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Diarmaid MacCulloch · 2024
Diarmaid MacCulloch is the historian who can hold three thousand years of Christianity in one hand and a single Tudor sermon in the other. Lower than the Angels is his history of sex and Christianity — written late in his career, in a register that knows exactly how much of this story has been told as moral verdict and refuses to tell it that way again.
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Appears in
What this book knows
Christianity's sexual history is stranger, more contested, and more humanly various than either its defenders or critics admit.
religion-and-sex
My assumptions had been completely outflanked by proclamation of trans identities; those opposing convictions both shared roots in the sexual revolution.
LTA-001Luther assured Spalatinus he would make love to his wife the same night: 'a joint effort!' — Protestant marriage reimagined as carnal solidarity.
LTA-003embodiment
According to nature I am a woman, but not according to my thoughts — a fine definition of gendering.
LTA-006obedience-and-authority
Marriage likened to unwholesome food already vomited: why return to it? Fear of a noble race dying out dismissed as mere filth on a father's neck.
LTA-004Sarah Crosby rode 960 miles, preached 220 public meetings, held 600 private ones — her Lord having removed all scruples about acting thus publicly.
LTA-005Illuminates
Editor’s framing
MacCulloch, Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford, came to wide readership with Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009), the long sweep that earned him both the prizes and the trust of readers who do not usually read church history. Lower than the Angels is the late, narrower book — the one he could only write after the sweep, because the sweep showed him where the sexual story keeps recurring, mutating, and being weaponized.
What to attend to: the long view that lets him see continuity where Augustine-only readings see rupture. The recurring observation that Christianity has rarely held one position on sex; it has held several, often simultaneously, and the official one is usually the one the historian arrived too late to argue with. The candid sections on the gap between what church courts prosecuted and what parishioners actually did — a gap that turns out to be one of the most reliable through-lines in the history.
Vela reads MacCulloch as the long-view anchor in our Christianity arc. Where Kyle Harper gives us late-antique precision and Elaine Pagels gives us the second-century alternatives that Christianity chose against, MacCulloch gives us the millennium-scale picture — the one that lets you see how the shame Augustine installed in the late fourth century survived translations into Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, evangelical, and back again. The arc essays at Vela (the figures from Paul to Luther) sit inside the long sweep MacCulloch makes legible.
Featured passage
More than half a century ago as a young graduate student, I was exhilarated at my radicalism in being open about homosexuality, and in subsequent years I felt rather pleased with myself in being at the forefront of sexual liberation. Then I found that my assumptions had been completely outflanked by proclamation of trans identities hardly ever discussed in my youth, and equally by vituperative criticism of trans identities on feminist grounds; those opposing but passionately held convictions both shared roots in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. These confusing experiences have taught me a lesson about being more observant or empathetic about the differences of others.
More than half a century ago as a young graduate student, I was exhilarated at my radicalism in being open about homosexuality, and in subsequent years I felt r…
Read alongside · the magazine
MacCulloch's long view is the historical context the Augustine pillar relies on — what Augustine installs at the end of the fourth century only becomes the West's because the next sixteen centuries carry it forward.
The Paul pillar reads the Pauline letters through the long reception MacCulloch traces — the same words doing different work across centuries.
The Luther pillar leans on MacCulloch for the Reformation context — what was actually being reformed, what was kept, what the reformers themselves did not realize they were ratifying.
Read alongside · the emotions
MacCulloch's long view is what makes the shame-installation thesis testable — you can watch the same posture survive five centuries of doctrinal change.
Disgust is the affect that shows up in MacCulloch's prosecutions-and-sermons chapters more often than shame — the official register has always been more disgust-laden than the lived one.
The distinction MacCulloch keeps drawing — between the act and the actor, between guilt and shame — is what gives Vela's reading of the arc its grammar.
6 published passages · book excerpt · lived experience
Reader resonance signals for text sources are not wired to this view yet.