I Am a Strange Loop

Although I seldom attach much weight to the etymologies of words, I was delighted to notice, when preparing a lecture on these ideas a few years ago, that the word “magnanimity”, which for us is essentially a synonym of “generosity”, originally meant, in Latin, “having a great soul” (animus meaning “soul”). It gave me much pleasure to see this familiar word in a new light, thanks to this X-ray. (And then, to my surprise, in preparing this book’s rather fanatical index, I discovered that “Mahatma” — the title of respect usually given to Gandhi — also means “great soul”.) Another appealing etymology is that of “compassion”, which comes from Latin roots meaning “suffering along with”. These hidden messages echoing down the millennia stimulated me to explore this further.

The Magnanimity of Albert Schweitzer

My personal paragon for great-souledness is the theologian, musician, writer, and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, who was born in 1875 in the tiny village of Kaysersberg in Alsace (which was then part of Germany, even though my beloved old French encyclopedia Le Petit Robert 2, dating from exactly one century later, claims him as français!), and who became world-famous for the hospital that he founded in 1913 in Lambaréné, Gabon, and where he worked for over fifty years.

Already at a very young age, Schweitzer identified with others, felt pity and compassion for them, and wanted to spare them pain. Where did this empathic generosity come from? Who can say? For example, on his very first day at school, six-year-old Albert noticed that he had been decked out by his parents in fancier clothes than his schoolmates, and this disparity disturbed him greatly. From that day onward, he insisted on dressing just like his poorer schoolmates.

A vivid excerpt from Schweitzer’s autobiographical opus Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit portrays the compassion that pervaded his life:

As far as I can peer back into my childhood, I suffered from all the misery that I saw in the world around me. I truly never knew a simple, youthful joie de vivre, and I believe that this is the case for many children, even if from the outside they give the appearance of being completely happy and carefree.

In particular, I was tormented by the fact that poor animals had to endure such great pain and need. The sight of an old, limping horse being dragged along by one man while another man beat it with a stick as it was being driven to the Colmar slaughterhouse haunted me for weeks. Even before I entered school, I found it incomprehensible that in my evening prayer I was supposed to pray only for the sake of human beings. And so I secretly spoke the words to a prayer that I had made up myself. It ran this way: “Dear God, protect and bless everything that breathes, keep it from all evil, and let it softly sleep.”

Schweitzer’s compassion for animals was not limited to mammals but extended all the way down the spectrum to such lowly creatures as worms and ants. (I say “all the way down” and “lowly” not to indicate disdain, but only to suggest that Schweitzer, like nearly all humans, must have had a “consciousness cone”, vaguely like mine on page 19. Such a mental hierarchy can just as easily give rise to a sense of concern and responsibility as to a sense of disdain.) He once remarked to a ten-year-old boy who was about to step on an ant, “That’s my personal ant. You’re liable to break its legs!” He would routinely pick up a worm he saw in the middle of a street or an insect flailing in a pond and place it in a field or on a plant so that it could try to survive. Indeed, he commented rather bitterly, “Whenever I help an insect in distress, I do so in an attempt to atone for some of the guilt contracted by humanity for its crimes against animals.”

As is well known, Schweitzer’s simple but profound guiding principle was what he termed “reverence for life”. In the address delivered when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1953, Schweitzer declared:

The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret… It has come to believe that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to human beings.

The following anecdote, also from Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit, is particularly revealing. In the springtime, with Easter approaching, little Albert, seven or eight years old, had been invited by a comrade — a comrade-in-arms, quite literally! — to go on an adventure of killing birds with slingshots that they had just made together. Looking back at this turning point in his life from the perspective of many decades later, Schweitzer recalls: