Background
Jaeger was born on July 30, 1888, in Lobberich, Niederrhein, Prussia (now Lobberich, Germany), the son of Karl August Jaeger, a businessman, and Helene Birschel. The family was Lutheran.
(Werner Jaeger's classic three-volume work, originally pub...)
Werner Jaeger's classic three-volume work, originally published in 1939, is now available in paperback. Paideia, the shaping of Greek character through a union of civilization, tradition, literature, and philosophy is the basis for Jaeger's evaluation of Hellenic culture. Volume I describes the foundation, growth, and crisis of Greek culture during the archaic and classical epochs, ending with the collapse of the Athenian empire. The second and third volumes of the work deal with the intellectual history of ancient Greece in the Age of Plato, the 4th century B.C.--the age in which Greece lost everything that is valued in this world--state, power, liberty--but still clung to the concept of paideia. As its last great poet, Menander summarized the primary role of this ideal in Greek culture when he said: "The possession which no one can take away from man is paideia."
https://www.amazon.com/Paideia-Ideals-Culture-Archaic-Greece/dp/0195004256?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0195004256
(The new and revolutionizing ideas which the early Greek t...)
The new and revolutionizing ideas which the early Greek thinkers developed about the nature of the universe had a direct impact upon their conception of what they called, in a new sense, 'God' or 'the Divine.' The history of the philosophical theology of the Greeks is thus the history of their rational approach to the nature of reality itself in its successive phases. The late Professor Jaeger's classic book traces this development from the first intimations in Hesiod of the theology that was to come, through the heroic age of Greek cosmological thought, down to the time of the Sophists of the fifth century B.C.
https://www.amazon.com/Theology-Early-Greek-Philosophers-Lectures/dp/1592443214?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1592443214
( This small book, the last work of a world-renowned scho...)
This small book, the last work of a world-renowned scholar, has established itself as a classic. It provides a superb overview of the vast historical process by which Christianity was Hellenized and Hellenic civilization became Christianized. Werner Jaeger shows that without the large postclassical expansion of Greek culture the rise of a Christian world religion would have been impossible. He explains why the Hellenization of Christianity was necessary in apostolic and postapostalic times; points out similarities between Greek philosophy and Christian belief; discuss such key figures as Clement, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa; and touches on the controversies that led to the ultimate complex synthesis of Greek and Christian thought.
https://www.amazon.com/Early-Christianity-Paidea-Werner-Jaeger/dp/0674220528?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0674220528
(Theological & Religious Studies, Philosophy, Greek Studies)
Theological & Religious Studies, Philosophy, Greek Studies
https://www.amazon.com/Theology-Early-Philosophers-Gifford-Lectures/dp/B0000CO3IO?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0000CO3IO
Jaeger was born on July 30, 1888, in Lobberich, Niederrhein, Prussia (now Lobberich, Germany), the son of Karl August Jaeger, a businessman, and Helene Birschel. The family was Lutheran.
At the age of eight Jaeger began Latin; at thirteen, Greek at the local Catholic gymnasium (now the Werner Jaeger Gymnasium). After a summer semester at Marburg (1907), Jaeger transferred to the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin (1907-1911), where he studied under Hermann Diels, Adolf Lasson, Eduard Norden, Johannes Vahlen, and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. The last won him for classical philology. His Berlin dissertation was Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Metaphysik des Aristoteles (1912).
Jaeger argued that the Metaphysics was not a systematic book but a collection of lectures. From this grew Aristoteles, Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung (1923), which perceived Aristotle's intellectual development as a gradual distancing from his teacher and colleague Plato. Jaeger's Habilitationsschrift, Nemesios von Emesa, studies in Neoplatonism and Posidonius, appeared in 1914. Later that year Jaeger assumed the chair of classical philology at the University of Basel, once held by Friedrich Nietzsche. The next year he went to Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, where he became a colleague of Eduard Fraenkel, Felix Jacoby, and Julius Stenzel. At the suggestion of Wilamowitz, Jaeger began his most enduring work, the critical edition of Gregory of Nyssa; the first two volumes appeared in 1921. The most important event in Jaeger's career occurred on March 12, 1921, when he was invited to succeed Wilamowitz at Berlin. Ability, diplomacy, and unexpected luck won him this position. His period of greatest influence coincided with his tenure of the chair (1921-1936). Alarmed at the decline of Greek and Latin, Jaeger fought to restore classical humanism to the center of German intellectual life. This struggle became known as the Third Humanism. As part of the effort, in 1925 he founded two journals, Die Antike, which he edited until 1936, and Gnomon, which was edited by his student Richard Harder. In the former, directed at the educated laity, Jaeger and his followers argued that many Greek ideals had an important bearing on modern life. He also founded Neue Philologische Untersuchungen (1926-1937), a monograph series in which his better students published their dissertations. The great document of the Third Humanism remains Jaeger's Paideia, a history of the Greek mind from Homer through Plato. The first volume appeared in Berlin in 1934. With the rise of National Socialism the Jaegers left Germany. In 1934 Jaeger became Sather Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. There he delivered lectures that were published as Demosthenes: The Origin and Growth of His Policy (1938). In 1936, Jaeger moved to the University of Chicago, to fill the chair of Paul Shorey, and in 1939 to Harvard. In 1943, he became a naturalized citizen. He retired in 1960. Jaeger wrote sadly in 1960 that to learn what classical scholarship was like in a culture where classical humanism did not exist, one must visit America. Classics were not an intellectual force in the United States, and American students could not compare with his German ones. Most colleagues seemed to Jaeger well-intentioned dilettantes. While in the United States, Jaeger produced three volumes of Paideia, translated into English by Gilbert Highet (1939-1944), The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (1947), the Oxford edition of Aristotle's Metaphysics (1957), Scripta Minora (1960), and Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (1961). There was also steady publication of volumes of Gregory of Nyssa by Jaeger and his associates. During Jaeger's lifetime Paideia was thought to be his great achievement. Jaeger died in Boston, on October 19, 1961.
(The new and revolutionizing ideas which the early Greek t...)
(Werner Jaeger's classic three-volume work, originally pub...)
( This small book, the last work of a world-renowned scho...)
(Theological & Religious Studies, Philosophy, Greek Studies)
Jaeger's American students found him a serene, gentle sage, withdrawn from the arena, with a twinkle in his eye and ever encouraging the deserving.
On March 28, 1914, Jaeger married Theodora Dammholz; they had three children. After a divorce from his first wife, Jaeger married Ruth Heinitz, a Jew, on December 29, 1931. They had one daughter.
He was a German-English philologist.
He was a German classical philologist and philosopher.
He was a German classicist and philologist.
