Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Real Virgin Mary

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

Why has the idea of the Virgin Mary’s virginity been so important?What does this tell us about the relationship between Christianity and sex? And what else do we know about this woman?Joining Kate today to help her get to know more about Mary, her life and her influence is author and historian Sir Diarmaid Macculloch.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link - https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/voting - and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you!Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. You are you, I am me, and this is Betwigs the Sheets. So are we all in the right place? Is everybody where they're supposed to be? You're here, I'm here, right? Okay, the guest is here as well.

But before we can go further, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults, about adulty things and an adulty wake-off and a range of those subjects, and you'd be an adult too. That's all designed to keep you safer. I feel safer. I hope you feel safer. Right on with the show.

Pulling around Nazareth in the first century, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that, well, according to the Bible at least, something pretty seismic is about to go down. It's just a sleepy village of a few hundred people, and one of them happens to be this girl called Mary. Huh, she seemed nice enough, but boy, oh boy, is her life about to change. And what I want to know, though, is who was the real Mary? What kind of woman did she grow up to be?

And just how difficult would it have been to parents someone who claims, to be the son of God. Yeah, there's no mum's net for that one. I have got just the guest who's going to help us get to know Mary a little bit better. Why do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect

copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the fire. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, dear. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheet. It's history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. Viginity is a myth.

It is. It's a myth. It's bullocks. It's a social construct. So we'll just get that one out of the way to begin with. You can't test for it. You can't check it. You do not lose something.

It's much better to think of it as a sexual debut. But why was the idea of Mary's virginity so important to the Christians in the centuries that followed her life? What does this tell us about the relationship between Christianity and sex? And do we know any of? Anything really historical about this woman? Well, joining me today is the rather fabulous author and historian, Sir Dermud McCulloch.

And if anyone is going to know the answers to these questions, it's him. But before I can allow you to continue, I can't keep nagging for this. Honestly, Stuart, I feel terrible. Right, okay, so that's my producer. He says that I've got to. He says, I've got to ask this favour of you. They're bored of it, Stu. They know they're supposed to vote for us at the Listener's Choice Awards

for the British Podcast Awards. They know it. They know that the link is in the show notes. All right, okay, I'll ask them. I'll ask them one more time. We're not doing it again. Please could you vote for us for the British podcast awards, listeners choice awards? Right, okay, will that do?

Stu, will that do? He's nodding. Right, okay, on with the show. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Sir Professor Dermad McCulloch. Professor Sermann McCulloch. How about Professor McCulloch? That might simplify things.

Do you not like to whip out the sir? I would. Well, if you want to whip out the sir, Fine by me. Do you ever use it? Just use it on driving insurance documents and things like that. It's just terribly complicated and it's thanks to a mistake of King Edward the 7th. Oh, hello.

Who was told that Anglican clergy could not use a knighthood when they were addressed because clergy aren't supposed to kill people and you see knights do that as part of their occupation. This was totally wrong. But there we are. If you enter a game of Cludo, you obey all the silly rules and say, So I try not to use it myself. That is a fabulous historical nugget, and we've only just got going. You were the author of, well, many, many, many books,

but for the purposes of this show, the book, Lower Than the Angels, a History of Sex and Christianity. Dermud, what on earth possessed you to write this book? 50 years? Well, actually, 73 years of being a gay man. There you go, that'll do it. And about 50 years of being a historian. Mm-hmm.

And these two things come together. Very early in my career, a wise old clergyman said to me, well, one day you ought to write a book because you're a historian of the history of sex. And I sort of said, uh-huh, but that came back to me after I'd finished a completely different sort of book, a biography of Thomas Cromwell, which I had published in 2019, I think it was. Anyway, what was I going to do next? I didn't want to do that sort of book again. I didn't want to do something detailed on Tudor history,

looking at bits of parchment, that sort of thing. So I thought, right, I'll do my other thing, which is big, windy generalisation books about huge topics. And what better, I thought, than the church and attitudes to sex because it's so absolutely topical in the Christian world and beyond it. Every religion at the moment is now obsessed with the subject of saying. and people's genitals, which wasn't the really big consideration in many religions over the years, Christianity included. I often think that. If you could get Jesus here and sort of show him around,

it's like, why are you so concerned with who's going to the toilet? Where, that wasn't the point of what I was trying to do. Exactly. And on the vexed topic of same-sex relations, which exercises all sorts of religions now, Jesus Christ said nothing, nothing whatsoever. And therefore you think, well, is it that important? But now everyone is obsessed by it. You think what, it's a bad idea burning people alive, but Christians did it for a very long time.

And they burn people alive mostly for what the bread and wine in the Eucharist meant, or what sort of church government you had, or what the Trinity meant. And now the whole balance is shifted, and that needs dealing with. That is strange, isn't it, that that's happened? Because you have this weird paradox is that a lot of people would think that Christianity is a faith that isn't interested in sex because there's an overriding narrative of like thou shalt not unless it's in certain circumstances. But when you actually break it down, if you're going around all the time saying don't have sex,

are you having sex, who's having sex? Why are you having sex? Stop having sex. You're thinking about having sex. That's not a group of people who have no issues with sex. No, it isn't. And the thing is that Christianity has Achinterland a background, and it is a Jewish background on the one hand, but it's also a Greek background. And if you look at those two worlds at the time of the coming of Jesus, they were already quite obsessed by saying who should have sex in what circumstances.

The Jews in particular, who are extremely excited about marriage and actually very unenthusiastic about even celibacy, whereas the Greeks had a... And the Romans with them had a very different attitude to sex. It was all about free males. And free men ran the show. And everything should be okay for them. And everyone else is sort of ancillary to that. That's women. That's actually also young males.

They're all part of the primary world of the free man, which in Latin would be pater familiaeus, the father of the family. It's all centered on that patafamilias. It is, isn't it? And when it comes to women and sex, because we're actually here today to talk about the Virgin Mary, that is a very interesting dichotomy that emerges

is the veneration of the Virgin, but also how other women are treated in biblical texts. Because there is actually quite a lot of sex in the Bible, even if they're running around saying, don't do that. There's quite a lot of it. I mean, there's two sisters early on who were said to want lovers with genitals the size of donkey, or something absolutely.

Yes. Prophet Ezekiel. That's the one. I'm surprised and shocked. You've looked that up. It stood out. The naughty bits of the Hebrew scripture. The Hebrew scripture, which Christians call the Old Testament,

is absolutely enthusiastic about physical sex. It's got a book called The Song of Songs, which Christian thinks is about marriage, but actually it isn't. There's not really a mention of marriage in it. It's about love and sexual love. And a lot of it may have been written by women, most of the Bible, written by men. But it is the consensus of scholarship these days that these are texts which include a lot of writing or singing by women.

Women could sing more than they wrote. And you can identify songs in the Old Testament, which may have been composed by women, certainly sung by them. Wow, I didn't know that. What's the evidence for that? Why did they say that they were sung by women? Because women are not the literate class in the ancient world, but they have quite clearly a world of dance of song and that is part of society. And so their song may be passed down from generation to generation of women, but in the end, it may be written down by men and form part of a biblical narrative. Wow.

When you go to much older faiths like Babylon, you get to me like Inana and we've got records of she sing songs. as well, quite rude ones. They're Song of a banana. Yeah. So there's nothing exceptional about Jews. They reflect the norm in the ancient world, particularly the Eastern Mediterranean. So let's talk virgins then. We've got, as you're laying the groundwork here, a group of people that are quite enthusiastic about sex. It certainly doesn't seem to be a don't do that, don't have sexual pleasure type of a world. They have their own hang-ups and we can get into that. When does this idea of venerating virginity come in? Well, firstly, the Jews and the Hebrew scripture which they created are not enthusiastic about celibacy.

They like their women virgins because that's helpful for the men who are going to marry them. But there is no sort of cult of virginity in the Hebrew scripture. And there isn't actually in the New Testament. That's the texts which Christians created for the life of Christ. I mean, you think of the great world of monks and nuns, which we'll no doubt go on to talk about, it is not there in the New Testament. And monks and nuns have always found problems justifying their existence in terms of the New Testament.

So you have to think, well, where does it come from when there's hardly any reference to anything which looks like monasticism in the New Testament? In fact, the one reference which you might say looks like a monastic community, people sharing goods, for instance, is in the book of acts. and the story is that he failed. So that's really not a good basis for monasticism.

