In the seventh of his Hymns on Divine Love, or Erotes, the Byzantine monk Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) took the part of the lover languishing in separation from his beloved.

His beloved, of course, is God, but Symeon’s vocabulary and rhetoric employ tropes of erotic literature. In the first-person singular, Symeon offers a lover’s lament that would not be out of place in late ancient or twelfth-century Greek novels, with their convoluted plots that encourage readerly delight in the separation and longing of lovers. The hymn’s discourse of pothos – of longing, yearning, or desire – renders the love of God akin to lovesickness, heightening expectation of a consummation yet deferred. In the thirtieth hymn, in quick and direct Greek verse, Symeon describes himself crying and wailing exceedingly in his cell.

Symeon’s overwhelming and passionate love recalls but does not quote erotic tropes present in the Song of Songs, such as verse 3:1: “On my bed at night, I sought him whom my soul loves. I sought him but I did not find him.”Footnote ³ The object of Symeon’s love is like a youthful male, conforming his yearning to patterns of same-sex desire of an older male for a beautiful boy, both invoking and subverting ancient norms for pederastic relations between social superiors and social inferiors.Footnote ⁴

Symeon was arguably the most important Byzantine Orthodox religious thinker between John of Damascus in the eighth century and Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth. He often describes salvation as a heavenly marriage, and scholars have long noted Symeon’s frequent use of erotic and nuptial imagery to explore the relationship between the monk and God.Footnote ⁵ What scholars have generally failed to account for is that much of this imagery is homoerotic. Moreover, Symeon engages novelistic tropes of unconsummated desire typical of flirting or separated lovers in late ancient and medieval Greek secular literature, where longing itself often receives thematic treatment, rendering his devotion to Christ both excessive and queer. In the Hymns and other works, and consistent with his emphasis on the essentially bodied nature of monastic practice, Symeon characterizes his piety in erotic – and homoerotic – terms. Carnal fantasy provides vivid metaphors for the devotion he feels for God, who is always already also incarnate.

God offers a most worthy object for the poet’s love. In Hymn Thirty-Nine, God’s beauty, “impossible … incomparable,” together with his goodness, ignite desire.Footnote ⁶ He explains to his beloved, “Because of [these], love and yearning toward You / more than conquer all love and yearning of mortals.”Footnote ⁷ Pothos, or longing, for God “covers all human love [agape]”; it “turns away eros of fleshly pleasure.” And yet in Symeon’s formulation “both eros and agape” for the Savior “are light” itself.Footnote ⁸ Contrary to modern (and some ancient) attempts to rescue some sort of “Christian love” from the erotic, there is in Symeon’s discourse no consistent difference between eros and agape.Footnote ⁹ In this he follows the divine erotics expressed in the sixth-century spiritual author known as Pseudo-Dionysios the Areopagite, who drew on standard vocabulary for erotic relationships between humans when he declared, “Divine love [eros] is ecstatic, just as lovers [erastas] belong not to themselves but to their beloved ones [eromenōn].”Footnote ¹⁰ Symeon’s representation of the love of God depends on real-world referents: male same-sex desire and male homosexual activity.Footnote ¹¹

What might this queer love for God have meant in the city of Constantinople around the year 1000? What did Byzantine monks want? Or rather, what did one influential and controversial Byzantine monastic teacher want them to want? In exploring the love of God through unabashedly erotic discourse, Symeon recasts celibacy. Contrary to expectations, here asceticism does not, in fact, require a negation of desire. For Symeon, monastic discipline is not precisely the opposite of sex.Footnote ¹² Symeon’s sexualized spirituality in itself reveals the impact of the erotic imagination on Symeon’s theology and his understanding of the male monastic, both the subject of his own reflection and of God’s desire for him. Symeon cannot convey or understand the love of God independent of human emotions and experience. Symeon redirects the focus of desire toward God. Desire for God becomes for Symeon its own sort of erotic orientation, a “facing East” full of fantasy and longing.

Symeon’s hymns celebrate such a devotional form in the Orthodox East a good century before the emergence of a similar discourse in the Roman Catholic West in the twelfth century, particularly among the Cistercians, and long before the early modern divine erotics of John of the Cross and John Donne.Footnote ¹³ More significant, however, in Western Christian discourses, a monk usually understood himself as a feminine soul (Latin: anima) married to Christ, a move deftly transgendering. In the writings of the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux in particular, this discourse was greatly aided by quotation from and commentary on the ebullient but consistently cross-sex Song of Songs, a work Symeon seems occasionally to echo but never to quote in his extensive corpus, perhaps because he could not turn its rhetoric to his less heteronormative purposes.Footnote ¹⁴

While Symeon is often cast as a mystic, his Orthodox theology of the incarnation and his commitment to a doctrine of theōsis, or deification, in which the entire human person would be joined to God and divinized, meant that Symeon’s piety never abandoned the salvation of the flesh.Footnote ¹⁵ Symeon employs same-sex desires in order to emphasize the male monastic body as a locus of theosis. The body’s ways of knowing and understanding remain more than simply metaphoric; they contribute materially to knowing that which is ultimately real. Instead of focusing on the soul alone, Symeon emphasizes the masculinity of the monk’s body, for it is his body in its entirety that God loves and saves. It is the monk’s bodily experience that grounds his experience of God. Thus, Symeon’s monk, as we shall see, remains sexed as male, rendering his love of God homoerotic. Moreover, loving the male monk, in turn, queers God himself. Symeon stages his love for God in a monastic context where homoerotic desires were deemed deeply troubling and sex between men could be catastrophic. Symeon found the tension between homoerotic fantasy and cultural opprobrium to be highly productive, providing a vulnerable space in which he could love God all the more.

Symeon’s Life

For the details of Symeon’s life we are almost entirely dependent on the hagiographical account composed by Niketas Stethatos more than thirty years after the saint’s death. Niketas’s Life of Symeon the New Theologian offers a rich portrait of a charismatic religious figure that situates his successes and failures within the context of urban monasticism and church politics. Niketas sought both to laud and to temper the legacy of his controversial hero and thus facilitate the establishment of Symeon’s cult in the city of Constantinople. Niketas was himself a significant philosopher and theologian, and his own concerns pervade the Life. Scholars have generally been suspicious of Niketas’s motives and agenda.Footnote ¹⁶ Nevertheless, between the Life and rare autobiographical passages in Symeon’s own works, a set of biographical details emerges.

Much of Symeon’s life overlapped with the long reign of Basil II (r. 976–1025), a period of growing prosperity and relative stability in the medieval Eastern Roman Empire, which Western scholars have, since the sixteenth century, called Byzantium.Footnote ¹⁷ Symeon was born around 949 in Paphlagonia, a province in north-central Anatolia, to an aristocratic land-owning family with long-standing connections to the imperial court.Footnote ¹⁸ His baptismal name was almost certainly George; he took the name Symeon only upon entering the monastic life in his later twenties. His father’s brother served as a chamberlain at court, likely already during the reign of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, who died in 959, and continuing during the co-regency of the young Basil II and Constantine VIII. As a youth Symeon went to the capital, where his uncle oversaw his education. The quality and level of this education is uncertain; Niketas claims that Symeon eschewed “secular learning … even if he did not totally avoid it.”Footnote ¹⁹ Symeon’s own writings, however, offer ample evidence that he had mastered rhetoric and metrics and some elements of classical culture.

