As it was in the beginning?
NEXT week, Penguin publishes in paperback my Lower than the Angels: A history of sex and Christianity. We launch it in an Anglican cathedral: the lovely St Saviour’s, Southwark, battered but graceful survivor of monastic dissolution, Georgian neglect, and the Blitz. Southwark is just right for a book that tries to do justice to 3000 years of discussion of sex, because Southwark Cathedral authorities have long led efforts to bring sanity to the Church of England’s entanglements on this still-thorny subject.
Southwark’s invitation produced a happy symmetry with our celebration of the hardback, last autumn, in London’s other great cathedral, St Paul’s, in front of an audience of about 1000. Why did so many appear on that icy November night, and why have they arrived in their hundreds to a long sequence of such introductions across the country over this past year? I suspect that most of them are unimpressed by the Church’s past and present efforts to discuss sexual morality, and they’re looking for a more coherent and plausible narrative of its history in Christian culture.
Those in the audience who’ve watched Christians tie themselves in knots about whether people of the same sex should get married in church react with amused interest when I point out the undoubted historical fact that, in the Early Church, no one got married in church. For three or four centuries after the life of Jesus, there was no such thing as a church wedding anywhere; in most of the Christian world, it was centuries before church weddings became the custom. Here, in the West, really it was the 12th century. Odd for a sacrament to conceal itself for so long.
Acts of unsettlement
HISTORIANS are professionally inclined to mischief. We like nothing better than the opportunity to “unsettle many settled facts”, in the delicious phrase of an Indian historian in the days of the British Raj, Sir Jadunath Sarkar. I can’t say that my account of sex and the Church is impartial: it is coloured by a lifetime of watching Christians either making a mess of the theology of sex, or doing a bit better than that. My book is, nevertheless, intended to be a help for the Church, not a hindrance or a diatribe.
Researching 3000 years of Judaeo-Christian history might have made Lower than the Angels a very angry text. I have met many people who have been left angry and damaged by idiotic versions of Christian morality, and they will feel that I’ve let the Church off lightly.
Traditionalists will have different motives for venting their rage on my book, but they will speak from a reassuringly contradictory range of points of view (traditionalists rarely know enough about the tradition), and, so far, they have been curiously silent. If they wish to shore up “traditional” versions of Christian moral theology, I’ll be interested to go through their footnotes to check out the story they tell, and to listen out for the gaps and tactful evasions.
Noise-cancelling culture
THREE decades ago, in 1996, I was in the large congregation at Southwark when the Dean and Chapter hosted a 20th-anniversary service for what was then called the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement. It was a joyous and liberating occasion, with excellent music: I especially remember the meditative performance of Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei, the gay composer’s own choral arrangement of his Adagio for Strings, effortlessly drowning out the susurration of pearls being clutched beyond the building.
Despite many blemishes on the intervening three decades in our own Communion and in the world at large, where Southwark led, many others now follow. How delighted I was when, earlier this summer, the Church in Wales elected a same-sex-partnered woman as its Archbishop, simply because its constitution gave the Welsh the ability to decide that she was the best candidate, filtering out all threatening ambient noise from the ill-disposed. An example to all Christian churches of how to make decisions.
Holy disruptive
AFTER introducing Lower than the Angels to audiences from Edinburgh to Paris over 12 months, I’m pretty tired, but among compensations has been an accumulation of warm invitations from great English cathedrals.
I’ve spoken in some of the most splendid and venerable sacred spaces in our land — more to come after Southwark, as in the coming months I woo book-lovers in, inter alia, Lichfield, Lincoln, and Gloucester. It’s reminded me what civilised communities our cathedrals are (despite occasional particular hiccups). They are the glory of the Church of England, commanding the affection of folk well beyond the ranks of churchgoers.
That happy result belies a complicated backstory. We forget (until some historian reminds us) that, frequently, English cathedrals have not been popular with the English faithful. In 1272, the good folk of Norwich were so furious with the monks of the cathedral Chapter that they trashed the place; you can still see the rebuilding that followed.
In 1831, Bristol Cathedral nearly suffered the same treatment when city rioters vented their wrath on their bishop for opposing parliamentary reform; they eventually confined themselves to burning down his palace next door. In their turn, Deans and Chapters from the Tudor age to Queen Victoria’s time were frequently unwelcoming to outsiders, even when the visitors were not rioting.
Really, it’s remarkable that cathedrals survived the English Reformation at all. Archbishop Cranmer wasn’t keen on them — particularly not their choirs. I hope that Cranmer in celestial tranquillity can now savour the irony that, today, perhaps the most cherished part of his Prayer Book is choral evensong, reverently sung. Cathedral evensong has been one of the incidental pleasures of my tour of the land.
The one sure rule of history is the Law of Unintended Consequences: it can be a work of the Holy Spirit, who is the great Unsettler of many Settled Facts. In serious houses on serious earth, witnesses over time to much holy unsettlement, I’m pleased to spell out a few more unintended consequences for the people of God.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Campion Hall and St Cross College, Oxford.
Lower than the Angels: A history of sex and Christianity will be published in paperback by Penguin on 18 September at £18.99 (CT Bookshop £17.09); 978-0-14-199095-8.
