“For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels; and hast crowned him with glory and honour.” This famous verse of Scripture, Psalm 8:5, gave Diarmaid MacCulloch the title for his new book, Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. In the Hebrew Bible, it is a gloss on the creation of human beings as the crowning work of God in Genesis 1. Christians read the text Christologically and applied it to Jesus (Hebrews 2:6). For “angels,” the Hebrew Bible has elohim, a noun that literally means “divinities” or “gods,” but that the Hebrew Bible commonly construes as a proper noun, “God,” and that many modern translations favor, including the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). But the ancient Jewish translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek known as the Septuagint rendered elohim as “angels,” as did the most widely circulated Latin version of the Psalter among Western Christians and the translators of the Authorized Version of 1611, popularly known as the King James Version.
Declaring humanity “lower than the angels” but at the same time God’s crowning creative work has always made this verse and the whole psalm a locus classicus of biblical humanism. It pitches our expectations for human performance at the very highest level. We do not, of course, always match up. “Marriages in this life have a tendency to be less than angelic,” as MacCulloch drily observes on the last page of his book. Readers of Walker Percy’s novel Love in the Ruins will remember Dr. Tom More and his “Qualitative-Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer,” which measures human management of the mind-body split on a scale ranging from angelism to bestialism—and perhaps nowhere more poignantly than where sex is concerned.
Considering this—and the generally fevered state of contemporary discussion of everything having to do with sex—it takes a brave historian to embark on an entire history of Christian thought, precept, and practice regarding sex and sexuality. MacCulloch does not lack for intellectual ambition, as he has shown over a long and distinguished career on his way to becoming the premier English-language church historian of his generation. To his credit are path-breaking studies of Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, the latter study offering a sympathetic revisionist portrait of Henry VIII’s counselor. Catholics and others are used to seeing Cromwell as the heavy in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, but MacCulloch restores him to actuality in a portrait closer to the fictional Cromwell of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels. MacCulloch has also written the leading English-language history of the Reformation period, the 2011 Gifford Lectures on “silence” in Christian history, and a massive history of Christianity provocatively subtitled The First Three Thousand Years—declaring Christianity’s origin in and inextricable link with Judaism. He is all over YouTube with crisply delivered lectures based on these books, including all six of the Gifford Lectures.
In addition to his publishing career, MacCulloch has also served as coeditor of The Journal of Ecclesiastical History and is now a fellow both of St. Cross College and Campion Hall at Oxford, and emeritus professor of the history of the Church at Oxford. He is an Anglican vicar’s son and an ordained deacon in the Church of England. He has also been an out gay man for most of his adult life, which kept him from ordination to the priesthood. He has been quoted describing himself as “a candid friend of Christianity.” Academic expertise and personal experience thus give him a special perspective on the subject of his latest book.
Lower than the Angels employs a standard periodization of Church history that tracks with MacCulloch’s own one-volume history, with parallel pages indicated in the endnotes. The dizzying range of topics covered includes liturgy, catechesis, canon law, civil law, philosophical anthropology, biology, art and architecture, biblical exegesis, the European witch craze, colonialism, ecumenism, and politics. An entire chapter titled “A Century of Contraception” is a tour of how modern Christianity (not just Roman Catholicism) has negotiated—usually by vainly resisting—the unprecedented sexual freedom of the past hundred years. The book also works hard to go beyond Western Christianity (i.e., the Protestant and Roman Catholic branches of the tradition) to include Orthodoxy, with its different approach to celibacy, as well as the non-Chalcedonian churches (the Christian communities on the eastern perimeter of the Roman Empire and beyond that did not accept the Council of Chalcedon’s dogma of the Incarnation). Such breadth allows MacCulloch to discuss, for example, the crossover influences and contrasts of monasticism in the Catholic and the Orthodox traditions, as well as the different positions on divorce and remarriage that the two traditions have taken in interpreting the competing accounts in Matthew and Mark of Jesus’ prohibition of divorce. He also tells us how Eastern Christians under Muslim rule dealt with Islam’s restoration of biblical polygamy. MacCulloch quotes generously from primary sources but also lets us know the scholarly debates surrounding a host of contentious subjects, from the family of Jesus to the history of homosexuality. In the case of the family of Jesus, he is frank about how respected Catholic New Testament scholar Fr. Raymond Brown flinched when directing research on the question of the illegitimacy of Jesus’ birth. By the same token, MacCulloch wisely dismisses in an endnote the claims made by the late Morton Smith for an alleged unabridged version of the Gospel of Mark.
