It was here, in the heart of equatorial Africa, where plants and animals and human beings fight for survival – that Dr Albert Schweitzer hit upon the phrase that summed up the philosophy he had sought for so long – Reverence for Life. Words that were to ring round the world for many years – that were taught in schools in practically every language under the sun – and indeed were to be the foundation and inspiration of the great humanitarian and ecological movements of the twentieth century.

This is how he described this crucial moment –

“For months on end I lived in a continual state of mental excitement. Without the least success I let my thoughts be concentrated, even all through my daily work at the hospital, on the connection between a positive view of the world and ethics. All that I had learnt from philosophy about ethics left me in the lurch. I felt like a man who has to build a new and better boat to replace a rotten one that’s no longer seaworthy, but does not know how to begin. I was wandering about in a thicket in which no path was to be found. I was leaning with all my might against an iron door which would not yield.

“While in this mental condition I had to undertake a longish journey on the river... to visit Madame Pelot, the ailing wife of a missionary, at N’Gomo, about 160 miles upstream. The only means of conveyance I could find was a small steamer, towing an over-laden barge, which was on the point of starting. Except myself, there were only Africans on board, but among them was Emil Ogouma, my friend from Lambarene. Since I had been in too much of a hurry to provide myself with enough food for the journey, they let me share the contents of their cooking pot.

“Slowly we crept upstream, laboriously feeling - it was the dry season - for the channels between the sandbanks. Lost in thought I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal conception of the ethical which I had not discovered in any philosophy. Sheet after sheet I covered with disconnected sentences, merely to keep myself concentrated on the problem. Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase, "Reverence for Life." The iron door had yielded: the path in the thicket had become visible”.

WHAT IS REVERENCE FOR LIFE?

Reverence for Life is a philosophy that says that the only thing we’re really sure of is that we live, and want to go on living. And this is something that we share with everything else that lives – from elephants to blades of grass. So we are brothers and sisters to all living things, and nothing else, neither race nor colour nor religion nor sex, should be more important than this one deepest, most extraordinary thing connecting us.

The whole world, indeed the whole universe, has evolved to give us life - you and me and the rest of the living world.

But only humans are aware of all this. This is some responsibility. Because we also have the ability to neglect, to destroy, to cause suffering and death. And indeed some suffering and death is inevitable. Even vegetarians can only survive by eating some living thing.

Reverence for Life is not some cranky and impossible commandment. It just says we must be aware of what we’re doing.

We must take responsibility for what we do when we harvest a crop of grain, when we eat the bread that’s made from it, when we grill a steak, when we kill a dangerous insect.

The key is awareness. Which makes us more alive.

For life is extraordinary. Every scientific advance tells us this. We now know the billion to one chances ever since the Big Bang that have enabled life to develop and then to survive on this planet, and the extreme rarity of it in the universe. More than ever, we have good reason to feel reverence for it.

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