Introduction
I don’t share the opinion that suicides are certainly to be
damned. My reason is that they do not wish to kill themselves but are overcome
by the power of the devil. They are like a man who is murdered in the woods by
a robber (Table Talk CCXXII).[2]
As
is clarified shortly, the analogy with the robber in the woods has to do with
an external cause of death that had nothing to do with a person’s intention. That said, magistrates should be harsh in
dealing with those who have attempted suicide, presumably in order to deter
others. Suicides serve as an example to
others of the devil’s power and the need to be prayerful. Significantly, Luther says that it is not
clear that the souls of those who commit suicide are damned.
Demonic influence was not the only reason for suicide. When asked about a case where a young girl
threw herself out of a window to her death to avoid rape, Luther said that she
was not responsible for her death. She
leapt for safety and her chastity (Table
Talk DCCXXXVIII). Luther thereby
overturns the view that suicide was the greater sin than unchastity (in the
case of rape).
Luther
was, however, concerned about more than the question of responsibility and
judgement. He was concerned with how the
Church handles suicide so that others might be deterred. Thus, to continue the quotation, he says:
However, this ought not be taught to the common people, lest
Satan be given an opportunity to cause slaughter, and I recommend that the
popular custom be strictly adhered to according to which it [the suicide’s
corpse] is not carried over the threshold, etc. Such persons do not die by free
choice or by law, but our Lord God will dispatch them as he executes a person
through a robber. Magistrates should treat them quite strictly, although it is
not plain that their souls are damned. However, they are examples by which our
Lord God wishes to show that the devil is powerful and also that we should be
diligent in prayer. But for these examples, we would not fear God. Hence he
must teach us in this way (Table Talk CCXXII).
John Calvin
John Calvin’s
views on suicide are mentioned in two sermons in which Saul and his
armor-bearer commit suicide by the sword after their defeat in battle with the
Philistines (1 Samuel 31) and in which Ahithophel commits suicide by hanging
when Absalom rejects his advice to assassinate King David (2 Samuel 17).[3]
As Jeffrey Watt points out from these sermons, Calvin saw suicide as a
rebellion against God’s will, as an unnatural act (animals do not do this), as
an act of hubris, and as demonically instigated.[4] The demonic explanation, also affirmed by
Martin Luther, for suicide was absent in Augustine (cf. (City of God 1.16-27) and Aquinas (Aquinas Secunda Secundae Quest. 64 Art. 5).
It developed in the Middle Ages.
With the philosophes guiding
culture in France, and not theologians, in the 2nd half of the 18th
century, the demonic explanation gave way to the view that suicide was often a
result of mental illnesses.[5]
Also, Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics V.XI.1138a)
and Aquinas, but not Calvin, opposed suicide as it deprives the state of one of
its members. As noted in Plato, persons
committing suicide were buried separately.
In 563, the Council of Braga denied suicides funerary rites of the Eucharist
and any singing of the Psalms. By the 16th
c., the corpses of suicides were desecrated, their properties were forfeited,
but, as Watt argues, Calvin appears to think these practices were not
theologically grounded and cultural.
Robert Burton
Robert Burton (1577-1640), an English vicar at St. Thomas the Martyr’s Church, published his first edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621.[6] In it, Burton explores the types, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and cures for depression. Under ‘Prognotics of Melancholy’ (Sect. IV Memb. I), he offers a discussion of suicide. Thus, his discussion is psychological and not in terms of sin and whether a person’s suicide is unpardonable: ‘In such sort doth the torture and extremity of his misery torment him, that he can take no pleasure in his life, but is in a manner enforced to offer violence unto himself, to be freed from his present insufferable pains’ (IV.I.2738). At hand was the recent writing of an Italian physician, Girolamo Fracastorio, whom Burton quotes: ‘in fury, but most in despair, sorrow, fear, and out of the anguish and vexation of their souls, offer violence to themselves: for their life is unhappy and miserable. They can take no rest in the night, nor sleep, or if they do slumber, fearful dreams astonish them’ (IV.I.2739). Thus, a psychological understanding of suicide is not a modern development with the beginning of psychology as a field of study in the 19th c. Burton offers his own vivid description of the psychological state of a person who may kill himself:
In the daytime they are affrighted still by some terrible object,
and torn in pieces with suspicion, fear, sorrow, discontents, cares, shame,
anguish, &c. as so many wild horses, that they cannot be quiet an hour, a
minute of time, but even against their wills they are intent, and still
thinking of it, they cannot forget it, it grinds their souls day and night,
they are perpetually tormented, a burden to themselves, as Job was, they can
neither eat, drink or sleep (IV.I.2739).