What would make even an accomplished historian want to take up such a controversial subject and cover it within such a broad time frame—starting, in fact, from even before the beginning of Christianity? Reprising his approach in The First Three Thousand Years, MacCulloch devotes his first three chapters to the Jewish and classical antecedents of Christianity. This approach makes sense when one realizes that Christian attitudes to sexuality and the institution of marriage have distinct roots in Judaism and in classical, Hellenistic, and Roman thought and practice, including the adherence to monogamy itself. MacCulloch asserts as fact that polygamy—or “polygyny” (many women), as he prefers to call it—was common in the Judaism of Jesus’ time and for long afterwards. Christianity’s commitment to monogamy is due very specifically to the teaching of Jesus himself and then more broadly to Greek and Roman practice. “[O]n the nature of marriage, the Christian future lay not with Judaism but with Hellenism.”
Reflecting on “the varied bundles of anger that we all bring to thinking of sex, sexuality, and gender,” MacCulloch says he wrote his book “to provide evidence for making decisions” and to overturn comfortable certainties: “[T]here is no single Christian theology of sex. There is a plethora of Christian theologies of sex.” In a more constructive vein, he aims to retrieve directions that did not in fact develop as they might have, “past versions of the Church that were less dominated by male clerical stories. Fundamental to any reassessment is the replacement of male circumcision by baptism for all believers as the mark of Christian identity in the earliest generation of Christianity’s existence.” We do not know exactly when or how the momentous decision was made to baptize women as well as men. Perhaps it was related to the equally significant decision not to require male circumcision of Gentiles who wanted to profess Jesus as Lord and Christ, which we know about thanks to the (doubtless idealized) account in chapter 15 of the Acts of the Apostles.
A consistent theme of the book is that in moments of change and upheaval, when women in particular begin to enjoy greater agency and standing, there is, almost inevitably, a stabilization that restores a measure of male control. This trend is evident from as early as the Montanist prophetic movement in second-century Asia Minor and echoed repeatedly in Christian history. There are, for example, the double (male and female) monasteries under royal ladies who served as abbesses in seventh- and eighth-century Anglo-Saxon England, the Beguines of the later Middle Ages, the Ursuline nuns of the Counter-Reformation, and the prominence of women in the American Pentecostalism of the early twentieth century. A remarkable Catholic example is the early-seventeenth-century effort by Mary Ward to form a women’s institute in Protestant England to be called “the Congregation of Jesus,” modeled on the Jesuit constitution. She had partial support in the Society of Jesus, though Pope Urban VIII finally banned her institute in 1639. She and her women associates found ways of working around the ban, and their group has persisted over time, receiving belated recognition in 2002 from Pope John Paul II. There was a similar effort earlier in Ireland. MacCulloch points to the circumstances of Catholic life in England at a time when the faith had to be practiced discreetly in households, where women might have special freedom. Ward’s initiative is noteworthy in part because the Jesuits remain the rare Catholic order or congregation that did not otherwise generate a viable female complement.
