Albert Schweitzer
“I remain convinced that truth, love, a peaceful spirit, gentleness and goodness are forces superior to any other” (our translation throughout). This quotation, which features on the back cover of this new biography by the historian Matthieu Arnold, gives us a useful insight into what drove this great man from Alsace and important figure of the 20th century. By drawing from the best sources, many for the first time, the author takes us on a journey of (re)discovery of the many faces of a man who was, at one and the same time, a doctor, a preacher, theologian, philosopher, musicologist and organist. He was also a prolific writer whose work was translated into many different languages. Deeply opposed to nationalism and a driving force behind humanitarian assistance, borrowing from the Rheinland basin humanism of his birthplace, Schweitzer lived many lives at the same time, Arnold stresses, highlighting his principled belief in the sanctity of life. The “Great Doctor”, as he was known, the founder of Lambaréné hospital in Gabon and 1953 Nobel Peace Prize winner, “was first and foremost an original and brave preacher, a bold exegete of the New Testament and an acknowledged expert at interpreting Kant and Bach”. Apart from the generous support received from Europe and the United States, it was his literary works and hundreds of concerts he gave throughout Europe that would go towards funding much of his hospital.
A student of Charles-Marie Widor, organist of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, Schweitzer was encouraged by his teacher in 1905 to write a book about Bach and his work as Cantor of Leipzig. In it, he describes Bach as a “poet and painter in sound”, who gives great depth of meaning to the words accompanying his music, unlike Mozart, who was “purely a musician”, setting the words to a beautiful melody. “In general, we are tempted to play the tempi for harpsichord too quickly, but the tempi for the cantatas and Passions too slowly […). Therefore, although Bach’s tempi are not too far removed from a certain average tempo of modern music, this average tempo, on the other hand, must be broken down into its tiniest nuances”, he advises musicians.
Arnold reminds us that Schweitzer was also the author of a book about research into the life of Jesus, “Von Reimarus zu Wrede”, which is still in print and referred to 120 years after it first came out. “Armed with the thesis that Jesus believed in the imminent and supernatural coming of the kingdom of God, and that Jesus would hasten this with his suffering, Schweitzer explores [in the book] a century and a half of research from an eschatological standpoint, putting forward the traditional image of a moralising and sentimental Jesus”, the author writes. Schweitzer praises the writers who accept eschatological ideas of Jesus and criticises those who deny that the man from Nazareth could have shared the messianic expectations of his contemporaries or spiritualise his conceptions. Schweitzer is particularly critical of the “sweet Jesuses, beautiful Marys and lovely Galileans” of Ernest Renan, all “looted in the windows of the art galleries on place Saint-Sulpice”. He believes that Renan “did not live in the simple and pure world” of the New Testament and that “in order to feel at home in it, he had to perfume it with sentimentalism”. Arnold goes on to write that “Schweitzer forcefully stresses the difference between Jesus, whose views were informed by the Jewish conceptions of the time, and contemporary man: Jesus, he tells us, is not a master of morals who would be familiar to us. By putting this Jewish man from 2000 years ago into context, far from making him closer, historical research has amplified his irreducible otherness; admittedly, it ‘undid the ropes tying him for centuries to the rock of the teachings of the Church’, it was delighted to see him ‘come back to life’, ‘but instead of staying there, he passed before our era to return to his own’. In other words, the quest connected to the historico- critical model, which believed it was possible to come to the Jesus of history by liberating him from the gang of dogmas keeping him prisoner, has come to a dead end. Even so, there is nothing tragic about the fact that Jesus has ‘returned to his era’: the believer’s relationship with Jesus is of a ‘mystical’ rather than an historical nature”, according to Schweitzer, by which he means that “our experience is that his clear will enrich and invigorate our own and that we find ourselves in it”.
Preaching to his flock at Saint-Nicolas on 6 January 1907 in favour of the mission, Schweitzer observed that “our States, which we praise so much for their civilisation, do not behave in an at all civilised fashion towards others; quite the reverse, there are only predator States”, writes Arnold; Schweitzer took the view that “the only true civilisation is to live as a disciple of Jesus, a human being is always there as a human being, as somebody who is entitled to our assistance and our devotion”. He concluded on the theme of expiation, relating it to the repression of the uprising of the Herero people, then of the Nama in German South-West Africa (now Namibia), which is now considered the first genocide of the 20th century. Out of the 80,000 Herero before the war, there were only 15,000, just 4,000 of them men, in 1909, Arnold points out.
A few weeks later, Schweitzer spoke out against the “false disposition towards peace [which] dominates […] relations between the States” and nationalism: “the men of our time are Germans, French, Russians or Poles to each other, but they are no longer men. The division between peoples is deeper than ever […]. There is no question but that our era is on the wrong track, with […] false patriotism spreading everywhere, setting them against each other”. “In itself, the feeling of closely belonging to a people is something natural, beautiful and entirely moral”, he went on to say, that “in the people of our time, the love of the homeland has become a blind drive for power”.