You do find it in the Christian church pretty early but not that early. What I mean is the second century of what we call AD or the Common Era, CE, rather than anodomini. So second century, and where do we find it? We find it in Syria, in the eastern Mediterranean, West Asia, if you prefer. and you have to think, well, where's it come from? It's there in Christianity. And you're getting monks or people who look like monks and nuns by the end of the second century. Well, my suggestion, not just me, is that we look eastwards.

Because the Syrians were the great traders of the ancient world. They're very commercially minded, energetic people. And they traded beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire, which they were in. And where would they trade? they'd trade to the great empires of the East, East Asia, China, of course, but also, crucially, India. And what would our Christian Syrian traders in the second century find when they got to India? They'd find monks and nuns, Buddhist monks and nuns, Hindu monks and nuns. And I can see them, and this is an entire speculation, but I can't see any other exclamation.

I can see them saying, this is rather good, where traders will trade back. this idea within our Christian faith. And that's why you get monks and nuns developing within Syrian Christianity. I think these sources are Hindu and Buddhist. They are not biblical. A lot is made of the fact that Jesus allegedly didn't get married and didn't have children. So the followers of, perhaps virginity are following his example. But not a lot about that's mentioned in the Bible full stop. You're right. I think Jesus, was a single man with no family and no children because some of the disciples are clearly delineated, sketched out as married people. The apostle Peter, for instance, is notorious. He's

got a mother-in-law, so must have a wife because of a mother-in-law. But Jesus does look like a celibate, but there are quite a few people in his time who were founding cults or who were prophets within Judaism, who were also single. So it's a thing. It's not just a a Jesus thing, it is now often said that, oh, well, it's clear his wife was Mary Magdalene. Now, that's nonsense. There is no ancient evidence of that whatsoever, and the evidence often is modern fakery. So let's just clear that one out of the way. So we have a single man, yes, but leading a set of disciples, some of whom I call the 12 apostles, some who are just apostles, some of whom are just disciples, and there are lots of married people. And you look at

look at the early Christian communities there in the New Testament. And they look like families. They look like families in the port cities of the eastern Mediterranean. There's no hint that they're getting together in monasteries. That is, again, jumping to the second century. It's a second century thing. Let's talk Mary then. Because I'm endlessly fascinated by how you understand Mary within the Christian pantheon.

Because one of the central tenets is there's one gods, but there's the Trinity. but there aren't goddesses, but there's Mary, and people pray to Mary, and she has shrines, and she has devotees. So she is occupying that place of being a goddess, but she's not a goddess. No, and you have to put the word eventually into everything you just said. Eventually, she has shrines, but not to start with. What have you got to start with? You have the story of a boy Jesus who is born of Mary.

That's quite clear. It's there all through the New Testament texts. But there is also something odd about this boy. Mary went on to have a husband, Joseph, and it is, we are told, that they were already engaged when it became apparent that Mary was pregnant. And it is quite clear that Joseph was not the father of Jesus. That's clear from all sorts of aspects of the four gospels. And then stories are attached to the birth of this baby from Mary. Let's keep. that, that's definite from Mary. But the stories are extraordinary, aren't they? They feather out in two of the Gospels, Luke and Matthew, into the most extraordinary events, angels, the coming of an angel to Mary and also to Joseph in one of the Gospels. There are shepherds, there's a journey to Bethlehem.

The funny thing is that everything else in the gospel does not suggest any relationship between Jesus, Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. And to cut a long story short, I think that all the things we hear in school, Nativity plays at Christmas, they're all myth, except for Jesus was born of Mary, her husband was Joseph. That's historical fact. But everything else is added. Why? Why is it added? It's added to make sense of something you mentioned in passing, that this is the birth of God. in a sense, from a human mother,

but also a human mother in which the story obstinately says that the father of the baby is not her husband, Joseph. And very early on, non-Christian said, well, look at that. That basically means he's illegitimate. He's the son of someone else. That joke has been around for a while then. Since the second century, at least. I suspect it reflects reality.

this birth of Jesus is not in the normal family setting of Judaism. And the two stories, Luke and Matthew, very different stories about the birth of Jesus, squarely face up to that. And they are saying, yep, this is a different sort of birth. It's a human birth, yes, but it is not the sort of birth you'd expect. Now, it seems to me that when you strip away all the miracle story, What the miracles are trying to say is, yes, this is a really special birth. And it has the most special things about it.

