Diverging Customs and Cultures

Now that we have some historical and political context with a theological background to help understand the widening berth between the Western and Eastern Churches, we will dive in closer to their respective cultural practices. We have established that the widening chasm between Christendom was not merely theological but rooted in the diverging cultural traditions.

In this section, we will examine the significant, and distinctive, customs: the facial grooming standards and norms of clergy and the use of bread in the Liturgy. While they may seem mundane and even separate issues, we will see how these they were the proverbial battleground in which the theological and ideological disagreements became enlarged in the two Churches. By examining these two aspects of the traditions we will see how they contributed to the Great Schism of Christendom.

The Dividing Line Becomes Razor Thin

There is no better example than with the changing norms in the Western half of Christendom with the priests and bishops adopting clean-shaveness, “Since Germans wore their hair long, maintaining short hair and well-trimmed beards (or going clean shaven) served to differentiate the clergy from the laity,” (Campbell).

This attitude was very much prescriptive with smaller councils, or synods, being convened in the early sixth century to discuss the problem, in which the Bishop, Caesarius of Arles, decreed that ‘a cleric is to allow neither hair nor beard to grow freely’” (Ibid.). Again, we see the issue arising in the mid-seventh century at a Western council, the Fourth Council of Toledo, where the 41st canon states: “In Galicia, heretofore, the clerics have worn long hair, like the laity, and have only shorn a little circle in the middle of the head. This may not, in future, be so” (Ibid.).

Identity and Tradition

The Western church was explicitly trying to show that their clergy were different from the laity, set apart from the world following the commandments found in the sacred texts of Christianity. By the early eighth century, the priests of Western Christendom sought the shaving shears and, symbolically, removed the world by going clean-shaven. Eventually, the Frankish civilization would follow-suit, “Around this time, secular men, as well, were going clean shaven more. When the Franks converted to Christianity, they tended to cut their long hair short after the Roman fashion while maintaining their mustaches as was custom” (Campbell). This would become the norm by the early ninth century in the Latin Church.

This norm, initially, beginning as a way to distinguish the clergy from the laity of Germanic Europe, became the early fuel for Byzantium’s polemics against the West, accusing it of breaking from tradition. The East sought the early church fathers as the soil in which the tradition is grown, and must not be broken from, they pointed to figures like the bishop and father of the Church, Augustine, who wrote, “The beard signifies the courageous; the beard distinguishes the grown men, the earnest, the active, the vigorous. So that when we describe such, we say, he is a bearded man” (Ibid.).

Augustine lived a couple hundred years after, perhaps the most vocal opponent of the shaved face on a man, Clement of Alexandria, who equated–and he was not alone–beardlessness to effeminacy and effeminacy to the desires of the flesh (Siecienski 25).

The Patristic teaching, going back to the early church, which the East relied on, not merely as a means to devise arguments against the Western Church, but as a way to understand themselves and their tradition, stated that men with beards are, well, men and they are close to God.

To the Church, the beard points toward holiness, the very piety of a man rather than the beard itself. It is an outward symbol of an internal process. And to shave it off was to break from that most revered symbol. Not only could the East accuse the West of effeminacy and walking with the world, but also it provided the polemic which would add to the widening gap between the two Churches that the West was formally turning from tradition, thereby turning from the Church.

To put it succinctly, the Byzantine Christians saw the West’s clerical removal of the beard as a symbolic disownment of their very patriarchal status which was always important to the Church.

By the time the clean-shaven look in the West was the norm, these polemics were responded to in the late-ninth century by the theologian Ratramnus, who followed the exposition of the eighth century Pope, Gregory II, who claimed that shaving the beard was an outward symbol of one’s inward commitment to God. The theologian stated, “In the shaving of their faces [priests] show the purity of their hearts, for the appearance of the head makes known the appearance of the heart…[just as shaving removed hair from the face of the head] the face of the heart ought to be continually stripped of earthly thoughts, in order that it may be able to look upon the glory of the Lord with a pure and sincere expression, and to be transformed into it through the grace of that contemplation” (Ibid.).

The response given by Ratramnus represents a theological talking point of the Patristic tradition, namely, the circumcision of the heart. In other words, an outward symbol of an internal process. The very reason for this, of course, was due to the world surrounding the Church in the West. To the Latin Church, they were not so much breaking from tradition, but breaking from the world to better honor that tradition.

And, accordingly, it was precisely for this reason that the Byzantine Church’s clergy remained fully bearded. While the Latin Church shaved to exemplify their piety in contrast with the heathen Goths the Byzantine Church kept their beards full-grown to contrast the religious and philosophical threats they were encountering in the East. A part of their protective nature toward tradition was a defense against the heretics in the Church, such the Non-Chalcedonian traditions that had previously broke from the Church as well as Platonism, Hellenism, and the rise of Islam. The beard, in the East, represented exactly what the clean-shaven look represented in the West: setting themselves apart from the world.

By the end of the tenth century these two traditions looked nothing like each other. Christendom was splitting over cultural norms and customs that were practiced in accordance with tradition yet expressed distinctively due to the world in which this tradition found itself. While beards are no longer the contentious issue that they were in the late first millennium they had significantly contributed to the widening gap between the Latin West and the Greek East. The grooming norms gave reason for the two churches not to recognize each other outwardly, making them suspicious of each other’s deeper, theological standing. The problem was only exacerbated by the seemingly mundane practice of the use of bread in the Liturgy.

Polemics and Accusations of Judaizing

A common Western polemic against the Eastern Church during the burgeoning beard controversy was that the Byzantines were “Judaizing” which “the early Church was ever wary of… and strenuously rejected the ceremonial aspects of the Jewish law that were fulfilled by the New Covenant” (Campbell). This was an argument used against sects in the burgeoning Church, referred to as both Judaizers and heretics, that taught a doctrine involving God’s grace in conjunction with human effort, that is works of the Jewish Law and customs. The Byzantine Church were, in this manner, accused of holding on to the Jewish, Levitical law, prescribing men to keep beards.

While the West leveled accusations of Judaizing against the East, they, in turn, accused the West of Judaizing when it came to how they baked the bread meant for the Eucharist.

While the Christian tradition’s scripture, specifically the Levitical law, is explicit about the beard of a man, it is a little more nuanced when talking about yeast, as the Bishop Augustine writes, “The Lord talked of yeast in a negative sense… and in a positive sense… We should not think it is de rigueur for us to assume that a thing always has to signify what it happens to signify in one passage by its resemblance to something else” (Siecienski 79).

Here, one of the Fathers of the Church admonishes a strictness for strictness’ sake, something that clearly neither half of Christendom truly practiced. The West and East, alike, chose Scripture carefully to support their argument for the use of unleavened bread in the West and leavened bread in the East.

The distinct views are demonstrably theological with the West dating the Last Supper of Scripture to a Passover meal, thus using the unleavened bread, with the East dating this momentous Biblical event to a period unrelated to the Passover, therefore making the bread leavened (Ibid.).

The theological differences would fuel polemics used in the second millennium to this very day, though contemporary debate is much less hostile, however there is ample evidence to suggest that the Eucharist, or communion, had been celebrated with leavened bread and the use of unleavened bread, or azymes, was a particular novelty of the West.

The Byzantine Christian tradition could therefore be correct in their accusation of the Western Church breaking from tradition. And there was an innovation in regard to the use of azymes in the West, but it was not out of heresy that this was done, nor was it an act of Judaizing. “There was a change, but it was for reasons completely unrelated to any criticism the Byzantines had to offer” (Siecienski 80).

To be Concluded…

Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