Werner Jaeger (1888-1961) was a German classicist who rose rapidly through the academic ranks in Germany in the 1920’s and 30’s but fled from Nazi Germany in 1936. He then taught in America at the University of Chicago and Harvard until he died. At the time he died, he was the world’s leading authority on the Cappadocian father, Gregory of Nyssa. In the 1940’s he produced a three-volume study of Greek culture, called Paideia, the ideals of Greek Culture. (I own the first two volumes and have read parts of the first. So many books, so little time.) Paideia was the Greek word for the kind of education associated with the ideal citizen of the Greek city-state. When we talk about “liberal arts” or “the well-rounded citizen,” we are drawing on that Greek idea.
In 1961, just before he died, Jaeger distilled those three-volumes into a 150 page book, called Early Christianity and Greek Paideia. In that book (which I have read), Jaeger draws primarily on Origen (184-253 AD) but cites Porphyry (234-305 AD) and a half dozen other ancient sources to build a case that Greek philosophical culture had a strong religious tenor. From Homer it drew the concept of arete, which we might call character—ideals of behavior. From the Olympian Gods and temple worship, it drew an abiding reverence codified in ritual. From the Ionian scientists, it drew a hunger for unity and comprehensive explanatory systems. This religious tenor was, according to Jaeger, the seedbed St. Paul used so effectively to spread the good news.
Origen is Jaeger’s superhero, fusing together Christianity and the Greek vision of a deep cultural unity based on an educational ideal drawn from Homer, Plato, and Aeschylus.
As Jaeger sees things, there is a direct line from Origen to the Cappadocians, particularly Gregory of Nazianzus (329-390 AD) and Gregory of Nyssa (335-395 AD). Gregory of Nazianzus and his friend Basil the Great (330-379 AD) had both trained in Athens, and Basil had brought that vision home to his brother Gregory of Nyssa. It is Gregory of Nyssa whom Jaeger particularly quotes in laying out this living educational ideal which he summarizes in pithy phrases such as, “Christianity [is] heir to everything in Greek tradition that seemed worthy of survival” (75).
It is hard not to be moved by this, particularly since it seems to put into words the ideal I sought when I was shepherding General Ed at Minot State, though I had to draw on more recent statements of it, from, e.g., John Newman’s Idea of a University.
But I have to offer a couple of reservations. One is that Jaeger’s vision of Greek culture is probably more unified than it was in reality. Jaeger lays a template on Greek culture that makes it glow but that leaves out a lot. The other is that his vision of Christianity is a lot more culture-based than what I find in St. Paul. We don’t find much in St. Paul (or Jesus) about reading Plato and Aeschylus. We do read about people rising from the dead, about healing, about scales falling from people’s eyes. We hear about becoming a new person rather suddenly, by hearing the word of god and hanging out with converts, not by a long arduous process of mastering difficult texts in Greek Philosophy after suitable training in Athens. Jaeger sees Christianity as a magnificent blossoming of a Jewish seed in the “perfect” seedbed of Greek paideia, but in reading the book of Acts, it often looks a lot more like an earthquake in a lava flow.
georgeslanger 