This article examines the beard not as a matter of fashion, but as a visible sign connected with Scripture, the Holy Fathers, the canons, and the iconographic memory of the Church.
Introduction: A Matter That Is Not Indifferent
There is, in the speech of today’s Orthodox Christian, an argument repeated almost automatically whenever the question of wearing the beard is raised: "the beard does not save you." Put this way, the argument seems not only true but also humble. And yet, if we look carefully, we notice something curious: this argument appears almost exclusively in one direction — in the direction of casting off an ancient rule. No one says "fasting does not save me, therefore I may eat meat on Wednesdays," or "prostrations do not save me, therefore I may dispense with them." The question must therefore be put in different terms: what does the Tradition of the Church say about the wearing of the beard by a man? Is this a contingent custom, tied to the fashion of each age, or is it the witness of a deeper order that concerns man in his very original image?
This article does not begin from sentiment or from nostalgia for a vanished age. It begins from the witness of Holy Scripture, of the Holy Fathers and of the canonical tradition — witnesses that demand to be heard with due attention. We shall see that the wearing of the beard by the Orthodox man is neither a monastic whim nor a cultural particularity of the East, but an ancient and steadfast expression of the masculine image as it was fashioned by God and preserved in the Church through the ages. We shall see also that the loss of this rule in the Church of today is not the fruit of theological reflection, but of historical pressures — cultural, political, ideological — which must be named for what they are.
I. The Scriptural Foundation
The Church does not begin its spiritual life from our own age, but from Holy Scripture. And on this matter, Scripture speaks clearly and in more than one place.
In the Book of Leviticus, the Lord gives through Moses two distinct commandments that must be read together. The first is addressed to all the men of the chosen people: "Ye shall not make a round cutting of the hair of your head, neither shall ye mar the figure of your beard" (Lev. 19:27, according to the Septuagint). The second commandment, more weighty, is addressed to the priests: "They shall not make a baldness on their head, nor shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings in their flesh" (Lev. 21:5). The distinction is significant: for all men, the marring of the beard is forbidden (Gr. οὐ φθερεῖτε); for priests, the express prohibition of shaving is added (Gr. οὐ ξυρήσονται). The priest, being consecrated to the service of God, observes more than the layman; but the layman observes also.
A second scriptural witness, less often remembered, is the episode of David’s messengers to King Hanun of the Ammonites. Seeing the royal envoys, Hanun "took David’s servants and shaved off half their beards, and cut off their garments in the middle, at their hips, and sent them away" (2 Sam. 10:4). When David learned of it, he sent word to them: "Tarry at Jericho until your beards be grown, and then return" (2 Sam. 10:5). The episode shows clearly what the shaving of the beard meant for a man of Israel: a dishonour so great that the shaved man could not appear in public until the sign of manhood had grown back. The war that followed — against the Ammonites and their Syrian (Aramean) allies — was provoked precisely by this mockery.
These witnesses of the Old Testament are not mere ancient customs, superseded in the New Covenant. The Lord Himself, our Saviour Jesus Christ, wore a beard in the days of His flesh. This we know not only from the unbroken witness of the icon (the painted image, as a foundation of Tradition), but also from the prophecy of the Prophet Isaiah: "I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting" (Isaiah 50:6) — a text which the Fathers interpret as showing that Christ wore a beard when He was plucked and struck. The Holy Apostles, according to the ancient witness of iconography and patristic sources, also wore beards. All the Patriarchs, all the Prophets, all the Righteous of the Old and New Covenants are depicted with beards in the icons of the Church.
II. The Patristic Witness
Holy Scripture does not speak alone. The Holy Fathers, who are the mouth of the Church, have spoken on this matter with a clarity that leaves no room for doubt.
The Apostolic Constitutions
The first great patristic witness we have is the Apostolic Constitutions (ca. 380, Antioch of Syria), an ancient writing of ecclesiastical discipline that lies at the foundation of the canonical rules of the East. In Book I, Section II, Chapter III, we read clearly:
"Nor may men destroy the hair of their beards, and unnaturally change the form of a man. For the law says: ‘You shall not mar your beards.’ For God the Creator has made this decent for women, but has determined that it is unsuitable for men. But if you do these things to please men, in contradiction to the law, you will be abominable with God, who created you after His own image."
(Apostolic Constitutions I, II, 3 — after the critical edition Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. VII, ed. Donaldson, Buffalo, 1886.)
Let us note two things in this witness. First, the text speaks not only of the total shaving of the beard, but of any "marring" of it — that is, cutting, shaping, altering the natural appearance. Second, the motivation is the image of God. To change the appearance of man in an unnatural way means to mar the very sign by which the Creator distinguished the masculine nature from the feminine.
Saint Clement of Alexandria
The second great patristic witness comes from Saint Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150 – ca. 215), one of the most ancient Fathers of the Church. In The Instructor (Paedagogus) — a work that guides the Christian in the becoming habits of life — Book III, Chapter III, Saint Clement writes:
"God wished women to be smooth, and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane; but has adorned man, like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him, as an attribute of manhood, with a shaggy chest — a sign of strength and rule."
And further:
"This, then, the mark of the man, the beard, by which he is seen to be a man, is older than Eve, and is the token of the superior nature."
And again:
"It is not lawful to pluck out the beard, man’s natural and noble ornament."
(St. Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus III, 3 — after the critical edition Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. II, pp. 275–276.)
Saint Clement uses for the beard the Greek word κόσμος — the same word that means both "ordered adornment" and "cosmos." For patristic thought, the man’s beard is not some incidental bodily feature, but a kosmos — that is, an ordered beauty, an adornment placed by the Creator within the very nature of man, as a sign of his rôle in the world. Saint Clement says plainly that the beard is "the mark of the man, by which he is seen to be a man" — a formulation that admits no ambiguity.
A clarification is in order here. Saint Clement uses, according to ancient usage, the expression "the token of the superior nature" — a formulation which, read with the eyes of our age, might appear to suggest that the Father is upholding an ontological superiority of man over woman. This is not the meaning. The Holy Fathers, when speaking of the distinction between masculine and feminine nature, speak of distinct, complementary rôles, not of unequal personal dignity. Man and woman are equally created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27); both are called to the same holiness and the same deification. Clement’s language about a "higher nature" refers to the rôle of governance (leadership through service) and of assumed responsibility that Scripture places upon the man’s shoulders (Eph. 5:23) — not to a superiority of the masculine person. And the beard is, in the Saint’s language, the visible sign of that rôle, not of an ontological superiority.
Saint Cyprian of Carthage
We have also a witness from the third century that comes from the West — and which, for that very reason, has a particular significance. Saint Cyprian of Carthage (ca. 200 – 258), bishop and martyr of the undivided Church, writes in his treatise On the Lapsed (De Lapsis), in which he reproves the Christians who, after the persecution of Decius, had fallen into sin through love of the world and outward adornment. In chapter 6, listing the signs of this falling away, Saint Cyprian writes:
"In men, their beards were defaced; in women, their complexion was dyed: the eyes were falsified from what God’s hand had made them; their hair was stained with a falsehood."
And further, in chapter 30, speaking of those who seek to please men instead of mourning their sins, he adds:
"And although it is written: ‘You shall not mar the figure of your beard’ (Lev. 19:27), he plucks out his beard, and dresses his hair; and does he now study to please any one who displeases God?"
(St. Cyprian of Carthage, De Lapsis / On the Lapsed, chs. 6 and 30 — after the Ante-Nicene Fathers edition, vol. V, ed. Wallis, 1886.)
This witness is of twofold importance. First, it shows that by the middle of the third century, in Western Carthage, the shaving of the beard was reckoned a marring of the image given by the order of God. Second — and this is the most significant point — Saint Cyprian is a Father of the West, writing for Christians in Roman Africa. That is to say: in the age when West and East were still united in the same Tradition, both sides knew the same rule. The change that would come later in the West, through Leo IX and Gregory VII, is not antiquity but novelty; not Tradition but rupture. Saint Cyprian, bishop of Latin Carthage, witnesses to the same faith as Saint Clement of Alexandria and as the Apostolic Constitutions of the East.
A Witness from the Romanian Language
Here a brief pause is in order over a witness we have in the very language we speak. The word bărbat in Romanian, meaning "man" (as in male adult, husband), comes by direct inheritance from the Latin barbatus, which literally means "one who bears a beard." The same root is preserved in all the Romance languages — Italian barbato, Spanish and Portuguese barbado, Provençal barbat. But among all these languages, only Romanian has kept barbatus as the common name for the male being. In Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese, the ordinary word for "man" comes from the Latin homo (Italian uomo, Spanish hombre, French homme, Portuguese homem). Only the Romanian, when he says "bărbat," says etymologically "bearer of a beard."
This concurrence of name and nature is not a curiosity, but a witness from a time in which the masculine nature and its visible sign were so closely joined that they became one word. The language has preserved, in its very root, a memory which the speakers of the language have lost. Etymology, of course, cannot by itself become a dogmatic argument — languages evolve, meanings shift, and today’s usage of "bărbat" no longer presupposes a beard on the face. And yet the fact that today we are obliged to say "a bearded man" — an addition which, in the old logic of the language, is a kind of redundancy — shows how far we have come from the meaning with which our forefathers used this word. When the old Romanian said "bărbat," he had nothing to add: the image was contained in the name.
Saint Epiphanius of Salamis
Saint Epiphanius of Salamis (ca. 315 – 403), Father of the fourth century and unbroken defender of the right faith, writes in his Panarion — the great work against heresies — clear words about the wearing of the beard. Here is his direct witness:
"But what is worse, and the opposite error, [is that] some cut off their beards, the mark of manhood, while often letting the hair of their heads grow long [like women]. And as to the beard, the sacred institution and teaching in the Ordinances of the Apostles says not to ‘spoil’ it — that is, not to cut the beard — and not to deck oneself with meretricious ornaments or have the approach of pride as a copy of righteousness."
(St. Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion, Books II–III, De Fide — after the English translation by Frank Williams, Brill, p. 651.)
Saint Epiphanius’ witness was also preserved by Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite, in his Pedalion (commentary on Canon 96 of the Council in Trullo), who adds the historical occasion: "Saint Epiphanius blamed the Massalians for cutting off their beards, which is the visage peculiar to man as distinguished from woman." The Massalians were a heretical sect that, under the pretext of ascetic piety, was altering the natural rules of the Church — and Saint Epiphanius saw in the shaving of the beard a sign of that aberration.
This witness is of twofold importance. First, it shows that by the end of the fourth century the shaving of the beard was considered a sign of heretical deviation. Second, Saint Epiphanius uses the same key word that Saint Clement of Alexandria had used over a century before, and that Saint Cyprian of Carthage had used as well: the beard is the mark of manhood, the image of man. The Holy Fathers, though separated by centuries and by places — Alexandria, Carthage, Salamis of Cyprus, Antioch of Syria — bear witness to the same thing with the same words. This is consensus patrum — the consensus of the Fathers, the surest criterion of Tradition.
Saint Cosmas of Aetolia
We leap across the centuries to a great enlightener of the East in the latter days — Saint Cosmas of Aetolia, Equal to the Apostles (1714 – 1779), who travelled through Greece, then under Turkish rule, preaching repentance. In his Seventh Teaching, preserved in his didaches, the Saint calls Christians back to the rules of the Fathers and speaks thus:
"If there is anyone among you who will let his beard grow, let him stand up and tell me, so that I may give him a comb, and I will ask all the Christians to forgive him, and we shall be brothers. […] I do not say that a beard will get you to heaven, but good works will."
(St. Cosmas of Aetolia, Seventh Teaching, after the text preserved in his didaches — English edition translated by Constantine Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos, 3rd edition, 1985.)
Let us note: Saint Cosmas, a man of prayer and sacrifice, of whom no one can say that he was concerned merely with externals, himself anticipates the modern argument — "a beard will not get you to heaven" — and yet in the very same teaching calls the faithful to grow their beards and promises a comb to those who do. From this it is plainly seen that the Holy Fathers knew well the distinction between the essential and the external in salvation. They knew it, and yet they asked that the external be observed — because in the spiritual life, man is not soul separated from body, but unity. The loss of the visible begets, in time, the loss of the invisible.
III. The Canonical Tradition and the Witness of Iconography
Canon 96 of the Council in Trullo
The Council in Trullo, also called Quinisext (year 692), is one of the foundations of Eastern canon law, received as drawing its authority from the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils. Canon 96 of this Council speaks thus:
"Those who by Baptism have put on Christ have professed that they will copy His manner of life in the flesh. Those, therefore, who adorn and arrange their hair to the detriment of those who see them — that is, by cunningly devised intertwinings — and by this means put a bait in the way of unstable souls, we correct paternally with a fitting penance, training them like children, and teaching them to live soberly."
(Council in Trullo, Canon 96 — after the text of the Pedalion.)
It must be said from the outset, for the sake of truth: the text of the canon itself does not speak directly of the beard, but of the hair of the head, adorned with cunning artifices in order to lead others astray. But the Eastern canonical commentators — and above all Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite in the Pedalion — have shown that the logic of the canon extends also to the shaving of the beard, because it concerns the same passion: the desire to alter one’s natural appearance, given by God, in order to please men.
Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite’s Commentary
In the Pedalion, Saint Nicodemus writes about Canon 96 with words of great weight:
"This excommunication is incurred also by those who shave off their beard in order to make their face smooth and handsome after such treatment, and not to have it curly, or in order to appear at all times like beardless young men; and those who singe the hair of their beard with a red-hot tile so as to remove any that is longer than the rest, or more crooked; or who use tweezers to pluck out the superfluous hairs on their face, in order to become tender and appear handsome; or who dye their beard, in order not to appear to be old men."
And further:
"And if these things are forbidden to be done by the laity in general, how much more they are forbidden to clerics and those in holy orders — who ought by their speech and by their conduct, and by the outward decency and plainness of their garments, and of their hair, and of their beard, to teach the laity not to be body-lovers and exquisites, but soul-lovers and virtue-lovers."
(St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite, Pedalion, commentary on Canon 96 of the Council in Trullo — after the English edition The Rudder, trans. Cummings, pp. 403–405.)
Saint Nicodemus shows further that God Himself forbade the shaving of the beard in the Law, both to laymen (Lev. 19:27) and to priests (Lev. 21:5). He then adds the witness of iconography: "And He appeared to Daniel with hair and beard, as the Ancient of Days (Dan. 7:9); and the Son of God wore a beard while He was in the flesh. And all our Patriarchs and Prophets and Apostles wore beards, as is plainly evident from the most ancient pictures of them."
The Witness of the Icon
Here we touch a fundamental point of Eastern theology. The icon, for the Church, is not a mere ornament but a witness of Tradition. Canon 82 of the same Council in Trullo orders that the icon of Christ should be painted in human form, not by symbolic representation; and more broadly, the icon is a witness of unwritten Tradition, alongside Scripture. Saint Basil the Great said that "the honour of the icon passes to its prototype" — that is, the icon bears witness to a reality.
Now in the entire iconography of the Church, in overwhelming measure, our Lord Jesus Christ is depicted with a beard. The Apostles and the Holy Fathers are, according to the settled iconographic order, depicted with beards — with certain known particularities (Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist, sometimes shown in his youth without a beard; certain young holy martyrs such as Saint George or Saint Demetrius, depicted as young soldiers). These particularities, however, do not alter the rule but rather confirm it, showing that the bearded depiction is the fulfilled image of the adult man, while youthful faces are shown as youthful. The great Holy Fathers — Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory the Theologian, Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Athanasius the Great, Saint Cyril of Alexandria — all are depicted with beards. This unbroken witness of the icon is not an artistic convention but a tradition: it shows us how the holy image of the man in the Church truly was, for two thousand years.
To deny oneself of the image which Christ, the Apostles, and the Holy Fathers bear, on the ground that "it does not matter," is a matter that deserves to be weighed.
IV. The Loss of the Tradition in the West
The natural question is: how did it come about that in the Church of today the shaving of the beard is regarded with indifference, when for fifteen hundred years it was ordered otherwise? The answer leads us to a sad history — namely, the departures of the Latin West from the common Tradition.
In the ancient Church, both in East and West, both clergy and laity wore beards. Saint Ambrose of Milan, Saint Benedict, Saint Gregory the Dialogist, all the Western Fathers of the early centuries are depicted with beards — as Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite testifies, having seen their images painted in the ancient Church of Saint Mark in Venice. The change was made in the West relatively late, on the eve of the Great Schism. Before Leo IX (1049–1054), the shaving of the beard among Latin clergy was not yet law; it was imposed more forcefully by Gregory VII (1073–1085), who even resorted to force to make bishops and clerics shave their beards.
This change is not an insignificant particularity. Cardinal Humbert, in the act of anathema he cast upon the altar of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople on the day of 16 July 1054 — the act that sealed the rupture of the West from the One Church — included among the accusations brought against the East precisely this: "Wearing beards and long hair, [you, Easterners,] reject the bond of brotherhood with the Roman clergy, since they shave and cut their hair." (cited after N.N. Voekov, The Church, Russia, and Rome, p. 98).
That is to say: the West, departing from the ancient Tradition, made of the shaving of the beard a sign of its own rupture, and of the preservation of the beard in the East — a ground of accusation. This is one of those historical coincidences that are not at all accidental. When a local Church separates itself from the fullness of the Tradition, the inner changes show themselves also outwardly: in rituals, in vestments, and even on the faces of its ministers.
Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite calls this change a "distortion of the masculine face," and of the sight of a shaved pope he says it is "the most loathsome and disgusting spectacle." Hard words, but they show how deeply the Fathers felt that this was no trifle, but a real loss of the masculine image.
V. The Modern Assault on the Masculine Image
From Peter the Great
The Orthodox East preserved the beard for far longer. Until the eighteenth century, both clergy and monks — without exception — and, broadly, Orthodox laymen of traditional, popular, and boyar circles — Greeks, Romanians, Russians, Serbs, Georgians, Bulgarians — wore the beard as the natural sign of the mature man. There were, of course, local and social variations, especially in circles influenced early by Western fashion; but the broad cultural norm of the East remained the beard. The first great wound at the level of the state was inflicted in Russia, under Tsar Peter the Great.
In the autumn of 1698, returning from his journey through the West, Peter called his Russian boyars before him and — to their astonishment and horror — drew out a razor and began to shave their beards with his own hand. This was not an act of extravagance, but a deliberate programme: the Westernisation of Russia, in Peter’s mind, passed through the erasure of the visible signs of the Orthodox image. In 1698 and 1705 he established a tax on the beard, graded according to rank: nobles and wealthy merchants paid large sums, townspeople less, and peasants entering a city had to pay a kopeck. The clergy, under pressure from the synod, was spared — for a time.
Patriarch Adrian of Moscow, the last Russian Patriarch before Peter abolished the Patriarchate, called the shaving of the beard a "deadly sin." The Old Believers refused en masse, seeing in it a casting off of the Orthodox image of the man — and many paid dearly for this, through persecution and exile. It must be said, for the sake of truth, that the Old Believers later fell into extreme rigorism and into other canonical errors; but on this point their historical witness remains true: they perceived that the shaving of the beard was not a neutral indifference, but the visible sign of a rupture already taking place in the depths.
Under Catherine II (1772), the beard tax was abolished — but the harm had been done. The loss of the beard had entered into the custom of the upper classes of Russia, and from there it spread, over the course of two centuries, throughout the Orthodox world, as a sign of "modernity" and "civilisation."
Saint Cosmas of Aetolia — The Witness of Resistance
It was precisely in this age, when the pressure of Westernisation was beginning to be felt in the East as well, that Saint Cosmas of Aetolia (†1779) was travelling through Greece, calling Christians back to the rules of the Fathers. The passage about the comb, which we have already cited, is part of a wider programme of awakening Orthodox conscience. The Saint was not a nostalgist but a missionary; he knew well that the Turks were not the only adversary of the Orthodox — at times, the most dangerous change came by way of "friend," dressed in the garments of Western fashion. With the comb given as a gift to the man who would let his beard grow, Saint Cosmas resisted, in a gentle and apostolic manner, the great wave of the scattering of Tradition.
More than this, in his didaches Saint Cosmas addresses also adult laymen directly:
"I shall also say a word to men. It is natural for a man going on fifty years to wear a beard. But here I see old men of sixty and eighty who still shave. Are you not ashamed to shave? Does not God, who gave us beards, know better? You, young men, honour those with beards. And if there is a man of thirty with a beard, and one of fifty, or sixty, or a hundred who shaves, place the one with the beard above the one who shaves, both in church and at the table."
(St. Cosmas of Aetolia, didaches — after Father Kosmas Apostle of the Poor, pp. 20–21, English edition.)
