[MUSIC]
Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatis Center at George Mason University.
“Bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems,”
learn more at Mercatis.org. For a full transcript of every conversation and hands-with-helpful links, visit conversationswithtiler.com. [MUSIC] Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversationswithtiler.
Today I am here with Dermod McCollock. He has a new book out, "Lower Than the Angels," a history of sex and Christianity, which I recommend very highly. In fact, all of his books are excellent. He is one of those historians where each and every book he has done is worth reading.
He is a meritist professor of the history of the church at Oxford, and now we're seeing your research fellow at Oxford. Dermod, welcome. Thank you very much. Nice to be here.
In the history of the West and the world more generally.
“Why does it seem that monotheistic religion and monogamy are so closely correlated?”
A good question.
They are not always closely correlated.
They certainly weren't in Judaism. Judaism is a form of religion in which, let's call it very precisely, "Poligini," rather than "Poligini," was a feature of Judaism really into the 20th century. In cultures where there were Jewish communities in Islam, then "Poligini" survived within living memory.
There are people alive, Jewish people alive, who would have known that "Poligini" context. In the West, it is further back with Judaism. It's a 12th century when Jews cease to allow "Poligini" in such circumstances. And I suspect that is because the pressures of Western society around the Western Christian society
forced them into a monogamous form.
“And conversely, monogamy was a feature of two great civilizations behind Christianity,”
which were not at all monotheistic. That is Greek and Roman civilizations. Most unusually in the ancient world were monogamous. And I strongly suspect, we may talk about this more, that this is the reason that Christianity decided to stick with monogamy against its cultural background in Judaism,
because it wanted to make an impression on Greek and Roman society. So you've got to be monogamous, otherwise that society will just not listen to you. But there seems to be a feature of Greek and Roman societies emphasizing intellectually a kind of subordination in sexual relationships. Christianity, at least, pretends to abolish.
Why that shift? Well, he didn't abolish it really. But intellectually it's trying to, right? Intellectually it's trying to, yes. And its great liturgical action is an affirmation of equality between the sexes.
That is baptism. When you compare that with the entry right into Judaism, which is male circumcision, you see the difference that to be in a sense fully Jewish is to be a man, a capable of being circumcised. Now Christianity introduced a new form of initiation to the religion and that is baptism.
Very difficult to see where it came from. It's not a prominent feature of Judaism before, or any of the religions around. But it's there very early indeed so that that leader who became subordinate to Jesus in the Christian faith, John, was known as the Baptist because this was the thing he did and we don't really have any records of Jesus doing baptism, but John did.
So here is what became the way you become a Christian and of course, unlike circumcision. It's something which both men and women can receive and they did. So yes, you're right in that sense Christianity had structured itself towards equality, but in so many ways, the history of the last 2000 years is a stealthy march away from that idea. In order to impose the normal patterns of the ancient world which are male-centered
and which women have a subordinate role. That's the history of Christianity and that may be something which is now changing. Well, certainly is changing since the 19th century we've seen in the ways in which women have increasingly asserted themselves in the Christian faith on an equal basis so so much so that so many churches now will allow women well welcome women even to be clerical people within it,
Clergy within it, have an ordained role within it.
And that initial egalitarian tendency, you think that's a genuine innovation in Christianity.
“I do. I can't see where it came from otherwise. The crucial test is circumcision versus”
baptism and it is there in a remarkable fragments within the New Testament record that set of writings which the Christian community created on top of the Hebrew scripture which became its Old Testament. Well, the New Testament contains the writings of Paul which are the Oldest writings within the New Testament and there are texts within what we now call one and two
Corinthians that is two letters to the Christian community in Corinth in which in the first one
chapter seven now there is an essay by Paul on marriage and it contains a most extraordinary statement about the relationship of married people that the bride and the groom, the man and the woman. And it says in a very conventional ancient way that the wife's body is not her own, it belongs to
“the husband. Yep, that's what you'd expect, any ancient culture but then it reverses it and it says”
likewise the man's body is not his own but he's owned by his wife. Now that is really extraordinary and it is new, it is our mystical statement that the relationship between man and woman is a relationship of physicality. This is about bodies but it is also a relationship with the assumption that there is something mystical about marriage which makes it a central part of Christianity. And actually most generations of the church since the last 2000 years have put that aside
particularly in eastern Orthodox Christianity. They've spiritualized it away so it is no longer about bodies you can see this and the great Greek theologian John Chrysostom who said it's it's about an equality of esteem or chastity or financial support anything but a physical body. Now the Western tradition didn't do that very interestingly and the medieval Western church for instance the canon lawyers who were creating a new legal system for the church and Christians generally
canon lawyers look to this text in Paul 1 Corinthians 7 3 and they emphasized that marriage is
about physicality. So much the church for the first time really said that marriage was characterized
by procreation must be characterized by the possibility of procreation so you get this coming back but actually at most times in Christian history they haven't gone with this poor line idea. They are not interested in equality and then not as a hidden equality and marriage either.
