JAEGEN, HIERONYMUS. - Mystic, b. 23 Aug. 1841 in Treviri, where he spent almost his entire life and where he d. 26 Jan. 1919. J. was successively 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.
While still a student in Berlin, he began to devote himself fervently to the ascetic life, and from 1867 he experienced all the degrees of mysticism; in 1918 he testified to this before his confessor. He wrote Der Kampf um die Krone (1883, later entitled Der Kampf um das höchste Gut [last ed. 1938]), in which he understood mysticism as the harmonious culmination of the Christian acquisition of virtue. Sobriety and clarity are the characteristics of the work he published in 1911, Das mystische Gnadenleben (4th ed., Heidelberg 1949). J. warns against false bodily and imaginative visions and denies ecstasy as an attribute of any of the six degrees. The process of beatification began in 1939.