Chapter3

Chapter 3: Albert Schweitzer’s

Affirmations of Reverence for Life

Prof. Marvin Meyer, Chapman University

Marvin Meyer presented this paper at the international

conference on “Albert Schweitzer at the Turn of the

Millennium,” held on the campus of Chapman University on

February 19-21, 1999. The paper was given as a scholarly

meditation in the context of an all-faiths service, which also

included an ecumenical liturgy, organ music of Bach played

by Schweitzer, and African Music and Dance performed by the

Dembrebrah West African Drum and Dance Company of Long

Beach, California. A slightly different version of this paper

appears in Reverence for Life: The Ethic of Albert Schweitzer

for the Twenty-first Century, published by Syracuse

University Press.

One of the vivid images, among others, that comes to mind

when I think of Albert Schweitzer affirming Reverence for

Life is the image of Schweitzer with his ants. This image has

been made memorable by the dentist, artist, and author

Frederick Franck, who lived and worked with Schweitzer for a

time in the late 1950s, and described his experiences in his

book Days with Albert Schweitzer: A Lambarene Landscape.

Among the charming drawings in the book is one with the

caption “Dr. Schweitzer entertains his ants.” Frederick was

kind enough to present me with an artist’s proof of the

drawing, and I have mounted it appropriately in my study

among other drawings and prints. The drawing shows

Schweitzer at 86, bushy of hair, mustache, and eyebrows,

hunched over his writing table, with pages of a manuscript

tacked to a wall, sheets of paper on the table, and ants

crawling over the sheets. Frederick describes Schweitzer

encountering his ants: “For some years he has been watching

this particular family of ants, a few hundred or a few thousand

quite benign and harmless ones, which live in a nest

somewhere under the floor boards of his room. After every

meal he puts a little piece of fish under the kerosene lamp on

his table; immediately the ants crawl up the table leg, walk in

a neat line across the top piled with papers, and start to tackle

the fish offering from all sides. It requires five or six of the

tiny insects to transport a huge fragment of two cubic

millimeters of fish across the table, down the leg to their

residence. Dr. Schweitzer and I watched with delight how first

the softer pieces of fish were chosen in preference to older,

harder ones.”

Schweitzer

considered

Reverence for Life

to be the elemental

and universal

ethical concept.

Schweitzer affirming Reverence for Life: Certainly Reverence

for Life comes to expression in Schweitzer’s treatment of his

ants, as well as his mosquitoes, his chickens, and his pelican

Parsifal, but it should not be trivialized as being reducible to

only that. Schweitzer considered Reverence for Life to be the

elemental and universal ethical concept; he considered

Reverence for Life to be the foundation for all sound moral

thought and action; he considered Reverence for Life to be a

necessity, a necessary conclusion, of clear thinking and

reflection. When Schweitzer affirmed Reverence for Life, he

affirmed the solidarity of all living things and the moral

obligation of people who live in the midst of living things.

Schweitzer affirming Reverence for Life: Certainly

Schweitzer was neither the only person nor the first person to

advocate love and solidarity among humans and all living

things. But when he affirmed Reverence for Life, he did so in

his own inimitable way, with the variety of formulations and

affirmations typical of the man who did so many different

things so well.

It is my pleasure in this meditation to examine several ways –

four or five ways – in which Albert Schweitzer articulated his

understanding of Reverence for Life.

Schweitzer affirmed

Reverence for Life

autobiographically.

First, Schweitzer affirmed Reverence for Life

autobiographically. In his Memoirs of Childhood and Youth

Schweitzer traced his sensitivity to the pain and suffering in

the world back to his childhood, and he recounted stories, now

familiar to us, of his concern for living things from the days of

his early childhood. I quote from the translation by Kurt and

Alice Bergel: “Already before I started school it seemed quite

incomprehensible to me that my evening prayers were

supposed to be limited to human beings. Therefore, when my

mother had prayed with me and kissed me goodnight, I

secretly added another prayer which I had made up myself for

all living beings. It went like this: ‘Dear God, protect and bless

all beings that breathe, keep all evil from them, and let them

sleep in peace.’ ” Again: “I had an experience during my

seventh or eighth year which

made a deep impression on me.

