Commentaria in Leviticum
For this same reason, when they devoted themselves to their gods, they cut their hair in a circle: for the Gentiles dedicated their hair to the gods, that is, to demons, as Lucian relates in the Syrian Goddess at the end, Theodoret here question 28, Cyril, book 16 On Adoration, and Athanasius, or rather Anastasius, in his Questions on Holy Scripture, question 64. Rightly, therefore, God here forbids the Jews the same, as if to say: I do not wish you, O Jews, to follow the Gentiles and demons, but rather the nature and disposition of the countenance, in the cutting of your head, and I wish to teach you all cleanliness and decency, even in clothes and hair. Hence among some Greeks to cut round the hair was a proverb for holding in derision. For so the hair is wont to be cut round, for mockery, on the stupid and foolish who do not feel it. Hence Lucian in the Misanthrope: “You sat while your hair was being cut round by them.” This precept was ceremonial, and therefore is now abolished; wherefore heretics wrongly twist it against the tonsure of monks, as Bellarmine shows, book 2 On Monks, chapter 40. The Septuagint render: “You shall not make sisoen of your hair.” The Septuagint seem to have taken the word sisoen from the Hebrew tsitsit, that is, a lock, as is plain from Ezechiel 8:3; for Suidas interprets sisoen as plaited hair; and Cyprian, book 3 of the Testimonies, testimony 83, renders sisoen a curl. St. Peter, epistle 1, chapter 3, verse 3, seems to call sisoen the plaiting of hair, which our translator renders capillatura; St. Paul, 1 Timothy 2:9, calls it plaited hair, that is, twisted locks; the Latins call it capillitium calamistratum, hair curled into ringlets with curling-irons.
The Septuagint, therefore, think that curls are here forbidden, and the Hebrew words, which so sound, can be understood of them: You shall not make circles, you shall not make round, or “you shall not trim the edge of your head.” The reason is that curled and frizzed hair is a sign of a soft and effeminate mind, and therefore ill becomes men.
Far from us be youths trimmed like women.
Hence that weighty saying of Arcesilaus in Plutarch, who, seeing a youth chaste but curled, with a broken voice and wanton eyes, said: “It matters not with which members you are shameless, the hinder or the fore”; and Plautus in the Asinaria: “Who would believe that of you, curled sodomite?” and Synesius in Caelius, book 15 of the Antiquities: “No long-haired man who is not also a sodomite”; and St. Ambrose, book 3 On Virgins: “Curls,” he says, “are not ornaments but crimes; allurements of beauty, not precepts of virtue.” That curls were as it were a title of harlots Clement of Alexandria teaches, book 3 of the Pedagogue, chapter 3. Rightly therefore Tiburtius in the Life of St. Sebastian rebukes Torquatus the curled, who thought himself a Christian by name; and when both were set before the judge on account of religion, and Torquatus, questioned about the faith, had answered that he was a Christian: “Dost thou believe, most illustrious sir,” said Tiburtius, “that this man is a Christian, who in contriving his allurement lets down the fringes of his head, etc.: never has Christ deigned to have such pests as his servants.” So much does the demon please himself in curls that he once usurped the name of Cincinnatulus. Caelius, book 8, chapter 10, handed down that he and nearly all Italy heard him speaking from the womb of a woman. “Cincinnatulus was the demon’s name; exulting in this appellation he answered when called: if you asked about things past or present that were most hidden, he gave marvellous answers; if of the future, he was always most lying.” Go now, young men, go, nobles, bind up your hair, anoint, crisp it, go, new glory of demons, delight of the lower world: he loves you, at your name he exults and leaps: prostitute your modesty and beauty.
“The Lord will make bald the crown of the head of the daughters of Sion, and instead of curled hair there shall be baldness.” Isaias 3.
Away, therefore, with these reproaches of men, these dishonours of manly virtue, these stains of the noblest sex, witnesses of lust, marks of infamy; and from horses and arms let them be thrust to the distaff and the task of wool.
