This is not quite correct, I’m afraid.

“The violent young male went from hero to zero, his place now taken by the law-abiding man who bettered himself not through plunder but through work and trade. ”

According to James Sharpe in A Fiery and Furious People: A History of Violence in England , the murder rate in England around 1350 was 120 per 100,000 – double that for Honduras today.

One wonders if the Normans had such a pacifying effect as supposed.

If we cut it down to strictly Ancient times (down to the fourth century BC), it’s 5 million words.

Did you mean AD here? Or your definition of Ancient Times refers to the pre-Hellenistic era only?

There is already a wealth of information on the Holy Fire Miracle, including relations of eyewitnesses
@http://www.holyfire.org/eng/
Yours truly was a witness.
A closely related theme is the formation of the image on the Shroud of Turin at The Shroud of
Turin Website
@https://www.shroud.com/

As an aside, Palamas’ ‘explanation of Theosis’ and vision of the Uncreated Light was not a ‘concepualization’ of the Ceremony of the Holy Fire.

Don’t thank me, thank my Greek friend. There are quite a few videos on youtube regarding the HolyLight ceremony at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on Holy Saturday – highly recommended! Candles mysteriously light in a miraculous fashion, witnessed by hundreds within. I was hoping that Anatoly didn’t miss this comment, he’s the one trying to figure out the mystery of Greek fire…

Fascinating.

Yes, there were some real Greek innovations. The Empire was militarily strained throughout its history, so a lot of its aggregate mind power must have went into the military sphere (e.g. Greek fire! still unsure how to exactly replicate it today. Byzantine military theory was also probably the world’s most advanced at the time). Though much less famous than Anna Comnena, Michael Psellos was arguably a precursor to Leonardo da Vinci.

A friend of mine, a retired professor of sociology who has taken a keen interest in Orthodox religious matters and ancient Greek history in his spare time, offers you this quite cogent explanation to your perplexing problem. He has spent way over 10 years researching this issue, and has offered me a copy of an essay that he’s written, that he does not wish to have published at this time. I hope that you find it satisfying:

“Who discovered piezoelectricity?

“The piezoelectric effect was discovered in 1880 by two French physicists, brothers Pierre and Paul-Jacques Curie, in crystals of quartz, tourmaline, and Rochelle salt (potassium sodium tartrate). They took the name from the Greek word, “piezein,” which means ‘to press-out.‘”

The above explanation, I credit is from the Web Site: “How Stuff Works.” Please Google it. Below is the continuation of my essay.

These piezoelectricity effects were discovered also, albeit primitively, by engineers of the Christian Roman Empress Anastasia (c 650 – c 720), the mother of Justinian II (669-711). These technicians improved the version of a napalm-like, mainly anti-ship weapon system called Roman Fire, helping to defeat, 40 years before, an Islamic attack (678-683) against the Christian Roman Empire’s capitol, Constantinople.

The upgraded weapon system was renamed, “Artificial Fire,” for natural but then unfamiliar physical effects (involving what is known today as hydrogen electrolysis out of pressurized steam by piezoelectricity) used by the greatly outnumbered troops of Leo III (717-741) along with Bulgarian soldiers and winter’s very unusual cold to defeat a second Arab Muslim attack by 80,000 men and hundreds of war ships even more decisively in 717, saving the Christian Roman Empire, headquartered in Constantinople, and saving Europe with Jews, and Christians and other faiths.

An improved, mainly naval weapon system called Artificial Fire achieved this victory by overcoming new defensive measures countering Roman Fire on enemy ships, with exploding hydrogen gas. Animal hides soaked in vinegar, draped over enemy ship hulls could not resist the exploding hydrogen of Artificial Fire.

In heavier warships, a below-deck pre-fire boiler (πρόπυρον) was used for piping scalding steam, pressurized via force-pump, to an iron tank of volatile petroleum distillates above deck. The tank generated piezoelectricity from piezoelectric natural crystals in its six, marble lined interior walls, also acting as heat shields.

Super-steam to 250°C pressed upon the piezoelectric crystals in the marble lining the insides of the tank. This steam was held with safety and blow-back valves. Discharge siphons ejected volatile hydrogen gas from piezoelectric electrolysis for break-up of steaming water molecules into hydrogen gas and oxygen, the latter supporting flame ignition.

Also ejected was exploding hydrogen gas, made by steam electrolysis within the tank, also containing napalm-like, volatile and now, burning petroleum distillates. The inextinguishable, roaring, plasma fire in dense steam, weighted by incompletely burning plasma and sticky resin thickeners spewed downwardly in booming cacophony and smoke to incinerate enemy ships.

Piezoelectrical effects today in the Holy Light Sacrament on Holy Saturday, along with those which the pious call supernatural support its credibility, now further reinforced by scientists in 2008.

The ceremony formalized Uncreated Light as concept for St. Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), in his explanation for Theosis. But the ceremony originated earlier in the late fourth century with the formal prayer of Cyril of Jerusalem (c 368).

Please see, https://es.scribd.com/document/88593657/Theosis-and-Gregory-Palamas

The Holy Saturday ceremony has continued annually ever since 368, in the same place, Jerusalem’s battered Church of the Resurrection, battered like that on the image of the Turin Shroud.

The Holy Light ceremony inspired the original invention of Roman Fire. The inventor, the seventh century chemist and architect, Kalinikos, of Heliopolis, Egypt, escaped captivity in Heliopolis, Syria, with his children after Muslim Arab conquest of Egypt (639-642).

At the Holy Light Sacrament in Jerusalem, where most pilgrims held up candles hoping for a supernatural lighting, Kalinikos held up a tube with petroleum, a little Jerusalem tomb crystal dust and a wick. It was lit as though supernaturally.

When he snuffed the flame, he discovered a distillate, “naphtha.” It became a key ingredient of Roman Naval Fire. Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, footnotes it as, “Fire from Jerusalem.”

The Holy Light manifestations include quantum energy discharges (plasma), in the nearby environment, whereby piezoelectric crystalline components of the granite structure over the tomb of Christ, housing his body for a short time, now experience deformative voltage pressure from a mysterious source (the invisible Holy Light) and change size slightly. These changes release irregular bursts of created, ionized plasma light and electrical energy for a short duration.

This results in discharge of cool plasma at maximum deformity. The invisible source energy can be hypothesized by pious laity as being supernatural, termed the Holy Light, along with these resulting globes produced partly from plasma discharges from the granite faces of the structure over the empty tomb of Christ and then further developed from their interaction with the source energy.

