Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965)

Albert Schweitzer was born on January 14, 1875, in Kaysersberg, in Upper Alsace, then part of the German Empire, the second of five children of a Lutheran pastor. The family moved within months to Günsbach, a village in the Munster valley, where his father served a congregation that shared its church building with Catholics, an accident of geography that left the boy with an early ease across confessional lines. His father taught him piano and then organ, and by his teens Schweitzer was playing the organ at services. He later wrote that a childhood scene, a day spent fishing with a friend, left him with a conviction that grew into the center of his ethics: that he had no right to take another creature's life, or suffering, lightly.

He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Strasbourg from 1893, interrupted by a year of military service, and took his doctorate in philosophy in 1899 with a dissertation on Kant's philosophy of religion. A licentiate in theology followed in 1900. He was ordained as a Lutheran minister and served as curate at St. Nicholas Church in Strasbourg, and in 1901 he became head of the Theological College of St. Thomas. Alongside this he studied the organ in Paris under Charles-Marie Widor, who became a friend and champion. By thirty he was a respected New Testament scholar, a concert organist, and an authority on Bach, and by any ordinary reckoning his career was made.

The turn came on an October day in 1905, when he read a Paris Missionary Society appeal describing the need for physicians in the Gabon colony of French Equatorial Africa. He dropped a note into the mailbox and set about retraining himself. He began medical studies at Strasbourg in 1905, while still teaching and preaching, and completed them in 1912; his thesis was a psychiatric study of the historical Jesus. In 1912 he married Helene Bresslau, daughter of a Strasbourg historian, who trained as a nurse to go with him. The Paris mission, wary of his liberal theology, objected to the appointment, and Schweitzer agreed to keep silent on doctrine in order to be accepted as a doctor.

In 1913 the couple sailed for Lambaréné, on the Ogowe River in Gabon, and built a hospital from a converted chicken coop. The First World War ended the first period of work: as German nationals on French colonial soil they were interned in 1917, shipped to France, and held in camps at Garaison and then Saint-Rémy. Schweitzer's health was broken, and he spent the postwar years recovering, preaching at St. Nicholas, lecturing, and raising funds through organ recitals across Europe. His daughter Rhena was born in 1919. During this period he arrived at the phrase "reverence for life," which came to him, he said, during a journey up the Ogowe in 1915, after days of searching for a foundation that would hold.

He returned to Lambaréné in 1924 and rebuilt on a larger site. The remaining four decades were spent largely in Africa, interrupted by trips to fund and publicize the work. Helene's tuberculosis kept her in Europe for long stretches, and the marriage was conducted at a distance; she died in 1957. Critics, then and since, have faulted the hospital's paternalism toward its African patients and its austere, aging facilities, and Schweitzer's own remarks about Africans remain a part of the record. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, used the money to build a leprosy ward, and in his last years lent his name to the campaign against nuclear testing. He died at Lambaréné on September 4, 1965, aged ninety, and is buried beside Helene near the hospital.

His Writing and Its Influence

Schweitzer began publishing as a young scholar in Strasbourg, and his first major theological work, The Mystery of the Kingdom of God (1901), already contained the argument that would make him famous: that Jesus must be understood within the apocalyptic expectations of first-century Judaism, not recast as a teacher of timeless moral truths. The Quest of the Historical Jesus, published in German in 1906 as Von Reimarus zu Wrede, surveyed a century of liberal Life-of-Jesus scholarship and concluded that each author had found in the Gospels a reflection of his own age. The Jesus who emerged from the evidence, Schweitzer argued, was a stranger, an eschatological prophet who expected the world to end and who died disappointed. The book ends with a passage that has outlived most of its argument: that to those who obey his call, Jesus comes "as One unknown, without a name," and reveals himself in the toil, the conflicts, and the sufferings they pass through in his fellowship.

The reception was severe. Liberal theologians resented the demolition of their portrait of Jesus, conservatives resented the loss of the Jesus of dogma, and the ecclesiastical authorities who later vetted him for missionary service remembered what he had written. Yet the book effectively ended the nineteenth-century quest and fixed the terms of New Testament debate for decades. Schweitzer's later study Paul and His Interpreters (1911) and The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (written before the war, published in 1930) argued that Paul's "being in Christ" was the center of his thought, not the doctrine of justification. That claim was contested and remains so, but it shaped the work of later Pauline scholars, and his insistence on eschatology as the key to the New Testament set the agenda for Rudolf Bultmann, C. H. Dodd, and their successors.

His second great concern was ethics. Schweitzer was Lutheran by upbringing and ordination, but he believed that Christianity had lost its ethical energy by retreating into doctrine, and that Western philosophy had failed to ground ethics in anything that could bear weight. The remedy he proposed, in The Philosophy of Civilization (1923) and in his Lambaréné writings, was reverence for life: the conviction that the will-to-live in oneself must recognize and serve the will-to-live in all other beings. It was neither a system nor a theology but a discipline of attention, and he insisted it was Christian in spirit without requiring Christian doctrine. Theologians have debated whether it was adequate, and philosophers have found it more devotional than rigorous. It has nonetheless been widely influential in animal ethics, environmental thought, and medical humanitarianism.

His other writings were more personal. Out of My Life and Thought (1931) is his autobiography, and On the Edge of the Primeval Forest (1922), an account of the first years at Lambaréné, brought him a popular readership. J. S. Bach, first written in French in 1905 and expanded in German in 1908, remains a classic study of the composer's musical symbolism. His sermons, preached in Strasbourg over many years, circulated more slowly but reveal the pastor beneath the scholar. His reputation has not been steady. Postwar admiration made him a secular saint, and later critics, particularly on his paternalism toward African patients, have forced a more complicated assessment, one that his own work, with its blend of humility and command, partly invites.

Who should read Schweitzer: Readers who suspect that the gap between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Jesus of their own tradition is wider than they have been told, and who can tolerate a scholar who dismantles comfortable certainties without offering new ones. He is valuable for those drawn to ethics as lived practice, and for anyone who wonders what it looks like when a theologian leaves the lecture hall for the jungle. He is not for readers wanting doctrinal reassurance, a settled account of Christ's person and work, or a saint without blemish. His life and his books ask for a reckoning, not agreement.