Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts

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0:26Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am here with Dermot McCulloch. He has a new book out, Lower Than the Angels, A History of Sex and Christianity, which I recommend very highly. In fact, all of his books are excellent. He is one of those historians where each and every book he has done is worth reading. He is Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford and now a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford. Dermid, welcome. Thank you very much. Nice to be here. In the history of the West and the world more generally, why does it seem that monotheistic religion and monogamy are so closely correlated?

1:09A good question. They are not always closely correlated. They certainly weren't in Judaism. Judaism is a form of religion in which, let's call it very precisely polygyny rather than polygamy. Polygyny was a feature of Judaism really into the 20th century. In cultures where there were Jewish communities in Islam, then polygyny survived within living memory. There are people alive, Jewish people alive, who would have known that polygynous context. In the West, it is further back with Judaism. It's the 12th century when Jews ceased to allow polygamy, polygyny, in such circumstances. And I suspect that is because the pressures of Western society around them, Western Christian society, forced them into a monogamous form.

2:05And conversely, monogamy was a feature of two great civilizations behind Christianity, which were not at all monotheistic. That is, Greek and Roman civilizations, most unusually in the ancient world, were monogamous. And I strongly suspect, and we may talk about this more, that this is the reason that Christianity decided to stick with monogamy against its cultural background in Judaism because it wanted to make an impression on Greek and Roman society. So you've got to be monogamous, otherwise that society will just not listen to you. There seems to be a feature of Greek and Roman societies emphasizing intellectually a kind of subordination in sexual relationships.

2:57Christianity at least pretends to abolish. Why that shift? Well, it didn't abolish it, really. But intellectually, it's trying to, right? Intellectually, it's trying to, yes. And its great liturgical action is an affirmation of equality between the sexes. That is baptism. When you compare that with the entry right into Judaism, which is male circumcision, you see the difference. That to be, in a sense, fully Jewish is to be a man capable of being circumcised. Now, Christianity introduced a new form of initiation to the religion, and that is baptism. Very difficult to see where it came from. It's not a prominent feature of Judaism before, or any of the religions around, But it's there very early indeed so that that leader who became subordinate to Jesus in the Christian faith, John, was known as the Baptist because this was the thing he did.

4:00And we don't really have any records of Jesus doing baptism, but John did. So here is what became the way you become a Christian. And of course, unlike circumcision, it's something which both men and women can receive. And they did. So, yes, you're right. In that sense, Christianity had structured itself towards equality. But in so many ways, the history of the last 2000 years is a stealthy march away from that idea in order to impose the normal patterns of the ancient world, which are male centered and which women have a subordinate role. That's the history of Christianity. And that may be something which is now changing.

4:44Well, it certainly is changing since the 19th century. We've seen in the ways in which women have increasingly asserted themselves in the Christian faith on an equal basis. So, so much so that so many churches now will allow women, will welcome women even, to be clerical people within it, clergy within it, have an ordained role within it. And that initial egalitarian tendency, you think that's a genuine innovation in Christianity? I do. I can't see where it came from otherwise. The crucial test is circumcision versus baptism. And it is there in remarkable fragments within the New Testament record, that set of writings which the Christian community created on top of the Hebrew scripture, which became its Old Testament.

5:33Well, the New Testament contains the writings of Paul, which are the oldest writings within the New Testament. And there are texts within what we now call 1 and 2 Corinthians. That is two letters to the Christian community in Corinth, in which in the first one, chapter 7 now, there is an essay by Paul on marriage. and it contains a most extraordinary statement about the relationship of married people, the bride and the groom, the man and the woman. And it says in a very conventional ancient way that the wife's body is not her own. It belongs to the husband. Yeah, it's what you'd expect, any ancient culture.

6:15But then it reverses it. And it says, likewise, the man's body is not his own, but he's owned by his wife. Now, that is really extraordinary. And it is new. It is our mystical statement that the relationship between man and woman is a relationship of physicality. This is about bodies. But it is also a relationship with the assumption that there is something mystical about marriage, which makes it a central part of Christianity. And actually, most generations of the church since, in the last 2 ,000 years, have put that aside, particularly in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. They've spiritualized it away so it is no longer about bodies.

