The Romans’ approach to suicide was reflected in their laws, which denied the liber mori only to criminals, soldiers, and slaves. A man accused of a crime committed another crime if he took his own life to avoid trial. Roman criminals often took their own lives because felony was usually punishable by death and the confiscation of property. Suicide before trial saved the suicide’s goods for his family. Roman law also forbade the suicide of slaves because a Roman slave was his master’s property—to kill himself, therefore, was to steal from his master. In fact, slaves came with a six-month antisuicide guarantee: any slave who attempted to kill himself within a half year of purchase could be returned to his former master. A soldier’s suicide was likened to desertion and regarded as a weakening of the legions that, if unpunished, might spread and become a threat to Roman security. Suicide by a private citizen, according to Justinian’s Digest of AD 533, was not punishable if caused by “impatience of pain or sickness, some grief” or by “weariness of life . . . lunacy, or fear of dishonor.” This left a great deal of leeway. Suicide was a crime only if it was “without cause”—an irrational suicide—the premise being that a man capable of killing himself for no reason might be just as apt to kill someone else instead.
In Imperial Rome, therefore, the only objections to suicide were not moral but economic; suicide was a crime only in proportion to its effect on state finances or stability. Otherwise the morality of a “Roman death,” as the poet Martial called it, was beyond dispute. The question was no longer whether but how. Suicide was a final test of character, to be carried out with dignity, courage, even bravado. When Caecina Paetus was condemned to death for his part in an unsuccessful conspiracy against Emperor Claudius, he knew that suicide was his only honorable option, but fear made him hesitate. His wife, Arria, seized his dagger and stabbed herself. Dying, she handed his weapon back to him, saying, “It does not hurt, my Paetus.” The fact of death seemed almost irrelevant; the manner of dying was the thing. Convinced that Nero sought his death, Petronius Arbiter, a celebrated voluptuary whose exquisite manners earned him his nickname “the Arbiter of Taste,” determined to evade the emperor by taking his own life. Calling his friends about him at his villa, he opened and closed his veins at will, prolonging his death as he arranged his affairs, took naps, or engaged in conversation. Unlike Cato, he spent his final hours not in contemplating philosophical questions but in cheerfully exchanging epigrams, songs, and gossip. Finally, he opened his veins for the last time, and in the middle of a sumptuous banquet Petronius Arbiter died as elegantly as he had lived.
For sheer exhibitionism the suicide of Peregrinus is unsurpassed. A wealthy native of Propontis, Greece, Peregrinus spent many years wandering through Palestine and Egypt and, after flirtations with Christianity and Eastern mysticism, found his niche in the doctrines of the Cynics. Preaching the vanity of pleasure and a contempt for death, he grew in reputation as he traveled along the Mediterranean coast. Expelled from Rome for insulting Emperor Antoninus Pius, he decided to solidify his position among the early Cynics by ending his life in a manner illustrating that school’s disdain for death. He announced that he would die on a flaming pyre at the Olympic games in AD 165. Vast crowds gathered to witness the spectacle. Telling them that he was about to bring “a golden life to a golden close,” Peregrinus doffed his Cynic’s robes, threw incense on the burning pyre, and, invoking the spirit of his ancestors, walked into the flames and disappeared as the moon rose. It is said that a brilliant phoenix flew upward from the fire.
One had to go to extremes to be noticed at a time when thirty thousand people a month were sacrificed for sport in the arenas and pet fish were fed the blood of slaves. The Stoic enthusiasm for suicide was a reflection of the general Roman attitude toward death, a nonchalance perhaps unrivaled in history. Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer reported that in Rome at the time of the Punic Wars, volunteers offering to be beheaded for public sport for five minae—payable to the dead man’s heirs—were so plentiful that many people, to improve their chances of getting the job, offered to be beaten to death rather than beheaded because that was a slower, more painful death and hence more appealing to spectators. With the barbarousness of the arena, the casual cruelty of the emperors, and the turmoil into which the Empire was frequently thrown by intrigues and civil wars, indifference to death may have been an important survival skill. It is in the moral chaos of the later Roman Empire, however, that the roots of Christianity’s fervent antisuicide sentiment can be found.
