THE EXAMPLE OF ALBERT SCHWEITZER

January commemorates another year of birth of Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), theologian, musicologist, philosopher, doctor, prolific writer, ordained Minister of the Gospel, missionary, and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. 

Almost all connoisseurs of the life of this hero and human genius know only the historical facts of his life; they think that Schweitzer's supreme ideal was his enthusiasm for philanthropy toward needy people in Africa.

They forget that his life trajectory has undergone several stages of intense evaluation of his human condition; on his struggle for self-knowledge, until at the age of 30 when he has decided to leave behind an entire life of success, for the practice of the “only necessary thing,” his self-realization, which was a natural consequence, an overflow of individual liberation, liberating oneself through charity towards Africans. Perhaps an inner call due to his Christian believes, perhaps a small recompense for the historic guilt of Europeans during colonization...

Albert Schweitzer was born in a well-known family of Lutherans in the city of Strasbourg. He had the happy life of a normal educated family boy with good financial conditions. Growing up in this environment and with a little more awareness of his reality, in front of so many other boys of his own age, facing privations. Woke up one morning, after vacation returns, thinking again of how much he had to be thankful for. From his window, he could hear the songs of birds and the peaceful sounds of a village just awakening. It was good to be back home again with his gentle, understanding parents and his sisters and brother. His studies were more like a game to him now, planning and preparing each one in the way he did. He thought of the pleasant evenings too with the organist in the church, going over the scores of Bach cantatas and talking together of the way they were to be performed.

Again, the question came to him when such thoughts as these runs through his head. Had he the right to this happiness? He felt now the same as he had when he was a child and learned that his friend George Nitschelm could not have nourishing broth such as he had for his supper. It was like a small cloud hovering on the horizon. He might turn away and forget it for a time, but it was still there, just the same, slowly growing and slowly coming closer. At last, he knew that he could ignore it no longer. As long as there were people in the world suffering from pain and necessities, it was not enough that he should accept his own happiness and perfect health without a thought for others. He had a strength that gave him the power to work and study day and night without ever knowing what it was to feel tired. Now he must give his strength to help others. He had been spare pain. Now he must try in some way to ease the pain of others. He must carry his own share of the misery of the world, instead of turning his back upon it and living for himself alone.

Without any doubt, at that moment, the meaning of words in the Bible, hidden from him until then, became clear. “Whosoever would save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake, shall save it.” He also must have remembered Dante's warning that: “the hottest place in hell is reserved for those who in a moment of moral crisis seek to maintain their neutrality.”

On that morning, in June 1896, when the sun came slanting through the windows of his room in the manse, Albert Schweitzer made a resolution that became the turning point of his life. He was twenty-one then. He would spend the next nine years, until he was thirty, doing the things he wanted to do, such as keeping on with his studies in science and music, and working as a pastor, as his father did. After that, he would give up these things and devote the rest of his life to serving mankind in some more direct way. Just what that way would be and how he would go about it, he was not sure. But now that he had made his decision, he had a feeling of inward peace.

Albert Schweitzer, this exponent of the mystical and dynamic Christianity, after finishing his studies and ready to target his goals, was not allowed by the Evangelical Missionary Society of Paris to work as a physician and surgeon in French Equatorial Africa, named Gabon these days, at the village of Lambaréné! Even though, he left Europe and demanded the forests of equatorial Africa, where the local population was poor and illiterate, where no one knew him and understood his genius, his greatness, his philosophy, his music.

And in this humble environment of total incomprehension, he lived for 52 years. If in part it was out of compassion for the suffering of that people, it was more for the sake of the “only necessary thing,” his self-realization. In Europe, he would have been admired for his intelligence, but he wanted to be forgotten by the world to be fulfilled in God. If in the last years of his life the world exalted him, it was not his fault, it happened to him in his absence.

Albert Schweitzer decided to dedicate his life to the direct and immediate service of the most unfortunate part of humanity, in the remote, poor and suffering Africa so that no one could make him retribution or even evaluate the greatness of his sacrifice; so there was no danger that he would act under some perverse and well-disguised selfishness; so there was no danger of recognition, applause or gratitude on the part of his beneficiaries. For while man retains a remnant of selfish and mercenary spirit, he did not realize the Christ within himself; serves the Satan in himself, judging himself to be the Christ.

