Lower than the Angels by Diarmaid MacCulloch
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Lower than the Angels:
A History of Sex and Christianity
By Diarmaid MacCulloch
Viking 2025
Diarmaid MacCulloch, the prince of Christian historians, has released a riveting new book on Christianity’s complex and ever-changing relationship with that most worldly of pursuits, sex. Along the way he also discusses how Christian approaches to gender relations and marriage have evolved over the millennia. He wears his subversive scholarly intent on his sleeve: ‘Accepting the glorious and inglorious difference of the past from the present may make it easier to see that our own beliefs about sexuality are our own creations, rather than something handed down on tablets of stone for all time.’
This book is littered with surprises that will intrigue non-believers and likely embarrass the devout. We learn that for most of the first millennium of Christianity, the concept of a church wedding was non-existent. Marriage was seen as a second-best compared to the holy ideal of lifelong celibacy, and the best marriages, from this perspective, were sexless. MacCulloch, with an eye to contemporary controversies, gleefully introduces us to the phenomenon of cross-dressing female ascetics. These were women desperate to shake off the sinfulness inherent in their femininity by passing themselves off as men, violating a proscription on transvestism in Deuteronomy. We are told that ‘despite considerable worries from the Church hierarchy, the disparity was not allowed to stand in the way of an edifying theme’.
Repudiating Christian exceptionalism, MacCulloch ruthlessly uncovers how Christianity borrowed misogynistic and sex-negative assumptions from Greco-Roman philosophy and the Jewish religion in formulating its approach towards women and sex. The Hellenised Jew Philo of Alexandria, a scholar celebrated by Christians, epitomised this fusion of Greek and Jewish misogyny. Philo’s conclusions from the Creation story were that ‘only a sexually undifferentiated Adam, not yet bereft of the rib with which God created Eve, can be a true likeness of the divine’. Meanwhile, Clement of Alexandria, taking Philo and the Pythagorean school as his model, pronounced anathema on sexual activity that was not strictly procreational, helping to lay the basis for Christian homophobia. Despite promising beginnings in early Christian history, where wealthy women appear to have played leading roles in getting the early church communities off the ground, women were quickly marginalised.
MacCulloch’s fair-minded scholarship results in a thoughtful and nuanced portrait of the debates that went on in early Christianity around sex and marriage. For example, he contrasts Tertullian’s insistence on Adam and Eve’s shared responsibility for the Fall with Justin Martyr’s focus on Eve’s especial guilt. Moreover, Paul’s notion of a ‘marital debt’ between husband and wife, in which both surrender their bodily autonomy to each other in an exclusive sexual partnership, is a theme that recurs throughout the book, its egalitarian potentialities always pressing against the reality of female subjection throughout Christian history.
Because MacCulloch puts so much of what is taken for granted about Christian doctrine in its proper context, the reader is able to appreciate how genuinely revolutionary certain landmark decisions in Christianity were, and how novel so many seemingly ancient Christian traditions are. It was only the Gregorian Revolution of the eleventh century that imposed clerical celibacy as an absolute, combining this with a more positive attitude towards lay marriage – an indispensable means of reproducing the next generation of believers. The dogma of clerical celibacy was then overturned by Martin Luther’s Reformation and a new Protestant tradition of clerical marriage, complete with a more whole-hearted embrace of marriage as a blessed state in its own right, not simply a grudging concession to a fallen, lust-filled humanity. In discussing Christianity and colonialism, MacCulloch narrates the clash between pre-colonial attitudes to sex and relationships, which invariably pitted indigenous traditions of polygamy and even same-sex relations against Christian puritanism. Only with difficulty did the latter win out.
MacCulloch’s rapier-wit is never far away. In a passage mocking Saint Jerome for his dubious use of cherry-picked Biblical episodes to condemn remarriage among widows, he writes ‘Naturally the Book of Ruth, that charming Old Testament story of a young widow who finds happiness in a second marriage, not to mention a son who was among the ancestors of David and Jesus, did not feature prominently in Jerome’s recommended reading on the subject.’ Elsewhere, when discussing the fanatical ‘Pataria’ movement that pushed for a celibate clergy, he describes the rationale given by one Patarine spokesman in amusingly contemporary terms as ‘a lay consumer’s demand for quality assurance in prayer’.
MacCulloch’s overview of post-Reformation Christianity includes a colourful narration of the role played by women, especially in British Evangelical Protestantism. The closing chapter looks at contemporary fights within the Church about the ordination of women and acceptance of same-sex relationships, making clear to the reader that the debate over sex and gender within the Christian tradition is far from settled. Readers will come away from this book with many an assumption shattered.
Aaron Kyerah-Mireku s a writer and reviewer living in London.