DESCRIPTION: Celibacy, bridal mysticism, and ankle-length priestly robes and habits can be interpreted as a cultural technique that detaches male desire from procreation and combat and directs it toward God—a deep hermeneutic reading with Jeffrey Kripal, the Church Fathers, and Plato.

Eros beneath the robe: the priesthood, mysticism and the transformation of male desire

Celibacy, the imagery of bridal mysticism and the long priestly robe together form a pattern. The priesthood and monasticism constitute a long-standing cultural technique that detaches male sexuality from procreation, family and combat, and directs it towards God. The religious studies scholar Jeffrey Kripal describes this redirection as having a homoerotic structure. This article examines this thesis in relation to the Church Fathers, mystics, Plato and the history of fashion, and concludes by identifying where it holds and where it overstates the case.

What does a deep hermeneutic reading of the priesthood entail?

Anyone who interprets a religious institution hermeneutically treats it like a text: a surface with an obvious meaning that simultaneously carries a deeper one. The claim made here is that sacred masculinity in Christianity is organised through the redirection of erotic energy towards God, towards Christ and towards a community of men. In the process, desire is displaced, disciplined and assigned a new object.

This perspective comes from Jeffrey Kripal, a historian of religion at Rice University. In *Kali’s Child* (1995), *Roads of Excess* (2001) and *Secret Body* (2017), he argues that eroticism is part of the mystical experience. Kripal employs two modes of interpretation. The ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’—Paul Ricœur’s term for the reductive interpretations of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud—dismisses religious experiences. Alongside this, Kripal advocates an interpretation that takes the same experience seriously: psychologically, socially, and possibly as a reality in its own right.

Freud’s concept of sublimation lends itself well to psychoanalysis. Forbidden instinctual energy takes on a socially recognised form. Fasting, asceticism and celibacy would then be forms into which sexuality is channelled. These interpretations generate hypotheses; they cannot prove anything. The article explicitly points this out in several places.

How does a man become a sacred exception?

Even predating the early advanced civilisations, shamanism recognised transformation of form and gender. In many Siberian and Arctic traditions, transformation is part of the shaman’s craft: the transition into animal form and, likewise, the change of gender. Waldemar Bogoras described the ‘transformed’ shamans among the Chukchi – the so-called ‘soft men’ – who, at the behest of the spirits, changed their clothing, role and gender. Access to the spirit world depended on transcending conventional masculinity. Mircea Eliade counts ecstasy, the flight of the soul and transformation into animals among the oldest core elements of this religiosity.

Pre-Christian religions, too, recognised forms of priestly masculinity that were desexualised, celibate or of a different gender. The clearest evidence from the Ancient Near East relates to the cults of Inanna and Ishtar. The Gala (Sumerian; Akkadian Kalû) sang laments in eme-sal, a linguistic register otherwise associated with the speech of goddesses and women. Alongside them, Assinnu and Kurgarrû appear as cult figures of ambiguous gender. One hymn attributes to Inanna the power to ‘transform a man into a woman and a woman into a man’, and in the myth of the goddess’s descent, the saviour figures are depicted as genderless. The goddess herself embodied both genders: Inanna and Ishtar were regarded as hermaphroditic; Ishtar bore the epithet ‘barbata’, the bearded one.

These figures stood outside the realm of reproductive masculinity and acted as mediators precisely through this shift between worlds. This interpretation carries risks. Recent Assyriological research has cast doubt on previous certainties. Ilan Peled disputes the assumption of routine castration; administrative texts refer to Gala as having a wife and children; and modern labels such as ‘third gender’ remain controversial. The structural core remains sound: a culture could designate its ritual specialists as men whose access to the divine was bound to a tempered, stripped-down masculinity.

