Take a Cold Bath

Few​ things expose the potential for illogicality, hypocrisy and cruelty within the Christian tradition more clearly than its attitude to sex. Throughout the centuries, the struggle to comprehend divine instruction and apply it to everyday life has revolved with particular intensity around the question of what people might want to do, and what they should be permitted to do, in their sexual relations. For anyone who thinks that the Bible gives clear directions about this, or that there has been any consistency in the attitudes of the Church, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Lower than the Angels will come as a corrective. This is not a polemical book, but an erudite, judicious and often sympathetic account of Christian history, in all its complexity, by a historian and theologian with impeccable credentials.

Christianity emerged in a world full of contradictions on sexual matters. Jewish culture, which saw sexual misconduct in terms of infidelity to God, bequeathed a weighty legacy to the religion it helped to create. Greek and Roman culture saw same-sex relations between men as an accepted feature of society, while placing an unusual emphasis on monogamy, marital love and children, though the nuclear family was sustained by the use of strategies including the exposure of unwanted infants. Christianity took shape in part by reacting against the values of the age, in part by internalising them.

Christians across the ages have put an awful lot of effort into avoiding sex altogether. Celibacy wasn’t particularly prized in the ancient world, but in MacCulloch’s view the preoccupation with it became a dominant influence in Christianity from the second to the 12th century. Austerity and asceticism were cast as essential virtues, and some ardent Christians even sought to emulate the alleged sexlessness of the angels by undergoing castration. The zeal of the convert is superbly illustrated by Tatian, a student of the second-century theologian Justin Martyr who concluded that all sexual acts, even those within marriage, were a sign that mankind was ‘enslaved … to sexual fornication and to the devil’. The tendency to see sexual acts as essentially Satanic was perhaps Christianity at its most extreme, but in every age there have been lurking fears about the dangers of sexual desire. The story of the fifth-century monk who found the application of a small desert snake to his genitals a useful aid in his battle against masturbation indicates the levels of alarm a sexual impulse could create. As late as the 20th century, the Skoptsy sect in Russia was still preaching self-mutilation as the godly response to sexual cravings.

Christian authorities in every age have defended their teachings by reference to the Bible. MacCulloch patiently explains the many problems with this, in a fashion that will no doubt leave biblical fundamentalists fulminating. He delivers a particularly deft blow to the notion that biblical teaching on sexual matters is either clear or consistent, pointing out that the Bible ‘is a library, not a book’, full of contrasting views and narratives. He rejects the claim that there is biblical sanction for homophobia. The much trumpeted Levitical prohibition against same-sex relationships, he argues, was actually directed explicitly at married men, one among a range of prohibitions intended to confine sexual activity within marriage. The sins of Sodom detailed in Genesis were not expressly same-sex acts, but more precisely the rape of strangers, male or female, as can be confirmed from the Book of Judges. Yet on the basis of these contested fragments of scripture men have been put to death, some even burned alive, for same-sex relationships, while the loving sexual relationship between David and Jonathan in the Old Testament has caused generations of biblical translators to tie themselves in knots trying to conceal the obvious. Christ himself made barely any pronouncements condemning sexuality. This has not stood in the way of Church authorities’ lavish condemnation of all sorts of human desire.

The problem was one of power. The strength of human attachments repeatedly threatened to undermine obedience to religious institutions. Sex wasn’t something just to be avoided, it was something to be conquered. Religious devotion had to be portrayed as a force even more powerful than the sexual urge. To this end, many saints or other religious adepts were celebrated for their ability to withstand sexual desire. This could take entertaining forms, such as the medieval tale of the pious Irishman who made ostentatious demonstration of his virtue by sharing his bed with ‘two maidens with pointed breasts’. When St Brendan, perhaps understandably, queried such arrangements, the maidens in question carried burning coals in their miraculously unsinged robes – an allusion to Proverbs 6:28, ‘Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned?’ – then climbed into bed with him. The story goes that St Brendan wasn’t so convincingly unmoved by their company as their previous bedfellow; they suggested he take a cold bath so they could all get some sleep.

That Jesus never said a word against same-sex relationships was disappointing to those attempting to write laws against sodomy in the Middle Ages; their ingenious solution was to spread the story that all the sodomites in the world died at the Nativity, since the Christ child couldn’t possibly have been born into a world that contained so much sin. This unlovely tale, which surfaced around 1200, was promoted by the Franciscans and Dominicans, then included in the Golden Legend – the collection of saints’ stories by Jacobus de Voragine – and the late medieval English sermon collection of John Mirk. The Orthodox Church, concerned to regulate monastic communities, severely penalised any behaviour that compromised masculine identity: shaving off one’s beard, and thereby appearing feminine, received a worse punishment than soliciting another man for sex.