Such suicidal
people seek what all creatures do, their own good. Thus, death becomes to them a ‘good’. The causes leading to suicide are many, such
as love, grief, anger, madness, shame, etc. (IV.I.2747).
Burton then
demonstrates how widespread in antiquity was the view that suicide was
acceptable and admirable—an example of courage—in certain cases. Yet he concludes that, ‘heathen philosophers
determine in this kind, they are impious, abominable, and upon a wrong ground’
(IV.I.2779). Yet he qualifies his
abjuration, noting that it may be that suicide was chosen in a fit of madness
and melancholy by persons deprived of reason (IV.I.2784). Such a person, Burton implies by referencing
2 Samuel 2.4 (David’s burial of Saul), should not be ignominiously buried
(IV.I.2786). God may well show mercy,
and he concludes ‘We ought not to be so rash and
rigorous in our censures, as some are; charity will judge and hope the best:
God be merciful unto us all’ (IV.I.2788).
John Sym
We might compare
and contrast two other British authors of the early 17th century,
John Donne and John Sym. They produced
the first book-length works on suicide in the English language about the same
time, but with opposing views. Donne
wrote first, but his work was published after Sym’s. Their writings come after William Shakespeare’s
address of suicide in certain of his plays, most notably in Romeo and Juliet in
the 1590s. The play dramatized an
Italian story by Mateo Bandelli that was already being read in English in two
versions in the 1560s.
John Sym was a
Scottish, Reformed minister in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex in the 1600s. He wrote a book on ‘self-killing’. Along with intentional suicide, he included
other behaviors that involved a flippant attitude towards life and a dangerous
living that could result in unintentional death. In the very first paragraph, he notes that,
after death, there is no further opportunity to recover from sin and avoid
eternal destruction (ch. 1).[7]
Non-rational life (vegetation, animals) follows nature in not committing
suicide. Only humans do. Both body and soul together comprise the
person, and to kill one is to kill the other.
As a whole person, one is fit to perform duties. Suicide destroys not only the person but all
his or her actions, such as being useful to God, the Church, and the commonwealth
(ch. 3). Sym notes that this life is a
preparation for the next, and so the person committing suicide cuts short his
opportunity to work up his salvation, adorn ‘his person with divine and saving
graces of God’s spirit’, and be obedient to God and perform His duties (ch.
4). Jesus’ parable of the rich man and
Lazarus (Luke 16) affirms that, after death, there is no amendment of life,
while in this life we might advance toward a better life by what we do. Sym’s says that ‘cheerfulness is an excellent
means of life’ (ch. 4). It is both
inward and outward. Jesus urges
disciples not to be anxious (Matthew 6).
In ch. 5, Sym discusses the importance of developing a spiritual life in
which God’s Spirit works in us and rightly orders our lives. Suicide is murder. It is also self-murder, which is worse (ch.
6, section 4). Four things apply in
murder: an innocent person is killed, the actor had no authority to do this,
the murderer knows the act will kill and is unlawful, and the murderer acted
with purpose and intent. In ch. 7, Sym
says that suicide is against the law of love (self-love), is a malice of Satan
(section 3). Ch. 8 considers how suicide
is also a spiritual self-murder. He says
that suicide deprives one of eternal life.
One neglects ‘to cherish and foment the graces of God’s Spirit’ and lets
them die before Christ is fully formed in him (2 John 8). Chs. 9-11 addresses bodily self-murder. Chs. 12-13 address direct and indirect
self-murder. Ch. 14 covers the means,
application of means, and methods of self-murder. Ch. 15 addresses many motives for
self-murder, and he includes a discussion of heretical teachings that have led
some to approve of suicide. One motive
considered is when the devil moves a person to suicide (section 21). Ch. 16 covers the subjects of persons subject
to self-murder (melancholy, Christians struggling with temptations, high-minded
and ambitious people, and someone living an obnoxious life), how people enter
by degrees into suicide, and the signs of suicide (solitariness, neglect of
duties, strange behavior, verbal cues).
Ch. 17 addresses arguments against suicide. It is against God’s Law, against God Himself,
against nature, injurious to mankind, wrongs oneself, is most harmful, and is
against reason.
