Monastic Tonsure

Cutting or shaving the hair as a sign of religious renunciation is old and widespread, attested in Buddhist monastic ordination from the tradition's earliest period and in Christian practice from at least late antiquity, and in both families of religion the act reads the same way: hair is an ordinary marker of worldly vanity and social status, and its removal visibly enacts a vow to set worldly concerns aside. In Buddhist ordination the head is shaved completely at the time a novice or monk takes vows, a practical as well as symbolic act repeated throughout monastic life rather than a one time rite, since hair that regrows is shaved again as a matter of routine discipline.

Christian monastic tonsure took a more varied historical form, from the small circular patch shaved at the crown associated with Western monasticism and clergy, sometimes called the Petrine tonsure and linked in legend to Saint Peter, to the wholesale shaving practiced in Eastern monasticism, and its use as a mark of clergy generally, not only monastics, lasted in the Western church until the Second Vatican Council formally abolished clerical tonsure as a distinct rite in 1972, after which it survives chiefly within religious orders as part of monastic profession rather than as a mark of ordination.

Eastern Orthodox monasticism gives tonsure its fullest ceremonial development, structuring the monastic life itself as a series of tonsures rather than a single admission. The rassophore, or robe bearer, is the first and lightest degree, at which a small cross shaped cutting of hair is taken and the candidate receives the outer monastic robe without yet taking permanent vows, a stage some monastics remain in for years or for life.

The stavrophore, or cross bearer, marks a fuller commitment, taken with formal vows and additional habit, and the great schema, the megaloschema, is the highest and most demanding degree, reserved in most monasteries for the most senior and spiritually tested monastics and accompanied by an extensive liturgy, a new monastic name distinct from the one given at baptism or at lower tonsure, and vows understood as final and irrevocable. Each tonsure is performed as a distinct liturgical rite within the church, with prayers, the cutting of hair in the form of a cross, and the formal clothing in the habit proper to that degree, and monastics who die are traditionally buried in the habit of the highest degree they attained. The practice has no precise Western Catholic equivalent, where religious profession is generally structured as temporary followed by final vows rather than as graded degrees each marked by its own tonsure.