This is pastoral teaching, not polemic. The Saint asks no one to save himself by his beard, but sets things in their proper place: the honour of old age, the sign of the man, the shame fitting to him who mars his natural appearance. And above all, this ordering: "Place the one with the beard above the one who shaves" — that is, in the Christian community, the honour due to the man is bound up with the keeping of the image given by the order of God.
Saint Paisios the Athonite — The Parable of the Olive Trees
In our own century, Saint Paisios the Athonite (1924 – 1994), one of the greatest Fathers of our time, in his turn preserved the witness of the patristic order concerning the image of the cleric and the monk. Here is a parable of his, preserved by his disciples, which speaks plainly on this theme:
"At one time some young, well-groomed and modernistic monks came to Father Paisios and told him that changes needed to be made in the outward appearance of clergy and monks. The Elder, after speaking with them, took them to a large olive tree and said: ‘Behold, this is a bishop.’ And pointing to a smaller olive tree, he said: ‘And this is a deacon.’ Then he took a sharp tool and cut off the trunks of the olive trees horizontally. After many months, the monks visited the Elder again. He took them to show them the trees that had dried up, and said to them: ‘Thus shall you become, if you change your appearance.’ A monk said to him: ‘Elder, did you not feel sorry for the olive trees?’ ‘Here, brother, the world is going to ruin, and you are thinking of the olive trees?’ answered the Elder."
(Parable of Saint Paisios the Athonite, preserved in John Sanidopoulos, The Blessed Rasson, pp. 152–153.)
The parable is vivid and singularly clear. Saint Paisios did not give a theological discourse, but, after the manner of the Fathers, spoke by image: a tree whose crown is cut off withers. So too does the cleric or monk who cuts off the visible signs of his order — the beard, the cassock, the uncut hair — wither within. The change of outward appearance is no trifle; it is the beginning of an inner withering which, in time, shows itself outwardly as well.
Saint Paisios often cited Saint Cosmas of Aetolia. Of the cleric who casts off his cassock and shaves his beard, he would say: "Saint Cosmas said that when clerics turn into laymen, laymen will turn into demons." And of the vestment of the priest — and, by extension, of his whole image — he used a short parable: "A priest without a cassock is like an orange without its peel." The parable is the same: what holds together the inner fruit is the visible covering; he who tears it off loses also the kernel.
The witness of Saint Paisios is all the more significant in that he was a direct witness of the wave of modernisation that swept over Mount Athos and the whole Orthodox world in the twentieth century. He knew well the pressure of those who wished to make the monk and the priest more "presentable," more "close to the world," more "relevant" to modern man. And he answered with a vivid, short, homely parable — as was his custom.
The Totalitarian Régimes and the "New Man"
In the twentieth century, the assault on the masculine image of the Orthodox was carried to an unprecedented extent through the totalitarian régimes. Communism, wherever it took root, sought not only the overturning of the political order, but the fashioning of a "new man" — a man stripped of the traditions of his fathers, of the faith of his forebears, of the marks of his original identity.
A significant distinction must be made here. The revolutionary leaders and ideologues of communism themselves often wore beards (Marx, Lenin in a reduced form, Castro, Che Guevara); there was no explicit prohibition of the beard among the great. But for the common man — for the worker, the soldier, the prisoner, the schoolchild — the ordered image was the shaved face, the close-cropped hair, the uniform. And especially in the communist prisons — in the Russia of Solovki and the Gulag, in the Romania of Piteşti, Aiud, Jilava, Gherla — the shaving of the beard and the cropping of the hair was one of the measures imposed upon prisoners. For the clerics and monks who were arrested, this measure had an added weight: it was a visible stripping of their clerical and monastic identity, akin in spirit to the shaming of David’s messengers at the hands of the king of the Ammonites. It was not a measure of hygiene, but a deliberate work of humbling and of stripping away clerical, monastic, Orthodox identity.
This did not happen without reason. The totalitarian régimes understood, better than the modern Christian understands, that the outward image is not indifferent. Whoever wishes to change the inner man begins from without. Whoever wishes to extinguish a tradition begins by making it invisible on faces. The new man of Soviet, fascist, communist régimes — was the shaved, close-cropped, uniformed man: an image stripped of tradition, ready to be filled with the ideology of the régime.
