Spinoza's God, in twenty five words

A rabbi prepaid fifty words for the answer. Einstein used half of them, and pointed at a lens grinder who had been expelled from his synagogue at twenty three.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-22 · Nondual

In April 1929 a rabbi in New York sent Einstein a telegram with a single question. Do you believe in God. He prepaid fifty words for the reply, which tells you he was expecting a careful man to hedge. Einstein used twenty five. He believed in Spinoza's God, he said, the one who shows up as the lawful harmony of the world, and not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and doings of people.

That answer gets quoted constantly, usually by someone who wants Einstein on their team, and almost always by people who have not read the man he was pointing at. I had not either. So I went and read him, and the surprise is that Spinoza is not a softer, more poetic God. He is a much stranger one.

Spinoza's move is in the first part of the Ethics and it is short. There is one substance. Not one God plus a world he made, not spirit over here and matter over there. One substance, and everything you can point at is a mode of it, the way a wave is a mode of the sea rather than a thing the sea produced. He writes it as a single phrase, God or Nature, and the word joining them is doing all the work. Not God and Nature. Not God in Nature. Or.

Follow that and the usual furniture goes. A substance that is everything cannot want anything, because wanting is the gap between what is and what is not yet, and there is no outside for the gap to sit in. So no plans. No favours. Nothing that could be flattered. Spinoza is blunt about it: people think nature works toward ends because they work toward ends, and they read their own habit into the sky.

Amsterdam did not take this well. He was expelled from his synagogue at twenty three, with the harshest wording on record in that community, and he did not convert to anything afterwards. He ground optical lenses for a living, turned down a chair at Heidelberg because it came with a condition about not disturbing the established religion, and died at forty four of a lung illness that the glass dust probably did not help. The Ethics came out after his death. It reads like geometry, definitions and axioms and propositions, which I think is a deliberate way of making a very hot claim look cold.

Now the part I actually care about. Read the first pages of the Ethics after a month with Advaita and the resemblance is uncomfortable. One without a second. The world not as a separate creation but as this appearing in a form. Even the endpoint rhymes. Spinoza's blessedness is not a payment you receive later for good behaviour, it is the state of seeing clearly, available now, and it does not depend on anyone owing you anything.

But the differences are real and I do not want to sand them off, because sanding them off is exactly what the internet does with this stuff. Spinoza's one substance has infinitely many attributes, and thought and extension are two of them, running in parallel, neither reducible to the other. Advaita does not say that. It says consciousness is the substance and everything else is a name and a form appearing in it. That is not a decorative difference. One of them makes mind and matter equals under a neutral third thing, the other makes matter a shape taken by mind. And Spinoza's world is fully real, a genuine expression of God, where Advaita keeps calling the world neither real nor unreal, which drives Western readers up the wall and is meant to.

The other thing worth saying out loud is that Einstein was not endorsing any of that. He was refusing a personal God in the fewest words that would still be polite to a rabbi. He said elsewhere, and more sharply near the end of his life, that he took the word God to be a human product, and he had no patience for people who recruited him as a mystic. Quoting him at a dinner party as evidence for nondual anything is borrowing a coat that does not fit.

What is left when you drop the borrowed authority is a seventeenth century lens grinder saying that there is one thing, that you are not standing outside it, and that understanding this is not a reward for being good but is itself the good. He got there by argument, alone, in a country where saying it cost him his community. Nobody handed him a lineage or a chant or a robe.

That is the part I keep turning over. Not that Spinoza proves the Vedantins right, he does not, and their disagreement about the status of the world is not a technicality. It is that the same shape keeps being arrived at by people with no access to each other, using whatever tools their century gave them. Either that is what minds do when they think hard enough about being, or there is something there. I still cannot tell which, and twenty five words did not settle it either.