“Actually you have to realize that throughout Christian history and not just Christian history”
marriage has been a contract between two men. The father of the bride and the father of the groom it is not primarily a contract between the bride and the groom the young people as they mostly are who get married. It's a family thing. Isn't spousal consent an important idea by what the 12th century year? Yeah exactly by the 12th century yes part of the the great revolution of thinking about marriage and sex in the 12th century but that's 1200 years more than half
of Christian history we must I'm sure we will talk about the importance of the 12th century in the West which transforms so many different things about marriage and sex. Where does that shift come from in the 12th or are you believe in the 11th century? It is because of changing ideas about the Eucharist, the bread and wine and what they mean in the Christian life. Increasingly the Western Church emphasised that bread and wine in Eucharist are body and blood of Christ,
the Savior and that they are created or made into that by the act of a priest and therefore what a priest does in celebrating the mass so-called as it's called in the West the Eucharist
is so powerful that you want that person who does it the priest to be as pure as possible
and there is a very short leap in talking about purity to sexual purity and so in the 11th and 12th century for the very first time in Christian history all the clergy of the West must be celibate they must be virgins just like monks monks are not the same as clergy not the same
As priests at all but now from now on there is a gradual amalgamation of thes...
call it a confusion of the role of the celibate monk with that of the priest and this is a 12th century development it has extraordinary consequences they they ripple away from this great change in the nature of Western priesthood through interviews about marriage because the logic of making all clergy celibate is that the laity are now the only people who are practicing sex within marriage of course otherwise it's illicit but now you've got the situation what because of a
celibate clergy logically you have a what you might call copulating laity and that's something new
“in the history of marriage in Christianity it means in the end that what you must say about”
a marriage is that it must be open to the the possibility of procreation now if you look back in church history Christian history before that there are a lot of instances of marriage which aren't deliberately celibate chased the people involved get married and they remain virgins as a token of their purity and there are recent stories like this we're in England we have a
a very famous saint saint ethyl dreda who became the first abbess of ealy which is now a
wonderful great Romanesque and Gothic cathedral in eastern England but it started life as an Anglo-Saxon monastery founded by this princess ethyl dreda who's not just a princess she'd been married twice to do different Anglo-Saxon kings and in both cases she had refused to give them sex which is a bit disconcerting if you're a king because what you want is an heir to the throne she must have been an extraordinary lady anyway second marriage they gave up the king said all right
you when you clearly want to be a nun go often be a nun and found a new monastery and this is an enormously popular story in Anglo-Saxon England but it's a story which would make no sense after the 12th century if you look at it closely because marriage is supposed to be about procreation and the church tells you that and otherwise there is no marriage so on the ways you
“get out of a marriage in Roman Catholic theology if no sex has taken place that's how Henry the 8th”
got out of one of his marriages by saying it had never taken place he'd never had sex
with that woman a phrase later reused but explaining the timing of that shift why in the 12th century in particular does that happen it is because of the nature the changing nature of thought about the Eucharist and that's a gradual originist though right like what's the ultimate call that's that's exactly what is about and that is a process of changing the Eucharist over the previous two or three hundred years into making the Eucharist a uniquely powerful thing which you do as
much as possible if you're a priest a monasteries are redesigned monastic churches were redesigned so that now they didn't just have one altar at which the Eucharist took place they had multiple
“altars side altars at which masses could be celebrated for saving the souls of particular people”
mostly numbers of the nobility who had paid for setting up the monastery and the prayers of the monks are there to save the souls of the nobility of Europe for the very good reason that Christianity still disapproved of the shedding of blood and anyone who's involved in that which meant the entire nobility of medieval Europe was deprived of that straight route to heaven but the way you can get around that is by getting monks to pray for you and do the penances which you deserve to do as
a shed of blood so there is a sequence of things not just the eleven to twelve century that's the culmination of a process which you can see beginning really in the eighth and ninth centuries relative to the ancient Greek world early Christianity is quite hostile to homosexuality
where does that come from? I come from two different places first it comes from Judaism which
increasingly emphasized procreation within marriage it's a religion which is very concerned with increasing the number of the chosen people so it is there and that means that there is something of a strand of homophobia within the Jewish tradition on same-sex relationships but it's also curiously from within the Greek world there is a deeply world denying or steer strain of Jewish philosophy which is against really any former sex and and within that Christians took up that idea
Applied it to the existing suspicion of hostility to same-sex relationships w...