Heinrich Bräsch and I had made

ourselves rubberband slingshots

with which we could shoot small

pebbles. One spring Sunday

during Lent he said to me, ‘Come

on, let’s go to the Rebberg and

shoot birds.’ I hated this idea, but

I did not contradict him for fear

he might laugh at me. We

approached a leafless tree in

which birds, apparently unafraid

of us, were singing sweetly in the

morning air. Crouching like an

Indian hunter, my friend put a

pebble in his slingshot and took aim. Obeying his look of

command, I did the same with terrible pangs of conscience

and vowing to myself to miss. At that very moment the church

bells began to ring out into the sunshine, mingling their

chimes with the song of the birds. It was the warning bell, half

an hour before the main bell ringing. For me, it was a voice

from Heaven. I put the slingshot aside, shooed the birds away

so that they were safe from my friend, and ran home. Ever

since then, when the bells of Passiontide ring out into the

sunshine and the naked trees, I remember, deeply moved and

grateful, how that day they rang into my heart the

commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ” Schweitzer told other

stories about an old horse being dragged to the slaughterhouse

in Colmar, about his own dog Phylax and his neighbor’s dog

Löscher, about the revolting experience of impaling worms

and hooking fish, and about the treatment extended to

Mausche the Jewish dealer when he passed through Günsbach.

Schweitzer observed

that the

commandment not to

kill and torture

impacted him in a

powerful way in his

childhood and

youth.

When reflecting on his childhood, Schweitzer observed that

the commandment not to kill and torture impacted him in a

powerful way in his childhood and youth, and such may well

be the case. It may well be that Schweitzer was predisposed

from childhood and influenced by childhood experiences to

feel a kinship with other living beings, a feeling that may

anticipate his later affirmations of Reverence for Life. Yet

Schweitzer’s reflections published in his Memoirs of

Childhood and Youth are

based upon his sessions, in

1922, with the psychologist

and pastor Oscar Pfister in

Zürich, when Schweitzer was

depressed and in need of

counsel. His reflections in

his Memoirs allowed him the

subsequent opportunity to

present his own

interpretation of the

experiences of his childhood

and youth, and while James

Bentley’s charges of

“emotional duplicity” seem

to me to put the matter too

strongly, I suggest that Schweitzer may in fact project his

values as an ethical thinker in his mid-forties back upon the

experiences of his childhood. In his Memoirs we may learn as

much about the values of the adult Schweitzer as we do about

young Albert in and around Günsbach.

Schweitzer affirmed

Reverence for Life

exegetically.

Second, Schweitzer affirmed Reverence for Life exegetically.

Albert Schweitzer grew up as a PK, a preacher’s kid, and from

an early age he was exposed to the interpretation of the Bible

in an open, liberal, Lutheran context. He was given a copy of

the New Testament, he says, at age eight, and he apparently

entered the world of critical biblical scholarship already in his

youth. If wise men from the East visited baby Jesus and

offered him valuable gifts, young Albert asked, why was the

holy family so poor? If shepherds saw the holy child in the

manger, he wondered, why did none of them become

followers of Jesus? And, not to leave out critical questions

pertaining to the Hebrew scriptures, how could a rainstorm

lasting forty days and forty nights produce a cataclysmic flood

according to Genesis, he questioned, when a similarly heavy

rain in Günsbach produced nothing of the kind? (His father’s

answer: In the old days it came down in bucketsful, not in

drops as it does today.)

Later, as a young man

involved in military service

for Germany, Schweitzer

spent some of his leisure

time opening his Greek New

Testament and reading a text

that was to play a powerful

role in his exegesis of the

Bible and his interpretation

of the person of Jesus:

Matthew 10. (Today I might

prefer to refer to this as the

Matthean version and

revision of the mission

speech in the synoptic

sayings source Q.) In

Matthew 10, Jesus sends out

the twelve followers to announce that heaven’s kingdom is

near, and he reassures them that, although they will be

opposed, they will not finish going through the towns of Israel

before the child of humankind – conventionally called the son

of man – comes. The child of humankind who is coming,

Schweitzer recognized, is the apocalyptic figure announced in

the book of Daniel and elsewhere, who will return to usher in

God’s kingdom at the end of time.

Schweitzer proposed

that Jesus was

convinced –

mistakenly,

tragically – that the

end was at hand.

