 

     Your reference to Werner Jaeger, has, as happens so
often, loosed a flood of memories of my student years.  I
never took any of Werner Jaegers courses either in college or
in graduate school.  He did give in English, a lecture course
on Greek culture or something like that, which my roomate and
future brother-in-law Alex took; I didn't know enough Greek
to be able to confront the philology, and I didn't want to
spend my time reading literature in translation; therefore,
instead, I took Sterling Dow's Introduction to Greek, Cedric
Whitman's course on Plato's Apology and Xenophon's Anabasis,
and John Finley's course on Antigone. I think I remember also
reading Aeschylus' Prometheus and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex with
Eric Havelock; and I think I remember Professor Havelock
snarling at my teutonically rough pronunciation of the "ch".
It took my a long time before I understood why the way I said
it, roused his ire.  I never took any Latin courses after
high school, assuming that I could always proceed to learn
more on my own as need and occasion arose.

     My association with Werner Jaeger came only after I was
in medical school, indirectly through Margaret who was at the
time supporting me by teaching at the Buckingham School in
Cambridge.  One of her students was Terry Jaeger, the Werner
Jaeger's only child from his second marriage.  Terry
described her father as being removed from practical
concerns, so awkward that he couldn't even use a can opener.
A parent-teacher meeting led to an dinner invitation to
Margaret and her husband at the Jaegers' house, I think it
was 43 Bailey Road in Watertown.  He asked about Margaret's
German, and I told him we were reading Goethe's Iphigenie auf
Tauris together.  He very much approved of the way in which I
was introducing my new wife to his classical ideal.  I
remember his asking me about my work with Karl Vietor.  I
thought I detected a tinge of jealousy in his question which
has stuck in my mind: "Ja worin besteht denn eigentlich nun
der Vietorismus?" (Well now, in what exactly does Vietorism
consist?"  He invited me to come to see him in his office in
Widener.  He told me about _his_ church father Saint Gregory
of Nyssa whose works he was editing. He took me to lunch, it
must have been two or three times, at the Window Shop on
Brattle Street, which was then a popular and high class
restaurant operated by emigres from Vienna.  I remember the
Wiener Schnitzel.  They were very good.  Professor Jaeger
also gave me a private tutorial on Plato's Protagoras which,
as an undergraduate, I had read in Jowett's translation in
Raphael Demos' Plato course.  He talked to me about
Aristotle, with the re-interpretation of whose intellectual
biography, Jaeger had originally established himself in the
academic world.  I realized that given my limited knowledge
and my limited language skills, I could only listen.  In
response to my question about Aristotle's philosophy,
Professor Jaeger said that he, Jaeger, did not "do"
philosophy.  I was surprised; I had thought that the
philosophy was the point of it all. I didn't understand
Jaeger's position then, but I think I understand it a little
bit now.

     Professor Jaeger described to me how he had grown up in
a little town on the lower Rhine, had educated himself by
reading Herodotus. "Herodot war mein Gymnasium" he explained
to me.  He went to Berlin wanting to study philosophy,
expecting to work as an assistant to Wilhelm Dilthey, then
already an old man, alcoholic, fumbling about in a mass of
manuscripts with which he could not cope. At that juncture,
Jaeger was "discovered" by Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, who
persuaded him to switch to classics, got him his first
teaching appointment at the University of Kiel, and not long
thereafter had him called to the University in Berlin.

     I was already in medical school, and rather disliked the
atmosphere.  Professor Jaeger gave me permission to attend
his courses which he held in the afternoon, when the Medical
School had scheduled "clinics" which I could cut with
impunity. Over the years there were two courses: one on
Aristotle's Metaphysics which Jaeger had just edited for the
Oxford University Press, and one on the Greek Hymn.  There
was a seminar on the hellenestic Dionysius' Peri Hypsous, (On
the Sublime). In contrast with Karl Vietor's studied oratory,
Jaeger, seated at the center at an oblong table, was simple
and conversational.  I remember vividly his introduction to
the metaphysics course. He folded his hands over the text and
said: "And now I am going to teach you to read."  And he did.
He took each sentence to examine the etymology, the
definition and the implications of every significant word,
referring specifically to other texts where it had been used
by Aristotle and by other authors. It was very slow going. By
the end of the term, we had covered fewer than ten or fifteen
pages of the book, which after all had been around for more
than two thousand years, so that there was no hurry. Even
now, often quite consciously, I read in the manner I was
taught by Professor Jaeger; the limitation being that many
books are too insubstantial to warrant such attention.

