Reverence for Life

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The silver-maned, bush-mustached old lion of a man had barely stepped out on the promenade deck when the New York press was upon him. "O.K., Dr. Schweitzer!" shouted the photographers. "Stand over there . . . now look this way--this way . . . Hey, Mr. Schweitzer, wave will-ya--with the hand, see? ... O.K., let's make him walk down the deck . . . Hey, Mr. Schweitzer!"

The Nieuw Amsterdam nudged its way slowly through New York Harbor, and 74-year-old Dr. Albert Schweitzer faced the crouching semicircle around him like an indulgent grandfather playing a strange new game with the children. Though he refused to use English, he soon caught on to the rules. When they asked his interpreter to get him to pose against the rail with the city sky line behind him, Albert Schweitzer briskly nodded his grizzled head and grinned. "New York et moil" he said.

Thus last week, in typical fashion, the U.S. welcomed one of the most extraordinary men of modern times. Albert Schweitzer, medical missionary, theologian, organist, interpreter of Bach's music, and one of the world's great humanitarians, has a life of achievement behind him which few contemporary men can equal. Throughout the civilized world he is also quietly honored as few are honored in their lifetime--for what he is.

Dr. Schweitzer is making his first visit to the U.S. to deliver the principal address at a festival launched last week in Aspen, Colo., honoring the 200th anniversary of Goethe's birth. He had never come before, some of his friends have said, largely because of what he has -heard about U.S. publicity and ballyhoo methods. But all through his first ordeal-by-press he seemed to be having a fine time. He turned his massive head alertly from questioner to questioner, often exploding into easy laughter, several times correcting his interpreter in the translation of a phrase. He seemed genuinely surprised by the big turnout. "You are so nice to me," he exclaimed at last in French. "You treat me like a big banker or a prizefighter."

The Man Who Turned His Back. Next day the U.S. press told its readers the story of Albert Schweitzer. As an organist he once played before jammed audiences in churches and concert halls of Europe; his recordings are still ranked at the top of their field. He is a musicologist whose edition of Bach's organ works is a standard text; his biography of Bach has never been surpassed. He is a doctor of medicine whose 36 years of selfless pioneering as a missionary to the natives of French Equatorial Africa are a bright highlight in the relations between the white race and the black. He is a philosopher who, like Spengler and Toynbee, has thought deeply about the crisis of Western culture. He is a Protestant minister and biblical scholar whose historical criticism of the New Testament, early in this century, turned out to be a theological blockbuster. Above all, he is a man who decided to turn his back on the dazzling rewards the world wanted to give him in order to serve his fellow men.

In 1875, when Evangelical Pastor Louis Schweitzer moved to the little Alsatian village of Giinsbach with his frail-looking six-month-old son Albert, the townspeople said: "Das Bueble isch die erschte Beer-digung wo der neue Pfarrer halte wird [That kid's going to be the new parson's first funeral]." The parson's wife decked out her yellow, pinch-faced baby in a white frock and colored ribbons for his father's induction ceremony. But even so, the visitors could manage no compliments for the baby, and Frau Pfarrer Schweitzer fled weeping to her bedroom with sickly little Albert.

The neighbors soon stopped worrying about young Albert Schweitzer, who began to grow up as straight and strong as an Alsatian pine. But his mother still had cause to weep--over his report cards. The first-rate education to which he was entitled as a parson's son, and the grandson of a minister and a schoolmaster, seemed at first to be a dubious investment. At home, Albert's brothers & sisters called him "the dreamer." At school, reading and writing came hard to him, and his nervous giggle earned him the nickname of Isaac (in Hebrew, "He laughs"). His parents had all they could do to keep him at his piano lessons. Twenty minutes was set aside for practicing each day, but Albert often scandalized the family by spending the first 15 minutes in the bathroom groaning with a trumped-up stomachache.

Yet to anyone with eyes to see, all the shining threads which were to make up the fabric of an exceptional life were already present in the sensitive schoolboy of Giinsbach.

All Things That Breathe. Albert felt a sense of deep obligation to those who were not as well off as he. One day, when he won a friendly wrestling match with a bigger schoolmate, the loser complained: "Yes, if I got broth to eat twice a week the way you do, I'd be as strong as you are." From that time on, Albert's broth stuck in his throat. He was punished repeatedly because he refused to accept such advantages as an everyday overcoat, new gloves, or leather shoes, which poorer boys did not have.

His instinctive respect for all living creatures seemed strange to his schoolmates, and often it made him sad. ("Youth's unqualified joie de vivre" he once wrote, "I never really knew.") Twice Albert went fishing, but "the treatment of the worms . . . and the wrenching of the mouths of the fishes" were too much for him. Each night, after his prayers with his mother, he added a secret one of his own: "O Heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath, guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in peace."

