Wilhelm Schmidt
Wilhelm Schmidt (1868 – 1954) was a German Roman Catholic priest, and a famous linguist, anthropologist, and ethnologist.
Life
Wilhelm Schmidt was born in Hörde, Germany in 1868. Already as a young man he met with Christian missionaries and dedicated his life to service of others. In 1890, he joined the Roman Catholic order of Society of the Divine Word and was ordained as a priest in 1892. After that he went on to study linguistics at the universities of Berlin and Vienna.
In 1906, Schmidt founded the journal Anthropos, and in 1931, the Anthropos Institute, which he directed from 1932 to 1950. In 1938, due to his strong opposition to Nazi ideas of evolutionary racism, Schmidt had to flee from Nazi-occupied Austria to Freiburg, Switzerland. The Anthropos journal and the institute moved together with him. After his death, both were relocated in St. Augustin near Bonn, Germany, where they have remained in operation.
Schmidt served as a professor at the University of Vienna from 1921 to 1938, and the University of Freiburg, Switzerland, from 1939 to 1951. Schmidt received numerous awards and recognitions, and was appointed the president at the Fourth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. He established the ethnological department of the papal Missionary Ethnological Museum at the Vatican in 1925, serving as its director from 1927 to 1939. Schmidt published over 600 books and articles. His works available in English translation are: The Origin and Growth of Religion (1931), High Gods in North America (1933), The Culture Historical Method of Ethnology (1939), and Primitive Revelation (1939).
Wilhelm Schmidt died in 1954 from natural causes, at the age of 86.
Work
Wilhelm Schmidt was a very productive writer, with a diverse interest in several areas, including linguistics, ethnology, and studies of family and religion.
Linguistics
Schmidt’s main passion was linguistics, and he spent many years in study of languages around the world. His early work was on the Mon-Khmer languages of South East Asia, and languages of Oceania and Australia. The conclusions from this study led him to hypothesize the existence of a broader Austric group of languages, connected to the Austronesian language group. Schmidt managed to prove that Mon-Khmer language has inner connection with other languages of the South Seas, which is one of the most important findings in the field of linguistics.
Schmidt also created a new phonetic system, which he called "Anthropos-Alphabet," which could relate the sounds of different foreign languages. By 1926 he had published his work systematizing all the languages in the world.
Religion
From 1912 to his death in 1954, Schmidt published his 12-volume Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (The Origin of the Idea of God). There he explained his theory of primitive monotheism — the belief that primitive religion in almost all tribal peoples began with an essentially monotheistic concept of a high god—usually a sky god—who was a benevolent creator. He argued that all primitive cultures in the world have that notion of a supreme god. They worship a single, high deity, omniscient and essentially similar to the God in Christianity. Here are some typical beliefs that he noted:
- God lives in, or above, the sky
- He is like a man, or a father
- He is the creator of everything
- He is eternal
- He is all-knowing
- All that is good ultimately comes from him and He is the giver of moral law.
- He judges people after their death
- People are alienated from him due to some misdemeanor in the past
- Therefore he is often supplanted in religions by gods which are "more accessible"; yet religions often carry a distant memory of this "Sky-God" whom they have lost most contact with
Schmidt believed that all peoples once believed in one god. However, due to the rebellion against Him people alienated themselves from Him, and their knowledge of Him was lost.
What Schmidt was proposing was that primitive religions were not polytheistic, as it was believed, but that they started as monotheistic. Thus, according to Schmidt, monotheism is the oldest religious system in the world. He strongly opposed to Sigmund Freud’s formulation of totemism as the oldest religion, claiming that many cultures in the world have never passed through the stage of totemism at all. Freud in return criticized Schmidt’s work (Vitz, 1988, pp. 197-199). Schmidt’s theory is generally not accepted by modern scholars.
Ethnology
Schmidt was interested in the development of cultures around the world. Early influences on him were from such anthropologists as Franz Boas and Edward Westermarck.
Schmidt believed in the existence of so-called “cultural circles”: four main stages through which all cultures in the world passed. The stages are as follows:
- Primitive stage (essentially the culture of hunter-gatherers);
- Primary stage (horticultural society);
- Secondary stage (pastoralist society);
- Tertiary stage (modern society).
This stage theory of cultural development was rather popular during his lifetime. Schmidt was inspired by Graebner’s idea of cultural diffusion, formulated in his theory of Kulturkreis, and they developed this four stage theory based on it.
Legacy
Wilhelm Schmidt was not a big name in anthropological circles. He was neither famous nor celebrated as many of his contemporaries. His work however reflects all characteristics of a great scientist. His systematization of the Southeast Asian languages and the link he drew between them and the languages of Oceania and Australia is still regarded as revolutionary. This discovery is equal in importance to the discovery of relationship among Indo-European languages.
Schmidt’s work on religion and ethnology is not very known either, mostly due to the facts that either it has not been translated from German or that the language Schmidt used in writing it is too sophisticated and too complex for a wider audience. To the Christian students of anthropology, Schmidt is, however, unavoidable to become familiar with. His study on primitive religions and monotheism remains among highly respected in the field of anthropology.
Bibliography
- Schmidt, Wilhelm. 1933. High Gods in North America. Oxford: Clarendon Press
- Schmidt, Wilhelm. 1938. The Creation Account of the Earliest Time in the Bible and in Ethnology. Stimmen der Zeit, 68, 134, 295-305.
- Schmidt, Wilhelm. 1939. Primitive Revelation. B. Herder Book Co.
- Schmidt, Wilhelm. 1972. (original work from 1931). The Origin and Growth of Religion: Facts and Theories. Cooper Square Publishing. ISBN 0815404085
- Schmidt, Wilhelm. 1974. (original work from 1939). The Culture Historical Method of Ethnology: The Scientific Approach to the Racial Question. Greenwood Press Reprint ISBN 0837170362
- Schmidt, Wilhelm & Scherer, Erich. 1963. Briefwechsel : Mit Einer Bibliographie Der Schriften Von Erich Schmidt. Erich Schmidt Verlag
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Brandewie, Ernest. 1983. Wilhelm Schmidt and the Origin of the Idea of God. University Press of America. ISBN 0819133647
- Brandewie Ernest. 1990. When giants walked the earth: The life and times of Wilhelm Schmidt. University Press of America. ISBN 3727807121
- Vitz, Paul C. 1988. Sigmund Freud's Christian Unconscious. New York: The Guildford Press.
External links
- Gusinde, Martin. 1954. Wilhelm Schmidt, S.V.D., 1868-1954. American Anthropologist, 56(5), 868-870
- Hanington, Greg. 1992. Wilhelm Schmidt and the origin of religion. Creation, 14(3), 20-21.
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