you see that particularly within the church the Christian church in Alexandria which is one of the
“meeting places of Greek culture and Jewish culture so there it is it's there in Paul course in the”
New Testament very very marginy he has one purple passage on it which is not really so much about same-sex relationships it's about idolatry and the example he uses of people indulging in idolatry is one of same-sex relationships that's the beginning of the epistle to the Romans and then various epistles have lists of people who aren't going to get to heaven and it's a funny old mix because it can be quite minor human pechadillos of people who don't get to heaven and in two of those lists
there are two sets of people called are Senacoitai and Malacoy it is not quite clear what these mean are Senacoitai is a slang term probably it's a very rare term in Greek
“so it's probably something which was used in the marketplace in the eastern Mediterranean”
now the other one means simply the soft put these together and you may have the two sorts of relationship that you get in the classical version of same-sex relationships which is in the unequal structure between a younger and an older partner that is a passive partner and an active partner and they may be on one side are Senacoitai on the other side Malacoy it's difficult to see why that should be applied to modern homosexuality it's a different institution that ancient
institution is not a lifestyle for life it's a phase that people go through in their heterosexual lifestyle or their general lifestyle so both partners would be expected to go on to be involved
“in a heterosexual marriage and notice it's also unequal by structure it's about educating”
the younger partner in the ways of the first Greek world so yes there is austerity to that there and
you look at Christian history that there's not much change there at all where as if you look at Islam there is much more acceptance of same-sex relationships in a rather traditional way in a rather a way rather like that of non-Christian Greek and Roman society as you know Michelle Foucaur wrote four volumes on the history of sexuality why did he get wrong about Christianity well I got a lot of things wrong he is he's he's not at all reliable in those four volumes
of course I've read from cover to cover what did he get wrong well he he didn't really talk
much about ancient Christianity and it's all about text he he never looked at the nature of
ancient society he also has particular agendas some of which I agree with some which I don't about power in relation to historical process but in general I would advise people to take Michelle Foucaur with several pinches of salt he was a pioneer in looking at same-sex relationships and he was of a decade in which there were several pioneers there was the American scholar John Boswell for instance writing about such matters there was an English scholar called Alan Bray and they're
real pioneers the three of them on such matters as same-sex relations but they got a lot wrong and it would not be right to start with them and not realize that they are historical texts now in each case actually you can see that their perspective is distorted by their Roman Catholicism
very specifically Foucaur born into a Catholic family never really left that world
Bray and Boswell converts to Roman Catholicism from Episcopalianism or Anglicanism if you like and the prince concerned with Bray and Boswell was always to say to set up a story which wasn't really true which was that Christianity had over the centuries actually been fairly hospitable to same-sex relations and you read Boswell now 40 years later and you see there's a lot of special pleading in that same with Bray so none of these historians are setting standards forever
and Foucaur made absurd assertions about the invention of homosexuality in the 19th century simply because the word was coined in 1869 well that's so so stupid and so French you see actually
Things which look precisely like modern for life equal relationships between ...
