Sacred Mysteries: there are bearded candidates for the papacy, but there’s little or no chance one will be elected

The new Archbishop of Canterbury is clean-shaven, and the last one to be bearded, before Rowan Williams, had been Gilbert Sheldon (reigned 1663-77). His beard was of the Van Dyck kind, but what made it impossible for archbishops of Canterbury to continue with beards was their adoption of wigs. The two don’t mix.

William Wake, enthroned in 1716, wore a fine curly wig, quite unlike real hair. The next eight Archbishops of Canterbury all wore formal wigs, ending with William Howley as late as 1848.

But if Roman Canon Law forbade clerical beards, why did it? The last things to look at are practicalities. Rational canon lawyers of the 19th century saw a reason for forbidding moustaches, because priests drank from the chalice at Mass and must avoid any irreverence to the blood of Christ. Yet Canon Law did not apply to religious orders, some of which made beards obligatory.

Much earlier the great debate had been whether St Peter himself was bearded and whether he shaved his head. The point of the argument was that popes were the successor of Peter, so popes and their clergy should imitate what he did.

The late John Higgitt of Edinburgh University contributed a most learned chapter on beards and tonsures in Anglo-Saxon England to St Cuthbert: His Cult and Community (1989).

A key piece of evidence is tantalisingly absent, the missing face on the moulded silver depiction of St Peter on a portable altar found in the coffin of St Cuthbert (died 687). Was he bearded, or not?

Generally, St Peter was depicted as beardless in Anglo-Saxon art. But the tonsure was even more heatedly debated. When Theodore of Tarsus, an Asian, became Archbishop of Canterbury in 669, he had had to let his hair grow for months to convert his kind of tonsure into a Roman crown tonsure – a tuffet of hair on top, shaved at the sides.

So hair, on the head or chin, identified an affinity, with supposed Roman practice. Beards were an emblem in a wider battle between Greeks and Latins.

Today few cardinals with beards are eligible to join the conclave voting for the pope. Moran Mor Baselios Cardinal Cleemis, Catholicos of the Syro-Malankarese is one. Only 53, he has a flourishing beard and a striking hat resembling an onion-dome in Red Square, with a little gold cross on top.

But the beard remains an emblem of the East, and an Eastern rite bishop is unlikely to be elected Bishop of Rome. We may get a black pope but not a bearded one.