Theologians: Living with a Verity

Albert Schweitzer was nine decades old when he died, a fitting age for a life so worthy, and a span sufficiently protracted beyond his main achievements that he himself had heard all possible praise and criticism that could be said of him. His apostles painted him as a saint; they turned his ethic of reverence for life into reverence for Schweitzer. His detractors found his philosophy uselessly pretentious and his medical practice frightfully outdated.The world weighed these extremes, consulted its feelings, and struck its bal ance on his humanity: he died admired by mankind.

His Master’s Lines. Schweitzer’s reputation outran his accomplishments, but his accomplishments were real enough. His Quest of the Historical Jesus was a milestone in modern theology that searingly exposed the futility of 19th century attempts to extricate the “real Jesus” from the Gospel Christ. Yet the book ends, paradoxically, with a real Jesus of Schweitzer’s own — a messianic teacher who preached the imminent coming of God’s Kingdom and accepted the Cross in the belief that his passion would bring the New Aeon to being on the instant. Schweitzer was a pioneering musicologist and interpreter of Bach, one of the first to protest the oversized orchestras with which the 19th century obscured the clarity of the master’s musical lines. Schweitzer’s two-volume biography of the composer, analyzing his mystical genius, is generally acknowledged as the starting point of the modern Bach revival.

Schweitzer took a grim view of modern history. His Civilization and Ethics begins with the dark warning that “our civilization is doomed” —a conviction he footnoted in later years with finger-wagging at the African independence movement and the Atomic Age. Yet Schweitzer saw a way to transform society, if only men would live according to his ethic of “reverence for life.” This verity became the framework of all morality and thus of culture. “It is good to maintain and further life; it is bad to damage and destroy life,” he wrote. He had a wistful faith that this formula was the panacea for the world’s woes. “Do you think that reverence for life is gaining ground?” he liked to ask visitors.

Children of Nature. His jungle hospital began as one man’s noble effort to follow the example of Jesus and became a bizarre institution tailored to the idiosyncrasies of a spiritual dictator. Because Schweitzer’s reverence extended to all life, not a fly was swatted at Lambarene; goats, pigs and traveler ants shared the squalid huts in which the patients lived. Only with reluctance did Schweitzer admit electricity to the operating room; sanitation still consists of open sewers flushed by the tropical rain. To the end, he wore a pith helmet, spoke French and German but did not bother to learn the local dialects. He believed that the African was “the child of nature,” who could not be trusted and wanted only to be left in the primitive security of tribal life.

Schweitzer clearly intended Lambarene to be his monument, and just before he died happily supervised the completion of a new ward. But soon after his burial, Schweitzer’s daughter, Rhena Eckert, as much as admitted that the hospital might have a hard time surviving. “We will try to carry on his work,” she told reporters, “but Lambarene as a spiritual center is irrevocably gone.” In time, the Gabonese villagers may come to prefer the gleaming white government hospital a mile up the river. But Lambarene, and the world, will always have the memory of a giant who tried in his singular way to love as Jesus loved, who oddly but honestly lived Goethe’s song: The deed is everything, The glory naught.