Albert Schweitzer in Thought and Action: A Life in Parts

By James Carleton Paget, Michael J. Thate, Steven J. Kraftchick and 13 more

In the 1940s and 1950s, Albert Schweitzer was one of the best-known figures on the world stage. Courted by monarchs, world statesmen, and distinguished figures from the literary, musical, and scientific fields, Schweitzer was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952, cementing his place as one of the great intellectual leaders of his time. Schweitzer is less well known now but nonetheless a man of perennial fascination, and this volume seeks to bring his achievements across a variety of areas—philosophy, theology, and medicine—into sharper focus. To that end, international scholars from diverse disciplines offer a wide-ranging examination of Schweitzer’s life and thought over the course of forty years. Albert Schweitzer in Thought and Action gives readers a fuller, richer, and more nuanced picture of this controversial but monumental figure of twentieth-century life—and, in some measure, of that complex century itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Dec 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9780815653684

Book preview

SELECT TITLES FROM THE ALBERT SCHWEITZER LIBRARY

The African Sermons

Albert Schweitzer; Steven E. G. Melamed, Sr., trans. and ed.

Albert Schweitzer: A Biography, Second Edition

James Brabazon

The Albert Schweitzer–Helene Bresslau Letters, 1902–1912

Rhena Schweitzer Miller and Gustav Woytt, eds.; Antje Bultman Lemke, trans.

Brothers in Spirit: The Correspondence of Albert Schweitzer and William Larimer Mellon, Jr.

Jeannette Q. Byers, trans.

Helene Schweitzer: A Life of Her Own

Patti M. Marxsen

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth

Albert Schweitzer; Kurt Bergel and Alice R. Bergel, trans.

Reverence for Life: The Ethics of Albert Schweitzer for the Twenty-First Century

Marvin Meyer and Kurt Bergel, eds.

Acknowledgment of reprinted material: Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, © SCM Press 2000. Used by permission of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd.

Copyright © 2016 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2016

16 17 18 19 20 21 6 5 4 3 2 1

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit www.SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu.

ISBN: 978-0-8156-3479-9 (hardcover)

978-0-8156-3464-5 (paperback)

978-0-8156-5368-4 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Information available upon request from publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

1. Introduction: Questioning the Relevance of Albert Schweitzer

James Carleton Paget and Michael J. Thate

PART ONE.

Schweitzer as New Testament Scholar, Theologian, and Musician

2. Schweitzer’s Foil: Wille and Vorstellung in the Quest of the Historical Jesus

Steven J. Kraftchick

3. Schweitzer, Paul, and Mysticism

R. Barry Matlock

4. Albert Schweitzer’s Challenge and the Response from New Testament Theology

Robert Morgan

5. Schweitzer and Modern Theology

Christophe Chalamet

6. Music and Ethics: Albert Schweitzer, the Musician

Harald Schützeichel

7. Schweitzer and World Religions

Predrag Cicovacki

PART TWO.

Schweitzer the Philosopher

8. The Philosophical Roots of Albert Schweitzer’s Reverence for Life

Claus Günzler

9. Reverence for Life: On the Role of Albert Schweitzer’s Ethics in Contemporary Ethical Debates

Ulrich H. J. Körtner

10. The Third Moralist: The Function of Nietzsche within Schweitzer’s Kulturphilosophie

Michael J. Thate

11. In the Drawing Power of Goethe’s Sun: A Preliminary Investigation into Albert Schweitzer’s Reception of Goethe

Thomas Xutong Qu

PART THREE.

Schweitzer and the Wider World

12. Albert Schweitzer and Politics

Thomas Suermann

13. Schweitzer’s Complicated Nest: Alsace and Life on the Imperial German Border

Anthony J. Steinhoff

14. A Man of the Church? Albert Schweitzer’s Liberal Piety and Theology

Werner Zager

15. An Anachronism in the African Jungle? Reassessing Albert Schweitzer’s African Legacy

Michael J. Thate

16. An Idea and a Person Whose Time Had Come: How Albert Schweitzer Became a Postwar Icon

Nils Ole Oermann

17. Strangely Immanent: On Schweitzer and a Miraculating Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy

Ward Blanton

Notes

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

Preface

The current volume is an attempt to cover the many different facets of Albert Schweitzer’s life in a detailed and informed way, taking account of a growing body of scholarly commentary. To this effect we have gathered together an international array of scholars (from Germany, Switzerland, Serbia, the United States, China, and the United Kingdom). In different ways they have written with authority on Schweitzer’s cultural, intellectual, and political background and the influences that were most important for him; on his contribution to the fields of theology, philosophy, and music; on his role as a churchman; as a medical missionary in Africa; as a peace campaigner; his rise to almost iconic world status; and the various vicissitudes that his reputation has undergone in a world very changed from the one which formed him. The book is predicated upon the conviction that Schweitzer remains a figure of perennial fascination, someone who in complex, interesting, and controversial ways remains a person of relevance and importance in a world that faces similarly acute challenges to the ones Schweitzer encountered (and indeed anticipated) during his own lifetime, and that he sought to address in his many writings and through his own actions. It had been hoped that the volume would have been published in 2015 to mark one hundred years since Schweitzer first set off to the Gabon with his wife, Helene, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of his death. In spite of ours and the publisher’s best efforts, that proved too difficult a task.

The essays are original, scholarly contributions to the ongoing debate about Albert Schweitzer’s life and thought, and in that respect assume an audience with a degree of familiarity with the subject. However, we hope that they have been written in a sufficiently accessible way that those less familiar with Schweitzer’s life can read them with profit, too, something of which Schweitzer would have approved as he was always insistent upon the need to write with a view to the ordinary person, in whose capacities he had great confidence. This dual audience has been reflected in some of the editorial decisions we have taken. Where it has been thought necessary, authors have quoted Albert Schweitzer (and others) in German. When this has occurred in the main text, as opposed to the endnotes, we have provided translations. However, where German has been cited in endnotes, we have sometimes left it untranslated, especially when its contents have been summarized in the main text. German titles of works have largely been left untranslated, too, unless an extant English translation already exists. So, for instance, the titles of the ten volumes of Schweitzer’s Nachlass, published by C. H. Beck of Munich, none of which have yet been translated into English, are presented with only their German titles.

Related to this point is our attitude to the citation of Schweitzer’s numerous works. Some authors have decided to cite these in translation; others in the original German (or, occasionally, French). Whichever form of citation they have decided upon, all works cited are found in the lengthy bibliography at the end.