Schweitzer’s radical proposal, following Johannes Weiss, was

eventually published in The Mystery of the Kingdom of God

and The Quest of the Historical Jesus. The latter work in

particular was a masterful piece; James Robinson observes

that the reader must be “amazed at the undistracted persistence

with which Schweitzer worked out a brilliant thesis as he

worked his way through enormous masses of literature.”

Schweitzer proposed that Jesus was convinced – mistakenly,

tragically – that the end was at hand, and that he was to be the

instrument by whom the final kingdom would be brought in.

Through Jesus’ efforts, and through his death, God’s kingdom

would come. Of this Jesus was convinced, but he was wrong,

heroically wrong, dead wrong. Schweitzer depicted Jesus’

grand and misguided efforts in this manner: “There is silence

all around. The Baptist appears and cries, ‘Repent, for

heaven’s kingdom is at hand.’ Soon after that comes Jesus,

and in the knowledge that he is the coming son of man lays

hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last

revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It

refuses to turn, and he throws himself upon it. Then it does

turn, and crushes him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological

conditions, he has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward,

and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great man,

who was strong enough to think of himself as the spiritual

ruler of humankind and to bend history to his purpose, is

hanging upon it still. That is his victory and his reign.”

Jesus, according to Schweitzer, is a stranger to our modern

world. “He comes to us,” Schweitzer writes in his conclusion

to his Quest, “as one unknown, without a name.” Schweitzer

scoffed at the many scholars who engaged in a quest for the

historical Jesus and ended up creating a modern Jesus in their

own image, after their own likeness, reflecting their own

values of their own world. Thus with regard to Ernest Renan’s

Life of Jesus, Schweitzer charges, “It is Christian art in the

worst sense of the term – the art of the wax image. The gentle

Jesus, the beautiful Mary, the fair Galileans who formed the

retinue of the ‘amiable carpenter,’ might have been taken over

in a body from the shop-window of an ecclesiastical art

emporium in the Place St. Sulpice.”

Schweitzer’s reconstruction of the life and death of Jesus is

not above reproach, however. In the face of a great deal of the

scholarship of his day, and scholarship to the present day,

Schweitzer stressed the primary place and importance of the

Gospel of Matthew. He chose his own scholarly path, passing

by his brilliant teacher Heinrich Holtzmann, who championed

the hypothesis of the primacy of Mark among the synoptic

gospels. I believe in this respect Holtzmann was probably

right and Schweitzer was probably wrong. Yet Schweitzer also

needed Matthew, he needed Matthew 10, he needed the

apocalyptic historical Jesus of

Matthew 10 in order for his

strange, foreign Jesus to emerge as

the eschatological child of

humankind. Though scholars in his

day and ours have seen Matthew

10 as the creation of the later

Christian church imposing its

apocalyptic vision upon its portrait

of Jesus, Schweitzer disagreed. He

thought the apocalyptic Jesus to be

the historical Jesus. Schweitzer’s

apocalyptic Jesus has remained

one of the truly compelling images

of Jesus throughout the twentieth

century, but it is no wonder that

many of us now gravitate to a

different paradigm of Jesus, a non-

apocalyptic paradigm of Jesus as a

teacher of wisdom.

Schweitzer was

touched by Jesus’

ethic of love, and he

was moved by the

Sermon on the

Mount.

It was not that Schweitzer was willing to bypass the

wisdom of Jesus. Schweitzer was touched by Jesus’ ethic

of love, and he was moved by the Sermon on the Mount as

much as Tolstoy, Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, and others. For

Schweitzer, the sayings of Jesus communicated the

message of love that was to remind him, increasingly, of

Reverence for Life. Already in 1905, in a sermon he

Sermon on the Mount --

Stained-glass window in

Christ Church, Pompton, NJ

preached at St. Nicholai’s Church on Sunday, November

19, he exclaimed, “What kind of a living person is Jesus?

Don’t search for formulas to describe him, even if they be

hallowed by centuries. I almost got angry the other day

when a religious person said to me that only someone who

believes in the resurrection of the body and in the glorified

body of the risen Christ can believe in the living Jesus . . .

Let me explain it in my way. The glorified body of Jesus is

to be found in his sayings.” If for Schweitzer those sayings

are the sayings of an apocalyptic preacher announcing the

end of the world, they remain the purer and stronger

because of that. They are the charged ethical sayings about

the life of love in the interim, in the brief time before the

end. They are the sayings about how to love when

everything is at stake, when there is no room for weakness

and vacillation. In his Quest Schweitzer describes our

encounter with Jesus and his sayings as an encounter with

“Jesus as spiritually risen within people,” and Schweitzer

himself becomes a proponent of “Jesus mysticism.”

Jesus actually only

used the language of

apocalyptic to

communicate his

primary message,

his ethical message

of love.

Later Schweitzer emphasized these sayings of Jesus even

more emphatically, when he suggested that Jesus actually

only used the language of apocalyptic to communicate his

primary message, his ethical message of love. In his 1950

preface to The Quest of the Historical Jesus he wrote, “It

was Jesus who began to spiritualize the idea of God’s

kingdom and the messiah. He introduced into the late-

Salvador Dali Sacrament of the Last Supper

Jewish conception of the kingdom his strong ethical

emphasis on love, making this, and the consistent practice

of it, the indispensable condition of entrance. By so doing

he charged the late-Jewish idea of God’s kingdom with

ethical forces, which transformed it into the spiritual and

ethical reality with which we are familiar. Since the faith

clung firmly to the ethical note, so dominant in the teaching

of Jesus, it was able to reconcile and identify the two,

neglecting those utterances in which Jesus voices the older

eschatology.”

For Schweitzer, then, Jesus becomes preeminently the

proclaimer of love, and for Schweitzer Jesus becomes –

like Schweitzer himself – the proclaimer of Reverence for

Life. In the epilogue to Out of My Life and Thought

Schweitzer puts it quite succinctly: Reverence for Life is

the ethic of Jesus, “the ethic of love widened into

universality.” Suddenly Jesus, who was said to come to us

as one unknown, does not seem so much a stranger to our

times after all. He seems to be, as Henry Clark put it, the

first liberal Christian, who under the guise of old-world

apocalyptic preached a modern, humanitarian message of

love and compassion. It is somewhat ironic, but perhaps

also indicative of Schweitzer’s own humanity, that the

person who called scholars to a self-critical stance in the

face of their modernizing portraits of Jesus, himself

concluded that he and Jesus articulated the same basic

ethical message for today.

Third, Schweitzer affirmed Reverence for Life religiously, I

mean in his study of world religions. Schweitzer was a student

of world religions, but he was no disinterested student. Rather,

he betrayed the nearly desperate spirit of a scholar who – one

of my colleagues noted – was writing his books on world

religions “as a drowning man looking for something –

anything – to grab onto.” He frantically searched – that same

colleague said he ransacked – the religions of the world to find

an appropriate ethic that would allow for an active affirmation

of life. The result of his academic and personal search was

Christianity and the Religions of the World, Indian Thought

and Its Development, and the still unpublished Chinese

10 -

Thought and Its Development. Schweitzer examined and

evaluated, in addition to Christianity, ancient Mediterranean

religions and Asian religions. I find it unfortunate that he did

not pay any particular attention to the African religions around

him, just as he did not learn an African language or study

African music. Among the world religions that he did study,

he appreciated features of many of them, particularly ancient

Stoicism, Chinese religions, and aspects of Indian religions.

An Indian ethical

principle that seems

to have made a

significant

impression upon

Schweitzer was that

of ahimsa, literally

nonviolence or non-

injury.

Schweitzer was especially fascinated with the ethical piety of

Lao-tse and Meng-tse, among others from China. In Indian

Thought and Its Development Schweitzer cites several Chinese

maxims and stories that are indicative of the ethical stance of

active compassion that he found so attractive in Chinese

sources. “Have a pitiful heart for all creatures.” “One must

bring no sorrow even upon worms and plants and trees.”

“One does evil who shoots birds, hunts animals, digs up the

larvae of insects, frightens nesting birds,” and so on. “Do not

allow your children to amuse themselves by playing with flies

or butterflies or little birds. It is not merely that such

proceedings may result in damage to living creatures: They

awaken in young hearts the inclination to cruelty and murder.”

Such statements of ethical wisdom are reminiscent of

Schweitzer’s own statements, stories, and actions having to do

with birds, worms, and insects – recall Schweitzer’s ants.

