All Scholars

Werner Jaeger, author of pioneer studies of Aristotle's development, of synthetic interpretive works on Greek culture, and of a monumental critical edition of the Greek Church father Gregory of Nyssa, was, it is generally agreed, the most influential classical scholar in Germany during the period between the world wars and in America thereafter. At Berlin he studied under Hermann Diels, Adolf Lasson, Eduard Meyer, Eduard Norden, Wilhelm Schulze, Johannes Vahlen, and, above all, the master of the field, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, as well as under the theologians Adolf von Harnack and Karl Holl, combining an interest from the very beginning in philology, history, philosophy, and theology. His doctoral dissertation clarified the kind of work which Aristotle's Metaphysics is— non-literary, esoteric, intended for the school and not for publication. In 1923 this interpretation was extended into a book covering almost the entire corpus of Aristotle's writing and tracing Aristotle's gradual intellectual development from his student years under Plato. In particular Jaeger reconstructed the lost dialogues of Aristotle, which belonged to that early period when Aristotle was under the influence of Plato; and Aristotle now emerged as a Platonist who had only gradually moved away from the philosophic views of his teacher. After holding the chair of Nietzsche at Basel and teaching for six years at Kiel, Jaeger was appointed at the age of 33 to the chair held by his great teacher Wilamowitz. While he was teaching at Berlin, it is fair to say that he was the most influential classics professor in Germany. Among his outstanding pupils were Harald Fuchs, Richard Harder, Hermann Langerbeck, Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Friedrich Solmsen, and Richard Walzer. After a failed attempt to live with National Socialism, in 1936 Jaeger came to the conclusion that life under Hitler was unbearable (one major ingredient in this decision was the fact that his wife was part-Jewish and he had either to divorce her or be fired) and accepted a professorship at Chicago to succeed Paul Shorey. The most important synthetic work which emerged from his years in Berlin was the first volume of Paideia, where he presented Greek culture in romantic, heroic terms. This work, according to Jaeger himself, was motivated by the crisis which he felt was facing the humanistic-cultural tradition of his day. For Jaeger paideia was the synthesis of thought and values, of poetry and philosophy, of history and action. He portrayed Greek paideia as an aristocratic, educational, humanistic idea. "Other nations," he said, "made gods, kings, spirits; the Greeks alone made men." It was his deepfelt belief that the Promethean urge to fashion men had its origins in Greek antiquity and that it remains the source of all classical scholarship. But his vast and sweeping generalizations always grew out of minutely comprehended texts, long passages of which he had committed to memory. Jaeger was not interested in the history of philosophic systems (as was Zeller, for example), but in the history of ideas. He treated Greek philosophy in the context of its historical setting, and in its relation to science, religion, education, law, and politics. Though Paideia was regarded during his lifetime as Jaeger's magnum opus, Jaeger himself devoted his energies, especially during his last years, to presenting a new edition, in effect an editio princeps so far as scholarship was concerned, of Gregory of Nyssa, in the belief that the Greek Church fathers, notably Gregory, continued directly the Greek tradition of paideia—a thesis which he pursued in his last book. Jaeger's interest in Christian paideia had started with the publication of his Nemesios von Emesa in 1914, which deals with the adoption of the Greek scientific tradition in a framework of Christian anthropology. Indeed, Jaeger saw a direct line of continuity from the pre-Socratics to the origins of the Platonic-Christian philosophy of the Greek Church fathers.