The writing of this volume has inevitably involved a number of people in its production. We are both grateful to those with whom we have worked at Syracuse University Press, which has an admirable record in publishing works both by Schweitzer and about him. Numbers of articles had to be translated from German into English and in this context we are very grateful to Ana Ilievska, Ellen Widmann, and Monique Cuany. We would also like to thanks Diane Hakala and Peter Gurry for help with proofreading and indexing. Various institutions, not least the Divinity Faculty of Cambridge University and Yale University, provided money to help in the production of this book and we would like to acknowledge their generosity.

We hope very much that this volume, which is unique in its in-depth and varied coverage of Schweitzer’s life, gives its reader, specialist or not, a sense of the richness and multifaceted character of its subject and makes it clear why pondering the phenomenon of Albert Schweitzer, more than fifty years after his death, remains a worthwhile and stimulating activity.

1

Introduction

Questioning the Relevance of Albert Schweitzer

James Carleton Paget and Michael J. Thate

A Long-Forgotten Giant for Peace

On December 10, 2009, in Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway, U.S. President Barack Obama began his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize by stating that he would be remiss not to acknowledge the considerable controversy surrounding his reception of the award. Perhaps in a move to mitigate some of this controversy, he suggested that, in comparison with some of the giants of history who’ve received this prize, his accomplishments were slight. President Obama went on to name four of these giants of history: Nelson Mandela (1993), George C. Marshall (1953), Martin Luther King Jr. (1964), and Albert Schweitzer (1952).¹ Schweitzer’s appearance in this list may have seemed surprising to some for he is a much less well-known figure than he once was, and certainly not as immediately recognizable as the other three men mentioned by Obama. And yet Obama’s homage raises important questions about why Schweitzer is less of a name to conjure with than he once was,² and whether that state of affairs should in fact be the case.

The year 2015 signaled a significant moment for a renewed study of Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), as it marked the fiftieth year since his death on September 4, 1965. Although this may well be as propitious a time as any to reassess the significance of Schweitzer’s life and thought, it is certainly worth exploring aspects of this significance. But how should we proceed in assessing the significance of Schweitzer’s life? Given the breadth of subjects a study of Schweitzer’s life touches upon, which include philosophy, theology, music, medicine, and missionary history in Africa, the accomplishment of this task by any one individual is a considerable undertaking.³ Thus the compilation of a multiauthored volume seems best suited to the task and more likely to give a rounded, informed account of Schweitzer’s life and work.

Yet such an undertaking might be deemed problematic because it will inevitably lack the unifying presence of a single intelligence that attempts to bring together the apparent disiecta membra of Schweitzer’s remarkable life. But such an observation raises the question as to whether any attempt at unifying Schweitzer’s thought, creating a seamless connection between his Leben and Denken, is possible or even desirable. Despite his remarkably systematic approach to life and his desire for unities, Schweitzer himself told the organist Edouard Nies-Berger, with whom he had a close relationship, I’m full of contradictions.⁴ And to his daughter, Rhena, he stated, I’m not a book with a well-constructed plot! I’m a man, with all a man’s contradictions.⁵ Against such a background the absence of a single unifying voice might in fact prove beneficial in that it allows for the exposure of the many sides and apparent contradictions of this man. With this in mind, the different contributions of this volume, written by scholars with divergent interests in Schweitzer and contrasting specialisms and evaluations, while giving one a sense of a many-sided human being, have not been written from one perspective or with a particular editorial vision. Insofar as the latter might emerge, it will be in this introduction.

The Location(s) of Albert Schweitzer

The many sides of Schweitzer raise questions about where to locate his enduring legacy. Some, even Schweitzer himself, might respond by pointing to his work at Lambarene. And yet there were many other Europeans in Africa who devoted their lives to humanitarian work. Moreover, it is also the case that Schweitzer’s work there has come under critical scrutiny from a number of angles.⁶ To locate his importance in his thought would also be insufficient—as a philosopher, his work remained incomplete, as he himself admitted, and it is too problematic, whatever its impulses, to find a place in the front rank of philosophy’s illuminati. As a theologian, though a brilliantly suggestive biblical scholar, the eccentricities of his doctrinal opinions and the unsystematic way in which they were expressed make it difficult to see him as an established voice there as well. Broadly similar observations might be made about his contributions to organ music, especially that of Bach, and its interpretation.

Might his significance, then, lie in the multifaceted character of his personality, the coming together in a single person of a varied body of talents and qualities, intellectual, aesthetic, and humanitarian? Possibly, and this may account for why he continues to fascinate some people. But what, aside from the admiration that such a combination of achievements elicits, is the sum of all these parts, the lasting residue that might be distilled from them, in the way that Schweitzer sought to discover the lasting importance of Jesus or Paul or even Bach, characters from another time but for him of enduring significance?⁷ The present volume, as well as seeking to discuss the varied character of Schweitzer’s activity, at certain points also addresses this urgent question, and we shall return to it at the end of this introduction.

When attempting to categorize Schweitzer in intellectual terms, he can be seen as both theologian and philosopher, an observation reflected in the way in which we have divided up the different parts of this volume (specifically parts 1 and 2). His first doctorate was in fact in philosophy,⁸ and his decision to study theology rather than going on to a professional career in philosophy arose in part from his commitment to becoming a Lutheran minister, strongly influenced by a desire to preach. Theobald Ziegler, one of his philosophy teachers, told him that preaching would not be compatible with the business of being a philosopher.⁹ While, as we shall see, Schweitzer himself preferred to be thought of as a philosopher, as Claus Günzler states in his contribution to the present volume, [b]etween religion and philosophy he only saw ‘a relative difference in the way of thinking’ and saw both as important contributors for progress in recognizing the ethical.

Schweitzer’s identity as a theologian should be emphasized, even if it is perhaps the less vocal side of the man. This arises in part from the fact that he wrote significant books on Jesus and Paul. In contradistinction to his philosophical volumes, these works continue to be read and admired, and their reception has, in general, been far kinder (a point made by Barry Matlock in his contribution on Schweitzer’s work on Paul). Moreover, he taught in a Protestant faculty of theology and was a minister of the Lutheran church as well as the Principal of the Lutheran theological training college in Strasbourg. He took this broadly pastoral role seriously, taking confirmation classes and, before he went to Africa, preaching regularly on Sundays, as well as occasionally writing for a popular church magazine—points highlighted in Werner Zager’s contribution. It is also striking that the last work he wrote, published posthumously as the first volume of the ten-volume Werke aus dem Nachlass (Unpublished Works), a series that has added greatly to our understanding of Schweitzer but has not attracted much attention,¹⁰ was on the Kingdom of God, and concerned itself in the main with the Bible.