Late antiquity, too, was familiar with the castrated priest. In the cult of Cybele, the Galloi mutilated themselves on the ‘Day of Blood’ in ecstatic frenzy and consecrated their reproductive organs to the goddess. From then on, the Gallos was regarded as a eunuch and, at the same time, as the ‘mystical husband’ of Cybele, admitted into the ‘bridal chamber’. Mircea Eliade interprets this as ritual androgyny and self-imposed chastity as a complete devotion to the deity. In the second degree of the Mithras initiation, the Nymphus, the initiate became the ‘bride’ of the god.

Christianity inherited this structure and reinterpreted it in terms of monotheism, asceticism and the church ministry.

Why did the Church Fathers prioritise virginity over marriage?

Peter Brown’s *The Body and Society* (1988) is the standard account of why early Christian sources wrote incessantly about sexuality. Permanent sexual abstinence became a socially and theologically productive practice that reordered the relationship between body, society and the cosmos. Brown’s emphasis is part of this: abstinence took many forms, and women were among its most active practitioners.

Within this movement, a hierarchy became established. In *Adversus Jovinianum* (c. 393), Jerome ranked virginity above widowhood and widowhood above marriage, interpreting Paul to mean that marriage was a concession against fornication. Even his contemporaries regarded his tone as excessive. Augustine provided the moderate version that prevailed: marriage is truly good, its benefits being offspring, fidelity and the indissoluble bond, and consecrated virginity stands above it. Ambrose coined the image of the consecrated virgin as the bride of Christ, and Gregory of Nyssa described the celibate as one who already leads the ‘life of the angels’, drawing on Jesus’ words that the risen are ‘like the angels’ (Luke 20:35 ff.).

This gives rise to a twofold development: the exaltation of the chaste, same-sex communal life and the subordination of procreation, with a misogynistic undercurrent, most sharply evident in Tertullian’s reference to women as the ‘gate of the devil’. Piety demanded self-restraint: scholars today interpret this passage as a rhetorical admonition within a treatise on adornment; its rigour also applied to men, and these same Fathers honoured individual female ascetics such as Paula, Julia Eustochium and Gregory’s sister Macrina. What is certain is the establishment of a male archetype that no longer corresponds to ordinary lay masculinity.

Is mysticism eroticism in disguise?

Mystical theology rejects a clear-cut separation between spiritual and erotic language. The preferred example is the Song of Songs. In the third century, Origen established the interpretation in which the bride represents the Church and the individual soul, and the bridegroom represents Christ, the Word. In his prologue, he speaks of the soul wounded by an ‘arrow of love’, struck by the beauty of the Word. Bernard of Clairvaux delivered 86 sermons on the Song of Songs (between around 1135 and 1153) to his Cistercian monks and taught a community of celibate men to assume the role of the female bride who longs for the male bridegroom. Islamic mysticism, too, recognises this eroticism of the divine: al-Hallaj describes union with God ( ) as ‘ischq’, or passionate love, and Ibn Arabi conceives of the perfect human being as simultaneously male and female.

Bridal mysticism casts the male soul in the role of the bride in relation to a male God, so that devotional eroticism for men becomes symbolically same-sex. This line of thought continues through to John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila, whose *The Interior Castle* culminates in the marriage of the soul to God. Teresa also provides the most powerful image: in Chapter 29 of her *Vita*, a seraph pierces her heart repeatedly with a golden arrow with a fiery tip, a pain so mingled with sweetness that she did not want it to end. Bernini sculpted the scene between 1647 and 1652 for the Cornaro Chapel.

The erotic interpretation of this sculpture forms part of its reception history, from Charles de Brosses to Jacques Lacan. Teresa herself insists on the spiritual nature of the wound in which the body shares. The hermeneutic core is this: desire is transposed and shifted into the heavenly realm, into Christ, into the soul, into the spiritual companion. This is precisely what Kripal asserts when he says that transcendent and sexual experience are linked time and again.