In early adolescence, Symeon was presented to the imperial family. He was given a senatorial rank and the title, possibly largely ceremonial, of spatharokoubikoularios, “sword-carrier of the imperial chamber,” that is, a bodyguard.Footnote ²⁰ Some holders of this title in earlier centuries are known to have been eunuchs, and it is possible that Symeon himself was a eunuch. In the middle Byzantine period, some aristocratic families selected prepubescent sons for castration with an eye toward placing them in imperial service.Footnote ²¹ Although their numbers were always small, in the tenth century eunuchs held prominent positions in the court, military, and church hierarchy. Eunuchs also found their way into monastic communities, most likely when careers at court fizzled or failed to suit.Footnote ²² On the one hand, there is no place in the extant corpus of Symeon’s writings where he says he was a eunuch, and Niketas, who is quite happy to report that other figures in the Life of Symeon are eunuchs, does not say the same of Symeon.Footnote ²³ On the other hand, Symeon appears in one posthumous vision as beardless eunuch. Whether this figment is an accurate representation of how he looked in life or a confirmation after death that he lacked untoward sexual desires is a matter of debate.Footnote ²⁴ For the purposes of this study, I have chosen to remain agnostic on the question, since I do not think we can know for certain and because I do not think knowing whether Symeon was a eunuch would yield markedly different readings of the passages I focus on in the course of this book. In much of his corpus Symeon speaks to the formation of monastic experience in general, an experience shared by intact and castrated monks alike.

When Symeon was fourteen in 963 (or perhaps when he was twenty in 969), his uncle fell out of favor, most likely during a change of regime, and met a violent end.Footnote ²⁵ Symeon began to visit the Monastery of Saint John the Forerunner at Stoudios in the southeastern suburbs of the city, perhaps seeking refuge from court life. The Stoudios Monastery, which had been revived in the early ninth century by Theodore the Stoudite and his brother Joseph, was the most important monastic institution in middle Byzantine Constantinople.Footnote ²⁶ Over the course of that century, it led empire-wide monastic and liturgical innovation, leaving a permanent stamp on all subsequent Orthodox monasticism.Footnote ²⁷ At its height it housed between three and four hundred monks.Footnote ²⁸ The monastery had long been a center of monastic learning. It possessed an excellent library. Its scriptorium produced high-quality manuscripts. By the eleventh century, its artists excelled in luxury illumination. Throughout the period, it maintained strong if complex relations with the court and the patriarchate.

At Stoudios, Symeon became a lay disciple of another Symeon, known as Symeon the Stoudite, or Symeon the Pious. As his spiritual father, the charismatic Symeon the Stoudite instructed him in the ascetic life, heard Symeon’s confessions, and imparted monastic wisdom. In response to a request for guidance in the monastic life, the elder handed him the writings of the fifth-century hermit, Mark the Monk, from whose treatise On the Spiritual Law he would treasure the saying, “When you seek healing, take heed of your conscience.”Footnote ²⁹ This Stoudite elder, however, offered Symeon something more. In his own account, Symeon describes how a young apprentice was once guided by his spiritual father to achieve an ecstatic and immersive experience of divine light.Footnote ³⁰ The method proceeded somewhat unorthodoxly and unascetically and began with the master and disciple sharing a large meal and drinking together before the elder sent him back to his cell to recite a brief prayer for divine mercy and go to sleep. Once back in his cell however, this young man underwent something profound.Footnote ³¹

Niketas places this extraordinary experience in the period when Symeon was still a layman, and in his telling, the elder Symeon resisted tonsuring him, perhaps because their association was perceived as being too close or due to pressure from Symeon’s family.Footnote ³³ The younger Symeon was even expelled from the monastery. Eventually, around the age of twenty-seven, the elder found a place for Symeon at the nearby, and much smaller, Monastery of Saint Mamas, where he was tonsured.Footnote ³⁴

After three years at Saint Mamas, around 980, Symeon was elected superior of the monastery and ordained a priest. While superior at Saint Mamas, he followed the Stoudite custom of preaching three mornings per week to his monks after Morning Prayer, or Orthros. From this period, some thirty-six Catechetical Discourses survive on topics relevant to monastic formation and the development of monastic spirituality.Footnote ³⁵ These teachings involve instruction in techniques of experiencing union with God, not a union earned or merited by ascetic achievement, but which God grants by divine grace. Moreover, the monk does not seek this union only eschatologically, as a consummation at the end of time, but also here and now, in the midst of his own progress. In Hymn Seventeen, Symeon extolls God saying,

Symeon taught that ecstatic experience could and should be an aspect of monastic life, breaking with a long tradition in Byzantine monasticism, going back to the eighth century at least, that had advised against seeking direct visions of God or illuminations of divine light.Footnote ³⁷ Furthermore, he emphasized a strongly affective, or emotional piety, characterized by intense love for God and profound grief for sin.Footnote ³⁸

Symeon served a stormy and controversial tenure as abbot, and around 998, some of his monks revolted against his authority, and perhaps against some of these teachings, driving him from the monastery. Only the patriarch’s intervention convinced them to take him back as their leader. He continued to serve as abbot until about 1005, when he resigned – according to Niketas – to devote himself to his monastic discipline and his writing. He remained at Saint Mamas until about 1009, when a conflict with the patriarchate, ostensibly over his devotion to his spiritual father, now deceased, resulted in his exile across the Bosporus to a village called Chrysopolis, where he led a small community at the Oratory of Saint Marina until his death in 1022.Footnote ³⁹ Around 1035, Niketas edited and published all of Symeon’s writings that now survive, including the Catechetical Discourses delivered at Saint Mamas, the Ethical Discourses written primarily at Saint Marina, and his Hymns on Divine Love, which span both periods of his life, in the city at Saint Mamas and in exile at Saint Marina.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Parable of the Rebel

In his Tenth Ethical Discourse, Symeon employs a homoerotic parable to assist in the formation of monastic spirituality. The parable and the interpretation that Symeon provides offer a fantasy of same-sex desire to structure expectations of salvation. In presenting the male monastic body as the object of God’s eros, the parable invokes themes also found among Symeon’s Hymns. As a whole, the Tenth Ethical Discourse explicates the meaning of the “Day of the Lord,” when all that will be saved will be joined to God. Symeon highlights the place of the repentant sinner in God’s work of redemption. In his story, which Symeon terms a paradeigma, an “illustration” or “example,” an emperor takes a repentant rebel to his bed.Footnote ⁴¹ To illustrate the joy that God might feel at the return of a rebellious subject, the story contains echoes of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but the narrative soon moves to the bedroom, where it remains.

The parable tells of “the emperor of the Christians” and a rebel who had fought for many years against him. “He received messages on several occasions from the emperor of the Christians that he should come to him, and be with him, and be honored with great gifts and reign with him.”Footnote ⁴² After many years, the prodigal became disillusioned with his rebellion and decided to obey the emperor, who had been sending him messages, believing that the emperor would not count the tardiness of his response against him; he had heard of the emperor’s compassion and goodness. The imperial context may reflect East Roman political and military realities early in Basil II’s reign when rebels changed sides in wars against the emperor. Significantly, Basil was a lifelong bachelor whose reported vow of celibacy was a subject of rumor.Footnote ⁴³ Symeon’s interest lies not in the conflict but in the delights of reconciliation.

