Sacred passions

A Martian whose knowledge of life on Earth came only from sampling our media might well have concluded, in recent decades, that the Christian Churches are primarily concerned with sex. The last three Lambeth Conferences, huge gatherings of bishops from the worldwide Anglican Communion, would hardly have gained any news coverage were it not for their disputes about homosexuality. Tentative efforts by Pope Francis to liberalize the Catholic Church’s stance on that subject – including, last year, authorizing the blessing of same-sex couples – have generated more publicity than almost anything else he has done. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, gained less favourable headlines for supporting, with only the most reluctant qualification, the ban on contraceptives, even as a protection against sexually transmitted disease in sub-Saharan Africa. And meanwhile both those Churches, and others (Protestant and Orthodox), have suffered a dismal succession of sexual abuse scandals, whether recent or historic.

Any practising Christian will tell you that Christianity is not “about sex”, except in so far as it is about the entire human condition. But a theologian would admit that there are special reasons why this religion, while not required to fixate on sex, cannot avoid having to think carefully about it. Two key moments in its sacred history are the Fall and the Incarnation, things essentially linked by the doctrines of sin and atonement. The Fall implies that human nature is corrupted, while the Incarnation involves God Himself taking on (albeit uncorruptedly) our nature in all its physicality. Add to that the historical fact that Christianity, especially the Western kind, appropriated Greco-Roman ideas of “nature” as a normative standard, framing much of its moral theory in terms of natural law, and you have the makings of many centuries’ worth of argument about physical desire and the ways in which we should or should not act on it.

To write a general history of this topic would seem an impossibly large task; but that has not deterred Diarmaid MacCulloch, emeritus professor of the history of the Church at Oxford, who already has a 1,160-page History of Christianity under his belt. His new book necessarily covers much of the same ground, beginning in ancient Israel and ending in the present, but from its own special angle. And that angle is not a narrow one: “sex” in the subtitle refers not just to what goes on between the sheets, but also to sex as a category, and therefore to how Christians have managed relations between the sexes more generally, especially within the framework of religious life.

Non-specialists (a term that surely includes all readers of some parts of the book, as well as some readers of all parts) will have a constant sense of eyes being opened and thoughts provoked. Many will not have known, for example, that until at least the eighth century BC the God of Israel had a wife, Asherah, who was herself an object of devotion (a memorable detail, though without obvious implications for the history of Christianity). And while readers of the Old Testament cannot fail to notice King Solomon’s 700 wives and 300 concubines, few may be aware that some Jews continued to practise polygamy until well into the Middle Ages.

The first of several revolutions chronicled in this book was the one effected by Jesus when, asked by the Pharisees about the lawfulness of divorce, he cited Genesis 2: 24: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh”. As MacCulloch notes, Jesus’s version of “one-flesh theology” ruled out not only divorce, but also polygamy, thereby setting up a model of a specifically Christian kind of marriage.

Things were not to remain so simple, however. St Paul swiftly added two loopholes permitting divorce, or at least formal separation: for wives who “departed” without remarrying, and for any Christian abandoned by a heathen spouse. But his greater contribution to future debates lay in his puzzling combination of different attitudes towards marital sex. On the one hand he made clear his distaste for it, praising his own celibacy and portraying marriage as a pis-allerthat would at least save the sexually incontinent from immorality. Yet on the other hand he set out in clear terms what has been called the doctrine of “marital debt”, where each spouse has an actual claim on the body of the other – not only giving sex a positive status in marriage, but presenting the justified demand for sex as entirely symmetrical between wife and husband.

The (post-Pauline) First Epistle to Timothy added another factor to this problematic equation when it declared that a Christian woman would be “saved in childbearing”, thereby assigning a positive theological value to procreation. The most long-lasting solution to the whole puzzle was the one associated with an early Father of the Church, Clement of Alexandria, who said that sex within marriage was good if aimed at procreation, but sinful if undertaken for any other reason, pleasure included. As MacCulloch points out, this “Alexandrian rule” had no basis in the Old Testament, nor in mainstream Greco-Roman culture, being derived, via a current in Hellenistic Judaism, from the philosophical sect of the Pythagoreans; yet it remains a framing principle of Roman Catholic moral theology to this day.

The same may be broadly true of the belief that celibacy represents a higher, more virtuous form of life, though MacCulloch discusses various theological views that also fed into this, including the doctrine that angels were sexless and the idea that a true Christian’s soul would become the Bride of Christ, which put human spousal relations firmly in their place. He charts the emergence of ascetic communities, paying special attention to the Eastern Churches; but while early monks were shunning sexual relations, the situation with ordinary priests was much less clear. Evidence suggests that the majority of priests in the third century were married and it is hard to tell how many actually heeded the advice of Pope Leo I in the mid-fifth century that they should keep their wives, but cease having sex with them. As late as the eleventh century most of the British clergy were themselves the sons of clergy.