way back you can see it in the ancient world is not the same as the normal
“what you might call normal inverted commas same-sex relationships these unequal things so”
the Foucaur passion seeing this as emerging as a sort of medicalization in the 19th century just doesn't stand up and it's extremely misleading and we should leave it behind there's a recent rise of interest in theories that attribute the rise of the west to the church banning cousin marriage that this broke down plant structures what's your view of that hypothesis it's as usual with such hypotheses far too simple I don't see that so at all
because and marriages went on as being a feature of Christianity particularly if you've got a pope to dispense such marriages in the west what could one say about such a theory cleanse families were not broken up by Christianity by far the reverse those structures did not
“change very significantly so no I don't think that really works at all why does Islam so”
emphasise the sexual desires of women relative to Christianity a good question because the Quran allows that to happen I'm the Quran has been interpreted by men when very often not it's talking about are is just people so that may be one explanation it's long did remain not a very much a militarised culture to start with so it's almost by definition run by men
but they're within it a powerful set of images for women in the Quran itself on top of the
Quran there is so much added and it's usually added by male societies so yes and no really there is a constant strain of things one can say about the position of women in Christianity women are constantly carving out parts of Christian faith for themselves against the fact that male men are increasingly running the church that's a fact of life think of the mystics of the medieval west and the way in which so many of them are females because to be a mystic
you don't need the male language of Latin the language of the professions the language of the clergy you can explore mysticism without the new invention of men in the 12th century theology
which is something associated with the first cathedral schools and then the universities
both of which are male institutions but mysticism no you can just get on with it it involves many of the same themes in every religion that turns to mysticism themes like fire and water air the vocabulary of the mystic really is quite universal it is not restricted to Christianity or Islam or anything it's the way that one aspect of humanity works out when it tries to meet the divine why is Islam sometimes at least at the intellectual level so obsessed with
Mary you can debate whether she was a saint or a prophet in a way the world in Christianity is much more circumscribed oh I wouldn't say that she is she appears more in the holy Quran than she doesn't the Bible of course but that is clearly the influences on the creation of this book which are probably forms of Christianity, merephasite Christianity and what is now the Arabian
“peninsula yes she's there and she is named unlike I think any other woman in the Quran”
the relationship is therefore complex and interesting but so is that of Jesus to the other prophets within Islam he is given a place of greater honour and naturally also his mother gets it Mary's positioning Christianity is as you know complex and it is a construction of the later church on extremely scanty evidence in the New Testament the picture of Mary in the Gospels is not entirely positive and the picture of Jesus's relationship with his family with his
brothers and sisters is not entirely positive so on one occasion and the gospels they turned up to say hi we want to we want to see him and Jesus looks around says well actually these people
are my brothers and sisters you know implication you're you know second class and and one's
got to deal with that the church ignored it as it created an increasingly central place for Mary as Queen of Heaven the Lynch Pino Salvation it ignored the fact that the foundations in the New Testament are scanty it took the Protestant reformers of the 16th century actually to look at the
Bible and look back at that and gleefully in some cases saw that Jesus could ...
with his mother and his family now you want needs to ask well why does the New Testament treat
“family members like this I think one way you can account for it is by saying that the New Testament”
is written by the winners in a very particular conflict and that is the conflict as to who is going to lead the church off to Jesus is it going to be the family is this going to be a
dinastic religion so James the brother of the Lord is one of the first people who are powerful
within the church or is it people who like Paul of Tarsus never actually met in his earthly life Jesus and the balance in that conflict is eventually one by the general number of disciples not the family and so you would expect the text created by that side of the battle to be somewhat dismissive of Jesus' family and the same thing is true of Islam of course between who is going to be in charge of the faith in future so Sunni Islam against Shia Islam have two different answers
“of that question so it's not dissimilar to what happened within Islam if I think of the 12th and”
13th centuries in England and France parts of Spain there are so many just incredible
cathedrals or religious structures built many of them still with us what accounts for so many Marvelous creations in what in a sense is a relatively narrow window of time you're right and scholars from the James brothers onwards have talked about this the age of the cathedrals it's really quite difficult to account for it in any way and you've got to realize also that such wonderful magnificent buildings one of which I was speaking in last night gloss to cathedrals
in Western England where there alongside monasteries in fact gloss to cathedrals was a great abbey before it was a cathedrals what are these saying well they're saying one thing that the church in the West now had a very strong tight organization by bishops and diocese in which the mother church of the diocese was a building a very great charisma and importance and had a set of clergy attached to it cannons who were as much a corporation as the
corporation of monks within an abbey and they benefited from this industry of prayer about which we were speaking earlier that the the elites of Western Europe needed prayer they needed people to pray for their souls and the laity generally also wanted prayer because they the Western church was developing a particular view of the afterlife in which is no longer that simple binary it is not just heaven and hell there is a state in the middle perigotry which is out wonderfully
useful way to to characterize the afterlife because perigotry is where you can go on being purged of your sins and you do that with the help of your friends and the clergy in their prayers particularly in the mass so perigotry is a big thing here cathedrals are full of altars just like abbey churches look around them and you see the innumerable side chapels there these are factories of prayer and that is worth spending money on and how raw they did because we are left with this
amazing legacy of wonderful buildings is there some institutional innovation from decentralized
bishops competing against each other through monastic orders or like something's paying for all this right yeah well the the secular inability of paying for it because they're endowing these places with land for the take of prayer it is not exactly a decentralized system it is a system you
“must remember which actually literally covers the map of Europe there are virtually no places”
not contained within the system and within the diocese that is the institution run by the bishop are what are called parishes which again virtually cover the map of Europe not that they had maps but they knew the boundaries of every parish and our parish is a very interesting institution it's new in the ninth century onwards in the west and the idea is that you have one priest in each of these parishes and that the area of land that he patrols is more of that's
controllable in a day that he can meet and visit all his parishioners I speak with feeling about
This because I am the son of one of those parish priests in the Church of Eng...
