Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (10 page)

Before he became pope in 1073, Gregory VII was known as Hildebrand, a monk, papal counselor, and standard-bearer for church power. Energized by a wave of religious enthusiasm that swept Europe in the 1000s, reformers like Hildebrand embraced a bold vision of a Christendom ruled not by rough and semiliterate feudal nobles but by pure and righteous churchmen. As pope, Gregory’s first priority was to secure the power to appoint bishops and other high church officials, which up to
that time had been largely in secular hands. In short order, he found himself toe to toe with Henry IV, the young king of Germany, who was equally determined to retain his own grip on church offices.

In January 1077, this struggle between the forces of sword and spirit came to a head on a remote mountaintop. Pope and king were traveling to meet each other to settle their dispute, and their paths crossed high in the Alps at Canossa Castle. At the moment, the pope had the upper hand. Almost a year before, he had invoked the authority of God in officially stripping Henry of his royal title, the first pope ever to take such drastic action. He had also excommunicated the king, declaring him cut off from the mother church and its soul-saving grace. By the pope’s decree, Henry’s subjects were released from any obligation to obey their royal master, prompting many lords and bishops to renounce their sovereign. King Henry was now a desperate man. His authority and his future hung in the balance, and only the pope’s satisfaction could save him.

Pope Gregory sat comfortably within the wintry walls of Canossa Castle, secure in his righteousness. Henry literally stood outside in the cold, begging to come in and seek the pope’s pardon. For two days in succession, Henry slowly walked barefoot up the winding, icy road to the castle gate, dressed in a plain, penitential woolen tunic, to kneel and tearfully plead for forgiveness, only to be denied admittance and forced to trudge back down to the village below. When Henry appeared again for a third day, the pope, surrounded by advisors who counseled mercy, finally relented. The king and five German bishops entered the castle, kneeling before the pope to receive his absolution, along with the symbolic kiss of peace. Henry promised in writing to obey the pope’s decisions concerning the church. The pope then celebrated mass with his former adversaries and hosted a sumptuous banquet.

Gregory had good reason to be pleased. He had got what he hoped for, but, strangely enough, so did Henry. By reconciling himself to the church, he was restored as the legitimate king. His subjects were once again obligated to obey him, and in the years ahead, he rebuilt his power to the point where he was able to force Gregory himself out of Rome and place for a time his own man on the papal throne. The back-and-forth between Henry and Gregory reflected the new character of medieval politics at this time, and for several centuries after. Neither
kings nor popes could rule without consideration of the other. There were two entrenched powers with two discrete systems of law (canon law and civil law), two hierarchies (ecclesiastical and noble), and two primary forms of manly dignity—professional and patriarchal. Naturally enough, there were also two contrasting masculine styles: shaved and bearded.

In their quest to strengthen the church, reformers like Gregory sought to imbue churchmen with a higher sense of professionalism. The essence of medieval professionalism—the very origin of the word—was the fulfillment of a vow to give oneself wholly to the service of God, especially in learning and prayer. To eleventh-century reformers like Pope Gregory, the truest model of professionalism was the monastery. A monk did not live to serve himself or his family, only God. He denied himself sex, children, and wealth so that he might give himself entirely to the church. Reformers dreamed of raising the entire clergy to this high standard and began to insist that all priests model themselves on monks. Like monks, they were to hold their offices as a calling, not a source of income. They should not pay money to powerful nobles for their posts (a sin called simony), and they should renounce worldly temptations in a celibate life. Not surprisingly, there were many objections to these new requirements, but Gregory and his allies were adamant. The church must be purified in order to serve God and command his kingdom.

Adopting the professionalism of monks meant looking like monks. Before the eleventh century, only monks had been required to shave. Now it was mandated for all churchmen. Beardlessness was next to godliness. As Pope Gregory engaged in battle with secular power, he vigorously enforced this and other reform measures. He excommunicated bishops for simony, denounced married priests, and strenuously insisted on shaving. In 1080, for example, he sent an urgent letter to the ruler of Cagliari, a Sardinian port city, instructing him to require the clergy under his control to shear off their beards. Those who refused were to have their properties confiscated. In explaining his rule, Gregory claimed that he was enforcing the practice of the church “from its beginning.”
13
This was pure fiction, of course. Shaving was an entirely new policy, but the pope was happy to rewrite history for a greater cause.

Perhaps it is a little unfair to blame Gregory for this fabrication. Around the time he was born, earlier reformers had covertly rewritten canon law to make it appear as though beardlessness was authorized by ancient councils. In 1023, a new collection of canon law was published in Rome that included three different statutes requiring clergymen to shave. Canon 208 carried the greatest weight, because it was said to come from the prestigious fifth-century
Statuta ecclesiae antiqua,
or Ancient Church Statues. The new version, however, subtly corrupted the older law: a word in the phrase “Clericus nec comam nutriat nec barbam radat” (Clergy should neither grow long hair,
nor
shave the beard) was changed, so that it now read “Clericus nec comam nutriat sed barbam radat” (Clergy should not grow long hair but
should
shave their beard).
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The adulterated regulation also declared that those of the Roman fellowship who disregarded this rule were to be expelled.
15
Beginning with a council of bishops meeting at Bourges (France) in 1031, church councils throughout Europe moved to enforce this and similar regulations.