One curious feature of the first millennium of Christianity is the remarkable slowness of the Church to develop a controlling interest in marriage itself. MacCulloch locates the turning point in 676, when the Syrian Patriarch decreed that Christian marriage must involve a Church ritual; the idea seems to have spread gradually in the Eastern Orthodox world, and was made law by the Emperor Leo VI c.900, but as late as the 860s the pope was complaining about this Eastern innovation. And although the Latin word sacramentum had been used to describe marriage by St Augustine, his reference was to the Roman sacred oath of allegiance, not to the later theological concept. The Christian doctrine of sacraments was slow to emerge and for a long time marriage was not on the list.

Between roughly 1000 and 1200 both practice and theory underwent significant changes in the West, changes described here as the first of two great revolutions. The transformation owed much to the reformist programme of Pope Gregory VII (r.1073–85), which, uniquely among the Christian Churches, required complete celibacy of priests and bishops – an attempt, as MacCulloch puts it, “to identify (or confuse) two separate Christian vocations, one to celibate life and the other to priesthood”. And since, as Dyan Elliott has pithily observed, a celibate clergy requires a copulating laity, this seems to have led to a new emphasis on sex in marriage; consummation became a theological requirement, with the failure to achieve it recognized as grounds for annulment. (MacCulloch draws here on the path-breaking work of David d’Avray, which has shown how this valorizing of sex drew on metaphors of erotic union in Christian spiritual writings – d’Avray compares this to elements of the Hindu tradition.) Also a factor, at the end of this revolutionary period, was the threat of the Cathar heresy, with its markedly negative view of sex; whereas in previous centuries virtuous Christians had been celebrated for living in non-sexual marriages, now there were cases of women being accused of heresy merely for trying to lead chaste lives.

The second great revolution was the Protestant Reformation, which overthrew key elements of the Gregorian reforms. Priests and nuns, or rather ex-nuns, were not just permitted but encouraged to marry. (In practice, many priests married the women who had been living with them as concubines anyway.) The division between priests and laity was eroded both in theology and in daily life: Lutheran ministers were encouraged to grow beards, abandoning the clean-shavenness that Gregory had required. And the bearded paterfamilias was meant to have a domestic life modelled on the late medieval vision of the Holy Family, with a loving, companionate marriage at its heart.

While this survived and flourished in the Puritan tradition, there was little here that could be described as “puritanical” in the popular sense of the term. It is pleasing to read that the First Book of Discipline of the Scottish Kirk (1560) described the attraction between young people as a “work of God” and advised that if the parents withheld consent on financial grounds or for reasons of social status, the minister should override their objections and marry the happy couple anyway. And if, on the other hand, companionate marriage failed, the Protestant ejection of marriage from the list of sacraments meant that divorce was now a real possibility. The major exception was the Tudor Church of England, which, as MacCulloch – very much on home territory here – explains, “through sheer historical accident … kept the strictest canon law on marriage in all Western Christendom”. (A shake-up of canon law, permitting divorce, was prepared under Edward VI, but then shelved for contingent political reasons and never reinstated by Elizabeth.)

Perhaps the greatest change described in this book, however, is the one that proceeded gradually in western societies from the early eighteenth century onwards. It is not presented as a third “revolution”, though the word is slipped in once; but its consequences were huge. In MacCulloch’s words, there was “a gradual but decisive split between sexual morality and what Churches had traditionally taught about sex. For the first time in a thousand years, Christian authorities lost control of the agenda”. Ecclesiastical control of ordinary life broke down, whether exercised directly or through the secular power, and sexual behaviour was increasingly seen as belonging to the private realm. The story he goes on to tell is far from unilinear: it includes laws criminalizing homosexual behaviour in Germany (1871) and the United Kingdom (1885). But the overall direction of change is clear enough; indeed, we stand now looking back, at the end of the process. So how and why did it begin?

MacCulloch starts by linking this change to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with its stress on personal judgement and autonomy; this in turn he credits with setting up “the enterprise of treating the Bible with all the skills of critical textual scholarship”. But to explain a new valuation of personal choice in terms of a new valuation of personal judgement looks more like a restatement than an explanation. So the book’s focus shifts instead to social and cultural developments grounded on economic change: beginning with England and the Netherlands in the 1690s, advanced economies generated leisure, spare income and discretionary consumption, which “awakened a wider psychological awareness of making choices, ultimately about one’s own personal identity”. And having set out this master theme, MacCulloch then applies it not only to the shift in moral conduct away from religious control, but also to new currents within religion itself: “Evangelicalism is recognizably part of the same newly forming world of choice that produced such phenomena as the emergence of homosexual identity and the drive for personal privacy in society”.

