Review of Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch (Viking, 2024)
Those who think that the Christian churches are responsible for all the ways in which Western society’s attitudes toward sex are repressive, unhealthy, demeaning, and misogynist will not find vindication in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s latest book, Lower Than the Angels.
Nor will it offer support for those who seek a historical golden age, either because they believe that Christianity can provide a fixed point for a return to tradition in the face of a hedonistic, selfish, and objectively disordered society, or because they believe that it once provided a liberatory atmosphere for varieties of human love.
Rather, this book is for those who want to have their view of a complicated institution further complicated.
Lower Than the Angels weighs in at five hundred pages (not counting notes); the account of the churches and sex is embedded in a crash course in the history of Christianity and cultures in which it emerged and developed. A non-academic can skip the footnotes and enjoy MacCulloch’s writing, although they may wonder anew in each chapter when he’s going to get to the sex.
The background material, however, shows that the author has done his homework. Like many other medievalists, my first reaction to such a broad history is to cringe, because the medieval period so often becomes a caricature, a “before” against which the excitement and change of an “after” can be seen. The author, however, is…
Auteur: Ruth Karras