The advance of clerical shaving created a dramatic contrast between churchmen and laymen, just as it was supposed to do.
16
The clergy became rather proud of their unique style and often guarded it jealously. When fashionable young knights adopted a smooth look in Burgundy and Germany in the early eleventh century, many clergymen reacted with alarm. Shaving was a spiritual act for churchmen but perverse in laymen. William of Volpiano, a Burgundian monk, repeatedly denounced vain men who sported outlandish clothes, indecent hose and shoes, and smooth faces. His protégé, Bishop Siegfried of Gorze, later issued similar denunciations of German nobles, warning that “with these exterior changes, it is the mores themselves which are changed,” a corruption that threatened to unleash on the Holy Roman Empire a plague of crime and sin.
17
Othlonus, a monk and scholar in Regensberg around the same time, included among his written works an account of a layman who was reproached by his priest for the sin of shaving. “Because you are a layman,” the priest said, “according to the custom of the laity, you ought not to go around with a shaved beard, but instead you, in contempt of divine law, have shaved your beard like a cleric.”
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After the layman reneged on his promise not to shave again, he was captured by his enemies and had his eyes gouged out, which
Othlonus interpreted as divine punishment for his heinous offense. A century later, churchmen were still complaining about the shaving vanities of young dandies. Alain of Lille, a scholarly (and shaven) French monk in the early 1200s, mocked vain men who “over-effeminize themselves with womanish adornments,” including tight shirts, small gloves and narrow shoes, and “set frequent ambushes with the razor for their sprouting beard.”
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From the perspective of the church, the wrong sort of shaving sent the wrong signal, undermining the essential link between beardlessness and holy professionalism. To shave in order to look youthful and handsome was both effeminizing and vile.

The ideal of holy hairlessness, now enshrined in church law, remained in force until 1917, when a beard finally ceased to be an excommunicable offense in the Catholic church. The ambition of the church to rule the world for God inspired its leaders to marshal its forces and raise its standards. Fundamentally, professionalism attempted to supplant patriarchy, or rather to become the new patriarchy. It may seem odd that celibate, shaved men claimed superiority over noble, bearded ones. The key to this paradox was that medieval thinkers saw in a hairless face not the absence of something but the presence of something better. The removal of the physical beard made way for the inner beard.

In the century after Pope Gregory’s battle with the Holy Roman Emperor, the church continued to gain prestige and strength. More than ever before or since, the holy professionals—monks and nuns—were held up as model Christians leading the ideal life. Landowning families donated their wealth as well as their sons and daughters to this great cause, and both old and new orders spread like holy wildfire.

At the forefront of this expansion was a new order, the Cistercians, who were admired throughout Europe for their quiet, austere routine of work and prayer. In their quest for simplicity, they sought out rural and isolated settings, built grand but plainly designed abbeys and cloisters, and trimmed back the elaborate processions and rituals popular in other monasteries. Even now, in their decayed or ruined state, the unornamented walls, arches, and windows of Cistercian abbeys evoke
a timeless peacefulness, far removed from the selfish striving of the world. The cloistered life was not always as serene or as selfless as it was meant to be, however. In 1160, Abbot Burchard, who was in charge of several hundred monks and lay brothers at the Cistercian abbey of Bellevaux, in eastern France, found himself embroiled in a controversy about beards.

Cistercian houses consisted of two ranks—regular ordained monks and lay brothers. The lay brothers were recruited from the peasant class, and their calling was to labor in the monastery’s fields and workshops rather than to pray in the choir stalls, as the regular monks did. In most houses they outnumbered the regular monks. The lay brothers wore a darker-hued robe and, by rule, wore medium-length beards to distinguish them from the shaven monks. Discipline among the bearded brothers, as they were often called, was occasionally a problem, and Burchard had received word of unruliness at Bellevaux’s daughter monastery at Rosières. Using a metaphorical turn of phrase, Burchard warned the lay brothers there that if they did not mend their ways, they might end up having their beards burned. He was making clever reference to a phrase in the book of Isaiah, in which the prophet warns that any garment mixed with blood would become fuel for the fire. In Burchard’s phrasing, the brothers needed to save their own garments—their beards—from the metaphorical flames by avoiding boasting, dissention, and vanity. But the lay brothers felt threatened rather than moved by Burchard’s words: Why did he scorn their beards? Were the brothers required to grow them so that the monks might abuse them and their hair?

As he pondered these objections, Abbot Burchard realized that a discussion of facial hair might be, as it were, a teaching moment for the lay brothers of his order. The result was history’s first book about beards, the
Apologia de Barbis
(Explanation of Beards).
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Burchard delighted in the complexity of his subject. He looked at how a beard can represent the moral self, signify right social manners, and reflect the glory of God’s creation. Beards were, he thought, a marvelous demonstration of God’s creative power and a fascinating example of “wisdom playing with nature.”
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When God’s wisdom molds nature in this manner, it leaves a divine imprint that instructs humans about the true order of things.