     About the course on the Greek hymn, I remember his
reading a particular poem, I think by Callimachus, I could
probably find it even now, which draws a picture of a bevy of
young girls running or dancing to a well from which they
would draw water, and I was struck by the sensuous passion
which this ancient text could incite in the old man.

     The seminar on Longinus (Dionysius) Peri Hupsous was in
fact an exercise in comparative literature to which Professor
Jaeger invited me to contribute. He was concerned to trace
the the concept of the sublime from its hellenistic origins
through the Renaissance, the French classics, to the English
18th Century and German classical literature, its modern
anchors being Shaftesbury's "On the Sublime and the
Beautiful" and a similar essay by Edmund Burke. My own
contribution, an analysis of Hoelderlin's poem "Die
Eichbaueme", the oak trees, seems to me in retrospect rather
paltry, though not entirely off the mark. It was received
generously, without criticism.  In the seminar, Jaeger had
the habit of referring to me with gentle irony as "ho iatros"
(the physician). Many years later, I discovered to my
considerable chagrin, when I leafed through Karl Vietor's
last book (for which I had helped check the foot notes), that
I had overlooked in my preparation his masterful essay:
"Ueber das Erhabene in der deutschen Literatur" (About the
Sublime in German Literature) But that's what happens when
you presume to be learning medicine at the same time.

     During the years that I knew him, Jaeger's reputation
rested on "Paideia", his three volume interpretation of the
"ideals of Greek culture". That is the work that I had
requested in 1948, when I was awarded a sophomore prize for
something or other in history and literature. What I was
received, of course, was an English version, Gilbert Highet's
translation.  I've always wanted to own the original German
text, but whenever I checked the price, I thought it was too
expensive.

     During his tenure at Harvard, where he had been brought
by James Conant, I think in about 1945, Jaeger, who as a
University Professor could teach any course he wanted, was
criticized from two perspectives. He had the popular renown
of being a "philosopher". The Harvard philosophy department
however, wouldn't give philosophy credit for any of his
courses, because they didn't think what he taught was
"philosophy." He would have agreed, except for the
misunderstanding implicit in the presumption that there was
anything philosophical about what was taught by the
department of philosophy in those years.

     A more substantial criticism was articulated by his
colleague Eric Havelock who was offended by the confusion of
Greek culture with Deutsche Kultur, and who was troubled by
the authoritarian implications of Jaeger's theorizing, in
much the way that Karl Popper took offense at Plato's
idealization of public virtue in "The Open Society and its
Enemies."  I felt at the time that there was too much envy
entailed in Havelock's attacks on Jaeger to take them
seriously, but I myself was not sufficiently mature to stake
out a position of my own. It was for me a matter of loyalty
and self-protection to stay within the confines of the
literary and, quite generally, cultural conservatism in which
I had been brought up by my parents, which was reinforced by
my teachers in college, and from which, I suspect, I have not
yet wholly escaped. It seems to me now that the analogy
between the Havelock-Jaeger controversy over whether culture
can be prescribed, is analogous to the controversy whether
virtue can be taught which Plato himself discussed in the
Protagoras.

     My own reinterpretation of the paideia controversy stems
from my review of the Septuagint's version of the 53rd
chapter of Isaiah and the verse "Paideia eirenes hemon ep
auton" which I consider the keystone of my theology. The
Jacobeans translate it: "The chastisement of our peace was
upon him." Jaeger was dismissive of the koine dialect of the
New Testament, and I infer that he wouldn't have valued the
language of the Septuagint any more highly.  (For all I know,
in non-academic life he was a not unconventional Lutheran
church member.) I suspect what Jaeger was in fact extolling
as Paideia was often a harsh, brutal, unfeeling military-like
discipline, a training to social and emotional and
intellectual conformity, an authoritarian promotion of
culture incompatible with Rousseau or Pestalozzi, with the
empathy of the Romantics, or the generosity of 19th century
liberals, not to speak of the iconoclasm of Nietzsche;
congenial rather to the nationalistic mind set of his patron
and teacher Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. But these are
mere musings, unsupported by research. They suggest to me
that in the end I might have come down on the side of Eric
Havelock after all.  It's just as well I never had the
opportunity to discuss my reservations with Professor Jaeger.
I rather suspect such a discussion would have put an end to
our acquaintance.

                      * * * * *
Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
