ABSTRACT
Once guilt is inherited, there are no specific crimes or sins. There is only the profound and restless sense of existential culpability. In a guilt culture, there is no remission – that is relief – only sublimation. The works of Kafka, Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard illustrate.
Further, the entire edifice of Christian belief now collapses. God has lost his central functions – the forgiveness of sins, the protection from evil, and the granting of immortality. That there is no remission means there can be no faith. Knowledge substitutes for salvation. And guilt has replaced God.
Matthew Arnold lamented the ebbing tide of faith already in 1851. Shortly after, Darwin’s theory of evolution struck a crippling blow to Biblical authority. Then Nietzsche proclaimed the ‘death of God’, spelling out its fatefully dire implications.
The period 1800–1920 is marked by a collapse of the balances achieved in the civilized guilt era, followed by a regression back to persecutory traits. In England, the period begins with new moral purpose in the Anglican Church. Methodism emerges as the austere neo-Calvinist religion sweeping through the lower-middle and working classes. But, by the 1890s, the defensive cultural regression began to falter. As belief in the Protestant God waned, so too did confidence in the bourgeois or middle-class ideal that it had spawned.
