Albert Schweitzer - Essential Writings by Albert Schweitzer

Author:Albert Schweitzer
Language: eng
Format: epub

The only possible way out of the present chaos is for us to adopt a worldview which will bring us once more under the control of the ideals of true civilization which are contained in it.

Even we Europeans have only in the course of time and through a change in our worldview arrived at our will to progress. In antiquity and in the Middle Ages there was nothing more than attempts at it. Greek thinking does try to reach a worldview of world- and life-affirmation, but it fails in the attempt and ends in resignation. The worldview of the Middle Ages is determined by the ideas of primitive Christianity as brought into harmony with Greek metaphysics. It is fundamentally world- and life-negating because the interest of that stage of Christianity was concentrated on a super-sensible world. All that in the Middle Ages made itself felt as world- and life-affirmation is a fruit of the active ethic contained in the preaching of Jesus and of the creative forces of the fresh and unspoiled new peoples on whom Christianity had imposed a worldview which was in contradiction to their nature.

Then little by little the world- and life-affirmation that was already germinating among the peoples formed as a result of the Volkerwanderung (the Great Migration) begins to manifest itself. The Renaissance proclaims its rejection of the world-and life-negating worldview of the Middle Ages. And an ethical character is given to this new world- and life-affirmation by its taking over from Christianity the ethic of love taught by Jesus. This, as an ethic of activity, is strong enough to throw off the worldview of life- and world-negation in which it arose, to unite itself with the new world- and life-affirmation, and thereby to reach the ideal of realizing a spiritual and ethical world within the natural world.

The striving for material and spiritual progress, then, which characterizes the peoples of modern Europe, has its source in the worldview to which these peoples have come. As a result of the Renaissance and the spiritual and religious movements bound up with it, men have entered on a new relation to themselves and to the world, and this has aroused in them a need to create by their own activities spiritual and material values which shall help to a higher development of individuals and of mankind. It is not the case that the man of modern Europe is enthusiastic for progress because he may hope to get some personal advantage from it. He is less concerned about his own condition than about the happiness which he hopes will be the lot of coming generations. Enthusiasm for progress has taken possession of him. Impressed by his great experience of finding the world revealed to him as constituted and maintained by forces which carry out a definite design, he himself wills to become an active, purposeful force in the world. He looks with confidence towards new and better times which shall dawn for mankind, and learns by experience that the

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