A BRIEF glance at Ecclesiastical History will furnish one or two
interesting matters. Most of the Fathers of the Church both wore and
approved of the Beard. Clement, of Alexandria, says, “nature adorned man
like the lion, with a Beard, as the index of strength and empire.”
Lactantius, Theodoret, St. Augustine, and St. Cyprian, are all eloquent
in praise of this natural feature: about which many discussions were
raised in the early ages of the Church, when matters of discipline
necessarily engaged much of the attention of its leaders. To settle
these disputes, at the 4th Council of Carthage, held A.D. 252, canon 44,
it was enacted “that a clergyman shall _not cherish his hair nor shave
his Beard_.” (Clericus nec comam nutriat nec barbam radat.) And Bingham
quotes an early letter, in which it is said of one who from a layman had
become a clergyman, “his habit, gait, modesty, countenance, and
discourse, were all _religious_, and _agreeably to these his hair was
short and his Beard long_;” shewing that in those early times St. Paul
was better understood than at a later date.
Subsequently the Beard was alternately commended to the clergy for its
becoming gravity, or condemned from the ascetic notion that pride was
apt to lurk in a fine Beard. In some of the monasteries lay members wore
the Beard, while those in orders were shaved, and the hairs, remnant of
an earlier superstition, devoutly consecrated to God with special
prayers and imposing ceremonies.
One order of the Cistercians were specially allowed to wear their
Beards, and were hence called “fratres barbati” or Bearded brethren.
The military orders of the Church, as the Knights of St. John and the
Templars, were always full Bearded.
To touch the Beard, was at one time a solemnity by which a godfather
acknowledged the child of his adoption.
One of the fertile sources of dispute between the Roman and Greek
Churches has been this subject of wearing or not wearing the Beard. The
Greek Church, with a firm faithfulness which does credit to its
orthodoxy, has stood manfully by the early Church decisions and refused
to admit any shaven saint into its calendar, heartily despising the
Romish Church for its weakness in this respect. On the other hand, the
Popes, to mark the distinction between Eastern and Western christianity,
early introduced statutes “de radendis barbis,” or concerning shaving
the Beard. Here and there, however, a manly old fellow, like Pope Julius
II, who made Michael Angelo sculpture him with a drawn sword in his
hand, or a Cardinal, like Pole or Allen, and many Bishops, managed to
believe that faith and nature might be reconciled by taking a
comprehensive and truly Catholic view of both.
The leading English and German Reformers wore their Beards; (if Luther
confined himself to a moustache, it was because his Monkish habit of
shaving was too strong for him,) and most of the Martyrs to the
Protestant Faith were burnt in their Beards.
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