Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane, £35

In mid-18^th century Russia, a peasant prophet named Kondratii Selivanov read the Bible and came to a shocking realisation. God, he told his followers, had instructed the Israelites to castrate themselves – and so, in order to eradicate lust, they too must cut off their breasts and genitals. Embarrassingly, his revelation was based on a mistranslation (God actually wanted his people to be fruitful), but this did not stop generations of Skoptsy Christians obeying his instructions. The sect was not eradicated until the mid-20th century.

Selivanov’s unorthodox teachings had terrible consequences for his disciples, but his confusion is understandable. As Diarmaid MacCulloch explains in Lower than the Angels, many biblical pronouncements on sexuality are ambiguous, if not downright contradictory. Indeed, as this magisterial history of Christianity’s complicated relationship with sex shows, many of the ideas we now assume to be Biblical teachings actually emerged in the second and early-third centuries, and were heavily influenced by (or were adopted as a reaction to) Roman and Judaic practices. It was, for example, during this period that virginity was firmly established as the Christian ideal. Although some spoke out in favour of marriage and the family (both of which were highly regarded by the Romans), most early Christian authorities agreed that marriage was an inferior state, that sex was acceptable only for the purposes of procreation, and that a man who took too much pleasure in marital relations was guilty of adultery.

In fact, MacCulloch argues, the modern idea of ‘traditional marriage’ as a companionate union at the heart of a nuclear family bears little resemblance to reality, and for centuries the only real constant was that marriage was usually ‘a contract between two men: the fathers of the bride and groom’. Beyond that, Christian notions of marriage have changed significantly over time, so that the faithful have variously been told that the best kind of marriage was a chaste marriage (that is, one in which the couple mutually agreed not to have sex), that the validity of a marriage was dependent on consummation (so that non-consummation was grounds for annulment), and that a married couple owed each other the marital debt (that is, they had the obligation to provide sex on demand). Some sects, most famously the Latter-Day Saints, have embraced polygyny; others, such as the Cathars, condemned both marriage and procreation. The existence (often co-existence) of such varied and contradictory ideas adds weight to MacCulloch’s claim that ‘there is no such thing as a Christian theology of sex’.

This impression is reinforced by the equally changeable rules about clerical sexuality. In the early Middle Ages, abstinence was primarily a monastic virtue, and most parish priests had wives – for, as one anonymous 11^th-century author put it: ‘It is right that a priest love a decent woman as a bedmate.’ Then Pope Gregory VII (1073-85), concerned about ritual pollution and the creation of clerical dynasties, decided that all clerics must be celibate. His reforms were not universally accepted: one opponent suggested that denying priests marital sex would force them to sleep with other men, and in some parts of Europe, including rural Iberia, the new rules were largely ignored.

At the Reformation, everything changed again: the monasteries were closed, and priests were allowed to marry, so that the paterfamilias, not the monk, became the Protestant ideal. Martin Luther married an ex-nun, Katharine von Bora, with whom he had six children, and was cringily enthusiastic about their sex life, writing to a newly-wed friend that ‘On the night that I calculate you will receive this letter, I assure you that I’ll make love to my wife, in your honour, while you’re making love to yours – a joint effort!’ Even the rather joyless John Calvin suggested that sex was a gift from God – though it must be enjoyed in moderation, and only by married couples.

Nor was he the only one urging restraint, because one of the few things early modern Protestants and Catholics agreed on was the importance of upholding strict moral standards. Consequently, pre-marital sex (which had been widely tolerated in medieval Europe) was increasingly punished as fornication, and attitudes to illegitimacy hardened. In some countries, serious sexual offences such as adultery and sodomy were punishable by death, and as late as 1676 a Burgundian priest was burnt to death for having sex with a nun. Such brutal punishments resulted from a moral fervour intensified by religious divisions, but they had their roots in something bigger. Lower than the Angels covers nearly 3,000 years of history, and ranges widely outside Europe; this means that there is of necessity a lot of contextual material, which at times makes the book feel like a general history of Christianity. Some readers will undoubtedly feel that topics with particular contemporary or personal resonance (such as abortion and clerical abuse) should have been discussed in greater detail.