Considering Christianity’s nearly two thousand years of intense opposition to suicide, it is surprising that neither the Old nor the New Testament directly prohibits the act. There are six suicides in the Old Testament. They earn neither blessing nor condemnation. Saul, wounded by the Philistines, fell on his sword to avoid capture, whereupon his armor bearer did the same. Abimelech also killed himself to avoid dishonor. During his siege of the tower of Thebes, he was mortally wounded by a millstone thrown by a woman; he commanded his armor bearer to kill him so that it could not be said that a woman had slain him. When Zimri realized that his siege of Tirzah was doomed, “he went into the citadel of the king’s house, and burned the king’s house over him with fire, and died.” Praying, “Let me die with the Philistines,” Samson pulled down the walls of the temple of Dagon, destroying both his enemy and himself. After deserting his master King David, Ahithophel, his advice rejected by Absalom, “saddled his ass, and went off home to his own city. And he set his house in order, and hanged himself.” Even Ahithophel’s suicide is recorded without criticism, and he was provided a ritual burial in his ancestral tomb. In the New Testament, Judas Iscariot’s suicide after his betrayal of Jesus Christ is viewed as a natural gesture of repentance; it is simply observed that “he went and hanged himself.”
In the succeeding two millennia, pro-suicide writers cited the Bible’s matter-of-fact treatment of self-destruction as evidence of Christian tolerance of the act. Antisuicide forces interpreted it as an implied condemnation, suggesting that suicide is so atrocious as to make specific written prohibition unnecessary. “In the same manner,” wrote one eighteenth-century minister, “I do not recollect in Scripture a single word against man-eating.” More probably the scarcity of suicide resulted from the strong commitment to life felt by Jews of the Old Testament period. An oft-cited example is Job. Although his sheep, oxen, camels, servants, and children had been destroyed and his body afflicted “with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head,” Job refused to lose faith. When his wife suggested that he give up in the face of such adversity, bidding him “curse God, and die,” Job was outraged. “You speak as one of the foolish women would speak,” he told her. “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” Ever since, Job has been employed as a role model for antisuicide moralists who find in his patient fortitude the proper attitude toward suffering. However, his was an example not often followed by early Christians.
In fact, by teaching that man’s earthly existence was merely a grim prelude to the eternal afterlife, Christianity offered an unmistakable, if unintentional, incentive to suicide. The longer one’s life, the more opportunity there was to sin and the less chance of eternal bliss. Suicide—in the form of martyrdom—became the quickest ticket to heaven. Baptism wiped the slate clean of original sin; martyrdom erased the transgressions of a lifetime. Not only was the martyr guaranteed redemption, but he earned posthumous glory, annual commemoration in the church calendar, and an income for his family from church funds.
Christians had ample opportunity to sate their appetite for martyrdom. Anti-Christian mobs roamed the streets, and each day the authorities fed hundreds of Christians to the lions. More often than not the Christians met the Romans halfway. Aedesius slapped the governor of Egypt; he was tortured and thrown into the sea. The centurion Marcellus threw down his arms in the middle of a parade and cried, “I am a soldier of Jesus Christ”; he was executed. The histories of the first thre
e centuries AD overflow with what we now call “indirect” suicides but at the time were described as “the splendid martyrs of Christ” who “everywhere astounded the eyewitnesses of their courage.”
The Christian martyrs received moral support from the church hierarchy. Even Clement, bishop of Alexandria, one of the few early Christian writers to attack voluntary death, condemned it not because suicide is sinful but because the martyr tempts the pagan to commit the sin of murder. Tertullian forbade his flock even to attempt to escape persecution. Like a football coach before the big game, he exhorted imprisoned Christians to die heroically, citing celebrated pagan suicides such as Lucretia, Dido, and Cleopatra as role models, and pointing out that Jesus Christ on the cross had given up his spirit voluntarily before crucifixion could kill him. Invoking the primitive notion of “killing oneself upon the head of another,” Tertullian promised posthumous revenge: “No City escaped punishment, which had shed Christian blood.”
And so the Christians rushed the pagan judges, confessing their faith and begging for martyrdom. Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, described a woman who celebrated her death sentence by “rejoicing and exulting at her departure as if invited to a wedding supper, not thrown to the beasts.” Once condemned, the Christians leaped into the flames, hugged the lions, and baited the pagans. Three young Christians who had destroyed pagan idols turned themselves in and were ordered to die on gridirons. As the execution began they called to the governor, “Amachus, give orders that our bodies may be turned on the fire if you do not desire to be served with meat cooked only on one side.” Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, en route to Rome and a date with the lions in the arena, was giddy with anticipation: “Let fire and cross, encounters with wild animals, tearing apart of bones, hacking of limbs, crushing of the whole body, tortures of the devil come upon me,” he wrote, “if only I may attain to Jesus Christ!”
Death by lion was the easy way out compared to the chosen fate of St. Simeon Stylites, who is said to have stood on a sixty-foot pillar near Antioch for thirty years, exposed to wind, rain, and snow. For one of those years he stood on one leg while the other was covered by hideous ulcers. His biographer was delegated to retrieve the worms that fell from St. Simeon’s body and to replace them in his open sores, as the saint urged the worms, “Eat what God has given you.” St. Simeon was one of many early Christian monks and hermits whose stupefying asceticism often led to madness, early death, and sainthood. One lived for thirty years on crusts of barley bread and muddy water; another carried 150 pounds of iron and lived in a dried-up well. To contemporary psychiatrists, such “chronic suicide” would be traced to masochism, but to the early Christians it was a blessed ending, perhaps even more praiseworthy in the eyes of God than being killed in the arena. “Lo! For these thirty years and more I have been dwelling and groaning unceasingly in the desert!” boasts St. Anthony in Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony “. . . And those who are decapitated, tortured with red hot pincers, or burned alive, are perhaps less meritorious than I, seeing that my whole life is but one prolonged martyrdom.”
Clearly, things were getting out of hand. It is not known how many martyrs died all told during the early years of Christianity. Contemporary estimates range from ten thousand to one hundred thousand. While there is no way to compute how many of these martyrs were voluntary, by all accounts the percentage was high. Yet there was evidence that some of the suicides were not religious zealots but impoverished Christians who found martyrdom the only way to secure food for their families. Others pursued self-sacrifice as far as prison in order to receive the alms and gifts that were often showered on prospective martyrs; then, well before their appointments with death, they recanted and were freed. In the fourth and fifth century, as the Roman Empire crumbled and the Church grew more powerful, ecclesiastical writers began to voice their disapproval. Gradually, suicide under persecution was no longer recognized as martyrdom, extreme asceticism was disparaged, and even suicide to preserve one’s chastity was no longer unanimously praised. Disapproval calcified to denunciation. “If it is base to destroy others,” declared St. John Chrysostom in the fourth century, “much more is it to destroy one’s self.” To St. Augustine, writing in the early fifth century, suicide was “monstrous.”
In City of God, Augustine set forth the arguments that would become the cornerstones of the Christian view of suicide, a position that, on the whole, remains that of the Catholic Church today. Realizing that Christianity contained a logical dilemma—if paradise is achieved by avoiding sin, the most sensible step following baptism is suicide—Augustine tried to demonstrate that suicide itself was a sin greater than any that it could atone for. He took his arguments not from the Bible but from Plato’s Phaedo. Life is a gift from God, explained Augustine, and suffering is sent by God to be endured. To bear suffering is a test of a soul’s greatness; to evade it is an admission of weakness and an act against the will of God. To reject God’s gift is to reject him—which is a sure path to eternal damnation. Furthermore, if a man kills himself to atone for his sins, he sins, for no private individual has the right to kill a guilty person; and if an innocent man kills himself to avoid sin, he has innocent blood on his hands—a sin worse than any he might have committed by living, for a suicide has no time to repent. Finally, Augustine maintained, a man who takes his own life kills a man and thus breaks the Sixth Commandment. Suicide, according to Augustine, was murder.
