“Monastic Desires” – A Book by Derek Krueger on Homoeroticism and Homophobia in Medieval Orthodoxy

“Monastic Desires: Homoeroticism, Homophobia, and the Love of God in Medieval Constantinople” is a book by the American historian of religion Derek Krueger, published in English by Cambridge University Press. The work studies Byzantine monasticism as a space where the renunciation of sexual life did not eliminate desire, but redirected it into religious forms.

Derek Krueger is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a specialist in Byzantine Christianity. His previous books include Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium and Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East.

At the center of the study is Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), a Byzantine abbot and one of the key writers of medieval Orthodox mysticism. Krueger shows that Symeon’s language about love for God, union with the divine, and the deification of the body was saturated with homoerotic imagery. At the same time, the same monastic culture produced strict norms of control: sermons, biblical commentaries, saints’ lives, and monastic rules warned against male same-sex desire and connected it with sin, punishment, and fear of the body.

The book examines these contradictions through Symeon’s writings, hagiography, penitential canons, monastic instructions, the tradition of John Climacus, and the works of Niketas Stethatos. Instead of placing monasticism outside the history of sexuality, Krueger places medieval Eastern Christian spirituality within that history. For this reason, Monastic Desires is important not only for Byzantine studies and the history of Christianity, but also for queer religious history: it shows how the love of God, bodily discipline, fear of same-sex desire, and male monastic intimacy existed within one religious system.