Schweitzer identified himself clearly with liberal Protestantism, a well-established tradition in his native Alsace. His father, his maternal grandfather, and his uncle were clerics from the same tradition. Schweitzer was marked out for such a tradition, as seen in his commitment to historical exegesis of the Bible, in particular of the New Testament, and to whatever truth might emerge from such investigation; his skepticism toward the established dogmas of the church and ecclesiastical tradition in general; his strong sense of the ethical core of the Christian message, exemplified in the figure of Jesus; and his conviction that Christianity needed to take account of modernity and developing thought. In later life, especially in Switzerland, he was to become the poster cleric, as it were, for those liberal theologians, such as Martin Werner and Fritz Buri, who opposed the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth.¹¹ His friendship with Adolf von Harnack, whom he had met as a young man while staying in Berlin but with whom he only came to correspond in any regular way toward the end of the latter’s life, in part resulted from a shared desire to oppose the rise of neo-orthodoxy in the form of Barth, Emil Brunner, and others.¹² In later life Schweitzer was to play an active role in the Freier Bund des Christentums (The Liberal Union of Christianity) and other liberal Christian organizations. His theological heroes were men of the left, even when he saw fault in them or took their positions to be extreme.

Schweitzer, Theology, and the New Testament

But Schweitzer’s theological liberalism was distinctive. After all, in traditional accounts of the quest for the historical Jesus, which even now often follow Schweitzer’s own periodization,¹³ the latter appears as an implacable opponent of the so-called liberal lives, believing them to be understandable yet false attempts to modernize Jesus’ message by seeking to ignore or reinterpret what Schweitzer takes to be its untranslatable, eschatological core.¹⁴ For Schweitzer, famously, Jesus is a figure dominated by the sense of an impending end in which he will become the heavenly Son of Man, and his ministry reflects the core concerns of that perspective—though admittedly in a transformed state. Because of this, Jesus emerges less as a person who will sit easily in our time but as one who returns to his own, at once irrevocably particular, historical, and rebarbative.¹⁵

In this context Schweitzer attacks the bourgeois morality of the Reich—which, in his opinion, had remade Jesus in its own image—with what he takes to be Jesus’ eschatological ethics, which concerned themselves with the moral consummation of all things.¹⁶ In such passages Schweitzer can sound more like Franz Overbeck (1837–1905) (whom, interestingly, he never mentions), playing up the world-denying, countercultural aspect of early Christianity in an attack upon liberal theologians, who would limit the moral greatness of Jesus by their own modernizing and distorting visions of his aims.¹⁷ Schweitzer, unlike Overbeck, however, did not leave the eschatology of Jesus (or in the case of Overbeck, the eschatology of the early Christian communities) suspended in a kind of Ur-history, but reconceived it as an eschatological ethics, which teaches difference from the world as precisely the prerequisite for effective work within it. Where Overbeck saw the monastery as the true embodiment of Christianity’s otherworldly, world-denying roots,¹⁸ Schweitzer saw active engagement in the world as a more whole reflection of those origins in terms of world-and-life affirmation and negation.¹⁹

Schweitzer’s claim that eschatology is the motivation behind Jesus’ ministry has found general support in New Testament circles, though many of the details of his theory have been heavily criticized. His work on Paul began with Paul and His Interpreters in 1911, and continued with perhaps his most important work, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, in 1930. Schweitzer’s work on Paul, in which the latter is similarly claimed as a creature of eschatology, understood as a Christ mysticism, has proved influential, not least upon significant figures in modern Pauline study, such as W. D. Davies and E. P. Sanders, as Barry Matlock shows in this volume. Both works belong together, and form part of a developing narrative of how Christianity moved from being what it was in the mind of Jesus to what it became in the mind of Ignatius of Antioch in the early part of the second century. Schweitzer was not able to sketch the last phase of that development, though Martin Werner, in the context of a far broader chronological expanse, argued a similar case to the one he thought that Schweitzer would have argued.²⁰

Schweitzer, insofar as he is a New Testament scholar, is then, broadly, a historian. Even so, whatever he discovers historically, he seeks by various means to appropriate for the present. As in the second edition of his Quest, by exhorting the coming together of Jesus’ and the present Christian’s will, or by showing how Paul gives us the blueprint of a Christ mysticism, Schweitzer’s project was a kind of ressourcement for his own developing ethical philosophy.²¹ Moreover, despite his lambasting against modernity, Schweitzer’s historical discoveries in Jesus and Paul were aided by the philosophers of modernity, as Steven J. Kraftchick shows, helpfully highlighting how the lines of Schweitzer as philosopher, theologian, ethicist, and biblical scholar often converge. Such hermeneutical activity, however, according to Robert Morgan, gives us pause in considering Schweitzer as a New Testament theologian. Schweitzer, like other New Testament scholars, is too keen to suggest a difference between the New Testament’s message about Christ and what in fact was the case. Like many theological liberals, he is a critic of the New Testament more perhaps than he is its follower—at many points, Schweitzer’s Jesus and Paul reflect views that are simply outdated and no longer possible (not least their eschatological opinions). This last point need not render a New Testament theology impossible—Rudolf Bultmann was, after all, a New Testament theologian, who entertained a critical attitude to the mythological world of the New Testament. But Schweitzer, Morgan argues, shows little of the sustained theological engagement with the New Testament that we find in Bultmann, where reconstruction of the historical past stands in the service of the interpretation of the New Testament writings under the presupposition that they have something to say to the present (and little also of any interest in the New Testament beyond Jesus and Paul). Morgan’s thesis to some extent arises from a particular view of New Testament theology.²² He is justified in sensing in Schweitzer’s own theology a somewhat distinct form from that of the New Testament,²³ even if he is willing to admit that Schweitzer’s engagement with both Jesus and Paul is not altogether foreign to a New Testament theology.

