Max Müller

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Friedrich Max Müller (December 6, 1823 – October 28, 1900), more commonly known as Max Müller, was a German philologist and Orientalist, one of the founders of Indian studies, who virtually created the discipline of comparative religion. Müller wrote both scholarly and 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.

1 Life and work
2 Controversies
3 Quotations
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Life and work

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

At Leipzig, Müller studied philosophy, but displayed particular aptitude for languages, learning the Classical languages as well as Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit. Müller continued to research Sanskrit under Franz Bopp, the first systematic scholar of the Indo-European languages. The example of Friedrich Schelling led Müller to relate the history of language to the history of religion. At this time, Müller published his first book, a German translation of the Hitopadesa, a collection of Indian fables.

In 1845, Müller moved to Paris to study Sanskrit under Eugène Burnouf. It was Burnouf who encouraged him to pursue his studies in England.

Müller went to England in 1846 in order to study Sanskrit texts in the collection of the East India Company. 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 complex exchanges between Indian and British intellectual culture, especially through Müller's links with the Brahmo Samaj. He 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) at All Souls College.

Müller attempted to formulate a philosophy of religion that addressed the crisis of faith engendered by the historical and critical study of religion by German scholars on the one hand, and by the Darwinian revolution on the other. Müller was wary of Darwin's work on human evolution, and attacked his view of the development of human faculties. His work was taken up by cultural commentators such as his friend John Ruskin, who saw it as a productive response to the crisis of the age (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; Müller's "anti-Darwinian" concepts of the evolution of human cultures are among his least lasting achievements.

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.

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 ^[1]. Müller was greatly influenced by Ramakrishna Paramhansa , his contemporary and proponent of Vedantic philosophy, and authored several essays and books on the subject ^[2].

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.

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.

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.

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."

His wife, Georgina Adelaide (died 1916) had his papers and correspondence carefully bound; they are at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.^[3] The Goethe Institutes in India are named Max Mueller Bhavan in his honour. Müller's son Wilhelm Max Müller was also an important scholar.

[edit] Controversies

The elderly Max Müller

Some controversy has arisen in certain quarters in modern India over Müller's interpretation of Vedic culture. In recent years he has been accused of using his scholarship to undermine Hinduism and encourage Christian missionary work. Ironically, in his own lifetime, his work produced precisely the opposite controversy, since many Christians considered his teaching of comparative religion as subversive of the Christian faith. According to Monsignor Munro, the Roman Catholic bishop of St. Andrew's Cathedral in Glasgow, his 1888 Gifford lectures on the "science of religion" represented nothing less than "a crusade against divine revelation, against Jesus Christ and Christianity". Similar accusations had already led to Müller's exclusion from the Boden chair in Sanskrit in favour of the uncontroversial Monier Monier-Williams. By the 1880s Müller was being courted by Charles Godfrey Leland, Helena Blavatsky and other writers who were seeking to assert the merits of either Pagan or Dharmic religious traditions over Christianity. The designer Mary Fraser Tytler stated that Müller's book Chips from a German Workshop (a collection of his essays) was her "Bible", which helped her to create a multi-cultural sacred imagery.

Müller, however, distanced himself from these developments, and remained within the Lutheran faith in which he had been brought up. He several times expressed the view that a "reformation" within Hinduism needed to occur comparable to the Christian Reformation. In his view, "if there is one thing which a comparative study of religions places in the clearest light, it is the inevitable decay to which every religion is exposed.... Whenever we can trace back a religion to its first beginnings, we find it free from many blemishes that affected it in its later states". He used his links with the Brahmo Samaj in order to encourage such a reformation on the lines pioneered by Ram Mohan Roy.

