FAQ - Frequently asked questions

Schweitzer was rarely, if ever, dogmatic about the application of Reverence for Life to concrete moral problems. He is often seriously misunderstood. Schweitzer was NOT a strict vegetarian, and he was NOT opposed to all animal research. What he emphasized was RESPONSIBILITY: "To the man who is truly ethical all life is sacred, including that which from the human point of view seems lower. Man makes distinctions...under the pressure of necessity, as for example, when it falls to him to decide which of two lives he must sacrifice in order to preserve the other. But all through this...he...knows that he bears the responsibility for the life that is sacrificed."

And specifically applying this to animal research:
"Those who test operations or drugs on animals, or who inoculate them with diseases so that they may be able to help human beings by means of the results thus obtained, ought never to rest satisfied with the general idea that their [work is...] performed in pursuit of a worthy aim. It is their duty to ponder in every separate case whether it is really and truly necessary thus to sacrifice an animal for humanity. They ought to be filled with anxious care to alleviate as much as possible the pain which they cause..."

There is a wonderful book edited by Ann Cottrell Free titled "Animals, Nature, and Albert Schweitzer" that includes many of Schweitzer's quotations on related subjects.

Q: On racist and anti-racist-sites I have found the following text:
This is what he said shortly before his death:
I have given my life to alleviate the sufferings of Africa. There is something that all white men who have lived here, must learn and know; that these individuals are a sub-race; they have neither the intellectual , mental or emotional abilities to equate or share in any of the functions of our civilisation.

"I have given my life to try to bring unto them the advantages which our civilisation must offer, but I have become well aware that we must retain this status; white, the superior, and they the inferior; for whenever a white man seeks to live among them as their equal, they will either destroy him or devour him, and they will destroy all his work; and so for any existing relationship or for any benefit to this people let white men from anywhere in the world who would come to help Africa remember that you must continually retain this status; you the master, and they the inferior, like children that you would help or teach. Never fraternise with them as equals, never accept them as your social equals ; or they will devour you; they will destroy you."- Dr. Albert Schweitzer, winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize for peace, in his 1961 book, From My African Notebook.

Answer: This quote is utterly false and is an outrageously inaccurate picture of Dr. Schweitzer’s view of Africans.  Dr. Schweitzer never said or wrote anything remotely like this.  It does NOT appear in the book African Notebook.  On the question of Schweitzer and race, my own comments from the Foreword to the current edition of African Notebook, are below.  


--Lachlan Forrow, MD
President, The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship (USA)
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Albert Schweitzer.
Few names from the 20th century conjure up such mythic images of superhuman achievement and even saintliness. Renowned in Europe before the age of 30 for his ground-breaking biblical studies, his book Quest of the Historical Jesus continues to influence New Testament scholars today, nearly a century after its original publication. An acclaimed musician, he was the organist for the Paris Bach Society, and his two volume study of Johann Sebastian Bach, still in bookstores today, has powerfully shaped the musical interpretations of contemporary artists such as Yo-Yo Ma.

Despite these extraordinary achievements, Albert Schweitzer remained uncomfortably unfulfilled. He ultimately chose to give up the prestige and relative comfort of his European life to begin studying, at the age of 30, to become a doctor. In 1913, at the age of 38, he and his new wife Hélène Bresslau, trained as a nurse, departed for French Equatorial Africa to create and lead a hospital at the mission station at Lambaréné.

During their first year of work, initially providing care in an abandoned chicken coop, they cared for nearly 2,000 patients. With the outbreak of World War I, however, they found themselves German citizens in a French colony, and by the end of the war they were incarcerated as prisoners of war in southern France. In 1924, Dr. Schweitzer returned to Africa, leaving Hélène and their 5-year-old daughter Rhena behind in Europe, because Hélène was suffering from poor health. He spent most of the next four decades of his life, until his death in Lambaréné in September of 1965, caring for individual patients, constructing an ever-expanding array of hospital buildings, continuing his philosophical and theological writings by kerosene lantern late at night, and rejuvenating his spirit and the spirits of those around him by playing his beloved Bach on the piano late into the African night. Honored with the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize, he dedicated much of the last decade of his life to campaigning for the abolition of all nuclear weapons, which Schweitzer considered humanity's most egregious insult to Reverence for Life. When he died, statesmen, scientists, musicians, and ordinary citizens throughout the world mourned the passing of one of their great heroes.

Beginning in the 1950's, however, an alternative and rather darker image of Schweitzer was painted by a small but significant number of detractors. As African nations and peoples threw off many of the chains of exploitative colonialism, these critics saw in Schweitzer a symbol of many of the sins of white Europeans working in Africa. Others condemned his village hospital as anachronistic and primitive, because it did not reflect the sparkling sanitary conditions of Europe and America's modern health care institutions.

Was Schweitzer a saint? Or a paternalistic racist? How should a critical thinker today even approach this question? Schweitzer himself offers us an approach in the preface to the doctoral dissertation he wrote for his medical degree, The Psychiatric Study of Jesus. Although he considered himself a disciple of Jesus, although (as he wrote his soul mate, Hélène Bresslau) he himself had chosen to go to Africa "to serve Jesus", Schweitzer did not shy away from asking the most radically probing questions, even about his Master.