MacCulloch’s interest in thwarted egalitarian trends does not lead him to exaggerate their extent. He is admirably balanced, for example, in how he treats the cluster of trends from the second century conventionally known as Gnosticism. Christians with claims to an exceptional knowledge that transcended the Creed were pushed to the margins or rejected totally by the consolidating authority structure in most Christian communities. Some modern scholarship has seen the heterodox flavor of such groups as anticipating modern religious liberalism or even as “a form of proto-feminism.” But MacCulloch rightly rejects this anachronistic interpretation as implausible, not least because most gnostic teaching was intensely ascetical and hostile to the body. At the same time, he points out, gnostic circles could be more open to women insofar as they sought to eliminate the difference between the sexes by rising above the body and emphasized individual revelation in a way that might give greater latitude to women.
He is equally impartial in discussing the question of an ordained female presbyterate (priesthood) in the early Church. He doubts it existed, but he also scorns the weak justification for modern Anglican resistance to the ordination of women as priests. What we do have in antiquity is evidence of a restricted female ordained ministry to women, such as that found in an important third-century Church order in Syriac known as the Didascalia Apostolorum (“Teaching of the Apostles”), which speaks of women deaconesses whose ministry was to women. They conducted the baptismal catechesis and the anointing of the head prior to baptism, though they were not allowed to perform the baptism itself. What MacCulloch finds more important, because more pervasive, is the status of the “widows” as a recognized privileged class of women and the related question whether they had the right to remarry (many in the early Church thought they did not).
He is also candid in rejecting as “wishful thinking” and “largely illusory” the thesis argued a generation ago by historian John Boswell regarding a supposed tolerance of gay people and even gay marriage in premodern Catholicism and Orthodoxy, including the ritual of adelphopoiesis, “brother-making.” But MacCulloch’s endnotes also show a sympathetic awareness of the abundant new scholarship in the history of homosexuality. See, for example, his discussion of the contrasting modes of same-sex male love in early-modern European Christianity: the prevalence in the Mediterranean south of “life-stage” homosexuality of older and younger males as practiced first in classical antiquity, versus a more companionate relationship of equals in northern Europe. He has damning words for the savage reprisals meted out to those accused of same-sex behavior once Christians had the coercive power of the state in their hands. Such legalized persecution did not really end in the United States until the recent decriminalization of homosexual acts. On this subject, the Catholic Church is still trying to think its way out of the dead end to which natural-law doctrine has led it. I recommend MacCulloch’s long discussion of contemporary debates over homosexuality as they have played out across denominational lines and even in national and international politics—for example, his discussion of the way Vladimir Putin’s Russia has presented itself as a defender of traditional Christianity in the face of Western liberalization with respect to gay people. And, of course, MacCulloch is also well informed about the role the issue has played in the fractious twentieth-century history of Anglicanism.
This book is especially engaging in its discussion of shifting boundaries in the definition and presentation of gender, a fluidity well illustrated by the complex roles played by “angels” in the Christian tradition. MacCulloch suggests that their evolution from aggressively male representations in the Hebrew Bible (see Genesis 6) to more female representations enabled the construction of a kind of third gender that was quickly applied to celibates, both male and female—and to eunuchs as well, helped no doubt by Jesus’ approval of the third class of eunuchs, “those who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 19:12). Though the exalted status granted to angels in the tradition might seem to confer on women ascetics a measure of equality with men, MacCulloch argues that the image of the eunuch also ended up prioritizing the importance of men over women. A similar skewing toward the male side occurred when the virginity of women was joined to marital metaphors, with Christ as the groom.
In short, much of this book reads like a defense of women against men, a defense of marriage against celibacy, and a defense of gay people (both men and women) against much of Christian history. There are also a few gestures toward a defense of trans people. Though their emergence as an identifiable group is largely of recent vintage, transitioning from one gender category to the other seems to emerge naturally (so to speak) from a Christian tradition that has from the very beginning pushed against the limits of biological and social determinisms.