Obviously, we emphasize different aspects of this issue.

By and large it did turn out as intended, despite the inevitable frictions between centrifugal tendencies. The Balkans remained Orthodox to this days. Not to say anything about Russia.

Interesting point of view.
The motive and intent, as you describe them, were certainly present, although it did not turn out as intended, hence unintended consequences.

As always, I think truth is somewhere in the middle. While Byzantium could “afford” to be altruistic when dealing with peoples and lands further away from the empire’s core, like Moravia, Panonia or Kievan Rus, closer to home, on the Balkans, one could actually witness a bitter struggle between Church Slavonic and Greek.

It was not at all unintentional. It was a conscious policy of the Empire to integrate the ‘barbarians’ into the ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’ (as it was called by the great historian Dimitry Obolensky, Professor of Russian and Balkan History at the University of Oxford (+2001) by evangelizing them. It was largely an altruistic endeavour. It did not impose Greek in the Church, but created the language for the cult, laws, administration.

Byzantine refugees certainly seem to have played an essential role in the Renaissance.

That’s wrong. Italian humanists (with the help of refugees from Byzantium) collected and translated the Greek texts preserved in Byzantium. But the phenomenon of the Renaissance was the result of the internal development of Italy, Byzantium had a negligible impact on this process.

Late Byzantine Iconography and art seeming to be a starting point for the master painters of the 1400s.

This is a completely false statement. Renaissance masters were inspired by the preserved samples of Greco-Roman painting in Italy. Ugly late Byzantine icons had nothing to do with Renaissance.

The ‘West’ started the chase for Greek manuscripts in the 12th century. From the 15th onward the West recovered all the Greek texts preserved in ‘Byzantium, not only the ‘classics’, but also the entire production of ‘byzantine’ writers up to the fall of Constantinople.

Second part is about modern days, not about the times when the Western Rus were all part of the PLC.

Try not to take quotes out of context.

Byzantine refugees certainly seem to have played an essential role in the Renaissance. The Iliad being introduced to Western Europe in the early 1400s. Late Byzantine Iconography and art seeming to be a starting point for the master painters of the 1400s.

I’m skeptical we have good numbers here. When Constantinople fell in 1453, accounts say the price of books plummeted, so flooded was the market with looted books, and this after the Crusaders had presumably done a number on the libraries. If we go by Anna Komnene’s account, Western Europeans had an inferiority complex around the Byzantines, while the Byzantines held westerners in open contempt. This to me sounds like a *stereotype* and thus it must be true!

The Anglo-Saxons certainly had a highly developed poetry, theology (St. Bede) and sense of curiosity especially considering their relative isolation, but they are the exception in Western Europe in the early Middle Ages. The AS concept of Wyrd is basically an intuition for probability distributions. The French and the French Normans (who were gay and cheated at Hastings) could hardly do much more than copy the Vulgate. They weren’t producing much original (Unlike the Anglo-Saxons) until they STOLE the Anglo-Saxons ideas after 1066, much as “whites” stole computers from Africans. So basically I want to encourage skepticism about the level of manuscript production, and to suggest that only True Western Orthodox Anglo-Saxons and Irish (1066 was a Papist false flag) were doing original work in this period in the west.

Polish colonies were a disaster (including in the field of education) for the indigenous population of these colonies.

You claim that, but your claims have been debunked.

Quote from AP:

Great Russians have produced a much larger amount of notable figures per capita than western Rus,

I don’t dispute this. It is quite true

¯ \ _ (ツ) _ / ¯

I wrote about the relatively high level of education in Poland, not about the Polish colonies.

Richest man in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with a massive private army, whose son became king of Poland, was a Rurikid prince and native of what is Ukraine. Point out a colony with a similar phenomenon.

Polish colonies were a disaster (including in the field of education) for the indigenous population of these colonies.

You claim that, but your claims have been debunked.

https://www.unz.com/akarlin/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-putin-again/#comment-3042522

True, but you contradict your claims in posts on another article’s comment section.

I wrote about the relatively high level of education in Poland, not about the Polish colonies. Polish colonies were a disaster (including in the field of education) for the indigenous population of these colonies.

While AK’s conclusion may very well be correct, it seems to me that the argument is tenuous for at least a few reasons:

1) My prior is that a more representative sample of medieval Latin literature is extant, since many Western European countries have some degree of institutional continuity going back at least a thousand years and sometimes more. This is much less true for the Byzantine empire (there are a small number of continuously functioning monasteries in the East, but as far as I know, there are no still existing secular institutions).

2) The premise of the discussion is rather questionable. While I certainly enjoy Chaucer,
I can’t say that it would be such a great loss to civilization if two scholars of Oxford had not cuckolded the Miller or his wife had not farted in his face. Having worked one summer on the catalogue of a large manuscript research center, it seemed to me that most of the rest of medieval Latin manuscripts concern the properties of urine for the diagnosis of illness.

The same can be said for ancient literature as a whole. There are a few works of literature that we can still enjoy, some sacred books which still have influence, some mathematics that has been incorporated into modern science, but the rest is simply fodder for more or less interesting socio-historical research.

3) At some point, the Northern Italians and then Northern Europeans figured out how to do new mathematics and dynamics (not just statics, which was fairly well-understood by architects since ancient times), and that’s when the real divergence begins. One can hypothesize that somehow all that Latin discussion of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin was preparation for a scientific revolution, but the usual explanation is that it was the rediscovery of ancient Greek literature that excited the Italians so much. Admittedly, for that to be possible the Italians had to at least be intelligent and literate.

4) Rather than comparing numbers of words, it would probably be more fruitful to compare law codes ,architecture, and ship-building. Unfortunately, I know very little of that in general and even less in the context of the Byzantine empire.

True, but you contradict your claims in posts on another article’s comment section.

“In the Orthodox Slavic countries the language of the Church was Church Slavonic, which isolated these countries from ancient literature, and made it useless to study Latin. The result is known-the Slavic countries that escaped the Byzantine “gifts” (Czech Kingdom and Poland), in the field of education were centuries ahead of the Orthodox Slavic countries.”

How can someone be so blind is perplexing.
Are you saying that it was better to be forced to read Latin and assimilate then to write and read the Gospels in your own mother’s tongue?

Because, Latin alphabet and literacy were the most powerful tools of Germanic priests in assimilating others, including many Slavs, just like Church Slavonic literacy was the most powerful “weapon” given to Slavs.

The Byzantine empire was asked to provide a Slavic alphabet and literacy precisely by the Western Slavic tribal leaders, forefathers of contemporary Czechs and Slovaks, who, at the time, were under intense pressure from Germanic Latin priests to adopt not only the Latin alphabet but the Latin language and thus assimilate.
For them, for them, having a Slavic written word and literacy was a mean to stay free.

Don’t despair for missing the chance to be part of the “advanced” Latin world.
Your own Alexander Nevsky would disagree.

Gibbon digresses on the learning of the Byzantine world. He mentions a few high lights like “the celebrated Photius” and a few others by whose “munificence the treasures of antiquity were deposited in the Imperial library; by their pens, or those of their associates, they were imparted in such extracts and abridgments as might amuse the curiosity, without oppressing the indolence, of the public.”

{snip}

“They held in their lifeless hands the riches of their fathers, without inheriting the spirit which had created and improved that sacred patrimony: they read, they praised, they compiled, but their languid souls seemed alike incapable of thought and action. In the revolution of ten centuries, not a single discovery was made to exalt the dignity or promote the happiness of mankind. Not a single idea has been added to the speculative systems of antiquity, and a succession of patient disciples became in their turn the dogmatic teachers of the next servile generation. Not a single composition of history, philosophy, or literature, has been saved from oblivion by the intrinsic beauties of style or sentiment, of original fancy, or even of successful imitation.”

It’s in vol 5 on Gutenberg if you want to read all Gibbon has to say on the subject.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/735/735-h/735-h.htm

I did not expect the author of this piece to be aware of the most significant achievement, albeit entirely unintentional, of the Byzantine Empire relative to all Slavs. It is a fact that Byzantine gave all Slavs the most potent weapon possible, and that is literacy.

In this case, it was a very controversial gift.

Language Catholic Church was Latin (which in theory should have known any priest), on this in Catholic countries (by necessity) built system schools where have studied Latin. This created an elite that knew a universal language, and had access to ancient literature.

In the Orthodox Slavic countries the language of the Church was Church Slavonic, which isolated these countries from ancient literature, and made it useless to study Latin. The result is known-the Slavic countries that escaped the Byzantine “gifts” (Czech Kingdom and Poland), in the field of education were centuries ahead of the Orthodox Slavic countries.

I did not expect the author of this piece to be aware of the most significant achievement, albeit entirely unintentional, of the Byzantine Empire relative to all Slavs.

It is a fact that Byzantine gave all Slavs the most potent weapon possible, and that is literacy. It was this gift that, at least in my opinion, enabled Slavs to not only retain their identity and numbers, but to spread and prosper in all directions mostly by assimilating others, entire nations sometimes, who lacked the power of the written word, be it on the Balkans, to the West, East or to the North.

Of course, that was not something that Byzantine did out of any altruistic motives. The Empire did that to augment itself in its geopolitical struggle of the era against the Western Christendom.
True, Slavs must have been the right candidate for something like that because, to quote one movie character “help is given to those who deserve it”.
But, boy, talking about unintended consequences.

Anyway, when trying to fulfill an ambitious task such as gauging an entire civilization one should be a lot less superficial.

“We can essentially consider Western Christendom world to have been one intellectual world, where the cognitive elites spoke and wrote in Latin. Multiple nodes comparable in demographic scope to the Byzantine Empire bouncing ideas off each other, while the latter’s scholars did not even have the language skills to participate.”

Maybe the cognitive elite of the Byzantine Empire were too oriented toward and therefore too corrupted by serving a singular state and a small set of oligarchs. Their Western peers did indeed have more varied views brought to bear on topics. Operating in Greek cut them out of a lot of exchane with the west, and it also didn’t help the Byzantines with their Orthodox peers, e.g. the Bulgars, who were indeed separated both linguistically and culturally.

Wow! Talk about a plunge from great heights. It makes them look even more pitiful today.

The disastrous Byzantine civil war after the Battle of Manzikert ( 1071) let the Seljuk Turks into Anatolia and led to the loss of the interior to the Turks. Despite occasional signs of revival, the patient lingered on for over 380 years ( 1453 ), the longest death bed scene in history.
The Turks have since erased the remaining Armenians from Anatolia as well.
The Turks mixed with the existing populations, enforcing Islam and the Turkish language.
The chances of finding new Byzantine manuscripts in Anatolia is minimal. Also, the histories of these areas and cities most likely were destroyed, too. One of the features of the European Middle Ages were the numerous local and national chroniclers, eg Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, to name one of
many. They greatly aid our understanding.
There may have been many Byzantine chroniclers and other writers, but the length and extent of destruction make this unknowable.

Hence why I wrote “(or rather, Arabized).”

What you wrote is technically correct, if you focus only on the very surface meanings of the words and twist historical trends beyond recognition compared to reality.

TL;DR – it’s Islam’s fault. Islam
a) ruined the Eastern Roman Empire, starting from the eighth century or so
b) destroyed Persian science
c) cut off intellectual traffic between Western Europe and the Levant/Mediterranean.

Talking about the history of the Middle Ages without mentioning how Islam turned everything to shit is like explaining the history of the 20th century without even once mentioning the USA.

The article is total and utter bullshit. The number of manuscripts extant depends on cultural continuity. There is obviously much less in the Greek East. Furthermore the number of manuscripts doesn´t day anything about their quality. Finally medieval Wester Europe´s intellectual production was largely due to the blooming of Islam civilisation. It is an indisputable fact that Christian Europe had only acknowledged certain writings by a few antique authors. The main one was Aristotle.
But from the 9th century the Arabs had started to collect and translate EVERYTHING that they could lay their hands on and founded huge libraries. They then took the antique wisdom and developed it further. In the natural sciences chemistry (itself an Arab word), mathematics (Algorithm is also an Arab word) and astronomy (practically all the lesser stars have Arab names like Betegeuze). In philisophy we have giants like Averroes without whom the greatest medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinus is unthinkable. Then there is Avicenna whose book of medicine translated as Liber Primus Naturalium was the preeminent handbook on medicine in Europe into the 18th century.
Therefore when one talks about the supposed advances of Western intellectual production one really talks about advances taken from the Arabs.

Byzantine Empire in the last few centuries was basically one town. Certainly when it concerned the intellectual output.

Orthodox ethnic groups (in the Balkans and Asia) were quite numerous.

East Romans(Byzantines) buried the own pagan culture with heavy dose of Christianity.
Western Romans also destroyed much pagan culture. But then, it was utterly destroyed by Germanic barbarians.
Since Eastern Roman Christians themselves destroyed Greco-Roman pagan culture(as wicked), it would have been inconvenient for them to revive it. It would have been a confession of wrong-doing.

But since Germanic barbarians destroyed Western Rome, the destruction of Greco-Roman pagan culture could be blamed on the Germanics and ‘gothicism’. Western Christians could revive Greco-Roman paganism as part of lost high civilization laid wasted by vandals.

Also, in the West, the triumph of Christianity all across Europe(even converting the barbarians) resulted in an extended civilization united by common spiritual theme. This made for relative peace. Once northern Europeans were Christianized, they tended to look to Rome with respect and reverence instead of planning more sackings and lootings. Also, almost all people in the West were white and European.

In the East, Christian Byzantines were at odds with the non-Christian Persians. They bled each other in endless conflicts, and this created a vacuum for a rival universal faith and movement, Islam. So, unlike Italy that had fellow Christians as its neighbors to the north, Byzantines’ neighbors were rivals in faith and themes. And of course, in race as well.

Renaissance took off in places like Florence. Such a city would have been unthinkable in the Byzantine world because it could never lower its guard and create sanctuary cities. Byzantine was about wars or walls. A fortress mentality took hold. Perhaps, if Islam hadn’t emerged, Byzantine Christianity could have gradually converted the Persian empire as well, and then there might have been long-lasting peace from Southern Europe to the Near East. But the rise of Islam made such prospect impossible. In time, Muslims would conquer and convert the Persian World, and against its growing wealth, manpower, and might, the Byzantines could only play defense. Byzantines went from wars to walls. A people under siege mentality aren’t going to have the freedom and spirit of individuality to be creative, innovative, and expressive.

There were continuous wars in the West too, but they were among kings and princes; it was not a clash of civilizations because all of Western Europe was Christian. In contrast, the conflict among Christians, Muslims, and Persians was civilizational. Defeat wasn’t only political but total in the spiritual and cultural sense. It was a zero-sum game.

In a way, Italy lucked out because Northern Europe had been so backward. Even though the Germanics managed to sack Rome, they were like the Mongols who sacked Peking. Culturally zero. So, they could be converted to the higher culture, and they were. As fellow Christians, they learned to behave and get along.
In contrast, Byzantine empire clashed with peoples and cultures that were equally ancient, prestigious, and proud. It was much more difficult to convert them to the Byzantine way. Persians weren’t a bunch of illiterate barbarians. And Arabs, though relatively backward, also had a sense of history and culture. Unlike northern Germanic barbarians, they were capable of coming up with their own religion: Islam.

What type of battle plan would have won Yarmouk for the Byzantines? What should Vahan have done? Did Justinian make a long term strategic error by trying to conquer the West?

Excellent post.

What is the length of the average medieval manuscript? (10K words? Might be more, after all

I’m not sure there’s a way of answering that; it would be hard to come to a reliable estimate even for the Western manuscripts they use for their data base in the article, given that

First of all, the ms in question should be handwritten, furthermore it is regarded as a codicological entity (the intended end product of a writers scribal activities, Mostert, 1989), which means that its size could range from a surviving fragment to a wholly intact ms as well as any fraction of a ms in between

(from the appendix about the construction of their data base).

How would one estimate the original word length of a fragmentary codex (whose full contents might be unknown)?
10 000 words intuitively seems low to me, but it’s not clear to me that one can arrive at any number that isn’t highly speculative (same for “copying run”), or that this could simply be assumed to have been static over centuries and the same for Byzantium.

Byzantine Empire in the last few centuries was basically one town. Certainly when it concerned the intellectual output.

According to the Byzantine Emperor Constantin P (Xth cent AD) the name of the Serbians come from “servula” to be a slave.

Also, the first to enslave the Slaves were the Romans:

http://historum.com/ancient-history/62034-goths-vandals-really-germans.html

Good article.

So in summary: Slavic originates from Slava/Slowo
or from Slave?

The white female wasn’t sought out or prized for their pale beauty, or because they were perceived as being “more” beautiful simply because they were white. No. They were picked out as sex slaves because they were perceived as more sexually available or permissible because they were free to walk around unaccompanied and uncovered. This is stereotype from the prophet’s era which never lost currency.

The white female wasn’t sought out or prized for their pale beauty, or because they were perceived as being “more” beautiful simply because they were white. No. They were picked out as sex slaves because they were perceived as more sexually available or permissible because they were free to walk around unaccompanied and uncovered.

“The two words aren’t really equivalent.”

Actually, they are, since both of them are corrupted pronunciations for the Latin niger, or black. However, it has been to the great advantage of certain sects of the post-modern religion to think one of them is somehow pejorative, rather than descriptive of color.

“The Mediterranean world of the Greco-Roman period was dominated by people who themselves were fair-skinned or relatively so. ”

No really. The Greco -Roman world was dominated by the swarthy, olive-skinned type. The fair type was a minority trait.

[…] http://www.unz.com/pfrost/white-skin-privilege/ […]

[…] Ref;  http://www.unz.com/pfrost/from-slavs-to-slaves/ […]

Mostly bollocks. Before The Crusades, Europe, the Med and Near Middle East (which people forget was part of Christendom) were invaded and attacked relentlessly by the forces of Islam; it was the muslims who enslaved the Slavs; they destroyed the Classical world (long story but they attacked at a time when the European powers had become weak), they destroyed almost all of Christendom, they destroyed the trade routes, and hunted the Slavs for the African and Arabian slave markets.

Europe was economically devastated by the Islamic invasions but it’s fortunes improved dramatically with the success of The Crusades. Making the Islamic jihadi invasions a sidenote in the story is like leaving the Nazis out of the story of the Second World War.

It is not my experience in the least that BanglaDeshis are mild mannered. Those I knew in East London were quite rough. They are physically small but went in gangs and are therefore more than a match for blacks.

[…] carrying on the tradition that had started in Rome of taking Slavic people as slaves, those Africans returned to the Old World and kidnapped Europeans, first enslaving them in the New […]

[…] From Slavs to Slaves – The Unz Review […]

[…] Link […]

I think the idea of the Sephardic origins of the Radhanites is rather one sided and a bit antiquated.
The maps of the Radhantes run between France and China and therefore gave the impression to many scholars that France was the origin.
However, after the important work by Moshe Gil, I believe it is more commonly accepted that the Radhanite’s origin was near Bagdad (where there was a long history of long distance trade by the Persians and then the Parthians). Though Jewish, they were not Sephardic at all.
There is some very strange belief that the Jewish world is and always was divided into Sephardic and Ashkenazi, but the Sephardics only exist since the 1492 and before that the vast majority of jews lived in the East (the area that was once the Persian Empire.)
With the advent of Islam Jewish traders held, a virtual monopoly on East-West trade (crossing boarders that Christians and Moslems could not). It was to the Khazar’s advantage as traders to convert and work with the Radhanite.
For further reading, and differing opinions about the origins, read this link: http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/Radhanite
Gil’s paper the Radhanite Merchants and the Land of Radhan is quite persuasive.

You can compare like with like. But when you do compare like with like, the like is not the independent variable. Something else is. This is basic inductive reasoning.

Peter talks about “affective or emotional empathy – capacity not only to understand how another person feels but also to experience those feelings involuntarily and to respond appropriately. Failure to help a person in distress can trigger a self-destructive sequence: anguish, depression, suicidal ideation””

The post quotes “In the Orthodox Christian understanding, they explicitly deny that humanity inherited guilt from anyone. Rather, they maintain that we inherit our fallen nature. While humanity does bear the consequences of the original, or first, sin, humanity does not bear the personal guilt associated with this sin.” and says “Finally, guilt culture was strengthened through confession of one’s sins, particularly after this practice became mandatory with the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). All wrongdoings had to be atoned at least once a year, however private or personal they might be ”

I suggested comparing like with like. Obviously West European countries are alike, and equally obviously people in east Europe may be Orthodox, have unpleasant lives and be likely to kill themselves for no good reason when they are drunk. Estonia isn’t orthodox and Skype was no fluke Estonia to offer e-citizenship to non-residents. (BTW ‘Eating Disorders in 7.7% of Estonian women’).

As I understand it Peter is saying people and nationalities that are highly efficient have a tendency to affective empathy that stems partly from the teaching of the Church and partly from addaptations to Mesolithic fish processing. Affective empathy can lead to guilt, and i was suggesting suicide and anorexia (which can lead to death) as a measure.

“The study seemed to confirm the stereotypes that the British have a sense of fair play, while the Greeks thirst for revenge. Players in Athens and Muscat had the highest level of revenge punishments, retaliating against the enforcers…”

“A version of the ultimatum game is called the dictator game, in which the Proposer simply dictates whether or not to give money and how much. … German children’s most frequent offer was an equal split“.

Look at a non European society “”Experiments conducted in villages in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (American Economic Review, vol 98, p 494). In these tests, two players started out with 50 rupees each. The first could choose to give his to the second, in which case the experimenters added a further 100 rupees, giving the second player 200 rupees in total. The second player could decide to keep the money for himself, or share it equally with the first player. A third player then entered the game, who could punish the second player – for each 2 rupees he was willing to spend, the second player was docked 10 rupees.

The results were startling. Even when the second player shared the money fairly, two-thirds of the time the newcomer decided to punish him anyway – a spiteful act with seemingly no altruistic payoff. “We asked one guy why, he said he thought it was fun.””

It was the high caste men who thought it was ‘fun’.

Guilt is the most efficient way to get people working together, the most efficient countries have the highest suicide rates.

Both of these are new assertions in this discussion, and they’re assertions that you haven’t justified.

The original claim was that higher suicide rates reflect a specific WE guilt trait and that comparing countries’ suicide rates demonstrates this. But non-WE countries have higher suicide rates, which suggests that high suicide rates aren’t necessarily caused by a specific WE guilt trait. You then suggested that non-WE suicide rates should be ignored, and only WE suicide rates should be compared, which of course would change the independent variable and make the comparison irrelevant for the original claim. Thus we’re left with the original claim which remains unjustified.

Also Estonia is not Catholic. And Skype was founded by Scandinavians that hired Estonian programmers.

You should look over Mill’s methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill%27s_methods

Also see Whewell’s work on inductive reasoning.

Guilt is the most efficient way to get people working together, the most efficient countries have the highest suicide rates. The (Catholic) country of Estonia, being the most suicide prone, technically accomplished (Skype came from there) and economically successful in Eastern Europe just proves my point.

None of that suggests that suicide rates are a good indication of a Western European guilt trait. You’re excluding the non-Western European suicide rates by asserting that they’re due to alcohol and shame. So you’re left with comparing suicide rates among Western European countries which woesn’t tell us that a W. European guilt trait causes high suicide rates. If you’re comparing among WE countries, a WE guilt trait is no longer an independent variable. You’re left with a different independent variable, like economic success as you suggest.

East European men die very young, there is an astonishing amount of alcohol abuse, and it has been backward for half a milenium. Yet the highest suicide rate in East Europe is in Estonia which is the most techically advanced.

There are quite a lot of countries in western Europe. Austria and Switzerland have the highest suicide rates in the West, and they are the most economically successful Western countries.

It is true that the economically sucessful countries of Asia (Korea and Japan) have high rates too, but guilt isn’t that different to shame. It’s just more efficient; less need for monitoring and enforcing compliance.

Black Africans have very low suicide rates. And black women don’t tend to get anorexia. Austria has the highest anorexia rates in Europe.

Comparing suicide rates among Western European countries wouldn’t tell us that a W. European guilt trait causes high suicide rates.

You’d have to compare with non-W. European countries, and it appears NE Europe, Eastern Europe, East Asia have higher suicide rates.

“When Schizophrenics hear voices the voices inevitably say “Kill yourself”‘,”

Got a link for that?

When Schizophrenics hear voices the voices inevitably say “Kill yourself”‘, clearly you can commit suicide for a variety of reasons. Lets compare comparable countries: suicide in Western Europe is highest in the most economically successful countries like Switzerland and Austria. They have a high degree of anxiety.

The only girl I know who had anorexia was extraordinarily good looking, face like a model, tall and slim. (intelligent hard working and artistically gifted too) She now works as a designer. She was from an upper middle class family, as girls with anorexia tend to be.

High achieving people tend to feel guilty and the high achieving countries have a tendency to guilt.

I usually explain it as: guilt is the belief that you’ve done something bad, shame is the belief that you are something bad.

Sean,

I believe male suicide rates are higher outside of NW European populations in places like NE Europe, Eastern Europe, East Asia, etc.

It can be shame over something, but you’re assuming there is a reason and one can feel guilty for no reason. A lot of people commit suicide for reasons that absolutely no one around them can understand. (You won’t read that too often because newspapers have a code on how to report suicides). From what I can gather, anorexia doen’t seem to be about shame. (There was a religious form of anorexia in the Middle Ages which involved young women living on Holy Communion). Guilt is an adaptation and some people have rare combinations of genes that give them a more than normal propensity to feel guilt.

Suicide is the leading cause of death for men aged 20-34 years; it’s guilt.

No, that’s completely wrong. Shame is a much bigger reason for people to commit suicide. Guilt, on the other hand, would impel a person to make amends or do penance, neither of which will happen if he/she is dead.

“Accusations of being a coward or a liar were enough for men to kill for in the last 150 years”. Yes, kill themselves. Suicide is the leading cause of death for men aged 20-34 years; it’s guilt. Anorexia nervosa is guilt too.

@ John Jeremiah Smith: Well put, thank you.

Early German and Celtic tribes were very willing to carry out blood feud some kept it up into the 19th or 20th Centuries. Killing or marginalizing the males with the most impulse control problems probably is what civilized the West. Guilt? Shame? Makes no difference honor is what mattered to a man and violence was an acceptable way of dealing with it. Accusations of being a coward or a liar were enough for men to kill for in the last 150 years.

The so-called “champion” of the democracy, the United States has not elected a female president or vice-president in its entire 300 year existence.

Three hundred years? Is that like the 57 states? Without Christianity’s influence there would be nothing called women’s rights. How many women does it take to equal a man’s evidence under sharia law?

Yes, but Frost argues that guilt is devoid of specific moral prescriptions. It’s a mental state that stimulates a person to adhere to certain moral prescriptions provided by society.

If internalized fear from punishment is so important in guilt, why do those in the modern West who do not believe in a God who can punish unrepentant sinners in the afterlife, still act as if they feel guilty? And why are they guiltily advocating for things that the Church never preached (like environmentalism) or actively opposed (such as gay rights)?

Superficially, I think Catholics are more prone to guilt than protestants. But I’ve wondered if the elimination of confession & absolution meant that many protestants have had some sort of implicit or subconscious guilt. The symbolism of confession & absolution can be a powerful one (and if your Catholic you believe it effects what it symbolizes).

I don’t know Peter, I saw of lot of guilt in Korea when it was more Buddhist weighted than
it is today. Your simple West has guilt and East has shame dialectic seems to be a non-starter.

Peter,

I understand your ideas about affective empathy – which seems to rely on a particular style of “early modern” education which developed in stable families and little schools (“see what you’ve done – what do you think the poor XYZ feels now?”)

Affective empathy has a certain impact on small-group life, perhaps not so much in mass society and political life.

But wasn’t internalized fear from punishment much more important?

E.g. the Catholic catechism defined “perfect repentance” indeed as something which transgressed mere internalized fear – but not via affective empathy with the victim, but via infinite love for God as the spender of morals and judge (as well as, perhaps, the advocate for the victims).

Peter Frost said “Medieval Christian culture favored the survival and reproduction of people who previously would not have survived and reproduced. Conversely, by criminalizing personal violence, particularly in cases where the offender felt no guilt or remorse, this culture was now eliminating people for behavior that had once been admired.”

In computer simulations where various strategies can compete, the implacably mean strategy will get off to a flying start and quickly dominate. However a population of always defect ‘players’ will eventually take each other out, and a surviving ‘tit for tat’ will rise to dominate. But the problem with a population all using tit for tat is that, when done with micro chip accuracy, it does not allow for mistakes or what is called ‘noise’; and in the real world there are mistakes. So (in the real world) you identify someone as having done something to offend you, and you tit for tat retaliate, but so will he. So you can end up taking each other out. Yet what gets it started might be a mistake, he may have done it by accident or you may have got it wrong. When they factor the aforementioned random errors into simulations, eventually a forgiving version of tit for tat becomes dominant, and then the population starts edging toward being nicer and nicer. ‘There is always an incentive to forgive quicker and quicker’.

At this point any always defect holdout or newcomer can go through the nicey-nicey population like a blowtorch through butter.

One could speculate that guilt is an adaptation to ensure a forgiving strategy and it has turned Western society uniformly nicey-nicey. In 1970 Alexandr Solzhenitsyn said ” Western society is approaching that point beyond which the system becomes metastable and must fall.”

Associating guilt with Christianity is a preposterous notion. Quilt as an artifice of power existed long before Jesus Christ lived. Christianity is the champion of forgiveness – the opposite of guilt. A third party using guilt to control people leads to evil doing. Quilt is an intellectual ploy to control people. Jews are the masters of using guilt.

On the other hand, shame is a personal useful human emotion that acknowledges current wrong doing and that prevents people from doing bad things in the future. Shame is personal thing, it does not involve a third party. Seeking and granting forgiveness allows the future to proceed unencumbered. Seeking and receiving forgiveness from the injured party and from God, does not let third party use of guilt to enter the picture.

Sean,
Orthodox Christianity’s influence is greatly reduced but I think it’s inevitable that the secular culture that follows would be shaped by historic Christianity. One possibility is that at least residual Christian notions of sin and guilt remain but without orthodox Christian faith and practice, there’s no forgiveness and purging of the sin and guilt.

Steve Sailer had a long post in May 2008, with over a 100 comments titled “White Guilt, Catholic Guilt, Jewish Guilt” Where he asserted Jewish guilt consisted of not being ethnic enough, contrary to what most of us assume would be a guilt provoking action.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/05/white-american-guilt-catholic-guilt.html

“Clearly, there is a form of Jewish guilt much like Catholic guilt that focuses on personal ethical lapses (for example, my father got a call on Yom Kippur once from a former colleague asking forgiveness for wronging him on the job), but that’s not what Americans typically mean by “Jewish guilt.”

What is typically meant is something almost exactly the opposite of what is theoretically meant by “white guilt.”

Joshua Halberstam wrote in The Forward in 2005 in “The Myth of Jewish Guilt:”

There is no credible empirical evidence — I’ve looked hard and carefully — that Jews feel more unwarranted guilt than others. The hypothesis is of course too amorphous to confirm or disconfirm with reliability; interestingly, however, when it comes to testable mental states such as psychosis, the data suggests that Jews suffer less than average. To be sure, sensitive, reflective individuals are discomforted when they disturb the traditions, the communities and the families to whom they feel attachments. This is true of Jews… and everyone else. …

How, then, did this bromide about Jewish guilt attain its status as a distinctive Jewish disposition? Unlike jokes about kishke, which Jews actually ate (and eat), and such slurs such as the Jews’ association with money — originally propounded by non-Jews — the Jewish guilt syndrome is a Jewish creation, the invention of the previous generation of assimilated American Jews (see Portnoy, Alexander).”

Sailor concludes
“In other words, “Jewish guilt” in modern America is, more than anything else, about not being racialist enough.”

Without refrigeration and sterilisation milk did not stay fresh. Being put into animal skins it rapidly turned into curds/cheese. Milk was consumed as either a form of cheese, or as soured milk. The lactose was digested by the appropriate microbes. Milk in one form or another was the main source of protein for a lot of people, especially of nordic cultures. Curds are mentioned in the old testament. Gen.18:8 Abraham is serving curds.

@Peter

I also suspect that there’s a tendency toward what we’re referring to as guilt in NW Europeans that goes deeper than Christian ideology. But that’s a hunch without any solid evidence, so I think it’s important to define what exactly differentiates guilt from shame so as to identify what’s unique about this culture.

Is guilt different from shame only in that witnesses other than humans (such as God or spirits) are also considered important? If so, then isn’t it fundamentally the same thing?

If guilt is a heightened ability to be ashamed of oneself over one’s moral failures, is it then something akin to the weakling who wishes he were strong and is frustrated by his shortcoming? Again, how is that qualitatively different from ordinary shame?

Or, could it be that guilt is just enhanced anxiety and/or fearfulness? Those of a more neurotic, introspective nature may simply be more inclined to dwell on things than others. Those who are by nature fearless and lacking in anxiety seldom seem to display much regret.

You suggest that guilt + empathy is what made the difference in NW Europe, but maybe guilt isn’t as important as we think.

This is the problem here, as I see it: when you speak of guilt, it’s easy to find other examples of people all over the world who could fit the definition of shame without witnesses. In some cultures, breaking a taboo could lead to suicide, which is the ultimate in self-punishment.

However, there may be a more highly developed sense of empathy in some populations, and this is at least as important as guilt in determining social outcomes (or else guilt means shame caused by empathy).

So maybe what we are looking at in NW Europe is not so much a “guilt culture” as it is a population with uniquely high levels of empathy and anxiety. I’d even go so far as to speculate that at least the latter is a relatively archaic trait that is bred out in long-established agricultural societies, so the more recent civilization of NW Europeans could account for higher than usual levels of anxiety in the Eurasian context.

In pagan Germany, and to some extent in Anglo Saxon England, killing a man was only considered murder if it was the secret killing of an unknown person. Guilt must have done the heavy lifting.

After medieval Christianity came a number of philosophers to whom guilt was central “PERHAPS the most central theme in Soren Kierkegaard’s religious thought is the doctrine of original sin: the idea that we share in some essential human guilt simply by being born. But guilt is an important concept also in Kierkegaard’s secular writings. He thought that the modern era was defined by its concept of guilt.”

Subsequent non Christian philosophers like Heidegger were still talking about guilt, as was Sartre with his “bad faith”. Levinas, with the individual “summoned” by an ethical duty to “the Other,” is the latest. Why do these ideas strike a chord with Europeans ?

Nietzsche: “God is dead, that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable”. Our moral notions are not based on anything, they are like the taboos of Polynesia which King Kamehameha II simply abolished.

As Alasdair MacIntyre asked: “Why should we think of our modern uses of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that from that in which we think about late eighteenth century uses of taboo . And why should we not think of Nietzsche as the Kamehameha II of the European tradition.”

Europeans’ feeling of guilt has a genetic basis, that is why the European moral order is not altering with the disappearance of its Christian cultural underpinning.

It is more likely that the guilt culture of confession and penitence was an innovation designed to use the ubiquitous church to make the barbarians behave.

Da.

In addition to your comment #3 (“You haven’t provided any evidence of guilt culture in pagan barbarian northwestern europe.”), the existence of “guilt cultures” outside of Europe hasn’t been explored. There is Micronesia and Japan, where one would have to make a very, very specific distinction between “guilt” and “shame” that might not be truly applicable. If you have “guilt” cultures developing post-selection of some as-yet-to-be-identified gene complex, then the “genetic” or “natural selection” theory is eminently discardable — particularly if “guilt” shows up in a non-European genetic line.

“Culture” remains the best, the most complete, and the most parsimonious explanation.

Oh, one more thing, the question I’m sure everyone’s dying to ask: if the Talmud doesn’t teach original sin, where does Jewish guilt come from?

If there is Justice to be found anywhere in an all-encompassing Universe, Jewish guilt must come from God. But, let’s get real … there is no such thing as “Jewish guilt”, there is only a demonstrated facade.

Your book seems to be available in English just fine. I just ordered it from the British Amazon (also available there), although there was a warning that I needed to be quick because “only 2 left in stock”, but we needn’t worry too much, since there was “more on the way”.

Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here [in this world] we have to sin. This life is not the dwelling place of righteousness…..No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. Do you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small?

If christian dogma makes sense to you, then so should the above quote from Martin Luther, northern european reformist. He cuts through the doublespeak of the catholic church.

Where is the burden of guilt, where is the need for penitence if you are already saved from eternal hell by the atoning blood sacrifice of Jesus?

As evidenced by the doctrine of original sin and the penitential tradition, Northwest European guilt culture was not a product of Christianity in general or of Protestantism in particular. It seems to have its origins in pre-existing tendencies that were absorbed into the new spiritual environment

1. The doctrine of original sin is not of northwestern european origin.

2. Penitence is not uniquely northwestern european.

3. You haven’t provided any evidence of guilt culture in pagan barbarian northwestern europe.

4. Christian dogma teaches that only the blood sacrifice of Jesus can atone for sin, including original sin. So where is the need for guilt or penitence if you are a baptized christian?

It is more likely that the guilt culture of confession and penitence was an innovation designed to use the ubiquitous church to make the barbarians behave.

“HEIDEGGER is crystal clear: like Cordelia in King Lear, nothing is said. The call of conscience is silent. It contains no instructions or advice. In order to understand this, it is important to grasp that, for Heidegger, inauthentic life is characterised by chatter – for example, the ever-ambiguous hubbub of the blogosphere. Conscience calls Dasein back from this chatter silently. It has the character of what Heidegger calls “reticence” (Verschwiegenheit), which is the privileged mode of language in Heidegger. So, the call of conscience is a silent call that silences the chatter of the world and brings me back to myself. But what does this uncanny call of conscience give one to understand? Conscience’s call can be reduced to one word: Guilty!”

The theologian Rudolph Bultmann said Heidegger was the Luther expert, and said Heidegger ‘knew Luther’s works better than many a professional theologian’ (see here).

If NW Europe has a guilt culture and ‘guilt is effective with or without a witness’ then Germans should be building great cars! And be incredibly efficient in their environmentalism.

Original sin – what bunk – what a waist of time. We do unsavory things in order to survive – a tribal member pecks his way to the top. That is our primordial nature. A pecking order is not a cooperative arrangement – it is a me-first way of living where position is more important then productivity. Successful pecking involves a specific set of mental genes.

Christian culture is different – it is a cooperative philosophy that says we can work together – this system requires a different set of mental genes to be activated.

Clearly the voluntary cooperation of volitional individuals is a more productive arrangement then is tribal antagonistic pecking.

Christianity has self selected cooperative peoples.

France viewed through the prism of shame vs. guilt is pretty complicated because the more “guilt” oriented Janenist Catholicism wasn’t defeated by the forces of a more shame-based Catholicism, but by the Jesuits and their emphasis on causitry which basically aims to evade both shame and guilt with convoluted reasoning.

That’s my bad and I offer a sincere mea culpa. I skimmed the article and missed the paragraph were he makes that explicit argument. You are absolutely right your rhetorical question demolishes his argument by its own terms.

If the Protestants have the most guilty cultures, why do they have the least guilty theologies? Unlike Catholicism or Orthodoxy, which teach that you must confess your sins regularly, Protestants are divided into Lutherans who teach that only faith, not good works, are needed for salvation, and Calvinists who deny free will and teach that nothing you do can change your predestined place in either heaven or hell.

We’re not going to find the answers in the theological systems.

A map of Europe and where anthropologists deem the border between shame and guilt cultures to lie might be useful. E.g. I’m under the impression that most Western Catholic cultures are in fact shame-cultures, i.e. the Spanish, French and Italians. Is that correct or no?

My point was that Peter Frost is making a very simplistic association between two things: having a doctrine of inherited guilt (original sin) and a guilt culture. And yet by his own admission, the Talmud, the foundational text of rabbinical Judaism, doesn’t teach original sin, so the well-known phenomenon of Jewish guilt is unexplained. If the Jews can have a guilt culture without original sin, then original sin doesn’t explain why Western Christians have a guilt culture (which isn’t even true for half of Western Christianity, i.e. those from Latin cultures, but we’ll leave that to the side).

I still think that you are mixing up two different distinctions:
a) the distinction between social punishment and social despise
b) the distinction between (originally) external factors and their internalization.
Internal punishment = guilt. But despise can be internalized the same way.

The connexion with the doctrine of “original sin” seems rather superfluous.

But it’s plausible that the penitential tradition helped to internalize guilt. Protestantism radicalized it only insofar as guilt became not so much a matter of concrete deeds but a matter of the person as a whole – making absolution more vague or even improbable.

I understand the idea that capital punishment worked as a kind of genetical selection. I don’t see how the penitential tradition might have made an impact on genetics.

Doesn’t the main rupture point for Lutheran Protantism occur at a a point beyond guilt and shame namely indulgences. Grace could theoretically apply equally to shame or a guilt based morality.

Failure to uphold God’s law. Is this a serious question? It sure was posed in the style of a 15 year old know it all.

So the introduction of guilt into the doctrine of ancestral sin by a 2nd century Gallic and 4th century North African bishop is the evidence that guilt was ingrained in northwestern Christianity from the beginning? Oh dear. I guess it’s an accident that southwestern Europeans today are known for their shame culture?

Examples of Anglo-Saxon penitentials a) only show evidence of Anglo-Saxon attitudes to sin, and don’t offer any information about their understanding of original sin and b) you can find plenty of Eastern Orthodox penitentials with similarly severe (look up the canons of St John the Faster, which have been used in Orthodox confessionals for about a thousand years). I can also tell you most definitely that Orthodoxy has a tradition of confession, which includes teaching the need to feel remorse for one’s sins. It’s not peripheral, but central to all the penitential and ascetic literature of the East. Where it differs from Western penitential traditions, at least later Western ones, is that the emphasis is not exclusively on guilt and confession, but more generally on ascesis and purification from passions, but this is a far cry from claiming that Orthodoxy has no concept of guilt.

Also, the logic here seems to be: northwest European Christians are more guilt-based than Christians elsewhere, ergo they must have inherited a predisposition to guilt from their pagan ancestors. Uh, aren’t there some other possibilities we haven’t entertained? Maybe they developed a predilection for guilt after they became Christian. To dismiss this hypothesis, you need evidence of pre-Christian Germanic or Celtic guilt-culture, and from my knowledge of them, they were just as shame-driven as the rest of humanity. So sorry, this hypothesis is not supported by the evidence you have brought to bear. It looks like if any culture is guilt-driven, it’s due to Christianity.

Oh, one more thing, the question I’m sure everyone’s dying to ask: if the Talmud doesn’t teach original sin, where does Jewish guilt come from?

William of Ockham believed ‘The ways of God are not open to reason’, which amounts to non rational obedience. Assuming virtuous behaviour is rewarded here on earth, there is no need for a reward in the hereafter. Socrates and Aristotle said that we always do what we think is for the best. Natural law rewards virtuous behavior with happiness according to Aristotle, who Luther called “that buffoon”.

When and where there is no reward for virtuous behaviour, there is still good reason for obeying God (ie doing what you don’t want to do, but feel you ought to) in order to secure your reward in the afterlife. That is why Henry Sidgwick was so interested in an afterlife. But if you have doubts about the afterlife it is difficult to justify doing what you feel you ought to do instead of doing what you desire and what it is in your personal interests to do.

Western ethics have tried to find good reasons for the feeling we ought to do our duty, even if it goes against our desires and interests. Now we know where that feeling came from.