In the 2nd c. AD, Justin Martyr explained why Christians do not commit suicide when faced with persecution in his Second Apology. The reason he gives is that God takes pleasure in our imitating His properties but is displeased when in word or deed we do not. So, self-killing is anti-procreation, anti-revelation (instruction in the divine doctrines), and anti-humanity (why the human race exists) (Justin Martyr, Second Apology 4). Yet, when examined before a judge to determine if one is a Christian, the penalty for which was at that time death, the Christian answered truthfully, for truth pleases God and helps unbelievers come to understand that their prejudice against Christians is unjust. Justin expected that he himself would be put to death for his faith when writing this apology—and he did become known as Justin Martyr.
Clement of Alexandria, Stromata
The
Gnostics were a formidable religious group for Christians in the 2nd
century AD. They borrowed elements of
Christianity but held to a totally different religion, but they were close
enough that people might confuse them for Christians. One of their peculiar teachings was that the
physical world was an evil creation, and therefore the body counted for
nothing. Such a teaching, he notes, led
them to give up their bodies easily (Stromata
Book IV, chs. iv,
x).
Lactantius
Lactantius
(c. 250-c. 325) notes that Plato’s Phaedrus
(‘On the Immortality of the Soul’) led some to commit suicide. The reasoning of other philosophers, too, led
them to suicide: Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Zeno, and Empedocles. They saw suicide as merely a release of the
soul from the body, not as a crime.
Lactantius says,
For if homicide is wicked because it is a destroyer of a
man, he who kills himself is fettered by the same guilt because he kills a man.
In fact, this ought to be judged a greater crime, the punishment of which
belongs to God alone. For, just as we
came into this life not of our own accord, departure from this domicile of the
body which was assigned to our protection must be made at the order of the same
One who put us into this body, to dwell therein until He should order us to
leave (The Divine Institutes III.18).[1]
Lactantius
criticizes non-Christians for assuming that they who do not know God deserve
something good in life. Also, they hold
that souls are eternal (so Socrates, Phaedo),
enter different bodies (so Pythagoras) and pay for their deeds from a former
life (III.18). They also believe, like
Cicero, that the life after death is either better or much the same, but no
worse (III.19). Christians, on the other
hand, see death as reward or punishment.
Non-Christians, however, ‘seek death as a good or avoid life as an
evil’. Their view, quoting Cicero (Consolation fragment 11), leads to the
beliefs that it would be better not to be born (the soul enters a body) and
that, being born, it is good to die quickly.
Eusebius
Eusebius
(c. 260-c. 340) narrates the torturing of Christians. He could give eyewitness and contemporary
testimony to the persecution during the latter part of the reign of Diocletian,
in AD 303-311. The persecution was
empire-wide and directed at people simply because they were Christians. People were tested as to their loyalty to the
emperor by being required to sacrifice to the Roman deities. If they refused, they were tortured in
horrific ways and put to death. Some
threw themselves from the tops of houses to avoid the cruel treatment of their
captors. Eusebius tells how a certain Christian
woman and her two, virgin daughters were captured during the time of a
persecution. To avoid violation by the
guards, they threw themselves into a river to die. The woman explained to her daughters ‘the
terrible things that awaited them from human hands, and the most intolerable
thing of all these terrors—the threat of fornication.’ She also said ‘that to surrender their souls
to the slavery of demons was worse than all deaths and every form of destruction’
(Church History VIII.12).[2]
Ambrose
Bishop
Ambrose (340-397) begins the story with a fifteen-year-old, Christian virgin,
Pelagia. She faced the possibility of
being raped by her persecutors before being killed for not sacrificing to Roman
gods. Contemplating suicide, Ambrose writes that she reasoned, ‘God is not
offended by a remedy against evil, and faith permits the act’ (‘Concerning
Virgins,’ III.7.32-39).[3] She was spared violation before her death,
but her captives then turned their attention to her mother and virgin
sisters. The mother suggested to her
sisters that they commit suicide by jumping into the river to avoid rape before
their torture and execution, describing the act as a baptism in the waters.