Like Jesus among the disciples, after Symeon has related his parable, he supplies an interpretation. Symeon’s own exegesis of the passage reads his parable as a type for the repentant monk: “Such is also our situation with God, and I know that it is in just such a manner that the good loving God welcomes and embraces those who repent, who, fleeing the illusory world and its ruler, strip themselves naked of the affairs of this life and approach Him as King and God.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This interpretation makes the embrace of God available to each ascetic, an ascetic who is described in a manner typical of the New Theologian as “naked.” In fact, Symeon often describes the monk as “naked before God,” either stripped bare of worldly things through rigorous discipline or resurrected naked before God on the Day of Judgment.Footnote ⁴⁶ Here, however, the nakedness carries an explicitly erotic charge, as the naked and repentant rebel is destined for God’s bed.

In Symeon’s parabolic narrative, the expectation of the Day of the Lord figures as the expectation of perpetual erotic delights. Indeed, for Symeon the exegetical point of his parable is clear: It should arouse desire and expectation in his monastic audience. His performative utterance flirts rhetorically with what within a monastic context is strictly forbidden. All sexual activity, including same-sex sexual activity, would violate the discipline of the monastic life. Yet Symeon trains his audience’s desire by channeling it.Footnote ⁴⁷ Symeon’s exegesis of his own parable becomes an invitation, as he continues:

The monk’s movement, naked, from falling before Christ, to being adorned with robe and diadem, to entering into the bridal chamber, inscribes the progression from repentance to eternal salvation.

Scholars have been unable to determine precisely where and when Symeon composed the Ethical Discourses, although it seems most likely that he composed these in exile at Saint Marina during the last phase of his life. Themes common to this discourse and some of the poems suggest long-standing emphases in his work rather than a fleeting interest. The original performative context for the Tenth Ethical Discourse also remains unclear: We do not know whether Symeon preached it aloud or intended it for a reading audience beyond his monastery.Footnote ⁴⁹ If the latter, the literary document mimics the form of an oral discourse complete with frequent performance indicators like direct address in the vocative to “my brothers” and “beloved ones.”Footnote ⁵⁰ As in the poems, the speaker performs queer desires. Thus, the category of performance, broadly conceived, provides an interpretative framework in which to consider the deployment of homoerotic imagery in ascetic instruction and raises questions about the place of homoeroticism in middle Byzantine male monastic formation.

Some modern commentators have found the parable and its interpretation troubling. The text’s French editor and translator notes that the story falls into a sensibility that is “a bit questionable” and opines that Symeon “gives the impression of having forgotten the ‘perfected sensation’ that he argues for.”Footnote ⁵¹ The English translator writes, “Sometimes the saint’s gift for image will exceed his discretion and good sense. This appears to be one such instance. We leave it in solely out of respect for the integrity of the text.”Footnote ⁵² The author of an otherwise helpful survey of Eastern Christian mystical traditions reflects, “Symeon’s ‘sodomy in desire’ [Hymns 24.75] may be reflected in his illustration of the king and his servant whose affection for one another is distastefully physical.”Footnote ⁵³ Some of these same critics (and others) have registered enthusiasm for, but little surprise at, Symeon’s more usual cross-sex nuptial imagery.Footnote ⁵⁴ We must resist the threat of expurgation, of course, and it would be good to set modern homophobic prejudice aside in order to have a clearer understanding of Symeon’s sensibilities and the contexts in which he was working. Inevitably this will mean investigating not only medieval homoeroticisms but also specifically medieval homophobias. Indeed, this passage offers important evidence for the erotic imaginary available to a middle Byzantine monastic theologian and the constraints under which it operated.

Observing modern scholarly discomfort, we should note that none of these remarks deny that there is homoeroticism in the text; indeed, they starkly observe it. Rather, these scholars would seem to think, or at least to desire, that this element of the text was somehow severable from the rest of Symeon’s account of spiritual life. Yet, the parable of the rebel is not an isolated instance of homoerotic fantasy in Symeon’s corpus. Regarding the existence of homoerotic themes in Symeon’s works without attempting to integrate these examples imagines that it is possible to understand his theology without it or while ignoring it. How might we do this differently? How might we understand Symeon’s homoeroticism as integral to his way of thinking about God and a monk’s relationship with God and not a mere aberration from good composure? What does it do for us if we understand that the piety that Symeon illustrates in his writing and preaching are rather queerer than some would like?

The past fifty years of scholarship on the history of homosexuality has illuminated the degree to which expressions and understandings of sexuality are culturally contingent and historically various.Footnote ⁵⁵ What did Symeon’s homoerotic fantasies mean in their middle Byzantine contexts? And what did they mean in relation to pervasive middle Byzantine Christian opprobrium toward male homoeroticism? Just as gay identities, as they emerged in the course of the twentieth century, are modern constructs and continue to develop and change in the twenty-first century, we should expect the same of modern homophobias. Symeon’s divine erotics were transgressive, but what exactly were they transgressing? They were not transgressing modern but medieval norms. That is, Symeon was also familiar with homophobias, but they were the homophobias of the medieval Eastern Roman Empire, and these we will need to tease out in subsequent chapters.

While Symeon often invokes divine eros in his understanding of the process of deification, it is debatable whether this parable and its interpretation are “consistent with the New Theologian’s use of nuptial imagery elsewhere,” as one scholar has claimed.Footnote ⁵⁶ It is certainly true that Symeon calls on wedding and erotic imagery in his works, including the First Ethical Discourse, where he reads salvation as a wedding between God and a rebel’s daughter. “It is the daughter of one who rebelled against Him, one who committed murder and adultery.”Footnote ⁵⁷ However, the parable in the Tenth Ethical Discourse is not so simply classified as nuptial, at least not in any conventional sense. Significantly, in this parable, God’s beloved remains male; he is neither transgendered into a bride nor identified with his grammatically feminine soul. Even though Symeon’s own exegesis asks his audience to read the parable as a type of marriage, at the very least, the passage encourages the reader to expand the meaning of “nuptial” to include some sort of otherwise inconceivable middle Byzantine same-sex nuptiality.

How then to read this text as part of the history of eros in Byzantine monasticism? Already in late antiquity, Christian hagiography deployed tropes of desire to describe, promote, and champion the ascetic life. Far from eschewing all desire, the narrative literatures of earlier Byzantine asceticism redeployed the erotic toward consummation with God and toward new conceptions of the ascetic self that seduced audiences to self-control.Footnote ⁵⁸ An understanding of Symeon’s parable within his work as a monastic leader benefits from following the course of multiple and convergent desires: God’s desire for the monk, the monk’s desire for God, and Symeon’s desires regarding the formation of his monastic subjects.

Intertextual Types

Before we contemplate the mysteries of the emperor’s bedroom, it helps to consider some of the literary and typological allusions at work in the parable of the emperor and the rebel, including biblical and Platonic overtones. This paradigm of the repentant sinner both recalls and quotes the Parable of the Prodigal Son. According to the Gospel of Luke, when the lost son returned home, “His father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell upon his neck and kissed him” (Lk 15:20). The father then charged his servants, “Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet” (Lk 15:22). Symeon thus links his own parable to this biblical illustration of repentance, confession, and forgiveness in which the Father, here a type for God, “falls upon” the sinner and kisses him before dressing him in a stole and sandals.Footnote ⁵⁹ As a reenactment of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, this stage of Symeon’s story illustrates divine joy as akin to the joy of a parent’s longing for his son. Symeon’s interest in the Prodigal Son also surfaces in Hymn Fifteen, where Symeon identifies himself as the Prodigal Son, the unworthy recipient of divine love.

In the Tenth Ethical Discourse, Symeon calls his monks to understand themselves similarly as God’s prodigal.

But as Symeon himself says in his parable, it is “not only this.” Within a few sentences, this image of parental love morphs into a depiction of same-sex erotic longing and activity. How does Symeon proceed from the model of a father embracing and dressing a son to a model of intimate bedfellows?Footnote ⁶¹ Symeon’s quotation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son arises in the context of an emperor investing a subordinate in lavish garments. The quick movement from a scene of investiture in the garments of redemption to the dressing and adorning of a bride or bridegroom for a wedding recalls Isaiah 61:10. In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the text reads, “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garment of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of rejoicing, as for a bridegroom he has placed around me a garland, and as a bride he has adorned me with a jewel.” Salvation here figures as a nuptial celebration, an image echoed in the New Testament sayings of Jesus that compare the kingdom of heaven to a marriage feast for a king’s son, and the frequent designations of Christ as bridegroom.Footnote ⁶² In Symeon’s parable, however, the rebel who is both Prodigal Son and lover is not Christ, but a figure for the monk. Curiously, the penchant in Hebrew poetry for repetition with variation renders the beloved in the Isaiah passage first a bridegroom and then a bride, or perhaps simultaneously both. The resulting fluidity with respect to gender provides some biblical perspective on Symeon’s license to turn the monk into the bridegroom, rather than the bride, of Christ.

In the course of the parable, the emperor covers the repentant rebel with two garments. Through these garments, Symeon proffers two different models of salvation. The first, the coronation robe (stole) that the emperor uses to elevate and adopt the former rebel, corresponds to the robes of light and the “robe of glory” that Symeon discusses elsewhere.Footnote ⁶³ In the Fourth Ethical Discourse, Symeon writes, “While it is one thing to be satisfied with cheap clothing and not to desire splendid robes, it is something else again to be clothed with God’s own light.” The passage continues by introducing themes both of lust and of sonship: “For many have despised the first [the splendid robes] while at the same time being dragged down by their thousand other lusts, but it is only those who have been arrayed in the second [the robes of God’s light] who have been made worthy of becoming sons of the light and of the day.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In the Tenth Ethical Discourse the relationship between salvation and the donning of clothing pushes beyond conventional interpretations of baptism as illumination. Immediately after the parable of the emperor and the rebel, Symeon argues that it is not enough simply to have “put on” Christ in baptism: His monks’ self-examination will reveal whether “they have received the power from Him to become children of God.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The second garment in Symeon’s narrative is a chlanidion, an outer garment or cloak that was also used as bedclothes. The term in this diminutive form has no direct biblical precedent, although in Matthew 27:28 Christ is dressed in a scarlet chlamys. The emperor covers the rebel with his chlanidion, keeping them warm and cozy together on the same bed and covering their physical contact. As in many premodern cultures, it was likely common for Byzantine men to share a bed without engaging in sexual activity. In the parable, however, the bed that the rebel and the emperor share becomes a marriage bed.Footnote ⁶⁶

The covering of one person by another with a cloak has sexual overtones in some biblical contexts. Ezekiel 16:4–9 begins with a description of an abandoned child: “On the day that you were born they did not swaddle your breasts [sic in LXX], nor were you bathed with water.” Such a child, ripe for adoption, becomes God’s bride instead: “And I passed by you and saw you, and behold, your season was a season for lodgers [that is, for sexual vulnerability]; I spread my cape [pterygas; literally, wings] over you, and covered your disgrace, and I swore to you and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord, and you became mine” (Ez 16:8–9). In the book of Ruth, a text which Symeon does not cite anywhere in his corpus but is well represented in contemporary manuscripts of the Octateuch, the first eight books of the Bible, the heroine lies down at Boaz’s “feet” and instructs him, “spread your cloak [pterygion] over your maidservant” (Ruth 3:9).Footnote ⁶⁷ “She lay at his feet until the morning, but got up before a man would recognize his neighbor. And Boaz said, ‘It must not be known that a woman came to the threshing floor’” (Ruth 3:14 LXX). Here the spreading of a garment is the precursor to presumed sexual activity. Ruth’s narrative may also give the rebel’s act of falling at the emperor’s feet in Symeon’s parable a sexual valence in retrospect. Both Ruth and the rebel approach their social superior’s “feet” and are later covered with a cloth to engage in erotic activity. While these biblical loci may seem remote from our passage, they provide a frame for understanding theological connections between covering with garments and sexuality.Footnote ⁶⁸

For Byzantine readers, who may have protested too much, the story of Ruth and Boaz had become a story of chastity, despite all appearances to the contrary. The standard, and sole surviving Byzantine commentary on the Book of Ruth was composed in the fifth century by Theodoret of Cyrrhus.Footnote ⁶⁹ It accompanied middle Byzantine copies of the biblical text, governing how it should be read. Theodoret’s commentary allows that some might find fault with Naomi’s suggestion that Ruth lie down at Boaz’s feet. But Theodoret explains that Naomi had confidence in Boaz’s prudence and righteousness. She did not encourage Ruth to “sell her beauty.” And as for Boaz, “Such was the man’s virtue that though a lovely young lady visited him at night, he maintained his continence and conducted the matter according to the Law.”Footnote ⁷⁰ That is, they spent the night together in a manner that was beyond reproach. In his early ninth-century funeral oration for his mother, Theodore the Stoudite invoked Ruth and Boaz on the threshing room floor to praise his parents’ sexual restraint: “If Boaz be praised for leaving Ruth untouched as she slept beside him one night, how can these two [my parents] not rightly win renown for their prudence?”Footnote ⁷¹

An illustrated Octateuch copied in Constantinople in the later eleventh century and now at the Vatican depicts this episode with maximal modesty. Ruth and Boaz sleep on the ground fully clothed, lying away from each other, their feet barely touching (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1

Ruth and Boaz sleep on the ground with their feet barely touching, from an illustrated Octateuch, Constantinople, later eleventh century. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 747, fol. 258 r.

© 2025 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, by permission of Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights reserved.

The biblical text appears to the left, above and below the image, while Theodoret’s commentary appears in slightly smaller script at the right. This manuscript is part of a family of illustrated Octateuchs with identical commentary and related images produced between the mid eleventh and late thirteenth centuries. In other extant versions, the artists have separated Ruth’s and Boaz’s feet by a measurable distance.Footnote ⁷² While Byzantine treatment of the story would seem to give Ruth and Boaz a sort of cover, if you will, the presentation of the text, image, and commentary cannot shake the question of impropriety and sexual subtext. By contrast, in Symeon’s parable of the rebel, the activities on the bed most certainly cloak the two potential lovers together. Symeon himself interprets this lying together as an allegory of the “bridal chamber of heaven,” enacting the union of God and his chosen. In the end, the robe of glory and the bedspread convey the same salvation. If there are echoes of Ruth, they are in the questions that Theodoret and his subsequent readers sought to deny.