To young Albert, music was sometimes a shattering experience. He once heard a group of older schoolboys practicing their singing lesson; the unexpected thrill of hearing two-part harmony, he wrote later, forced him to steady himself against the wall to keep from falling. When he first heard brass instruments played together, he says, "I almost fainted from excess of pleasure."

At eight, Albert foreshadowed the direction of his future biblical criticism when he asked, on reading the story of the Three Wise Men, how the parents of Jesus could have been poor after receiving the gold and costly gifts the Magi brought. "And that the Wise Men should never have troubled themselves again about the Child Jesus was to me incomprehensible. The absence, too, of any record of the shepherds of Bethlehem becoming disciples gave me a severe shock."

The Answer. By dint of will power rather than brilliance, Schweitzer passed creditably in his studies at the Gymnasium (preparatory school), and at 18 entered the University of Strasbourg to major in philosophy and theology. He began to enjoy himself hugely. Strasbourg's faculty was young and stimulating, his work was rewarding, and he had already begun lessons with the famed French organist, Charles Marie Widor. But Schweitzer's thoughtful happiness also carried with it some pain. "It became steadily clearer to me," he has written, "that I had not the inward right to take as a matter of course my happy youth, my good health, and my power of work. Out of the depths of my feeling of happiness there grew up gradually within me an understanding . . . that . . . whosoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others . . ."

One bright summer morning in Guns-bach when he was 21, Schweitzer awoke and calmly came to a momentous decision: "I would consider myself justified in living until I was 30 for science and art, in order to devote myself from that time forward to the direct service of humanity. Many a time already had I tried to settle what meaning lay hidden for me in the saying of Jesus: 'Whosoever would save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the Gospels shall save it.' Now the answer was found. In addition to the outward, I had now inward happiness."

Preaching Was Necessary. For an idealist of 21, there was nothing particularly unusual about his decision except that he acted upon it. For Albert Schweitzer, the resolution was a binding contract with himself. Without telling anyone of his decision, he set out upon such a decade of activity as would have done credit to an ordinary man's lifetime.

Three years later, his first philosophical book, The Religious Philosophy of Kant, was published, while he was working for his licentiate in theology. At the same time, he became a preacher in Strasbourg's Church of St. Nicholas. "Preaching was a necessity of my being," he wrote in his autobiography.-"I felt it as something wonderful that I was allowed to address a congregation every Sunday about the deepest questions of life." In 1902 he was made a curate of the church.

The Second Coming. In 1903, Schweitzer was appointed principal of Strasbourg's Theological College. In preparation for a series of lectures on the history of research into the life of Jesus, he began the work which was first to make his reputation international--The Quest of the Historical Jesus.

Reading the New Testament in Greek while on army maneuvers during his military service in 1894, he had been especially interested in Matthew 10-11, in which Jesus sent forth his disciples to preach that "the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Jesus, reasoned Schweitzer, "tells them that they will almost immediately have to undergo severe persecution. But they suffer nothing of the kind. He tells them also that the appearance of the Son of Man will take place before they have gone through the cities of Israel, which can only mean that the Messianic kingdom will be revealed while they are thus engaged. He has, therefore, no expectation of seeing them return."

The coming kingdom which Jesus preached, argues Schweitzer, is that which was commonly believed in by the Jews of His time--the end of the world, accompanied by the reappearance of the Messiah to judge all men. Since the end did not come after the preaching mission of the Twelve, Schweitzer reasons, Jesus decided that He must take upon Himself the period of suffering and that the kingdom would follow hard upon His death. In this expectation, he holds, Jesus went to the Passover celebration at Jerusalem and was crucified. As a result, early Christianity is exclusively concerned with Christ's expected second coming and the beginning of the kingdom, according to Schweitzer. The whole history of the church, he concludes, is based upon the delay, and finally the abandonment of this belief.

In writing The Quest, Schweitzer struck a telling blow against the idea of the so-called "liberal Jesus" presented by the rationalist theologians of the 19th Century, who saw Jesus as "the best man that ever lived" and a great moral teacher, but not necessarily a man of divine origin and nature. Schweitzer's Jesus is no such secularized modern but a man of His own time, thinking and acting within the framework of contemporary Jewish belief.

The faith of Schweitzer is embedded deep in a paradox: while he believes that the Jesus who lived and died in Palestine was as wrong in his calculations as any man of His time, he also knows the presence of a living, timeless Jesus, real and compelling beyond the deepest experience of many more orthodox believers. In one passage he writes:

"Anyone who ventures to look the historical Jesus in the face and to listen . . . soon ceases to ask what this strange-seeming Jesus can still be to him. He learns to know Him as One who claims authority over him. The true understanding of Jesus is the understanding of will acting on will. The true relation to Him is to be taken possession of by Him. Christian piety of any and every sort is valuable only so far as it means surrender of our will to His."

The Quest of the Historical Jesus closes with the words: "He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those who knew Him not. He speaks the same word: 'Follow thou Me!' And sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, be they wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who He is."

Feet In a Bucket. On Oct. 13, 1905, Schweitzer posted letters to his parents and a few intimates breaking the news that at the beginning of the winter term he was planning to take up the study of medicine, and would spend the rest of his life as a doctor in Equatorial Africa. The hubbub that resulted astonished him: he was burying talents that had been entrusted to him, his friends and family cried; anyway, he could do much more for the Africans by raising money for them through concerts and lectures. Wrote Schweitzer: "It moved me strangely to see [my friends] so far from perceiving that the effort to serve the love preached by Jesus may sweep a man into a new course of life, although they read in the New Testament that it can do so and found it there quite in order."

For the next seven years Schweitzer went through a period which he called "a continuous struggle with fatigue." While he studied for his M.D. at Strasbourg University, he continued his preaching nearly every Sunday and played the organ concerts of the Bach Society in Paris each winter. He wrote a short book on organ building and completed a second major theological work, Paul and His Interpreters. Many nights he worked at his desk without going to bed at all, his feet soaking in a bucket of cold water to keep himself awake. When the ordeal was over at last, one of his medical professors said to him with professional wonder: "It is only because you have such excellent health that you got through a job like that."

Dives Goes to Lazarus. In June 1912, Schweitzer married Helene Bresslau. The daughter of a well-known Strasbourg historian, she had equipped herself for the life they were to lead together by becoming a trained nurse.* They spent their first months of married life compiling lists and carefully purchasing and packing medical supplies. On Good Friday of 1913 they set out for Africa.

Why Africa? Because, says Schweitzer, there in all the world the need was the greatest, and the hands that were stretched out to help, the fewest. In Africa he saw the greatest unpaid debt of Western civilization--to the black man the white man had wronged, as Dives wronged Lazarus, through selfishness and ignorance.

In a Hen House. Lambarene is a tiny French Protestant missionary settlement in the midst of a lake and river system, a day and a half by boat from the port of Cape Lopez on Africa's west coast. When the Schweitzers reached it they found the need for a doctor even greater than they had anticipated. Before the medicines and instruments could be unpacked, they were besieged by sick natives. As news of the white doctor and nurse spread, Negroes came from as far as 200 miles, bringing relatives and friends with them.

None of the buildings Schweitzer had expected to be ready had been put up; his first surgery was a windowless chicken house with a leaky roof. But in spite of the heavy physical labor of constructing new buildings--in which the new doctor himself worked as woodcutter, carpenter, foreman and architect--Schweitzer treated some 2,000 cases during his first nine months in Africa.

During the years since then, in a climate notoriously hard on Europeans, Albert Schweitzer has labored between the conducting of morning and evening prayer as doctor and artisan in his hospital. During the evenings, he sometimes practices on the piano, especially ant-proofed and equipped with organ pedals, which the Paris Bach Society gave him when he left Europe. Often he whittles patiently away, in his neat, round longhand, at his voluminous correspondence. But the most important work to take up his evenings is the completion of his multiple-volume work, The Philosophy of Civilization.

The Iron Door Yields. Two volumes have already been published (both in 1923): The Decay and Restoration of Civilization and Civilization and Ethics. In them, Schweitzer addresses himself to the problem of how "we [who] are living today under the sign of the collapse of civilization" may shore up the swaying, creaking structure before it is too late. His conclusion: man must acquire a positive, optimistic ethic in a universe about which nothing positive or optimistic may be said. Albert Schweitzer is skeptical about the possibility of man's seeing the universe and his place in it with any kind of overall, God's-eye view. Man must start within himself, he believes, and build his ethic from the inside out.

Descartes, beginning his philosophy in the same way, took as his irreducible datum his famed "I think, therefore I am." Schweitzer finds as the most basic and essential statement he can make about himself: "I am life which wills to live." On taking cognizance of what lies around him he enlarged it to: "I am life which wills to live in the midst of life which wills to live."

But how to achieve an ethic from that --to bridge the gap with reason from this bare statement to an ethical corollary? "All I had learned from philosophy about ethics," he writes, "left me in the lurch."

