On Beard-Shaving #
Unfortunately, what was once considered natural for believers is today met with profound misunderstanding. Before the Church schism of the 17th century, all Orthodox men in Rus’ did not shave their beards—such an idea, I think, never even occurred to them. Wearing a beard was a common religious and ethical norm. The same was true in the Orthodox East and everywhere Christianity existed. As the centuries pass, we are sorrowfully compelled to witness humanity following the path of apostasy. Western Catholic and Protestant currents consciously distort the meaning of the Bible to suit their own weaknesses. This includes the matter of beard-shaving.
Even the Old Testament Scriptures clearly point to beard-shaving as a God-opposing custom. Christ Himself wore a beard. The beard is a symbolic and tangible representation of the image of God in man.
A whole host of Holy Fathers—such as Cyprian of Carthage, Nikon of the Black Mountain, and Isidore of Pelusium—call Christians to refrain from shaving their beards. Canonically, beard-shaving is forbidden by the 96th rule of the Sixth Ecumenical Council. This is affirmed unanimously by the commentators Matthew Blastares and John Zonaras.
The tradition of wearing a beard was zealously kept in Rus’, as witnessed by the Russkaya Pravda, the letters of Maximus the Greek, Metropolitan Makary, the Kirilova Kniga, the Book on the Faith, the Great Moscow Council of 1551, and the Trebnik of Saint Philaret Romanov. Beard-shaving was equated by the Orthodox with the Latin heresy.
Peter’s reforms finally killed off the custom of beard-wearing among the nobility and the military. Beard-shaving gradually came to be tolerated in the post-reform Synodal Church. It was even theologically justified by certain Latin-minded bishops, such as Dmitry of Rostov.
After the Revolution, the Bolsheviks set about establishing new societal customs, and beard-wearing was out of the question.
A reverent religious attitude toward this pious Christian custom remains only among the Old Believers. Shaven parishioners are not admitted to Communion. In earlier times, those who shaved their beards were sent to the narthex—that is, during services they had to stand at the threshold of the church.
The Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church periodically returns to this topic and brings it to discussion at Holy Councils and Synodal meetings. At the Holy Council of the Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church in 2014, the following resolution was issued:
17. On the matter of beard-shaving.
17.1. Bishops and spiritual fathers are urged to pay attention to the outward appearance of Christians, including church servants, compelling them—even with corresponding disciplinary measures—to observe the Church canons forbidding the sin of beard-shaving and beard-clipping.
17.2. Those given over to this sin are not to be permitted entry into the Holy Altar.
17.3. Pastors are to be reminded of the Council’s 1908 resolution: “Recognizing beard-shaving as a sin and a heretical act, the Holy Council assigns to priests the unqualified duty of diligently persuading those subject to this vice to abandon it, and if they do not heed the admonition, then—as the Apostle says—after the second and third warning, to bar them from Communion and other sacred things, at the priest’s discretion.”