The covering of two lovers with a cloak may also contain an allusion to Plato’s Symposium. Niketas Stethatos, who had his own agenda, and who himself was captivated by Neoplatonism and its Christian assimilation, leaves the impression that Symeon’s education stopped short of the curriculum in classical literature shared by highly educated men.Footnote ⁷³ Symeon himself claims that “the philosophers” and “those who study the Greeks” lack access to divine illumination.Footnote ⁷⁴ Although these remarks are not a denial of familiarity with secular letters, scholars have generally argued that Symeon’s theology lacks evidence of direct knowledge of classical philosophy.Footnote ⁷⁵ But one does not need to claim that Symeon has recently been reading Plato, or even that he had read him in his youth, although he might well have. Key images and episodes had long been assimilated into Christian intellectual culture. Indeed, in his First Ethical Discourse, Symeon alludes to and reworks Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, describing someone born and raised in a dark prison who suddenly sees the sky and is engulfed in a vision of spiritual light.Footnote ⁷⁶

The incident with the emperor and the rebel under the chlanidion offers an ironic twist on Socrates and Alcibiades. In the Symposium, Alcibiades complains that Socrates refuses to engage in sex with him, even when, on a cold night: “I had thrown my cloak [himation] around him … and lay down under his philosopher’s cloak [tribona].” Then Alcibiades embraces Socrates for the entire night.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Symposium is well represented in middle Byzantine manuscripts containing works of Plato, including a late ninth-century manuscript commissioned by the intellectual and polymath Arethas, Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, a student of Photios, Patriarch of Constantinople, and a mid tenth-century manuscript executed by a monk named Ephraim.Footnote ⁷⁸ The episode was well known in middle Byzantine intellectual culture. The tenth-century encyclopedia known as the Souda lists Alcibiades as Socrates’ beloved “according to some.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Symeon’s familiarity with the story of Socrates and Alcibiades and their discourse on the place of desire in the relations between a master and disciple would have resonated in his relationship with his own spiritual father, even as the chastity in Socrates’ story contrasts with the intimacy between the emperor and the rebel. In the Symposium, covering with a cloak raises the expectation of delight, but the delight appears to be deferred or denied, unless, of course, constant embrace is itself the goal.Footnote ⁸⁰ In Symeon’s parable, the delight under the cloak is perpetual.

The Parts of the Monastic Body

Literary allusions, both biblical and Platonic, however, do not suffice to explain the cloaked encounter between the emperor and the repentant rebel, and its implications for structuring Symeon’s readers’ relations with Christ as Christ’s beloved. In the parable in question, this encounter is particularly intimate. Indeed, the intimacy imagined far exceeds acceptable levels of contact between the men under Symeon’s own authority. Earlier, in a sermon delivered while he was a young abbot at Saint Mamas, Symeon strictly regulated contact between monks, insisting that a monk never enter another monk’s cell without permission granted by the abbot or another officer of the monastery: “When you go there, endeavor neither to speak nor to hear a word apart from the necessity for which you were sent. When you have performed your errand, return quickly.”Footnote ⁸¹ Even outside the cells, a monk was not to speak to a brother who was by himself. Intimacy between monks threatened a monk’s solitude and focus on penitence.Footnote ⁸² The rule seems to assume that Symeon’s monks, in contrast to monks at other Byzantine monasteries, did not share cells. For example, according to the typikon, or rule, of the Monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis, founded nearby in the mid eleventh century, monks were to live two to a cell, usually a novice or younger monk paired with an older monk.Footnote ⁸³ Intimate friendships between monks, even between a master and his disciple, could be a source of scandal. In his Life of Symeon the New Theologian, Niketas is at pains to portray Symeon’s own close relationship with his eccentric mentor Symeon the Stoudite as above reproach.Footnote ⁸⁴

The parable of the emperor and the rebel suggests that Symeon had decided to employ the potent homoerotic environment of the monastery rather than deny it. The parable uses allegory to construct the male monastic’s body in its entirety as the object of God’s desire. But what does it mean for the emperor of the Christians to place his face “upon all the members” of the penitent rebel? One problem is the use of the term melos, a word that in common parlance means “limb” as opposed to the torso or core of the body. But, as we shall see, Symeon’s usage of the term elsewhere extends the meaning of ta mele (plural of melos) to other appendages of the body, suggesting that the translation “member” is more accurate. Under pressure from New Testament usage, Symeon’s catalogue of the parts of the body in Hymn Fifteen and in the Fourth Ethical Discourse includes the “shameful members.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In these texts, Symeon argues strenuously that even these parts of the body are redeemed in Christ.Footnote ⁸⁶ Symeon’s Hymn Fifteen, a text controversial in its own era, focuses on the monk’s body as a locus of deification through the incarnation, and articulates themes also found in the Tenth Ethical Discourse. An extended section of Hymn Fifteen reflects on the incarnation in light of Paul’s discussion of the parts of the Christian body in 1 Corinthians 12:14–26. Paul wrote:

In Paul’s discussion, “all the members” – “all the parts” – includes the shameful parts that are customarily covered out of modesty, that is, the genitals, regarded as shameful for their sexual and excretory functions.Footnote ⁸⁸

Symeon uses this inventory of the parts of the body of Christ as a template for meditation on the deification of the monk’s body afforded by the incarnation of Christ.

For Symeon, the incarnate presence of God within his own body serves as an invitation for others to permit their bodies to become Christ’s body:

Symeon invites the celibate monk to entertain an eschatological desire for his own decent genitals. But in contrast to Paul, who seems to promise this transformation of the body only in the End Times, Symeon proposes that such a body of Christlike members is available already in the present.

Symeon stresses the radical shock of a promise of deification that extends to all the members of the body, including those that are regarded as dishonorable. “And so thus you well know that both my finger and my penis are Christ. / Do you tremble or feel ashamed?”Footnote ⁹¹ The term here translated “penis,” balanos, literally an “acorn,” was already used by Aristotle and Galen to refer to the head of the penis. In this context, Symeon would seem to intend the part for the whole. For Symeon, the shuddering or blushing of his imagined interlocutor has doctrinal consequences, since denying the presence of the entirety of God in the penis tends toward a denial of the incarnation and thus heresy. Symeon says, “But God was not ashamed to become like you, / yet you are ashamed to become like him?”Footnote ⁹² Symeon then supplies his interlocutor’s words, “I am not ashamed to become like him. / But in saying He is like a shameful member [compare 1 Cor 12:23] / I suspect that you speak blasphemy.”Footnote ⁹³ Echoing Paul, Symeon argues that there is nothing shameful in this, since the genitals

The head of the penis, hidden from view, is thus paradoxically among the most appropriate signs of the hidden God.Footnote ⁹⁵

In creating a dialogue within the hymn between himself and a horrified interlocutor, Symeon asserts control of possible reactions to his theological investigation. Later, the interlocutor demands, “Are you not ashamed of the shameful members?” and accuses, “You bring Christ down to shameful members.”Footnote ⁹⁶ By performing both voices in the dialectic, Symeon guides his audience through the ramifications of faith in the incarnation. Symeon’s interest in the divine and divinized penis extends beyond mere anatomy: He allegorizes its physiology as well. It is God,

Symeon describes the emission of divine seed as phriktos, “causing to shudder,” rendering his imagery shocking and abominable at the same time that it is frightening and awe inspiring. This shuddering mystery is at once penetrative, ejaculatory, and nuptial, uniting the monk to Christ through the transmission of seed.

The two become one flesh. Symeon also connects these themes of divine intercourse with images of covering with garments. He disparages his interlocutor for covering the soul with the “immaculate chiton [or: garment]” of Christ and yet retaining his shame for the remaining members. Symeon insists that far from being shameful, these parts of the body are “holy members.”Footnote ⁹⁹ There is hedonistic delight in speaking the unspeakable, because it skirts the boundaries both of what can be properly said about God and of what can be decently said about having sex. This theological discourse in itself titillates.