"The Memory of Portraits"
There is yet another witness near at hand in our own days: the portraits of past ages. If we look attentively at the faces of the great men of culture and of the Church up to the beginning of the twentieth century, we shall see, almost without exception, bearded men. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Brahms, Verdi, Wagner, Tesla, Darwin, Eminescu, Creangă, Caragiale, Hașdeu, Iorga, Coșbuc, Pann. And in the world of the Church: Saint Justin Popović, Saint Nectarios of Aegina, Saint Silouan the Athonite, Elder Paisios the Athonite, Elder Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia, Elder Cleopa, Elder Arsenie Papacioc. This was the natural state of the serious adult man — man of art, man of science, man of prayer. The change, when it came, did not come from any theological or philosophical reflection, but from causes of a different kind: industrialisation (the safety razor, a mass-produced item from 1903), war (the gas mask of the First World War required a shaved face), the Western corporation, the cinema screen, revolutionary ideology.
The fact that, looking at these old portraits, we feel today that those men looked like men — is not nostalgia, but recognition of a lost image. Saint Nicodemus would have called this "the judgement of right reason" breaking through the habit of fashion. Nature, even after the Fall, preserves in its depths a memory of the original order.
The Loss of the Beard and the Loss of Manliness
A delicate and grave point must be touched here, for it concerns the very ordering of the household and of the Church. Holy Scripture shows us that in the beginning "God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them" (Gen. 1:27) — two distinct natures, equally honoured but distinguished in rôle and appearance. The same Scripture ordains, through Deuteronomy 22:5, that "the woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment." Canon 13 of the Council of Gangra anathematises women who, under pretext of piety, take on men’s clothing.
The Holy Fathers — as we have already seen in Saint Clement of Alexandria, repeated by Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite — describe the shaving of the beard as a passage toward a "feminine appearance." On the other hand, the Holy Apostle Paul says: "If a woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered" (1 Cor. 11:6) — showing that the long hair of the woman is "her glory" (1 Cor. 11:15), and that the shearing of the woman is a shaming.
The ancient Tradition therefore held the masculine image distinct from the feminine — also outwardly, through beard, hair, garments, conduct. In modernity, this distinction has gradually melted away, and the melting is seen in several directions at once: in clothing, in conduct, in the rôles of the family, in the very way the body itself is presented. The man shaved himself and put on undignified clothing; the woman, alongside the loss of the head-covering and the long garment, gradually took on the masculine garment and appearance. The man weakened his assumption of the household before God; the woman, seeing the void, often took it on her shoulders out of necessity. And the grandchildren grew up reckoning all this as the way of the world.
We must say, however, with sorrow and with justice, the true order of this fall. It was not the woman who first took on the masculine rôle, nor did the shaving of the beard mar the inner man; rather, the inner manliness of the man melted first — the fear of God, daily prayer, fasting, the assumption of household and children before God, self-sacrifice, steadfastness. When that inner manliness weakened, its visible sign, the beard, also became incomprehensible and superfluous. And the woman, seeing the void left by the man, filled it out of need — often with pain and reluctance, more rarely with pleasure. The man is the one who answers first, the Holy Fathers have always said. Saint John Chrysostom, when speaking of the disorder of households, always begins with the man: he is the head, he answers first.
To make the woman responsible for a reversal that the man initiated through inner abandonment would be both unjust and unpatristic. The cause is not there. The cause is with us, the men, who first lost the manliness that is according to God — the manliness of which Saint Peter speaks: "Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered" (1 Pet. 3:7). This is the manliness which the Fathers call andreia — spiritual courage in the struggle with the passions, sacrifice for those whom one leads. Not a proud dominion, but a service which only the inwardly strong can bear.
The restoration of order, therefore, is not made from sign to soul — it is not enough for the man to grow his beard in order to become a man again. Restoration is made from soul to sign: through ascetic struggle, through prayer, through frequent confession, through assuming responsibility before God. But — and here is the key — neither one without the other. For man is not soul separated from body, but unity; and the loss of the visible sign in time makes the inner reality unimaginable for those who come after us. Generations raised without seeing bearded men will have the greatest difficulty imagining what true manliness is. For this reason the Holy Fathers held so firmly to the outward things: not out of formalism, but because they knew that the visible upholds the invisible, and the invisible deposits itself in the visible.
