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.
Author
Jaeger attended school at Lobberich and at the Gymnasium Thomaeum in Kempen Jaeger studied at the University of Marburg and University of Berlin. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin in 1911 for a dissertation on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. His habilitation was on Nemesios of Emesa (1914). Only 26 years old, Jaeger was called to a professorship with chair at the University of Basel in Switzerland. One year later he moved to a similar position at Kiel, and in 1921 he returned to Berlin. Jaeger remained in Berlin until 1936, when he emigrated to the United States because he was unhappy with Adolf Hitler's regime. Jaeger expressed his veiled disapproval with Humanistische Reden und Vortraege (1937) and his book on Demosthenes (1938) based on his Sather lecture from 1934. Jaeger's messages were fully understood in German university circles; the ardent Nazi followers sharply attacked Jaeger. In the United States, Jaeger worked as a full professor at the University of Chicago from 1936 to 1939, at which time he moved to Harvard University to continue his edition of the Church father Gregory of Nyssa on which he started before World War I. Jaeger remained in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until his death. The Canadian philosopher James Doull was among his students at Harvard. Jaeger wrote two dissertations, one in Latin and one in German, on Aristotle's Metaphysics. Jaeger's edition of the Metaphysics was printed in 1957. Only two years after editing Gregory of Nyssa's Contra Eunomium (1921), Jaeger became famous with his groundbreaking study on Aristotle in 1923 which largely remained undisputed until the 1960s. Jaeger founded two journals: Die Antike (1925–1944) and the influential review journal Gnomon (since 1925). Jaeger was the editor of the church father Gregory of Nyssa, Gregorii Nysseni Opera, editing Gregory's major work Contra Eunomium (1921, 1960). This edition is a major scholarly achievement and the philological foundation of the current studies on the Cappadocian Fathers. Jaeger is perhaps best known for his multivolume work "Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture", an extensive consideration of both the earliest practices and later philosophical reflections on the cultural nature of education in Ancient Greece, which he hoped would restore a decadent early 20th century Europe to the values of its Hellenic origins. Jaeger's last lecture, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (1961) is a very impressive summary of his life's work covering Greek philology, philosophy and theology from Homer, the Presocratic philosophers, Plato to the Church Fathers, roughly a thousand years. Source