parish which in which I grew up was about a couple of square miles each way he could have walked it
and often did so this is an extraordinarily effective way of giving everyone in Europe pastoral care in fact not just the nobility the nobility I get the deluxe end of it with the great mastery the endowments of catheterals but everyone has a parish church it's an extraordinarily
“wonderfully integrated system and I think us with a western tradition often forget how”
absolutely unusual that is within world religions to have a single form of a religion absolutely dominating everything within a particular continent nothing else like it except
perhaps Saudi Arabia in the 20s and 21st centuries don't you find it striking how few of those
structures are mediocre there may be some survival bias but it's very hard to just find an ugly looking church from that time well it's maybe the way we look at them I'm a huge enthusiast for the mall and spend my time spare time looking around them all but could one say that they are actually superlatively wonderful I think are way of looking at them makes them such they are hollowed by the fact that they have been there for so long that they are sacred places
in which prayer has been valid to quote an English poet it's a wonderful thing there's
still there and as you know in England we still have that rather unusual thing and established
church which is their administer all of them look after of them and you can walk from church to church and so many of them are still medieval yes it's a wonderful thing true of course in each north of ox places to in Greece in Bulgaria if you had to pick a favorite in England what would it be oh now you ask me an impossible question there but probably I would say it is the church which my dad served when I was a little boy when I was four to twenty at the church of St Mary
in Weatherden in East Anglia then the County of Suffolk a church in which you had every architectural style from the 12th century through to the 20th the furnishings of every age parts of the building added at various times so it was a wonderful textbook for a bookish boy like me to grow up with
“a knife I sort of I think mentally apply that church to every church that I visit afterwards however”
huge like Bloster Cathedral last night why are there still a fair number of English Catholics but so few in the Nordic countries no interesting question Lutheranism became much more universal in the Nordic countries Catholicism did not survive there the government to the monarchy is of these countries I think much more thorough going in suppressing it think the nobility also decided to go over to the reformation fairly uniformly in Sweden and Norway Denmark
so in of course it does matter when the nobility make decisions in England they were divided so quite a lot of the nobility and gentry did stick with the old faith maybe because they admired a many of the bishops of the old church and I did a little work of research on this in my younger days in which you could see that those gentry who stayed Catholic after the reformation were often those who had personal ties to the great bishops of the pre-reformation church yet
“the picture is very different in England to that in Scandinavia but also remember that extraordinary”
counter case the case of Ireland where the government became Protestant as it did in England but the great bulk of the population did not go with it and the story of Ireland is a story of the rejection of the religion of the upper classes right through to the present day when they now rejected so much of Catholicism too so it fascinating different stories next to each other there now you're one of the best known historians of the reformation and there's a very standard account
the printing press comes well bibles can be published and printed more easily more cheaply that leads to the reformation are there any aspects of that story that you're skeptical about I wouldn't say I'm skeptical about that that's certainly true that the circulation of text particularly biblical text is really very important in in late medieval Europe and it's not the Catholic church in general for bad such texts it just didn't see whether might lead but I think there's
something very significant about the reformation which is underplayed those who know about it and
Talk about it look at Martin Luther for instance and they use a piece of theo...