In Bordeaux on 26 March 1913, Schweitzer and his wife, Hélène, boarded the Europe and set sail for equatorial Africa and Lambaréné. “Before very long, he was having to examine a dozen patients every day, even when his 70 cases of luggage were still in Port-Gentil”, the author writes. Very soon, the number of consultations increased, exceeding 30 to 40 cases a day. By the end of 1913, he had already treated “nearly two thousand sick people”. But European history would catch up with Mr and Mrs Schweitzer “on the fringes of the virgin forest”. “On the evening of 5 August [1914], they were notified that as German nationals [Alsace was German between 1871 and 1918: Ed], they were under arrest”, Arnold writes, going on to describe the various phases of the custody in which they were held for more than four years: after house arrest between November 1914 in October 1917, they were forced by the French authorities to board the Afrique, before being interned in the “Austro-German concentration camp” of Garaison, in the High Pyrenees, then, in late March 1918, at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, which was reserved for natives of Alsace and Lorraine who were considered to be “of uncertain attitude and dubious sentiment”. Finally, in the framework of an exchange of prisoners, the pair finally returned to Alsace, via Switzerland, on 19 July 1918.
On the eve of the armistice, with the French authorities engaged in a policy of purging – the author prefers to use the terms proscription and expulsion – Schweitzer, who had resumed his preaching duties in Strasbourg, delivered a first sermon that “does not ring like a cry of triumph, but with the accents of a confession of sins”. “Taking as his theme the soldiers who lost their lives in the fighting, without distinguishing between nationalities, he said ‘it is our fault they are dead […]. [Before the war] we held the mysterious and irreplaceable value of human life in too little regard’. For this reason, the dead ‘demand something of us’: ‘for the sanctity of life and human suffering – including the most humble and most obscure men – to be iron law governing the whole world!”, Arnold writes, adding that the “sanctity of life” would become “Schweitzer’s ethical watchword”. It would be at front and centre of one of his other major works, “La philosophie de la civilisation”, which was published in 1923.
But by April 1924, Schweitzer was back in Lambaréné, where he would build a new hospital, gradually becoming independent of the support of the Société des missions. Criticised, particularly in the late 1950s, by Western visitors who found it archaic, colonial, even insalubrious, this hospital was based on a model aiming to embed it fully into its environment. Instead of transposing the purely hospital structure of a building with different floors to Africa, Dr Schweitzer basically had cells built, mainly out of local materials, to house the sick and those accompanying them, thereby allowing them to take care of loved ones and, by helping out the hospital staff, contribute to the cost of caring for the patient, with a large area of land (80 ha) adjacent to the hospital being used as a plantation to grow food for all the “inhabitants” of the hospital village. Although wild animals or the state of cleanliness of the environment may on occasion have shocked certain Western visitors, the level of hygiene and permanent updating of instruments, medical techniques and drugs consistently gave the hospital success rates at least equivalent to those of the best hospital facilities in Europe. By 1927, the hospital was able to take 250 patients and this number continued to rise. Although most of the patients were treated for sleeping sickness, dysentery, leprosy or bilharzia, and surgical operations (700 in the year 1938 alone) frequently concerned hernias and cases of elephantiasis, the hospital would also develop a gynaecology service, with a maternity ward, and a form of “soft” treatment taking account of certain practices of the time on individuals presenting with mental illness. The authorities of Gabon, who have built a new hospital on the site, as also preserved hospital of Dr Schweitzer, where he died on 4 September 1965, and have tried, so far in vain (the last application dating from 2021) to have it recognised by UNESCO.
Albert Schweitzer also believed that “the main problem with colonisation” is the “application and […] protection of human rights”, according to Arnold. In 1928, he called for the creation of “more reasonable social relations than those we have at the moment” and listed seven rights to observe: (1) the right to somewhere to live; (2) the right to choose one’s own place of residence freely; (3) the right to land and enjoyment of its resources; (4) the right to the freedom of work and trade; (5) the right to the protection of laws and justice; (6) the right to live in the natural framework of a national organisation; (7) the right to education.
Although the Nobel Peace Prize 1952 (a year in which it was not awarded) was issued to him in 1953 for his humanitarian and medical work in Lambaréné, he would finally become involved in the following years in the fight against nuclear tests and weapons. In his Nobel Prize award acceptance speech on 4 November 1954, he warned his audience against new destructive powers liable to “cause disasters threatening humanity’s very existence”. In total, he would make three appeals against nuclear weapons, earning him much criticism from the United States and even triggering an FBI investigation into the Schweitzer Fellowship, the American organisation in support of the Lambaréné hospital, in 1957, which concluded only that it was indeed a purely humanitarian enterprise. Surprisingly, “Schweitzer’s anti-nuclear stance did not damage his popularity in the United States: although a persona non grata of the Eisenhower government, he was the Americans’ third most-admired person in the world at the end of 1958”, Arnold stresses. When he died, Martin Luther King wrote: “in Dr. Albert Schweitzer […] We have lost one of the brightest stars in the human firmament. His long and rich career as a scientist and benefactor of humanity is one of the epic sagas of the 20th century. It will inspire future generations. He was one of History’s rare generous souls who devote themselves to the good of others”. (Olivier Jehin)
Matthieu Arnold. Albert Schweitzer (available in French only). Fayard. ISBN: 978-2-2137-1163-8. 508 pages. €25,00