Heterosexual attraction could usually be fitted into Christian schemes of salvation, albeit uneasily. Most of the difficulties, it seems, were caused by women. Early Christian communities put women in positions of authority, such as Phoebe (in Cenchreae, near Corinth) and Junia, who was imprisoned by the Roman authorities alongside St Paul. Later accounts of Junia often changed her name to the male form; the role of female deacons in the early Church has been conveniently obscured. Should women keep silent? Might they be able to prophesy if they wore a veil? These agonised questions from the first years of Christian history have plenty of modern echoes. The presence of strong-minded and wealthy widows in the early Church caused much anxiety, especially over whether or not they should remarry. Instructions from third-century Syria insisted that widows stay at home and not cause trouble, noting that ‘the altar of God indeed never wanders or runs about anywhere.’ Yet the earliest known Christian epitaph for a member of the Church hierarchy is for the second-century widow Flavia Arcas, whose daughter paid for the memorial to ‘the sweetest of mothers’. Many Christian authorities enjoined widows not to marry again, ignoring the biblical story of Ruth, the young widow who found happiness in a second marriage, and whose son was among the ancestors of David and Jesus. St Jerome lambasted the young widow Furia, seemingly apoplectic at the thought she might remarry: she had, after all, already encountered ‘the miseries of marriage’, which he described as ‘unwholesome food’. ‘Perhaps you are afraid that your noble race will die out,’ he wrote, ‘and your father will not have a brat to crawl about his shoulders and smear his neck with filth.’ The family values of fourth-century Christianity were not all they might have been.

Many authorities were suspicious of marriage generally. Christ’s first recorded miracle – the transformation of water into wine for a wedding feast – caused many biblical scholars acute discomfort until they recast it as a story about the symbolism of the Eucharist. St Paul, it is true, preached both sexual equality and equality within marriage, but this seems to have been the part of his teaching that was least popular with those who came after him. Only a decade or two later, the writer of the Epistle to the Ephesians ignored Paul’s idea of a mutual obligation within marriage and instead told wives that they should submit to their husband’s authority. St Basil thought as many as three marriages might be permissible, but Jerome struggled with the prospect of even one, taking the gloomy view that ‘a man who loves his wife excessively is an adulterer.’ Clerical marriage was driven out of the Catholic Church in the 12th century, only to return as a key feature of Protestantism in the 16th. MacCulloch, a specialist in the history of the Reformation, here suggests that the institution of clerical marriage possibly had a much greater impact on society than any doctrinal formulation on salvation or predestination. This recasting of the Reformation is followed by a novel slant on the Enlightenment: Kant may have dared us all to use our reason, but took an unenlightened view of sexual desire, maintaining that all sex was debasing and likening masturbation to suicide.

More encouragingly, this book also contains a great deal of love and subversion. In the 12th century, Peter Abelard, having been separated from his wife and son, forcibly castrated and confined to a monastery, nevertheless remained committed to the view that ‘no natural pleasures of the flesh should be counted as sin.’ It should not be considered a fault, he argued, ‘to have pleasure in something in which … the feeling of pleasure is unavoidable’. In the fourth century, Jovinian, although himself a celibate, had the courage to attack Jerome’s unremitting vilification of marriage, and was ultimately declared a heretic. In the 11th century, as the campaign against married clergy – previously the norm – gathered pace, one defiant annotation in the margin of a sermon protested: ‘It is right that a priest love a decent woman as a bedmate.’ Female mystics moved away from conceptualising God in terms of power and wrath to stress themes of marriage and motherhood. The realities of sex as a commodity led to a predicament for the canons of Notre-Dame when the guild of Parisian sex workers tried to present the cathedral with a stained-glass window. (The bishop refused the gift.) Despite the best efforts of those in authority, the laws of desire still found a way to shape society.

Lower than the Angels is sweeping in its scope and expresses an amused tolerance for the oddities of religious life. There are also moments of sorrow, and perhaps controlled rage, at the prejudice, discrimination and persecution of centuries, justified in the name of a religion supposedly of love and self-sacrifice. It is a work that cannot fail to command respect. It is, however, manifestly a book written by a man. The experience of sex here revolves around the sexual act itself, with little consideration that for women, in almost every century under discussion, the point of sex wasn’t just the sexual encounter itself but the pregnancy that might ensue. Yet pregnancy, childbirth and babies barely feature in this book. A rare comment by the 17th-century bishop Jeremy Taylor, noting that children ‘make a man’s heart dance’ and encouraging the female members of his congregation to breastfeed with what he called their ‘exuberant fontinels’, is an exception, but even then authored by a man.