Morgan’s observations, as we have noted, arise in part from the fact that Schweitzer fails to take account of core, traditional Christian doctrines in his engagement with the New Testament. As Zager shows, and Morgan also indicates, Schweitzer denied traditional interpretations of key Christian doctrines such as the atonement and the resurrection (both in more conventionally scholarly books and in sermons and more popular writings); and other central Christian doctrines, such as the incarnation, are never systematically addressed. Christophe Chalamet, in his contribution to the volume, while contextualizing Schweitzer’s theological emphases in the liberal tradition out of which he came and that he continued to support in his lifetime, sees Schweitzer’s suspicion of doctrine as a potential shortcoming.²⁴ He understands Schweitzer’s constructive theology, understood largely as ethical in orientation, as resembling a religious philosophy (a point not dissimilar to the one made by Morgan).

To some extent this has the consequence, at which Chalamet hints, that Schweitzer is not really a significant player in the history of twentieth-century theology—however challenging his problematizing of Jesus’ eschatology might have been.²⁵ Against this background, that most problematic of theologians, as Karl Barth was to call Schweitzer, is not a significant part of the theological landscape of twentieth-century theology, perceived as systematic theology. And aside from the now little-known Martin Werner, he spawned no lasting school of theological thinking. And yet it is difficult to conceive of Schweitzer’s theological thinking apart from the lasting and fundamental influence of his distinctive readings of Jesus and Paul—and, of course, some of the strong reactions to these readings. It may well be that though Chalamet is formally correct, the theological world may have in fact imbibed far more of Schweitzer than is apparent.²⁶

Schweitzer and World Religions

Schweitzer’s interest in religion was not limited to Christianity and to some extent ancient Judaism. As Predrag Cicovacki shows in his contribution to this volume, Schweitzer, reflecting a trend in the second half of the nineteenth century, takes an interest in other religions. Unlike Schopenhauer, who clearly influenced Schweitzer in a variety of ways—on which see Kraftchick—and with whose philosophy Schweitzer became familiar when he was seventeen,²⁷ he is not intent upon advancing a view of the superiority of oriental religions. In fact, Schweitzer lobbied for just the opposite. Moreover, he is not a student of these religions in the way that a conventional Religionswissenschaftler (historian of religion) would be. They are surveyed very much through the prism of Schweitzer’s own theological (and philosophical) interests, through dualities that he has constructed, and this leads to judgments that are questionable and problematic.²⁸ What Cicovacki, and Günzler also, show, however, is that Schweitzer owed a great deal to both Indian and Chinese religions in his formulation of the idea of reverence for life.²⁹ In particular, Schweitzer positions his ethical philosophy in what he sees as sensibilities that arise from a developed sense of our connectedness to the natural world, itself an opinion influenced by the complex monism of Indian and Chinese religions. While Schweitzer rejects monism as such (he believes in a personal God who is somehow separate from nature), in Cicovacki’s opinion, somewhat to the detriment of his own thought, monism has in part sensitized him to the idea that ethics cannot be concerned exclusively with human-to-human relations but must concern itself with all of life. It is this combination of aspects of what Schweitzer takes to be elements of an Asian tradition with Western philosophy that, arguably, in Günzler’s view, makes Schweitzer an expositor of a kind of world philosophy, whatever its difficulties.

Schweitzer’s Ethical Philosophy

As already noted, Schweitzer considered himself to be primarily a philosopher rather than a theologian. He wrote to his East German biographer, Rudolf Grabs, that he wanted to be understood neither as a historian nor a theologian, but above all through his philosophy.³⁰ And he admitted to his former student, Fritz Buri, that he considered himself something of an Amateurphilosoph (amateur philosopher).³¹ As a philosopher he was an ethicist, identifying philosophy as a discipline whose principal task was bound up with ethics. But it is in this area of his work that Schweitzer was never taken particularly seriously, at least by professionals, a point acknowledged by both Günzler and Ulrich H. J. Körtner in the present volume. Insofar as Schweitzer was hailed as a thinker about ethics and his idea of reverence for life bandied around, it was by people who were already admirers of his personality.³² And yet Schweitzer wished for a hearing among philosophers, whose profession, he felt, had abrogated its responsibility by becoming specialist and, in his opinion, increasingly inaccessible, somehow disengaged from a sense of itself as an ethical guide to the populous more generally.³³

It is not the aim of this Introduction to analyze Schweitzer’s philosophical thinking. Reverence for life, which, as Günzler shows, is something of a misnomer, or at least a phrase that detracts from Schweitzer’s major concerns, has its roots both in what Schweitzer takes to be the Greeks’ equation of happiness and virtue, and in the conviction that there should be a connection between moral normativity and subjective motivation, between moral standards and personal experiences. Morality, then, is not something commanded from outside. As Günzler and Thate show, Schweitzer has sympathy for Nietzsche’s radical thesis that the traditional morality of humility and self-sacrifice is deception because it makes the individual into a slave of society, and conflicts with life because it disregards the natural self-assertion of the individual. Nietzsche’s insight that all ethics rests on individual ethics is foundational for Schweitzer.³⁴ After all, an ethics that cannot be developed out of individual life cannot exercise influence upon individual action.

As Günzler states, a key to Schweitzer’s thinking lies in adopting a principle that every individual autonomously finds in themselves. In some senses such an assumption is Kantian, but Schweitzer modifies it by associating it with feeling as well as pure rationality. Where Schweitzer differs from Nietzsche is in his conviction that such moral self-assertion, such life-affirmation, will lead to the will-to-love or reverence-for-life, to an attitude that embraces in a benign way all life, rather than the will to power, as Nietzsche argued, and so is an exclusive form of self-assertion. Here is where most agree an aporia appears in Schweitzer’s thinking. That is, the conviction that as wills-to-live, living among wills-to-live, we will feel an immediate sense of identity with life around us, and so a desire not to harm life but to preserve it, is not a necessity of thought. Nietzsche’s challenge still remains, as Körtner makes plain, and it was this challenge that Schweitzer felt very deeply throughout his life.

The conviction of reverence for life, however, does not arise from a view of the world, a Weltanschauung somehow derived from gaining a sense of the reason inherent in the world—a natural philosophy, of sorts. In fact, no such thing is discernible. The odd mixture in the world of cruelty and goodness, wonder and horror, render it a mystery, a pessimistic sense that Schweitzer can be said to derive from Schopenhauer, whose resignation in the face of the horrors of the world Schweitzer rejects, but whose compassion he accepts in an active form. It arises rather from an inward reflection, from an understanding of the nature of our wills and their identification with other wills. It is this that leads us to experience a sense of moral responsibility, which is reverence for life; and in this context Nietzsche’s view of life as self-affirmation takes on a social dynamic. I live my life in God, in the mysterious divine personality which I do not know as such in the world, but only experience as mysterious Will within myself.³⁵ Key to life, then, is a dualism in that we experience what Schweitzer terms God differently in ourselves from the way we experience God in the world. The resolution to this lies in ethical action, what Schweitzer terms an ethische Mystik (ethical mysticism), in which, in spite of our sense of an irresolvable dualism, we conceive of action as the only correct response to this dilemma, which to some extent is never resolvable. Schweitzer’s philosophy or thought, then, is an ethic—or an ethical philosophy—that refuses precisely to take the world as it is, and though resigned to the fact of that world, uses resignation positively to act upon it.