7:03You can see this in the great Greek theologian John Chrysostom, who said it's about an equality of esteem or chastity or financial support, anything but a physical body. Now, the Western tradition didn't do that, very interestingly. And the medieval Western church, for instance, the canon lawyers who were creating a new legal system for the church and Christians generally, canon lawyers look to this text in Paul, 1 Corinthians 7.3, and they emphasize that marriage is about physicality. So much so that the church, for the first time, really said that marriage was characterized by procreation, must be characterized by the possibility of procreation.

7:53So you get this coming back. But actually, at most times in Christian history, they haven't gone with this Pauline idea. They are not interested in equality, and they're not interested in equality in marriage either. Because actually, you have to realize that throughout Christian history, and not just Christian history, marriage has been a contract between two men, the father of the bride and the father of the groom. It is not primarily a contract between the bride and the groom, the young people, as they mostly are, who get married. It's a family thing. Isn't spousal consent an important idea by, what, the 12th century?

8:38Yeah, exactly, by the 12th century. Yes, part of the great revolution of thinking about marriage and sex in the 12th century. But that's 1 ,200 years, more than half of Christian history. We must, I'm sure we will, talk about the importance of the 12th century in the West, which transformed so many different things about marriage and sex. Where does that shift come from in the 12th or arguably even the 11th century? It is because of changing ideas about the Eucharist, the bread and wine and what they mean in the Christian life. Increasingly, the Western Church emphasised that bread and wine in Eucharist are body and blood of Christ the Saviour, and that they are created or made into that by the act of a priest.

9:29and therefore what a priest does in celebrating the mass so-called as it's called in the west the eucharist is so powerful that you want that person who does it the priest to be as pure as possible and there is a very short leap in talking about purity to sexual purity and so in the 11th and 12th century, for the very first time in Christian history, all the clergy of the West must be celibate. They must be virgins, just like monks. Monks are not the same as clergy, not the same as priests at all. But now, from now on, there is a gradual amalgamation of these roles. You might call it a confusion of the role of the celibate monk with that of the priest.

10:18And this is a 12th century development, it has extraordinary consequences. They ripple away from this great change in the nature of Western priesthood through interviews about marriage, because the logic of making all clergy celibate is that the laity are now the only people who are practicing sex within marriage, of course. Otherwise, it's illicit. But now you've got the situation, well, because of a celibate clergy, logically, you have what you might call copulating laity. And that's something new in the history of marriage in Christianity. It means in the end that what you must say about a marriage is that it must be open to the possibility of procreation.

11:10Now, if you look back in church history, Christian history before that, there are a lot of instances of marriage which are deliberately celibate, chaste. The people involved get married, and they remain virgins as a token of their purity. And there are saints stories like this. In England, we have a very famous saint, Saint Ethelreda, who became the first abbess of Ely, which is now a wonderful, great Romanesque and Gothic cathedral in eastern England. But it started life as an Anglo-Saxon monastery founded by this princess, Etheldrida, who was not just a princess. She'd been married twice to two different Anglo-Saxon kings, and in both cases, she had refused to give them sex, which is a bit disconcerting if you're a king, because what you want is an heir to the throne.

12:06She must have been an extraordinary lady. Anyway, second marriage, they gave up. The king said, all right, you win. You clearly want to be a nun. Go off and be a nun and found a new monastery. And this is an enormously popular story in Anglo-Saxon England. But it's a story which would make no sense after the 12th century, if you look at it closely, because marriage is supposed to be about procreation. The church tells you that. And otherwise, there is no marriage. It's one of the ways you get out of a marriage in Roman Catholic theology. If no sex has taken place, that's how Henry VIII got out of one of his marriages, by saying it had never taken place, he'd never had sex with that woman, a phrase later reused.