To provide benefits to humanity to see and hear its name in the newspapers, on the radio, on the television, or to savour the praises on the pulpit, from the lips of friends, or to glow on a bronze or a marble plaque at the entrance of a temple, to figure in some “book of remembrance” as an excellent benefactor of this or that philanthropic work - all this is selfishness disguised as altruism, and all the more perverse as the more camouflaged of virtue.

The profane man believes that this divestiture is a selfish attitude because he does not comprehend that self-realization is the most radical work of ego-liberation. Self-realization is the fulfilment of the supreme and unique destiny of human existence, and this concept nourished in its spirit during the phase of self-knowledge culminated in Schweitzer’s distance from a society radicalized in the things of “having,” not the promise of “being,” which is in itself the duty of man conscious of his spiritual condition.

There is nothing that so surely preserves the health of our soul from morbid contagion, as this direct contact with human miseries.

Anyone who has to endure the usual brutalities of society, the ingratitude of its beneficiaries, will hardly be in the danger of falling victim to proud complacency or sickly mysticism. The harshness of sincere and disinterested ethics is an infallible prophylactic against the bacteria of sentimental mysticism.

When Ramana Maharishi was asked by an English scientist how to practice good deeds to mankind, the great seer of Arunachala replied: “The only way to do good is to be good.” To be good means to realize oneself in God, for this realization, is the only way to do good to men.

And in this environment of alarming poverty, to see every day in his makeshift hospital, a procession of desperate people, nothing better than experiencing the reality of the true hero, not that he considered himself one when once he stated: “that there are no heroes of action, only heroes of renunciation and suffering.”

Not only from the point of view of human existence and its miseries, he was concerned with all sorts of lives, also for the presence of wild creatures, some orphans, whose parents were killed by hunters, others who, attracted by the environment, wandered about by the village to the point that many of them become adopted as pets. Due to the glare of lamps at night, many insects were attracted to it, and despite the heat and humidity, Schweitzer closed the house and wrapped the lamps with small nets of protection, so that these insects did not die burned, and from this “bioethical imperative,” arises his reverence for any kind of life on the planet. The reverence which is born of the integral man, because the unconscious man lives in ignorance and arrogance, understanding himself to be the supreme being of creation. He affirmed that: “Ethics consists in the responsibility towards all that lives, responsibility so magnified that it has no limits,” since each being, however “insignificant”, is provided with responsibilities that beneficially affect all lives, in that dynamic symbiosis still abounding on this planet, but whose equilibrium has been gradually affected by the intervention of the unsuspecting man.

In his Reverence for Life, he writes: “If I am a thinking being, I must regard other life than my own with equal reverence. I shall know that it longs for fullness and development as deeply as I do myself.”

In this sense, he also warns that “Man will only be truly ethical when he fulfils the obligation to help all kind of life and when to avoid harming any living creature. He will not ask why this or that life will merit his sympathy, as being valuable, nor will he be interested in knowing whether, and to what extent, it is still susceptible to sensations. Life as such will be sacred to him”; “The fundamental idea of good is thus, that it consists in preserving life, in favouring it, in wanting to bring it to its highest value. Evil consists in destroying life, doing it injury, hindering its development.”

His fame spread throughout Europe, reaching other continents. His books translated into many languages; invitations to lectures and speeches by many countries, organ recitals of Bach's works all over Europe, including studio and recording sessions.

A scholar in Christianity, he continued on his journey as a shepherd of souls for many years, yet severe criticism he made about how the clergy conducted and interpreted the messages of Jesus, affirming that today's Christians, duly vaccinated with the serum of ecclesiastical theologies became immune against the onslaughts of the Christ of the Gospel; the injection of a meek and accommodating pseudo-Christianity immunized Christians against the revolutionary spirit of the mystical and dynamic Christianity of the catacombs and amphitheatres.

He lived for an ideal, affirming that the only essential thing is that we strive to have light in our inner selves. Our striving will one day be recognized, and when people have light in their inner selves, it will shine out from them. Then we get to know each other as we talk together in deep darkness!