Werner Jaeger

William M. Calder III. Preface in Werner Jaeger Reconsidered. Illinois Classical Studies (1992)

Werner Jaeger (1888-1961) held the chairs of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, and Paul Shorey. A University Professorship, above all departments and requiring small teaching and no administrative obligations, was created for him at Harvard University. He enjoyed the finest education available in the history of classical studies. He founded two journals and what Eduard Spraigner first called "The Third Humanism." He published widely in the fields of Greek education and philosophy and the Greek church fathers. He stressed Christianity as the continuation of Hellenism rather than its destroyer. His students included men of the rank of Richard Harder, Viktor Pöschl, and Wolfgang Schadewaldt. Today what was acclaimed as his most famous work is read only by dilettantes too naive to perceive its defects. The Third Humanism has become a passing fashion, an aberration of the dying Weimar Republic, of as little abiding influence as its rival the George Circle. His name is rarely cited in the footnotes of the learned. Modern students of his own subject no longer recognize his name.

[...] C. H. Kahn remarked at the end of the conference, "I came admiring him; I departed pitying him." This was the feeling of most of us. Similar reactions were evoked at the Eduard Norden conference held in Bad Homburg in June 1991. The gulf between the ideals professed by Jaeger as the prophet of the Third Humanism and the petty compromises and betrayals that his Sitz im Lebel elicited from him caused difficulties for some. Ten years ago when I published with her permission Wilamowitz' Latin Autobiography, the nonagenarian Schwester Hildegard von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff with great wisdom said to me, "Wilamowitz was my father; for you he is a Forschungsobjekt. I understand that." Many do not, alas, understand the difference between funeral panegyric or a disciple's pietas and scholarship. Those who do not should deal with the long dead, Homer, Plato, or Aristotle. Jaeger, like his teacher Wilamowitz, is great enough to survive his indiscretions, and, indeed, becomes more interesting because of them.