In this context Müller wrote a letter to his wife, in reply to her concerns that he was undermining Christianity:

The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years.^[4]

Ironically, Munro had argued that Müller's theories "uprooted our idea of God, for it repudiated the idea of a personal God." He made "divine revelation simply impossible, because it [his theory] reduced God to mere nature, and did away with the body and soul as we know them." Müller remained profoundly influenced by the Kantian Transcendentalist model of spirituality, and was opposed to Darwinian ideas of human development, arguing that "language forms an impassable barrier between man and beast."^[5] Though he took the view that Christian morality was superior to Vedic traditions, his Gifford lectures rejected the concept of direct divine revelation in favour of a trancendental model of spiritual insight, which, in his view, was perfected in the Vedanta. However, at the very end of his life he embarrassed some members of the Brahmo Samaj when he wrote to them asking them to declare that their version of Hinduism was now a form of Christianity, and that they had become Christians.

[edit] Quotations

"If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of the Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life...again I should point to India."^[6]

"The Upanishads are the ... sources of ... the Vedanta philosophy, a system in which human speculation seems to me to have reached its very acme." "I spend my happiest hours in reading Vedantic books. They are to me like the light of the morning, like the pure air of the mountains - so simple, so true, if once understood."

On the Vedas:

"Large number of Vedic hymns are childish in the extreme ; tedious, low, commonplace."^[7]. "Nay, they (the Vedas) contain, by the side of simple, natural, childish thoughts, many ideas which to us sound decidedly modern.^[8]

On "Aryans" :

"I have declared again and again that if I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language… in that sense, and in that sense only, do I say that even the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians...To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar."^[9]

On Christianity:

Letter to his son: "Would you say that any one sacred book is superior to all others in the world? ...I say the New Testament, after that, I should place the Koran, which in its moral teachings, is hardly more than a later edition of the New Testament. Then would follow according to my opinion the Old Testament, the Southern Buddhist Tripitaka, the Tao-te-king of Laotze, the Kings of Confucius, the Veda and the Avesta.'(Vol. II, Ch. XXXII., page 339.)."

Letter to Protap Chunder Mozoomdar, author of The Oriental Christ: "Tell me some of your chief difficulties that prevent you and your countrymen from openly following Christ, and when I write to you I shall do my best to explain how I and many who agree with me have met them and solved them. I do not hesitate to say that on some of these points we may have to learn more from you than we can teach you, and I say this honestly, and from personal experience. That too will be a lesson difficult to learn for our bishops and missionaries, but in Christian humility they will have to learn it. From my point of view, India, at least the best part of it, is already converted to Christianity. You want no persuasion to become a follower of Christ. Then make up your mind to act for yourselves. Unite your flock, and put up a few folds to hold them together. The bridge has been built by you for those who came before you. Step boldly forward, it will not break under you, and you will find many friends to welcome you on the other shore, and among them none more delighted than your old friend and fellow labourer."(Vol. II., Ch. XXXIV., pages 415-416.)

[edit] References

↑ Müller archive
↑ Müller, F. Max. India, What can it teach us, Lecture I, 1882.
↑ Müller, Georgina, The Life and Letters of Right Honorable Friedrich Max Müller, 2 vols. London: Longman, 1902.
↑ Müller, F. Max. Three Lectures on the Science of Language, etc., with a Supplement, My Predecessors. 3rd ed. Chicago, 1899, p. 5.
↑ Müller, F. Max. Chips from a German Workshop, second edition, 1866, p. 27.
↑ Müller, F. Max. India, What can it teach us, Lecture IV, p. 118, 1882.
↑ Müller, F. Max. Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas, p. 120
↑ Müller, F. Max. Ramakrishna His Life and Sayings
↑ Müller, F. Max. Rig-Veda-Samhita: The Sacred Hymns of the Brahmans

Lourens P. van den Bosch, Friedrich Max Müller: A Life Devoted to the Humanities, 2002. Recent biography sets him in the context of Victorian intellectual culture.

Jon R. Stone (ed.), The Essential Max Müller: On Language, Mythology, and Religion, New York: Palgrave, 2002. Collection of 19 essays; also includes an intellectual biography.