Symeon’s theological interest in the monk’s penis features in the Ethical Discourses as well. In a related passage in the Fourth Ethical Discourse, Symeon allegorizes a catalogue of body parts into a body of virtues. Symeon says, “Legs and ankles and calves and knees and thighs are non-possession, nakedness, voluntary exile, willing submission for the sake of Christ, obedience, and eager service.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Symeon includes the monks’ genitals in his discussion, again recalling the language of 1 Corinthians 12: “The members and parts which one is obliged to hide are unceasing prayer of the mind, the sweetness which derives from the shedding of tears, the joy of the heart and its inexpressible consolation.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Far from being irredeemable, this portion of human anatomy represents some of a monk’s highest virtues and rewards. After addressing the rest of the body (except for the head, which comes next in his discussion) he declares the body, “complete in all its members.”Footnote ¹⁰² The perfection of the body lies in its identity with the indivisible Christ. In Hymn Fifteen, Symeon declares that each will be “completely made like Christ in the whole body / and each of our members shall be the whole Christ.”Footnote ¹⁰³

It is difficult to know how Symeon’s concern with the body “complete in all its members” squares with the possibility that the New Theologian might himself have been a eunuch. The most common surgical method for rendering a eunuch involved excision of the testicles from the scrotum before the onset of puberty.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It is important to remember that in most cases, removal of the testicles did not prevent erection and even ejaculation, and certainly did not prevent the capacity for sexual desire.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Symeon’s interest in the intact body of the monk, however, does not provide obvious counterevidence. Throughout his career Symeon knew and preached to a community of monks that included at least one eunuch – his successor as abbot at Saint Mamas, Arsenios – and perhaps more. His description of Christ incarnate in the monk’s body does not seem to be the least bit concerned with whether the monk has testicles or not. A eunuch as such is never problematized. All monks would seem to be “complete” enough for complete divinization. More to the present point, in Hymns Fifteen and Sixteen and the Fourth Ethical Discourse, Symeon’s image of the glorious body of the monk is persistently sexed. Far from calling on monks to become “eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom,” Symeon challenges monks to regard their own body in a way that conforms to God’s desire for them in all their members.

The transmission of Hymn Fifteen within the corpus of Symeon’s works offers clues to the force of its claims and the discomfort it caused later readers. The first printed edition of Symeon’s Hymns, published by the monk Dionysios Zagoraios in 1790, omitted Hymn Fifteen, likely because Zagoraios found it shocking and quite inappropriate for monastic readers.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ When in 1035, Niketas prepared his edition of the Hymns, he defended the poem by offering marginal notes, or scholia. Glossing the lines where the interlocutor accuses the poet of claiming that Christ is “like a shameful member,” and Symeon responds, “there are no shameful members,” Niketas supplies,

Niketas asserts the biblical basis and the doctrinal orthodoxy of Symeon’s poem. He clarifies that the “unspeakable union” with God indeed extends to the genitals, but his implicit sense is that this happens only to those deemed worthy of the divine nature on account of their holiness and their faith.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In the earliest surviving copy of the complete cycle of the Hymns, Niketas’s scholia to these passages appear in red, bordering Symeon’s text by filling the margins at the top and bottom of the page and partly at the left side (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2

Symeon the New Theologian, Hymn Fifteen with Niketas Stethatos’s scholia, in the manuscript Venice, Biblioteca Marciana gr. 494, fol. 270 r., thirteenth century.

Photo: Biblioteca Marciana. On concession of the Ministry of Culture – Marciana National Library, reproduction prohibited.

This thirteenth-century paper manuscript, now in Venice, likely preserves Niketas’s original layout for the text and suggests that Niketas could not imagine publishing the text without intervening to qualify and temper it. Unlike Christ, who refuses to respect the limits of the human body when he pervades it for himself, Niketas sought to keep Symeon’s corpus within bounds, restricting divine glory for the saints.

The Practices of Desire

Next to the elaborate imagery of the male body in Hymn Fifteen, the parable of the Tenth Ethical Discourse may seem quite tame. Symeon’s interpretation of the parable as the consummation of a marriage raises questions about the practices of desire, both the sexual behavior and the acts of fantasy that Byzantines might have engaged in. In Hymn Fifteen, Symeon illustrates the union of the human and the divine by stressing the presence of God in the monk’s body, including his penis. In the Tenth Ethical Discourse, God lies not within the monk’s body, but rather next to it, desiring it and embracing it. From the perspective of the monk, God is not self but rather a loving other. Another scenario of erotic encounter between the human body and the divine occurs in Hymn Sixteen, where Symeon depicts God as both within him and lovingly intertwined with him. He begins with an image of divine rapture, reminiscent both of Paul’s ascent to the third heaven in 2 Corinthians 12 and of Zeus’s abduction of Ganymede, a classical trope of divine homoerotics.

Here, sexual embrace of the entirety of the body serves as a potent allegory for divine revelation and deification. The interpenetration of the human and the divine is accomplished from both the inside and the outside, through God’s inhabiting of the monastic body and God’s erotic possession of it.Footnote ¹¹⁰ All the members of the body glow with divine light.

Symeon would grant to the Christian monk what Byzantine interpreters of ancient Greek myth might attempt to deny Ganymede. Using techniques of interpretation developed in the Hellenistic period, Byzantines sought to deny divine agency in the legends of the ancient Greeks. The Souda relates divergent traditions. One entry explains that mortals, not gods, fell in love with Ganymede because of his beauty and kidnapped him, while another supplies, “The poets wrote that Ganymede was kidnapped by Zeus, turning the bitterness of his death into myth.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Another entry, however, asserts, “it was Zeus himself who first fell in love with Ganymede.”Footnote ¹¹² In any case, the myth that Zeus came to Ganymede in the form of an eagle and abducted him up to heaven was well known and provided a tantalizing model of divine rapture, of God’s seizing or snatching up beloved and beautiful humans.Footnote ¹¹³

Themes of rapture as rescue figure in Symeon’s own thinking about emperors and their servants. In the Fourth Ethical Discourse, Symeon changes up the scenario, now imagining a member of the emperor’s staff who has been taken into bondage in the house of the emperor’s enemy.

The servant loves his emperor for rescuing him from a servitude that includes providing his overlord with sexual gratification. For his reprieve, the servant offers the emperor thanksgiving. And for this, the emperor “will in turn give the servant further proof of his immeasurable love for him.” Symeon thus draws a contrast between male–male sexual slavery, a bondage to queer sin, and the love between God and the monk, where the love is freely given and in no way degrades its participants. Such a love would seem both chaste and doubly queer, a loving remedy that exchanges one model of same-sex love for another.