In considering his subject, Burchard would have benefited from the work of his contemporary to the east, the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen, a famous mystic and a natural theorist. Unfortunately, her works on human physiology and medicine were not yet known in 1160, which was too bad, because her scientific explanation of beards was the best ever proposed in the Middle Ages. The ancients had spoken of vital heat, moisture, and porous skin but never figured out a convincing reason why beards grew on certain parts of the face and not others. Hildegard had an answer. Thinking of biblical passages about the life-giving breath of God, she imagined that it was the hotter breath of men that nourished the growth of hair around the mouth. Women did not have beards because their breath was not so warm.
22
To Hildegard this difference of heat and hair had deeper roots in the Genesis creation. “That the male has a beard,” she wrote, “and more hair on his body than a woman is because the male is formed from earth and has greater strength and warmth and is everywhere more active than woman. . . . But woman is without a beard because she is formed from the flesh of man and is subordinate to man and lives in greater quiet.”
23
Here Hildegard offers a concise, if standard, concept of gender difference in relation to the physiology of hair.

If Burchard had known of Hildegard’s ideas, he might have explored this connection between hair and creation. As it was, he relied on the authority of St. Augustine, who thought that all references to beards in scripture indicated masculine qualities of courage, earnestness, and vigor. Burchard surmised that there was more to it than that. The great variety of beards must mean something, and he imagined a typology where different parts of facial hair represented distinct moral qualities. Hair on the chin signified wisdom, hair under the chin was the sign of strong feeling, and hair along the jaw, a projection of virtue. “All in all,” he wrote, “a beard is appropriate to a man as a sign of his comeliness, as a sign of his strength, as a sign of his wisdom, as a sign of his maturity, and as a sign of his piety. And when these things are equally present in a man, he can justly be called full bearded, since his beard shows him to be, not a half-man or a womanly man, but a complete man, with a beard that is plentiful on his chin and along his jaw and under his chin.”
24

To this extent facial hair was an admirable thing, but monks rid themselves of this emblem of wisdom and virtue because they pursued
an even higher manly calling: the inner beard. In taking up this theme, Burchard stood on the firm ground of well-established medieval theology. Early medieval writers, notably Pope Gregory the Great in the seventh century, had written of hair as an allegorical representation of worldly thoughts, sinful or not, that must be shed in order to bare oneself to God. The twelfth-century abbot and bishop Bruno (d. 1123) put this idea in the clearest terms: “Men who are strong are superior to those who only wish to seem so. Therefore, let our interior beard grow, just as the exterior is shaved; for the former grows without impediment, while the latter, unless it is shaved, creates many inconveniences and is only nurtured and made beautiful by men who are truly idle and vain.”
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What grows inside, Bruno was saying, is the true strength of holy manliness.

Burchard extended this line of thought in his discourse to the bearded brothers. Like Bruno, he argued that actual beards were temptations to vanity. Worldly and powerful men sported braided beards, pointed mustaches, and shaped, forked, or fish-tailed cuts in order to stand out and impress. He advised the brothers to avoid these conceits and “let the beard appear to be neglected in rustic lack of fashion rather than shaped with excessive care into a lustful composition.”
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For the monks, as opposed to lay brothers, this modesty was not enough. “We form the hair of our heads into the shape of a crown by shaving, and shave our beards in order to aim for perfection in mind and spirit while we seek to strip away all that is superfluous and this-worldly from our feelings and desires.”
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Lay brothers, by contrast, do not make the form of a crown on their heads or shave their beards, “because lay simplicity, occupied by the earthly kind of labor, is not learned in the writings that allow one to penetrate spiritual matters.” If Burchard hoped to soothe the lay brothers’ wounded pride, this argument would not help. He was putting the brothers in their place. There were two sorts of men, ordained and lay, and while each needed the other, the lay brothers were not of the same order as the ordained choir monks.

In the final chapters of his investigation of beards, Burchard considers the afterlife. Christian doctrine was clear that the resurrection of the elect was the resurrection of the physical body, but what did this mean for beards? Men would be bearded in heaven, he affirmed, and they would cease shaving. He was saying, in effect, that when nature and
spirit are fully harmonized in the life to come, all external beards would become inner beards and vice versa. By the same token, men would not have to fear for their masculinity. It would be preserved in their bodies and hair. Women would still be women, and beardless. The gender order was eternal, and all saved men, clerical and lay, would eventually enter into the bearded brotherhood of heaven.

We have no record of what the lay brothers thought of Burchard’s great discourse. It was, in any case, addressed as much to posterity as to his own charges. Burchard offers us a window into the medieval mind on matters of faith, morals, and manliness. He saw his own body as an allegory of the spiritual life, and the shaving of his face as a feature of a higher calling and superior spiritual authority.

The bearded brothers of the Cistercian order were debarred by rule and by theology from shearing away their facial hair. This was true in other monastic orders as well, and this rule reflected a more general divide between clerical and lay manliness. This dualism was not always strictly observed, however. In some cases, churchmen encouraged laymen also to renounce beards as a sign of moral discipline and religious commitment. These efforts eventually wrought lasting changes.