|
|
Affirming Reverence for Life
Marvin Meyer
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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 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."
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-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 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.
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 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 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.
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
. . ."
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 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, 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.
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 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. 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?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|