Ch. 18 asks
whether suicide damns one to hell forever with the devil. Damage is done not only to the body but
especially to the soul. Some committing
suicide are exempt from eternal damnation: a child, a ‘natural fool’, a person
in a fit of lunacy, fever, or frenzy, or one who commits suicide by
mistake. Other self-murderers are
reprobates without the state of grace: those who wittingly and willingly
committing suicide. Examples in
Scripture are Saul, Ahithophel, Zimri, Judas, etc. Sym distinguishes laws proper to humankind
and laws exceeding this limit that offend against both creature and
creator. Regarding these latter limits,
he says
if man do sin transcendently-presumptuously, and properly against
more universal, or higher Laws, that concerns the being of God, or of the whole
frame of the creation; the violating whereof natural instinct, and divine
horror may make us abominate; there is no comfort of the Gospel, nor salvation
to such, as is apparent in the devils; into whose qualities, and order such men
do degenerate, by their transcendent sins, beyond the list of those, for which
mercy may be had by the Gospel, which respects pardon of sins, limited only
within compass of that Law, which is properly given to man; and requires a
modified justice, suitable to the power man had at first to perform duty.
Now, self-murder properly so called, is such an extra-categorian and
transcendent sin, beyond or above the law of reason, or of divine imposition
proper to man, that it violates the frame of the Creation and the Majesty of
God himself, (as well as his Law,) in endeavoring the destruction of both; from
which horrible fact, both natural instinct, and divine horror might restrain a
man; if he had not put off humanity (ch. 18, section 5).
Also,
self-murderers lack the possibility to repent before death, and so they cannot
be saved.
The Church
rightly refuses them funerary bells, the singing of psalms, and burial on
consecrated ground. Their wills are
nullified. No commemoration is made. In this, the practice is that also of the
Roman Catholics. Acting so, the Church
gives a witness that self-murder is an odious practice for all. Section 9 of ch. 18 considers objections to
the position taken. Sym considers some
examples of self-killers who were not self-murderers, Samson being one. He also excuses Pelagia and other Christians
who killed themselves to avoid sin as they were unaware of the moral nature and
acted out of passions responding in surprise to the threat they faced. Suicide may be the result of a sin of
infirmity or a more calculated act—‘a most presumptuous sin, which he doth so
advisedly, deliberately, wittingly, and willingly go about’ (section 11). For this reason, one cannot repent and pray
for forgiveness and then commit suicide.
Chapter 19, the
last chapter, considers antidotes to self-murder.
John Donne
John Donne’s Biathanatos
(from the Greek: life-death) A softer position was also taken a century earlier
by Thomas More, an ancestor of Donne’s wife.
More had described a fictional people in his Utopia who cared wonderfully for their sick but who allowed suicide
or assisted suicide when there was no cure for a painful malady:
when any is taken with a torturing and lingering pain, so that there
is no hope either of recovery or ease, the priests and magistrates come and
exhort them, that, since they are now unable to go on with the business of
life, are become a burden to themselves and to all about them, and they have
really out-lived themselves, they should no longer nourish such a rooted
distemper, but choose rather to die since they cannot live but in much misery;
being assured that if they thus deliver themselves from torture, or are willing
that others should do it, they shall be happy after death: since, by their
acting thus, they lose none of the pleasures, but only the troubles of life,
they think they behave not only reasonably but in a manner consistent with
religion and piety; because they follow the advice given them by their priests,
who are the expounders of the will of God.[8]
More says that they either starved themselves or took
opium so that they died without pain.
Nobody forces them to commit suicide; it is entirely voluntary. However, if one kills oneself without the
consent of the priests or senate, they are given none of the honors of a decent
funeral, and their bodies are thrown into a ditch.
Richard Baxter
The influential,
English Nonconformist theologian, Richard Baxter (1615-1691), included a
section on suicide in his A Christian
Directory.[10] Baxter
has remained a significant writer in Puritan and Reformed circles. He took the view that suicide was
self-murder, an act against nature. He
offers pastoral advice concerning those who are inclined to suicide, saying,
first, that melancholy is the chief cause.
This condition is close to madness and, therefore, it renders a person
less culpable for the act—though he does treat it as a sin. Also, Baxter sees melancholy as ripe for the
devil’s urging a person to kill himself or herself. Prevention efforts include reasoning with
them as much as is possible, removal of items they might use to kill
themselves, letting others in their company know of their inclination, and
medical and counselling help that might cure the person of suicidal thoughts.