The powers of the world, King Herod, all that sort of worldly power, is defeated by this birth. And that's a message of liberation. It's a message of good news, which it reflects off the reality at the middle, that this is an irregular birth. It's a birth, if you like, by the Holy Spirit, who is the spirit of randomness, of the unexpected. And that's what's built in, particularly into Luke's story, because it is Mary is pregnant by the Holy Spirit. So that's the basis in which you're working. Mary is a girl from Galilee who does marry, a man called Joseph, they have children. And that's true. It is true. It's in their gospels and it's sort of casually put in there. Jesus' brothers and

sisters came up and he wasn't best pleased when they appeared. He's never actually very pleased when his family, including his mother, come along. And that clearly it reflects some sort of reality. What I think it reflects is arguments within the church after Jesus' death and resurrection about who should lead the church. Should it be family members or should it be inspired people like the apostle Paul. And so the stories of the Gospels are actually written by that latter group, the non-family people, saying, yeah, hang on. The family are not actually the priority in the church. It is us, lot. It is everyone who believes in Jesus. And Jesus actually is made to say that in the Gospels. The family appear. And he looks around, he's been told, your brothers and sisters

are here. And he looks around and says, these are my brothers and sisters, not my Family is the implication, including Mary, including Mary. He can be quite snotty with her on occasions, can't he? You know, a sort of bit of a petulant adolescent, I suppose. But then I was going to say he's only human, but he's not supposed to be. What is only human? He is as human as divine. It is making a theological point.

They're telling stories which are meant to show you what we would technically call this jargon word theology. But they're talking about truth. It's a different sort of truth from. the banal historical fact, for instance, that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066. It's not that sort of historical truth. It is truth about this most important story of all. The birth of Jesus, the life of Jesus, the death of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus. So that puts a different spin on things because if you remember that he has siblings, then Mary, the Virgin Mary, there should be a sort of a bracketed afterwards, virgin for a bit, Mary.

because presumably she didn't stay her virgin then. She didn't. This has always embarrassed the church that you can't get away from the fact that in the New Testament in the Gospels, it talks about the brothers and sisters of Jesus. And you can get up to the number seven by the names of those who are actually named in the New Testament as relatives of Jesus. And at least two sisters. And the church simply forgot about this or explained it away. in later centuries right up to the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.

When the Protestants, of course, said, well, our religion is Bible, and we go back to the Bible. And the more radical of them said, well, actually, Jesus had brothers and sisters. And actually, many Protestants were shocked by that, but it's no less than their truth in the Bible. And so Protestants who said this were really on the outside, but they had seen the reality. I'll be back with Dermard and Mary after this short break.

I buy completely into the idea that Mary and Joseph were real historical figures, that Jesus was the real historical person, whether you have faith around that or not. This is a person who had some quite groovy ideas. But we sort of see this, the veneration of the Virgin building over time. And when does that start to happen? Well, once more, significantly, it's Syria in the second century, just at the time that I'm seeing the first monks and nuns, Syrian theologians start talking a lot more about virginity

than the New Testament had done. So we have writings, texts from that period. One of them has a terribly complicated name, I will say it. It is the Prott Evangelium of James. This means a sort of gospel prelude of James. And it fills in the bits which are missing in the New Testament. And this is the infancy of Mary, the life of young Mary, and the birth of Jesus. And this is where we get the first references to Mary being perpetually virgin, virgin all the time,

with most extraordinary stories attached to it that a midwife comes along and investigates Mary and is skeptical that she's been a virgin. and the midwife inserts, shall we say, some fingers into the Blessed Virgin Mary and is he immediately punished from heaven by it because her hand catches fire. Oh my God, that wasn't in my school nativity. Wow. Oh, no. But this isn't the Proto-Vingal James.

