Max Müller

Friedrich Max Müller (December 6, 1823 – October 28, 1900), more commonly known as Max Müller, was a German-born British Philologist and Orientalist, one of the founders of Indian studies, who virtually created the discipline of comparative religion. Müller wrote both scholarly and a popular works on this subject, a discipline he introduced to the British reading public, and the Sacred Books of the East, a massive, 50-volume set of English translations prepared under his direction, stands as an enduring monument to Victorian scholarship.

Life and work

He was the son of the Romantic poet Wilhelm Müller, whose verse Schubert had set to music in his song-cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. Müller knew Felix Mendelssohn and had Carl Maria von Weber as a godfather, but at Leipzig University he left his early interest in music for Sanskrit, the classical language of ancient India. He published work in Sanskrit linguistics that students still read and use.

Related Topics:
Wilhelm Müller - Schubert - Felix Mendelssohn - Carl Maria von Weber - Leipzig University - Sanskrit

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Müller went to England in 1846 and became a member of Christ Church, Oxford in 1851, when he gave his first series of lectures on comparative philology. He gained appointments as Taylorian Professor of Modern European Languages in 1854 and as Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford. Defeated in the 1860 competition for the tenured Chair of Sanskrit, he later became Oxford's first Professor of Comparative Theology (1868 – 1875). In his time, some circles considered his teaching of comparative religion as subversive of morality. According to Monsignor Munro, the Roman Catholic bishop of St. Andrews Cathedral in Glasgow, the lectures repesented nothing less than "a crusade against divine revelation, against Jesus Christ and Christianity". Muller attempted to reach a philosophy of religion that addressed the crisis of faith that was engendered by the historical and critical study of religion by German scholars on the one hand, and by the Darwinian revolution on the other (compare Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach"). He analyzed mythologies as rationalizations of natural phenomena, primitive beginnings that we might denominate "protoscience" within a cultural evolution; Muller's "Darwinian" concepts of the evolution of human cultures are among his least lasting achievements.

Related Topics:
Christ Church, Oxford - Darwinian revolution - Matthew Arnold - Dover Beach - Protoscience

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Müller shared many of the ideas associated with Romanticism, which coloured his account of ancient religions, in particular his emphasis on the formative influence on early religion of emotional communion with natural forces.

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Müller's Sanskrit studies came at a time when scholars had started to see language development in relation to cultural development. The recent discovery of the Indo-European (IE) language group had started to lead to much speculation about the relationship between Greco-Roman cultures and those of more ancient peoples. In particular the Vedic culture of India was thought to have been the ancestor of European Classical cultures, and scholars sought to compare the genetically related European and Asian languages in order to reconstruct the earliest form of the root-language. The Vedic language, Sanskrit, was thought to be the oldest of the IE languages. Müller therefore devoted himself to the study of this language, becoming one of the major Sanskrit scholars of his day. Müller believed that the earliest documents of Vedic culture should be studied in order to provide the key to the development of pagan European religions, and of religious belief in general. To this end Müller sought to understand the most ancient of Vedic scriptures, the Rig-Veda.

Related Topics:
Indo-European - Greco-Roman - Vedic - India - Sanskrit - Pagan - Rig-Veda

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For Müller, however, the study of the language had to relate to the study of the culture in which it had been used. He came to the view that the development of languages should be tied to that of belief-systems. At that time the Vedic scriptures were little-known in the West, though there was increasing interest in the philosophy of the Upanishads. Müller believed that the sophisticated Upanishadic philosophy could be linked to the more primitive Vedic paganism from which it evolved. He had to travel to London in order to look at documents held in the collection of the British East India Company. While there he persuaded the company to allow him to undertake a critical edition of the Rig-Veda, a task he pursued doggedly over many years (1849 - 1874), and which resulted in the critical edition for which he is most remembered.

Related Topics:
West - Upanishads - London - British East India Company

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He supported himself at first with creative writing, his novel German Love being popular in its day. Müller's connections with the East India Company and with Sanskritists based at Oxford University led to a career in Britain, where he eventually became the leading intellectual commentator on the culture of India, which Britain controlled as part of its Empire. This led to the development of links with Indian intellectuals, notably the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, and to syncretist attempts to unite Christian and Hindu traditions. Modern Indians have both praised and vilified these activities.

Related Topics:
Brahmo Samaj - Syncretist

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For Müller, the culture of the Vedic peoples represented a form of nature worship, an idea clearly influenced by Romanticism. He saw the gods of the Rig-Veda as active forces of nature, only partly personified as imagined supernatural persons. From this claim Müller derived his theory that mythology is 'a disease of language'. By this he meant that myth transforms concepts into beings and stories. In Müller's view 'gods' began as words constructed in order to express abstract ideas, but were transformed into imagined personalities. Thus the Indo-European father-god appears under various names: Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus Pita. For Müller all these names can be traced to the word 'Dyaus', which he understands to imply 'shining' or 'radiance'. This leads to the terms 'deva', 'deus', 'theos' as generic terms for a god, and to the names 'Zeus' and 'Jupiter' (derived from deus-pater). In this way a metaphor becomes personified and ossified. This aspect of Müller's thinking closely resembled the later ideas of Nietzsche.

Related Topics:
Nature worship - Supernatural - Zeus - Jupiter - Dyaus Pita - Nietzsche

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Nevertheless Müller's work contributed to the developing interest in Aryan culture which set Indo-European ('Aryan') traditions in opposition to Semitic religions. He was deeply saddened by the fact that these later came to be expressed in racist terms. This was far from Müller's own intention. For Müller the discovery of common Indian and European ancestry was a powerful argument against racism.

Related Topics:
Aryan - Semitic - Racist

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In 1881, he published a translation of the first edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He agreed with Schopenhauer that this edition was the most direct and honest expression of Kant's thought. His translation corrected several errors that were committed by previous translators. Müller wrote, "The materials are now accessible, and the English-speaking race, the race of the future, will have in Kant's Critique another Aryan heirloom, as precious as the Veda -- a work that may be criticised, but can never be ignored."

Related Topics:
Critique of Pure Reason - Schopenhauer - Race - Future - Aryan

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His wife, Georgina Adelaide (died 1916) had his papers and correspondence carefully bound; they are at the Bodleian Library, Oxford http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/1500-1900/muller/maxmuller.html The Goethe Institutes in India are named Max Mueller Bhavan in his honour.

Related Topics:
1916 - Bodleian Library - Goethe Institute

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