Commentaria in IV Regum
23. AND ELISEUS WENT UP FROM THENCE TO BETHEL,—where King Jeroboam had set up one of his golden calves as an idol, that Eliseus might fight against it.
LITTLE BOYS CAME OUT OF THE CITY AND MOCKED HIM, SAYING: GO UP, THOU BALD HEAD.—Baldness is the loss of the hair of the head, and therefore a deformity, as its beauty and as it were crown is the head of hair and the locks; especially among the Syrians and Palestinians, where, as in a hot and dry region, almost all are hairy, and have thick and hard hair. Whence Ovid:
Foul is a shorn flock, foul a field without grass, And a shrub without leaves, and a head without hair.
And Aristotle, book V On the Generation of Animals, asserts that for a man to grow bald is the same as for birds to be unfeathered, or for trees to lose their leaves. Hence the Romans of old shaved the heads of slaves; and the Emperor Caligula, says Suetonius in his Life, chapter xxxv, whenever he met handsome and long-haired young men, disfigured them by shaving the back of the head, for mockery. On the other side, how great a grace of the head the hair is, St. Ambrose shows, book VI of the Hexameron, chapter ix: “The very crown of the head,” he says, “how pleasant and agreeable! how comely the hair, how reverend in old men, how venerable in priests, how terrible in warriors, how becoming in young men, how neat in women, how sweet in boys!” Then he adds what Aristotle said just before: “From trees one may estimate what grace the human head has. In the head of a tree is all the fruit; there is all the beauty: take from a tree its foliage, and the whole tree is unlovely.” This reproach and insult of the boys against Eliseus, “Go up, thou bald head,” is therefore partly physical, partly ethical. Physical, because they reproach him with a defect of nature, namely baldness; ethical, because they tacitly reproach him with lust. For the bald are held by many to be lustful. Whence that of Juvenal, Satire IV, on the lustful and cruel Emperor Domitian: Some grow bald by old age, others by disease, others by continual and intense study, others by deep meditation, etc., for these dry up and weaken the brain. For the head can be chilled, the brain weakened and contracted, and the skull hardened by dryness of the head, from various causes, which are the three causes of baldness, as Aristotle, Galen, Method XIV, chapter xvii, and other physicians teach. Whence St. Thomas Aquinas was partly bald on account of continual and intent study, who yet was always a virgin, indeed girded by Angels with the girdle of virginity, as his Life has it. Moreover other writers, ancient and modern, reckon baldness, as well as grey hair, not a reproach but an honour of old age; indeed the bald were once held to be beautiful, like the shining moon.
When the last of the Flavians was now rending the weary world, And Rome was in bondage to a bald Nero.
And that of Suetonius on Julius Caesar: “Citizens, guard your wives, we are bringing the bald adulterer.” Indeed Pliny and Aristotle assign lust as the proper cause of baldness: for Pliny, book XI, chapter xxiv, speaks thus: “The falling out of the hair is rare in women, not seen in eunuchs, nor in anyone before the use of Venus.” Yet he says in the same place: “Certain animals are naturally bald, as the ostrich, camels, and water-serpents.” Aristotle, book V On the Generation of Animals, chapter iii: “No one,” he says, “grows bald before he begins to have intercourse; but it comes rather from venereal intercourse, namely in those who are by their nature the more inclined to it.” He adds the cause: “For since the brain is the coldest of all the parts of the body, the use of venereal things cools it still more, whence it comes about that the heat necessary to the brain for producing hair on the head fails, and so baldness arises.” And soon: “Those who produce seed grow bald at the very age at which they emit seed.” But these authors are to be explained thus, that they mean baldness in many to arise from excessive venery, yet not in all; again, that those inclined to venery grow bald sooner than others; moreover that no one grows bald before he is able to emit seed, that is, before puberty. So Cardan explains Aristotle, book IV On preserving health, chapter xv. For experience shows that even the chaste grow bald, as Eliseus was bald; and that the bald are loved by the moon that old verse teaches: Mars, the beardless and the bald, O moon, thou hast loved.
