Why single out Albert Schweitzer, a humanitarian from the late 19th and early 20th centuries? The reference may seem quaint at first, and yet, on reflection, he is less so when seen as a precursor of today’s Médecins Sans Frontières.

His interpretation of the gospels in the light of his notion of “thoroughgoing eschatology” is, I believe, logically untenable and a serious mistake. But that’s really beside the point. The important thing is that his heart was in the right place. His preconceptions did not blind him to the meaning he clearly saw in the gospels: the call to action.

In the end, he didn’t have the means to fulfill his mission adquately, but then who does? And he may not have really understood the people he went to help. But his role was to set an example, and others have followed it.

Ironically, perhaps, his younger cousin Jean-Paul Sartre might have written his motto of Existentialism for him: Faire, et en faisant, se faire, et n’être rien que ce qu’on s’est fait. — Roughly: “In taking action, you become what you do, and you will be only what you’ve done.”

Be it noted parenthetically that Sartre’s “motto,” as he calls it, for existentialism, is prose poetry. It’s easier to understand in French than in English, even if one knows little more than basic grammar. Faire has a larger semantic field — range of meaning and usage — than any English equivalent.

The motto’s meaning is clear: people are what they do of their own free will and cannot be defined by their accidental qualities. Whether deliberately or inadvertently, Sartre echoes Galatians 3:28 and 1 Corinthians 12:13, which sketch out the principle of radical equality and universal humanity, an idea revolutionary in the Roman world, not to mention our own.