On a slow, long boat trip up the river, Schweitzer sat covering sheet after sheet of paper with disjointed sentences to keep his mind concentrated on the problem. Suddenly, on the third day, at sunset, as the riverboat made its 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."

"Ethics Are Pity." Schweitzer believed that he had an intellectual justification,, at last, for what he had felt all along to be true: that he must "show to all will-to-live the same reverence as I do to my own." That is the "basic principle ... It is good to maintain and to encourage life; it is bad to destroy life or to obstruct it ...

"Ethics are pity. All life is suffering. The will-to-live which has attained to knowledge is therefore seized with deep pity for all creatures . . . What is called in ordinary ethics 'love' is in its real essence pity. In this powerful feeling of pity the will-to-live is diverted from itself. Its purification begins."

Schweitzer has also written: "The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of Jesus brought to philosophical expression, extended into cosmical form, and conceived of as intellectually necessary."

Will-to-Love. Is Albert Schweitzer a Christian? He is certainly not an orthodox one. He subscribes to no creed and has no patience with theological distinctions. His religious thinking and living have character that defies any precise labeling. He is a pantheist, but he is far more than a pantheist. "Every form of living Christianity," he says, "is pantheistic in that it is bound to envisage everything that exists as having its being in the great First Cause of all being." But to him, ethical piety cannot depend upon the impersonal First Cause manifested in nature but upon the First Cause manifested in the "will-to-love."

And how can God's will-to-love be found? "In Jesus Christ, God is manifested as the Will of Love. In union with Christ, union with God is realized in the only form attainable by us."

"Mass Murderer." In his daily life Schweitzer takes his own injunction to revere life so seriously that it sometimes astonishes those around him. He himsel" reports that the natives consider his view impractical and perverted when he tell them they must transplant young palm trees instead of cutting them down when a clearing is to be made. A Lambarene colleague reports that when a grapefruit was brought to Schweitzer as he worked late at night, he would always drop a spoonful of the juice on the floor beside him for the ants. "Look at my ants," he would say. "Just like cows around a pond."

"That man is truly ethical," he has written, "who shatters no ice crystal as it sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from a tree, cuts no flower . . ." As a physician, Schweitzer calls himself "a mass murderer of bacteria," and says he cannot help thinking, when he peers into a microscope, "I have to sacrifice this life in order to preserve other life."

Disorganized & Leisurely. Last week Dr. Schweitzer took no part in the Goethe festival, but waited in Manhattan, working on his address and resting. Though Poet-Philosopher Goethe is one of his favorite subjects (in 1928 he received the city of Frankfurt's Goethe Prize*), he had not really wanted to come to the U.S. When he went from Lambarene to Giinsbach last October for a visit, he found at least six invitations to address Goethe bicentennial events, but he was so tired that he refused them all. Then from the University of Chicago's Chancellor Robert Hutchins, chairman of the U.S. Goethe Bicentennial Foundation, came a persuader that set Dr. Schweitzer to brooding. The foundation would make the Lambarene hospital a gift of 2,000,000 francs ($6,100), Chairman Hutchins promised, if Dr. Schweitzer would come.

For five days Albert Schweitzer wrestled with his conscience. Hutchins, to be sure, was no Goethe scholar, his university no center of Goethe study in the U.S. Moreover, America was far away. But the thought of what the 2,000,000 francs would mean for his patients in Africa clinched his decision. Schweitzer sent his acceptance.

Since then he has found that he will be expected to work harder for his hospital than he had bargained for. He had not realized that the festival (which Hutchins calls "the greatest cultural event ever held in the U.S.") would be held at 7,930-ft.-high Aspen--a onetime ghost town recently bought by Box Tycoon Walter P. Paepcke and turned into a resort. Later he learned that he was scheduled to make his address twice, once in French and once in German, on different days. And last week it was announced that Dr. Schweitzer would be awarded an honorary degree from the University of Chicago, which meant that an acceptance speech would have to be prepared and delivered.

But tired old Dr. Schweitzer seemed to be having a wonderful time finding out about the U.S. It was much more congenial than he had expected. Said he last week in New York: "I feel very much at home. I am delighted to find that people here are almost as disorganized and leisurely as they are in Europe."

-Out of My Life and Thought, reissued this week by Henry Holt & Co. ($3.50). -A daughter, Rhena, was born in 1919, new lives near Zurich with her organ-technician husband and four children. - Schweitzer's address on that occasion, together with two of his other Goethe addresses and one essay, was published last week under the title Goethe, Four Studies by Albert Schweitzer (Beacon Press; $2.50).

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