Great Man in the Jungle

Who is the "greatest man in the world today?" Abraham Aaron Roback, onetime Harvard instructor, thinks he knows. Roback has never seen him, but for five years he has been working on a book to honor him, "a man without parallel, in our generation." The great man's name: Albert Schweitzer.

Last week Roback published the Albert Schweitzer Jubilee Book in a limited edition of 1,050 copies. It included essays by Roback and 22 other scholars, many of them topflight,* who largely share Roback's admiration--though not to his worshipful extent--for Albert Schweitzer.

The book hardly tries to prove that Schweitzer is the world's greatest living man. But it does give recognition to a little-known "scholar's scholar." At 30, Albert Schweitzer decided to relinquish his honors as Europe's No. 1 authority on Bach, and as an organist and organ-builder, theologian, philosopher, historian, preacher, teacher and author--to live out his life, and live his faith, in French Equatorial Africa. There, 41 years later, he is still at work.

Mastery without Talent. Albert Schweitzer, an Alsatian, was the son and grandson of schoolteachers and Evangelical ministers. At nine he played the organ in church, later studied in Paris under the great organist Charles Marie Widor. By his teens he had developed a fascination for "mastering subjects for which I had no special talent," and frequently read the clock around.

On maneuvers in 1894 as a German Army conscript, Schweitzer carried a Greek Testament in his pack, and germinated the "eschatological interpretation of Jesus" (later published as The Quest of the Historical Jesus) that won him his first theological notice. Schweitzer's thesis: Jesus shared the Jewish Messianic expectation that the world was soon coming to an end, to be followed by a supernatural Kingdom of God. Since it did not, Schweitzer reasoned, Jesus must have been capable of error. Schweitzer advised liberal Protestantism to discard the infallible "Christ personality of dogma"--without discarding the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount, which he hailed as the charter of a great ethical faith.

By the time he was 24, Schweitzer had published a volume on Immanuel Kant, earned two doctorates (theology and philosophy) at Strasbourg University, and become a curate. His superiors had to order him to preach for a full 20 minutes when parishioners complained that Schweitzer just "stopped speaking when he found he had nothing more to say." As a sideline, he wrote (in French) a definitive study of Bach, and rewrote it from scratch in German, because the idea of mere translation bored him.

Mute as a Carp. One sunny summer morning in his Alsace home, he resolved to seek the meaning in the words of Jesus: "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it." A Paris missionary magazine turned his mind to Africa.

But the missionary society would send out no minister who did not fulfill its doctrinal requirements. Schweitzer volunteered to go as a doctor, and to keep "muet comme une carpe" (mute as a carp). Patiently, Schweitzer settled down to study medicine for seven years--without abandoning his other pursuits, and even adding a few (editing, with Widor, five volumes of Bach's organ music).

Before sailing for Africa, on Good Friday, 1913, 38-year-old Albert Schweitzer married Helene Bresslau, an Alsatian Jewess who had studied nursing "so you cannot go without me." At Lambarene, several days' journey up the Ogowe River, the Schweitzers pitched camp.

From a leafy amphitheater above the half-roofed, abandoned henhouse he used as a hospital, natives watched Dr. Schweitzer's first hernia operation. Soon word spread through the jungle about the white Oganga (medicine man) who could kill a native, cut him open and then bring him back to life with no pain in his belly. Africans with malaria, leprosy, sleeping sickness, hernia, elephantiasis and dysentery trooped in from 400 kilometers around.

Black Brother's Keeper. Says Schweitzer: "Have we white people the right to impose our rule on primitive and semi-primitive peoples. . . ? No, if we only want to rule over them and draw material advantage from their country. Yes, if we seriously desire to educate them and help them to attain to a condition of well-being."

But white men, too, live on a level far below their capacities. "The spirit of our age . . . is filled with disdain for thinking. . . . The organized political, social and religious associations of our time are at work to induce the individual man [to take his convictions] ready made [as] electric advertisements exercise pressure on him to buy their boot polish or their soup tablets."

In World War I, the French seized Schweitzer in Africa as an enemy alien, interned him in the Pyrenees. In prison, he wrote a philosophy of civilization, shadow-played the organ at a table to keep his fingers and footwork limber, acted as doctor and preacher, and picked the brains of a polyglot crew of interned scholars, merchants and artisans because there were no books around for him to read. Schweitzer got back to Lambarene in 1924, found that ants and the jungle had destroyed his hospital. He started all over again. In World War II the French left him alone.

Today Lambarene boasts three doctors, six European nurses, ten African assistants, 300 hospital beds, a lying-in ward and an asylum for the insane (whom the natives used to drown). Medicine, supplies and money reach the mission from the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, a small but energetic world organization of his admirers.

Last week the debilitating rainy season was nearing an end in Lambarene. News of the far-off publication of Roback & Co.'s eulogy had not yet reached the hulking, walrus-mustached, 71-year-old subject. Schweitzer, "still passably robust," was--when last heard from--busy playing Bach on his ant-proof piano-organ, treating and teaching the Africans, and writing his 21st book.

* Among the contributors: Theologian J. S. Bixler, president of Maine's Colby College; Harvard's Biblical Scholar Kirsopp Lake; Negro Sociologist W. E. B. DuBois.

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