And then, of course, an angel is told miraculously to restore the hand to this unfortunate person because she's been taught a lesson. And that is that Mary is an ever virgin. And that's a really important dropping off, or starting off point from the idea of Mary being a virgin throughout her life. And at the time, this text, this Proto Evangelium, was thought eccentric. It was not mainstream, and it took about 150 years before people all over the Christian world started saying,

I see the point of this Syrian text. And so it becomes really important, really important. Are they just not read the Bible bit where Jesus has brothers and sisters before they came up with this Mary and her flame-retardant vagina story? It is because suddenly it really matters that purity, virginity, celibacy are central. Because by and large, increasingly, theology, talking about God, is being done by celibates, by virgins, by monks, by nuns. And it is their priorities which now decide what the church's priorities are.

And monasticism was just such a success story in the early church. It spread from Syria all over the place. By the 4th and 5th century, monks and nuns and monasteries and nunneries were there everywhere in the Christian world, and they were the people doing the thinking, doing the talking. And of course, there is a sort of consequence of that, a spin-off from there, that marriage had become a second best. What is the big story is virginity.

And getting to heaven is easier for virgins and celibate than it is from married people. Well, now we have a conundrum that the early church found itself getting knotted up into quite regularly. If you want everyone to be a virgin, hurrah, go and be a virgin. But we are going to run out of little Christians pretty quickly. If somebody has to be having sex, so how are we going to square that? circle. Well, we just have to tolerate marriage. Okay. It is rather tolerating marriage. And one early theologian, my origin by name, came from Alexandria, did say that anyone who's had sex shouldn't have anything to do with worship immediately afterwards. It's too yucky. It's too

disrespectful. And this actually may be why you get separate church buildings from the second and third century, because these are places you don't have sex in. I, I, I, I hope you don't. I do not. And from then on, marriage is there. Of course, it has to be there because most Christians still are getting married and having kids. But it is not really the church is concerned. It's interesting how little the early church talked about marriage.

And the fascinating fact, this is a killer fact, which I tell people about sex in the early church. In the early church, there was no such things at church wedding. we now argue about whether same-sex people should get married in church well in the other church no one got married in church and I'm talking up to the fourth and fifth century here it's not a thing you associate with church and even then it's a very slow process church weddings became the norm in the very eastern part of the church

in the 7th century in Western Europe the world of the Catholic church it's the 12th century Well, Christian marriage is a sort of a medieval invention. It's new. It would have been very baffling to the people who actually wrote the scriptures, the idea of that. Yeah. But on the other hand, a lot of clergy in the early church, probably the majority, were married. They weren't monks, but they were married with kids. So that's something which, again, the medieval world in the West changed. And Mary is part of the process of doing this. There is a lady called Tecla, who is supposed to be,

a big mate of Paul of Tarsus, the Apostle Paul. You see developing in the Syrian church again, interesting, in the 4th and 5th centuries, and then Mary, soon after that, spread throughout the Christian world. So we really are talking quite late in the development of Christianity. And the one of the shrines, you see, the shrines of Our Lady, shrines of St. Mary, are 5th century onwards. and again, very many of them medieval. Someone else that you see coming out in medieval theology, it has been described by some scholars as misogyny that develops within the church around

sort of like your St. Jerome's and your early four things like that. And they're contrasting Mary with Eve. This sort of battle starts to emerge. Could you speak to that a little bit? Did Eve's role develop as well from somebody that went scrumping in the Garden of Eve even when she shouldn't have done. Well, already the Jews had made this the basic of a cosmic story. Adam and Eve are the people who betrayed us all by disobeying God.

And remember, it's Eve who does the first disobeying. She sort of eggs Adam on to eat the fruit. Let the whole side down. Yeah, yes. Of course, it's not an apple in the Old Testament. It's a fruit to the tree. It's going to be nothing and there are lots of early explanation. The point is, it's already there in the way that Jews,

see their religion, a cosmic disaster caused by you and me, or our mom and dad, rather, Adam and Eve. So that part of the story is there before Mary, before Jesus. But then as Mary's role grows, and in the second century you can begin to see bishops and theologians already saying this, well, if Eve destroyed everything, then clearly Jesus' his mother, simply by being his mother, put it all right. and she is the one who reverses the fall of humanity simply by being the mother of God. And then the implications of that, it's very physical.

