Why sex was a sin
Celibacy barely merits a mention in the Bible. Yet, by the early Middle Ages, it was being celebrated as a shortcut to a seat next to God. Diarmaid MacCulloch explores Christianity’s long love affair with sexual abstinence
Christianity has always been a religion of family values, right? Not if you know anything about its history. For centuries, Christians valued celibacy – that is, abstention from sex and rejection of family life – well above wife and kids. Celibates, especially professed monks and nuns, would get to heaven more quickly than the married.
It was possible to rescue married people from marriage if they made the turn into monastic life. Listen to this horrible tale from one of the leaders in early monasticism, the fourth-century monk John Cassian. In his book of instruction, The Institutes, Cassian reminisces about Patermutus (‘the silent father’), a wealthy man who wanted to embrace the religious life and brought his eight-year-old son along when he entered a monastery. The abbot was having none of this and, seeking to sever the biological bond, separated father and son in different institutions.
Patermutus was then sadistically tested. He heard that his little son was “purposely neglected”, “clothed in rags” and left filthy, even randomly beaten until he cried, just to emphasise that the natural father should not intervene in this cruelty. The story shockingly culminates in a ritually enacted parody of the Old Testament patriarch Abraham offering his son Isaac for a sacrificial death. The abbot ordered Patermutus to throw his son into the river, and the pair were actually at the water’s edge before two strategically placed monks intervened to tell the father he had passed the test of loyalty to his new vocation. Like Isaac, the boy did not die, but now Patermutus had lost everything from the past. He was no longer even a parent.
Cassian’s readers were expected to commend the tale of Patermutus and his little son, because Patermutus had become a celibate. From at least the fourth century, celibate men and women – hermits, monks and nuns who had rejected involvement in any form of sex – were seen as spiritually superior to conventional biological families which arise from the messy business of sexual relations. That remained so for the next millennium, especially in the western church. But why?
Confronted with this question, it may seem reasonable to start by looking for clues in the Hebrew Bible or the Christian New Testament. But there’s little or nothing in either that provides a basis for monastic life or celibacy. Just the opposite. Judaism was, and remains, a religion where the family unit is central, and the first generations of Christians pictured in the New Testament do not seem to have been too different in their attitudes.
Instead, it’s second-century Syria that provides the first sighting of the practice of celibacy, long after the last books in the Bible were written. Geography and the interaction between Christians and other faiths may provide clues as to where the idea came from.
Syrians were the great entrepreneurs of the eastern Mediterranean. They traded west into the Roman empire, but also east, in India, central Asia, even China. What did they find in the east? Monasteries – communities of celibates, both Buddhist and Hindu. Syrian Christians may have noted a good idea, profited from it spiritually and exported it back home.
Whatever precisely happened, once monasticism arrived, it was a huge success story. More and more Christians wanted to be monks and nuns because celibacy placed them as near as possible to the angels, God’s immediate servants. The angels were beings with a male character, but increasingly not so male as in the Bible (where you’d be well advised to lock up your daughters while they were around). If humans can be only “a little lower than the angels” (a phrase in the Epistle to the Hebrews), monks saw themselves as the nearest humans to the angels – male, but not too male.
Abstinent fathers
A complication arose in the fourth and fifth centuries, when two different classes of males thought of themselves as like angels: monks and eunuchs. Eunuchs were an important part of Christian society at this time: servants to emperors and empresses, and generals in the Byzantine empire. In the Byzantine church, several of the patriarchs (essentially archbishops) of Constantinople were eunuchs. Confusing things further, quite a few monks were also eunuchs. For ambitious young men, castration might offer a chance for career advancement under the Byzantine emperors.
Monastic life expanded further when the Christian church allied with Roman imperial power, and celibacy became a personal choice in a society that otherwise offered limited choices to most people. Indeed, celibacy provided a chance for individuals to approach union with God by embracing a sort of living martyrdom at a time when actual martyrdom was no longer a possibility because Rome had inconveniently replaced persecution with financial subsidies.
Two of the empire’s best-known early monastic leaders – Pachomios in Egypt and Martin of Tours in Gaul – were former soldiers. When they moved from one single-sex organisation to another – army to monastery – they drew on their experience of Roman military discipline to lead their communities in campaigns of prayer against the Satanic spiritual powers surrounding Christians.