Was Jesus queer? Kripal’s reading of the Gospels

Kripal’s starting premise is simple: within the biblical framework, God is male. A man who loves God or marries Christ in the language of the bride is thus symbolically in a same-sex relationship. Priestly and monastic institutions are structured in this way as homoerotic, because they organise strong emotional and devotional bonds between men whilst shifting heterosexuality outwards into marriage and procreation.

The Gospel material he cites is thought-provoking yet remains tentative, and he is aware of this. The beloved disciple rests ‘on the breast’ of Jesus. The Greek en tō kolpō in John 13:23 is more physical than the tame ‘lay next to him’ of modern translations. Jesus praises those who make themselves eunuchs ‘for the sake of the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 19:12), strings together remarks critical of the family, does not marry, and Paul wishes for everyone to be ‘virgins’ betrothed to Christ. When asked whether Jesus was gay, Kripal replies that the question is anachronistic, and suggests instead: ‘anything but heterosexual’.

The weakest piece of evidence is Morton Smith’s ‘Secret Gospel of Mark’. The letter, found at Mar Saba in 1958, quotes a longer version of the Gospel of Mark featuring a young man who comes to Jesus at night, his naked body covered by a linen cloth, and is reminiscent of the young man fleeing naked in Mark 14:51 ff. Its evidential value is low: the manuscript has been considered lost since around 1990, and experts dispute whether it is genuine or a modern forgery. Kripal himself describes his heretical Jesus as a ‘historical koan’, a provocation to reflection.

What did Plato know about Eros and the ascent to the divine?

The image of Eros leading to the divine predates Christianity. In the *Phaedrus*, Plato depicts the soul as a charioteer with two winged horses and makes the wing the organ of ascent, nourished by beauty, wisdom and goodness. At the sight of a beautiful youth, the lost plumage begins to grow back, amidst pricks and the pangs of birth. Erotic desire – in the convention of the dialogue, the desire for a beautiful man – is the mechanism of remembrance by which the soul ascends to beauty itself. The *Symposium* contains the same ascent in the form of Diotima’s ladder.

This is what Kripal means when he says that Plato saw same-sex desire as the wings to the Good and the Beautiful, whilst Freud ‘flattens’ Plato. Plato remains ambivalent. The later ‘Laws’ become strict, permitting sexuality primarily for procreation and condemning same-sex acts as ‘unnatural’. Christianity inherited both ‘Platons’: the erotic ascent rediscovered by its mystical bride-theologians, and the reproductive narrow-mindedness codified by its moralists. It retained the structure of the ascent whilst suppressing its original same-sex licence.

Why do priests wear long robes and laypeople wear shorts?

Clothing makes theology visible. Liturgical vestments derive from late Roman civilian clothing: the alb from the tunica alba, the chasuble from the paenula or casula, the ‘little house’ that covered the whole body, along with the dalmatic, stole and choir robe. When the tunica alba went out of fashion in the sixth century, the Church retained it. With the upheavals of the Migration Period, clerical attire became distinct from lay clothing.

The Church then enshrined this distinction in law. As late as 428, Pope Celestine I urged that clerics should distinguish themselves from the laity through their education, not through their clothing. The Council of Braga (572) required an ankle-length vestis talaris; the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) prohibited outer garments that were too short; an English council in 1237 criticised clerical attire that was ‘more befitting a knight’; and in 1589, Sixtus V prescribed the floor-length robe on pain of forfeiting one’s benefice. The pressure persisted because men’s lay fashion was moving in the opposite direction. Around 1350, as one chronicler marvelled, men wore skirts ‘so short and tight’ that they revealed what modesty demands be concealed. The leg-emphasising silhouette, consisting of a doublet and leggings, originated in military attire. The clergy did not follow suit.

