Out of My Life and Thought by Albert Schweitzer

First published:Aus meinem Leben und Denken, 1931 (English translation, 1933)

Edition(s) used:Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography, translated by C. T. Campion. New York: Henry Holt, 1933

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Autobiography; meditation and contemplation

Core issue(s): Conscience; devotional life; ethics; life; love; morality; mysticism; religion; service; truth

Overview

Albert Schweitzer’s Out of My Life and Thought is a spiritual autobiography in that it is both an account of spiritual progress and an expression of it. His book could very well have been entitled “Out of My Thought, My Life,” for the thinking he calls “elemental” concerns itself with the fundamental conditions and opportunities of life and is itself an expression of the will-to-live. It is Schweitzer’s thesis, exemplified in the course of his creative life of service, that elemental thought, in aiming at truth, effects a transition from the will-to-life to the will-to-love. His autobiography is an account spiritualized by just such a process—a course of fundamental thinking leading to the will-to-love and, accordingly, to a religion of love that proves itself in life-affirming service to others.

A gifted organist, philosopher, theologian, pastor, and writer, Schweitzer decided, at the age of thirty, to become a medical doctor and to devote his life to the service of natives of equatorial Africa. He had conceived the idea during his days as a student, and he reports that “It struck me as incomprehensible that I should be allowed to lead such a happy life, while I saw so many people around me wrestling with care and suffering.” At Gunsbach in 1896, while on holiday away from the university at Strassburg, Schweitzer decided that he would be justified in living until he was thirty for science and art, and then should devote the remainder of his life to the “direct service of humanity.” His decision to become a doctor and to serve in Africa was prompted in the autumn of 1904 by his reading an article on the needs of the Congo mission, published in a magazine of the Paris Missionary Society. A few months later, on his thirtieth birthday, January 14, 1905, he decided on equatorial Africa as his place of service and, despite the opposition of his friends and relatives, began planning to enter medical college. He persevered despite being told that he was throwing away his many talents in order to bury himself in the jungle. He writes that “it moved me strangely to see them [people who passed for Christians] so far from perceiving that the effort to serve the love preached by Jesus may sweep a man into a new course of life.”

Schweitzer’s account of his life experience (to 1931, when he still had thirty-four years to live) alternates reports of significant events in his life with reviews of his thoughts and commitments. It becomes apparent as one reads that the events of his life stimulated thought, thought gave rise to commitment, and commitment showed itself in action. The thesis he argues is proved in the life he led.

While at Strassburg studying philosophy and theology, Schweitzer undertook an inquiry that later assumed the title Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesus Forschung (1906; The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1910). Schweitzer’s studies led him to the conclusion that Jesus accepted the late-Jewish Messianic worldview involving the imminent end of the world and the establishment of the kingdom of God. The idea that Jesus held views later shown to be false is repugnant to many Christians, Schweitzer points out, but he argues that the religion of love that Jesus taught need not be dependent upon the worldview in which it first appeared. Although we cannot accept the dogma involved in the late-Jewish Messianic expectation, Schweitzer writes, “the spirituality which lies in this religion of love must gradually, like a refiner’s fire, seize upon all ideas which come into communication with it,” and hence, he concludes, “it is the destiny of Christianity to develop through a constant process of spiritualization.” The religion of love persists whatever the prevailing Weltanschauung of any particular period; the spiritual and ethical truth continues to be influential whatever temporal view may clothe it.

Schweitzer and his wife arrived in Lambaréné in the spring of 1913, and the construction of the jungle hospital began. The intensive medical work was interrupted the following year with the beginning of the war in Europe. The Schweitzers were interned at the Lambaréné mission-station, and on the second day of their internment Schweitzer began work on a problem that had occupied his mind for a number of years—the problem of civilization. The product of his labors was to be published under the title Kulturphilosophie (The Philosophy of Civilization, 1946), but not until its completion in 1923, when the first two volumes were published.

Having called into question the common opinion that humankind naturally develops in the direction of progress, Schweitzer sought to resolve the problem of restoring civilization. Having realized that “the catastrophe of civilization started from a catastrophe of world-view,” he explored the idea of civilization itself. His conclusion was that “the essential element in civilization is the ethical perfecting of the individual and of society as well,” that the “will to civilization is . . . the universal will to progress which is conscious of the ethical as the highest value of all.” The worldview that is required, then, is one that consists in an ethical affirmation of the world and life. What is needed is “an act of the spirit” whereby progress is understood to be internal, not external; spiritual, not material; life-and world-affirming, not negating.