Schweitzer’s thinking is an intriguing blend of rationality and feeling, paradox and contrast, a concern with the particular and a quest for the general. It is a kind of natural philosophy, though one that in the end rejects natural philosophy; and it entertains a view that from this can be derived a Kantian principle, which, precisely because it arises from within, is universalizable. Its intellectual difficulties are acknowledged by both Körtner and Günzler, not least its personal aspect. As Günzler notes, Anyone who rejects the immersion into the proper ‘I’ and nature will not accept reverence for life as a leitmotif. But so are its benefits seen at once in its connection with life more generally (rather than simply an anthropocentric vision), and with its cultivation of a sense of responsibility, seen in the nurturing of reverence as a disposition or attitude (Gesinnung). Reverence for life, Körtner asserts, quoting Heike Baranzke, is not a principle of justification of ethics but a moral-psychological principle of sensitization for the formation of the acceptance of responsibility. Similarly, Schweitzer’s ethical thinking can be seen as a protest against what Charles Taylor has called disengaged reason,³⁶ which deliberately breaks with ordinary, corporeal experience. As Körtner notes, His [Schweitzer’s] ethics aspires precisely to an engaged reason in which knowing passes into experiencing.

Schweitzer’s philosophical and broadly theological reasoning can seem to pass each other like ships in the night. While Schweitzer might speak about Christ having taken control of him,³⁷ and present the possibility of his will entering into ours, or talk about the transformative power of Christ’s will upon those living in the present,³⁸ derived in some sense from Paul’s own theology,³⁹ and mention at many points, in almost redemptive terms, the kingdom of God, these ideas never become part of his philosophical discourse. Insofar as religion enters in at that point, it is more the insights of Indian religions than straightforwardly those of Christianity. For Schweitzer, although religion contained within itself thoughts of real value, especially relating to ethics, and religion’s study could lead to the uncovering of those thoughts and the healthy exchange of different insights, he was intent in arguing his ethical case philosophically, in a universalizable language, not one that derived its value from some form of revelation.

And yet, as some have argued, there is a clear connection between the dualism of Schweitzer’s eschatological ethics and the sense of a disconnect between the world as it is and our need to act in a way that is distinct from it. There is a sense in which reverence for life and Jesus mysticism come together. Schweitzer could himself write: The ethics of reverence for life is the ethics of love widened into universality. It is the ethics of Jesus now recognized as a logical necessity of thought.⁴⁰ This raises the question of whether philosophy has influenced biblical interpretation or the other way round. Schweitzer answered the question one way; namely, that philosophy has influenced theology.⁴¹ His answer might still seem compelling, but as Ward Blanton has demonstrated in a fascinating essay in this volume, the partition between these two regimes is often traversed, and Schweitzer may well prove prescient—or, at least, relevant—in light of some of the so-called philosophical returns to religion. Equally important in such a discussion of the relationship between Schweitzer’s philosophical ethics and his interpretation of the New Testament remains the oft-noted aporia in Schweitzer’s thought already highlighted above; that is, the fact that the apprehension that we are wills-to-live, living among other wills-to-live, does not necessarily lead to reverence for life. But to some the solution to this problem is found in the conviction that the operation of a will-to-love in the form of Christ transforms our wills, and so theology, in an unacknowledged way, steps in to cast aside the aporia.⁴² It is difficult to prove this assertion, but it has a certain appeal and reveals Schweitzer as a more Christocentric individual than some have held, however we understand that Christocentrism.⁴³

Fin de Siècle and Cultural Decline

Schweitzer’s philosophical position, whatever its relationship to his theology, arose from a strong sense of cultural decline, seen especially in the evolution of a kind of mass culture, brought about by industrialization, which in various ways threatened to absorb individuals and transform them into unthinking automata.⁴⁴ As Oermann has written, The goal of Schweitzer’s ethics was essentially the realization of humanity’s nature as an individual, rather than as part of an amorphous mass.⁴⁵ And Thate, in his contribution on Schweitzer’s relationship to Nietzsche, notes that Schweitzer’s felt anxiety was the threat of the collectivity to the individual as it threatens to absorb him.⁴⁶ As already noted, Schweitzer saw in Nietzsche an ally in proclaiming that morality and personality belong together. At the core of his work lies a strong belief both in the individual and his or her capacity to think their way to a position of moral regeneration. At one level there appears almost no societal dimension to his thinking. In fact, Schweitzer seeks to transcend the demands of society. The transformed world for Schweitzer is the world of individuals who have transformed their thinking. That he spoke of this transformation through the medium of the idea of Kultur, which he saw in a decline brought about by industrialization, makes him typical of his age.⁴⁷ That he saw regeneration as ethical and rational, however, does not.⁴⁸

Schweitzer and the Academy

Schweitzer’s work as a philosopher was intended to be accessible. After all, in a manner that might now appear naïve, he saw one of the causes of the cultural decline that he described so vividly as lying in the abrogation of the philosopher’s public responsibility to be concerned with the construction of an accessible ethical philosophy. In many ways, Schweitzer saw this embodied in the Enlightenment. Although Schweitzer had an inherent respect for the achievement of German scholarship, and indeed appeared, at least at the outset of his life, to be intent upon a scholarly career (and this was certainly the opinion of those closest to him), there is a clear sense in which he did not subscribe to a narrow vision of Wissenschaft as a procedure or methodology that would lead to progress in knowledge. Scholarship was, therefore, never conceived as a purely academic task but one allied to the advancement of humanity more generally, and to a purpose that transcended its academic particularity.

