Albert Schweitzer on the Reverence for Life
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”Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was a medical doctor, protestant theologian, musician and philosopher – an almost mythical presence of a man. In many ways, he was a son of his time, contemporary to others who seem larger than life: he was born right between Gandhi, who was six years older, and that other Albert, the physicist Einstein, four years his younger. It was an age whose protagonists built and destroyed empires, erected cathedrals of science, and dedicated their lives to almost inhuman levels of altruism – and all that over lifetimes that included the two most terrible and inhuman wars that history had ever seen.
Thinking back to the world they inhabited and formed, one is reminded of that great line in the script to Graham Greene’s Third Man, where Harry Lime says:
“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Albert Schweitzer is not much remembered today. His legacy is not carried forward by an army of scientists or a whole nation of a billion people. Philosophers never took him seriously as an ethicist, although few who call themselves ethicists today would be willing to put their whole lives in the service of their beliefs, as he did.
As a young man, he studied theology and music, becoming an expert in the study and restoration of historic church organs. He was such an accomplished musician, that in 1905 he was invited to play for the king and queen of Spain. After the concert, the king asked him: “Is it difficult to play the organ?” – to which Schweitzer answered: “Almost as difficult as it is to rule Spain.”
As a scholar, he wrote two books on the interpretation of Bach’s music and published more, widely acclaimed books on the historical Jesus and (much later) the mysticism of early Christianity. But as he grew older, he also grew restless, unsatisfied with a life of privilege, as we would say now, asking himself how he could justify his existence in the face of Jesus’ commandments. To a friend he wrote:
For me the whole essence of religion is at stake. For me religion means to be human, plainly human in the sense in which Jesus was. In the colonies things are pretty hopeless and comfortless. We – the Christian nations – send out there the mere dregs of our people; we think only of what we can get out of the natives … in short, what is happening there is a mockery of humanity and Christianity. If this wrong is in some measure to be atoned for, we must send out there men who will do good in the name of Jesus, not simply proselytising missionaries, but men who will help the distressed as they must be helped if the Sermon on the Mount and the words of Jesus are valid and right.
Now we sit here and study theology, and then compete for the best ecclesiastical posts, write thick learned books in order to become professors of theology … and what is going on out there where the honour and the name of Jesus are at stake, does not concern us at all. … I cannot do so. For years I’ve turned these matters over in my mind, this way and that. At last it became clear to me that this isn’t my life. I want to be a simple human being, doing something small in the spirit of Jesus.
We might today dislike some of Schweitzer’s word choices, but this was over a hundred years ago and Schweitzer was just using the language of his time. More important is that, at this early stage already, Schweitzer felt that we should be grateful for life. Nobody can know, he said, where we came from or where we were going. The only sure thing was existence itself, and the only way to affirm life was to take responsibility for our existence. Much later, Schweitzer’s young cousin, born around the time Schweitzer wrote these words, Jean-Paul Sartre, would make existence the central theme of his philosophy.
But for Sartre, this meant futility and distress, not thankfulness. The word “existentialist” could be applied to both. But it was Sartre’s version, not Schweitzer’s, that gained currency in the philosophical world. (Brabazon, Albert Schweitzer. A biography. p.195)
Three years later, Schweitzer finished his medical studies. Already teaching theology at the university, he had become a student again, at 30, ten years older than his peers, and in the time left to him, he was an organist of rising international reputation. As his biographer remarks, his biggest problem at that time, among all the studying, teaching, writing and playing music, was to stay awake. But slowly he was approaching his dream of spending his life in a more meaningful way. In 1913, he set out on a boat to Africa.
It was in Africa where Schweitzer founded his hospital with his own money at Lambaréné on the Ogooué river, in what is now Gabon. It was the work in Africa that brought into sharp focus for him the difference between one’s rationality and one’s emotions:
I was always, even as a boy, engrossed in the philosophical problem of the relation between emotion and reason. Certain truths originate in feeling, others in the mind. Those truths that come from our emotions are of a moral kind – compassion, kindness, forgiveness, love for our neighbour. Reason, on the other hand, teaches us the truths that come from reflection.
But with the great spirits of our world – the Hebrew prophets, Christ, Zoroaster, the Buddha, and others – feeling is always paramount. In them, emotion holds its ground against reason, and all of us have an inner assurance that the truth of emotion that these great spiritual figures reveal to us is the most profound and the most important truth.
One day, Schweitzer had to take a long journey up the river that passed by his hospital. He recounts:
Lost in thought, I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal concept of the ethical that I had not discovered in any philosophy. I covered sheet after sheet with disconnected sentences merely to concentrate on the problem. Two days passed. Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase: “Reverence for Life”. The iron door had yielded. The path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had found my way to the principle in which affirmation of the world and ethics are joined together!
Later he would summarise his philosophy in this passage from Civilisation and Ethics:
Ethics is nothing other than Reverence for Life. Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.
“Reverence” is not the best translation. The German word Schweitzer used is “Ehrfurcht”: a composite of Ehre, meaning honour, and Furcht, meaning fear. Ehrfurcht is the awe and fear we experience in the presence of the Sublime, in the presence of God. Like his contemporary Albert Einstein, Schweitzer too agreed with Spinoza that God is not some being that resides far away on a cloud and judges mankind. Instead, Schweitzer’s God, like Einstein’s and Spinoza’s, is one who cannot be separated from the world – God is the world:
I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings. (Albert Einstein)
Schweitzer lived his life according to the idea that God manifests Himself in every form of life. His co-workers at his hospital would remember him carefully picking up and placing little earthworms and spiders to the side before planting a sapling into the ground.
And if God is equally present in all life, then we cannot see human life as superior to other forms of life. The essential moral element in all living things is life itself – the moment one begins to distinguish different qualities of life, one is on the path that leads, ultimately, to the misconception that animal life is more valuable than plant life, that human life is more valuable than animal life, and that perhaps even some human lives should be seen as more valuable than others. And this Schweitzer was never going to accept. In the end, therefore, his view of things boils down to a very simple maxim:
I am life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to live. (Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought).
Schweitzer was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. He returned to Africa, where he used the Nobel Prize money to expand his hospital in Lambarene. Shortly before he died, his daughter wrote in a letter:
Lambarene hospital is in great degree an African village, which now comprises 72 buildings grouped around the central core: operating theatre, X-ray room, laboratory, dental clinic, delivery room … About a thousand operations a year are performed … About 350 babies are born each year at the hospital.
Until the end, Schweitzer did not find peace either with the church or with his famous cousin, and his ethics never got the recognition of academic philosophy. About Sartre he wrote:
We are correct and friendly with one another, but we have no deep relationship. His philosophy is witty and clever but not profound. … His plays are better than his philosophy. In them he deals with ethics, which have no place in his philosophy.
Because for Albert Schweitzer, real philosophy was nothing without the Reverence for Life.
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