Even Baptist minister Charles Spurgeon, in an apparent attempt to win a “most overstated case for anything ever” competition, famously advised his students that growing a beard was “a habit most natural, scriptural, manly, and beneficial.”

At first glance, a beard may seem like an unremarkable thing—just a bit of protein, really, sort of like a fluffy toenail for your face. Many grown men, myself included, can’t even grow them.

And yet, for many men throughout religious history, they’ve been a big deal. The law of Moses commanded men not to trim the corners of their beards—a custom that Orthodox Jews still practice to this day. Many of the Reformers grew long beards, possibly to signify their break with the traditionally clean-shaven Catholic clergy. Even Baptist minister Charles Spurgeon, in an apparent attempt to win a “most overstated case for anything ever” competition, famously advised his students that growing a beard was “a habit most natural, scriptural, manly, and beneficial.”

So yeah, beards can be unreasonably important sometimes. One time, they even contributed to one of the deepest, oldest, and ugliest rifts in all of Christendom: the Great Schism.

Of course, anyone with a cursory knowledge of church history knows that until approximately A.D. 1054 , there was basically one united church for the geographic area that used to be the Roman Empire. The western, Latin-speaking half of the empire fell in 476, but its church hung around well past that. Meanwhile, the Eastern, Greek-speaking half, which became known as the Byzantine Empire, was still a thing into the 15th century. Ostensibly, one of the forces that united these two very different halves of the church was the Nicene Creed: a couple hundred words that articulated their shared beliefs.

But then the Western Church had to go and screw that up.

Trouble started when the Western church officially added a single word to the Creed in 1014: filioque, which roughly translates to “and the Son.” If you come from a somewhat liturgical church, you know what I’m talking about: “We believe in the Holy Spirit . . . Who proceeds from the Father and the Son.”

It’s not necessarily a biblically indefensible position to take—but it was a strange change to make unilaterally, considering that the Creed was supposed to be an ecumenical confession. For reasons that are, for our purposes, dry as dirt, the Eastern Church was understandably upset when they found out about the change.

As everyone knows, the horse wouldn’t be invented for another 258 years, so news traveled slowly. The Christology really hit the fan in 1053, when Pope Leo IX finally sent an emissary to the eastern empire to hammer out, once and for all, those who were being a big bunch of heretics about this whole thing. The envoy was led by a cardinal named Humbert, which apparently is not just a name that Nabokov made up.

When Humbert got to Constantinople, the Byzantine emperor welcomed him, but Patriarch Michael I Cerularius (the leader of the Eastern Church) refused to give him an audience. Eventually, Humbert got sick of just hanging around the Byzantine court, making jokes about how “Byzantine” everything was, and (one assumes) hitting on the empress’s friends, so he decided to open up a can of whoop-tushy on the whole “heresy” situation.

Basically, he excommunicated half of all Christendom—for having beards.

Read More

[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]