THESIS «MYTH AS A DISEASE OF LANGUAGE»: THE INFLUENCE OF MAX MÜLLER’S UNDERSTANDING OF MYTH ON THE DOCTRINE OF REVELATION AND THE HERMENEUTICS OF SACRED TEXTS

Abstract

The article offers a systematic analysis of F. M. Müller’s formula “mythology is a disease of language” and its consequences for the understanding of the nature of myth, the language of revelation, and the hermeneutics of sacred texts. Drawing on Müller’s key works (Comparative Mythology, Lectures on the Science of Language, Introduction to the Science of Religion, the Hibbert and Gifford Lectures, as well as the programmatic texts of The Sacred Books of the East project), the study reconstructs his philological–linguistic model of mythogenesis: semantic shifts, personification, and the “hardening” of metaphors, described through the transition from nomina to numina. Special attention is paid to the “core–shell” model, within which revelation is conceived as an intuition of the Infinite that inevitably becomes overgrown with historical, linguistic, and mythic layers as it enters human discourse. It is shown that Müller’s philological hermeneutics provides a productive resource for criticizing naive literalism and opens up a space for symbolic reading. At the same time, it generates theological and methodological constraints: linguistic reductionism, textocentrism, and a tendency toward Eurocentric universalism (including in the discourse of “world religions”). As a conclusion, the article proposes a dialectical model for appropriating Müller’s legacy. It presupposes preserving philological rigor while integrating it into an expanded hermeneutics that takes into account ritual, power, social memory, and postcolonial/feminist perspectives. From this angle, the thesis of the “disease of language” is read not as a call to eliminate myth, but as an indication of the inherent tension of language as a medium of revelation.