My Conversation with Diarmaid MacCulloch

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and Diarmaid explore whether monotheism correlates with monogamy, Christianity’s early instinct towards egalitarianism, what the Eucharistic revolution reveals about the cathedral building boom, the role of Mary in Christianity and Islam, where Michel Foucault went wrong on sexuality, the significance of the clerical family replacing the celibate monk, why Elizabeth I—not Henry VIII—mattered most for the English Reformation, why English Renaissance music began so brilliantly but then needed to start importing Germans, whether Christianity needs hell to survive, what MacCulloch plans to do next, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: 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 clan structures. What’s your view of that hypothesis?

MACCULLOCH: It’s, as usual with such hypotheses, far too simple. I don’t see that so at all. Cousin marriages went on 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? Clans, families were not broken up by Christianity. By far, the reverse. Those structures did not change very significantly. No, I don’t think that really works at all.

COWEN: Why does Islam so emphasize the sexual desires of women relative to Christianity?

MACCULLOCH: A good question. Because the Quran allows that to happen? The Quran has been interpreted by men when very often what it’s talking about is just people, so that may be one explanation. Islam did remain very much a militarized culture to start with, so it’s almost by definition run by men. There within it, is 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 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. 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, first, the 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.

COWEN: 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 role in Christianity is much more circumscribed.

And:

COWEN: Why are there still a fair number of English Catholics, but so few in the Nordic countries?

MACCULLOCH: Now, an interesting question. Lutheranism became much more universal in the Nordic countries. Catholicism did not survive there. The monarchies of these countries were, I think, much more thorough-going in suppressing it. I think the nobility also decided to go over to the Reformation fairly uniformly in Sweden, Norway, Denmark. Of course, it does matter when the nobility make decisions.

In England, they were divided. Quite a lot of the nobility and gentry did stick with the old faith, maybe because they admired many of the bishops of the old church. 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.

Yes, the picture is very different in England to that in Scandinavia. 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. 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’ve now rejected so much of Catholicism too. Fascinating different stories next to each other there.

Recommended.