VI. Response to an Objection: "The Beard Does Not Save You"
We mentioned in the introduction the most common argument in our age: "the beard does not save you." The word itself is, in the literal sense, true — it is not the beard that saves, but Christ. But the argument, as used today, conceals a judgement foreign to Tradition, and we ought to name it for what it is.
First, we observe that this argument is used in only one direction — in the direction of casting off an ancient rule. No one says: "the cross I wear around my neck does not save me, so I may lay it aside"; or "the icon in the corner of the house does not save me, so I may take it down"; or "the head-covering of the woman in church does not save her, so she may enter with her head uncovered." The argument is selectively applied — a sign that it is not honest reasoning, but a pretext for a casting off already decided in the heart.
Second, if we carry this argument to its conclusion, it ends by abolishing the whole outward life of the Church. Prostrations do not save you, fasting does not save you, the candle lit before the icon does not save you, the prayer rope does not save you, kneeling does not save you, incense does not save you, the reading of the Psalter does not save you. The end of this road is Protestantism — a faith only in the heart, emptied of all visible things. But the Eastern Church has always rejected this separation of soul from body and of faith from visible life. Orthodoxy is an incarnate faith; and the incarnation of faith is seen on the face, on the garment, in the home, in the church, in the whole manner of life.
Third, we have already shown that Saint Cosmas of Aetolia himself anticipated this argument: "I do not say that a beard will get you to heaven, but good works will." But in the very same teaching he calls Christians to grow their beards. Saint Cosmas knew the distinction between the essential and the external in salvation; yet he asked that the external be kept. Why? Because the Tradition of the Church does not work according to the reckoning of "what is strictly necessary for salvation" — that is a foreign reckoning, coming from Western scholasticism, which divided the faith into "essential" and "non-essential," and cast all that was reckoned "non-essential" into the dustbin of time. Eastern Tradition works according to the reckoning of fullness: all that has been received from the Holy Fathers is kept, not because each element by itself saves, but because the Tradition as a whole is the vessel in which we receive salvation.
To remove from a vessel now one piece, now another, on the ground that "this piece does not keep me alive," leads in the end to the emptying of the vessel. And then we have nothing left to honour, nothing to give our children, nothing to defend before God.
Therefore, the fitting answer to "the beard does not save you" is: "True. But the Tradition, of which the beard is a part, leads me to Him who saves. And it is not for me to cut from the Tradition what I think can be cut, but to receive it as I have received it from the Fathers who gave it to me."
Conclusion
The wearing of the beard by the Orthodox man is neither a law of the Church which, if broken, casts the soul into damnation, nor a trifle of no consequence which can be cast off without loss. It is an ancient rule, witnessed by Holy Scripture, by the Holy Fathers, by the canons of the Church, and by the unbroken witness of the icon — a rule which concerns the image of man as he was created by God and preserved in the Church through the ages.
He who can approach this rule with humility and quietness — not presenting it as a cause for pride, nor reckoning it a sign of a spiritual stature he does not have — takes a step toward placing himself within the ancient Tradition of the Church. He who, for blessed reasons (a profession that does not allow it, a bodily infirmity, obedience to his spiritual father), cannot fully wear the beard, yet keeps honour for it in his heart and does not judge with indifference those of others. And he who, reading this article, feels that something has opened within him, will find in confession to his spiritual father the guidance proper for him.
Tradition is not received through force, nor through polemic, but through longing for the whole image of man in Christ. And this image — we see in the icons, we see in the faces of the saints, we see in the faces of our fathers grown old in spiritual struggle. It is a beautiful, mature, steadfast, expressive image — the image of the man who has not cast off what he has received. Our language itself, through the very word "bărbat" (bearer of a beard), waits for us to recognise it.
And the word to hold to, when next we hear the customary argument of our age, is this: the beard does not save you — but indifference toward Tradition impoverishes us. The first truth is spoken alike by Saint Cosmas of Aetolia and by the Christian of today. The second is loudly witnessed by the Holy Fathers, the canons, the iconography, and by the very faces of those who passed through spiritual struggle before us.
Glory to God for all things.