Albs, chasubles, choir robes, cassocks and choir shirts cover the lower body, obscure the contours of the legs and allow the drape of the fabric to take precedence over the body’s outline. In a culture that had begun to interpret revealing legwear as masculine, the clergyman’s enveloping column of fabric appeared as a departure from prevailing masculinity: unmartial and remote from procreation. Many monks, however, wore femoralia or Bruche, men’s underpants, and only ascetic orders such as the Cistercians dispensed with them. And the ‘feminisation’ of clerical attire is one interpretation. The coding of robes and trousers has varied throughout history and only became fixed in the 19th century. The priest is marked as different from the ordinary man, without thereby becoming feminine.

What does Kripal’s own history have to do with this?

The interpretation depends on the reader, and Kripal has made his own body the subject matter. As a teenager, he was deeply religious and severely anorexic, before the term even existed. He channelled his hunger into fasting, asceticism and celibacy, and today interprets it as a way of suppressing the emerging sexuality of puberty. A monk with psychoanalytic training introduced him to Freud. Kripal learnt to interpret his own fasting behaviour in sexual terms, and subsequently recognised the pattern among his fellow seminar participants.

He built an entire metaphysical system around a later experience. During the Kali festival in Kolkata in 1989, he awoke in the night paralysed, wide awake, flooded by a violent, erotic and frightening energy that he initially mistook for an electric shock. After letting go, he felt it flow into his chest, experienced an out-of-body experience and returned with the impression that a ‘download’ had been transmitted, which he later interpreted as the seed of all his future books. His ‘two-aspect monism’ understands reality as one in being and two in cognition, with the brain acting as a filter, based on the Pauli–Jung hypothesis. This hypothesis posits a shared, fundamental reality underlying both the material and the spiritual worlds. Psychologically, asceticism and eating disorders could be interpreted here as sublimation.

Why does desire transform rather than disappear?

Taken together, all these strands describe a single structure. The Christian priesthood arises through the elevation of a life of abstinence and same-sex communal living, the symbolic weakening of the male body, and the translation of Eros into mystical and sacramental forms. This is why, over the centuries, the priest has appeared as a paradoxical figure: endowed with social authority yet erotically ascetic, biologically male yet visibly distanced from lay masculinity, desexualised in doctrine, and permeated by a displaced erotic intensity in ritual and devotion.

The most concise formulation is this: the priesthood constitutes a sacred third position within the gender order, with a genuine ancient Oriental history. It rests on hierarchies that are directed both against heterosexuality and, in part, against women, and it produces a homoerotically charged, partly feminised male form. It only becomes comprehensible when one reads institutional history, theological language and the semiotics of the body in conjunction. Celibacy on its own appears as mere asceticism, the robe on its own as mere conservatism, and mysticism on its own as a private eccentricity. Taken together, they converge on a male body that is detached from ordinary masculinity and oriented towards God.

How robust is this interpretation?

A work of such wide-ranging scope owes its readers an account of its own limitations. The first is structural. Anyone who expects repressed sexuality to be present everywhere makes the thesis difficult to refute, and Kripal almost admits as much when he says that, upon reading others’ accounts of their experiences, he thinks: ‘Here comes the sex stuff.’ That is either pattern recognition or bias, depending on your perspective. This same structure allows him to classify counter-examples as ‘heterodox’, such as the heterosexual mystics Agehananda Bharati and Chögyam Trungpa, or heterosexual tantra. This tautological premise cannot prove itself: orthodoxy is homoerotic; whatever is not homoerotic is heterodox.

The second limitation concerns the evidence. Kripal’s method of reading contemporary experience back into ancient texts is precisely the point of attack for his critics. The most detailed rebuttal, Swami Tyagananda’s and Pravrajika Vrajaprana’s *Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali’s Child Revisited* (2010), accuses him of biased translation from Bengali, cultural misunderstanding and speculation passed off as fact. Taken together with the controversial status of the Secret Gospel of Mark and the disputed labelling of ancient Oriental priestly roles, one thing is clear: the logical fallacy lies in deriving a definitional or universal proposition from a finite number of examples, leaving no room for counterexamples.

