Lower Than the Angels (that is the condition of man, according to the psalmist and St Paul) is a book that combines the two most fascinating subjects, religion and sex – but you do have to take both bits of the agenda. This is Christian history with an eye to marriage, sexual acts, sexuality, celibacy, feminism and gender. Diarmaid MacCulloch is primarily a historian of the Reformation but, as his A History of Christianity (2009) demonstrates, he’s up for the bigger picture. This history takes us from early Jewish concepts of God and sex (I was startled to find the God of Abraham was once assigned a spouse, Asherah) right up to current Anglican rows about homosexuality.
Clerical celibacy only became the western norm after the Gregorian reforms of the 11th century
If there is a theme to such a capacious book it’s that the Christian view of sex is more multifarious than we might have thought.
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