Wandering celibates
Down the years, differences developed between eastern and western monasticism. Following John Cassian’s teachings, Benedict of Nursia (c480–c547, creator in Italy of the most influential of all western monastic orders, the Benedictines) condemned the eastern customs of two or three monks living together and monks wandering outside any one community. Both forms of celibacy remain common in eastern Christian monasticism, whereas it was the 13th century before the west reinvented a carefully controlled variety of wandering celibate known as a friar (frater, or ‘brother’).
Most importantly, as monasteries became central to the life and culture of western Europe, the western church took a step unique in Christian history. It fused together two different vocations: celibacy and priesthood. This was part of a wholesale reconstruction of western society led by successive popes, especially Gregory VII (1073–85), who was both head of the church and a monk, in what’s often characterised as the ‘Gregorian’ reformation, or even revolution.
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Originally, very few monks had also been priests and most priests were married but, from the 11th century, Gregory and other western church leaders forbade marriage altogether to deacons, priests and bishops. The logic was that involvement in sex, even marital sex, brought impurity, and impurity threatened the distinctive calling of clergy to celebrate the mass.
A radical divide now chopped western society into two halves: clergy and laity. As the modern historian Dyan Elliott pithily points out, the consequence here is that “a clerical celibate elite requires a copulating laity”, a logic that still shapes Roman Catholic theology of Christian marriage.
Once again, ideas were mutating because, previously, Christian marriage could actually involve rejecting sexual contact. Between the fourth and the tenth centuries in both eastern and western Christianity, you will find stories of saintly husbands and wives, married celibates.
One of the most popular of Anglo-Saxon saints, the high-born Abbess Etheldreda (Æthelthryth) of Ely (c636–679), was venerated even though she refused to have sex through two successive royal marriages. All this changed during the Gregorian revolution as marriage became not simply the only setting where procreation should take place, but was defined by procreation – and as much as possible. This notion is no older than the 11th and 12th centuries.
In the 16th century, Martin Luther and his fellow Protestant reformers challenged this neat twofold vision of society by rebelling against what they saw as the corruption of the old western church. The chief symbol of this corruption was the celibacy of the clergy. Luther pro- claimed that clergy were no different from other humans – and, like other human beings, should be given the chance, indeed almost be required, to get married and procreate. Luther set an example by marrying a former nun, Katharina von Bora, enjoying a boisterously happy family life.
As a result of the shift in thinking triggered by Luther’s Reformation, monasteries were dissolved. All over Protestant Europe, one can view their poignant ruins, as well as enjoy some of the great monastery churches that survived only because Protestants turned them over to use as parish churches. Visit Tewkesbury ‘Abbey’ in Gloucestershire or Dorset’s Christchurch ‘Priory’ to see how splendid their monasteries had once been.
In both Reformation Europe and within Protestantism as it spread around the world, celibacy became regarded not just as second-best to marriage but, worse than second-best, a popish superstition. Clergy families once more took a leading role all over Protestant Europe. In fact, their presence in the community made role-models for other families. (Here, I should declare a vested inter- est. I come from one of those clerical families, indeed a clerical dynasty.)
Yet, once again, there was a reaction as the western church vigorously reaffirmed medieval attitudes to celibacy. The Council of Trent, which fleshed out the ‘Counter-Reformation’, Catholicism’s fightback against Protestantism, pronounced anathema (the most solemn curse possible) on anyone claiming that “the married state excels the state of virginity or celibacy, and that it is better and happier to be united in matrimony than to remain in virginity or celibacy”.
There was also an expansion in the forms of celibate life available to the faithful, courtesy of the emergence of Ignatius of Loyola’s Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. Founded in 1540, the society was from the off an international organisation that offered celibate men rigorous training. In turn, Jesuits offered elite lay families a broadly based and sophisticated education for their sons. Female celibate allies of the Jesuits, the ‘Ursulines’, performed a parallel service for girls.
In countries where the Catholic church held sway, the ideas of the Counter-Reformation were in the ascendancy for two centuries. But then, in 1789, came the French Revolution. This particularly targeted priestly celibacy in a steadily more brutal campaign against the power of the old church. Clergy were hunted down for death, imprisonment or exile, and their only reliable safe course was to marry.
When something of the old Catholic framework returned after 1801, the year Napoleon and Rome thrashed out a deal agreeing the status of the church in France, more than 3,000 members of the clergy, including around 1,000 monks and nearly 300 nuns, sought papal absolution for the ‘sins’ they had committed over the previous decade. In bewildering times, it’s likely many more chose not to reveal what they had done.