What remains, nevertheless, is considerable. The hierarchy that places virginity above marriage is well documented. The bridal mysticism that makes the monk the bride of a male God is a real structure with its own body of texts, ranging from Origen to John of the Cross. The dress code, which prioritises veiling over a doublet, leggings and a sword, is decreed by the council and thus on record. The most provocative claims – a queer Jesus and a thoroughly homoerotic Orthodoxy – are best taken as Kripal frames them: as ‘historical koans’. In Zen Buddhism, a koan is a paradoxical, enigmatic statement intended to transcend ordinary, discursive understanding. Kripal’s exaggerations bring to light a real and largely overlooked field of sacralised male intimacy and physical renunciation.

Key points in brief

•             The priesthood and monasticism can be interpreted as a technique that detaches male desire from procreation and combat and directs it towards God, Christ and a community of men.

•             The transformation of the sacred man’s form and gender ranges from shamanism through the ‘bearded’ Ishtar to the self-castrated Galloi of Cybele.

•             The Church Fathers placed virginity and the ‘angelic life’ above marriage. Augustine regarded marriage as good, but abstinence as superior.

•             The mysticism of the Bride, from Origen through Bernard to John of the Cross, places the male soul in the role of the bride of a male God, a symbolically same-sex devotional eroticism.

•             Plato’s *Phaedrus* presents the image of Eros as a wing leading to the divine. The *Laws*, however, reduce him once again to the realm of procreation.

•             The liturgical robe is a legacy of late Roman civilian dress. From Braga (572) to Sixtus V (1589), the Church kept it long, whilst lay fashion from around 1350 onwards revealed the legs.

•             Freud’s concept of sublimation interprets asceticism, fasting and celibacy as forms into which sexuality is channelled.

•             Kripal’s theses on the queer Jesus and a homoerotic Christian orthodoxy remain provocative. The hierarchy of virginity, bridal mysticism and the history of fashion are well documented.

•             Caution is advised: the process of reading backwards generates hypotheses and proves little.

Sources

•             Jeffrey J. Kripal, *Secret Body* (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

•             ‘The Queerness of It All’: Interview with Jeffrey Kripal, Los Angeles Review of Books

•             Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries (University of Chicago Press, 1978), §§5–7 (shamanism, ecstasy, soul-flight) and §19 (Inanna/Ishtar as ‘Ishtar barbata’), pp. 19–28 and 64.

•             Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 2: From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity (University of Chicago Press, 1982), §207 (Cybele, Attis and the Galloi; ritual androgyny; the Mithraic rank ‘Nymphus’), pp. 284–290, and §236 (baptism and androgyny, Galatians 3:28), p. 401.

•             Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol. 3: From Muhammad to the Age of Reforms (University of Chicago Press, 1985), §277 (al-Hallaj, ‘ischq’), §280 (Ibn Arabi, the androgynous ‘perfect man’) and §282 (Rumi), pp. 128–146.

•             Mircea Eliade & Ioan Petru Culianu, Dicționar al religiilor (Humanitas, 1993), Chapter 29 (Shamanism) and the entries for Tapas and Sannyāsa (asceticism).

•             Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton University Press, 1964); Waldemar Bogoras, The Chukchee (1904–1909) – on shape-shifting, gender transformation and the ‘effeminate men’ of the Chukchi.

•             Peter Brown, *The Body and Society* (Columbia University Press, 1988)

•             Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum (New Advent)

•             Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity (New Advent)

•             Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs (Internet Archive)

•             Teresa of Ávila and Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (overview)

•             Plato, Phaedrus (Perseus Digital Library)

•             Catholic Encyclopaedia, Clerical Costume (New Advent)

•             Encyclopædia Britannica, Religious Dress: Roman Catholic

•             The Secret Gospel of Mark and the Authenticity Debate (Overview)

•             Swami Tyagananda & Pravrajika Vrajaprana, Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali’s Child Revisited (2010)

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