Book Review: "Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity"
Diarmaid MacCulloch's timely book is a potent reminder that, contrary to what some might like to think, Christianity has never had a coherent or stable theology of sex.
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So, my spiritual journey continues and, because I can’t ever keep anything to myself, I wanted to share some of my findings with you, my subscribers. We are all, in one way or another, on a spiritual journey of one form or another, even if our eventual destinations are widely variant. Similarly, many of us are going to have to contend with matters of sexuality in one form or another throughout our lives or, at the very least, have to grapple with others’ opinions of said sexuality, that very important part of many people’s lives and social identities.
This is particularly true for those of us who either grew up in some form of Christian denomination or who encounter Christians and Christianity on anything like a regular basis. In the United States, of course, it’s impossible not to be aware of this community’s views on everything related to sex, particularly in the present day, when a resurgent religious right continues to use the acquiescent Trump administration to see their social and cultural agenda put into place.
Of course, if you know anything about Christianity, you know that it’s a faith that thinks about sex. A lot. In fact, for many people–mostly, but not exclusively, on the right side of the religious/political spectrum–it’s sex, and one’s stance on it, that separates the true believers from those who are going to burn in Hell forever. It’s for this reason that such pressing issues as abortion, marriage, and homosexuality have become such flashpoints in the current debates roiling many denominations.
However, as Diarmaid MacCulloch reveals in his new book, Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, Christianity’s relationship with sex, the body, and everything having to do with those things, including and especially marriage, has a deep history, with some surprises even for those who know a thing or two about the history of the faith. Contrary to what so many on today’s religious right would like to believe, there has never been a unified Christian theology of sex. Instead the faith has always been at war with itself in its attempt to grapple with the reality of the human body and human sexuality, never quite able to paper over or resolve the contradictions built into its very conception and its self-identity.
McCulloch begins, appropriately enough, by taking a step back from Christianity itself to explore the two cultural traditions from which the new faith drew as it crafted its own identity. One of these, of course, was Judaism, which had developed an entire system of laws and religious regulations regarding the body and what one should, and shouldn’t, do with it. The other, of course, was the Greco-Roman culture of the broader Mediterranean. These two strands didn’t always fit well together, because each of them offered the nascent religion things that they liked (monogamy in the case of Greco-Roman culture, certain restrictions in the case of Jewish culture), even when those things didn’t always fit neatly together. As a result, early Christian writers–from St. Paul to St. Augustine to St. Jerome–really had a lot to do to square the circle when it came to how Christians should behave in terms of sex.
Take, for example, the question of celibacy. This was a motivating concern for no less a figure than Paul himself, who finally had to admit that, yes, he supposed it was better to marry than to burn (with lust). It would also prove to be an urgent question for both St. Augustine and St. Jerome, with the latter being particularly scathing about those men who desired their wives to an unseemly and profane degree. Given the intensity of this debate about marriage and how it should be understood, it’s not surprising that, for the next couple of millennia, Christian thinkers would repeatedly return to the question of which was better: to not have sex at all or to do so within the carefully defined bounds of marriage.
Even the weaving of marriage into Christianity itself was a process rather than a starting point, as MacCulloch also makes clear. I daresay that most of us laypeople tend to assume that marriage has always been a key part of Christian worship and identity, but it took time for this to develop. It would prove to be a recurring issue for doctrine, particularly once Martin Luther and the Reformation abolished clerical celibacy and brought a whole new series of questions about marriage and sex to the forefront. This development, as MacCulloch reminds us, helped to usher in a new period in which women began to take an ever more important role in various churches and religious movements, to such a degree that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, at least, Christianity started to seem far too feminine for some men’s tastes. It’s thus easy to see why so many male religious figures in the present continue to want to push women out of their positions of prominence in some denominations.
What’s remarkable about Lower than the Angels is just how deeply-researched yet accessible it is. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, however, given that MacCulloch has published widely on the history of Christianity, including a sweeping history of the faith itself just a few years ago. There are times when this can make for tough going if you’re not interested in the broader history of Europe and the West, but he always leavens even the heavier material with his trademark wit and humor. Moreover, I would argue that you can’t detach Christianity and its preoccupation with matters of sex and the body from the broader contexts in which it has always been located. The brilliance of Christianity as a belief system is its ability to change, transform, and mutate over the centuries and the millennia, finding new ways to speak to the faithful.
This is as true for the past century as it was for earlier periods in the past. By now we’re all familiar with the various denominations and their spokespeople who claim that theirs is the one true way, that they are practicing Christianity as it was in the earliest (and thus purest) days of the faith. In fact, I grew up in one such denomination and, tempting as it is to accede to their claims of spiritual primacy, to do so is to ignore the rich, complex, and at times deeply contradictory history of Christianity. To deny this history is to deny ourselves, and the faith that we love, the vigor that a historical awareness can provide.
Even a book as far-reaching as this one, however, has to draw some boundaries somewhere, and most of Lower than the Angels focuses on western Christianity. There are, to be sure, some passages that look at Orthodoxy in its various forms and how sex and marriage have played out differently in those contexts. While brief, they nevertheless add an important layer of complexity to our understanding of how Christianity as a broadly interconnected series of beliefs have taken shape in different contexts. MacCulloch’s discussion of sex and Christianity in places such as Africa likewise are brief but significant.
As I find my way back into the Christian faith that I abandoned over two decades ago, I find works like Lower than the Angels a powerful and encouraging reminder that sex, marriage, and everything in between are far from settled doctrine. History, as so often, enlightens and enlivens the presence, reminding us that the only thing constant, in Christianity as in so much else, is change.