Lucian teaches the same, whose words Robert Titius recites, book III of Controversies, chapter xvii. For Lucian, speaking of the men who are fabled to dwell in the moon, says: “Among them the bald man, without hair, is held handsome: but the hairy they abominate. But among those who inhabit the stars called comets, on the contrary, the hairy are held beautiful.” Whence also I think it came about that the bald are called by Synesius “little moons,” unless one prefers to refer the cause of this name to the splendour of the hairless skull, which shines like the moon: certainly a jest is recorded of Isocrates, that his brain shone through his bald pate. Valerius Maximus indeed, speaking of the poet Aeschylus, says: “In Sicily, having gone out beyond the walls of the city in which he was staying, he sat down in a sunny place; over him an eagle carrying a tortoise, deceived by the brightness of his head (for it was bare of hair), dashed it on it as on a stone.” And so Petronius Arbiter in a certain epigram said the bald skull laughs, that is, shines; for that is sometimes what that word signifies, as in Horace: “The house laughs with silver.” Finally Nicetas Choniates, speaking of Ducas: “Moreover Ducas,” he says, “whom we mentioned before, standing by him, took off his cap, and begged that the diadem be placed on him, showing his baldness, which shone back like the full moon.”
Finally some think that Eliseus was bald not by nature, nor by age and old age, but had shaved his head after the manner of religious and Nazarites, and was therefore bald, that is, shaved, like those ancients. St. Ignatius, in his epistle to the Philadelphians, numbers [Eliseus] among the virgins. For addressing virgins he says: “Virgins, have Christ alone before your eyes, and the Father in your souls, enlightened by the Spirit Holy. I am mindful of your holiness as of Elias, as of Jesus Nave, as of Melchisedech, as of Eliseus, as of Jeremias, as of John the Baptist, as of the most beloved disciple (St. John), as of Timothy, as of Titus, as of Evodius, as of Clement, and of those who departed from life in chastity; but I do not disparage the other blessed ones who were joined in wedlock, of whom I do not now make mention.” Avicenna teaches that baldness in some is a hereditary affection, and that they grow bald because they are born of bald parents, just as, on the contrary, Ethiopians and those born of them hardly grow bald on account of the great heat. In the new law Pontiffs, Priests and Monks, by the ecclesiastical tonsure, have the head shaved in a circle, and are as it were bald, both to represent the crown of thorns of Christ, and that, bidding farewell to the world, they may dedicate themselves wholly to God, as the Nazarites did of old: for St. Isidore, book On the divine offices, in the Council of Aachen, chapter i, hands down that this tonsure was taken from them; hear him: “The use of the ecclesiastical tonsure arose, if I am not mistaken, from the Nazarites, who, having first kept their hair, afterwards, after a great continence of life, devotion being completed, shaved the head, and were commanded to put their hair into the fire of the sacrifice; namely that they might consecrate to the Lord the perfection of their devotion. The use of this example, therefore, was introduced by the Apostles, that those who are bound to divine worship and consecrated to the Lord should, like Nazarites, that is, saints of God, be renewed by the cutting of the hair. This also is commanded to the prophet Ezechiel, the Lord saying: Thou, son of man, take thee a sharp sword, and cause it to pass over thy head and thy beard. Namely because he himself served God of the priestly stock in the ministry of sacrifice. This also we read that Priscilla and Aquila were the first Nazarites to do in the Acts of the Apostles; Paul the Apostle also, and certain disciples of Christ, who stood forth as imitators of this manner of observance. The tonsure is for clerics a kind of sign which is figured in the body and enacted in the soul: namely that by this sign and by religion vices may be cut away, and we be stripped of the crimes of our flesh as of hair, and that thence, with our senses renewed, as with fresh locks, we may shine forth; putting off, according to the Apostle, the old man with his deeds, and putting on the new, who is renewed in the knowledge of God; which renewal ought to be made in the mind, but shown in the head, where the mind itself is known to dwell. But that, the head being shorn above, a circle as a crown is left below, signifies that the priesthood and kingdom of the Church are figured in them.”