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's God is no softer or more poetic. He is a much stranger one.

Spinoza's move is in the Ethics and it is short. There is one substance, where the usual picture has a God plus a world he made, or spirit over here and matter over there. Everything anyone can point at is a mode of it, the way a wave is a mode of the sea. He writes it as a single phrase, God or Nature, and the word joining them is doing all the work.

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 it has no plans and cannot 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.

Read after a month with Advaita, the first pages of the Ethics show an uncomfortable resemblance. One without a second. The world as this appearing in a form. Even the endpoint rhymes. Spinoza's blessedness is the state of seeing clearly, available now. Nobody pays it out later for good behaviour, and it does not depend on anyone owing you anything.

The differences are real, and sanding them off is 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 says consciousness is the substance and everything else is a name and a form appearing in it. 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.

So Spinoza does not prove the Vedantins right, and their disagreement about the status of the world is no technicality. But 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 cannot tell which.

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.

Drop the borrowed authority and what is left is a seventeenth century lens grinder saying that there is one thing, that nobody stands outside it, and that understanding this 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 robe.