Let virgins hear what St. Jerome says to Demetrias: “Let the virgin shun curled and frizzed boys, and the skins that smell of foreign musk, as certain pests and poisons of chastity.”
NOR SHAVE YOUR BEARD.—To trim the beard was not forbidden the Jews, but to shave it, as for instance with a razor drawn over it, as is done in the crowns which priests wear on the top of the head; the Hebrew is: You shall not destroy the edge of your beard; for God wished the beard to appear in his people as a mark of manliness; for the beard signifies a man. Hence Diogenes answered that he wore a beard that he might continually remember that he was a man; and Artemidorus said that sons bring their fathers only as much ornament as a beard adds of comeliness to the face. The Cynic also in Lucian thinks it as unseemly for men to take away the ornament of the beard as for a lion to have its mane cut off (1).
A certain Laconian, asked why he wore so long a beard, answered: “That seeing my grey hairs I may admit nothing unworthy of them.” Witness Plutarch in his Laconic Sayings, who adds in the same place that the Laconians were wont to wear their hair long, remembering the saying of Lycurgus, who pronounced that long hair increases the beauty of the handsome, and renders the ugly more terrible.
They say, finally, that Theseus never wished to cut his beard, that by this sign he might profess his own virtue. The beard, then, is first the mark of a man; secondly, of virtue; thirdly, of perfection, says Hesychius; fourthly, of fortitude, says Eucherius; fifthly, of wisdom, says Rudolph. The Hebrews are therefore commanded to keep the beard, that even in the habit of the countenance they may appear to bear the form of virtue and wisdom. Excepted from this law are lepers already cleansed; for these in their legal purification had to shave all the hairs of the body, according to the law of Leviticus 14:9. Further, among Christians clerics do not shave, but trim the beard, from ancient usage; but monks, as dead to the world, shave, though in different Churches the custom in this matter has been different. See Baronius, year of Christ 58.
Martinus Polonus therefore is mistaken, and misleads, The beard becomes a man as the mane a lion, in his Chronicle, and Peter de Natalibus book 4, chapter 57, who write that Pope Anicetus forbade clerics the beard as well as the hair. For in the decrees of Anicetus, distinction 23, chapter “Clericis,” no mention of the beard is made. For it is from the tradition of the Apostles that clerics wear the beard, as Clement of Alexandria teaches, book 3 of the Pedagogue, chapter 3, Cyprian, book 3 to Quirinus, Epiphanius, heresy 80, besides that the images of the Apostles remove all doubt. Clerics, then, as they cut the hair, so they wore the beard. Hence that ordinance of the Fourth Council of Carthage, canon 44: “Let a cleric neither nourish his hair, nor shave his beard”; for so reads the Vatican manuscript. Wrongly, therefore, someone erased “nor shave,” as it has been erased in the decree of Burchard, book 2, chapter 174, and chapter 5 of the Extravagantes, On the Life and Honesty of Clerics. Indeed Sidonius Apollinaris, book 4, epistle 24 to Turnus Maximus, formerly a palatine, now a priest, thus portrays and celebrates him: “The man’s bearing, rank, modesty, colour, religious speech; then his hair, his long beard.”
28. AND FOR THE DEAD YOU SHALL NOT CUT YOUR FLESH.—In Deuteronomy 14:1 the pulling out of the hair is also forbidden: and that first, lest the Jews follow the dead with excessive grief, but rather by the hope of resurrection set a measure to mourning. Beautifully and truly St. Jerome to Paula on the death of Blesilla: “Why,” he says, “do we grieve that anyone is dead? Were we born to remain for ever? Abraham, Moses, Isaias, Peter, James, John, Paul, the vessel of election, and above all the Son of God dies; and are we indignant that someone goes out of the body, who perhaps was snatched away lest malice should change his understanding? Let the dead be mourned, but him whom gehenna receives, whom tartarus devours, for whose punishment eternal fire burns. We, whose departure a troop of angels accompanies, whom Christ meets, should rather be grieved if we dwell longer in this tabernacle of death; for as long as we abide here, we are pilgrims from the Lord,” etc.