§ 73. Tonsure Into the Clergy

The visible sign of a person’s entry into the clergy is the seal of tonsure (σφραγὶς ἐπικουρίδος, character tonsurae) by the bishop’s hand. Sacred tonsure (ἱερατικὴ κουρά, sacerdotalis tonsura) is prescribed by the 33rd canon of the VI Ecumenical Council and the 14th canon of the VII Ecumenical Council as the necessary and first act by which one may be enrolled in the clergy and so enter the hierarchy. Balsamon writes: “The canons regard as a cleric everyone from the day he received the seal of tonsure from the hand of the hierarch.”[1] “As soon as anyone has received the laying-on of hands of tonsure from a hierarch, that same hour he has become a cleric.”[2]

The act of tonsure is founded upon the apostolic ordinance concerning the vow to God.[3] But as a rite for entry into the clergy, this act was introduced into the Church at the time when the legislative activity of the Church began to develop more vigorously and when prayers and the rite of laying-on of hands for the several hierarchical degrees came to be prescribed—that is, in the second half of the fourth century and in the fifth century. It was introduced, moreover, on the model of monastic tonsure (κουρὰ μοναχική, tonsura monachalis), when bishops wished that clerics too should imitate monks in life and in virtues, and when bishops themselves, for the greater part, began to come from the monks.[4]

The act of the tonsure of a cleric[5] by itself confers on the person concerned no hierarchical right as yet. This act is performed before the person receives the “first degree of the priesthood,” that is, that of reader, so that one who has received only the tonsure but has not been made a reader is not empowered, by the ordinance of the 14th canon of the VII Ecumenical Council, to read from the ambo in church. The act of tonsure is necessary in order that the hierarchical degrees may afterward be received, but of itself it only enters the person concerned into the roll of the clergy, and on the strength of that act he may perform the subordinate church services that his ruling bishop assigns him.