Augustine’s arguments against suicide, devised to restrain the mania of martyrdom, were based on a respect for life that contrasted sharply with the barbarity of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, they triggered an unexpectedly barbaric reaction. Though Augustine himself did not recommend punishment for what he called “a detestable crime and a damnable sin,” his pronouncements, combined with the growing tide of public opinion, resulted in the first Christian edicts against suicide. In AD 452, the Council of Arles, declaring suicide to be caused by diabolical possession, reaffirmed the Roman slave clauses prohibiting suicide by servants. In 533, the Council of Orleans denied funeral rites to anyone who killed himself while accused of a crime. “The oblations of those who were killed in the commission of any crime may be received,” they wrote, “except of such who laid violent hands upon themselves.” Not only was suicide a crime, they implied, it was the worst of crimes; ordinary criminals were still allowed Christian burial. In 563, the Council of Braga denied funeral rites to all suicides; and in 693, the Council of Toledo declared that even attempters would be excommunicated.
The Church could not have made itself clearer. Suicide was a mortal sin. In a few centuries it had gone from being a passport to paradise to being the shortest route to hell. When the Albigenses of southern France sought martyrdom in droves in the thirteenth century, they were following in the footsteps of the early Christian martyrs. Near Narbonne, 140 of the group’s spiritual elders cheated the executioner by throwing themselves on a burning pyre; elsewhere, seventy-four knights chose hanging over recantation and freedom. While the early Christian martyrs had earned sainthood for such acts, the Albigensians had compounded their sins by suicide and thus, it was said, deserved the savagery with which some five thousand of them were put to death in 1218. Suicides were no longer martyrs for God; they were, according to the eleventh century’s St. Bruno, “martyrs for Satan.” In this ecclesiastic revisionism, Judas, theologians claimed, was more damned for killing himself than for betraying Christ. Rather than being the ultimate proof of faith, suicide was now conclusive proof of faithlessness; the suicide had despaired of God’s grace. When Joan of Arc, imprisoned at Bouvreuil in 1431, threw herself from her cell window to avoid falling into the hands of the English, her suicide attempt was used by the bishops at her trial as further proof of demonic possession.
By then a curious transformation had taken place. The Church had reversed its position on suicide so forcefully, it seemed to jar loose the primitive superstitions surrounding suicide that had been submerged through the classical age. In medieval Englan
d, custom dictated that a suicide must leave the room in which he died not by the door but through a hole bored under the threshold. In Danzig the corpse was lowered by pulleys from the window and the window frame subsequently burned. The corpse was then hanged from a gallows. Each town had its own variations; in some areas the bodies of suicides were burned, in others they were buried on the beach below the high-water mark. In Zurich a suicide who had killed himself by jumping from a height was buried under a mountain whose weight would press upon his restive soul. While these customs had their origins in the primitive rituals designed to placate the suicide’s ghost, the ghost was no longer the primary target; now the act itself was the object of punishment, and the rituals began to be defined by fury more than by fear.
What started at Arles as canonical legislation was soon reinforced by civil law. Feudal lords had an economic stake in seeing that their workers didn’t kill themselves. In 967, England’s King Edgar gave state sanction to the ecclesiastical penalties. Gradually, the connection between suicide and murder that the Church had forged by its interpretation of the Sixth Commandment found secular approval. The suicide was a self-murderer, subject to similar punishment. In England, the first civil mandate against suicide was probably imported by the Danes during their invasion in 1013: “Let him who hath murdered himself, be fined in all his goods to his lord: let him find a place of burial neither in the church nor church yard; unless ill health and madness drove him to the perpetration.” The thirteenth-century legal authority Henry de Bracton recorded that the ordinary self-murderer forfeited his goods; the person who killed himself while awaiting trial forfeited both goods and land. There were exceptions: “The madman, or the idiot, or the infant, or the person under such acute pain as to produce a temporary distraction, who kills himself, shall forfeit neither lands nor chattels, because he is deprived of reason.” Suicide was (self-) murder unless the perpetrator was insane—the loophole by which Catholic and Jewish suicides have been allowed burial to this day.
November of the Soul Page 23