Augustine
Augustine
(354-430), however, took a different view in his City of God. A person
committing suicide commits homicide, typically of an innocent person, oneself
(I.17). By committing a homicide and
dying when one commits suicide, one leaves no room for repentance and so is
eternally damned. In the case of a raped
woman, Augustine says that the sin is not hers but the person raping her. Referring to the ancient Roman story of the
rape of Lucretia, Augustine notes that her subsequent suicide for her shame was
extolled in Roman culture.[4] Augustine, however, demurred, saying that she
slew an innocent person (I.19). The
example is relevant: Christian women had been violated in times of persecution,
as already noted in Eusebius and Ambrose.
Augustine maintains that the sanctity of the body remains, even when
violated, when the sanctity of the soul remains (I.18). In this matter, he affirms the view
established in Livy’s telling of the story: ‘ it
is the mind that sins, not the body; and that where purpose has been wanting
there is no guilt’ (History of Rome I.58.9).[5]
Further,
Augustine says,
It is not without significance, that in no passage of the
holy canonical books there can be found either divine precept or permission to
take away our own life, whether for the sake of entering on the enjoyment of
immortality, or of shunning, or ridding ourselves of anything whatever. Nay,
the law, rightly interpreted, even prohibits suicide, where it says, ‘Thou
shalt not kill’ (City of God I.20).[6]
Moreover,
while no positive examples can be found in Scripture for suicide, one can
present the longsuffering of Job to the contrary (I.24). Another argument Augustine presents is that,
if Christians are not justified in killing someone else, even an enemy who has
sinned against them, how could they kill themselves to avoid serving the enemy?
(I.24). Next, Augustine considers the
situation where someone facing rape commits suicide to save the perpetrator
from committing the sin and perhaps herself or himself from desiring this
intercourse and so committing a sin. His
answer is that one does not commit one sin to avoid another (I.25). One might entertain the notion that God
commands or grants a person to commit suicide for some reason, such as with the
case of Samson, but lacking such a direct word from God, it is wrong. One who commits suicide does not have a
better life in the next (I.26). Nor
should anyone commit suicide to avoid sin (I.27). Scripture calls us to live righteously, not
die to avoid sin.
In
the so-called Roman Penitential, we
find this directive:
20. If any man who is betrothed defiles the sister of his
betrothed, and clings to her as if she were his own, yet marries the former,
that is, his betrothed, but she who has suffered defilement commits suicide
—all who have consented to the deed shall be sentenced to ten years on bread
and water, according to the provisions of the canon.[7]
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas
Aquinas (1225-74) developed an ethic of natural law in his Summa Theologiae. Natural
law has to do with the reasons behind Christian moral teachings: while divine
law (Scripture) teaches us what is wrong, we can see the connection between
what is revealed in writing by God to what is revealed in nature. As Stephen Pope explains, Aquinas held that we
come to understand ‘how these kinds of acts violate the good of rational
creatures made in the ‘image of God’.’[8] So, for example, we share desires with
irrational creatures for self-preservation, water, food, air, and sex. These desires are based on our rational
nature: to form political community, develop friendships, and know the truth
about God. ‘We ‘participate’ in the
eternal law by freely deciding to act in morally good ways, that is, in accord
with the ‘dictates of reason,’ the knowledge ‘written on the heart,’ and the
natural ends built into human nature.
‘Natural goods are proper objects of human action as long as they are
pursued with reasonable moderation and in accord with their natural purposes.’[9]
Some
examples will help to clarify the nature of this natural law approach to
ethics. Lying violates the natural
purpose of human speech. Baptism of
infants when parents do not wish this violates the parents’ responsibility for
children. Suicide opposes natural
self-love and love of the common good.
Usury violates the purpose of money.[10] As rational beings, we have an inner capacity
to access first principles (synderesis),
namely, that we ought to seek good not evil and treat others as we wish they
would treat us.
Furthermore,
these first principles grounded in nature are the basis for other principles:
honour your parents, protect human life, respect others’ property, tell the
truth, be faithful in marriage.[11] But this reasoning to more remote precepts
from first principles can become difficult: we do not always know what to do in
concrete situations, and we need to have revealed to us what our true end is to
make decisions about what to do. This
revelation is termed ‘the beatific vision’—an idea with Platonic roots that
precedes Aquinas in Christian teaching.