One can only admire the ambition of this large-scale theory, even if one also has to doubt several of the component claims on which it rests. The textual-critical approach to the Bible was more than a century old by 1700. The notion of a change in sexual morality in England and the Netherlands at the turn of the eighteenth century fits an established historical theory about the “emergence of homosexual identity”, but may not withstand a fuller analysis of the evidence. MacCulloch accepts that there were much longer continuities in same-sex behaviour, but clings to the idea that there was a significant and fairly rapid change in identity formation around this time. His claim that the term “effeminate” suddenly and completely altered its meaning after 1700, for example, oversimplifies a much more complex story. And in any case, while some homosexuals may well have felt more able or willing to express their sexual identity in limited circumstances, the identity itself was surely not something they had just adopted as a lifestyle choice.

As for the new forms of Christianity, such as the Pietists, the Moravians and the Methodists, resolving to set one’s religious life on the basis of a direct responsibility to God and/or a direct experience of Holy Writ may of course be described in terms of personal choosing, but surely not in terms of anything akin to consumer choice. Those persecuted and deracinated Moravians who gathered together under the deeply pious Count von Zinzendorf, or the early Methodists who, listening to Wesley’s open-air sermons, “shrieked, wept and rolled on the ground in their sense of transformation” (MacCulloch’s description), sound like the radical opposites of modern secular choice-makers. In fact they sound much more like some of the people who had been caught up in the Reformation two centuries before them.

Whatever its cause, the long-term shift towards the so-called privatization of sexual morality does give an underlying pattern to the final part of the book – despite the various counter-moves that took place, such as the strengthening of the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion in 1869. But are there any larger patterns to be observed over the two millennia covered here? Possibly there is just one great arc, in which many things to do with sex begin by being matters between the sinner and the priest in confession, are then moved into the courtroom (whether ecclesiastical or secular), and only finally return to the private realm.

Mostly, however, one is struck by how contingent so many of these developments were. Again and again clerics adopted a position not on purely theological grounds, but rather to differentiate themselves from some other group seen as enemies or rivals. Gregory’s priests had to be clean-shaven to be different from Orthodox ones; human physicality was revalorized to counter the Cathars; Lutherans argued fiercely against polygamy (after some initial wavering by their founder) to distinguish themselves from radical Anabaptists; and as recently as 1968 a minority report by Catholic theologians argued (successfully) that Paul VI should maintain the ban on contraception because the Anglican Church had lifted it.

Given the variety as well as the contingency of so many past changes of position, it is all too tempting for present-day activists to rummage through this multifarious history in search of an apparent authority for whatever it is that they are advocating. Women priests? Well, there are references in late antiquity to presbyterae and episcopae, with the words in feminine forms. Same-sex marriage? The late John Boswell wrote a whole book about a kind of partnership ceremony conducted in Orthodox monasteries. And so on. MacCulloch has been an activist himself; one of his notes conscientiously mentions his early involvement in the Gay Christian Movement. But he is too good a historian to let his judgement be swayed by any of the usual wishful thinking. Those presbyterae and episcopae were, he explains, the priests’ and bishops’ wives; the Boswell thesis was, he notes, expertly dismantled by Claudia Rapp several years ago.

There is much in these many centuries of Christian history that is shameful and disturbing. But MacCulloch guides us through it with equanimity as well as expertise, while constantly trying to place the people he discusses in their own particular historical context. All too often one reads historians who reach for a term such as “misogyny” as if it were a timeless category that can do all the explanatory work by itself. The term is certainly not absent here, but what gives this account real depth is the author’s constant desire to understand how such views were formed, with particular aspects of religious belief and religious behaviour serving as causes as well as consequences.

One of the minor heroes of this book is the fifth-century Bishop Julian of Eclanum, who, in his disputes with St Augustine, argued that a truly human Jesus Christ must have experienced sexual desire. Because of his defence of the Pelagian heresy, Julian has not had a good press. But he is singled out for well-deserved praise here, being described as having “a wider knowledge of the Christian world, backed by a compassionately humorous understanding of humanity”. Diarmaid MacCulloch deserves no less praise himself.

Noel Malcolm’s books include Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-male sexual relations, 1400–1750, 2024

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