A second cause
of suicide is concern over ‘worldly trouble and discontent’. By this he means those who ‘too much by any
earthly thing’ that their discontent moves them to suicidal inclinations. It might be overvaluing themselves or their
wealth or friends. We might call this
‘disordered desires’. The antidote to
this is to ‘go to Christ, to beg and learn to be meek and lowly in
spirit’. A third cause of suicide is
passion itself, without discontent. A
fourth is a guilty conscience for some sin (as with Ahithophel and Judas in
Scripture).
Baxter highlights
the importance of warning people of hell’s torments, which might dissuade one
from taking one’s life. The suicidal act
involves committing a sin without opportunity to repent. People also need to understand that great
mercy of God extended to repentant sinners.
Thus, nobody should be overtaken by their own sinfulness that they think
God has rejected them. The devil is
active in persuading people think that God is ‘odious to the soul’, in seeing
‘love itself as our enemy, that we might not love him’.
John Bunyan
John Bunyan’s
(1628-1688) counsel in Pilgrim’s Progress,
spoken by Pilgrim’s friend, Hopeful, is that suicide is self-murder, the
penalty for which is hell (see the narrative about Giant Despair and his
castle). The
counsel Bunyan’s readers receive from the narrative is that one can overcome
despair rather than give into it.
Compare Paul’s words, ‘No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to
man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability,
but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be
able to endure it’ (1 Corinthians 10.13).
Pilgrim and Hopeful use the key of God’s promises and escape Despair. In this narrative,
despair may have less to do with psychological torment than with despair over
whether one is saved or not—the ‘promises’ of God are, indeed, spiritual
promises.
David Hume and
the Enlightenment
1. God does allow humans to alter natural law, as when we deal with diseases and calamities
2. If we understand by ‘divine order’ laws that are rational and produce our happiness, then why not understand suicide to fit these conditions on certain occasions?
3. If by ‘divine order’ we mean that God orders all events in the world, then a person’s choosing suicide would be by His design.
This argument is frightfully simplistic. By focusing on divine versus human choice, he fails to address the matter about what is chosen. Very few Christians take God’s sovereignty to the level of fatalism (the third point, above). Given that humans do choose in ethical matters, the question comes to focus on what is chosen and why.
Other
Enlightenment thinkers considered the topic of suicide in terms of the
will. Immanuel Kant understood an act to
be moral when one could exercise a rational choice to do the act (as opposed to
being compelled). Suicide, then, is a
destruction of the very person who makes moral choices, and therefore is a
destruction of morality itself. Arthur
Schopenhauer argued that suicide ends up being the will pursuing desires rather
than directing or overcoming them.
Through the pursuit of desire, then, we undermine the rational
will. He therefore opposed suicide as a
fulfilment of an irrational desire.
Friedrich Nietzsche qualified this argument by saying that not all such
desires are irrational. ‘Suicide can be
a praiseworthy assertion of one’s will.’[13] After all, for Nietzsche, the world itself
was meaningless. To end one’s
meaningless life in such a world could be a rational decision.
Romanticism
offered a non-rational, secular perspective in the Enlightenment. Suicide could be understood as ‘the inevitable
response of a misunderstood and anguished soul jilted by love or shunned by
society’.[14] The late 18th-19th
century also saw the emergence of psychiatry.
According to Kenneth Kendler, Kathryn Tabb, and John Wright, three
developments at this time allowed the development of psychiatry: the concept of
a ‘mind’ and not just body and soul; the rejection of humoral theories of
treatment (purging, bleeding, emetics) for treatment of the brain and nerves;
and the development of the asylum, where doctors could observe and treat large
numbers of patients.[15] The medical field largely overtook
theological and moral discussions of suicide, though not entirely. Suicide was decriminalized, even if life
insurance policies are nullified in such cases.