Throughout Hymn Fifteen, the monastic body, the object of divine desire, persists explicitly as male. Even so, the soul, psyche in Greek, is grammatically feminine and figures in that poem as female. This admits some fluidity in the gender of Christ’s beloved monk. Despite his male body and its deified penis, the subject’s soul becomes Christ’s bride:

Far from a chaste union, God and the soul consummate their marriage. Even as it is spiritual, it depends on clear material referents. The shifting of gendered terms in Symeon’s construction of God’s beloved allows complexity, playing with gender binaries by oscillating between them. If Symeon had wanted to feminize the entirety of the male monastic subject in order to figure God’s desire as heteronormative he could have done this; but his commitment to the deification of the male monk’s body in its entirety leads him to ascribe both cross-sex and same-sex desire to God.Footnote ¹¹⁶

When, in the Tenth Ethical Discourse, the emperor of the Christians “places his own face upon all the members” of the penitent’s body, Symeon illustrates God’s desire for the monastic body. This act figuratively consummates the union of monk and God. For the figuration to work, the audience must be able to enter imaginatively into the scenario. Symeon’s allegory depends on a shared understanding of male same-sex sexual activities and their pleasures, even while such pleasures were illicit. But what does it mean when a lover “is placing his face” on all his beloved’s members? Our knowledge of medieval Greek sexual vocabulary is limited, in part by the nature of our sources and in part by the questions that we have posed to them. Even more serious are the gaps in our knowledge of middle Byzantine sexuality and sexual practices. The conventions of same-sex erotic practices are particularly obscure.Footnote ¹¹⁷ If an understanding of the history of sexuality in Byzantium is to advance, it will, in fact, have to take account of passages like this; but expecting this passage to be either typical or normative engages in a circular logic.

Taken literally, and at a minimum, the passage describes a sort of nuzzling, a loving pressing of the face upon another’s body. Elsewhere in the discourse, God’s face in itself becomes an object of desire: “I saw joy and happiness overflowing in me at the revelation and appearance of his face.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ But from the perspective of the twenty-first century, perpetual nuzzling, even upon all the parts of the body including the genitals, seems insufficient to illustrate the consummation of divine desire. Is “pressing the face” a euphemism? There is evidence in the passage to suggest that Symeon means something more, such that “placing one’s face” “on the members” of another involves kissing the parts of the body, including the genitals.

The scene on the emperor’s bed is preceded by two previous descriptions of physical intimacy. First, in the initial scene of the rebels’ supplications, the emperor falls upon the rebel’s neck and “kisse[s] him all over” including on his eyes. Then, the activities that follow are expressed not with aorist participles but with present active and mediopassive participles: Symeon is describing repeated and habitual activity. The passage states that “night and day,” the emperor was “embracing and kissing” him, “mouth to mouth.” Thus, oral contact with the rebel’s body is already and habitually under way before the emperor begins taking the former rebel to his bed. The constant, “night and day,” mouth-to-mouth kissing figures as middle Byzantine foreplay, the lead-in to the bedtime activities that express the emperor’s superordinate love. This does not, in fact, clarify whether the subsequent and repeated contact in the sleeping chamber, the “laying down and embracing,” involves kissing. But since the bedroom routine described continues the act of embracing and includes face-to-body contact, the text seems to extend the kissing onto the bed, rather than suggesting that once in the bedroom, the kissing stops, and is replaced by nuzzling alone.

Now sometimes a kiss is just a kiss, and in the medieval Eastern Mediterranean, men’s kissing and embracing might indicate intense emotion and friendship. In his Life of Symeon, Niketas describes his master as having transmitted mystical knowledge to him “mouth to mouth,” a metaphor for discipleship.Footnote ¹¹⁹ However, the emperor and his rebel are engaging in activity that Symeon cues his audience to regard as sexual, activity appropriate to “the bridal chamber of heaven.” While it remains unclear whether the face-to-body contact under the cloak involves oral-genital contact, let alone oral incorporation, I would argue that the lack of clarity is part of the point. What is the emperor doing under the cloak? And with which part of his face? And to what part of the rebel’s body? Does the rebel achieve orgasm, or is he in a constant state of arousal? What should a Byzantine monk imagine two men would do on their wedding night?Footnote ¹²⁰ In Hymn Sixteen, the speaker is penetrated and inseminated by God. On the other hand, the loving face-pressing of the parable, by itself, might disrupt reasonable expectations of nuptial delights. What happens in the emperor’s bedroom is cloaked in mystery. Symeon invites rather than denies further fantasy.

The parable does not limit the reader’s interest to the rebel’s experience alone. It also figures Christ’s love for the sinner as homoerotic longing. “Seized by unexpected joy,” Christ does not merely welcome his prodigal but embraces him and kisses him, refusing to be separated from him, lying down with him on his bed under his own cloak. Christ’s passion, if you will, is fulfilled in the bedroom, in his desiring embrace. Moreover, Christ’s perpetual nuptial activity involves (at the very least) placing his face on his beloved’s members. The King of Heaven expresses his desire for the entirety of the monastic body by showing honor to all of it, perhaps giving greatest honor to the most hidden parts. The valence of such an act in Byzantium is not entirely clear. In general, ancient constructions of sexuality still persisted. Sexual activity continued to be conceived as something that a social superior did to a social inferior, for the superior’s gratification.Footnote ¹²¹ In this instance, in concerning himself with the repentant sinner’s gratification, Christ takes on the form of a subject. As in Christ’s descent from heaven in the incarnation, his adoration of the monk’s body performs humility.Footnote ¹²²

Performance Anxieties

How then should we understand Symeon’s engagement with inflaming and potentially inflammatory speech? That Symeon might engage in a rhetorical performance of homoeroticism should not be entirely surprising, especially in light of his flamboyant confession in Hymn Twenty-Four that he had been “an adulterer at heart / and a sodomite in deed and by free choice.”Footnote ¹²³ In the same passage he declares himself a murderer, philanderer, magician, and a corrupter of boys, among other things. And while the historicity of some these claims may be problematic, the rhetoric of Symeon’s public confession of such deeds and desires effects the construction of a performed persona, a textual Symeon.Footnote ¹²⁴ In medieval Greek, the term “sodomite [sodomites]” frequently designated men who had sex with men, specifically penetrative anal sex. As we shall see in Chapter 2, it had long been unmoored from the biblical past and the myth of the destruction of an ancient city to apply to sinners in the present. It carried with it a great burden of opprobrium and an expectation of shame. The word sodomia, akin to “sodomy” in English, did not enter the Greek language until after the fall of the Eastern Roman state in the fifteenth century, arriving through Latin or Italian.Footnote ¹²⁵ Instead, the tenth-century Life of Nephon of Constantiane, for example, refers to sex between men with adjectives formed from “sodomite”: “the sodomitical sin,” “sodomitical fornication,” “sodomitical wastefulness [asotia, or: prodigality],” “the sodomitical stench.”Footnote ¹²⁶ We shall return to Symeon’s confession in Chapter 6, but for now, we should note its potential continuity with his performance of sodomitical desire for God in Hymn Sixteen and his efforts to engage similar desires in the Tenth Ethical Discourse. Together these writings reflect Symeon’s willingness to form the monastic subject by cultivating the power of homoerotic fantasies despite their troubling implications.

Symeon places boundaries on his metaphors even as he presents them as normative. Later in the Tenth Ethical Discourse, Symeon admonishes his monks not to “serve the flesh by making provisions for its desires.”Footnote ¹²⁷ In Hymn Forty-Six, he qualifies an erotic metaphor even as he offers it:

These verses are full of double entendres. The phrase “the unutterable pleasure of communion [sunousias]” also the means “the unutterable pleasure of sexual intercourse.” The “boundless yearning for marriage [gamou pothon]” is just as easily a keen desire for the act of its consummation. Like something you cannot unsee, there is a lot Symeon is unwilling to unsay. Symeon can barely contain himself. He is aflame for God and with desire for God.