about the Protestant reformation they talk about justification by faith alone who knows what that
means well what it means is that salvation is really in the hands of God not in the hands of the clergy
“now that's the important thing that one of the things which Martin Luther did very quickly”
as he began unfurling his own instincts about the need for change in the church was to make sure that the clergy once more would marry they would become like lay men in that they had an equal right to have marriage and families and that made them the same as the rest of the world Martin Luther's concept of the old church the church he was rejected was one which had played a huge confidence trick on the laity of Europe by saying that clergy are special and the way we're
going to make them special is by making them celebrate so making all clergy married which is effectively what happened in the Protestant reformation absolutely transforms the rules on marriage and sexuality generally because from then on actually the clerical family is the model of the Christian life previously the model of the Christian life had been that of the monk the celibate clergy the celibate priest and now that is absolutely reversed Protestants destroyed
most of the monasteries get a few in Lutheran countries but very few otherwise this absolutely central part of medieval western Christianity the monastery was absolutely eliminated and in what is it place the parish the minister in his parish with his wife with his children one of whom is me so I'm particularly passionate about this thought that Protestantism put the minister on the pedestal as the way that all Christians should live not just clergy all Christians
could take the model of marriage and family from the clergy as you well now if we look at
“Henry shen England some key figures like Cromwell, Cranmer will see they don't come from very”
exalted backgrounds right they started off as quite common yeah there's something meritocratic about the society how does that happen or where does that come from how do they climb
they climb by being clever and they climb by the fact that the first two two demonic
did encourage them to do so because hinder the seventh for the first of the two demonics was the most unlikely person in English history to become a monarch his claim to the throne was laughably weak and there were very many people among the English nobility how to far more royal blood than he did and so he frankly didn't trust many of these people virtually none of whom he'd ever met before he came to the throne the English throne he'd been in exile for a very
long time so he's going to look around for those people to lead his government who are not necessarily aristocratic at all they are there by merit and his son Henry the eighth did inherit that thought Henry did like doing aristocratic things with aristocrats like josting for instance so that impulse began to weaken under Henry the eighth rather than Henry the seventh and you see in Henry the eighths quite long reign
are an alternating pattern between the the capable man of affairs who was as made his way up with royal encouragement and the nobleman who feels entitled to have his position in government
and Henry's always slapping down one and then slapping down the other so poor waltzie didn't deliver
the goods so he was slapped down cronwell famously also lost the plot failed to deliver a marriage which Henry liked in fact created a humiliating marriage and he lost his head cronwell survived remember
“he survived by loyalty to King Henry the eighth and and I think genuinely loved Henry the eighth”
and so served him with a good conscience trouble about that is that a man like Henry the eighth is a narcissist I think we may have seen some in modern politics and the thing about narcissists is that they make good people do bad things and Henry the eighth was talented making good people such as crama and I would say almost cronwell do bad things how does William bird survive as a Catholic is that also meritocracy oh yes it is by being a composer of genius
and having a patroness the queen who appreciated very good music Elizabeth was a Protestant
She was a slightly odd sort of Protestant she disapproved very intensely of r...
fanaticism of any sort as she had an eye for beauty in music and architecture and music is actually
rather cheaper for a monarch to patronise than lavish buildings than costs so much and she also genuinely loved it she was the person who saved the English cathedral in the wonderful form that I experienced it at Gloucester last night she approved her cathedrals because she approved their music and she gave patronage to the choirs and had her own choir the chapel royal which encouraged the cathedrals to go on doing this really wrong the elaborate form of music it's more elaborate
than any other form of Protestantism even the Lutherans whose music can be very elaborate but
“now if you want to look at the most important person in the whole English reformation the person”
who set the patterns for the church of England and the England as a whole in the 16th century
it's Queen Elizabeth the first it's not in really eighth it's Elizabeth the first.
How is it that English Renaissance music is so wonderful but by the time you get to the 18th century you're having to import Germans and Austrians yeah that's exactly for your musical life you're right what happened a run of quite exceptional composers in late medieval England there's an extraordinarily lavish and beautiful style of music which the reformation more or less dismanfold but some of the practitioners jump chip and serve the Protestant church Thomas Talis is the obvious
example a composer of international standard William Bird is the next generation bird did serve
“the church of England of course to start with and went on serving it in the Queen's chapel”
royal but then you'll write there is this curious paradox that in the 17th century the tradition
became well you could call it international in that Germans in particular came to this country to work for the new Protestant Hanoverian monarchs and were extraordinarily good at it we were extraordinarily lucky to get Georg Friedrich Kinder and turn him into George Frederick Handel an English composer to become the more of them the English composer of his period I mean you think of the great coronation music that he wrote for that deeply undistinguished King George II and that produced the wonderful
anthem Zedok the priest and Nathan the prophet that the most pretrient from Protestant Coral music you can think of but you're right there's a paradox 16th century England was right at the centre of beautiful music just as much as palestrian as Italy and in the 17th century it all sailed off a bit and it wasn't in the end until really the late 19th century that England became once more internationally respected as a place of church music music generally what is it in organ music
that has the greatest meaning to you as a statement of either religiosity or Christianity if you want to make it more specific well an easy question for an organist of course your answer best in Bach so versatile but which pieces I would say the trio son artist but what's your number I find them intimidating frankly because I find it very difficult to play I look rather to the Coral Pralue tradition which can be extraordinarily intimidatingly difficult but has some
staggeringly beautiful and devotionally heart-rending music because of course it is the Lutheran Coral so Bach was working from a musical tradition he knew very well which was very specifically Lutheran though he course did other things too he did the great B minor mass which has nothing really to do with Lutheranism at all but the Coral Pralue is a wonderful vehicle of Christian sentiment I think of Coral Pralue's one I played a week ago to even song in my near in my hour
of need I cried to the oh god it's a Lutheran Coral but he was gently plays with the melody over a tune which he has invented for himself and they interact so Bach of course Bach of course and the fugues and the Pralue's with which they are preface to our extraordinary and it's a wonderful way of losing yourself amid the miseries of the present world you may
“remember that in the days of the communist regime in eastern Europe organ recitals were crowded out”
because of the way that the general public could connect with the transcendent in a regime which denied the transcendent and as a lovely phrase from an English bishop of the 20th century bishop Charles Gore great theologian and he went to hear a brand and bird concerto in the concert hall
He was a gruff man and he as he walked out he was heard to matter if that's t...
