Angels & Eunuchs

Lower than the Angels employs a standard periodization of Church history that tracks with MacCulloch’s own one-volume history, with parallel pages indicated in the endnotes. The dizzying range of topics covered includes liturgy, catechesis, canon law, civil law, philosophical anthropology, biology, art and architecture, biblical exegesis, the European witch craze, colonialism, ecumenism, and politics. An entire chapter titled “A Century of Contraception” is a tour of how modern Christianity (not just Roman Catholicism) has negotiated—usually by vainly resisting—the unprecedented sexual freedom of the past hundred years. The book also works hard to go beyond Western Christianity (i.e., the Protestant and Roman Catholic branches of the tradition) to include Orthodoxy, with its different approach to celibacy, as well as the non-Chalcedonian churches (the Christian communities on the eastern perimeter of the Roman Empire and beyond that did not accept the Council of Chalcedon’s dogma of the Incarnation). Such breadth allows MacCulloch to discuss, for example, the crossover influences and contrasts of monasticism in the Catholic and the Orthodox traditions, as well as the different positions on divorce and remarriage that the two traditions have taken in interpreting the competing accounts in Matthew and Mark of Jesus’ prohibition of divorce. Read Full Article »