Max Müller

• 1. Introduction

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  Max Müller was born on the 6th of December 1823 in Dessau, the son of Wilhelm Müller, a lyric poet whose verse Franz Schubert had set to music in those celebrated song-cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. His godfather was Carl Maria von Weber. He was named partly after the central character in Weber's opera Der Freischütz, and he would go on to become one of the most controversial and influential scholars of the nineteenth century. The question that drove his entire career was deceptively simple: where do religions come from, and what do the oldest languages reveal about the oldest beliefs? That question would take him from Leipzig to Paris to Oxford, generate bitter enemies and devoted admirers, and leave behind a fifty-volume legacy that outlasted him by decades.

• 2. A German Education

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  Müller entered the gymnasium at Dessau when he was six years old. In 1835 he moved into the household of Carl Gustav Carus in Leipzig, attending the Nikolaischule and studying music alongside classics. It was in Leipzig that he frequently met Felix Mendelssohn. To attend Leipzig University he needed a scholarship, which required sitting the abitur examination at Zerbst. The syllabus there differed sharply from what he had been taught, and he was forced to rapidly master mathematics, modern languages, and science before he could pass. He entered Leipzig University in 1841 to study philology, received his doctorate in September 1843, and submitted a dissertation on Spinoza's Ethics. He had already acquired Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit. Later in life he found the surname Müller so common that he adopted Max as part of it, a move that explains why his name appears as Maximilian on several of his formal honours.

• 3. Sanskrit and the Study of Belief

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  In 1844 Müller studied in Berlin with Friedrich Schelling, beginning a translation of the Upanishads and researching Sanskrit under Franz Bopp, the first systematic scholar of the Indo-European languages. It was Schelling who led him to connect the history of language with the history of religion. That same year he published his first book, a German translation of the Hitopadesa, a collection of Indian fables. In 1845 he moved to Paris to study under Eugène Burnouf, who urged him to publish a complete edition of the Rigveda using manuscripts held in England. He settled in England in 1846 to examine texts in the East India Company's collection, supporting himself initially through creative writing, his novel German Love finding a popular readership. Burnouf's encouragement bore fruit when Müller persuaded the East India Company to fund a critical edition of the Rig-Veda. He pursued that task over many years, from 1849 to 1874. For Müller, the Vedic culture represented a form of nature worship. He saw the gods of the Rig-Veda as active forces of nature, only partly personified. From this he developed his famous theory that mythology is "a disease of language": myth transforms abstract concepts into beings and stories. The Indo-European father-god, he argued, appears under various names, Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus Pita, all traceable to the word "Dyaus", implying "shining" or "radiance", giving rise to "deva", "deus", and "theos" as generic terms for a god. He also translated the Rigveda Samhita book written by the fourteenth-century Sanskrit scholar Sayanacharya from Sanskrit into English. His admiration for Ramakrishna Paramhansa, proponent of Vedantic philosophy, produced several essays and books on that subject.

• 4. Oxford and Its Controversies

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  In 1850 Müller was appointed deputy Taylorian professor of modern European languages at Oxford. At the suggestion of Thomas Gaisford he was made an honorary M.A. and a member of Christ Church in 1851, and succeeded to the full professorship in 1854. In 1858 he was elected to a life fellowship at All Souls' College. The 1860 election for the Boden Professorship of Sanskrit was a "keen disappointment": though the professors voted for him almost unanimously, Müller lost to Monier Monier-Williams. His Lutheranism, German birth, and lack of first-hand experience of India were held against him. After the result he wrote to his mother: "all the best people voted for me, the Professors almost unanimously, but the vulgus profanum made the majority." In 1868 Oxford created for him the position of professor of comparative philology, which he held until his death, though he retired from active duties in 1875. During his Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow, which began in 1888 as the first in what became an annual series, he was accused by Monsignor Alexander Munro at St Andrew's Cathedral of delivering "nothing less than a crusade against Divine revelation, against Jesus Christ, and against Christianity." A motion at the Established Presbytery of Glasgow in 1891 called his teaching "subversive of the Christian faith." Müller nevertheless remained within the Lutheran faith throughout his life. Twenty-first century scholars of religion have approached the same body of work from the opposite angle, examining it as evidence of a bias towards Christian conceptions of God in early academic religious studies.

• 5. Views on India, Shifting Over Time

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  On the 25th of August 1866, Müller wrote to Chevalier Bunsen describing India as "much riper for Christianity than Rome or Greece were at the time of St. Paul" and expressing a wish to help overturn what he called "the old mischief of Indian priestcraft." He used his links with the Brahmo Samaj, and with the reforming tradition pioneered by Ram Mohan Roy, to encourage what he saw as a necessary reformation within Hinduism. He believed the Brahmos were in practice "Christians, without being Roman Catholics, Anglicans or Lutherans." In 1868 he wrote to George Campbell, the newly appointed Secretary of State for India, urging that education funding be tripled or quadrupled and arguing that Sanskrit literature should be part of the curriculum to reawaken "a national feeling of pride and self-respect." By his sixties and seventies, his view had shifted markedly. In his "What can India teach us?" lecture at Cambridge he described India as the country under whose sky the human mind had "most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life" and found solutions deserving the attention even of those who had studied Plato and Kant. In a separate lecture on the character of the Hindus, he argued that ancient Indian literature showed a profound regard for truth and that the charge of untruthfulness brought against the Indian people was "utterly unfounded with regard to ancient times." Swami Vivekananda, foremost disciple of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, met Müller and his wife over lunch on the 28th of May 1896, and later wrote that he saw in Müller not the philologist or scholar but "a soul that is every day realizing its oneness with the universe."

• 6. Language, Race, and the Aryan Question

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  Müller's work helped generate the nineteenth century's fascination with Aryan culture by showing shared ancestry between Indo-European and Asian languages. He was careful to insist that the discovery argued against racism, not for it. He wrote that "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," adding that "the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians." He was, in his own words, deeply saddened when these classifications came to be expressed in racist terms. Alongside the Aryan question he put forward a theory of a "Turanian" family of languages, comprising Finnic, Samoyedic, Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. He distinguished these as "nomadic languages" from the Aryan and Semitic families, which he called State or political languages. The term Turanian became an archaism more quickly than Aryan did, yet it was later absorbed into nationalist ideologies in Hungary and Turkey. His disagreement with Darwin was public and specific: in 1870 he gave three lectures at the British Institution titled "On Darwin's Philosophy of Language," arguing that language forms "an impassable barrier between man and beast" and that human language could not have developed from animal language. In 1873 he sent a copy of those lectures to Darwin, reassuring him that he remained "one of his diligent readers and sincere admirers" even while differing on these conclusions.

• 7. Honours, Legacy, and the Sacred Books

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  In June 1874, Müller received the Pour le Mérite in its civil class, an honour that surprised him. When commanded to dine at Windsor soon after, he wrote to Prince Leopold asking whether he might wear his Order. The reply came back: "Not may, but must." In 1875 he received the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art; in a letter to his mother dated the 19th of December he called it more showy than the Pour le Mérite, "but that is the best." In 1869 he had been elected to the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres as an associé étranger. In 1896 he was appointed a member of the Privy Council. He had become a naturalised British citizen in 1855 and married Georgina Adelaide Grenfell on the 3rd of August 1859, overcoming opposition from her family. They had four children, including William Grenfell, though two of those children predeceased their parents. Müller's health began to fail in 1898 and he died at his home in Oxford on the 28th of October 1900, interred at Holywell Cemetery on the 1st of November. After his death the Max Müller Memorial Fund was established at Oxford to promote learning and research in the history, languages, literatures, and religions of ancient India. The crowning editorial achievement of his career, the Sacred Books of the East, a fifty-volume set of English translations, continued publication after his death. The Goethe Institutes in India are named Max Müller Bhavan in his honour, and a street in New Delhi bears his name as Max Mueller Marg.