12:52But explaining the timing of that shift, why in the 12th century in particular does that happen? It is because of the nature, the changing nature of thought about the Eucharist. And that's a gradual. That's endogenous though, right? Like what's the ultimate cause? No, that's exactly what it's about. And that is a process of changing the Eucharist over the previous two or three hundred years into making the Eucharist a uniquely powerful thing, which you do as much as possible if you're a priest. Monasteries are redesigned. Monastic churches were redesigned so that now they didn't just have one altar at which the Eucharist took place.

13:30They had multiple altars, side altars, at which masses could be celebrated for saving the souls of particular people, mostly members of the nobility who had paid for setting up the monastery. And the prayers of the monks are there to save the souls of the nobility of Europe for the very good reason that Christianity still disapproved of the shedding of blood. And anyone who was involved in that, which meant the entire nobility of medieval Europe, was deprived of a straight route to heaven. But the way you can get around that is by getting monks to pray for you and do the penances which you deserve to do as a shedder of blood.

14:14So there is a sequence of things, not just the 11th and 12th century. That's the culmination of a process which you can see beginning really in the 8th and 9th centuries. Relative to the ancient Greek world, early Christianity is quite hostile to homosexuality. Where does that come from? It comes from two different places. First, it comes from Judaism, which increasingly emphasized procreation within marriage. It's a religion which is very concerned with increasing the number of the chosen people. So it is there, and that means that there is something of a strand of homophobia within the Jewish tradition on same-sex relationships.

14:56But it's also, curiously, from within the Greek world, there is a deeply world-denying, austere strain of Jewish philosophy, which is against really any form of sex. and within that Christians took up that idea and applied it to the existing suspicion of hostility to same-sex relationships within Judaism you see that particularly within the church the Christian church in Alexandria which is one of the meeting places of Greek culture and Jewish culture so there it is it's there in Paul of course in the in the New Testament very very marginally He has one purple passage on it, which is not really so much about same-sex relationships.

15:40It's about idolatry. And the example he uses of people indulging in idolatry is one of same-sex relationships. That's the beginning of the epistle to the Romans. And then various epistles have lists of people who aren't going to get to heaven. And it's a funny old mix because it can be quite minor human peccadilloes of people who won't get to heaven. And in two of those lists, there are two sets of people called Arsenikoitai and Malakoi. It is not quite clear what these mean. Arsenikoitai is a slang term, probably. It's a very rare term in Greek. So it's probably something which was used in the marketplace in the Eastern Mediterranean.

16:25Now, the other one means simply the soft. put these together and you may have the two sorts of relationship that you get in the classical version of same-sex relationships which is an unequal structure between a younger and an older partner that is a passive partner and an active partner and they may be on one side arsenikoitai on the other side malakoi it's difficult to see why that should be applied to modern homosexuality It's a different institution. That ancient institution is not a lifestyle for life. It's a phase that people go through in their heterosexual lifestyle or their general lifestyle.

17:10So both partners would be expected to go on to be involved in a heterosexual marriage. And notice it's also unequal by structure. It's about educating the younger partner in the ways of the first Greek world. So, yes, there is austerity there, and you look at Christian history, there's not much change there at all. Whereas if you look at Islam, there is much more acceptance of same-sex relationships in a rather traditional way, in a way rather like that of non-Christian Greek and Roman society. As you know, Michel Foucault wrote four volumes on the history of sexuality. What did he get wrong about Christianity?

17:58Well, he got a lot of things wrong. He's not at all reliable in those four volumes, which, of course, I've read from cover to cover. What did he get wrong? Well, he didn't really talk much about ancient Christianity, and it's all about text. He never looked at the nature of ancient society. He also has particular agendas, some of which I agree with, some of which I don't, about power in relation to historical process. But in general, I would advise people to take Michel Foucault with several pinches of salt. He was a pioneer in looking at same-sex relationships, and he was of a decade in which there were several pioneers.

18:45There was the American scholar John Boswell, for instance, writing about such matters. There was an English scholar called Alan Bray, and they're real pioneers, the three of them, on such matters as same-sex relations. but they got a lot wrong and it would not be right to start with them and not realize that they are historical texts now in each case actually you can see that their perspective is distorted by their Roman Catholicism very specifically Foucault born into a Catholic family never really left that world, Bray and Boswell converts to Roman Catholicism from Episcopalianism or Anglicanism, if you like.

