Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) was much more than a man of many talents, however awesome these may still appear to his admirers. But he is also now much less than the icon of European civilisation he appeared to many at the height of his celebrity in the 1940s and ’50s. In Britain (unlike in Germany) it seems he now has little name recognition among those under sixty. So the question of James Carleton Paget at the end of this quite magnificent work of scholarship, ‘Why bother with Albert Schweitzer?’, might be changed to whether. The medical missionary to the Gabon, a French colony in equatorial Africa (the Congo) that originated in blocking slave traders, is so remote from a post-colonial age that the excitement and admiration Schweitzer excited in primary schoolchildren a few decades ago is scarcely intelligible. His attitude to the indigenous population he served was of its time and is now intolerable. His books on Bach are still of interest to some musicologists, but his expertise on organ-building and his involvement as a mediator between German and French culture in helping Widor set up the Paris Bach Society have only biographical interest – and we cannot now hear his notable concert-playing to raise money for his hospital. His books on Paul remain of interest to New Testament scholars, and The quest of the historical Jesus (1906, English 1910, new edition 2000) is a great book, and parts of it still a delight to read; how far he was right about either Jesus or Paul remains a question. Schweitzer’s ‘reverence for life’ ethics is becoming more attractive as the environment becomes a central concern, even though this is hardly ‘a necessity of thought’. His philosophy of civilisation deserves more attention than it has received, whereas his books on Indian and Chinese religion are those of a gifted amateur with an eye to the main points, but dependent on translations and secondary sources.

Carleton Paget’s magisterial book provides us with materials to deepen our reflection on all these issues. The product of many years’ research alongside a productive career as a Cambridge New Testament scholar, it is soaked in the primary sources, an enormous oeuvre, some of it now available in ten handsome volumes, the Beck edition (1995–2005) of Werke aus dem Nachlass, and in other collections. The voluminous secondary literature, mostly in German but including the more accessible 2016 collection that Carleton Paget edited with Michael Thate, is sometimes quoted at length and much of it judiciously assessed. It is hard to disagree with any of Carleton Paget’s judgements on other scholars or with his occasional reservations about Schweitzer’s self-belief. A careful use of three volumes of Schweitzer’s correspondence (1901–12) with his future wife, Helene Bresslau, published in 2005–11, allows fresh insights into Carleton Paget’s subject’s thinking and feelings.

It is hard to overstate what this intellectual biography achieves, and yet it is not (quite) in the form originally planned. Instead, 158 pages of clearly subsectioned introductory survey (with 735 footnotes) provide a shorter version of that biography and are followed by nine chapters on particular themes. Eight of these, which include the conclusion, are substantial revisions of previous publications from 2006 to 2021 (pp. 159–498). This format has advantages, inviting readers to explore further what most concerns them, and gives the author opportunity to take his own assessments further. It is unsurprising that what must now be the standard work on Schweitzer was written by a New Testament scholar who is a more accomplished theologian than most of his guild, and more sympathetic to Schweitzer’s liberal theology than some of his anglophone colleagues.

As one whose admiration for the medical missionary goes back to infant school, and whose interest in the history of research was kindled by the Quest, but who disagrees with Schweitzer’s picture of Jesus and part of his Paul, my own testimony to the value of this book is to confess that its chapter on the 1913 edition of the Quest alerted me to much I had never noticed, and the chapter on Schweitzer and Harnack compelled me to think again, and more positively, about that now underestimated representative of Wilhelmine historical theology. Others will be more stimulated by chapter vi, on Schweitzer, Judaism and the Jews, which faces the question of his public silence about Nazism despite his private abhorrence and his wife’s being half-Jewish. That contrasts with his very public stance on atomic weapons.

Schweitzer preferred to call himself a philosopher rather than a theologian in any confessional sense. His first doctorate was on Kant’s Religionsphilosophie (1899), and more traditional theologians, even liberals, will find his Christian humanism inadequate. But he remained a Lutheran clergyman all his adult life, loved preaching and enjoyed his few years in charge of the Strasbourg theological college (Stift) educating ordinands. The book gives all that due weight, and chapter iv on ‘aspects of his piety’ is key because Schweitzer’s philosophy is perhaps only fully persuasive if combined with a religious standpoint. His ‘life and thought’ make less sense apart from that deep piety. If it makes some disinclined to ‘bother’ with him now, it could nevertheless have more to say to others than it did in his own lifetime.

Schweitzer’s biography remains ‘compelling to some as a tale of self-abnegation for the sake of moral action’ (p. 479). It will outlive his detractors, and his thought will continue to stimulate some who think his historical work questionable but his religious philosophy worth revisiting, and this ‘stranger and enigma’ to his own time admirable. Perhaps his greatest claim on our attention in dark times again today is as a prophet who, like Nietzsche but without the bad bits, saw the abyss into which Europe was moving, and suggested ways out of it. The will to power is replaced by a will to love, and Schweitzer transmuted the pessimism he rejected in his mentor Schopenhauer into an optimism based on the example and spirit of Jesus. As a historian he was probably mistaken in thinking the historical Jesus disillusioned. We cannot know, but some theologians learned from Schweitzer the limits of historical study, and found their own priorities confirmed by his life and work. His early resolution to devote himself to a university career until he was thirty, and then to prioritise more direct action, yielded more theological fruit than he perhaps expected. Some of his more important seeds are still germinating. This book provides invaluable fertiliser, and Mohr Siebeck deserves credit for making its WUNT series available complete online.