The bodies of those committing suicide are not desecrated, buried at
night and in a separate section from other burials or on consecrated ground in
churchyards, and so forth.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer argued that ‘bodily life, which we receive without any action on our
own part, carries within itself the right to its own preservation’ (‘The Last
Things and the Things Before Last’, Ethics).[16] Upon the natural right of life rest all
natural rights. Opposing euthanasia,
Bonhoeffer cites Exodus 23.7: ‘...do not kill the innocent....’ Unlike animals, humans can distinguish their
bodies from their lives. This gives them
freedom to accept or destroy their lives, and so humans should accept their
bodies as God’s gift to be preserved and a sacrifice to be offered. This is key: one should not end one’s life
merely to destroy it, but one can give one’s life for a higher purpose,
sacrificially. Such a freedom regarding
one’s life makes humans human, and any giving of their lives is an exercise of
freedom to God. This cannot be said of
suicide. While despair might lead people
to suicide, the act itself is, humanly speaking, one of self-justification as a
human being, that is, one who has this freedom and exercises it. Such a perspective allows us to understand
suicide as something done in despair and loneliness while also being a human
act. It also means that suicide is not
to be judged in moral terms having to do with oneself or another but in terms
of God. One who commits suicide is
guilty before God, the maker and master of one’s life. It is a lack of faith, not a moral matter,
whereby one does not consider God. To do
so is to sin. Such an argument does not
convince atheists, of course.
Bonhoeffer
cautions that we should not put too much emphasis on the last act of a person’s
life and claim that a suicide means eternal damnation. He opposes addressing one in despair of life
with commands, telling him or her what to do for, what is needed is a new
spirit. We should also be clear
ourselves that we may well not know the motive or motives of the suicide. To help such a person, he or she needs the
comfort of grace and Christian prayer.
The person needs to know grace in forgiveness. He concludes, ‘But who would venture to say
that God’s grace and mercy cannot embrace and sustain even a man’s failure to
resist this hardest of all temptations?’[17]
Stanley Hauerwas,
with Richard Bondi
The most disruptive
practices or acts in a community are those that abandon or deny the virtues and
skills that the character of a community makes available and incumbent on the
members of that community.[20]
[1] Martin Luther, The Table Talk
of Martin Luther, trans. W. Hazlitt (New York: World Pub. Co., 1952).
[2] Martin Luther, Table Talk #222 [April 7, 1532], Luther’s
Works, Vol. 54 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967).
[3] Calvin, CO 46:712-722 in Ionnnis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, ed. Gulielmus Baum,
Eduardus Cunitz, Eduardus Reus (Brunswick, Germany, 1891) and Supplementa Caliviniana, ed. Hans
Rückert (Neukirschen, Germany, 1961).
[4] Jeffrey R. Watt, ‘Calvin
on Suicide,’ Church History 66.3
(September, 1997), pp. 463-476.
[5] Watt (Ibid.) notes the
detailed work of Michael McDonalds,
‘The Secularization of Suicide in England 1660-1800’, Past and Present 111 (1986), pp. 50-100.
[6] Available online: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10800/pg10800-images.html
(accessed 29 January, 2025).
[7] John Sym, Life’s Preservation against Self-Killing
(London: M. Fleischer, 1637).
[8] See the section, ‘Of Their Slaves, and of Their Marriages,’ E-book,
updated April 7, 2021); online: The Project Gutenberg eBook of Utopia, by
Thomas More (accessed 2 January 2016).
[9] Donne quotes the Latin. My
translation: ‘peccatus est actus devians
ab ordine debiti finis, contra regulum naturae, rationis, aut legis aeternae’. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, p. 64.a.1 con.
[10] Richard Baxter, A Body of
Practical Divinity, or A Christian Directory, Vol. 5, Part 4: Christian
Politics; Chapt. 8; Tit. 2: ‘Advice Against Self-Murder’; online: Richard Baxter | Digital
Puritan Press (accessed 4 February, 2025).
[11] Online: Hume Texts Online
(accessed 10 January, 2025).
[12] ‘Suicide,’ Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, rev. 9 Nov. 2021; online: Suicide (Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy) (accessed 2 January, 2025).
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Kenneth Kendler,
Kathryn Tabb, and John Wright, ‘The Emergence of Psychiatry: 1650-1850,’ American Journal of Psychiatry 179.5;
online: https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.21060614 (accessed 2 January 2025).
[16] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Eberhard Bethge
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965), p. 155.
[17] Ibid., p. 172.
[18] Stanley Hauerwas and Richard Bondi,
‘Memory, Community, and the Reasons for Living: Reflections on Suicide and
Euthanasia, in The Hauerwas Reader,
eds. Michael Cartwright, John Berkman, and Stanley Hauerwas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001),
pp. 577-595; p. 581.
[19] George Lindbeck, The Nature
of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, KY:
Westminster/John Knox Press, 2009).
[20] Ibid., p. 582.
[21] Ibid., p. 585.
[22] Ibid., p. 591.
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