Thanks. Did all of the Eastern Early Church Fathers have beards?
Yes, absolutely. The appearance of "stylized" beards and fashionable haircuts appears after WWI and especially after the intrduction of ecumenism.
“Thanks. Did all of the Eastern Early Church Fathers have beards?”
Photos of them are few and far between! :)
The icons show them with beards. BTW here’s a comment on beards for the clergy from The Rudder:
“MAN
The Apostles in their Injunctions, Book I, Chapter 3 command that no one shall
destroy the hair of his beard, and change the natural visage of the man into one
that is unnatural. “For,” says he, “God the Creator made this to be becoming to
women, but deemed it to be out of harmony with men.” The innovation of
shaving the beard ensued in the Roman Church a little before Leo IX. Gregory
VII even resorted to force in order to make bishops and clerics shave off their
beard. What a most ugly and most disgusting sight it is to see the successor of St.
Peter close-shaven, as the Greeks say, like a “fine bridegroom,” with this
difference, however, that he wears a stole and a pallium, and sits in the chief seat
among a large number of other men like him in a council called the college of
cardinals, while he himself is styled the Pope. Yet bearded Popes did not become
extinct after insane Gregory, a witness to this fact being Pope Gelasius growing a
beard, as is stated in his biography. See the Dodecabiblus of Dositheos, pages
776-8. Meletios the Confessor (subject 7, concerning unleavened wafers) states
that the king arrested a certain Pope by the name of Peter on account of his
lascivious acts and one half of his beard was shaven off as a mark of dishonor.
According to another authority, in other temples too there were princes, even on
the clerical list, who had a beard, as in Leipzig they are to be seen painted after
Martin Luther in the church called St. Paul’s and that called St. Thomas’s. I saw
the same things also in Bardislabia.”
and this:
“BISHOPS, PRIESTS AND DEACONS MUST BE BEARDED
Note that the present Canon censures the priests of the Latins who shave off
their moustache and their beard and who look like very young men and
handsome bridegrooms and have the face of women. For God forbids men of the
laity in general to shave their beard, by saying: “You shall not mar the
appearance of your bearded chin” (Leviticus 19:27). But He specially
forbids those in Holy Orders to shave their beard, by saying to Moses to tell the
sons of Aaron, or, in other words, the priests, not to shave the skin of their
bearded chin (Leviticus 21:5, Not only did He forbid this in words, but He even
appeared to Daniel with whiskers and beard as the Ancient of Days (Daniel 7:9);
and the Son of God wore a beard while he was alive in the flesh. And our
Forefathers and Patriarchs and Prophets and Apostles all wore beards, as is
plainly evident from the most ancient pictures of them wherein they are painted
with beards. But, more to the point, even the saints in Italy, like St. Ambrose, the
father of monks Benedict, Gregory Dialogus, and the rest, all had beards, as they
appear in their pictures painted in the church of St. Mark in Venice.
Why, even the judgment of right reason decides the shaving of the beard to be
improper. For the beard is the difference which in respect of appearance
distinguishes a woman from a man. That is why a certain philosopher when asked
why he grew a beard and whiskers, replied that as often as he stroked his beard
and whiskers he felt that he was a man, and not a woman. Those men who shave
their beard are not possessors of a manly face, but of a womanly face. Hence it
was that Epiphanios blamed the Massalians for cutting off their beard, which is
the visage peculiar to man as distinguished from woman.”