DEREK KRUEGER, lately retired from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he taught for 33 years, has produced a work of exceptional interest. Situated mainly in the tenth century CE, in the Eastern empire, and in the monastic tradition, the book brings alive the many tensions and contradictions between a deeply homophobic culture in church, monastery, and society, and the homosocial life of monks which sometimes expressed itself in deeply felt (and highly explicit) homoerotic imagery. Yet, this same imagery was also an expression of the monk’s love of God and desire for theosis (becoming, or becoming one with, God).
Chapter 1, subtitled “The Queer Fantasies of Symeon the New Theologian” (949-1022) describes how “Symeon’s representation of the love of God depends on real-world referents: male same-sex desire and male homosexual activity”. Chapter 2 outlines the construction of homophobia (“an archaeology of opprobrium”) in the writings of George the Monk (mid-800s). This is part of the context in which Symeon’s life and writings are set. Chapter 3, “The Edge of Yearning” returns to Symeon’s writings and examines his Hymns on Divine Love, finding there the uneasy combination of homoerotic desire and the desire for God, awaiting fulfilment in the world to come.
Chapter 4 examines the monastery as a place of perils where queer desire and queer loathing coalesce. While Western readers may be more familiar with monks’ and Christians’ generally gendering themselves female in relation to God (because they are brides of the living Christ), Symeon in his Hymns does not do this. Rather, he fully acknowledges himself as a gay man who gives himself to God and loves God without shame or denial.
Chapters 5 and 6 turn to dire warnings against “man-craziness” (andromania) and “the corruption of boys”, found in four tenth-century texts, while chapters 7 and 8 return to Symeon, but through the eyes of Symeon’s biographer, Niketas Stethatos, an 11th-century monk and disciple of Symeon. Niketas says his idealised subject had “escaped semen for tears”, that is, “The wound of sexual pleasure had given way to the joy-bearing grief of penthos [a sorrow for one’s sins that leads to spiritual transformation], the monastic emotion par excellence.”
A short coda finds in Symeon an “alternative erotics”. This was not passionlessness or apatheia, but an acknowledgment of queerness together with the practice of restraint. This restraint, in its own pain, was simultaneously pleasurable because, while it could be anticipated in this life, in the next life — one of complete union with God — it could be innocently and joyfully fulfilled.
The book will long be appreciated not merely for its meticulous scholarship and easy accessibility, but for its empathy with its subjects, and great sensitivity towards their felt contradictions. It is affectively attentive to the detail and reality of monastic life, its temptations and dangers. While the author wisely desists from suggesting what, if anything, we readers can learn about homoeroticism and homophobia in the contemporary Church, we cannot fail to be impressed both by the empathetic understanding of gay desire in a homophobic context, and by the continuity of that desire and homophobic resistance in our own. The book is an outstanding contribution to church history, gay history, and gay spirituality.
Dr Adrian Thatcher is Honorary Professor of Theology and Religion in the University of Exeter.
Monastic Desires: Homoeroticism, homophobia, and the love of God in medieval Constantinople
Derek Krueger
Cambridge University Press £35
(978-1-009-64833-2)
Church Times Bookshop £31.50