MÜLLER, FRIEDRICH MAXIMILIAN (MAX MÜLLER). – Philologist and mythologist, born at Dessau on 6 December 1823, professor at Oxford, where he died on 28 October 1900. His manifold activity unfolded especially in three areas: comparative mythology; Indo-European philology and linguistics in general; and the history and philosophy of religion.
As a mythologist, he is the founder of comparative mythology in that, building upon the principle—already advanced by the Brothers Grimm in their study of German mythology—of regarding myth as a spontaneous product of popular imagination, he added the contribution furnished by comparison with Indian mythology, which he studied especially in the Vedas (v.), translating and commenting upon them. For Müller, the figures of myth arise from a spontaneous process of personification inherent in the mind, which identifies, by means of adjectives that are nomina agentis, the objects that fall under its observation. Thus, from the vision of the celestial bodies, which are pre-eminently the shining ones (deva, from div = to shine), derives the name of God in all Indo-European mythologies. Language, Müller concludes, determines the physiognomy of myth, and in this sense myth may be said to be a “disease of language.” This concept is inexact because language is the natural expression of the imaginative perception that personifies things and obeys II.
As a philologist and linguist, his output was exceedingly fruitful: *The Science of Language* (2 vols., London 1861–63; 14th ed. 1885; new ed. 1890; Italian trans., Milan 1871); *Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas* (London 1888; new ed. 1898) and the various essays collected under the title *Chips from a German Workshop* (4 vols., ibid. 1867–75; new ed. 1880); *Last Essays* (ibid. 1901); and above all the translation of the sacred books of the East, the *Sacred Books of the East*, which he directed and entrusted to various scholars, completed in 50 vols., of which 33 were devoted to India (21 to Brahmanism and 12 to Jainism and Buddhism); 8 to Persia; 2 to Islam; 6 to China, plus indices.
As a historian and philosopher of religion, he showed that from the mythical world religion develops when man, after having personified the forces of nature, feels that beyond what he sees and which presents itself as limited there is an invisible and boundless, infinite world. This innate sense develops, and thus, through the enotheistic form (by which epithets belonging to the Supreme Being are attributed to a given divinity), one arrives at the monotheistic form of the one God conceived as the Father who is in heaven.
The writings in which he developed this aspect of his scholarly activity are: *Introduction to the Science of Religion* (London 1873; new ed. 1882; Italian trans., Florence 1874); *The Origin and Growth of Religion* (London 1878; new edd., 1882 and 1891); *Natural Religion* (ibid. 1889; 2nd ed. 1892); *Physical Religion* (ibid. 1891; 2nd ed. 1898); *Anthropological Religion* (ibid. 1892; 2nd ed. 1898); *Theosophy, or Psychological Religion* (ibid. 1893; 2nd ed. 1895, and reprint); *Contributions to the Science of Mythology* (2 vols., ibid. 1897); *The Science of Thought* (ibid. 1887); *Three Lectures on the Vedanta Philosophy* (ibid. 1894); *The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy* (ibid. 1899). A complete collection of his works has been issued (*Collected Works*, 20 vols., London 1898 ff.).
He was among the first historians who, overcoming the Enlightenment’s hostility toward the “Gothic” age, rediscovered the allure of the Middle Ages (*Reisen der Päpste* [1782]). In his masterpiece, *Geschichte der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft* (1786), he portrays Swiss medieval history as an age of organic Christian civilization.
M., a Protestant and Pietist, still retained the eighteenth-century antipathy toward monks, yet he was among the first to delineate medieval papacy as a shaper of civil liberties, even if his view arose from a precise and contingent polemic against the absolutist state of his own time.