The “Open Letters” about Goodness for the World

Abstract

The article is a preface to the translation of two Strasbourg sermons on reverence for life de­livered by Albert Schweitzer in the midst of a difficult time, harsh both for himself and the world. Schweitzer’s return from Africa and internment, the Paris Peace Conference and the eve of the Versailles Treaty went along with fear of new means of destruction. In Feb­ruary 1919 sermons, Schweitzer tries to rehabilitate Christian morality, which has been
reduced to nothingness. In response to Nietzsche’s “God is dead”, Dr. Schweitzer speaks of perception based on true reason and true heart, referring to the idea of a new whole Human­ity. The basis of the new ethics, the foundation of all morality, should be a mysterious and incomprehensible phenomenon of life and the noble feeling of reverence for it. When doctri­naire morality turns out to be helpless in the face of a real possibility that the mankind will be destructed by its own technical power, it is reverence for life that becomes the great and simple commandment, resisting the concept of a superman. Schweitzer’s ideas are in tune with the works of Russian philosophers (Vladimir Solovyov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Fyodorov), who urged to actively overcome death. In the second sermon, Schweitzer speaks of an ambivalent will to live, of temptations and deep contradictions of a moral conscious­ness that is forced to make a choice in favor of this or that life, of the need for active com­passion for all living beings. In the 1919 sermons, four years before the publication of Cul­ture and Ethics, Schweitzer focuses on the ethical issue, and the first two ones, delivered in February, embody his principle of reverence for life.