The Philosophy of Beards by Thomas S. Gowing

Author:Thomas S. Gowing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY

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 ad 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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