One of the many striking features of this hugely enjoyable book is a coloured illustration, depicting the visit of Pope Francis to the martyrs’ shrine in Namugongo, Kampala. The caption, having noted the Pope’s presence, adds: “Behind him (in Canterbury cap) stands the Anglican archbishop Stanley Ntagali, strong supporter of Ugandan legislation reintroducing the death penalty for homosexual offences. The Pope’s public remarks avoided the subject.”
In that dense sentence, there is much that is characteristic of Diarmaid MacCulloch, a learned, witty, Gibbonian historian, whose magisterial A History of Christianity is a classic, and whose mainstream achievements include histories of the Reformation. The word “reintroducing” is chilling – just last year Uganda passed a bill which re-established capital punishment for same-sex sexual conduct. The mildly camp Anglicanism of the author is revealed in his drawing attention to the Archbishop’s headgear, a “Canterbury cap”, one of those soft birettas which used to be favoured in England by High Church clergy who wished to distinguish themselves from the stiff birettas worn by Roman Catholic priests. And even the name of the archbishop is extraordinary. Ntagali is presumably Bantu, but his mother and father chose, by invoking the name of the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley, to suggest a positive celebration of the imperial past. Is it the bishop’s African culture which makes him so harsh about homosexuality, or is he the heir of the mindset of His Imperial Majesty King George V, who said: “I thought men like that shot themselves”?
While it would be safe to say that every Anglican bishop in England would writhe with embarrassment at any approving comments made about the British colonists in Uganda, they would be, and are – as the closing chapters of this book mercilessly and brilliantly show – divided over the rights and wrongs of sex. The conservative evangelical wing of the Church of England would not perhaps go so far as Archbishop Ntagali in calling for the death penalty, but some of them do support the living death of “conversion therapy” for homosexuals, in defiance of almost all enlightened medical and psychotherapeutic wisdom.
The polemic in this book is well controlled, which makes it all the more persuasive. One of the most interesting strands in the sections devoted to the 20th century concerns contraception. That very intelligent and in some ways “liberal Catholic” Anglican bishop Charles Gore gave his mind to the question of contraception relatively early. By the mid-1930s, having opposed any method of “family planning”, the Anglican bishops had come round to approving of its use, eventually deciding that it was a “right and important factor in Christian family life”. If this were the case, however, Gore (who, to me attractively, once remarked that “the majority is always wrong”) pointed out that to separate sexual pleasure from procreation, “justifies the philosophy of homosexuality”. Gore intended this to be a condemnation of contraception, not an endorsement of homosexuality, but as MacCulloch points out, there was something unintentionally prophetic in the judgement.
Before the 20th century, shamefully few Christians stood out from their secular contemporaries as conspicuous believers in a Gospel which distrusted worldly wealth. Christians accumulated riches with no obvious qualms of conscience, despite the frequent biblical injunctions which speak against the love of money. Few outside the ranks of the Quakers were prepared to practise the pacifist creed of the Gospels. It was in these areas that their creed, if they took it seriously, would have distinguished them from their non-believing, or merely casual, contemporaries.
About sex, the New Testament is reticent. Jesus was a friend to prostitutes, as to other social outcasts, and he never mentioned what we would call homosexuality. It is doubtful whether St Paul’s very occasional and diasapproving references to homosexual orgies in ancient Rome are meant as advice to modern homosexuals living quiet lives in our day. But, to judge from some modern Christians, and from the press, you might guess that Christianity is sex-obsessed.
In the matter of sexual morality, in a world where divorce was all but unknown and where reckless unchastity led to the immediate danger of deadly transmitted disease, convention and the teachings of the Christians were, for most of the Church’s history, almost indistinguishable. This is especially true after the Reformation when the celibacy of monks and nuns seemed, by comparison with the family life of the good Protestants, positively unwholesome. There is a lovely quotation from Jeremy Taylor, the 17th-century bishop who delighted in parenthood, who says: “No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many delicious accents make a man’s heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society.”
As you would expect from MacCulloch, the fullest section of the book – which stretches from Moses to Tammy Faye Bakker – concerns the Reformation. The marriage in 1522 of the Swiss theologian Huldrych Zwingli came, MacCulloch writes, “as relief for his conscience, for he freely admitted that he had never succeeded in remaining celibate in his previous clerical appointments. His wife, Anna Reinhart, remained more in the background than Katharina von Bora, the spirited ex-nun who married Martin Luther three years later, but Anna still deserves honour for her pioneering role in overturning the special status and privilege of clergy upheld by the medieval Western rule on clerical celibacy.” Presumably, the discontinuance of sacramental confession in the Protestant world led to a growth of “respectability” among those Christians who were at least trying to be chaste, whereas for Catholics, the confessional offered the chance to lead a double life in which the failures of the penitent to live up to the highest standards of Christian perfection could be wiped out ritually.
The book takes us right back to pre-Christian times, not only to the Hebrew past, but also the Greek. Plato is there, of course. However, MacCulloch doesn’t mention what to my mind is the key text, The Symposium. In it, Alcibiades, the army officer in love with Socrates, remarks with a mixture of bafflement, impatience and some admiration that the philosopher, while clearly being in love with the soldier, refrains from actual physical expression. Although Socrates refuses to contribute a speech in favour of Eros, the god of love, he says that love is a “daimon” that can lead us astray if we become its slave, but can, when it stops short of consummation, lead us from the contemplation of the beloved’s beautiful physique, to the love of the “absolutely beautiful”. It is this which makes the dialogue influential, though many of us will enjoy Aristophanes’s farcical “myth” of human beings having started out as quadrupeds more. It does, after all, suggest that those who have been chopped in half are perpetually running round in search of their “other half” – some gay, some straight, some gender-neutral.
I mention it here, not to criticise MacCulloch for omitting it, but because it seems to say so much about the human quest for sexual satisfaction, and – a more difficult goal – the aim of trying to live a sane life while being in possession of a frenzied sexual being. MacCulloch (probably fairly) blames Augustine of Hippo for equating the Fall with sexual temptation in The City of God, something that is not present in the account in Genesis. “The Western Church,” MacCulloch writes, “was thus launched on an inescapable association between shame and sex, not excluding marital sexuality, and for many commentators over the last three centuries that has earned Augustine a dark reputation for shaping Western Christianity’s variety of the ancient Christian negativity on sex.” Sometimes, though, the tone of this book was so cool and sensible that it forgot the delirious part of sexual experience, and surely the reason why so many moralities – pagan, Christian, and secular – believe that some conventions and restraints are necessary.
Some readers of this book will find in its pages confirmation of the conviction, implanted by Sigmund Freud, that feelings of shame in this area are of their essence neurotic: perhaps, further, that the very idea of monotheism derives from sexual trauma implanted by our feelings of father-fear or father-hatred. But is there a difference between neurotic shame and the surely un-neurotic experience of sexual passion leading human beings, regardless of their religious viewpoint, into a kind of madness? (Hence my allusion to The Symposium.) MacCulloch sometimes writes as if the advocates of chastity were irrational, especially in the later chapters of the book.
When Coldingham Abbey, a mixed religious community, was destroyed by fire in 683, the Venerable Bede considered it a just punishment by God for their “feasting, drinking, gossip, and other delights”. Bede also denounced thanes who built monasteries where they put their wives who, “in equal foolishness… allow themselves to be abbesses of the maidservants of Christ. That saying of the common folk suits them well: ‘Wasps may well build combs but they store up poison in them, not honey.’” The implication in MacCulloch’s amused, distant tone is that Bede was absurd. But surely he was writing about a community where the experiment of the sexes living together had “got out of control”? Sensible modern academics like MacCulloch, accustomed to mixed colleges and faculties, have perhaps become too grown up to imagine the claustrophobic atmosphere of a mixed religious community.
Art and life furnish many examples – comic, sordid and poignant – where the distinctions between sacred and profane love have become blurred. This book, in its great sweep, often seems to echo the words of Puck as he observes the amorous absurdity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”
AN Wilson’s most recent book is “Goethe: His Faustian Life” (Bloomsbury Continuum)
Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Allen Lane, 688pp, £35
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[See also: How Goethe sold his soul to Faust]
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This article appears in the 25 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, All-out war