He was such an accomplished musician, that in 1905 he was invited to play for the king and queen of Spain. Philosophers never took him seriously as an ethicist, although few who call themselves ethicists today would be willing to put their whole lives in the service of their beliefs, as he did.Īs a young man, he studied theology and music, becoming an expert in the study and restoration of historic church organs. His legacy is not carried forward by an army of scientists or a whole nation of a billion people. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”Īlbert Schweitzer is not much remembered today. “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. Thinking back to the world they inhabited and formed, one is reminded of that great line in the script to Graham Greene’s Third Man, where Harry Lime says: It was an age whose protagonists built and destroyed empires, erected cathedrals of science, and dedicated their lives to almost inhuman levels of altruism – and all that over lifetimes that included the two most terrible and inhuman wars that history had ever seen. In many ways, he was a son of his time, contemporary to others who seem larger than life: he was born right between Gandhi, who was six years older, and that other Albert, the physicist Einstein, four years his younger. (Albert Schweitzer, Civilisation and Ethics) ”Īlbert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was a medical doctor, protestant theologian, musician and philosopher – an almost mythical presence of a man.
“Ethics is nothing other than Reverence for Life.
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