and that's true with Bach he is a symbol of the transcendency beyond our human idiocy
and frequent evil towards something which connects us to the divine to me there's something unique and special and lasting about CS Lewis writes fiction nonfiction with success extremely smart a tremendous writer he's both deep and very popular
“can the contemporary world produce another CS Lewis or is that somehow becoming possible?”
I doubt it's impossible I don't quite share your universal admiration of Lewis I think the children's fiction is really quite manipulative in which case talking of children's fiction I
would look to Philip Pullman who of course isn't a formal Christian believer but seems to me to
talk about profound issues in a way which can engage children very much I guess one could look to run Williams and I would look to the poetry of our former archwish of a canterbury as perhaps his most lasting work I would of course also look to CS Elliot so I guess one says I guess predates Lewis and Elliot says some very profound things connecting him to that
“tradition which I know so well that that of Anglicanism these things happen and when you least”
expect them geniuses emerge like John Bunyan ordinary man in 17th century Bedfordshire creating this extraordinary work of Christian meditation though it's at the centre of it our themes of which I am a little suspicious Calvinist predestination they keep coming and I don't think we should
be worried about them never coming again but has it surprised you how rapidly Anglicanism has
declined because there are just fewer Anglicans right? Are you not well known by religion in England is Islam? No not really Anglicanism has not declined worldwide it is shifted its position How do you know Anglicanism? In England it's numbers have gone down because it is you no longer need to have it as a means of becoming respectable we're a much more varied culture than we were even when I was our boy there are very white and rather boring culture then it is now
exhilaratingly multicultural and yes Islam is part of that and so is Hinduism in there are more
“Hindus in the UK than there are Muslims they're not so prominent I think and there are plenty of”
Sikhs so we have become a multi faith country at the centre of it is still the Church of England and the Church of Rome has done reasonably well in recent years because it's constantly being replenished from outside the country my immigration the great thing about the Church of England is that it has this own now rather unusual mission to the entire nation so that my dad was proud of being able to talk to anybody in his parish whether they came to church or not and is the Church of England is
that one body within the nation which exists to minister to those beyond its walls and not those you can that seems to be a rather precious thing to have and it is also appreciated by the other faith Muslims Hindus Sikhs are pleased that there is an established church at the centre of our country because it is a symbol of the importance the seriousness of religion so it's a happy set of relationships and I look again to our parish churches all the thousands of them and our cathedrals
our cathedrals are an enormous success story at the present day attendants cathedrals is rising numbers through the door visitors beyond congregations are increasing they have a mission to educate to inspire through traditional litigy which is absolutely flourishing has flying actual problems but it is in no way in a state of decay so I may rather more sanguine about the church of England than you might be but I see numbers published it's say five percent of Englishman
go to church or if you just pulled white native born Englishman you know do you believe in the Trinity how many millions would say yes compared to the number of Sikhs Hindus and Muslims that would profess a loyalty to their religions isn't it in terms of actual belief now a minority religion in England well I think you're comparing apples and carrots really
Because what you'd be examining with Muslims Sikhs Hindus is a religion based...
