Albert Schweitzer With James Carleton Paget

In 2009, when he received, perhaps surprisingly, the Nobel Peace Prize, President Barack Obama mentioned four previous winners of that prize with whom he compared himself somewhat unfavourably. One was General Marshall of the Marshall Plan, one was Nelson Mandela, one was Martin Luther King, and the fourth, perhaps surprisingly, was Albert Schweitzer. I say surprisingly because nowadays Albert Schweitzer is a much less well-known person than he was at the height of his fame in the period following the war leading to his death from 1945 to 1964. What I want to do in this brief discussion is to pass over and discuss some of the most important facets of his life. That life is multidimensional. He is not a conventional theologian, a conventional philosopher, in the sense that he spent his entire life doing those things. Immanuel Kant spent his entire life philosophising and only engaged occasionally in outdoor activities. Albert Schweitzer, on the other hand, engaged in considerable amounts of outside activity from 1913 to his death in 1964, where for the majority of the time he was a medical missionary in the Gabon in West Africa. Albert Schweitzer was born on the 14th of January 1875 in the small town of Kaisersberg in Alsace-Lorraine. His family was a clerical family. His father was a Lutheran cleric, his mother was the daughter of a Lutheran cleric, and the brother of a Lutheran cleric. Indeed, it was after his uncle that Albert was named Albert, and his uncle had been a somewhat heroic person, looking after a number of people in the siege of Strasbourg, where he had been killed by a cannonball. Schweitzer's family was liberal in orientation. By liberal theological, one would mean this, that they took a somewhat critical attitude towards the traditional doctrines of Christianity, particularly traditional Christian dogmas, that they were keen that Christianity be seen to be a message that had relevance to modernity and to culture as it was developing. And they took also, by and large, a quite sceptical attitude to the historical claims of the Bible. Schweitzer's life was to be dominated to some extent by these theological assumptions, one other of which was that the Christian message, insofar as it was true and important, lay primarily in its ethical claims rather than its dogmatic assertions. The fact that Schweitzer was born in Alsace is also important. In 1870, Alsace had been annexed by the German state, the Reich, as a result of the Franco-Prussian War, which the Prussians had won. Bismarck annexed Alsace, as I said, and Schweitzer therefore was to lead the most important part of his life, the period running from 1875 to 1913, in a country that was German. Schweitzer's family itself was what one might call French patriotic. His two uncles had, once Alsace had been annexed, opted to go and live in France. Part of the relevant treaty between the French and the Prussians, as a result of the war, stated that the citizens of Alsace who wished to, could opt to live in non-occupied France, that is in mainland France, and these two gentlemen had opted to live there. They were French nationalists. Schweitzer's father was not so, and Schweitzer himself was never to identify with any form of nationalism. Insofar as he may have possessed one, it was as an Alsatian, as someone who inhabited a territory that was both German and French, what one could call border territory, which I think to some extent contributed to his more universal approach to humanity. Schweitzer's family moved from Kaisersberg, when he was about three, to the small town of Gunzbach, and it was in that town that Schweitzer was to live for the rest of his life, in truth, though of course there were to be these considerable intermissions, and it is there that you can visit his house and learn in fact more about him. When he was at Gunzbach, he was educated in the local primary school, and then he went to grammar school at a place called Munster, that was south of Gunzbach, where he lived with his rather austere uncle and aunt. Schweitzer was not a brilliant pupil. He was slightly sluggish, and not particularly hard working. However, at the grammar school, he became enthused by history and to a lesser extent by philosophy, and he succeeded in passing his grammar school examinations and going in 1893 to the University of Strasbourg. This was a new university in the sense that it had been refounded by the Prussian state in the early 1870s, and as a new university, it was one populated by young academics and breathing a kind of liberal spirit. It was the aim of the Prussians, though they were not entirely successful in this, to attract as many Alsatians as they could to the university in order that they might, as it were, be Germanified. Schweitzer's education at the University of Strasbourg was an education therefore conducted in German, and though at home he spoke the patois, which is sometimes referred to as Alsatian, and spoke French also with his parents and his brothers and sisters, he would write in German most of his most important books. At Strasbourg, he studied both theology and philosophy, and it was in philosophy that he wrote his first major work, a study of Kant's philosophy of religion, in which he asserted boldly that Kant's view of religion impinged too little upon his view of ethics, and as a result, the religion that emerged from Kant was dry and not entirely useful. This piece of work, which got him a doctorate in 1899, might well, it could be thought, have set him on a career as a philosopher, but when he consulted his philosophy tutor at the university, a man called Theobald Ziegler, about whether he should become a philosopher, Ziegler said, well, that's fine, but if you want to become a cleric as well, you might well be somewhat frowned upon as someone trying to combine these two things. Schweitzer interestingly notes in his autobiography that because he enjoyed preaching so much, the idea of preaching, he decided that he would continue and go forward to the church and have a life as a theologian, and in 1900, he passed his second important theological examination, and in 1903, he attained his second doctorate in theology with a work on what he called the in Strasbourg. The Stift was where you would learn to become a cleric. It was a theological training college. Schweitzer lectured in the university, but at the same time, he did other things. Something I haven't mentioned up to this point is Schweitzer's role as a musician. From an early age, he took lessons in the organ. He was taught initially by a man called Munch, who was a very successful organ teacher and a renowned organist, but his life really changed in relation to the organ when in 1893, he went to Paris to see one of his uncles, and his uncle introduced him to Vidor, the great composer and organist at Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Schweitzer was taken on by Vidor as his pupil, and this kindled an extraordinary relationship, which would lead Schweitzer to write a major book on Bach, first in French and then in German. The book now is surpassed in terms of its scholarship, but it remains an important work, one inspired by his association with Vidor, and one that, if one looks at it more closely, shows continuities, I would claim, with some of the things that he asserts theologically later on in his life. Between 1903 and 1906, dramatic things happened in Schweitzer's life. In 1904, he claims that he was sitting in his room and he happened to see on his desk a magazine published by the Paris Missionary Society. The Paris Missionary Society was a Protestant and non-conformist society that had been formed during the Protestant revival in France, and it ran various mission stations around the world, and in it was an advertisement calling upon people to take up the offer of Jesus, follow him, and go to Africa as a missionary. Schweitzer says that he was gripped by this particular plea and decided at that moment that a quest that he claims had gone back to 1896, a quest to serve other people for the rest of his life, in 1896 he had argued, he had claimed at least, that he had had the view that he would spend the first 40 years of his life doing aesthetic and intellectual things, and then for the rest of his life he would spend it devoted to humanity. Here seemed to be the answer, and he wrote to the Paris Missionary Society in 1905, offering it to him.