The New Orientalist Advaita Vedanta. Max Müller’s and Paul Deussen’s Joint Revision of Religion and Christianity

The aim of the article is to highlight the hitherto underestimated role of nineteenth-century German Indology in rethinking Christianity in response to the challenges of scientific materialism and historical-philological research. It is argued that, similar to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, a new self-understanding of Christianity as an inward religion emerged in nineteenth-century European Christianity, which was strongly influenced by colonial and global discourses. In this respect, Christianity has so far received too little attention, also because two leading protagonists of the relevant developments were not professional theologians but Indologists, who profiled their new view of Christianity by drawing on a specific interpretation of Advaita Vedanta. These were the German-British Indologist at Oxford University, Max Müller (1823–1900), and the German Indologist at Kiel University, Paul Deussen (1845–1919). Additionally, previous research has tended to study them in isolation. However, the significance of their approaches only becomes apparent when recognizing that they not only shared very similar positions but also regarded themselves as strategic allies. They were also in close contact with the Indian Hindu reformer Vivekananda (1863–1902).