JAEGEN, Hieronymus. – Mystic, born 23 Aug. 1841 at Trier, where he spent almost his entire life and where he died 26 Jan. 1919. Jaegen successively worked as an engineer, bank director, and deputy to the second assembly of the Prussian Parliament. At the same time, he carried on intense activity for various Catholic institutions.
Even as a student in Berlin he began zealously to devote himself to the ascetic life, and from 1867 he experienced all the stages of mysticism, testifying to this in 1918 to his confessor. He wrote *Der Kampf um die Krone* (1883, later titled *Der Kampf um das höchste Gut* [latest ed. 1938]), in which he presents mysticism as the harmonious culmination of the Christian conquest of virtue. Sobriety and clarity are the hallmarks of the work he published in 1911, *Das mystische Gnadenleben* (4th ed., Heidelberg 1949). Jaegen warned against false corporeal and imaginative visions and denied ecstasy as an attribute of one of the six stages. The process of beatification began in 1939.