Pilgrimage to Humanity by Schweitzer Albert;

Author:Schweitzer, Albert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

GOETHE

From the Goethe Prize Address, Delivered at Frankfort-am-Main, August 28, 1928

At the end of my days as a student, I reread by chance the description of the Harzreise in the winter of 1777. It struck me as wonderful that this man, whom we consider an Olympian, made his way through November mists and rain in order to visit and to try to bring spiritual help to a pastor’s son who was in spiritual distress. Again I discovered in the Olympian a profoundly simple man. I learned to love Goethe. Thus, when I had to render help to some man in the course of my life, I said myself, “This is your Harzreise.”

When life’s way led me to undertake a work far removed from my natural talents and distant from the vocation for which I had prepared, Goethe the comforter provided the words to help me. Even those who best understood me found fault with my decision to study medicine. I was not really prepared for this, they said. It was quixotic. I reflected that this venture would not perhaps have appeared so quixotic to the great man who permitted his Wilhelm Meister to become a surgeon in order to serve, although he was not prepared for it. And it struck me as something significant for all of us that Goethe, in his endeavor to understand human destiny, permits Faust and Wilhelm Meister to end their lives in thoroughly humble activities, through which they achieve humanity in the fullest sense.

As I began to prepare myself for this new vocation and service, I met Goethe again. In preparation for my medical career, I had to study natural science. I did it as a student but he as a man of research. How remote the natural sciences were from the intellectual achievements I planned before I entered my practical work! Then I remembered that Goethe had come back into the natural sciences from intellectual activities. It disturbed me that he lost himself in the natural sciences at the time when so much of what moved within him should have been given its final form. Now I was required to devote myself to the natural sciences, although my preoccupation had formerly been with intellectual matters. By this fortune I was, however, required to sound the depths of my nature. I discovered why Goethe surrendered himself in loyalty to natural sciences. It is a distinctive gain and an occasion of enlightenment for anyone immersed in intellectual work to confront facts which are to be reckoned with, not because he has imagined them, but simply because they exist. All thinking is strengthened when, forsaking preoccupation with imagined entities, it must work its way through reality. And when I experienced this “necessity of working one’s way through reality,” I was able to view the man who had made this movement before all of us.

When my trying student days had passed and I ventured forth as a doctor, I met Goethe again. This time I conversed with him in the primeval forest.

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