Given the date and content of this letter, it is clear that Wolff is responding to an article that Einstein published in the November 9, 1930 issue of the New York Times Magazine (which can be accessed here). Wolff writes of “a crying need” that can “no longer be satisfied in its depths by the outworn creeds and forms of current religiosity” and that this need requires “a new vehicle of expression that will be convincing to the form of intellectual consciousness which dominates the world today.” In particular, Wolff believes that the spiritual principles “enunciated by the liberated Sages of the past are eternal and are adequate for every inner need of man” but that these values require a new vehicle of expression that will be convincing to the modern intellect. Einstein, he continues, has shown us that this language may be provided by the “key-science of all physical science,” which is mathematics.
Wolff relates that “I have had some realization of the profound mysticism which underlies the whole of mathematics and becomes especially marked in the field of the transfinite” and that through his training in mathematics he was able to “see the thought of men like Gautama Buddha and Shankara as a rational whole grounded in mystical profundity.” He goes on to say that he has “no doubt that within mathematics lies the same undying Wisdom which forms the common substance of all the great Sages,” and he asks Einstein whether it is possible “that somehow out of mathematics, or mathematics in combination with physical science, we will find the adequate language to express mystical profundity in a form which will command both the attention and respect of our present externally intellectualized public?” Wolff believes that we can, and that Einstein has become a focal point for such expression. (3 pages)
