Writing in 2013 for this newspaper, Diarmaid MacCulloch said that “Christian history, like all history, is a delicious smorgasbord of unintended consequences, paradoxes, misunderstandings, sudden veerings in new directions. If you like to call that the work of the Holy Spirit, then fine, but do note that the Holy Spirit delights in confounding human expectations and going its own way.”
You might say that this magisterial work is a chronicle of the frequently mischievous journey of that Holy Spirit through the labyrinthine ways of sex and gender in more than 2,000 years of Christianity and further back to the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome where, it might be argued, his writ may not have extended, at least formally, even as the mischief did.
The scale of MacCulloch’s ambition in writing such a book comes as no surprise to those aware of his 2009 opus A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, later made into a much-praised BBC series.
Some might even suggest it is probable that the scale of MacCulloch’s aspiration in this more recent work may only be equalled bv that of another Englishman, the 17th-century Puritan poet John Milton who, with usual modesty, set it as his task to explain the ways of God to men.
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In this history, MacCulloch finds room for all of humanity, including people of ever-splintering sexual identity. And he is no puritan, of either upper- or lower-case variety.
Emeritus professor of the history of the church at Oxford University, and knighted in 2012, MacCulloch is a gay man who, in 1987, was ordained deacon in the Church of England but declined ordination to the priesthood because of the church’s stance on homosexuality, not least among its clergy.
In Dublin, during the 2014 Church of Ireland General Synod, he spoke of his misery on ordination as a deacon and then being prevented from progressing further due to his sexuality. For some time, he fell away from the church, he said.
That was at a fringe meeting organised by Changing Attitude Ireland, which promotes equality for LGBTIQ+ within the church. The attendance included half the Church of Ireland House of Bishops. Since then the Church of Ireland remains at stalemate on the issue of gay clergy, as does the wider Anglican Communion.
Clearly, Lower than Angels is coloured by MacCulloch’s personal experience and is unashamedly liberal in its approach to gender and sexuality, not least within the worldwide Anglican Communion which still teeters on the edge of schism over the issue of gay clergy.
That said, it would be an injustice to say this work is other than scholarly. It shows clear evidence of the four years’ labour the author put into it.
In its opening chapter, MacCulloch warns that it will “displease those confident that they can find a consistent view on sex in a seamless and infallible text known as the Bible, or those who with equal confidence believe that a single true Church has preached a timeless message on the subject. Others will bring experiences leading them to hate Christianity as a vehicle of oppression and trauma in sexual matters, and they may be dissatisfied with a story that tries to avoid caricaturing the past.”
Such is the fate of those who choose the via media, whatever the context. They displease those confident in their convictions, regardless of those convictions.
MacCulloch notes how in the past 50 years or thereabouts “sex and gender have rapidly become more instrumental in internal church conflict than at any time over the last two millennia of Christian life”. This has been a worldwide phenomenon, “not just in societies with a Christian complexion”.
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It has also moved with “extraordinary speed”, even overcoming his own sense of radicalism in being open about his homosexuality and “at the forefront of sexual liberation”.
It means he now finds himself “completely outflanked by proclamation of trans identities hardly ever discussed in my youth, and equally by vituperative criticism of trans identities on feminist grounds; those opposing but passionately held convictions, both sharing roots in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s”.
That said, if there is a weakness in this book, it is the paucity of material on the parallel evolution of those trans identities within the history of Christianity.
Lower than Angels is coloured by MacCulloch’s personal experience and is unashamedly liberal in its approach to gender and sexuality, not least within the worldwide Anglican Communion which still teeters on the edge of schism over the issue of gay clergy
This personal outflanking has taught him a lesson about “being more observant or empathetic about the differences of others”. It also led him to the generous conclusion that “we should not be surprised that those slow-moving conglomerations of myriad opinions known as Churches have found it agonisingly hard to react coherently to questions they had not previously asked, let alone answered”.
All that said, he notes that there is “no such thing as a single Christian theology of sex. There is a plethora of Christian theologies of sex” some, at times, “totally contrary” to one another and many without base in the teachings of Jesus who, he recalls, “never mentions” homosexuality.
Of particular interest is his discussion on the late arrival of marriage as a Christian institution, saying that “one of the greatest forgotten realities of Christian history is that for centuries, from the first years of the Church, there was no such thing as a church wedding, and when church weddings did start appearing patchily, in the fourth century, the Church did not offer them to all the faithful”.
Using a phrase he clearly likes, as it is repeated a number of times in the book, he points out, wittily, how “the one common feature of marriage in the Mediterranean world, whether Hellenistic, Roman or Jewish, was that it was primarily a contract between two men”.
These were “the fathers of a prospective bridegroom and bride”, while “its setting was secular, without much or any reference to sacred ceremony”.
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From the second to the 12th century, “Christians wrote far more about celibacy than marriage”, he says. They treated marriage as “a second best to celibacy” which found expression in a flourishing monasticism.
This, he suggests, may even have had its origins much further afield, in “non-Christian Asia” such as “celibate communities in the Buddhist tradition as well as the solitary holy men of Hinduism, traditions long predating Christianity”.
In his opinion “many errors in understanding sex and Christianity have clustered around the complexities in the nature of marriage, not least the frequent assertions that there is something called `traditional marriage’ that needs defending against all competitors”.
Such an understanding, he points out, “has very little precedent in the history of the Church. Love and marriage have not always gone together like a horse and carriage.”
Patsy McGarry was Religious Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times for more than 25 years. His latest book is Well, Holy God: My Life as an Irish, Catholic, Agnostic Correspondent
