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Chapter 5. Albert Schweitzer

    Albert Schweitzer was a world renown theologian and philosopher, as
well as a medical doctor and famous medical missionary. He spent the
majority of his life devoted to setting up hospitals in Africa and
personally tending to the sick.

  Schweitzer was born in 1875 in Kayserberg, which is located in Alsace
between the border of Germany and France. His father was a Lutheran
minister--his mother the daughter of a cleric. By age five, Albert Schweitzer
was taking piano lessons from his father. By eight, he was playing the organ.
At the age of ten was good enough to be a substitute for the organist at his
church.

   Even at the age of eight, Schweitzer remembered asking embarrassing
questions about the Bible.  For example, he wanted to know what happened to
the gold and other presents that the Magi had brought to Jesus--And why
Jesus and his parents were still poor after this?  Again, when he was 13 and
awaiting confirmation, he found himself still "beset" with questions which
he "dared not ask" because his pastor had made it clear that "reason must
always be silenced in submission to faith." He later wrote on his experience,
"I was convinced even then, that the fundamental principles of Christianity
had to be proven true by reasoning, and by no other method."

  Despite his personal doubts, Schweitzer found that he loved his father's
Sunday services-- The beautiful hymns and organ music, in his words, "filled
my need for quiet and self-recollection, and without which I cannot realize
the meaning of life."

  He obtained his doctorate in philosophy at the age of 24.  The following
year, he received a doctorate in theology.  Before being ordained, he
was given the following caution: "Because of the heresies you have already
put into print, there is probably not another synod of the Lutheran church
in the world who would ordain you. But we know your father, and so we
are willing to take a chance."

  Schweitzer however maintained his skepticism. He wrote two works,
THE MYSTERY OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD (1901) and THE QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL
JESUS (1906), which created a great deal of controversy when they came out.
In them, Albert Schweitzer concluded that Jesus was not a god. Instead,
Schweitzer believed that Jesus was one of the greatest ethical and moral
men of all time. Growing up during the turbulent times of the Roman
occupation in Israel, the brilliant Jesus came to conceive of himself as the
long awaited-for Messiah.   To inaugurate the heavenly kingdom of God on
earth, Jesus set himself as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of man.

   According to Albert Schweitzer, because Jesus was 'wrong' about his
predictions of his return, this proved that Jesus was not the messiah.
This, however did not invalidate Jesus' great moral teachings,
which Schweitzer believed made Jesus the greatest man who ever lived.

Schweitzer's Decision to Become a Medical Doctor in Africa

  When glancing through a magazine, Albert Schweitzer found a report
which told of the high levels of pain and disease suffered by natives of
Africa's Upper Congo and that there was a lack of medical doctors who were
willing to practice under such primitive conditions.  Schweitzer decided
that he would leave for Africa, after completing his medical training.
His family and friends were horrified at his decision.  The dean of the
medical school that he was attending, suggested Schweitzer go see a
psychiatrist.

  Reflecting later on his decision, Schweitzer wrote: "There grew within me
an understanding... that whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself
called upon to help in diminishing the pain of others."

 In a conversation with Norman Cousins years later, he explained:

  "My decision was not the result of having heard the voice of God, or
  any such fantasy, but a completely rational decision consistent with the
  pattern and projections of my life.  I decided I would make my life my
  argument.  I would advocate the things I believed in terms of the life
  I led and what I did."

  In 1911, Albert Schweitzer completed his medical studies, and after
raising money for both his and his wife's passage , he headed off to Africa.
The story of his trials and tribulations--including building a hospital out
of what was originally an abandoned chicken coup, is described in his book
ON THE EDGE OF THE PRIMEVAL FOREST, and in his autobiography, OUT OF MY LIFE
AND THOUGHT.

  World War I broke out in 1914. Appalled at the state of the world, he
wrote in his THE PHILOSOPHY OF CIVILIZATION:

  "The suicide of civilization is in progress. Rationalism has been
  dismissed... Our own age, having never taken the trouble to reflect, has
  arrived at the opinion that civilization consists primarily in
  scientific, technological, and artistic achievements, and that it
  can reach its goals without ethics, or with a minimum of them."

   Schweitzer defined ethics as: "the maintaining of life at the highest
point of development--of my own life and other life by devoting myself
to it in help and love...The beginning of ethics is pity for all
life that suffers.  The maturity of ethics is love expressed in action.
And this ethics, profound, universal, has the significance of religion.
It is religion."

  To Schweitzer, spirituality is defined as "the yearning of the human
mind to exceed its own human frailties, to rise above pettiness, envy
jealousy, to be courageous, noble, to be truly unselfish, to give
of oneself without seeking glory or applause."

  To those who claimed mystical experiences, Schweitzer warned:

  "Individuals who believe that they have at their disposal peculiar
   psychic experiences, and assert that with their aid they can look
   behind the actual nature of phenomena, come forward as producers of
   a world-view.  That the road to world-view leads through metaphysics
   is a fatal error which has already enjoyed too long a span of life in
   our Western thought."

  When questioned once why he seldom used the word "God" in his writings,
Schweitzer repled in a letter dated January 2, 1924:

  "Because I express no more than I have experienced, I never speak
  of 'God' but only of the 'universal will-to-live-which comes to
  consciousness in me in a two-fold way: first as a creative will
  perceived   as manifestations in observable phenomena external to me,
  and secondly, as ethical will experienced within me."

