Noah’s Ark on Irish Shores: German Historicism and the Religious Politics of Ancient Origins

Abstract

In 1844, Hermann Müller, a Catholic law professor from Würzburg, published a hefty volume on Nordic Greekdom and the Original History of North-Western Europe. The study claimed to hold definitive proof of the north-European origins of Hellenism, Abrahamic monotheism, and the entire human race. Germanic history was not German at all, Müller argued, but Celtic, and underneath it lay another hidden history of Nordic Greekdom, of which Southern Hellenism had been but a minor branch. Though it is today largely forgotten, Müller’s book elicited several responses upon publication and as late as the 1920s in Nazi literature. This article examines the reception of Nordic Greekdom as a striking example of the politicization of antiquity as an origin myth, arguing that the array of modern historicizations of antiquity and of Christianity’s place within it forms a ruptured and incoherent continuity of which ideologies as dissimilar as liberalism, Christian conservatism, and fascism—to name but a few—were all a part. Tracing this variety across ideological divides avoids overly rigid dichotomies such as the distinction between theological and racial antisemitism, while acknowledging the persistent, vast significance of Christianity within these discussions, whether as a living faith or as a discarded inheritance.

1. Introduction

In 1844, a professor at the University of Würzburg by the name of Hermann Müller (1803–1876) published a hefty volume on Nordic Greekdom and the Original History of North-Western Europe (Das nordische Griechenthum und die urgeschichtliche Bedeutung des nordwestlichen Europas). The study was an ambitious foray into classical philology and biblical criticism by a law professor who specialized in neither. Müller’s contentions were bold: The Garden of Eden had been a north European, and not a Mesopotamian, paradise. It referred to the same region as the northern paradise of Hyperborea known from Greek mythology, where the heavenly realm of Elysium, the hellish pit of Tartarus, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis were also to be found. The four Rivers of Paradise were the Rhine delta. Finally, Noah’s Ark did not wash up at the foot of Mount Ararat, but on the shores of Ireland. These findings were embedded in an overarching theory that early Celtic civilization was the original, “Nordic” Greekdom, of which Mediterranean Hellenism was but a minor branch. According to this theory, the Irish, rather than the Germans, were the descendants of the Germanic tribes (Müller 1844).

Though now largely forgotten, Nordic Greekdom caused a stir upon publication. Müller offered bafflingly anomalous answers to widely debated questions—What was the singular origin of humankind? How did this origin story result in the branching out of distinct religions and civilizations? And how would it determine history’s future unfolding? This article examines the reception of Müller’s study as a striking example of the politicization of antiquity as an origin myth.

The question of origins has long occupied the minds of European intellectuals. Since the Middle Ages, scholars have interrogated ancient myths, confirming, challenging, or dispelling them in the quest to determine the origins of humankind and its respective civilizations (see Olender 1992; Kidd 2006). This pursuit has recurringly resulted in new myths, in the sense of a “narrative of origins that gives individuals a feeling of belonging with others; that motivates certain actions; that legitimizes specific institutions; and that presents certain behaviors, feelings, and norms as natural, eternal, necessary” (Arvidsson 2006, p. 7). In its ambition to settle grand questions once and for all, the production of origin myths has always been political. But Müller’s thesis of Nordic Greekdom and its reception demonstrate how antiquity was also weaponized on a much pettier scale. As I will argue, the German fascination with antiquity in the 1840s reflected the deterministic assumption that the question of European civilization’s origins, particularly its Christian heritage, would determine the outcome of national, racial, and religious rivalries both big and small.

Müller himself was a staunchly conservative Catholic. More so than his unconventional historical contentions in and of themselves, it was the perception that a pro-Irish and hence pro-Catholic agenda stood to gain from them that caught contemporaries’ attention. Whether the Celts had descended from a hitherto unknown, Nordic Greekdom was considered directly relevant to the overarching power dynamics between Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christianity across the continent and vis-à-vis Islam, but also to the Irish campaign for Catholic emancipation, the Greek struggle against the Ottomans, and the Russian threat. This level of politicization illuminates the extent of historical determinism in the nineteenth century in the context of an unprecedented grappling with Europe’s Christian history.

German probes into ancient origins revolved around three main axes: Hellenism; the Hebrew Bible, particularly the story of Genesis; and the life of Jesus Christ. There is an impressive body of research in both scope and quality capturing the intensity of German intellectuals’ interest in these fields and how it gave rise to the increasing racialization of world history, feeding into notions of racial, ethnic, or national superiority (Olender 1992; Marchand 1996; Howard 1999; Christ 1999; Vick 2002; Williamson 2004; Kidd 2006; Blanton 2007; Carhart 2007; Legaspi 2010; Ilany 2018). Common to these contributions is that they focus almost exclusively on German Protestant thought, chronologically charting an intellectual genealogy that was infused with anti-clerical and nationalistic sensibilities.1 Müller’s Catholic, aggressively pro-clerical and politically conservative interpretation and the responses it garnered therefore offer a rare glimpse into the weaponization of antiquity across the political spectrum.

Rather than trace a tradition of thought through time, this article captures the question of origins at a particularly volatile historical moment, during which German intellectuals employed antiquity studies excessively in disputes over religious and foreign policy. Tellingly, elements of Müller’s thesis would be regurgitated in the form of Nazi propaganda almost a century later within a starkly different political context. The array of modern historicizations of antiquity and of Christianity’s place within it thus emerges as a ruptured and incoherent continuity of which ideologies as dissimilar as liberalism, Christian conservatism, and fascism—to name but a few—were all a part. Tracing this variety across ideological divides avoids overly rigid dichotomies such as the distinction between theological and racial antisemitism, while acknowledging the persistent, vast significance of Christianity within these discussions, whether as a living faith or as a discarded inheritance.

2. Biblical Criticism and the Question of Origins

Well-aware that his thesis was highly unorthodox, Müller wrote with the affected modesty of a tortured scholar who had unwillingly made an earth-shattering discovery. He framed the book’s preface as a half-dedication, half-apology to his brother Ludwig, whom he beseeched to keep an open mind. Initially, it had been hard for him, too, to accept that “all of the most civilized nations of modern Europe have based their history on an error” (Müller 1844, pp. vi–vii).2 The bulk of Nordic Greekdom consists of elaborate etymological ramblings on the origins of Hellenism. Only the last seven pages turn to the Hebrew Bible and discuss what Müller termed “the most disputed” topic of them all—the geographical location of the Garden of Eden (Müller 1844, p. x, pp. 513–20). These nevertheless form the culmination of the entire study. Laying the ground for his shocking conclusion in the preface, Müller urged his brother Ludwig to bravely set aside his existing understanding of the Old Testament. It was necessary, he explained, to first trace the prehistory of humankind back from ancient Greece without giving a thought to Scripture. This line of inquiry led to the irrefutable conclusion that “humanity originated in the north-western part of the world.” Armed with this new insight, one could then turn back to Scripture and find its true meaning revealed (Müller 1844, pp. ix–x).

Müller’s reading of Genesis was true to the German tradition of biblical criticism in that it treated Scripture as a historical text to be dissected and interpreted with the toolkit of the historian and the philologist. The mere possibility of a critical-historical understanding of Scripture asserted a new epistemological hierarchy, seeking to externally verify Scripture’s truth-claim rather than allude to its divine origins (Howard 1999, pp. 14–16). While he radically reinterpreted the Hebrew Bible’s historicity, however, Müller did not dispute it. “If even a word of the conjectures I dared to express is incompatible with the content of our divine tradition,” he declared in the conclusion, “then it shall collapse into itself as idle and vain.” He nevertheless added a caveat to this oath of allegiance: “It seemed to me, however, that the word of Gospel, as well as the doctrine of the [Catholic] Church, allowed for great freedom here” (Müller 1844, pp. 519–20).

By drawing on the academic tradition of biblical criticism, Müller was engaging with one of the most high-profile public debates of his time. In the 1840s, the question of Scripture’s historicity gave rise to polarizing religious disputes. Known as the Vormärz, this was a period of fermentation in the German lands, during which both liberalism and Christian conservatism consolidated as political movements. In the spotlight were the Young Hegelians, a movement of young intellectuals in the wake of Hegel’s death whose theological and political critique of monarchical and ecclesiastical authority seminally shaped German liberalism and its anti-clerical sensibilities (Breckman 2001). The Young Hegelians’ political dissent and revolutionary fervor led to their forceful censorship and cost them professional positions on more than one occasion (Howard 1999, p. 97; Howard 2006, pp. 289–90; Breckman 2001, p. 99). A row of publications by the Young Hegelians in the 1830s and 40s scandalized and polarized the German public for years on end, among them David Friedrich Strauss’ (1808–1874) The Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet) from 1835; Ludwig Feuerbach’s (1804–1872) The Essence of Christianity (Das Wesen des Christentums) from 1841; and a series of works by Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) on the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, culminating in his subsequently banned Christianity Exposed (Das entdeckte Christentum) from 1843.

In the spirit of biblical criticism, Strauss and Bauer plainly formulated their studies as historical critiques of the Gospels’ account of early Christianity. The case of Feuerbach was less straightforward. As he clarified in the preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity from 1843, his was not a purely historical, but a “historical-philosophical” critique of Christianity. Rather than interrogate Christianity’s origins, he was interested in isolating the abstract principles animating it as a faith (Feuerbach [1843] 1956, pp. 24–25). Unlike Strauss and Bauer, Feuerbach explained, he did not set out to settle the question of whether Scripture’s account of historical events was true. Nevertheless, Feuerbach adopted a critical-historical approach that appealed to the authority of “objective, present or historical, facts” rather than speculative conjecture (Feuerbach [1843] 1956, pp. 13–14). Further, a central part of Feuerbach’s critique pertained to Christianity’s conception of history. Christ, he posited, was not the central point of history according to the Christian faith, but its termination. Christianity was hence founded on the anticipation of the end of the world, rendering any other aspect of worldly history null and void (Feuerbach [1843] 1956, pp. 245–46).

The Young Hegelians’ critical re-examining of early Christianity and of Christianity’s conception of history more broadly followed in the footsteps of the German Enlightenment universities who had first institutionalized biblical criticism in the late eighteenth century (see Legaspi 2010, pp. 27–52). The new academic discipline, spearheaded by Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791) of Göttingen University, had emerged as a subset of philology. Michaelis reimagined Hebraism as a classical golden age comparable to Hellenism. In an attempt to imbue biblical criticism with the academic prestige of classical studies, he approached the Hebrew biblical text philologically rather than through the interpretive lens of a given theological tradition (Legaspi 2010, pp. 96–103). The decades during which Michaelis was active coincided with the phenomenal success of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s (1717–1768) works, which popularized classical Greek art among the German public and unleashed an unprecedented veneration of Hellenist antiquity. As pointed out by Michael C. Legaspi, German philhellenism was not merely a cultural craze, but an integral part of the broader attempt to grapple with Europe’s Christian legacy—“To its proponents, it entailed the monumental task of replacing Christianity with a new form of life derived from an imaginative engagement with Greek antiquity” (Legaspi 2010, p. 55).

Michaelis’ own interpretation of the Hebrew Bible offered a sophisticated answer to the question of Christianity’s origins. Diasporic Judaism, he argued, had no roots in Israelite antiquity and therefore no real claim over it. The Hebrew Bible was a time capsule written in the dead language of an extinct civilization. Its meaning had to be deciphered anew through philological efforts, a pursuit to which Jewish erudition had nothing to contribute (Legaspi 2010, pp. 84–95). This rendering had the dual effect of classicizing Christianity’s origins and minimizing their Jewishness. Rather than tracing Christianity to the Revelation and subsequent universalization of the Jewish God, Michaelis ascribed it to an ancient, long-extinct culture whose sole hold over modern European minds was the gratifying task of unearthing its richness (Legaspi 2010, p. 100). Michaelis’ philological, even secularizing historicization of the Hebrew Bible coincided with another philological discovery—Proto-Indo-European. The realization that European and Indian languages shared a kinship that set them apart from the Semitic Hebrew further bifurcated European civilization’s origin story, generating a perceived dichotomy between Europe’s indulgently aesthetic and knowledge-seeking Hellenistic roots and the austere, unforgiving heritage of Israelite monotheism (Masuzawa 2005, pp. 147–49).

This notion of Europe’s dual legacy animated the works of the Young Hegelians, who historicized Jesus Christ as a worldly figure rooted in a specific national and cultural context. That Jesus was a Jew from Judea recast monotheism as fundamentally foreign to Europe’s indigenous history. Though they differed in the particulars, Strauss, Bauer, and Feuerbach were convinced that it was European civilization’s destiny to deliver the next stage in world history, and that the radical adaptation or supersession of Christianity would facilitate this progression (Zachhuber 2013, pp. 76–77; Moggach 2003, pp. 61, 99–118; Breckman 2001, pp. 102–6). It was necessary to emancipate Europe from Christianity’s Levantine roots, a dead weight that was holding Europe back. Worthy of preservation was only the ahistorical, metaphysical component of Christianity, which was indeed indigenous to Europe (Howard 1999, pp. 78–79). This vision rested on a shared conception of history as empirically verifiable and contingent, yet at the same time having a clear direction, even a destination (Olender 1992, pp. 19–20). There was such a thing as historical progress, and the ancient past held the key to deciphering its meaning and direction. In contrast to traditional Christian understandings of temporality, this historicism conceived of a worldly machinery of progress that either minimized or entirely denied the role of divine intervention (see Bennett 2019).

A conservative Catholic, Müller suggested quite a different solution to the conundrum of Europe’s origins. The historical account of the Gospels was not irrelevant, he maintained, nor was it false. It had simply been misconstrued. Thus, though Müller adopted both the epistemology and the rhetoric of biblical criticism, he did not reject Christian doctrine’s historicity but rather revised its historical narrative in a way that resolved the conflict. Christianity did not originate in the Levante and was not foreign to Europe’s pagan roots after all. Rather, they were one and the same.

3. Defending Catholicism

Mockery of Müller’s thesis ensued immediately upon publication. This is not surprising, considering that Müller’s methods and findings were questionable, to say the least. More noteworthy is the genuine anti-Catholic outrage that accompanied this mockery. The historian Peter Feddersen Stuhr (1787–1851) took the trouble of reviewing Müller’s book twice, for different venues. Stuhr was committed to rationalist critiques of religious doctrine and dedicated much of his energy to denouncing Catholic dogmatism. His many works include a volume on Nordic antiquity, as well as several volumes on ancient pagan religions (Stuhr 1817, 1831, 1836a, 1836b). Stuhr’s first review of Nordic Greekdom was published in December of 1844 in the “Journal for Scientific Critique.” The organ of the similarly named “Berlin Society for Scientific Critique,” the journal was a central platform of the Hegelian movement and had been founded in 1827 with the involvement of the philosopher himself. Among its contributors was also Ludwig Feuerbach, who praised it as “one of the most esteemed, if not the most esteemed scientific institute of its time” (Schlawe 1959, p. 251).

Stuhr listed Müller’s findings one-by-one, complete with lengthy quotations, in a mocking tone. It is of note that the journal judged Müller’s obviously amateurish study to warrant such a detailed, 13-column-long rebuttal. “Professor Müller’s relation to current-day science could be compared to that of Euhemeros in his time,” Stuhr observed, referring to the Greek mythographer known for attributing myths to real-world, if embellished, historical events (Stuhr 1844, p. 925). As Stuhr explained in the concluding paragraph with mocking derision, the problem was not Müller’s deficient scientific understanding so much as the political motivations driving it: “After such discoveries, the churchly obedience of the spirit behind them, which treads so freely in the realms of science, is all the more admirable, considering the decline of this obedience in Catholics nowadays, even, according to reports, in Father Henricus Gossler” (Stuhr 1844, p. 944). Stuhr was referring to a Franciscan monk who had tried to establish a convent for women in Dorsten in 1842, in defiance of both Catholic and Prussian authorities. Gossler was subsequently summoned to Rome by the Pope, where four of the women followed him, causing a scandal. After declaring one of the women as stigmatized in 1846, Gossler would be called out as fraudulent by the Prussian government (Stegemann 2017).

In 1845, Stuhr published another, shorter review of Nordic Greekdom as part of a series of book reviews for the “Journal for Historical Science,” a project of the brothers Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859) Grimm and Leopold Ranke (1795–1886), the famed pioneer of critical, source-based historical research. Here, Stuhr briefly addressed Müller’s methods, accusing him of willfully ignoring historical evidence that contradicted his thesis (Schmidt et al. 1845, p. 189). Once again, however, Stuhr’s chief concern was calling out Müller’s partisan motivations, which stemmed, he argued, “from a peculiarly religious, or should one say, churchly standpoint” (Schmidt et al. 1845, p. 188).

Stuhr’s reading of Nordic Greekdom was informed by his own understanding of European civilization’s origins. In 1842, he had published a booklet on “the relationship of Christian theology to philosophy and mythology according to the current state of science” (Stuhr 1842). Stuhr’s argument was essentially that of the Young Hegelians. It was necessary, he wrote, to distinguish between the philosophical, ahistorical component of Christianity and the factual claims Christian doctrine made about the past. European, and especially Germanic civilization, was founded on a dual, contradictory legacy. Whereas “modern science and philosophy” rested on a “pagan foundation,” Christian theology was rooted in a “doctrine of revelation” (Offenbarungslehre) that had originated with the Israelites, a people who had vehemently opposed paganism. This inherent contradiction in Western civilization remained unresolved (Stuhr 1842, pp. 4–5). Stuhr concluded his essay with a fierce condemnation of Catholic teachings, which he accused of irrationally perpetuating this contradiction to the detriment of progress. “Religious life must be considered as intrinsically free in its development,” he argued. The dangerously erroneous Catholic insistence on a “misconstrued original revelation or doctrine” prohibited such development and was merely designed to preserve the distance between the priesthood, which maintained exclusive interpretive authority, and the laity (Stuhr 1842, p. 19). Stuhr’s issue with Catholicism had everything to do with the question of origins. Catholic doctrine irrationally insisted on retaining an antiquated, revelation-based historical narrative whose actual historical roots were fundamentally foreign to Europe. It was not just the abstract principle of divine revelation that presented a problem, but that the resulting Catholic understanding of European civilization’s origin story was false. To unleash civilizational progress, it was essential to acknowledge Europe’s true, pagan origins.

As Stuhr’s reaction to Nordic Greekdom demonstrates, the book hit a nerve with anti-clerical liberals. Particularly maddening was that it used rationalist argumentation strategies and turned them on their head, whole-heartedly adopting the premise that Scripture was not above scientific verification. More infuriating still was that Müller’s findings were by no means orthodox by ecclesiastical standards, but merely politically convenient from a pro-Catholic point of view. Indeed, despite brazenly undermining any conceivably mainstream interpretation of Scripture, they did not elicit so much as a ripple of indignance in Catholic circles.

A Rhenish Catholic journal reviewed Nordic Greekdom somewhat ambivalently. Whether Müller’s findings were valid, the reviewer would “neither confirm nor deny,” describing the book as “strange; for it casts doubt on the Germanness of the Germanic peoples,” essentially demolishing “our conventional history.” That the book also contested doctrinal assumptions on the origins of humankind and the Gospels themselves did not seem to trouble the author as much. Nordic Greekdom was nevertheless worthy of appraisal, the author conceded, if only because Müller was “among those thoughtful men who is a rarity these days in any field, just as he declared every word as null and void insofar as it may be incompatible with our divine tradition” (Das nordische 1845, p. 372). The review concluded half-heartedly that it was difficult to make out the book’s religious significance: “A one and only God of light does shine through, but under so many names and guises that He is difficult to grasp or make sense of” (Das nordische 1845, p. 379).

This cautious praise was not merely the result of cynical political calculations. At a time of considerable religious tumult and increasing marginalization of the German Catholic community, Müller was a rare champion of conservative Catholicism within a predominantly clerical-sceptic academia. Two years after his death in 1876, the publisher of Nordic Greekdom, Franz Kirchheim—one of the most prominent publishing houses of German Catholicism—published a biography of Müller celebrating his life and faith. The author, M. Liederbach, portrayed Müller as a misunderstood genius, a tactic that allowed him to reconcile Müller’s devout Catholicism with the more unorthodox elements of his work. Geniuses, Liederbach explained, those “darlings of the world” who are so easily given over to temptation in their quest for beauty and truth, “are forgiven much” (Liederbach 1878, p. 4). It was specifically Müller’s groundbreaking scholarship on antiquity “at the nexus between biblical, classical, and Germanic pagan tradition” that put him in this special category. At great personal cost, Müller had pursued his scholarship with uncompromising integrity and untiring defense of the “Christian world order” against “arbitrary fictions of freedom… against the contrived right for national state-unity… [and] the presumptions of science…” (Liederbach 1878, pp. 5–6). Attesting to Müller’s scholarly rectitude was his unflinching commitment to discoveries that undermined even his own worldview, not least his deep, inborn identity as a German: “It follows that his reluctantly won conviction of the un-German origin and character of the Germanics in the first three centuries shook his entire historical worldview to the core…” (Liederbach 1878, p. 63, see also p. 164).

Liederbach was referring, of course, to Nordic Greekdom, which he believed represented Müller’s finest and most poorly understood work:

H. M.’s book on Nordic Greekdom, where he cuts through the fog of the Celtic North Sea with the aid of Odysseus’ compass like a daring argonaut… illuminating an entire facet of prehistoric antiquity with Greek fire and finally reopening Hades itself; this whole book is likely the most ingenious of his works… It shall not be concealed here, but rather stated expressly, that H. M.’s bold presentation and handling of the problem of prehistoric Nordic Greekdom was rejected by the guild-like scholarly community outright, that its weakest parts were scornfully torn out of context and taken apart, while its best parts were stifled.

(Liederbach 1878, p. 64)

Liederbach’s book-long eulogy provides a stark contrast to the entry on Müller in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). The most ambitious biographical project on German personalities to date, ADB began as a suggestion raised by Leopold Ranke at the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1858 (Hockerts 2008, p. 19). The initiative was officially taken up a decade later and co-edited, as of 1873, by Franz Xaver von Wegele (1823–1897). Incidentally, Wegele was rector of the University of Würzburg, where Müller had been a professor (Liliencron and Wegele 1875, p. xii). As stated by Wegele and his co-editor in the preface to the first volume, the project did not cover living personalities so as not to risk unnecessary partisanship and compromise clear judgement in “calm objectivity” (Liliencron and Wegele 1875, p. vi). The entry on Müller, authored by Wegele himself, was appended in 1885, almost a decade after his death and well over a decade after unification under Prussian hegemony and the advent of the Reich’s anti-Catholic campaign in the 1870s, known as the Kulturkampf. Wegele commemorated Müller in no uncertain terms as an enemy of the Reich. That Müller was included in the ADB as late as 1885, along with the brazenly partisan rendering of his life-story, once again point to the politically volatile impact of his work.

Except for two early works that gained little to no traction, Wegele did not mention any of Müller’s writings, nor much anything pertaining to his contribution as a scholar or member of society. The entry reads like a cautionary tale; a public repudiation of someone who has fallen from grace. Wegele recounted Müller’s apparent failure to obtain a position in Prussia, hinting heavily that his position in Würzburg was the result of political deal-making with Bavaria’s “ultramontane” government at the time. Following a futile attempt to pursue a political career as a representative at the Frankfurt parliament, Müller remained in the Prussian Rhineland rather than resume his duties as a professor, where he took over as editor of the “Deutsche Volkshalle,” a journal whose obvious aim it was “to incite the Rhenish population against the Prussian government.” After being disgracefully exiled from Prussia in 1850, Müller once again utilized his connections in the Bavarian government to arrange a position for himself at the University of Würzburg as a philology professor—a position for which his qualifications were “questionable.” Wegele’s damning summation of Müller’s life was a far cry from anything feasibly resembling “calm objectivity”: “A richly endowed nature has perished with neither gratitude nor glory due to the misuse of its gifts and the lamentable development of its character” (Wegele 1885, p. 561).

4. Deterministic Geopolitics

The un-Germanic origins of the Germans remained Müller’s most controversial idea, across the political spectrum. It was not Müller’s contentions on the origins of humankind, the whereabouts of numerous mythical locations, or the historicity of Scripture that prompted the most outrage, but his conviction that the Celts, rather than the Germans, were the descendants of the Germanics, as well as the primary heirs to Christian, Hellenic, and Hebraic civilization. Müller framed his alternative history as a reasonable bargain for the Germans. True, it meant that they had lost their ancestral claim to the Germanic tribes. But what they lost in roots, he suggested in consolation, they gained in land, in that “northern Europe, and especially Germany, France, and Britain, until recently only a forsaken corner of the world in ancient times, is now adorned with the highest ancient, even classical splendor…” (Müller 1844, p. 5).

Müller’s conciliatory tone to his fellow Germans as he broke the news that they were not Germanic after all briefly exposes the logic behind the question of origins. The prestige bequeathed to a nation through antiquity had direct implications for its present and near future. According to Müller’s thesis, this prestige was not bequeathed to the Germans, but to the Irish. The cradle of both ancient Greece and European Christendom was Celtic civilization. The ancient Druids had provided the blueprint for Christian priesthood (Müller 1844, p. 190) and Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847), the famed Irish agitator for Catholic emancipation, was of Milesian descent (Müller 1844, p. 185).

It is important to clarify the specific geopolitical context Müller was invoking, namely the Irish campaign to repeal the Act of Union from 1800. Here too, Müller was capitalizing on prior social traction to get his foot in the door. The movement for repeal was led by O’Connell, whose figure assumed almost mythical proportions in German imaginations in the 1840s, illustrating the ambivalence surrounding the Irish question among the German public in this period. On the one hand, O’Connell’s campaign was the epitome of liberal values, dissenting against British authorities in the name of national determination and religious freedom. On the other hand, it enjoyed significant backing from the clergy, drawing strength from the rise of an increasingly assertive and coordinated Catholicism in Europe, a thorn in the eye of the liberal movement. It should come as no surprise that the German Catholic press consistently represented O’Connell as a pious believer and defender of the Church, while minimizing his nationalistic motivations and outspoken liberal views (Grogan 1991). Among German liberals, O’Connell was a more divisive figure, with responses ranging from unbridled heroization to suspicion toward his cooperation with the clergy and angry accusations that he was cynically exploiting the plight of destitute Irish farmers for his own gain (Bourke 1996). Further complicating matters, unflattering portrayals of O’Connell resonated a broader Anglo-German discourse that racialized the Catholic Irish as Celts, inferior to the ancestrally “Teutonic” English, Scots, and Germans (Wheatley 2015, pp. 156–82; Steinberg 2023). It was likely this specific dimension of the Irish question to which Müller felt compelled to respond with a complete rewriting of ancient history.

“Not content with relocating the entire prehistory and mythology of classical antiquity… [Müller] wishes also to claim the location of the sacred texts, the creation of Man; the Garden of Eden, the mountains of Ararat, and Noah’s Ark for the Strait of Dover and the British Isles,” wrote Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (1790–1861) in 1845 in the journal of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Science. Müller nevertheless came to the “patriotic conclusion,” Fallmerayer continued, that “the German Rhine could well be the river of rivers, the river of the Mosaic paradise,” even as he allowed for the possibility that the French Seine was the biblical Gihon, “so as not to spoil things with our neighbors to the west” (Fallmerayer 1845, p. 408). Fallmerayer’s dripping sarcasm portrayed Müller’s thesis as a kind of prize-giving frenzy driven by religious conceit. Müller fashioned himself, Fallmerayer scorned, as a modern-day prophet: “To review and dispute with secular analysis a book whose content the author himself considers a kind of inspiration and scientific revelation would be, at the very least, inappropriate, if not a profanation of all that is sacred” (Fallmerayer 1845, p. 372). Fallmerayer was particularly irked by how Müller radically flouted scholarly convention merely as a means of defending traditionalist politics:

Mr. M pursues a higher purpose and is not in the least perturbed by the effect of the flaming torch he hurls at Western scholars. For if, “guided by his inner light,” he is forced to see nothing but inadequacy, falsity, and confusion in antiquity studies, he takes comfort amid the ruin of secular scholarship in the thought “that in holy truth, the light of revelation protects against misjudgment.” Mr. M clearly wrote his book primarily in the interest of pious faith, especially, however, to combat the arrogant self-indulgence of “contemporary philosophy”… Even if the method of his pious-historical propaganda is somewhat peculiar.3

(Fallmerayer 1845, p. 370–71)

On the face of it, Fallmerayer simply reacted to Müller with the same anti-clerical vitriol as his peers. Yet in his ridicule of Müller’s excessive historical revisionism, Fallmerayer was betraying his own willingness to weaponize antiquity for political purposes. A vehemently anti-clerical Slavophobe, the Austrian Fallmerayer was something of an anomaly in the German political landscape of the 1840s, who sported his own controversial thesis on antiquity. His 1830 work, The History of the Morea Peninsula in the Middle Ages (Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters), disputed the Hellenistic origins of modern-day Greeks, who were, he claimed, descendants of Slavic tribes (Fallmerayer 1830). Fallmerayer’s theory, promptly rejected by the scholarly community, was intended to undermine the cause of Greek independence that had taken Europe by storm. A relatively lone critic of phillhellenism, Fallmerayer feared it would compound the Russian threat, which he deemed existential. The Ottoman Empire was necessary to contain this threat within a grand arena of Slavic and Latin-Germanic rivalry. As termed by Stefan Lindinger, Fallmerayer essentially “Balkanized” the Greeks, enrooting them within a purportedly cohesive historical region stretching “from Kiev to the Peloponnese” that upheld Byzantine Christendom and defined itself in opposition to both Islam and Roman Catholicism. Though Fallmerayer defined the common denominator of these peoples as religious, he also racialized their kinship as “Slavo-Albanian” (Lindinger 2019, pp. 77–78).

The racial element underpinning both Fallmerayer and Müller’s theses was indicative of a broader shift in the historicization of religion in nineteenth-century Europe. The discovery of Proto-Indo-European—or Indo-Germanic, as many a German scholar called it—and the resulting taxonomy of language families gave rise to the increasing ethnicization and racialization of religious history. European philologists were convinced that language families corresponded to races, such as the Slavic, Semitic, or Aryan race, neatly corresponding to the historic branching out of religions. Thus, for example, the “languid, indulgent, and dissolute ‘Mussulman’—epitomized by the fabulously rich, corpulent Ottoman pasha,” became “a fierce zealot, a sword-wielding, camel-riding desert nomad… an Arab” (Masuzawa 2005, p. 170). This intellectual shift coincided with what Michael Carhart has termed the rise of a “science of culture” in late-eighteenth-century German scholarship, which identified national “spirits” as the single most important force of historical change. A nation’s spirit or character was the main determinant of its historical trajectory on the world stage. The interaction between national spirits propelled world history forward (Carhart 2007, pp. 3–4, 23–26, 222–47).

This backdrop provides necessary context for understanding Fallmerayer and Müller’s intellectual trajectories, which share some striking parallels. Like Müller, Fallmerayer was something of an outlier in German academia. His fervent anti-clericalism hurt his career prospects and eventually led to his estrangement from King Maximillian II of Bavaria, with whom he had enjoyed a previously close relationship (Lindinger 2019, p. 81). But it was Fallmerayer’s position on the Greek question, much more than his radical anti-clericalism, that set him apart from his colleagues. In the 1830s and 40s, the victorious Greek struggle for independence captured the hearts of German liberals, becoming an overwhelmingly championed cause, especially in Bavaria. Moreover, Maximilian II’s brother, Otto von Wittelsbach, became king of the newly established Kingdom of Greece in 1832. German intellectuals’ infatuation with the Greek struggle had everything to do with their romanticization of Greek antiquity and the continuity they perceived between the two, which Fallmerayer denied (Lindinger 2019, pp. 82–83). Fallmerayer’s “Balkanization” of the Greeks was rooted in a visceral fear of Russian expansionism. Therewith lies the most unusual aspect of the politicization of antiquity in the 1840s—the overwhelming conviction among contemporaries that the ancient past would necessarily determine the future outcome of geopolitical and religious rivalries. If Fallmerayer’s reading of ancient history was far from typical, his historical determinism was not. In the same vein, it is telling that in his dedication to the Catholic cause, Müller felt compelled to rewrite the West’s entire understanding of antiquity and prehistory and crown the ancient Celts as the cradle of human civilization. Whether he himself believed his findings to be valid is beside the point. Suffice to say that assertions of ancestry mattered in contemporary politics to an unreasonable degree, not just as a legitimization of moral claims, but as a determinant of fate.

In a lecture on migration in the natural world from the late 1850s, the botanist Matthias Jakob Schleiden (1804–1881), known for his central role in the formulation of cell theory, took this determinism to the extreme. Schleiden concluded his lecture with the topic of human migration and its implications for civilizational progress, at which point he briefly mentioned Müller, albeit not by name:

How wonderful it would be if the old saying that there is no foolery so great that no scholar would defend it, did not apply in this case. Not many years ago, a Würzburg professor wrote a book: “Nordic Greekdom.” Starting with the perhaps defensible notion that Greek seafaring legends, such as those Homer preserved for our benefit, might contain an obscure and misunderstood account of the northern coasts of Europe, he increasingly falls in love with his subject and loses all rational inhibition, arriving via neck-breaking reasoning and tasteless wordplay at the conclusion that Ireland is the cradle of the human race. […] But enough of this nonsense. The only serious, truly regrettable thing about the affair is that such fools, however harmless, are still permitted to instruct youth.

(Schleiden 1857, pp. 42–43)

Like Stuhr and Fallmerayer, Schleiden had nothing to say about Müller’s methods, merely presenting his findings as absurd. The context in which he brings up Müller, however, is telling. In the preceding paragraph, Schleiden contended that human migration was governed by an “unbendable” law of nature: “Just as the migration of plants and animals from east to west gradually determines the physiognomy of nature, so does the westward march of Man determine history… […] Man moves with the sun; the East is his cradle, the West his destination” (Schleiden 1857, p. 42). It is unclear whether Schleiden was familiar with Hegel’s similar dictum that “World history moves from East to West, for Europe is the absolute end of world history, Asia its beginning” (Hegel [1837] 1924). In any event, he did not cite Hegel, but rather Jacob Grimm’s History of the German Language (Geschichte der deutschen Sprache), which used the similarly positivistic term “immutable natural law” (unwandelbares Naturgesetz) (Grimm 1848, p. 169). Müller’s crime, therefore, was not the wild and unfounded speculations he made to contrive a narrative that aligned with his politics. Rather, it was that his account of ancient times dared defy this “natural law,” claiming as it did that humanity had spread eastward. Though he did not specify Müller’s alleged motives, portraying him merely as a harmless fool, Schleiden clearly had a bone to pick with his answer to the question of origins. Unlike the Young Hegelians, Schleiden did not deal with Europe’s conflicted roots by discarding its Levantine heritage, nor did he reinvent them, as Müller did. He instead turned the logic of origins on its head—it was not the inheritance of a distant golden age that guaranteed a people’s future greatness but its willingness to leave everything behind and migrate westward. It was this capacity that set the Indo-Germanics apart from all other human groups. Three human lineages were of particular interest to the history of migration, Schleiden explained—the Semites, the Indians, and the Indo-Germanics. The Indians and the Semites had migrated west while clinging to the heritage of their original eastern settlements. Not so the Indo-Germanics:

They [the Semites and the Indians] quickly developed these imported elements [of their heritage] to a high degree of cultivation; but just as quickly, their culture, not native to the new soil and unable to thrive naturally, ossified. They ceased to have a true history, as with the case of the Chinese and the Indians, or degenerated into savage hordes, as with the case of most of the Semitic tribes.4 Not so the third group [Völkerfamilie], the Indo-Germanics. They appear to have been the last to migrate out of the nursery of humanity. […] But among all the Indo-Germanic tribes, there are no legends to be found commemorating their original homeland. They had the courage to leave the past and their history, and to a large degree perhaps even their culture, behind. They were granted a great future in return, and it is in them alone that the truly progressive civilizational history [fortschreitende Entwickkungsgeschichte] of humanity is realized.

(Schleiden 1857, p. 41)

As clarified in an endnote, Schleiden based his sweeping summary of prehistoric human migration almost entirely on Arthur de Gobineau’s (1816–1882) infamous Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (Essai sur l’inegalité des races humaines), one of the founding texts of modern race theory (Schleiden 1857, p. 47). Similarly to Gobineau, he, too, drew firm conclusions on the ranking of various human groups’ contributions to civilizational progress. Though Schleiden did not explicitly mention Jews, his depiction of Semitic tribes as “degenerated… savage hordes” resonated the longstanding tradition of portraying Judaism as a petrified cultural remnant that obstinately refused change (Masuzawa 2005, pp. 147–49; see also Newman 1993). In that respect, his rendering of ancient history was a mirror image to Michaelis’ above-mentioned historicization of the Hebrew Bible. Whereas Michaelis denied any connection between the Hebrew Bible and diasporic Judaism, Schleiden implied that the Jewish reverence of the past had a degenerative effect. This notable difference notwithstanding, both thinkers were driven by a remarkably deterministic conception of historical progress and Europe’s role therein. Put in this context, Schleiden’s positivistic approach to the question of origins also implicitly grapples with the legacy of Christianity, in that it asserts a forward, westward march of history driven by the laws of nature rather than by a revelation-based eschatology. In some ways, Schleiden’s understanding of progress as the total discarding of the past is even more religiously radical than that of the Young Hegelians, as well as immeasurably bleaker. In the concluding paragraph, Schleiden implied that Western civilization was no longer in the midst of its progression but had arrived at an endpoint. Arriving at his own geopolitical conclusions, Schleiden contended that all that was left was to protect in a firm embrace what it had built in face of the looming threat from the East:

The mature man, the representative of humanity, stands on the ground of his most recent deeds. The sun sinks deep toward the West, while the dark night approaches from the East, ever blacker. Looking back, he sees the decimated cradle of his race in the desert, desecrated by savage hordes. All living things flee westward before the rising night in pursuit of the escaping sun. The earth shakes beneath his feet, the old pillars of justice and truth crumbling, darkness creeping from the East, as he asks himself: should I give in to the overwhelming pull of life? Should I stay put? And then his gaze falls upon a small green hill; there lies the grandmother on whose lap he had babbled the first human words; beside her, the child who first greeted him with the sweet name of the father. Deeply moved, he falls on his knees; whatever his fate may bring, he stays and protects the ashes of his loved ones.

(Schleiden 1857, pp. 43–44)

5. A Hyperborean Atlantis

Perhaps the latest text to reference Müller’s Nordic Greekdom was Hans F. K. Günther’s (1891–1968) Racial history of the Greek and Roman peoples (Rassengeschichte des Hellenischen und des Römischen Volkes) from 1929. Günther, a eugenicist known in Nazi Germany for his expertise in racial science, cited Müller in the very first paragraph:

In his novel “Zanoni” from 1842, the English novelist Bulwer (Lord Lytton) expressed the view that the Hellenes were of a northern racial heritage, “of the same great family as the Norman tribe.” Their ruling classes were blond and blue-eyed. Published in 1844, Nordic Greekdom and the Original History of Northwestern Europe, by Herman Müller, similarly claimed that the Hellenes hailed from north-western Europe, more specifically the British Isles. Such views surely seemed like unfounded fables at the time. Today, it is acknowledged that Bulwer and Müller had captured something truthful and tenable.

(Günther 1929a, p. 9)

Günther did not directly engage with either Bulwer or Müller’s arguments, merely appealing to their vaguely conceived authority. Günther thus created the false semblance of a direct intellectual continuity between Bulwer, Müller, and himself. Elsewhere, in the third, expanded edition to his Rassenkunde Europas (translated to English as Racial Elements of European History), also from 1929, Günther cited Fallmerayer in the same manner, alluding to his claim that the Hellenes had been European by origin and had nothing to do with modern-day Greeks (Günther 1929b, p. 214). Like many before him, including Müller himself, Günther was cherry-picking quotes that buttressed his argument, wrenching them out of context. This habit highlights the problematics of a genealogical approach to the discourse of origins. As we know, Fallmerayer and Müller were hardly of the same intellectual stock. Both, however, engaged with a question generations of thinkers sought to answer, Günther being no exception. As this article argues, it is more useful to approach the question of origins as part of an ongoing grappling with Europe’s Christian legacy that yielded rivaling, often conflicting results, both synchronously and through the ages.

Illustrating this point is perhaps the most striking parallel between Müller’s largely forgotten theory of Nordic Greekdom and Nazi origin myths—the idea of a Hyperborean Atlantis. Tracing the historical origins of this idea, Dan Edelstein identifies its likely genesis in the work of French astronomer and revolutionary Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736–93). Edelstien places Bailly’s speculations on Atlantis within the context of the French Enlightenment’s orientalism, and specifically Voltaire’s 1756 work, Essay on the Manners of Nations (Essai sur les mœres et l’esprit des nations). Preempting much of the discourse surrounding the Indo-European language family, Voltaire declared India as the cradle of human civilization and scientific progress (Edelstein 2006, p. 269; see also Olender 1992, pp. 7–8). Bailly adopted Voltaire’s diffusionist theory that civilization had spread from a single, eastern source, employing the same metaphor Hegel, Jacob Grimm, and Schleiden would adopt decades later: “the light [of the sciences], born in the east like that of the sun, advances like that star westward, and in an exceedingly slow revolution, appears compelled to circle the globe” (cited in Edelstein 2006, p. 271). It was the mythical Atlantis, however, rather than India, that Bailly identified as the mother of all civilizations. In defiance of tradition, Bailly located Atlantis in the far north-east, somewhere near the North Pole, claiming that it was the ancient Atlanteans—a white, northern European race—who had taught scientific progress to the first Asian civilizations (Edelstein 2006, p. 272). Bailly thus subscribed to the logic that the inheritance of a grand antiquity determined an equally grand future. Rather than dispute the historically eastward spread of civilization Voltaire had posited, he simply added another link to the chain—a mythical, ancient society whose whereabouts were conveniently undetermined. This sophisticated maneuver, according to Edelstein, is what made Bailly’s theory so attractive to race theory advocates later on, and ultimately to Nazi ideologues.

Edelstein draws a direct line between Bailly; Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s (1831–1891) Secret Doctrine from 1888, which indeed cites him excessively; and Alfred Rosenberg’s infamous The Myth of the 20th Century (Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts), a bestseller in Nazi Germany second only to Mein Kampf (Edelstein 2006, pp. 278–79). Rosenberg speculated that Atlantis had been a northern continent of “seafarers and warriors” whose superior culture had spread far and wide. To Rosenberg, this primordial Nordic antiquity was the genesis of “racial history,” a “history of the religion of blood” that was “natural history” and “soul-mysticism” combined (Rosenberg 1934, p. 14). The idea of a great, lost northern society from which all human civilization had originated was key to Rosenberg’s answer to the question of origins. By producing a new myth, a new historical narrative of the “religion of blood” that would establish a new world order, Rosenberg sought to replace Christianity, which he declared a “Jewish,” obsolete religion.

Rosenberg did not cite Bailly, and it is impossible to determine whether he read him. Neither did he cite Müller, whose theory of a Hyperborean Atlantis was almost identical. According to Müller, the northern Atlantis, which he located, along with nearly every other mythical realm, in the British Isles, had been “the cradle of the greatest peoples in all parts of the earth!” The Persians, the Medes, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Germanics—they had all begun as parts of the Atlantean empire (Müller 1844, pp. 504–5). Müller, too, did not cite Bailly, or any modern source, for that matter, boldly basing his conclusions on Plato and Diodorus. Whether Rosenberg or Müller had been directly or indirectly influenced by Bailly is perhaps beside the point. For Rosenberg, Atlantis was a myth with which to replace Christianity; for Müller, it was a means to reassert the Catholic faith. But for both, a northern Atlantis provided the perfect origin myth to resolve the conundrum of origins that, to their minds, plagued European civilization.

In her study on the Nazi-era Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflüsses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben), Susannah Heschel challenges the view that Nazi racial theory and antisemitism constituted a complete rejection of Christian teachings:

Nazism’s relationship to Christianity was not one of rejection, nor was it an effort to displace Christianity and become a form of “political religion.” Nazism did not present racial antisemitism as antithetical to Christian theological anti-Judaism; rather, Nazi ideology was a form of supersessionism, a usurpation and colonization of Christian theology, especially its antisemitism, for its own purposes.

(Heschel 2008, p. 8, see also pp. 19, 26–27)

Heschel indeed provides ample evidence that Nazism did not reject Christianity unambiguously. It is nevertheless somewhat limiting to interrogate Nazi ideology in these terms. Whether Nazi ideologues sought to reconcile their beliefs with Christianity or opted for its outright rejection—arguably, there were Nazis inhabiting both ends of this spectrum—they could not deny the centrality of Christianity to European history. In their feverish quest for an origin story, they had to confront the Christian elephant in the room. They were neither the first nor the last to embark on this endeavor, and it is this history of repeated attempts to address the question of origins that often misleadingly creates the illusion of direct influence where there was none. At the same time, these iterations are not meaningless or random, pointing to the persistence of Europe’s conundrum of origins and its enduring political and religious significance. The case of Alfred Rosenberg exemplifies this complexity. Rosenberg was known for his opposition to Christianity and his conviction that Nazism was incompatible with it (Heschel 2008, pp. 210, 251). Yet in The Myth of the 20th Century, he drew a distinction similar to the one the Young Hegelians had made between Christianity’s timeless, ahistorical wisdom and its Jewish roots, albeit in far more extreme and racially explicit terms:

This young generation wants nothing more than to behold the great personality of the founder of Christianity in all his greatness, without those bastardizing ingredients, which Jewish zealots such as Matthew, materialistic rabbis such as Paul, African jurists such as Tertullian, or spineless hybrids such as Augustine have imposed upon us in the form of the most horrendous spiritual ballast. They want to grasp the world and Christianity through their essence, to fathom them through Germanic values…

(Rosenberg 1934, p. 39)

A few pages later, Rosenberg addressed the issue of Jesus’ ancestry, asserting in a footnote that “there is not the slightest reason to assume that Jesus was of Jewish descent” (Rosenberg 1934, p. 42). There is no direct line connecting the Young Hegelians’ distinction between the spiritual, worthy, indigenously European components of Christianity and its Jewish history and the Nazi conviction that the mass extermination of Jews was necessary and justified. Neither did Müller’s rewriting of Christianity’s Jewish roots as Celtic in any way foreshadow this horrific outcome. Each of these figures had their own motivations to interrogate the question of origins and their own means for resolving it. Yet to all of them, the question of Europe’s Christian origins was acutely relevant, believing as they did that it would determine the outcome of world history.

6. Conclusions

A reception history, this article examined responses to Müller’s Nordic Greekdom, ranging from anti-clerical liberal authors and conservative Catholics to positivistic natural scientists and Nazi race “experts.” The purpose of this exercise is not to demonstrate direct intellectual influences, but to illuminate the political elasticity of European Christianity’s question of origins. The sheer range of ideologically motivated answers to this question does point, however, to a broader intellectual continuity, one that spans this stunning diversity of religious and political identifications—namely, the belief that Christianity’s ancient origins are a kind of cryptic prophecy. Once deciphered, this prophecy endows one with certain knowledge of the near and far future, down to the outcome of the most inconsequential—in sweeping historical terms—in-group rivalry.

Despite the appeal to biblical criticism, at a time when the principles of the scientific method and critical source reading were consolidating and gaining ground, the reception of Nordic Greekdom was not a scholarly debate of methods. The responses reviewed here had next to nothing to say about the soundness of Müller’s research or the scientific validity of his findings. It was not Müller’s obvious lack of scholarly integrity that sparked the outrage of his critics, but the political and religious implications of his claims, which they could not help but take seriously. Irrespective of religious beliefs, these critics’ passion and conviction betrayed a sense of urgency surrounding the question of origins that only intensified in the twentieth century with the rise of fascism and is difficult to account for in rational terms.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to explain the historical determinism permeating these discussions merely as a sublimation of Christian eschatology. Once again, the intellectual evolution of these ideas was neither coherent nor linear. It coincided with the emergence of a new kind of historical consciousness amid unprecedented, rapid change, which did not supplant so much as complicate traditionally Christian understandings of temporality. This rethinking of history was part of a larger, intense reckoning with Christianity as the foundation of European civilization, particularly the conundrum of its Judaic, Levantine origins. The resultant revisionist, often overtly antisemitic theories involved the entire political and religious spectrum, from the most devout Christians to the most unabashed heathens. Defying any neat distinction between theological and racial antisemitism, they are a testament to European civilization’s fraught relationship to its own roots.