And yet, by showing us the bigger picture, MacCulloch allows the reader to fully appreciate the complexity and diversity of Christian experience, and to identify recurrent themes – including a persistent tendency to see sex as something which needed to be both feared and controlled. In the early seventh century, one influential Irish penitential not only identified and prescribed penances for 33 different sexual sins, but also ruled that, for liturgical and medical reasons, a married couple must not have sex on nearly two thirds of the days of the year. More than a millennium later, there was a moral panic about masturbation, which was seen as a threat to both health and morals: the 1716 treatise Onania, or The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution went through 60 English editions in 90 years, and was widely translated. During Europe’s colonial heyday, both governments and missionaries worked hard to root out non-Christian practices, such as homosexuality and polygamy, with lasting implications down to the present day.

Such interventions into the private lives of ordinary people have had particular impact on those who defied sexual norms, especially gay people. Women have also suffered disproportionately under an ideology which has mostly confined nuns to cloisters, defined laywomen in terms of marriage and motherhood, and viewed their bodies as source of pollution and sin. In 12th–century Durham, women were barred from much of the Cathedral, including the area around St Cuthbert’s shrine; when a Scottish noblewoman broke the rules, the monk-custodian had a vision of the angry saint shouting ‘Get that bitch out of here!’ Some medieval holy men refused even to look at women – though not the sixth-century Irish saint Scothíne of Tisscoffin, who regularly shared his bed with ‘two maidens with pointed breasts’.

Scothíne denied that there was anything improper about his conduct; his ability to sleep chastely alongside these attractive young women proved his exceptional continence. Many clerics, though, have failed to live up to the high standards they preached. In 18th-century Scotland, members of the Beggar’s Benison club – which celebrated male sexuality through collective masturbation rituals – included numerous clergymen, and at least one future bishop. Around the same time, the Welsh evangelist Howell Harris (1714-73) fell for a married woman, Mrs Sidney Griffith, who accompanied him on his preaching tours and prophesised that both would soon be free of their troublesome spouses. (Howell insisted that ‘God is on my side, and all the opposition to me is against the Lord’, but soon fell from grace.) Sexual abuse scandals have been a persistent problem, fuelled first by the widespread practice of child oblation (which meant that early medieval monasteries were full of very young boys), and more recently by the Counter-Reformation’s enthusiasm for entrusting the education of children to often-unwilling celibates. In recent decades, Catholic leaders such as Cardinal Trujillo have vehemently denied that condoms offer protection against HIV (instead insisting that abstinence is the only permissible prophylactic), while secretly engaging in enthusiastic sex lives of their own.

The fallout from such scandals partially explains the declining influence of Christianity in contemporary Europe, but the roots of that decline can be traced back much further. As early as 1787, the British Parliament abolished the right of the ecclesiastical courts to punish pre-marital fornication, and in subsequent decades several countries legalised both civil marriages and divorce. The pace of change accelerated rapidly in the 20th century, not least because the increased availability of reliable contraception led to greater emphasis on non-reproductive sex for pleasure.

While mainstream Protestantism has (more or less, and often with reluctance) embraced these changes, there has been considerable resistance from other quarters: the Catholic Church has issued repeated prohibitions on all forms of artificial birth control, and non-conformist movements are increasingly defined by ‘an angry alarm at what the liberal west is saying and doing about sex’.

Those who are offended by the loose morals of contemporary Western society will surely be further angered by this thought-provoking and compassionate book because, though deeply learned and rigorously argued, Lower than the Angels is, in many respects, a polemic. MacCulloch has strong views about the harm done by Christian teachings on sexuality, and on the need for the Church to move with the times. Given that Christianity remains the world’s largest religion, and a significant political force in many countries around the world, its (in)ability to do so will have a significant impact on people of all faiths, and none.