Early Christianity and Greek Paidea

161 Pages·1961·4.753 MB·English

by  Werner Jaeger

Early Christianity
and Greek Paideia
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WERNER JAEGER
Early Christianity
and Greek Paideia
THE BELKNAP PRESS OF
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
© 1961 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 61-15275
Printed in the United States of America
Preface
The present volume contains the Carl Newell Jack-
son Lectures for the year 1960, which I had the honor
to deliver at Harvard University. Professor Carl Jack-
son, after whom this lectureship is named, was instru¬
mental in bringing me to Harvard, and it has deep
meaning for me to be able to record my lasting grati¬
tude to this man at the moment at which I am retiring
from my activity as a teacher in this university.
I have discussed various aspects of the subject of
the lectures more briefly on other occasions. The lec¬
tures appear here greatly expanded and accompanied
by ample notes, which are an essential part of the book;
but even in their present enlarged form the lectures
are not the full realization of my original plan. When
I wrote my Paideia, I had intended from the beginning
that that work should include a special volume on the
reception of the Greek paideia into the early Chris¬
tian world. But though most of my work since then
has been done in the field of ancient Christian litera¬
ture, it has been precisely the large scope of this work
that has prevented my carrying out the plan of a more
comprehensive book on the historical continuity and
PREFACE
transformation of the tradition of Greek paideia
in the Christian centuries of late antiquity. At my
present age I can no longer be sure that I shall ever
be in a position to treat the issue on that broad scale,
and even though I have not given up hope of achiev¬
ing that goal, now that I think I am sufficiently pre¬
pared to do so, I have decided to lay down certain
main outlines in these lectures and to publish them
as a kind of down payment on what I hope will be a
larger whole.
At the moment when, by sheer good fortune, rich
treasures of Oriental origin such as the Qumram Scrolls
of the Dead Sea and the whole corpus of gnostic writ¬
ings found at Nag-Hammadi in Upper Egypt have
fallen into our hands, and there is a sudden resurgence
of historical research on early Christianity, it is inevi¬
table that simultaneously there should begin a total
reappraisal of the third great factor that determined
the history of the Christian religion — Greek culture
and philosophy — in the first centuries of our era. I
submit this little book as a first contribution to such a
fresh approach.
Werner Jaeger
Harvard University
Easter 1961
Early Christianity
and Greek Paideia

I
In these lectures I shall not undertake to contrast
religion and culture as two heterogeneous forms of
the human mind, as might appear from the title, espe¬
cially in our day, when theologians such as Karl Barth
and Brunner insist on the fact that religion is not a sub¬
ordinate part of civilization, as the old school of liberal
theologians often took for granted when they talked
of art, science, and religion in one breath. In other
words, I do not wish to debate the issue of religion
and culture in the abstract, but shall speak of Chris¬
tianity and its relation to Greek culture quite con¬
cretely; and my approach to the phenomenon will be
a historical one, as befits the classical scholar. I do not
want, either, to compare the Hellenic mind, as it is ex¬
pressed in the tragedies of Sophocles or in the Par¬
thenon, with the spirit of the Christian faith, as Ernest
Renan once did when, returning from his visit to the
Holy Land, he set foot on the Acropolis of Athens. He
felt overwhelmed by that sublime manifestation of
pure beauty and pure reason, as he understood and
praised it in his enthusiastic prayer on the Acropolis.1
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EARLY CHRISTIANITY
Friedrich Nietzsche, his younger contemporary, him¬
self the son of a Protestant minister and a fervent
apostle of Dionysus, carried this comparison to an ex¬
treme, and from a classical scholar became a mission¬
ary of the Antichrist. Instead, I shall speak of Greek
culture as it was at the time when the Christian reli¬
gion appeared and of the historical encounter of these
two worlds during the first centuries of our era. The
limited space at my disposal will make it impossible
for me to speak of early Christian art or to include the
Latin hemisphere of late ancient civilization and of
the early church.
Ever since the awakening of modern historical con¬
sciousness in the second half of the eighteenth century,
theological scholars have been aware, when analyzing
and describing the great historical process that began
with the birth of the new religion, that among the fac¬
tors that determined the final form of the Christian
tradition Greek civilization exercised a profound in¬
fluence on the Christian mind.2 Originally Christianity
was a product of the religious life of late Judaism.3
Recent discoveries such as that of the so-called Dead
Sea scrolls have cast new light on this period of Jew¬
ish religion, and parallels have been drawn between
the ascetic piety of the religious sect living at that time
on the shores of the Dead Sea and the messianic mes¬
sage of Jesus. There are apparently some striking simi¬
larities. But one is struck by one great difference, and
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