19:31And the concern with Bray and Boswell was always to set up a story which wasn't really true, which was that Christianity had, over the centuries, actually been fairly hospitable to same-sex relations. And you read Boswell now, 40 years later, and you see there's a lot of special pleading in that. Same with Bray. So none of these historians are setting standards forever. Foucault made absurd assertions about the invention of homosexuality in the 19th century, simply because the word was coined in 1869. Well, that's so stupid and so French. You see, actually things which look precisely like modern, for life, equal relationships between same-sex people way back.

20:23You can see it in the ancient world is not the same as the normal, what you might call normal in inverted commas, same-sex relationships, these unequal things. So the Foucault pattern, seeing this as emerging as a sort of medicalisation in the 19th century, just doesn't stand up, and it's extremely misleading, and we should leave it behind. There's a recent rise of interest in theories that attribute the rise of the West to the church banning cousin marriage, that this broke down clan structures. What's your view of that hypothesis? It's, as usual with such hypotheses, far too simple. I don't see that so at all.

21:03Cousin marriages went on as being a feature of Christianity, particularly if you've got a pope to dispense such marriages in the West. What could one say about such a theory? Clans, families were not broken up by Christianity, by far the reverse. Those structures did not change very significantly. So, no, I don't think that really works at all. Why does Islam so emphasize the sexual desires of women relative to Christianity? A good question, because the Quran allows that to happen. I mean, the Quran has been interpreted by men, when very often what it's talking about is just people. So that may be one explanation.

21:49Islam did remain very much a militarized culture to start with so it's almost by definition run by men but there within it a powerful set of images for women in the Quran itself on top of the Quran there is so much added and it's usually added by male societies so yes and no really there is a constant strain of things one can say about the position of women in Christianity Women are constantly carving out parts of Christian faith for themselves against the fact that male men are increasingly running the church. That's a fact of life. Think of the mystics of the medieval West and the way in which so many of them are females.

22:34Because to be a mystic, you don't need the male language of Latin, the language of the professions, the language of the clergy. You can explore mysticism without the new invention of men in the 12th century, theology, which is something associated with the first the cathedral schools and then the universities, both of which are male institutions. But mysticism, no. You can just get on with it. It involves many of the same themes in every religion that turns to mysticism, themes like fire and water, air. The vocabulary of the mystic really is quite universal. It is not restricted to Christianity or Islam or anything.

23:21It's the way that one aspect of humanity works out when it tries to meet the divine. Why is Islam sometimes, at least at the intellectual level, so obsessed with Mary? You can debate whether she was a saint or a prophet. In a way, the role in Christianity is much more circumscribed. Oh, I wouldn't say that. She appears more in the Holy Quran than she does in the Bible, of course. But that is clearly the influences on the creation of this book, which are probably forms of Christianity, miaphysite Christianity in what is now the Arabian Peninsula. Yes, she's there, and she is named, unlike, I think, any other woman in the Quran.

24:03The relationship is therefore complex and interesting, but so is that of Jesus to the other prophets within Islam. He is given a place of great honor, and naturally also his mother gets it. Mary's position in Christianity is, as you know, complex, and it is a construction of the later church on extremely scanty evidence in the New Testament. The picture of Mary in the Gospels is not entirely positive, and the picture of Jesus' relationship with his family, with his brothers and sisters, is not entirely positive. So on one occasion in the Gospels, they turned up to say, hi, we want to see him. And Jesus looks around and says, well, actually, these people are my brothers and sisters.

24:55Implication, you're a second class, and one's got to deal with that. The church ignored it as it created an increasingly central place for Mary as Queen of Heaven, the linchpin of salvation. It ignored the fact that foundations in the New Testament are scanty. It took the Protestant reformers of the 16th century actually to look at the Bible and look back at that and gleefully, in some cases, saw that Jesus could be quite offhand with his mother and his family. Now, one needs to ask, well, why does the New Testament treat family members like this? I think one way you can account for it is by saying that the New Testament is written by the winners in a very particular conflict, and that is the conflict as to who is going to lead the church after Jesus.

25:53Is it going to be the family? Is this going to be a dynastic religion? So James, the brother of the Lord, is one of the first people who are powerful within the church? Or is it people who, like Paul of Tarsus, never actually met in his earthly life, Jesus. And the balance in that conflict is eventually won by the general number of disciples, not the family. And so you would expect the text created by that side of the battle to be somewhat dismissive of Jesus's family. And the same thing is true of Islam, of course, between who is going to be in charge of the faith in future. So Sunni Islam against Shia Islam have two different answers to that question.

26:41So it's not dissimilar to what happened within Islam. If I think of the 12th and 13th centuries, in England, in France, parts of Spain, there are so many just incredible cathedrals or religious structures built, many of them still with us. What accounts for so many marvelous creations in what, in a sense, is a relatively narrow window of time. You're right. And scholars from the James Brothers onwards have talked about this, the age of the cathedrals. It's really quite difficult to account for it in any way. And you've got to realize also that such wonderful, magnificent buildings, one of which I was speaking in last night, Gloucester Cathedral in Western England, were there alongside monasteries.

27:27In fact, Gloucester Cathedral was a great abbey before it was a cathedral. What are these saying? Well, they're saying one thing, that the church in the West now had a very strong, tight organization by bishops and dioceses, in which the mother church of the diocese was a building of very great charisma and importance, and had a set of clergy attached to it, canons, who were as much a corporation as the corporation of monks within an abbey. And they benefited from this industry of prayer about which we were speaking earlier, that the elites of Western Europe needed prayer. They needed people to pray for their souls, And the laity generally also wanted prayer because they, the Western church, was developing a particular view of the afterlife in which it is no longer that simple binary.

28:26It is not just heaven and hell. There is a state in the middle, purgatory, which is a wonderfully useful way to characterize the afterlife because purgatory is where you can go on being purged of your sins. and you do that with the help of your friends and the clergy in their prayers, particularly in the mass. So purgatory is a big thing here. Cathedrals are full of altars, just like abbey churches. Look around them and you see the innumerable side chapels there. These are factories of prayer and that is worth spending money on. And hurrah they did because we are left with this amazing legacy of wonderful buildings.

29:10Is there some institutional innovation from decentralized bishops competing against each other through monastic orders or like something's paying for all this, right? Yeah, well, the secular nobility are paying for it because they're endowing these places with land for the sake of prayer. It is not exactly a decentralized system. it is a system you must remember which actually literally covers the map of Europe there are virtually no places not contained within the system and within the diocese that is the institution run by the bishop are what are called parishes which again virtually cover the map of Europe not that they had maps but they knew the boundaries of every parish and a parish is a very interesting institution.

30:00It's new in the ninth century onwards in the West. And the idea is that you have one priest in each of these parishes and that the area of land that he patrols is more or less patrolable in a day, that he can meet and visit all his parishioners. I speak with feeling about this because I am the son of one of those parish priests in the Church of England. And his first parish in which I grew up was about a couple of square miles each way. He could have walked it and often did. So this is an extraordinarily effective way of giving everyone in Europe pastoral care. In fact, not just the nobility. The nobility, I get the deluxe end of it with the great monastery, the endowments of cathedrals, but everyone has a parish church.

30:54It's an extraordinarily wonderfully integrated system. And I think us with a Western tradition often forget how absolutely unusual that is within world religions, to have a single form of a religion absolutely dominating everything within a particular continent. Nothing else like it except perhaps Saudi Arabia in the 20th and 21st centuries. Don't you find it striking how few of those structures are mediocre? There may be some survival bias, but it's very hard to just find an ugly-looking church from that time. Well, it's maybe the way we look at them. I'm a huge enthusiast for them all and spend my spare time looking around them all, but could one say that they are actually superlatively wonderful?