Kaitlin’s Reviews > Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity > Status Update

"In consequence, even if the emphasis in marriage returned to the civil contract as in the early Church, the expectation remained that it should be marked by some church ceremony."

"And, therefore, virtually for the first time, theological discussion of marriage and the family was conducted by those with practical experience of marriage: even by some women."

"[Women] were distanced from formal Latin intellectual training in doctrinal propositions or in the argumentative clashes of scholasticism, but they could still use their imaginations to enter divine hiddenness, in the free explorations of the human mind that stretch across world religions in the form of mysticism."

"There were always other voices."

"What does remain is a substantial contemporary literature of argument in favour of clerical marriage . . . . Its arguments were straightforwardly biblical, with no need to resort to typology or allegory, unlike the proponents of clerical celibacy."

"A censorious passing angel submitted a critical report on Coldingham to a particularly austere male member of the community; the specific wickedness seems to have consisted of accomplished weaving and oversleeping, plus 'feasting, drinking, gossip, and other delights.'"

"Everyone, male or female or eunuch, could reach God through the contemplation of icons whenever they sensed God calling them to it. Devotion to icons wherever they may be founds remains a form of sacred democracy in Orthodoxy, undergirding it against the powerful who would like to monopolize Christian allegiance."

"Indeed, it is perhaps only after 676 that we can speak unequivocally of a thing called Christian marriage affirmed by the Church[.]"

" At most celibacy had been an aspiration for a tiny minority of would-be philosophers, and, with vanishingly rare and partial institutional exceptions like the Vestal Virgins of Rome, Graeco-Roman culture produced nothing like a monastic community, any more than did mainstream Judaism."