(Could Schweitzer have carried these Chinese maxims into his

own writing and his own life?) Compare also the following

story about the wife of a Chinese soldier. She was, it is said, ill

and near death: “As a remedy she was ordered to eat the brains

Jungle Whispering to Reconnected Human

watercolor by Susan Cohen Thompson

11 -

of a hundred sparrows. When she saw the birds in a cage, she

sighed and said, ‘Shall it come to pass that to cure me a

hundred living creatures shall be slain? I will rather die than

allow that suffering shall come to them.’ She opened the cage

and let them fly. Shortly after, she recovered from her illness.”

Schweitzer at times returned to a conviction that Christianity,

and particularly the gospel of Jesus, may represent the best

articulation of a living spirituality and of Reverence for Life.

He once wrote, “Christianity alone is ethical mysticism,”

whereas the union with the divine found in Eastern religions

represents a less active form of personal spirituality.

Schweitzer was not appreciative of the renunciation of the

world, of life, and of action that he considered characteristic of

Indian religions.

Nonetheless, I am convinced,

with Ara Barsam, that

Schweitzer was deeply

influenced by religious

expressions from China and

India. An Indian ethical

principle that seems to have

made a significant

impression upon Schweitzer

was that of ahimsa, literally

nonviolence or non-injury, as

preached and practiced

among Jains and others.

Jainism was established in the sixth century BCE by a

reformer of Hinduism named Mahavira. The Jains believe that

the universe is alive with suffering souls and agonizing lives:

A person is hurt, an insect is crushed, a tree is cut, a stone is

kicked – in our infinite cycle of births and deaths and rebirths–

samsara–our souls have known indescribable pains. Since our

human lives are bound together with the existence of all other

beings in the world, Mahavira affirmed, “One who neglects or

disregards the existence of earth, air, fire, water, and

vegetation disregards his own existence which is entwined

with them.” To live rightly and well in this sort of world

requires that we repudiate all the violence and the killing that

can increase the stain of karma (the causality that shapes our

Mahavira

12 -

destiny and determines the character of birth and rebirth).

Thus, the Jain Sutras proclaim, “All things breathing, all

things existing, all things living, all beings whatever, should

not be slain or treated with violence, or insulted, or tortured, or

driven away.” A deep commitment to a life of ahimsa may be

seen in the everyday practices of observant Jains. Jains

ordinarily observe a strict vegetarian diet, and even the

vegetables–that are, after all, living things to be killed or

eaten–are evaluated for their karmic weight. Jains advocate

that kindness and consideration be shown to animals and

support programs for the prevention of cruelty to animals.

Some Jains even wear masks to prevent the inadvertent

slaughter of tiny insects that otherwise might be killed as

people breathe in and out; some sweep the surface of the

ground ahead of them lest they trample living things. Such

radically nonviolent practices, extreme as they sometimes are,

illustrate a lifestyle that is mindful of the precariousness of life

all around and the need to exercise care and gentleness in the

presence of other living things. Jains compare this restrained

and gentle life to that of “the bee that sucks honey in the

blossoms of a tree without hurting the blossom and

strengthens itself.”

In his evaluation of ahimsa, Schweitzer admitted that the

proclamation of ahimsa is of great importance in the

development of ethical thought. “The laying down of the

commandment not to kill and not to damage is one of the

greatest events in the spiritual history of humankind,”

Schweitzer announced in Indian Thought. “Starting from its

principle, founded on world and life denial, of abstention from

action, ancient Indian thought – and this in a period when in

other respects ethics has not progressed very far – reaches the

tremendous discovery that ethics knows no bounds! So far as

we know, this is for the first time clearly expressed by

Jainism.” Schweitzer goes on to praise Buddha (with

qualifications) for making this ethic of nonviolence an ethic of

compassion, and he lauds Gandhi for transforming ahimsa into

a principle of active compassion and affirmation of life – an

ethic comparable, as Gandhi also recognized, to the ethic of

Jesus as enunciated in the Sermon on the Mount.

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“The idea of

Reverence for Life

came to me as an

unexpected

discovery… And

when the idea and

the words had come

to me, it was of

Buddha I thought...”

Schweitzer’s affirmation of Reverence for Life compares well,

in several respects, with the ethic of ahimsa of Jains and

others. If ahimsa is an all-

encompassing ethical principle

that fundamentally shapes the

nonviolent lives and

commitments of Jains and

others, so does Reverence for

Life for Schweitzer. If ahimsa

embraces the value of all life –

humans, animals, and plants –

and proclaims solidarity among

humans and all living things, so

does Reverence for Life for

Schweitzer. Schweitzer goes so

far, in his Philosophy of

Civilization, as to see, with Schopenhauer, a will to live not

only in humans, animals, and plants, but even in crystals. And

if ahimsa implies something of a gloomy, pessimistic

assessment of life in the world – we cannot, finally, avoid the

taking of life – so does Reverence for Life for Schweitzer.

Mike Martin notes the guilt-mongering of Schweitzer; James

Brabazon reminds us that we might equally well speak of debt

rather than guilt. Schweitzer himself says that since we cannot

avoid destroying and injuring life, we necessarily incur guilt

or indebtedness. “The good conscience,” he wrote, “is an

invention of the devil.”

It is not entirely surprising, after all, to remember what

Schweitzer told Charles Joy about the origin of the idea of

Reverence for Life: “The idea of Reverence for Life came to

me as an unexpected discovery, like an illumination coming

upon me in the midst of intense thought while I was

completely conscious. And when the idea and the words had

come to me, it was of Buddha I thought . . .”

Schweitzer affirmed

Reverence for Life

philosophically.

Fourth, Schweitzer affirmed Reverence for Life

philosophically. In his correspondence with his soon-to-be

wife Helene, Schweitzer acknowledged that he was essentially

a philosopher, though a philosopher who was caught by Jesus.

(“Basically I am philosopher – but I let myself be caught by

Buddha

14 -

“It is good to

maintain and to

encourage life; it is

bad to destroy life or

to obstruct it.”

him, the greatest, the most divine of all philosophers, in whom

the most sublime thought leads back to the most simple.

Because of this obedience he will forgive my heresies . . .”) In

his correspondence with Oskar Kraus, Schweitzer explained

that in his philosophical writings he employed exclusively the

language of philosophy and logical thinking, and thus referred

to “the universal will-to-live” rather than “God.” Schweitzer’s

most complete and arguably most compelling discussion of

Reverence for Life is given in his philosophical writings,

specifically The Philosophy of Civilization. There he considers

Descartes’ starting-point for philosophical discourse, the

dictum cogito ergo sum, and pronounces it paltry and

arbitrary. Instead, Schweitzer suggests that true philosophy

begins with another sort of immediate awareness, in which

each of us lives and moves, he claims, day by day: "I am life

which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live."

From this awareness Schweitzer derives disarmingly simple

and straightforward definitions of ethics, of moral goodness,

and of evil: “Ethics consist, therefore, in my experiencing the

compulsion to show to all will-to-live the same reverence as I

do to my own.” And, as for good and evil: “It is good to

maintain and to encourage life; it is bad to destroy life or to

obstruct it.” Schweitzer never allows these descriptions of

good and evil to degenerate into either relativism or legalism.

Reverence for Life remains absolute, to be sure, but the

application of Reverence for Life in concrete situations, in

which we inevitably must make hard decisions that will

sometimes – but only when necessary – destroy and obstruct

life, requires the application of thoughtful reflection and

ethical responsibility. Hence, as we have seen, Schweitzer’s

assertions about the need for clear thinking and a sensitive

conscience.

Schweitzer maintained that this exposition of Reverence for

Life discloses that Reverence for Life is a logical consequence

or necessity of thought. James Brabazon is helpful in his

discussion of what Schweitzer meant by “thought,” denken,

auf Deutsch. When Schweitzer asserts that Reverence for Life

is a necessity of thought, Brabazon explains, he is not

referring only to intellectual argumentation and logical proof

but also to other sorts of reflection: meditation, intuition,

15 -

mystical reflection. Brabazon quotes Schweitzer approvingly

in this regard: “If rational thought thinks itself out to a

conclusion, it arrives at something non-rational which,

nevertheless, is a necessity of thought.” In spite of the best

efforts of Schweitzer and Brabazon, I still do not think a

strong case is made for Reverence for Life as a necessity of

thought. Schweitzer himself admits that “the world is a ghastly

drama of will-to-live divided against itself,” that the world is,

as we also recognize to our grief, a dog-eat-dog world, or, for

Schweitzer, a hippo-eat-hippo world. For this question, this

issue, Schweitzer has no answer, and he calls the contrast

between creative will and destructive will an enigma. Further,

even if necessity of thought is not judged to be logical

necessity, few thinkers other than committed Schweitzerians

buy into the necessary relationship Schweitzer poses between

rational and non-rational thought, nor do ethicists feel

compelled to draw the same conclusion as Schweitzer.

Reverence for Life remains a powerful, appealing ethical

option, but it does not appear to be a necessity of thought.

Foundational to

Reverence for Life, I

would propose, is

reciprocity…

Nevertheless, it may be possible, in another way, to

demonstrate a universalizing tendency in the principle of

Reverence for Life.

Foundational to Reverence for

Life, I would propose, is

reciprocity, the recognition that

it is right and proper to balance

my expectations and actions

for myself with my

expectations and actions for

others. Thus Jesus, speaking

out of his Jewish tradition,

advises, “Act toward others the

way you want others to act

toward you.” (the golden rule,

which sometimes is articulated

in the negative as the so-called

silver rule), and he commands,

“Love your neighbor as

yourself” (love that includes love for enemy, as Jesus states in

the Sermon on the Mount). Schweitzer himself preached a

Confucius:

“Do not to others

what you do not want them

to do to you.”

16 -

But there is an

additional way,

arguably the most

important way, in

which Schweitzer

affirmed Reverence

for Life. …

He lived Reverence

for Life.

sermon on love for neighbor on February 16, 1919. These

ethical rules of reciprocity are to be found all around the world

among devotees of the religions of the world. Hinduism

praises one who looks on neighbor as self. Buddhism

announces a universal love for all beings, a love that

overcomes the hatred of others. Confucianism proclaims, “Do

not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.”

The Tao-te-Ching observes, “One who loves the world as

one’s own body can be entrusted with the world.” With these

affirmations we are close indeed to Schweitzer’s affirmation

of Reverence for Life.

In September, 1915, Schweitzer says, he came up with the

phrase Reverence for Life while passing through a herd of

hippopotami on the Ogowe River, and thereafter he found a

variety of ways to affirm Reverence for Life –

autobiographically, exegetically, religiously,

philosophically. But there is an additional way, arguably

the most important way, in which Schweitzer affirmed

Reverence for Life. He did so daily, actively, in his life. He

lived Reverence for Life. As a medical doctor for Africans

and Europeans who were in

need of medical attention, as

the head of a village hospital

that welcomed and nurtured

people and animals,

Schweitzer practiced

Reverence for Life for half a

century at Lambarene and in

the equatorial jungle around.

Like Goethe, in Wilhelm

Meister, Schweitzer chose

Reverence as the category to

explain life in the world, and

like Goethe, in Faust,

Schweitzer considered the

opening of the Gospel of

John, en arche en ho logos, “In the beginning was the

word,” and understood it, “In the beginning was action.”

Before going to Africa, Schweitzer promised to be quiet as

a fish, and he maintained that his life was his argument.

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Schweitzer found Reverence for Life when he found

Lambarene and lived in Lambarene.

It remains for us, then, to evaluate for ourselves these

affirmations of Reverence for Life. I do not anticipate that

many of us will emulate Schweitzer by encountering and

entertaining our own family of ants, but what shall we do?

How shall we understand the challenges of moral goodness,

evil, and ethics in the world? How shall we see ourselves in

the context of other living beings in the world? How shall

we assume our responsibilities, and act upon our

responsibilities, in a world of painful and perplexing

ambiguities? Finally, our consideration of Schweitzer’s

understanding of Reverence for Life may become a call to

us, not unlike the call that Schweitzer describes at the end

of The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the call to which he

responded by going to live and work in Africa. This call

has been issued, in different places and different times, by

Buddha, by Mahavira, by Jesus, and by others, and in

Schweitzer this call is a call to ethical action. How do we

understand Reverence for Life? How shall we affirm life

and Reverence for Life? How shall we find our own

Lambarene?

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Albert Schwietzer’s Autobiography: