Lower Than the Angels (that is the condition of man, according to the psalmist and St Paul) is a book that combines the two most fascinating subjects, religion and sex – but you do have to take both bits of the agenda. This is Christian history with an eye to marriage, sexual acts, sexuality, celibacy, feminism and gender. Diarmaid MacCulloch is primarily a historian of the Reformation but, as his A History of Christianity (2009) demonstrates, he’s up for the bigger picture. This history takes us from early Jewish concepts of God and sex (I was startled to find the God of Abraham was once assigned a spouse, Asherah) right up to current Anglican rows about homosexuality.
Clerical celibacy only became the western norm after the Gregorian reforms of the 11th century
If there is a theme to such a capacious book it’s that the Christian view of sex is more multifarious than we might have thought. The author has his sights set on the notion that ‘a single true Church has preached a timeless message on the subject’. You can see where he’s going. He has fun in his final chapter demolishing the Moral Majority movement’s view in America that Christ was all about the nuclear family. Plainly he wasn’t.
Christ was single (MacCulloch dismisses the nutty idea that he was married to Mary Magdalene). He gave us the most exalted idea of matrimony, of husband and wife as one flesh, but his mother was a virgin: he was conceived outside marriage (something MacCulloch accepts, though he makes a convoluted bid to read the gospels to escape the Virgin Birth). Christ condemned fornication but ignored homosexuality and detested divorce – a prohibition that hasn’t had much appeal to Protestant evangelicals. His approach to the woman taken in adultery was startlingly at odds with the punitive culture of the time: ‘It subverts the ethical expectations of its age,’ observes MacCulloch.
St Paul was no less radical. MacCulloch points to Paul’s letter to the Corinthians on the sexual reciprocity between husband and wife, the so-called marital debt. The notion that a wife could expect the same fidelity from a husband as he from her was equally at odds with the assumptions of the Mediterranean world. But Paul also introduces a novel element into the condemnation of idolators who engage in same-sex relations: he sees them as acting against nature, a text with important consequences.
Christian marriage, then, was monogamous (and it comes as a surprise that Judaism accepted polygamy not just at the time of Christ but centuries later). The infant faith was situated in the Graeco-Roman world in which monogamy was the norm, something MacCulloch oddly attributes to the impact of Homer. But a distinctive Christian contribution to the sexual mix was voluntary celibacy, something vanishingly rare in Judaism and the Roman world, and a radical option for women, though it took three centuries for monasticism to emerge in Syria.
He charts the early Christian debates with gusto. Was marriage justified only by procreation, as Jerome splenetically argued; or could it be, as the married Tertullian suggested, a means of mutual sanctification? Was it defined by consent or by consummation? What about the much admired marriages in which both parties voluntarily gave up sex? Then there were the ‘brother-making’ ceremonies in Orthodoxy – and no, it turns out they weren’t proto-gay marriages.
MacCulloch is fond of pointing out that weddings in church were a relatively late development, while clerical celibacy only became the western norm after the Gregorian reforms in the 11th century; the narrative is littered with bishops’ sons. What about eunuchs? It took time for the Church to outlaw voluntary self-castration (there’s a poignant medieval depiction on page 116 of poor Origen about to cut off his testicles) but, as MacCulloch observes, eunuchs’ ambiguous gender has a contemporary resonance, given current debates about identity.
For much of Christian history, sexual and marital behaviour was governed by social norms and expectations, framed, regulated and sometimes challenged by the Church. Where MacCulloch identifies a discernibly modern move to personal autonomy was in the 18th century, when he thinks the Enlightenment project combined with greater affluence created what we call choice, extended to human relationships. Yet the choices were often for a demonstrative religion such as Methodism, and many of philosophes were conservative about sex. But it is striking that in this period masturbation became a perceived social menace, as did the emergence of homosexuality between equals, rather than in Greek fashion between young and older men. Usefully, MacCulloch identifies a pragmatic factor: people were more likely to have personal private space.
The book should be read a little at a time to take in the complex narrative. Think of the author more as a genial, knowledge-able companion than an infallible authority; I wanted to argue endlessly about his conclusions as I read, and that’s how he’d like it.
A warning for the dirty-minded. The cover of Lower Than the Angels has a close up of Eve modestly covering her bits with her hand. The subtitle seems to promise lubricious material. Too bad: it’s not what you get.
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