What Schweitzer sought in order to complete his basic idea of the conditions of true civilization was a fundamental truth, an “elementary and universal conception of the ethical,” that would enable the connection between a spiritual worldview and civilization to be realized. For months he grappled with the problem, but it was not until he was traveling upstream on the Ogowe River to visit the ailing wife of a missionary that he suddenly conceived the answer: “Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase ’Reverence for Life.’”

What is Reverence for Life? Schweitzer asks, and in response he suggests that we look away from the manifold, the product of thought and knowledge, and turn attention to the immediate fact of consciousness, the assertion, “I am life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live.” Life-affirmation, Schweitzer writes, is a “spiritual act” by which a person becomes devoted to life with reverence “in order to raise it to its true value.”

A “thinking” being, Schweitzer insists, is one who gives to every life the same reverence given one’s own. Thus, such a being “accepts as being good: to preserve life, to promote life, to raise to its highest value life which is capable of development; and as being evil: to destroy life, to injure life, to repress life which is capable of development.” This principle, stemming from the will-to-live, is the fundamental principle of morality. “The Reverence for Life, therefore,” Schweitzer concludes, “. . . contains world-and life-affirmation and the ethical fused together.” The spiritual and ethical perfection of humanity becomes the highest ideal.

Schweitzer concludes that the solidarity with all life cannot completely be brought about, for each human being “is subject to the puzzling and horrible law of being obliged to live at the cost of other life, and to incur again and again the guilt of destroying and injuring life.” The thinking, ethical being, Schweitzer adds, “strives to escape whenever possible from this necessity.”

The discovery of and commitment to the reverence for life enabled Schweitzer to complete the first two volumes of his Philosophy of Civilization: Verfall und Wiederaufbau der Kultur (1923; The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, 1946) and Kultur und Ethik (1923; Civilization and Ethics, 1946). Schweitzer bemoaned the modern renunciation of thinking. Elemental thinking shows that the will to truth must involve the will to sincerity, and the will to sincerity and truth leads to the reverence for life, which contains within itself resignation (one sees the world as it is, with all its suffering), world-and life-affirmation (one thinks through to a solidarity with other wills-to-live), and the ethical (the call for action issued by love).

Schweitzer describes the worldview that involves reverence for life as an “ethical mysticism.” He contends that rational thinking, “if it goes deep, ends of necessity in the non-rational of mysticism.” The essential element in Christianity, then, as preached by Jesus, is that “it is only through love that we can attain to communion with God. All living knowledge of God rests upon this foundation: that we experience Him in our lives as Will-to-Love.”

Christian Themes

Schweitzer believed that religion of love Jesus taught makes it clear that ethics is the essence of religion. It is the destiny of Christianity to develop through a process of spiritualization made evident in the religion of love. Christians must bring themselves into spiritual relation with the world and become one with it through active service out of a reverence for life. Elemental thought that penetrates to the nature of things leads to a world-and life-affirmation that stems from an ethics based on the will-to-live and, accordingly, on a reverence for all life. We experience God in our lives as the will-to-love.

Sources for Further Study

Cousins, Norman. Albert Schweitzer’s Mission: Healing and Peace. New York: Norton, 1985. Part 1 is an adaptation of Cousins’s Dr. Schweitzer of Lambaréné (1960) and provides a sensitive and sympathetic portrait based on a visit Cousins made to the jungle hospital; part 2 contains previously unpublished correspondence involving Schweitzer, Jawaharlal Nehru, Dwight Eisenhower, Nikita Krushchev, John F. Kennedy, and Cousins, centering on Schweitzer’s effort to awaken world consciousness to the catastrophic dangers of nuclear war.

Joy, Charles R., ed. Albert Schweitzer: An Anthology. 1947. Enlarged ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1956. Joy has edited an excellent and moving anthology drawn from Schweitzer’s most effective writings. It includes a chronological summary of Schweitzer’s life (to 1956) and a bibliography.

Schweitzer, Albert. Civilization and Ethics. Part 2 of The Philosophy of Civilization. Translated by C. T. Campion. New York: Macmillan, 1929. The central spiritual and ethical philosophy is here developed at length.

Schweitzer, Albert. On the Edge of the Primeval Forest. Published with The Forest Hospital at Lambaréné. Translated by C. T. Campion. New York: Macmillan, 1948. Schweitzer’s African reminiscences, dealing in part with the problems of colonization among primitive peoples.

Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede. Translated by W. Montgomery. New York: Macmillan, 1945. Insisting on Jesus’ messianic worldview, Schweitzer calls attention to his religion of love.