Here's are a few quotes I have put together for various places.
- St Clement of Alexandria
- "The hair of the chin showed him to be a man." St Clement of Alexandria (c.195, E), 2.271
- "How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them!
For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He adorned man like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest--a sign of strength and rule." St. Clement of Alexandria, 2.275
- "This, then, is the mark of the man, the beard. By this, he is seen to be a man. It is older than Eve. It is the token of the superior nature
.It is therefore unholy to desecrate the symbol of manhood, hairiness. St. Clement of Alexandria, 2.276
- "It is not lawful to pluck out the beard, mans natural and noble adornment." St. Clement of Alexandria, 2.277
- St Cyprian
- "In their manners, there was no discipline. In men, their beards were defaced." St Cyprian (c. 250, W), 5.438
- "The beard must not be plucked. 'You will not deface the figure of your beard'." [Lev 19:27] St. Cyprian, 5.553
- Lactantius
- "The nature of the beard contributes in an incredible degree to distinguish the maturity of bodies, or to distinguish the sex, or to contribute to the beauty of manliness and strength." Lactantius (c. 304-314, W), 7.288
- Apostolic Constitutions
- "Men may not destroy the hair of their beards and unnaturally change the form of a man. For the Law says, You will not deface your beards. For God the Creator has made this decent for women, but has determined that it is unsuitable for men." Apostolic Constitutions (compiled c.390, E) 7.392. (1)
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Let the head of men be clipped, unless they have curly hair. But let the chin have the hair. ... Cutting is to be used, not for the sake of elegance, but on account of the necessity of the case ... so that it may not grow so long as to come down and interfere with the eyes. - St. Clement of Alexandria (circa 195 AD), 2.286.
Post-Apostolic times also confirmed this. The long-standing tradition of obedience was still going strong. As we can see from the following quotes, the post-Apostolic Fathers were completely in harmony with their ancestors: "The beard must not be plucked. "You shall not deface the figure of your beard." St. Cyprian of Carthage AD 250
"If there happens to be a man 30 years old who has
let his beard grow, and one of 50, 60 or 100 years who shaves,
make the one who has let his beard grow sit higher up than the
one who shaves, as much in the church as at the table"
(Augoustinos Kantiotis,
Saint Cosmas Aitolos [Athens, 1959], p.
86).
"There are some things, too, which have such a place in the body, that they obviously serve no useful purpose, but are solely for beauty, as e.g. the teats on a man's breast, or the beard on his face; for that this is for ornament, and not for protection, is proved by the bare faces of women, who ought rather, as the weaker sex, to enjoy such a defence." St. Augustine of Hippo
Little Russian Philokalia, Vol. 3, St. Herman. Pages 71-72 Metropolitan Gabriel (Petrov) of Petersburg and Novgorod was once going to a service, where the Archpriest Andrew Samborsky, whose beard was shaved off, was supposed to serve together with him. Seeing Samborsky, the Metropolitan said: "What kind of man are you? Our Church does not accept those who shave the beard. Get out!"
It says in a document titled, The Oregon Old Orthodox and Their Faith by Brother Ambrose (page 13), "The men do not shave in imitation of Christ (canon 96 of the ecum. council) and as an expression of their belief in the veneration of icons, since shaving was the practice of the early opponents of this dogma as others burnt their dead in opposition to the dogma of the general resurrection." As there is no good example if shaving or trimming the beard it is sinful to even desire such things.
In the book titled Peter the Great, by Robert Massie we will see on page 244: For most Orthodox Russians, the beard was a fundamental symbol of religious belief and self-respect. It was an ornament given by God, worn by the prophets, the apostles and by Jesus himself. Ivan the Terrible expressed the traditional Muscovite felling when he declared, "To shave the beard is a sin that the blood of all the martyrs cannot cleanse. It is to deface the image of man created by God." Priests generally refused to bless men without beards; they were considered shameful and beyond the pale of Christendom. Patriarch Adrian said, "God did not create men beardless, only cats and dogs. Shaving is not only foolishness and dishonor; it is a mortal sin."
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