Friedrich Max Muller

The Sacred Books of the East is the reason his name is still in circulation. Beginning in 1879 and running to fifty volumes, it put translations of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Taoist and Islamic scripture into English under one editorial scheme, with introductions, and made it possible for a reader with no oriental languages to compare them.

The scale required organisation rather than genius. Muller recruited the translators, among them Rhys Davids for the Pali texts, James Legge for the Chinese and Julius Eggeling for the Brahmanas, argued with Oxford University Press about money, and edited to a deadline for twenty years. Before it, a general reader in English had the Bible, a translation of the Quran and fragments. After it, the raw material for comparison existed in one place, and it is still cited, because for several of those texts no better English version was made for a century.

He had already done the same job on a smaller scale for a single text. His edition of the Rig Veda with the commentary of Sayana, six volumes published between 1849 and 1874 with East India Company money, established the printed text that Vedic scholarship worked from. The series and the edition together are why he is remembered as the organiser of a field as much as a theorist within it, and the organising has lasted much better than the theory.

The programmatic claim, set out in the lectures published in 1873 as Introduction to the Science of Religion, is that religion can be studied the way language is, comparatively and historically, and that a religion known on its own is not really known at all. His formulation, adapted from Goethe on languages, is that whoever knows one knows none. It is the founding argument of the discipline and it is still the answer to anyone who asks why a scholar of one tradition should read about another.

His own comparative theory has not survived. He held that myth arises from a disease of language: that words for natural phenomena, especially the sun and the dawn, lost their transparency as languages changed, and that the resulting confusion was mistaken for narrative about persons. On that reading a large proportion of Indo-European myth turns out to be about the sun. The theory was mocked in his own lifetime, most memorably by a parody demonstrating that Muller himself was a solar myth, and the fieldwork generation abandoned it entirely.

His position was awkward in other ways. He was passed over in 1860 for the Boden professorship of Sanskrit, which went to Monier Monier-Williams, in a contested election in which his German birth and his liberal theology were both used against him. And he wrote as a believing if unorthodox Christian who expected comparison to show religion to be universal rather than to dissolve it, which satisfied neither the orthodox nor the secularists of his day.