Review: Lower than the Angels by Diarmaid MacCulloch
This review was published in Sofia magazine issue 154 ‘In My Exchanges Every Land Shall Walk’
Allen Lane imprint of Penguin Random House (London, 2024) Hbk 660 page £35.00
Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch offers a calm and thorough history of sex and Christianity in this compendium, which manages to span millennia of history but still zoom in on interesting details along the way. Pertinent to many of the most contentious topics in Christianity today, ‘Lower than the Angels’ brings light without adding heat to the debate.
MacCulloch’s tone is light and observational, with neither anger nor flippancy. This is fortunate, as the history of sex and Christianity is so often deplorable, comical or both at once. The book isn’t without its wry observations, but it never feels like there is any agenda other than telling you the facts, as far as that’s possible with history.
It is all the more impressive because the author does have skin in the game. His Father, grandfather and great grandfather had all been ordained as Anglican vicars. He had sought the same, only to find it was ‘complicated’ as an openly gay man.
The book starts a thousand years before Christ – not a mistake – but a deliberate decision to describe the influence and inheritance from the Greek and Jewish traditions. These chapters highlight how Christians began to become distinctive, and the tensions in the early churches between a family focused or monastic Christianity.
At this point the focus shifts to be on the Western church, describing its ‘two revolutions’ in relation to sex. The first is the establishment of Western Christendom from the 11th to 16th centuries, the division of society into clergy and laity and the decision by the Catholic Church to force celibacy on all clergy. ‘A celibate clergy demands a copulating laity’, so this is also becomes the story of the church’s interest in marriage.
On marriage, MacCulloch pithily notes: ‘Marriage traditionally has been a contract between two men’ – that is the fathers of the bride and groom! Perhaps one of the better legacies of the church was its (albeit intermittent) belief that the bride and groom and their feelings were relevant.
There were no church weddings at all under the 11th and 12th century. So unsure were churches in England, that weddings took place outside the church. Decorative porches were added for the purpose, constructed of wood or differently to the church to make the demarcation clear. Many of those porches remain on older English churches today, a visible reminder of the churches ambivalent history to marriage. This fact, which seems quite important to the contemporary debate on marriage, didn’t make it into the Church of England’s 460 page tome for the ‘Living in Love and Faith’ course.
The second revolution takes place in the reformation, which broke down the celibacy distinction between clergy and laity for the Protestants. Next follows the Enlightenment and growth of people’s choice in the lives, including on sex. We then come to the arrival of contraception and the 20th century history of sex with which we might be more familiar.
The inescapable conclusion, having read this history, is that there is simply no such thing as a traditional Christian view on marriage on sex.
Instead there are a myriad of beliefs and practices, often totally contradictory. Is it better to be married or celibate? How many wives could you have, at once or ever? When could you divorce?
Not only is there no single Christian tradition or theology of sex, there isn’t even a direction of travel.
Perhaps the only consistency is that the recorded history was being written by churched men, with the author gleaming what he can about what happened to women and the wider population. For example, the Catholic church is still against contraception, but it is a matter of fact that the average Catholic family continues to get smaller.
This book leaves you in no doubt that sex has loomed large in Christianity, but it doesn’t frame this as a criticism or imply the church is sex obsessed. After all, don’t most ethical questions come down to how people relate to each other, and isn’t sex one of the most important (and certainly most physical) ways we relate to each other?