This applies equally, we would suggest, to his theological endeavors. The Quest, in both its first and considerably modified second edition,⁴⁹ ends in an almost sermonic manner with a passage about discipleship. The final reflections of the Mysticism of Paul the Apostle are also appellative and sermonic, at least in part.⁵⁰ Moreover, as many have noted, Schweitzer’s approach to scholarship was not conventional. His first doctoral dissertation on Kant consisted of little more than a discussion of primary texts with almost no reference to secondary material. And his scriptural works, though much more interested in secondary material, argued their case through a kind of logical inference bound up with a type of exclusivist reasoning (the famous either-ors), which in part emerged,x at least in the case of The Quest, from the manner in which the history of scholarship was presented. Almost nowhere did Schweitzer indulge in close exegesis, with its well-known procedures and heavy philological emphasis, so carefully developed and nurtured in German Protestant theology faculties, of which Schweitzer supposedly was a product (a point his contemporaries were only too willing to point out). Nor did he demonstrate interest in small-scale but detailed studies, which customarily appeared in academic journals, particularly in Germany. Moreover, and in a trope that is widely distributed in his writings,⁵¹ Schweitzer often presents the origins of his major personal and scholarly decisions as the result of a sudden moment of revelation rather than the endpoint of lengthy and painstaking scholarly labor and reflection. Whether all of this is evidence of Werner Picht’s assertion that Schweitzer’s oeuvre was not in fact of a scholarly nature, and so it is wrong to assert that he gave up a considerable academic career to go to Africa,⁵² it is evidence of a broader and more engaged view of scholarship’s public function (to use Kantian terms, a sense of scholarship as a Welt-, not a Schulbegriff).⁵³ Such a sensibility may have arisen from tendencies within German liberal theology. It may have also been influenced by Schweitzer’s own teacher, Theobald Ziegler, whose many publications assumed wider audiences and whose style and manner of argumentation were adapted to a more general audience. It also arose from Schweitzer’s own idealized view of the healthy synergy between scholarly, and in particular philosophical, endeavor and the wider world as he saw that evidenced in the Enlightenment.

Schweitzer and Music

Schweitzer’s commitment to the organ, and in particular the work of Bach, has contributed greatly to the sense of him as a universal man. The combination in one person of intellectual, practical, and aesthetic gifts is seen as especially striking; and his ability to give organ concerts helped greatly in the raising of funds for his hospital. Schweitzer’s contribution to the study of Bach in particular has been the subject of much discussion, and in the current volume this matter is dealt with relatively briefly. Harald Schützeichel attempts in his contribution to show how Schweitzer’s engagement with Bach is at one with his approach to the study of Jesus in attempting to avoid the tendency to modernize its subject (in this instance, to play Bach in a romantic manner) or to treat it in a narrowly historic manner (what is sometimes referred to as a pure musical approach). What the interpreter of Bach must try to do is to extract that which is spiritually lasting from the music, and this through a kind of mystical interaction with Bach, which arises from experiencing Bach’s music in the same manner in which it was composed by a man Schweitzer holds to be the great German mystic. Schützeichel, in a contribution that attempts to contextualize Bach within Schweitzer’s variegated endeavors, argues strongly for what he terms Einheit in der Vielfalt (unity in multiplicity), asserting that, in the end, as with everything else in Schweitzer’s intellectual life, his highly personal interpretation of Bach is ethical, for it trusts in the ethical power of Bach’s achievement, and this constitutes the most enduring aspect of his musical contribution. Against this background, the placement of a chapter on Schweitzer’s musical work in a section devoted to theology makes sense.

Schweitzer and Africa

The limitations of an analysis of Schweitzer in terms of what now would dryly be referred to as his scholarly outputs is, of course, obvious given his decision, tortuous and complex as it was, to go to the Gabon and work as a missionary doctor for the Paris Missionary Society. Arguably, his philosophical works in particular would not have received the broad dissemination they did had Schweitzer not made this decision. Certainly he would not have become the public figure he did had he remained in the cloistered world of German Wissenschaft. After World War II in particular, his iconic status grew, not only in Europe but especially in the United States, as he appeared from the wreckage of that conflict as a man bearing the halo of unsullied goodness—a process that Nils Ole Oermann describes in this volume.

In many ways, perhaps inevitably, Schweitzer’s work in Africa has become an area of deep contestation. What in those early years after World War II and through most of the 1950s was seen as an unambiguously benign and beneficent contribution to the world of the deprived African has now, in the wake of shifts in cultural, political, and intellectual trends, become a more ambiguous and complex matter. Such criticisms, as Thate shows in his essay on Schweitzer and Africa in this volume, had begun already in Schweitzer’s own lifetime. Even in the Festschrift that appeared in 1945, and a second that appeared in 1962, dedicated to celebrating and surveying his achievements, W. E. B. Du Bois expressed such criticisms. Some of these criticisms relate to his distance from the culture of which he was a part. While keen to enact his learned powers of medical care upon the population, he did not learn their languages, never trained an African to be a doctor—in fact quarreled with the idea that Africans should be educated to the highest level—did not allow Africans to eat with him at the table, and spoke of the world they inhabited in terms of the terrible prose of Africa from which escape was necessary and important.

This narrative, however, is not so straightforward. Some have pointed to Schweitzer’s training of orderlies, surgical assistants, and nurses from local peoples, and his founding of a nursing school where his staff could provide formal instruction for locals who would become nurses throughout the coastal cities.⁵⁴ And, of course, training medical doctors and conferring medical degrees were not within Schweitzer’s formal powers. The charge of Schweitzer’s aloofness to local languages, too, is in need of some clarification. There were some four hundred languages and dialects spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Schweitzer himself was required by colonial authorities to use French in formal communication with the local people, and he had to manage the good graces of the mission and hospital with such governing authorities. Also languages were never his strength—he never, for instance, learned English.

And yet this sense of distance manifested itself in other ways. Although Schweitzer himself was excoriating in his criticism of the West, and engaged in a form of cultural criticism in his Kulturphilosophie—which, though distant from some of the assumptions of Spengler and others, was nevertheless similarly hostile and unremitting—he never saw Africa as providing, even in part, ideas for Western regeneration, in the way some of his contemporary missionaries had. Schweitzer’s acceptance of the obligation of the white man to the black man, of the latter’s younger brother status; his partial acceptance of the necessity of colonials’ harsh treatment of Africans; and his opposition to African self-rule strike one as in tension with his own professed belief in the attitude of reverence for life. It also seems at odds with his initially harsh attacks upon colonial treatment of Africans found in particular in early sermons preceding his arrival to Africa. In some senses, living in Africa had dampened the ardor of his original polemic against colonialism, as had interaction with those he wanted to treat, whose mores and attitudes he could both praise but also severely criticize.