The fact that pregnancy could be a death sentence is noted only in passing by another 17th-century cleric, the Massachusetts minister Cotton Mather, who thought that women had a greater moral seriousness than men because of the risk of death in childbirth. Child mortality was also high through most of the period under scrutiny here, and the image of the Pietà, in which the Virgin Mary cradles the mutilated body of her dead son, was central to much religious art. Its resonance must have been painfully intense for generations of parents who mourned their own dead children. MacCulloch does celebrate the achievements of women, frequently in the face of repression, from the defiant female Jesuit Mary Ward in the 17th century to the female evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in the 20th, the first woman to preach a sermon on the radio. But from a female perspective, this book, however wide its sweep, neglects important priorities and tragedies.

If​ this is unmistakably a book written by a man, it is just as clearly a book written by a theologian. At the beginning, MacCulloch writes that where once ‘ecclesiastical explosions’ were about ‘the nature of the Trinity or the Eucharist, the means of salvation or patterns of Church authority’, we are now living in a time where ‘human genitalia overshadow most other organs of ill-will.’ In other words, where once we debated who could be saved, now we argue about who we should have sex with. This is based on the assumption that religion is chiefly some kind of intellectual disputation. The pages of this book are full of theologians (largely male) who bitterly debated questions of chastity or fornication, sometimes beyond the confines of either reason or compassion. But a word should be said for the stores of human experience across centuries where theological vitriol was irrelevant, where faith was chiefly a source of moral aspiration or communal warmth, where Christianity could live alongside other religions and not be defined by its internal disagreements. Most people did not argue about their religion so much as dwell within it: faith wasn’t a set of intellectual propositions but a way of life. Obscured by the jagged edges of MacCulloch’s narrative there is a quieter entity, a Church that is defined not by the squabbles and definitions of churchmen and theologians, but by a body of faithful believers trying to do the right thing.

The struggle to reconcile religious aspiration with human desire is still far from concluded, and the experience of the last century hasn’t always been a vast improvement on the previous ones. As the population of the modern world began to explode, MacCulloch writes, the arrival of contraception proved the ‘most fundamental change in the experience of human sexuality’. Scientific developments did not, however, mean the arrival of sense. The Catholic Church wrestled unconvincingly with the problem while the Catholic laity quietly had ideas of its own. Pope John Paul II responded to Aids by condemning the use of condoms, which might have saved the lives of millions. This was yet another pronouncement from a celibate male cleric, ‘logical indeed in his theological framework, but woodenly unrealistic in dealing with real human beings’. Child abuse has been uncovered in churches of every denomination. The first same-sex weddings and the ordination of women might look like victories over prejudice, but the consecration of the first openly gay man as a bishop (in New Hampshire in 2003) had to take place with the bishop, his partner and the presiding bishop all wearing bullet-proof vests. The tone of much modern Christianity is one of angry conservatism, from Russia’s Orthodox Church to the American right. Indignant straight men, seeing their hegemony eroded, are seeking vengeance. It is estimated that in Russia a woman dies every forty minutes from domestic violence, yet Putin’s decriminalisation of some forms of such abuse has gone hand in hand with the oppression of LGBTQ+ people in service of what the Russian Orthodox Church has pronounced the protection of ‘traditional’ values. As one Jesuit quoted by MacCulloch puts it, Christianity is in danger of being seen as ‘an uncontained movement of reaction and resentment, furious at the freedoms and liberations of the modern age’.

MacCulloch does justice to the desolation caused by bigotry. But he also tells stories of love and devotion, from David and Jonathan in the Old Testament to the pioneers of same-sex marriage in the 21st century. Most of the more strident voices in the book belong to men, but there is at the last the luminous hope that ‘in the next two millennia we may be liberated to listen to women’s accounts of the Incarnation more than we have been able to amid the din of male theological voices.’ It is hard to resist the thought that if there is a true Christian message, based in love and forgiveness, humanity has shown a remarkable inability to comprehend it. The book ends with the words of Christ in the Gospels, responding to a pedantic inquiry about marriage regulations: ‘Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?’ MacCulloch’s unspoken conclusion might well be that religion should begin again from scratch.