The beatific vision is a spiritual journey towards God. Aquinas held, as Pope says, that ‘the essence
of the Christian life lies in a spiritual journey towards God made possible
only by the grace-inspired theological virtues of faith, hope, and
charity. Natural law thus plays a
subordinate but important role within the Thomistic vision of the Christian
moral life.’[12]
With
this background to understanding Aquinas, we might turn to what he says about
suicide. He opposes a person taking his or
her own life for three reasons: it is a sin against oneself, against the
community, and against God. He introduces
his argument with Augustine’s statement in The
City of God that the commandment not to kill extends to suicide (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, question 64, article
5). So, first, it is a sin against
oneself. Self-killing is against both
natural law and the grace-inspired virtue of charity because it is contrary to
self-love. Every creature loves itself
(natural law) and so wants to protect its life.
By God’s grace, we love not only others but also ourselves.
Aquinas’ second argument follows from the
natural law that every thing is a part of a whole, and individuals are parts of
a community. Here, he is following an
argument from Aristotle (Nichomachean
Ethics book V). From this it follows
that to kill oneself does injury to the community.
Third, to commit suicide is to arrogate to
oneself authority that does not belong to oneself—it is God’s to give and take
life. He quotes Deuteronomy 32.39, where
God says, ‘I kill and I make alive’. The
verse is God’s claim to divine authority.
Aquinas says that commit suicide is like killing the slave of someone
else, implying we have no right to take even our own lives for they belong to
God who gave them.
In further discussion, Aquinas says that one
may not commit suicide to avoid life’s miseries. Noting that the most frightful misery one
faces is death, he says that the suicide choose this over lesser miseries. Nor must one commit suicide for some sin he
has committed for, in doing so, he removes the time for penitence. Nor should a woman commit suicide to avoid
rape, for doing so is to choose the maximal sin. He adds that a raped woman has not committed
a sin because ‘the body is not corrupted without the mind’s consent’ (a quote
from Golden Legend IV). Even if she was to some extent complicit in
the fornication, this is a lesser sin than suicide. Paul disapproves of doing evil that good may
come (Romans 3.8). Applied to the case
at hand, doing evil (suicide) that good may come from it (avoiding rape, or
avoiding sin) is wrong. These are the
main arguments that Aquinas discusses in regard to suicide.
The Church’s denunciation of suicide was codified at the Synod of Braga (536), which denied full burial rites,
the Council of Auxerre (578), which forbad the Church to receive offerings on behalf
of suicides, the Synod of Toledo (693), which disallowed persons who attempted suicide
to participate in practices of the Church, and the Synod of Nines (1284), which
forbad burial of suicides in consecrated grounds.
Previously: Suicide in the Graeco-Roman World
[1] Lanctantius, The Divine
Institutes, Books I-VIII, trans. Mary Francis McDonald (Washington:
Catholic University of America Press, 1964).
[2] Eusebius, The Church History of Eusebius, trans. Rev. Arthur Cushman
McGiffert, in Nicene and Post-Nicene
Fathers of the Christian Church, Vol. 1: Eusebius Pamphilus, ed.
Philip Schaff (New York: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890).
[3] A Select Library of Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, eds. Philip
Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1955),
Vol. 10, pp. 386-387. Cf. Ambrose, Letters XXXVII.36-38).
[4] A translation of this story of Lucretia may be found in Livy, The History of Rome, Vol. 1, ed. Ernest
Rys, trans. Rev. Canon Roberts (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1912). See book I, sections 57-58.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Augustine, City of God,
trans. Marcus Dods (New York: The Modern Library, 2000); online: The
City of God by St. Augustine : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet
Archive (accessed 25 December, 2024).
[7] Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the
Principle Libri Poenitentiales and Selections from Related Documents, trans.
John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990;
orig. 1938); accessible online: Medieval
Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal "Libri Poenitentiales"
and Selections From Related Documents : John T. McNeill; Helena M. Gamer : Free
Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
(accessed 26 January, 2025).
[8]
Stephen J. Pope, ‘Natural Law and Christian Ethics,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics, ed. Robin Gill
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 77-95; here p. 79.
[9] Ibid., p. 80
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., p. 81.
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