Lambarene was, in at least some respects, the enactment of an ethical vision, and the embodiment of an argument. Though Schweitzer did, in a number of publications, busy himself with the particularities of that setting, rarely did those particularities serve to make him a more engaged participant in the culture in which he was living. As Ruth Harris has suggested, noted by Thate in his chapter on Africa, Schweitzer’s isolation in the jungle enabled him to break away from the hierarchies of university, church and even the musical world. He maintained authority in a little colony of his own making, and a kind of intellectual autonomy that permitted an unconventionality that would have been difficult for a professor of Lutheran theology in Strasbourg (Ruth Harris, The Allure of Albert Schweitzer, History of European Ideas 40 (2014): 817). But such detachment, she maintains, was also evidence of a disconnection as he strove to operate between two cultures. The disconnection, as other critics have maintained, was also between Schweitzer’s idea of reverence for life and his failure to respect African manifestations of that life.

It is easy to adopt a censorious tone, however, even in relation to Schweitzer’s medical activities, though the most recent research on this matter shows his hospital to have been far more effective than the alternatives provided by the French and indeed to have provoked the jealousy and suspicion of the colonial authorities.⁵⁵ Du Bois, to whose criticisms of Schweitzer we have already referred, could still praise him for his work in Lambarene; and the fact that history has somehow overtaken him, that changing circumstances have contributed to a harsher assessment of his role in Africa,⁵⁶ should not allow us to make him the subject of an uncritical polemic. In this respect he remains an important figure with which and through which we may think about the complexities and barbarisms of African colonialism. Any word on this subject, of course, is bound to invite controversy in a world with very different preoccupations and concerns from Schweitzer’s and in which the colonialist heritage of Africa is regarded with deep skepticism, even where it might be perceived as motivated by benign and altruistic thoughts.

Schweitzer as Homo Politicus

Schweitzer’s role as a public intellectual, facilitated in large part by his medical work in Africa, at once raises questions about his political identity, a subject rarely broached until recently.⁵⁷ In his autobiography about his childhood and youth, Schweitzer confesses to a strong interest in politics.⁵⁸ At least to some extent, his origins as an Alsatian, covered in the present volume in Anthony Steinhoff’s contribution, would have sensitized him to political issues in a land that had remained an area of dispute between France and Germany, and just before his birth had reverted to German rule in the wake of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Germany’s annexation of the land led to what Steinhoff sees as a largely failed policy of Germanization—though one that may have had more success in relation to the second generation of Alsatians who experienced it, among whom Schweitzer is numbered. In this context Schweitzer cuts an interesting figure. His two uncles, Auguste and Karl, the latter of whom was the grandfather of Jean-Paul Sartre and the butt of the latter’s opprobrium in Les Mots, had opted to move to France after the annexation of Alsace by Germany. Schweitzer’s uncles were among a relatively small number of Alsatians to take up such an offer and both were French patriots, as Sartre makes plain in his account of life with his grandfather. Schweitzer’s maternal uncle, after whom he was named, had died in the siege of Strasbourg in 1870 while tending the French wounded and sick in what appeared to have been heroic circumstances. Steinhoff, in a contribution that adds a new dimension to the study of Schweitzer’s complex identity, begins by quoting from Schweitzer’s letter to his fellow Alsatian, Alfred Boegner, when he first applied to work as a missionary with the Paris Missionary Society in July of 1906. Here Schweitzer makes it plain that he does not want to leave his job as Principal of the theological Stift before he has secured a place for an Alsatian replacement: I do not wish to leave without being able to recommend a young Alsatian as my successor; otherwise there is a danger that some German or another will be appointed to my position. . . . I do not wish that my departure should provide Germany with a new opportunity to take possession of an Alsatian institution (Schweitzer to Boegner in Das Albert Schweitzer Lesebuch, 102).

Here, as Steinhoff notes, Schweitzer appears as one keen to preserve the regional identity of Alsace against encroaching Germanization, at once political and knowing. Schweitzer, who does not appear to have been an active member of regionalist groups in Alsace, which emerged at the turn of the century, even if he may have sympathized with their cause, as his letter to Boegner indicates, belonged to a second generation of Alsatians, whose attitude to the so-called Altdeutsche (Germans who had come to live and work in Alsace after 1870) was, as we have indicated, less hostile than that of their parents’ generation who had experienced the Germans as invaders. Schweitzer had himself been educated in one of the new Gymnasiums set up by the Germans. By studying theology at the newly founded Strasbourg University, he would have come into contact with a reasonable number of Altdeutsche, both as students and teachers.⁵⁹ Socially he mixed with Altdeutsche (in the letter to Boegner, quoted by Steinhoff, Schweitzer is clear that he has many dear friends in Germany), and would eventually marry Helene Bresslau, the daughter of the German-Jewish Rector of the University of Strasbourg, the distinguished medieval historian Harry Bresslau. Such unions were becoming much less rare in the Reichsland than had previously been the case.

Schweitzer’s attachment to Germany, however, was more cultural than political.⁶⁰ In an interesting exchange with Helene, at that time his fiancée, he was quick to criticize Germany’s aggression as he understood it in the Moroccan crisis of 1911 (this against Helene’s pro-German views).⁶¹ But this was not born, it seems, from a developed French nationalism. Indeed, Schweitzer deplored the rise of nationalisms of all sorts, seeing them as recidivist and destructive.⁶² It is striking, for instance, that when he was asked by those on the board of the Paris Missionary Society to take up French nationality before he left for the Gabon, he refused, and it was only because of the intervention of a well-placed French official, the politician and writer Théodore Reinach, who was Schweitzer’s friend, that he was able to leave for the Gabon as a German. As Steinhoff argues, Schweitzer embodied key aspects of the argument about Alsace’s double culture, both in his linguistic exertions and in his work as a personal emissary between the cultural and intellectual worlds of late nineteenth-century Germany and France. This was facilitated by Schweitzer’s association with a German university and his personal connections to France and, in particular, Paris.

