Diarmaid MacCulloch

One of the most powerful social forces is silence. A silent man before a crowd speaks volumes without opening his mouth. Silence is powerful in that it forces the listener to be still within themselves, to not desperately fill the moment with words. In an age where media of all sorts constantly surrounds us, it is nice to gain a little perspective and be silent. Diarmid MacCulloch’s Silence is a look at the use of silence in the history of Christianity.

There are myriad references to show more silence in the Bible and the Tanakh and MacCulloch begins his study there. But even while this is a Christian history, the temptation to dip into Greek philosophy is too great. The fact that the early Church fathers used Greek texts brings in new levels of complexity when discussing cases of silence. The Old Testament, with a mild emphasis on pre-Christ Judaism, revels in episodes of silence in both its stories and its rituals. The New Testament bring with it both the interpretation of the silences of Jesus and Paul’s rebuke of “noisy Christians.” In the Middle Ages, monastic silence became a way of life and a means of self-reflection and each of the Reformations brought a new meaning to silence.

This book is rich in Church history and analysis, and MacCulloch should be commended for his efforts. While many episodes of Christian silence are moments of stoicism and prayer, MacCulloch does not shy away from silence in the heated topics of homosexuality, gender inequality, and child abuse. While silence can be powerful, breaking a long silence can be just as effective. MacCulloch’s investigation of silence as a part of Christian history is as splendid as it is encompassing. A dense but rich book. show less

Anyone sitting down to read a history of sex and Christianity in the twenty-first century is likely to have one reason or another for being in a rage. This book will serve as a receptacle for an impressively contradictory range of furies. It will displease those confident that they can find a consistent view on sex in a seamless and infallible text known as the Bible, or those who with equal confidence believe that a single true Church has preached a timeless message on the subject. Others

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will bring experiences leading them to hate Christianity as a vehicle of oppression and trauma in sexual matters, and they may be dissatisfied with a story that tries to avoid caricaturing the past.

As the author warns us, this is a subject where the reader inevitably brings along a certain amount of baggage. If you didn‘t have strong views, you wouldn’t be here. MacCulloch goes out of his way to avoid treading on our toes during this three-thousand-year jog through the more prurient sides of ecclesiastical history, with the inevitable result that we start to get frustrated with his calm refusal to mock or condemn anybody’s standpoint, however absurd or closed-minded it seems to us in hindsight.

On the other hand, he does take us smoothly through an awful lot of material, clearing up a lot of misconceptions along the way. It becomes very clear that Christianity as a whole has never had a single, consistent teaching on human sexuality. At one time or another, just about anything we might do with our genitals (or to them — cf. Origen) has been condemned by some theologians and licensed by others. Christians have sought to apply the very fragmentary and contradictory teachings found in the Bible to the times they are living in, and come up with what often feels like a baffling range of different answers. Some of these proved to be impractical or destructive, and were quickly discarded, others met the needs of ordinary Christians or the church authorities in some way and embedded themselves in the fabric of ecclesiastical reality for longer or shorter periods of time. Monogamy, for instance, was an innovation adopted to meet social expectations when the church first expanded from West Asia into the main part of the Roman Empire, but stuck, and has only very occasionally been challenged since then (e.g. by the Mormons or by some 20th century African churches).

Obviously, in a book that takes us all the way from Old Testament Judaism to Putin and Patriarch Kirill, we have to spend a lot of time in the Middle Ages and don’t get to look at events in our own lifetime in as much detail as we might like, but there are plenty of other sources for that, and MacCulloch provides us with a comprehensive bibliography. An interesting, useful and quite lively book, even if it does engender the occasional fit of rage… show less

‘What religion am I?’ asks Homer Simpson in one episode of his family’s eponymous cartoon. ‘I’m the one with all the well-meaning rules that don’t work out in real life...uh...Christianity.’ One of the many pleasures in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s amazingly comprehensive book is getting a handle on what historical basis there is for the rules and doctrines of this prolific and mercurial religion, which nowadays seems characterized by extreme reactions of either perfect secular show more indifference or increasingly literalist devotion.

There are excellent books available for all kinds of angles on this story, but a single-volume history of the whole lot seems crazily ambitious. I think MacCulloch has done a beautiful job, and let’s note the fact that anything which is acclaimed by both Christopher Hitchens and the Archbishop of Canterbury as being the definitive work of its kind must be doing something right. What makes it particularly impressive is that it combines a clear explanation of the usual theological debates of the early Church with a very wide-ranging, internationalist scope that also has perceptive things to say about Christianity’s survival and development in Ethiopia, or why it succeeded in Korea but failed in Japan.

Though MacCulloch is too even-handed to build a cumulative argument out of this story, the theme that emerges for me is the constant interplay between Christianity’s interior, metaphorical truths, and the factual historicity of the information by which such truths have been communicated. This is related to a crucial duality present from the very start.

Jewish and Christian traditions want to say at the same time that God has a personal relationship with individual human beings and that he is also beyond all meaning, all characterization.

In part this comes from the dual heritage of Christianity, which is well encapsulated by this book’s provocative subtitle, ‘The First Three Thousand Years’. The first 70 pages trace the Greek philosophical traditions of thinking about divinity – the Platonic idea of a remote, unknowable God – which became fused with Judaic tradition in an uneasy but dynamic relationship that is unique to Christianity.