The need to defend women should be self-evident. Despite the vivid presence of women in the gospels and the precedent of baptizing them, the long influence, for example, of purity laws is a recurrent and chastening theme in MacCulloch’s book. These include prohibitions against women receiving the Eucharist when they were menstruating, though one is grateful to have Pope Gregory the Great’s critique of this in a dossier of letters preserved in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. From the long and sorry history of mistreatment of women in the tradition, we could perhaps single out the “witchcraft craze” of the early modern period, when, by one estimate, between forty and fifty thousand people, mostly women, died in Europe and colonial North America. This collective madness was justified early on by the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”), the notorious inquisitors’ textbook published in 1486. MacCulloch calls it “one of the most effective conspiracy-theory texts of all time,” and notes that we should have an easier time understanding its success than some earlier generations did. But he also points out that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are also the period when more women than men—both Protestant and Catholic—became active in the devotional practice of Christianity. The “feminization” of Christianity may have begun centuries ago.
The defense of marriage against celibacy as a privileged state is a major theme of this book. It is a fact that for the first thousand years of Christian literature, MacCulloch notes, far more was written about celibacy than about marriage. There are of course reasons for this that have to do with who could read and write. But it’s notable that even the defense of marriage in Clement of Alexandria, who was writing early in the third century, seems grudging in its rejection of all pleasure in marital intercourse. We must wait, MacCulloch says, until Peter Abelard in the twelfth century to find a Christian writer who defends sexual pleasure as a good. MacCulloch is generous in his characterization of how late-medieval Catholicism was “exuberantly varied” in evolving a new place for the family in relation to the historic valuation of celibacy in priesthood and religious life.
One of the important through lines in the book is the contrast between two approaches to marriage, one that stresses male headship (see, for example, 1 Corinthians 11:3 and Ephesians 5:22–25) and another that speaks of mutuality and equality, the classic example being Paul’s treatment of the “marital debt” (the phrase is “conjugal rights” in the NRSV) in 1 Corinthians 7:3–4. MacCulloch sees the “marital debt” theme reaching its culmination in the work of medieval canonists who defined the central importance of “consent” in marriage, the historic moment when marriage becomes the choice of individual persons rather than essentially a social contract between the fathers of families. This is also the moment when marriage came under the aegis of the Church; it had largely been a civil affair in the ancient period. Marriage achieved full sacramental status only in the twelfth century—though it remained the case that the couple married each other, with the priest serving only as witness and bestower of a blessing. Even as a sacrament of the Church, MacCulloch points out, the marriage service was kept at first literally outside the Church building, as we are reminded by some surviving wooden porches that were added to stone buildings for this purpose.
In his handling of the status of celibacy in the Christian tradition, a certain confessional bias tugs at MacCulloch’s impartiality. After reading the first hundred pages of this book, I told a friend it was a very Protestant book. That was premature. Readers like myself can sympathize with the author’s defense of lay initiatives against clericalism, especially a Catholic clericalism sanctioned after the Gregorian Reform by canonical celibacy. And I certainly agree with MacCulloch’s unsparing treatment of clerical sexual abuse, which he knows is not exclusively a Catholic problem, nor a new one. Four hundred years ago, the Catholic religious order of the Piarists—or to use their full name, the Order of Poor Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools—had to be suppressed just one generation after its founding in 1621 because of sexual scandals, only to be restored several decades later. The concealed history of their troubled beginning did not become known until the twentieth century, when conscientious scholarship recovered it.
Nevertheless, this Catholic reader felt a certain bias against celibacy, starting with MacCulloch’s account of its origin. He blames Paul for inaugurating the tradition that celibacy was preferable to marriage. I would argue that the higher evaluation of celibacy over the family begins with Jesus himself, whose singleness seems to me to be actual and not a revisionist redaction of the tradition. To his credit, MacCulloch does not overvalue the countervailing testimony of some of the noncanonical material loosely called “gospels.” And he knows the power of Jesus’ example on later monastic literature.
The fascinating and exceedingly influential second-century document known as the Protoevangelium of James is not about Jesus but about Mary—indeed, as MacCulloch notes, it is the source of a large portion of traditional Catholic and Orthodox belief about Mary. As for Jesus himself, MacCulloch calls attention to the clear tension that the synoptic narratives report between Jesus and his family of birth, and Jesus’ mixed view of family as such. But is it accurate to speak of “the unexpectedly combative tone in some of the New Testament’s scanty references to Mary outside the Infancy Narratives” or of “Jesus’ direct put-down both of Mary and an over-enthusiastic female follower” (see Luke 11:27–28)? Here MacCulloch correctly points out that the distance that the synoptic accounts put between Jesus and his family was more or less ignored until the Reformation era, when Protestants were bent on discrediting Mary’s intercessory status and that of the saints in general. Still, the tone of the rhetoric here is grating. Dismissing the Protoevangelium as “wild fiction” doesn’t seem the most fruitful way to explain its function and appeal. To his credit, MacCulloch does not ignore the consequence of the Reformation’s valorization of the family for removing a major alternative way of life for women who could not enjoy—or did not want the strictures of—marriage and motherhood.
The view of Christianity’s origins that I share sees Jesus and his message arising from the movement known as Jewish restorationism, which saw a restored Israel as the nucleus of a renewed world. That emphatically includes the renewal of the human body and of the social world created by embodiment. In the face of the coming transformation, all human constructs are relativized and seen as under judgment: marriage and the family above all, but also money, commerce, the state, etc. The ethical demands imposed on those who would be part of this renewal cut right across the normal duties and inclinations of human nature as it exists. The Sermon on the Mount, to point to the most thorough statement of those demands, presumes a radically reconstructed human nature, a new heart. The treatment of the family can be shockingly cold-hearted. “Let the dead bury the dead.” “Who are my family? These [his listeners and followers] are my family.” “Unless a man hates his mother and father, he cannot be my disciple.” “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, his own town, and among his own house and his own kin.” “In heaven there is neither giving nor taking in marriage, but they are like angels.”
It is that last utterance—a reply to the Sadducees, who did not believe in resurrection—that I would point to as the key text for grasping Jesus’ view of sexuality and marriage. It is the governing rubric for appreciating the exalted status he otherwise appears to attribute to marriage in his rigorous repudiation of the right to divorce, which was accepted among Jews—at least where the husband’s power over the wife is concerned. Jesus rescinds that particular Mosaic dispensation (Deuteronomy 24:1–4) by appealing to Genesis and saying that “in the beginning it was not so,” and that, in the union of man and woman, “the two become one flesh,” concluding that “What God has joined, no one should separate” (Mark 10:9). In other words, permanent monogamous marriage is a circumstance of humanity as created. But marriage, like everything else, has suffered under the effects of human sinfulness—hence Jesus’ explanation of the Mosaic dispensation as due to “your hardness of heart.” But even marriage will not endure in the resurrection. I have mentioned how central angels and angelic representations are in MacCulloch’s book. It is therefore notable that he returns to the encounter with the Sadducees in his very last sentences—only to treat it with a wave of the hand as a “playful riposte” by Jesus. It is far weightier than that. It grows out of a deep belief in what a new world would mean and how it should be realized.
I will close with a passage from a second-century noncanonical text known as Second Clement, though it is not a letter but probably a homily, and not by Clement of Rome but by some anonymous Christian, perhaps in Alexandria. It interprets a noncanonical saying attributed to Jesus about man and woman being neither male nor female as meaning that the Kingdom of God will come when a Christian brother looks at a Christian sister and no longer thinks of her as a sister—i.e., as female—and vice versa (see 2 Clement 12:5). Perhaps this tells us how some early Christians understood Jesus’ angelic supersession of marriage: a rising above the constraints of the existing order and the beginning of a new one that transcends sexuality altogether. In our time, when the meaning of “male” and “female” are bitterly contested, there may be some useful wisdom to be gleaned from ascetical elements in our tradition that aren’t reducible to misogyny or hatred of the body. I wish that MacCulloch’s rich and fascinating book had been more open to that redeeming possibility.
Lower than the Angels
A History of Sex and Christianity
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Viking
$40 | 688 pp.