not on systematic thought or theology these are religions of ortho practicing to use a piece of
technical jargon not orthodoxy and that makes you a very different sort of practitioner religion Christianity, Anglicanism, their religions in which you may know a lot about technical matters may you may not you may do what the Hindu does and just go into a sacred space that is a very common attitude within English religion and it seems to me a perfectly healthy one doctrine theology yes Christianity is a religion of such things but that's not all that there is to it
do you think it's possible to have a sustainable Christianity without strong beliefs and how
“if I think of America where I live a lot of Americans either still believe in hell or at least”
will claim they do and they're not outright lying and we're much more religious than Western Europe
is you are should have held necessary? No I know I'm more what you're more religious what you mean is many more of you practice going to church that's a different matter the thing about hell is all right it's there and the Bible but it is profoundly unconvincing doctrine, human beings are are it very capable of creating hells and there is certainly an aspect of human existence which is deeply, deeply inflected with evil and Christianity is a fight against evil but that does not
imply consignment of people to hell it is true that when you stop trying to persuade people of the
real existence of hell very many of them will stop going to church for instance as they have
been Scotland where the church of Scotland's church attendance has plummeted over the last 50 years
“because Calvinism without the belief in hell done amount to all that much that's why a eucharistic”
faith is much more likely to be sustainable and a religion of sacred place is more likely to be sustainable than the religion of reformed Protestantism evolved in the 16th century. Once you remove the stick from religion and maybe the carrot doesn't look so interesting. Fewer people are going to be involved in it that is inevitable we in England used to have church going as a form of social contract you enter the church of England particularly if you're respectable or if you want to make a statement
you enter non-conformist Protestant churches or if you want to make a statement about your culture and maybe ethnic backgrounds you enter the Roman Catholic church that is no longer the case
“so intimately. You also need to look at cases like Scandinavia where the number of regular church”
goes is very small but the church is so no sign at all of fading away and are very high in public esteem and the extraordinary situation in Denmark where church going is not very prevalent I know 10% the population whatever but 80% of the population have been baptized and taking out taking their children to be baptized it is part of a way of being Danish. That may be you might call that folk culture but it is a form of Christianity which may have equal validity it's been
called belonging without believing and that may be a form of Christianity which does not depend on orthodoxy but like so much Judaism depends on orthopraxy things you do in tradition form your religion. Last set of questions are there common barriers for issues that prevent today's young historians from becoming great older historians or another way to put it can there be a younger version who will become a you. Oh well I wouldn't wish to flatter myself by hoping that that would
be the case. The number of books you've written the number of topics how incredibly originally in well research the Kranmer biography is it seems harder to attain that now. Oh I don't think so at all that the whole work of a historian in every generation is to look at what the previous generation say and say well I don't think that's quite right the emphasis or right or perhaps more importantly you have simply not listened to things which I am now going to listen to. I noticed that in my
younger colleagues we have an extraordinarily flourishing world of church history in the University of Oxford
With seminars packed out with enthusiastic young historians how we're going t...
future as another matter but there are still extremely able people coming through the system and that
“is because of the the wonderfully self renewing nature of the historical profession and it's inquiry.”
I quote in the book you may have noticed the remark of an Indian historian of the 20th century so Jadunath Saka who was vice chancellor of the University of Calcutta in the 1920s and so Jadunath under the British Raj was also the chairman of the Imperial Records Commission for the Indian
Empire and they met one day in 1937 a meeting committee meeting of the commission and he
dryly observed that civil servants within the Imperial record office in New Delhi were worried that giving access to the general public to all their archives would unsettle many settled facts beautiful piece of irony and that is what historians do we look at settled facts and we unsettle them and that is good for human sanity it's why you do it is not just the my curiosity as a boy in that suffocate church about it it is to keep the human race sane and to stop it listening to
lies by setting down historical method for judging what is true and what is false so we are the profession historians are the profession which keeps the human race sane we don't give you a cure for cancer we don't give you a rocket to the moon those things can be done by mad people what we do do is show you what are the same things in society and what can be a sane future last two questions first what will you do next in terms of writing and second what do you want
“to learn about next good questions both well i am 74 and i think i may be entitled to a rest i've”
been writing books for 50 years and i think my last this last book on sex and Christianity
is the widest topic i've covered and it may be the most important it is part of my campaign to
make the world sane and what i'm doing at the moment is talking about it as i'm talking to you as i're talking plastic cathedral last night to very large audiences in simple cathedral in London when we launched the hardback version of the book we had an audience of a thousand and when you're getting that sort of number you think well this is an important topic i'm not sure there
“is anything which i can see which i can do as important and inquiry you ask me well one thing i want”
to go on love to go on doing is simply traveling around English Paris churches looking at them i may have seen i don't know six thousand well that means there are eight thousand to go at each of them is like meeting a new person and teasing out a new story so it may be that that's the way that my my final years go again the title of your book is lower than the angels a history of sex and christianity but i'm happy to recommend all your books German McCollock thank you very
much thank you it's been a pleasure thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the show on apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app if you like this podcast please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review this helps other listeners find the show on twitter i'm at Tyler Cowan and the show is at cowan convos until next time please keep listening and learning