One result of this, after the Enlightenment, has been a hyper-literalist defence of religion which in modern times can be seen, especially in the US, in the uneducated flourishing of ‘Creationism’. MacCulloch, who demonstrates well that ‘there is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history’, gives such concepts short shrift.

The modern conservative Christian (and Islamic) fashion of Creationism is no more than a set of circular logical arguments, and Creationist ‘science’ has been unique among modern aspirations to scientific systems in producing no original discoveries at all.

Quite; and yet, despite referring to modern ‘fashion’, one thing this narrative shows is that polarities of literalism and metaphoricity have always been there. In the second century, Marcion of Sinope was already writing commentaries on Biblical scriptures which denied any but the most literal interpretations; while his contemporary Origen could write such opposite things as this:

Who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, planted a paradise eastward in Eden, and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life, of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?

MacCulloch notes drily: ‘Origen might be saddened to find that seventeen hundred years later, millions of Christians are that silly.’ And yet neither of these theologians really won out: both saw their writings declared heretical, and the ‘official’ Churches have maintained an uneasy balance between the two ever since. Reading this, it’s impossible to escape a sense of arbitrariness about such decisions among early religious authorities.

This is particularly true when it comes to the bewildering array of theological debates over what exactly was meant by such counter-intuitive doctrines as the Trinity, or Christ’s divinity. It’s instructive to consider how little modern Christians think about such things, given their central importance to early thinkers. Were the three persons of the Trinity separate substances, or one substance manifested in three different essences? The difference was almost wholly semantic, and yet people fought and died over it. Did Christ have two distinct natures, fully human and fully divine, or did he have one composite nature which blended human with divine? The question was fought over with a violence and vehemence that now seems incredible. Those involved would be amazed to know that many modern Christians are probably not sure of the ‘right’ answers to these questions.

While MacCulloch is bracingly clear on the arbitrary nature of many of these doctrines, he is also often critical of modern revisionism – he offers a reminder, for instance, that Gnosticism, far from being a kind of early New-Age mysticism, was generally much more ascetic and authoritarian than mainstream Christianity was. Similarly, a text like 1 Timothy 2:12, often pounced on by the anti-religious because its patriarchal ideas seem so opposed to modern values, is here given a far more interesting and nuanced reading:

One has always to remember that throughout the New Testament we are hearing one side of an argument. When the writer to Timothy inisists with irritating fussiness that ‘I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent’, we can be sure that there were women doing precisely the opposite, who were probably not slow in asserting their own point of view. But their voices are lost […].

One thing that this book creates is a deep awareness of just how different things might easily have been, had a few decisions gone the other way. It is fascinating to realise, for example, that if Islam had not suddenly exploded across the Middle East, the centre of Christendom in the Middle Ages would almost certainly have moved east to the region of Iraq, rather than west to Rome. MacCulloch is especially good on the interplay between these two faiths, offering such titbits as the fact that Islamic minarets may well have come about in imitation of Christian stylites – the early Orthodox monks who lived their lives on top of pillars. Such fascinating windows on history and belief are thrown open right the way through to the modern day, revealing such unexpected delights as the fact that most Christians among the Maasai in southern Africa think of God as a woman.

It’s hard to find much fault with this book, although there will always be sections where the narrative flags a little, depending on where your interests lie. I thought the tone was exemplary – in the words of Rowan Williams, who reviewed it for the Guardian, it is ‘neither uncritical nor hostile’, which is no small achievement in itself. In one of his most felicitous phrases, MacCulloch describes Christianity at one point as ‘a marginal branch of Judaism whose founder left no known written works’. Such a faith is always going to be a struggle between different interpretations, leading to a term – ‘Christianity’ – which can embrace the incense swung around an Orthodox icon, the speaking in tongues of a Pentecostalist, the resonant stone slabs which call faithful Ethiopians to prayer, and indeed the breezy indifference of Homer Simpson. If any book can give you a sense of how such diversity developed, and what it can possibly have in common – it’s this one. show less

There's not a lot to fault here. The fascinating story occasionally gets bogged down in religious terminology and you may need a scorecard to keep track of all the various players art some point, but McCulloch's narrative is compelling and fair. This is not a book about the truth of the bible or the integrity of biblical text, although it touches upon those matters. It is more a book about the beginnings of the Christian Church, its success in putting down early heresies, then its later show more splits into Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant (and all the sub-varieties within at least the last two of these.) Along the way a modern reader should be repulsed by the violence committed in the name of religion--I won't even say in the name of god, although I'm an atheist, since it is so clearly about preserving the hegemony of one church or another. McCulloch tries to point out good things along the way, and a few folks do emerge as principled and thinking. But the church leadership (see The Bad Popes for some good examples) is often out of touch with reality. Infallibility? Give me a break. The last part of the book focuses on the changing nature of Christianity after its separation from government. McCulloch makes some hopeful noises, and yes, despite those of us who just wish it would go away, religion still holds a central part in the lives of people all over the world, including well over two billion Christians. I just have to be honest and admit that they are going to outlast me. But books like this do provide a better understanding of and even some enjoyment in Christianity. show less