Friedrich Max Muller's Biography(Books)(Photos)

Friedrich Max Muller (December 6, 1823 – october 28,
1900), more regularly known as Max Muller, was a German

Defeated in the 1860 competition for the tenured Chair of
Sanskrit, he later became Oxford's first Professor of

philologist and Orientalist, one of the founders of the
western academic field of Indian studies and the discipline

Comparative Theology (1868 – 1875), at All Souls College.

of comparative religion. Muller wrote both scholarly and
popular works on the subject of Indology, a discipline he

Muller's comparative religion was criticized as subversive
of the Christian faith. According to Monsignor Munro, the

introduced to the British reading public, and the Sacred
Books of the East, a massive, 50-volume set of English

Roman Catholic bishop of St Andrew's Cathedral in Glasgow,
his 1888 Gifford Lectures on the "science of religion"

translations prepared under his direction, stands as an
enduring monument to Victorian scholarship.

represented nothing less than "a crusade against divine
revelation, against Jesus Christ and Christianity". Similar

He was born in Dessau, the son of the Romantic poet Wilhelm

accusations had already led to Muller's exclusion from the
Boden chair in Sanskrit in favour of the conservative Monier

Muller, whose verse Franz Schubert had set to music in his
song-cycles Die schone Mullerin and Winterreise. Max

Monier-Williams. By the 1880s Muller was being courted by
Charles Godfrey Leland, Helena Blavatsky and other writers

Muller's mother, Adelheide Muller, was the eldest daughter
of a chief minister of Anhalt-Dessau. Muller knew Felix

who were seeking to assert the merits of "Pagan" religious
traditions over Christianity. The designer Mary Fraser

Mendelssohn and had Carl Maria von Weber as a godfather.

Tytler stated that Muller's book Chips from a German
Workshop (a collection of his essays) was her "Bible", which

In 1841 he entered Leipzig University, where he left his
early interest in music and poetry in favour of philosophy.

helped her to create a multi-cultural sacred imagery.

Muller received his Ph.D. in 1843 for a dissertation on
Spinoza's Ethics. He also displayed an aptitude for

Muller distanced himself from these developments, and
remained within the Lutheran faith in which he had been

languages, learning the Classical languages Greek and Latin,
as well as Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit. In 1844 Muller went

brought up. He several times expressed the view that a
"reformation" within Hinduism needed to occur comparable to

to Berlin to study with Friedrich Schelling. He began to
translate the Upanishads for Schelling, and continued to

the Christian Reformation. In his view, "if there is one
thing which a comparative study of religions places in the

research Sanskrit under Franz Bopp, the first systematic
scholar of the Indo-European languages. Schelling led Muller

clearest light, it is the inevitable decay to which every
religion is exposed... Whenever we can trace back a religion

to relate the history of language to the history of
religion. At this time, Muller published his first book, a

to its first beginnings, we find it free from many blemishes
that affected it in its later states". He used his links

German translation of the Hitopadesa, a collection of Indian
fables.

with the Brahmo Samaj in order to encourage such a
reformation on the lines pioneered by Ram Mohan Roy.

In 1845, Muller moved to Paris to study Sanskrit under

Eugene Burnouf. It was Burnouf who encouraged him to publish
the complete Rig Veda in Sanskrit, using manuscripts

The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a

available in England.

great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of
millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their

Muller moved to England in 1846 in order to study Sanskrit
texts in the collection of the East India Company. He

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

supported himself at first with creative writing, his novel
German Love being popular in its day. Muller's connections

the last 3000 years.

with the East India Company and with Sanskritists based at
Oxford University led to a career in Britain, where he

Munro had argued conversely that Muller'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." Muller remained
profoundly influenced by the Kantian Transcendentalist model

links with the Brahmo Samaj. He became a member of Christ
Church, Oxford in 1851, when he gave his first series of

of spirituality, and was opposed to Darwinian ideas of human
development, arguing that "language forms an impassable

lectures on comparative philology. He gained appointments as
Taylorian Professor of Modern European Languages in 1854.

barrier between man and beast."