Observing that contemporary writers had raised the question of whether Jesus, with his apocalyptic belief in the impending end of the world, was delusional, paranoid, or even "psychopathic", Schweitzer wrote:

Should it really turn out that Jesus' object world must be considered by the doctor as in some degree the world of a sick man, still this conclusion, regardless of the consequences that follow from it and the shock to many that would result from it, must not remain unuttered, since reverence for truth must be exalted above everything else. With this conviction I began to work, suppressing the unpleasant feeling of having to subject a great personality to psychiatric examination, and pondering the truth that what is great and profound in the ethical teachings of Jesus would retain its significance even if the conceptions in his world outlook and some of his actions had to be called more or less diseased.

As he had argued in Quest of the Historical Jesus, Schweitzer acknowledged that Jesus expected a Messianic Kingdom to arrive imminently and that at least in terms of historical time he was factually wrong. Nonetheless, Schweitzer concluded that such a mistaken belief was not in any way a matter of psychopathology, but rather the influence of "contemporary thought of the time" on Jesus' conceptual view of the world. In fact, Jesus' belief that historical time was nearing its end was, Schweitzer believed, directly related to his recognition and preaching of the most profound moral and spiritual truths: that concern for the Kingdom of God should guide one's life and that love of God and of one's neighbor have absolute priority over any material "treasures".

Just as Jesus was in part a product of his own time and its thinking, so too was Albert Schweitzer. And just as understanding Jesus' life and teachings requires interpreting them within the framework of his contemporary world view, so too for Schweitzer. For example, Schweitzer is often criticized for having stated, early in his career in Africa, that "the African is my brother, but he is my younger brother." To many of today's ears, this has an unmistakable ring of paternalism and even racist condescension. But for a white European in 1913, leaving fame and adulation behind in Europe to dedicate his life to service to Africans in desperate need, the insistence that "the African is my brother" expresses a spirit of radical solidarity that was far outside the mainstream of contemporary European culture.

Today's readers of the stories in this book will find that Schweitzer did often view the life and personality of Africans in the spirit of an "older" brother. Completed in 1938, these stories include passages and phrases that clearly reflect ways in which Schweitzer was a product of his 19th century European upbringing.

Nonetheless, later in his life Schweitzer was quoted as saying that "The time for speaking of older and younger brothers has passed." Far more important than any of Schweitzer's words are the terms upon which Schweitzer himself insisted that he be judged. As he repeatedly explained to others, "I went to Africa to make my life my argument." In numerous conversations I have had with Africans at and around the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, which continues to care for tens of thousands of patients each year, I have often raised the question of whether, at least by today's standards, Schweitzer might be considered a colonialist or perhaps even racist. Although a frequent response that I have had from my Gabonese friends has been a look of confusion or even bewilderment at the posing of the question, another common response has been sheer laughter. For these Africans, the moral core of Schweitzer's life and work is very simple: he gave up a privileged life in Europe to work for decades in hardship, offering every ounce of his energy and every fiber of his body to try to help alleviate the suffering of his African neighbors. Unlike many other "missionaries", he did not try to "win over" the souls of Africans for Christianity; he tried to heal their bodies and strengthen their spirits. Far from imposing European culture as a superior form of civilization, he instead built a "village hospital" modeled after local African villages, where patients and families could feel comfortably at home, supported by their own traditions.

Albert Schweitzer was not a saint; Albert Schweitzer was a human being, a man who was shaped by his historical era but nonetheless transcended it. If more individuals today were as far ahead of our time, morally and spiritually, as Schweitzer was of his own, then progress toward a world of true human solidarity, rooted in an ethic of Reverence for all Life, would accelerate rapidly.

Lachlan Forrow MD

Note on translation: Some of the most troubling and even offensive passages in Schweitzer's writings as they have appeared in English reflect problems or even frank errors in translation, rather than Schweitzer's own thoughts. Perhaps the most extreme in this regard are references by Dr. Schweitzer to Africans as "savages". In fact, although Schweitzer used several different German words to refer to his African neighbors, none of those would be translated as "savage" today, but rather as "black" or "native" or "primitive". The translation by Mrs. C.E.B. Russell of this book into English was published in 1939, and her use of the word "savage" is as mistaken and regrettable as it is offensive.

The following prayer is said to be from Schweitzer. He didn't write it, but it follows his ethic of "Reverence for Life"

Hear our humble prayer, O God, for our friends the animals,
especially for animals who are suffering;
for animals that are overworked, underfed and cruelly treated;
for all wistful creatures in captivity that beat their wings against bars;
for any that are hunted or lost or deserted or frightened or hungry;
for all that must be put death.
We entreat for them all Thy mercy and pity,
and for those who deal with them we ask a heart of compassion
and gentle hands and kindly words.
Make us, ourselves, to be true friends to animals,
and so to share the blessings of the merciful.

The following little prayer the little Albert used to pray every evening when his mother left his room:

O, heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath;
guard them from all evil,
and let them sleep in peace.

(From: Memories of Childhood and Youth)