  Although captured briefly as a prisoner-of-war during WW I, he was
released in 1917.  For the next seven years he gave a series of lectures
and concerts, with which funds he returned to Africa to continue his
humanitarian efforts in his now expanded hospital. In 1953, he received
the Nobel Peace prize.  In his acceptance speech, he noted, "Humanism,
in all its simplicity, is the only genuine spirituality."

  In the 1950's and 60's, Albert Schweitzer used his fame to join
forces with other public figures such as Albert Einstein and Linus
Pauling to sway public opinion against nuclear testing.  When the Test
Ban treaty was adopted in 1963, he sent a congratulatory letter to then
President John F. Kennedy, which was read in a broadcast by the president.
Schweitzer died two years later in 1965, at the age of 90.

  Below I have quoted from Albert Schweitzer's REVERENCE FOR LIFE, which
   probably best describes Schweitzer's philosophy on life:

Reverence for Life

  "Reason is the desire for knowledge and the desire for happiness, and
  both are mysteriously connected with one another, in an inward way.
  Desire for reason! Explore everything around you, penetrate to the
  furthest limits of human knowledge, and always you will come up against
  something inexplicable in the end.  It is called life.  It is a mystery
  so inexplicable that the knowledge of the educated and the ignorant is
  purely relative when contemplating it.

  "But what is the difference between the scientist who observes in his
  microscope the most minute and unexpected signs of life; and the old
  farmer who by contrast can barely read or write, who stands in springtime
  in his garden and contemplates the buds opening on the branches of his
  trees? Both are confronted with the riddle of life.  One may be able
  to describe life in greater detail, but for both it remains equally
  inscrutable.  All knowledge is, in the final analysis, the knowledge of
  life.  All realization is amazement at this riddle of life--a reverence
  for life in its infinite and yet ever-fresh manifestations.  How amazing
  this coming into being, living, and dying! How fantastic that in other
  existences something comes into being, passes away again, comes into
  being once more, and so forth from eternity to eternity!  How can it be?
  We can do all things, and we can do nothing.  For in all our wisdom we
  cannot create life.  What we create is dead.

  "Life means strength, will, arising from the abyss, dissolving into the
  abyss again.  Life is feeling, experience, suffering.  If you study life
  deeply, looking with perceptive eyes into the vast animated chaos of
  this creation, its profundity will seize you suddenly with dizziness.  In
  everything you recognize yourself.  The tiny beetle that lies dead in
  your path--it was a living creature, struggling for existence like yourself,
  rejoicing in the sun like you, knowing fear and pain like you.  And now
  it is no more than decaying matter--which is what you will be sooner or
  later, too.

  "You walk outside and it is snowing.  You carelessly shake the snow from
  your sleeves.  It attracts your attention:  A lacy snowflake glistens in
  your hand.  You can't help looking at it.  See how it sparkles in a
  wonderfully intricate pattern.  Then it quivers, and the delicate needles
  of which it consists contract.  It melts and lies dead in your head.  It is
  no more.  The snowflake which fluttered down from infinity space upon your
  hand, where it sparkled and quivered and died--that is yourself. Wherever
  you see life--that is yourself!

  "What is this recognition, this knowledge within the reach of the most
  scientific and the most childlike?  It is reverence for life, reverence
  for the unfathomable mystery we confront in our universe, an existence
  different in its outward appearance and yet inwardly of the same character
  as our own, terribly similar, awesomely related.  The strangeness between
  us and other creatures is here removed.

  "Reverence for the infinity of life means removal of the alienation,
  restoration of empathy, compassion, sympathy.  And so the final result
  of knowledge is the same as that required of us by the commandment of
  love.  Heart and reason agree together when we desire and dare to
  be men who seek to fathom the depths of the universe.

  "Reason discovers the bridge between love for God and love for men--
  love for all creatures, reverence for all being, compassion with all
  life, however dissimilar to our own.

 "I cannot but have reverence for all that is called life. I cannot avoid
  compassion for everything that is called life.  That is the beginning and
  foundation of morality.  Once a man has experienced it and continues to
  do so--and he who has once experienced it will continue to do so--he is
  ethical.  He carries his morality within him and can never lose it, for
  it continues to develop within him. He who has never experienced this has     
  only a set of superficial principles.  these theories have no root in him,
  they do not belong to him, and they fall off him.  The worst is that the
  whole of our generation had only such a set of superficial principles.
  Then the time came to put the ethical code to the test, and it evaporated.
  For centuries the human race had been educated with only a set of superficial
  principles.  We were brutal, ignorant, and heartless without being aware of
  it.  We had no scale of values, for we had no reverence for life.

  "It is our duty to share and maintain life.  Reverence concerning all
  life is the greatest commandment in its most elementary form. Or expressed
  in negative terms: "Thou shalt not kill."  We take this prohibition so
  lightly, thoughtlessly plucking a flower, thoughtlessly stepping on a
  poor insect, thoughtless, in terrible blindness because everything takes
  its revenge, disregarding the suffering and lives of our fellow men,
  sacrificing them to trivial earthly goals.

  "Much talk is heard in our times about building a new human race.  How are
  we to build a new humanity?  Only by leading men toward a true, inalienable
  ethic of our own, which is capable of further development.  But this
  goal cannot be reached unless countless individuals will transform
  themselves from blind men into seeing ones and begin to spell our the
  great commandment which is: Reverence for Life.  Existence depends
  more on reverence for life than the law and the prophets.  Reverence for
  life comprises the whole ethic of love in its deepest and highest sense.
  It is the source of constant renewal for the individual and for mankind."