You can't get away from it being physical, but the embarrassment around how much sex might be involved. And then, for instance, once you start saying it's the Holy Spirit, in the sense of a bit of God, who was the father of Jesus, well, how did he and Mary link up? Which orifice may once ask is the way in which the Holy Spirit makes the connection, and no prize is for guessing, it is not the normal one by which children are made. It's any other available orifice.

It could be the nose, for instance, because one theory among theologians was it is the sweet saver of the Holy Spirit's message, which is conveyed to Mary's nose. Actually, that's not very easy to express in art, which I think is one reason it wasn't very popular. But the big one which most theologians thought is most plausible is the ear. It's an orifice, and Mary listens to what the angel says, and she is given the message by the ear. So a lot of medieval art shows that. It shows the image of what's called the Annunciation, Mary being announced that Jesus is coming, the angel announces it to her.

And that's what she hears. So it's all done via the ear. Is there a correlation between some medieval and later iconography I've seen of Eve being whispered to by the serpent then? Yes, exactly. Wow. It all makes beautiful symmetry. It does. And this is the second century idea.

One theologian called Irinaos is the heart of this, that they are a corresponding set of women. and particularly if you're speaking Latin, which he didn't. It was a Greek speaker, but soon there were Latin speakers doing theology. And the great thing is that Eva's name is Eva. Yeah? Well, Our Lady, Mary, is addressed by the angel, Hail Mary. And in Latin that is Ave.

A-V-E. You see, it's the other way round from Eva. It's a beautiful piece of poet. and anyone who speak Latin sees the point. So it's a lovely way of expressing this sense of reversal that all harm done by Eve and Adam is reversed by the second Adam who is Jesus and the second Eve who is Mary.

And there was a lot of debate around what kind of sex was going on in the Garden of Eden. I remember St. Augustine came up with a really interesting theory of how Adam and Eve were having sex. It was like by osmosis almost, lying next to each other. August is not terribly specific because he doesn't want to be yucky. But what he's describing and clearly intends is that it must be a fairly conventional form of sex as we know it. Yes.

But it mustn't have the awful connotations of losing control, which does seem to be to be a rather usual characteristic of sex. He says it very specifically. it's about losing control after the fall. And that's why it's so tainted. But he's insistent, and I think this is of any healthy insistence, that sex was there, at least potentially, before the fall of Adam and Eve. Now, the importance of that is someone you've mentioned in passing,

Jerome, a Latin-speaking theologian of the time of Augustine, who absolutely detested sex. And he argued, and many other, Theologians, particularly in the Eastern Church, argued that sex wasn't there before the fallen of Adam and Eve. It is part of the thing which Satan brought in. And actually, it is therefore satanic. Sex is satanic, according to such theologians. Oh, that's where it comes from. Yeah. And Augustine, who many sees a gloomy old thing, actually is saying something much more healthy. He is saying, no, sex is part of God's plan. We've mucked it up because we've fallen. But it's still there as part of God's plan.

And that means that marriage is also part of God's plan. And we must respect it. I had to learn this about Augustine because I always thought gloomy old Augustine. But then I started reading more Augustine. I saw the point that he's writing really against St. Jerome and really rigorous, grim theologians like that to say marriage is good. he wrote a treatise called of the good of marriage

de bono conugali, which he did pair with a treatise about how good virginity was, but interestingly, in the treatise on virginity, he's very insistent on humility. He's very aware that virgins and celibates may be giving

themselves airs at the expense of the marriage. And there's so much, which is fascinating and sympathetic in Augustine, we must give him credit for what he did. Wasn't he a bit of a scallywagging his youth as well, Augustine? Well, he was doing what a conventional young Roman man would do. He had a mistress until it came to be time to get married,

and he lived with a mistress for a very long time, 16 plus years. They had a son who I think may have been an accident, because in Latin he was called Adeodatus, which means given by God. And it suggests to me that God had made that decision, not the couple. but it doesn't matter really. The big thing is that he was a man who knew the joys of marriage, a link with another person. He knew passion,

and he was prepared to respect it and try and give them a meaning for it in Christianity. I'd never thought of him that way before. I've always thought of him as one of the dower, thou shalt not gloomy early Christian teachers. But when you actually point that out, yeah. A bit like gloomy old Paul, you know, Paul Tarsus. who's always thought was a gloomy old chap as well.

He wrote something fascinating about marriage and already begin to get the sense that marriages are given by God saying it is mystical because he said in one of his epistles, each partner in the marriage, the boy and the girl, the bride and the groom, they have equal duties to each other in a sexual way. Their body is owned by the other person. Any old Roman would have said, yeah, of course, my wife's body is my property. But no, Paul is saying, that too, that too,

Yes, but the wife owns the husband's body. That's really radical. It sounds like our love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage sort of attitude to marriage. But that's a modern thing. We've sort of had to rediscover that from Paul. I'll be back with Dermud and Mary after this short break. When you're looking at the early Christian church and the biblical scriptures, is there as much an emphasis on male virginity as there is on women's virginity?

Does that play a part? In scripture, not at all. No, of course not. And particularly the Hebrew scripture. No, it is part of this new movement in the second to fifth centuries when monasticism crystallized. There's a fascinating symptom of that. And it is the art around angels. Now, let me tell you a fascinating fact about angels in the Bible.

They do not have wings. No. There are supernatural creatures in the Bible who do have wings, but they're called cherubim and seraphim, and they're not angels. Wings for angels came in in Christian art in the fourth and fifth centuries, and they clearly borrowed them from somewhere else, and the reason that it's suddenly happening is that now they are identified by with monks. Monks get to heaven quickly, so do angels, and the best way to do that is by having wings, which they had not done in any biblical reference. Check all references to angel in the Bible and you'll see that.

I'm going to write a letter to my old Sunday school teacher and just point this stuff out and just but excuse me, we need some corrections. It's going to ruin those school nativity plays, isn't it? It will do. Especially when I tell them that thing about the angel's hand catching on fire, my goodness. Oh yes, yes, that was a naughty angel making the poor lady's hand burn. But did it put it right? As a final question that I could talk you about this forever and ever and ever,

where do you think the status of virginity is, this is a huge question, the status of virginity is today within the Christian faith. Do you think that it can be challenged, it can be dismantled, do you think it's as important? Because what we know now through medical research is that virginity is really a nonsense. You can't prove it. It's an entirely social construct. Yes, and actually the ancient world knew that too.

Did they? Wow. Yeah, the idea of the hymen, for instance, is a fourth, third, fourth century medical innovation. Well, where is it now? It's where it always could have been and often should have been and was, and that is that it can be extremely liberating to liberate yourself from sex. That was clearly what appealed to all those monks and nuns back in the ancient world,

because they were liberated from all the conventions, all the tyrannies of the family system, the patafamilias, particularly women. And women's relationship with sex It was not what it was today It was extremely uncomfortable It was at the behest of men It could kill you And so it would rather nice alternative

To go off and be an abyss somewhere And the appeal is still there We're going through a phase in our society Particularly Western society Where sex sex sex is everything And actually sex is often quite uncomfortable Quite miserable And even if it isn't

it is not the be-and-all and end-all of fulfillment. And the celibate life continues to show us that. The Protestant Reformation rejected it completely. They said that celibacy, monks, nuns are all part of this big con trick, which we Protestants are rescuing the world from. That was an overreaction. That was chucking out the baby with the bathwater. But now that the churches are often coming together,

I think we can be much more sensible and balanced measured about virginity and celibacy. Damard, you have been fascinating. Thank you so much for giving us some of your very precious time. I've thoroughly enjoyed myself. I've enjoyed myself too. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

Do you have a social media presence or are you smarter? I'm on Facebook, but generally you could just Google around and I'm around a lot there. I wrote this book, which you mentioned, Loden the Angels. I actually read the audiobook of it. So if you want to go on listening to me, You can just find the audiobook at Penguin

and there I am but otherwise there is the book and Kindle and text form and please do go and have a look Thank you so much for coming by You've been marvellous Thank you very much It's been a pleasure

Thank you for listening And thank you so much to Dermud for joining us Honestly how good was he When I talk to his stories like that I honestly think Just pack it up lads It's done It's not going to get any better than that

No one's going to know anything more than this guy is But if you want us to explore a suburb or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. Coming up, we've got episodes on the vanity of Henry VIII and a Shag-Marry Kill episode with the Roman Emperors. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall and produced by Stuart Beckworth. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.