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Little is known about the circumstances that led the teenage Albert Einstein not to follow through with his bar mitzvah, but the decision foreshadowed his eventual journey to figure out a different way to embrace religion, science and spirituality.
While Einstein's scientific work has been the focus of much scholarship, "I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox takes a new approach, treating the physicist as an "imperfect" metaphysical leader from whom we can learn much. And yet, as Fox also writes: "Although Einstein's example can give us guidance, we shouldn't think of him as a guru. It's not for Einstein (much less me) to determine anyone's else spiritual path."
As a student in Munich's Luitpold Gymnasium, Einstein was required to take two hours of religion classes per week along with other Jewish students, an obligation he fulfilled begrudgingly. On the occasion of his 50th birthday, a religious teacher from his youth, Heinrich Friedmann, congratulated him on growing into one of history's greatest scientists. In return, Friedmann received something of an apology from the scientific celebrity about that lack of a bar mitzvah: "It certainly was not your fault; you have fought valiantly and energetically against laziness and all kinds of naughtiness."
Einstein's acknowledgment of his "naughtiness" points to a side of him dismissed by most scholars. As one of his biographers put it, the "lower-level Einstein" - the man who abandoned his children and made a whole lifestyle out of infidelity - pales in comparison to the great scientist and humanitarian who fought for pacifism, spoke up against Hitler and campaigned for civil rights.
Yet even Einstein's contributions to these political causes are of scant interest to Fox, who is looking for something vaster: transformative and transcendental lessons to lead us toward "a higher calling." His book is thus conceived as a therapeutic guide for professionals struggling to keep up with "the demands of day-to-day life." In the process of writing about Einstein, Fox found the "divine amidst all the death and disease," and as "this book changed me; I hope that reading it will change you, too."
(Buy the book in hardcover by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 37% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.)
Fox exhorts us to join Einstein in holding the "highest stage of consciousness as the highest ideal." We witness the author's admiration for an illuminatus ("the greatest genius") who saw in the universe a "fabric of pure wonder" arranged in thorough "harmony" and at "one" with "infinity," "eternity" and "divinity." We also learn how much Fox fears being left behind, bogged down in a "daily grind" where "it's so easy to believe that there's nothing more to us than our fragile little egos." And so, "if we wish to see the same vistas Einstein saw, we must climb higher."
Einstein's own efforts at ascension were not entirely successful. When he tried to transform himself into a spiritual leader nearly two decades after he was celebrated for his scientific accomplishments, he founded a movement called Cosmic Religion that garnered few converts. The reaction from notable representatives of both science and faith was for the most part negative. One prominent Catholic monsignor said, "There is only one fault with [Einstein's] cosmical religion: he put an extra letter in the word - the letter ‘s.'" Niels Bohr, upon hearing Einstein quip that "G od does not play dice with the universe," scolded him, telling him to please stop telling G od what he could do.
Scholars who have studied his private life have noted that his ex-wife, Mileva Marić, who became pregnant before their marriage with a daughter who never met her father, was found lying unconscious on the road shortly before her death. She had been walking through icy streets trying to reach their younger son, whom she cared for after Einstein left the family to marry his cousin Elsa. And Elsa, in turn, eventually learned to live with infidelities so numerous that Einstein's personal doctor claimed without evidence that the aortal aneurysm to which he succumbed was probably a result of syphilis. In light of the publication in 1993 of some of the most cruel and salacious aspects of his private life after years of litigation against the Einstein estate, his granddaughter Evelyn Einstein felt vindicated: "Nobody likes to see their sacred cow criticized, but it is about time the real story came out."
Since then, Einstein's flaunting of petty bourgeoise morality has been largely integrated by scholars as a notable though secondary aspect of his story, even something of a prerequisite for his genius, which by definition requires thinking outside of social conventions. When Elsa caught him traveling with a much younger woman, he asked her not to get angry at his companion, since the woman had behaved "according to the best Christian-Jewish ethics" and followed Einstein's rules for ethical behavior: "1) one should do what one enjoys and what won't harm anyone else; and 2) one should refrain from doing things one does not take delight in and which annoy another person." He had "proof" that his companion had complied. "Because of #1, she came with me, and because of #2 she didn't tell you a word. Isn't that irreproachable?"
Fox cares little about the mundane world of the physicist, though, focusing instead on Einstein's intellectual kinship with other great thinkers, from Pythagoras to Gandhi. "I am Part of Infinity" also dwells on Einstein's "love of living creatures," evident in his affection for his pets, "a tomcat named Tiger, a dog named Chico Marx and even a parrot by the name of Bibo." Fox is in pursuit of something that has nothing to do with Einstein's compassion (or lack thereof) toward the people around him. That is why he cares more about Einstein's pets - because they lay apart from, and perhaps in some way above, human relationships. With respect to the physicist's intimate relationships, Fox (a physician-scientist studying meditation and psychedelics) is interested almost exclusively in Einstein's correspondence with his son Eduard, who spent most of his life interned as a schizophrenic at the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich.
Einstein believed Eduard's "wretched condition" was genetically inherited from his mother. "If only I had known, he would never have come into this world," he once said. Yet what strikes Fox about their relationship is not the suffering of the unwanted child but a lesson he sees on how Einstein cured his "emptiness." Without "the pursuit of the ever unattainable in art and scientific research," he responded to his son, "my life would have been empty." In the end, the marvel of Einstein's crusade against egoism was its evident self-centeredness.
"I Am a Part of Infinity" is unusually personal in the ways that it reveals Fox's struggle to deal with the regular world, which strikes him as insufficient compared to the "high," "grand, "cosmic" and "spiritual" approach offered by Einstein. This experience of a rupture between the mundane and the metaphysical - the experience of disenchantment - is an essential element of the problem of science and modernity more generally. The sociological theorist Max Weber, a contemporary of Einstein, eloquently diagnosed the anguish brought about by the "Entzauberung der Welt," where "the transcendental realm of mystic life" was severed from "the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations." Such binaries characterized not only Einstein's work and legacy, but they also left a deep mark on scholarship unable to reconcile myth and man. Fox does not set out to resolve that dilemma, but he does capture the deeper discontent that rumbles beneath it. In this respect, he should be commended for displaying the depths of our despair.
(Buy the book in hardcover by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 37% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.)
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Jimena Canales is a historian of science and author of "The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time."
