spinoza believed God and Nature were more or less synonymous, and this idea of finding God in nature attracted Einstein.
Einstein’s admiration of Spinoza is also the source of a famous anecdote. A Catholic bishop in 1929 fulminated publicly over Einstein’s “befogged” theory of relativity and its “ghastly apparition of atheism.” Afterward, a rabbi in New York wrote Einstein an improbable telegram: “Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid. 50 words.”
Einstein answered with words to spare: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and doings of mankind.” Again, Einstein dismisses a personal God but embraces an all-encompassing idea of the divine.
In the end, ideas were the heart of religion for Einstein. “The path to genuine religiosity,” he once said, “does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.”
Sam Kean is the associate editor of Search.