The fact that Schweitzer felt the need to spread German culture among the French, which in part explains his central role in the Paris Bach Society, and the fact that he lectured on important German cultural figures in Paris, including Nietzsche, Hauptmann, and Goethe, differentiated him from many Alsatians of his generation, as Steinhoff points out.⁶³ After World War I, during which, as a German citizen, Schweitzer was interned, he spoke out bravely against the harsh treatment of Germans in a now French Alsace.⁶⁴ In the wake of German defeat, Alsace had begun to adopt a deeply anti-German atmosphere, expelling almost all Altdeutsche from the former Reichsland, including Schweitzer’s father-in-law. Indeed Schweitzer was to find himself a suspected figure in postwar Alsace. As Steinhoff states, he was to be treated in a manner compatible with the German identity that his passport declared. And, as such, his return to the Gabon in the early 1920s was opposed by French officials.⁶⁵

The political Schweitzer, insofar as one can talk about that entity, extends beyond his involvement in Alsatian affairs, as Thomas Suermann’s essay in this volume indicates. Politics in this context should not be understood as narrowly party-political, but rather in broader terms as involvement in public life. Certainly, as Suermann shows, Schweitzer had a keen interest in politics and was not afraid to exchange frank opinions with his friends, always in private correspondence, on the emerging political scene especially in the 1950s and beyond. On occasion he showed himself to be a perceptive observer of political developments as well as a man who thought hard about constitutional and related subjects.⁶⁶

As already noted, Schweitzer was keen to influence the public with his ideas. He thought the latter could be transformative in the restoration of what he took to be a fallen culture and recreative for a peaceful world, free of nationalism and confessionalism. This vision was formed in large measure by the liberal opinions of those like Ziegler and Wilhelm Windelband who had been his teachers.⁶⁷ Such a change would only occur if, as Suermann informs us, there were a change in the individual attitudes of people. Politics was not a collective enterprise. In fact, Schweitzer shared with many others a genuine fear of mass cultures and their effect upon the capacity of individuals to think for themselves in coherent and beneficent ways.

A willingness to allow people of influence to visit Lambarene, and to write to well-known political figures, mark out the latter part of Schweitzer’s life. This was especially the case when he decided to become a part of the antinuclear movement under the influence of Linus Pauling. Engagement with the latter, not least because it involved heavy criticism of the policies of Charles de Gaulle and John F. Kennedy, incurred the wrath of some in the West. Such hostility grew when people observed his increasingly close relationship to the East German authorities—a relationship, as Suermann indicates, which reflects a certain naïveté on the part of Schweitzer.

A word must also be said about Schweitzer’s controversial political silence on certain matters. In line with what we have just written, a desire to be seen as a neutral figure in the Cold War more generally meant that he failed to speak out in a way he perhaps should have over such issues as the creation of the Berlin Wall. Other omissions also appear odd. His decision not to protest publicly against Nazi oppression of the Jews,⁶⁸ in spite of pleas on the part of his own family and a number of distinguished German academics, including Max Planck, seems a striking oversight, not least given that he himself had married into a Jewish family.⁶⁹ Schweitzer, it appears, would come to regret this decision. The motivation behind such silence has elicited some discussion, on which Suermann comments, and which can appear strangely incompatible with a man so concerned with reverence for life.

In any case, Schweitzer’s view of himself as a universal figure, not beholden to the restrictions of nationality or confessionalism, may have been the partial cause of these oversights, as well as of his lack of criticism of the communist east. As Suermann notes, throughout his life he regarded himself as being politically interested only on a supra-national and supra-political level, shying away from any expression of his own political creed. Regardless of the merits of such a conviction, Schweitzer’s neglect of certain political particulars leaves the contemporary critic puzzled and even strongly critical. Here something of the contradictory character of Schweitzer emerges and requires further examination.

Enigma and Personality

Mention of Schweitzer’s self-understanding raises questions, too, about his personality. At one level he emerges as somewhat enigmatic. He was quite suspicious about revealing too much of himself to the world.⁷⁰ His autobiography, written in 1931, which was never subsequently updated, reads like a set of carefully crafted expositions in which life and work intersect but in which ideas are of the essence and the personality of the individual behind these remains concealed. It is easy also to see his memoirs of childhood and youth, published earlier in 1924, as a kind of refraction of his ideas through incidents in his early life. (The work itself had been inspired by a series of clinical interviews with the Freudian psychiatrist and clergyman, Oskar Pfister.)

The sense of partiality in these accounts is revealed when they are contrasted with the extraordinary correspondence between Schweitzer and his future wife Helene Bresslau when they were courting in the period running from 1901 until their marriage in June 1912. Not only does the correspondence indicate that Schweitzer’s life did not proceed on a preordained course from 1896, the date on which he claims to have made his decision to serve humanity from his thirtieth year,⁷¹ but it also reveals a more perfervid and introspective character, constantly struggling to discover what his destiny might be, sometimes in a manner that must have seemed exasperating and even confusing. What emerges, too, from these letters is Schweitzer’s hauteur and confidence and a rather developed sense of destiny—despite his lack of clarity on its particulars, which would be a point of intermittent angst for Schweitzer. In one letter, for instance, he reports that many people think that his main aim is to become a senior German professor, a thought that inspires the exclamation: If only I was so modest. And in another he reports with a striking sense of bravura how a meeting with the distinguished Old Testament scholar, Hermann Gunkel, led him to thank God that he was a Mensch and not a purely professorial figure.⁷² His sense of intellectual confidence can be seen also in his books, not least those on the New Testament. In the Quest, Schweitzer presents himself as the successful endpoint of the attempt by scholars to understand the identity of the historical Jesus, a point that was not lost on some of those who reviewed the work. Schweitzer’s own physical self-presentation in these years also betrays a certain self-regard as he looks out at us with his Nietzschean moustache and his well-tailored Frack.⁷³ Something, too, of this sense of self and indeed of purpose is seen not just in the manner in which he cast aside the opinions of relatives and friends when he announced in 1906 that he was going to the Gabon, but also in his striking silence, at least in public, when books began to be written against Lambarene and its powerful ruler in the early 1960s.

Passion, steeliness, an extraordinary capacity for work, self-confidence, and a striking sense of purpose, almost stubbornness, are features of Schweitzer’s personality. Intellectually these could manifest themselves in the ability to write compelling books with almost absolute conclusions. They could also manifest themselves in an inability to move from a position once adopted. In this respect it is possible to argue that Schweitzer’s thought never really developed after the age of forty—approximately the time he went to Africa. In part this had to do with the fact that, although he visited Europe frequently in the years following 1913, he remained essentially an inhabitant of Lambarene in a form of self-imposed exile, cut off to some extent from the intellectual and cultural worlds that had nurtured him in his youth and early middle age.⁷⁴ But it is also attributable to his mentality and the manner in which he arrived at his decisions, which