Why Beards?

Because of a beard, a papacy was lost. That is the story of Johannes Bessarion, a 15th-century cardinal and convert from Greek Orthodoxy who strove to reunite Eastern and Western Christianity. Extraordinarily influential among the Catholic hierarchy, Bessarion was widely thought to be a likely successor to Pope Nicholas V. But at the conclave following Nicholas’s death, a serious personal flaw was pointed out: retaining an Eastern Orthodox custom shunned by Rome, Bessarion still sported a full beard. As the historian Mark Zucker tells it:

Not only did this result in Bessarion’s loss of the pontifical throne, but his beard was later to cause him even greater humiliation and suffering. For a slight breach of etiquette during an embassy to Louis XI in 1471, the French king pulled him by the beard, an insult so serious and so upsetting that it is said to have brought about his death, from shame and grief, a year later.

To anyone familiar with talmudic tales, Bessarion’s story cannot help bringing to mind another, much earlier episode of contested religious leadership. It seems the sage Rabban Gamliel, the nasi or religious head of post-Temple Jewry, was temporarily relieved of his position on account of what his colleagues considered a heavy-handed exercise of authority. The rabbis’ ultimate choice of a successor was Elazar ben Azaryah, a brilliant scion of prestigious lineage. But Elazar, too, had a flaw, though the opposite of Bessarion’s: being only eighteen years old, he did not yet have the full growth of facial hair expected of a Jewish religious leader. Fortunately, according to the Talmud, a miracle was wrought overnight, and Elazar awoke to find himself the owner of a long white beard. The story concludes that he was wont to say of himself: “Behold, I am akin to a man of seventy years.”