One might reasonably ask, what sort of dispassion, apatheia, is this really?Footnote ¹²⁹ There are some alluring clues. In Hymn Fifteen, Symeon’s mentor, Symeon the Stoudite, figures as the ideal monk precisely in his indifference to the naked body, both his own and those of others.

Symeon the New Theologian characterizes Symeon the Stoudite as unmoved by the nakedness of bodies of either gender, male or female.Footnote ¹³¹ In the homosocial context of the Stoudios Monastery where he had lived, however, and where the New Theologian had been his disciple starting in his own youth, the opportunities to see others naked would primarily have been opportunities to see other males, perhaps if they were sharing a cell, or more probably in the monastery’s dedicated bathhouse.Footnote ¹³² The eleventh-century Evergetis Typikon, heavily influenced by practices at Stoudios, permitted bathing the sick as needed, but otherwise the bath was only heated three times a year for healthy brothers.Footnote ¹³³ A compendium of monastic wisdom compiled by that monastery’s founder taught, “a monk should not bathe or strip completely naked unless compelled by necessity.”Footnote ¹³⁴ In reality, the frequency with which bathing was permitted or required varied from one monastery to another ranging from three to twelve times per year among extant typika.Footnote ¹³⁵ One can imagine monks anticipating bathing days with a mix of excitement and anxiety. Surely a custody of the eyes was in order. The bathhouse offered the elder Symeon a peculiar – nearly sacramental – religious experience. Faced with the naked members of others, the Stoudite saw only the body of Christ, a covering for all humanity. Pointedly, while surrounded by bodies of Christ, he remained “unmoved” and “dispassionate,” unerect. Ironically, one’s own perpetually flaccid penis becomes the object and the goal of monastic desire.

The New Theologian heightens the contrast for his easily shocked interlocutor, as he sneers, “But if you are naked and your flesh were to touch flesh, / then you would be in rut like an ass or a horse.”Footnote ¹³⁶ I have translated the word thelumanes as “in rut” here because of the animal references. It literally means “crazy for women” or perhaps “girl-crazy.” Symeon may be indicating that his interlocutor is a male susceptible to uncontrollable cross-sex desire, while his Stoudite mentor – he claims – was free of this.Footnote ¹³⁷ It is also possible that the word indicates spontaneous sexual desire more generally and thus means something more like “horny.” Of course, if the interlocutor is another monk in a monastery, the most likely scenario for brushing up against another person while naked is with another male. In which case, the point may be that the interlocutor is subject to a variety of uncontrollable desires, many homoerotic. A generation later, Niketas Stethatos would write of Symeon the Stoudite that he “had mortified his flesh through his extreme dispassion and, while still alive, had caused its natural emotions to wither completely away so that he had the same feelings toward the bodies of people who came into close physical contact with him as a corpse would have for another corpse,” although to deflect any praise, “he used to pretend to have passionate feelings” for others.Footnote ¹³⁸ Surely it was hard to tell the difference. And Niketas effectively admits that years after Symeon the Stoudite’s death, his reputation was framed by the impression that he had intense desires for the bodies of those he had touched. In context, it is fairly clear that the presumed objects of these apparent desires included the young New Theologian himself. We are thus presented with a Stoudite elder who in cultural memory embodied discordant desires: a desire to be dispassionate and a desire to have a reputation for having inappropriate desires, indeed to be humiliated by such a reputation.

Symeon may have encouraged his monks to envision being touched all over by God, but he also warned them against touching themselves. Offering instruction about “life-giving mortification,” he emphasizes compunction and self-monitoring. In the Sixth Ethical Discourse, Symeon warns monks not to hide “any passing evil thought” from their spiritual father and to strive not to go “through even one single day, so far as possible without tears.” This discipline includes avoiding concern to wash their face, or to trim their hair or beard. They ought not worry about comfort when they sleep nor about their attire when awake. That is, they are to think about their own bodies as little as possible. Furthermore, Symeon warns against “putting your hand within your clothing” ostensibly in order to scratch themselves, “but instead protecting yourself from other kinds of touching.” They should not look anyone in the face – including old people. Such monastic control, such affliction of the body, avoids both pleasure and desire. The one “who is continent in every respect and has trained his soul not to wander in a disorderly manner” will come to recognize God in his commandments. “When he meets him … he will be astounded. Prostrate before Him, he will have no other desire than to look upon Him.” “His memory is aflame, burning with longing, kindled by the hope that he will see Him once more.” Chasing after good until he is exhausted, “he sees the One whom he pursues.” In this way he is “caught up into paradise” and “enters the bridal chamber, arrives at the bridal bed, sees the Bridegroom, partakes of the spiritual marriage.” These nuptial images give way to images of the eucharist, the exodus from Egypt, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son. God’s beloved “is filled by the mystical cup, by the fatted calf, by the living bread, by the drink of life, by the Lamb without spot, by the manna of the intellect.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Ascetic rigor, modesty, and restraint are temporary measures, a saving yourself for marriage, delaying fulfillment until union and communion with God.

***

In the end, while homoerotic desire may serve as a model for divine love and love of the divine, physical desire in itself threatens to deflect the monk from the passionless desire for God. Eros remains ambiguously both aroused and disciplined. On some very basic level, of course, the reader or hearer of the Tenth Ethical Discourse is not supposed to take the parable of the emperor and the rebel literally. It is, after all, a parable. But as a parable, it is a soteriological fantasy dependent on a series of plausible referents: an emperor and a rebel; rites of investiture; biblical passages regarding clothing, salvation, and weddings; and the desire of men for physical intimacy with other men. Indeed, one might argue that homoeroticism is the parable’s most important referent, since Symeon calls on his audience to identify with such desire in order to understand salvation. The text models homoerotic desire and arouses it in its audience; then the text redeploys this desire by integrating it into the desire for Christ.

Understanding the consummation with the divine in the age to come turns on a vivid same-sex erotic scenario, one that stresses that salvation is corporeal and complete, that God’s love encompasses the entirety of the human body in all its members. Symeon places this emphasis on the body even as he deploys his textual performance to distance himself and his audience from actual physical contact. Indeed, the homoeroticism may hold even more theological power because it is discursive and textual, because it is already mimesis and fantasy. A virtual or discursively performative sexuality becomes only more powerful in its subsequent contemplation. Removed from the surface of the body it forms thoughts in the mind. Chapter 3 returns to Symeon’s expressions of desire, particularly his cultivation of longing for God in his verse compositions. But in order to understand the transgressive force of this desire and to understand countervailing monastic desires for the eradication of same-sex eros, Chapter 2 traces discourses of homophobia and opprobrium toward male homoeroticism in middle Byzantine monastic culture. The condemnation of Sodom in Byzantine homilies and biblical exegesis make Symeon’s parable of the rebel all the more remarkable.

The place of eros in the ascetic life remains a subject of contemplation. In an essay on “The Body’s Grace,” Rowan Williams has observed:

Symeon’s performance incites desire for the desired and desiring Christ, forming in his audience an overwhelming and embodied longing both for Christ and for themselves as Christ’s beloved. He calls his monks to a distinctly queer celibacy. He locates God’s love in the gendered body of the male monk. The performative character of this desire within the text allows Symeon to leave a peculiar tension unresolved: Homoerotic desire has a place in the monastery. It is a powerful tool in the making of his monks.