Decline of the west
Priestly celibacy was restored in the newly assertive Catholic church, but in the 20th century it faced new challenges, with many Catholic clergy or potential clergy hoping to see it made optional. Instead, Pope Paul VI reaffirmed its compulsory nature in 1967. Many priests renounced their public ministry to marry. In the west, numbers seeking ordination began an inexorable decline.
Among Catholics in many parts of Africa, where marriage is considered de rigueur for everyone regardless of clerical status, the reaction was simply to carry on as usual and to look benevolently on Catholic priests who cherished spouses and offspring. In Africa, significantly, vocations to the priesthood have continued to flourish.
Meantime, Protestant hostility to celibacy and life in monastic communities took a long time to fade. But, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the ‘Anglican’ successor-churches of the Church of England across the world – both within and beyond the British empire – revived communities of monks, friars and nuns. Other churches have experimented with communities, welcoming celibates or exploring religious communal life.
Think of the ecumenical Iona Community, established in 1938 when a team led by the Scots Presbyterian minister George MacLeod began the restoration of the island’s ancient abbey. Even while celibate numbers have fallen across the western world, these new developments show the continuing liveliness, and adaptability, of the ideal.
Hospitality, always a basic principle of Benedictine monasticism, has blossomed into a veritable industry of monastic retreats and guides to spiritual direction. Fascinatingly, monasteries against what they saw as the corruption of the old western church. The chief symbol of this corruption was the celibacy of the clergy. Luther proclaimed that clergy were no different from other humans – and, like other human beings, should be given the chance, indeed almost be required, to get married and procreate. Luther set an example by marrying a former nun, Katharina von Bora, enjoying a boisterously happy family life.
As a result of the shift in thinking triggered by Luther’s Reformation, monasteries were dissolved. All over Protestant Europe, one can view their poignant ruins, as well as enjoy some of the great monastery churches that survived only because Protestants turned them over to use as parish churches. Visit Tewkesbury ‘Abbey’ in Gloucestershire or Dorset’s Christchurch ‘Priory’ to see how splendid their monasteries had once been.
In both Reformation Europe and within Protestantism and nunneries appeal to so many precisely because of their counter-culturalism: in a self-centred and materialistic world, they are devoted to what an ancient Greek philosopher called “that yonder”. For all the historical tensions over the role of celibate religious orders, monasteries and nunneries continue to draw us in – above all, perhaps, when we need a break from the hurly-burly of family life.
Less sex, more power? How celibacy helped early Christian women find their voices
Women were involved in the celibate enterprise as early as men. And in Christianity’s first recognisably celibate group – which appeared in Syria in the second century – we see celibacy offering female believers liberating opportunities.
Syria was a pioneer in Christian music, and the involvement of women as well as men in public musical activity within the group radically infringed gender conventions in the Graeco-Roman world that women should keep silent in public. These proto-nuns were preserved from scandal by the holiness of their celibate state.
That’s not to say, however, that early nuns didn’t run into tensions with conventional male society. They could face misogynistic hostility, even from monks worried about their own emotions. One Egyptian monk turned aside from the road to avoid meeting some travelling nuns. He was rebuked by their abbess, who pointed out: “If you had been a perfect monk, you would not have looked at us, and you would not have known that we were women.”
Celibacy helped women find their voices in the medieval western church. While the growth of universities (all-male institutions) excluded women from scholarly study, they could continue their own explorations for God in ways that outflanked male theologians, through mysticism. Female mystics were far more ready than men to seize on themes of marriage and motherhood in expressing what they felt about their relationship with God, transforming the dependency assigned to women by medieval society.
Visionaries recounted experiences like changing babies’ nappies. Adelheid of Frauenburg, a 14th-century Dominican nun, was reported as wishing to “remove her skin so it could serve as a nappy for Our Lord, her veins to be made into a skirt [for him]”. Sometimes such exuberant female constructions sound suspiciously as if designed to test out the embarrassment thresholds of senior male clergy.
The delicate balance between spiritual freedom and male efforts to control it have remained a theme in female celibate life over the millennia.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is emeritus professor of the history of the church at the University of Oxford. His latest book is Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (Allen Lane, 2024).
This article was first published in the Christmas 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine