November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  In Summa Theologiae (1267–73), a codification of ecclesiastical teachings, Thomas Aquinas, summing up the Church’s position on suicide, reflected the changes since Augustine. Augustine had based his antisuicide stance on spiritual arguments; Aquinas reinforced the religious objections with secular rationale. He reiterated Plato’s “life as a gift from God” argument as filtered through Augustine. “Life is a gift made to man by God,” wrote Aquinas, “and it is subject to him who is master of death and life. Therefore a person who takes his own life sins against God, just as he who kills another’s slave injures the slave’s master, or just as he who usurps judgement in a matter outside his authority also commits a sin. And God alone has authority to decide about life and death.” Aquinas went beyond this familiar reasoning to raise two secular objections. First, he maintained that suicide is unnatural; it goes against man’s instinct for self-preservation and is contrary to the charity that a man ought to bear to himself. Second, borrowing from Aristotle, Aquinas said that by killing himself a person injures the community of which he is a part. Furthermore, he asserted that anyone who commits suicide to avoid punishment is a coward.

  By combining secular and religious arguments Aquinas offered an intellectual justification for civil penalties against suicide. An act that had been a rational end to the Greeks, an honorable end to the Romans, and a means to heaven to the early Christians was now damned by God and despised by man. Suicide, concluded Aquinas, was “completely wrong.”

  In Canto XIII of the Divine Comedy, written at the start of the fourteenth century, Virgil leads Dante below the burning heretics, below the murderers in their river of blood, to a dark, pathless wood. Dante hears human voices weeping all about him; frightened, he reaches out and snaps off a twig. “Why dost thou rend me?” cries the trunk, turning dark with blood. “Men we were and now are turned to trees.” Dante is in the forest of suicides. Every tree and bush in the wood harbors the soul of a self-killer. The tree whose twig he plucked holds the soul of Piero delle Vigne, once chief counselor to Emperor Frederick II of Sicily. In 1249, unjustly accused of treason, imprisoned and blinded, he smashed his brains out against the walls of his cell. Now delle Vigne tells Dante that when the soul tears itself from its own body, it is cast into the seventh circle of hell where it grows into a gnarled, thorny tree. The Harpies, winged creatures with human faces and sharp claws, nest in the trees and pick at their leaves, causing the branches to bleed and the souls to cry out in pain, thus repeating the violent action of suicide every moment for eternity.

  III

  RENAISSANCE

  AND ENLIGHTENMENT:

  “IT IS HIS CASE,

  IT MAY BE THINE”

  LIKE A KNIFE THROWER’S TARGET, medieval man was circumscribed by Christian dogma, which taught him that life was hell, death was torture, and hell was worse. In this scheme of things suicide was unspeakable. Against this joyless landscape the Renaissance blew in like a cool breeze, bringing an awareness of the world’s beauty and a renewed faith in man’s possibilities. Memento mori, the somber slogan of the Middle Ages, became memento vivere. Earthly life was once again valued for itself and not merely as a transition to the hereafter. Renaissance scholars rediscovered classical art, literature, and philosophy, and the Greek and Roman ideals of self-reliance and self-determination were reborn. In his “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” Pico della Mirandola imagines God addressing humanity: “Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature . . . as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.” And if man’s life was his own, so was his death. The decaying flesh, voracious worms, and eternal torment that filled the medieval vision of death gave way to a serene new view:

  Death is a remedy against all evils: It is a most assured haven, never to be feared, and often to be sought: All comes to one period, whether man make an end of himselfe, or whether he endure it; whether he run before his day, or whether he expect it: whence soever it come, it is ever his owne, where ever the threed be broken, it is all there, it’s the end of the web. The voluntariest death, is the fairest. Life dependeth on the will of others, death on ours. In nothing should we so much accommodate our selves to our humours, as in that.

  In his essay “A Custome of the Ile of Cea” (referring to state-sponsored suicide in the ancient Greek colony of Ceos), Michel de Montaigne, whose skeptical essays questioned prevailing attitudes on almost any subject, based his defense of suicide, written in the 1570s, on classical notions of free will. But Montaigne was less interested in endorsing suicide than in demystifying death. “All the wisdom and reasoning in the world boils down finally to this point,” he once wrote, “to teach us not to be afraid to die.” And in the end Montaigne’s arguments were leavened with Renaissance optimism. He found suicide not immoral but a bit foolish. “The opinion which disdaineth our life, is ridiculous,” he wrote, “for, in fine, it is our being. It is our all in all.” He introduced a practical argument that would become a staple of modern suicide prevention: “Moreover, there being so many sudden changes, and violent alterations in humane things, it is hard to judge in what state or point we are justly at the end of our hope. . . . I have seene a hundred Hares save themselves even in the Greyhounds jawes.”

  “A Custome of the Ile of Cea” was the first significant discussion of suicide to question the Church’s blanket prohibition. After eight centuries suicide was once more a topic for debate. Even those who argued against it, like the fourteenth-century humanist Petrarch, disdained religious intimidation in favor of balanced argument. In The Funeral, Erasmus explained that God meant death to be dreadful “lest men far and wide commit suicide. And since, even today, we see so many do violence to themselves, what do you suppose would happen if death weren’t horrible? Whenever a servant or even a young son got a thrashing, whenever a wife fell out with her husband, whenever a man lost his money, or something else occurred that upset him, off they’d rush to noose, sword, river, cliff, poison.” Yet in The Praise of Folly, Erasmus described those who killed themselves in disgust at the miserable world as “people who lived next door to wisdom.” In Renaissance literature suicide was once more a conversation piece. Less than a century after Dante condemned suicides to the seventh circle of hell, Chaucer used Thisbe, Dido, Lucretia, and Cleopatra as models in his Legende of Goode Women; Lucretia became a heroine of Tudor and Elizabethan poetry and a popular model for Renaissance painters. And as early as 1516, Thomas More’s Utopia offered what may have been the first Christian consideration of voluntary euthanasia. In More’s ideal republic, although provided the best possible medical care, the terminally ill were permitted, even encouraged, to end their lives.

  But yf the dysease be not onelye uncurable, but also full of contynuall payne and anguyshe, then the priestes and the magistrates exhort the man, seynge he ys not able to doo annye dewtye of lyffe, and by ouerlyuing hys owne deathe is noysome and yrkesome to other, and greuous to himself; that he wyll determyne with hymselfe no longer to cheryshe that pestilent and peynefull dysease: and, seynge hys lyfe ys to hym but a tourmente, that he wyll nott bee unwyllynge too dye, but rather take a good hope to hym, and other dyspatche hymselfe owte of that paynfull lyffe, as owte of a pryson or a racke of tormente, or elles suffer hym selfe wyllynglye to be rydde owte of yt by other. And in so doynge they tell hym he shal doo wyselye, seynge by hys deathe he shall lyse no commodytye, but ende hys payne.

  Renaissance writers would most affect the discussion of suicide not by introducing any fresh philosophical angle but by beginning to describe what, centuries later, would be called the psychology of a suicidal person. In Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Despair, his cave littered with the corpses of suicides, presses a dagger upon the Red Cross Knight. Suddenly, a familiar-sounding iteration of the traditional arguments for and against self-destruction gives way to the magnified heartbeat of a true suici
dal crisis: “. . . his hand did quake / And tremble like a leafe of Aspin greene, / And troubled bloud through his pale face was seene / To come, and goe with tydings from the hart, / As it a running messenger had beene.”

  It would be Shakespeare, of course, who most fully explored the suicidal person’s internal landscape. In his eight tragedies there are fourteen suicides. Shakespeare examined what were known as honor suicides—to avoid capture, to rejoin a lost loved one, and so on—and saw them not as types but as individuals with complex motives. Cassius, for instance, who orders his servant to run him through with his sword, is not simply the traditional “suicide to avoid capture” but a proud man undone by his refusal to compromise his lofty self-concept. Othello, too, values his good name more than his life. He stabs himself not so much out of guilt for killing Desdemona but as a way of reviving his reputation. As M. D. Faber has pointed out in an essay on Shakespeare’s suicides, Othello kills the bad part of himself (the jealous monster who killed innocent Desdemona) so that the good part (the just, noble warrior) may live on posthumously. Faber suggested that Romeo’s suicide is less a romantic attempt to rejoin his lost loved one, Juliet, than an impulsive act of rage, spite, and frustration. “ ‘I defy you, stars,’ cries Romeo just as he decides to die, and in that cry we have much of what is driving him,” wrote Faber. “. . . His suicide is, in large part, an obscene gesture directed toward the world and the world’s authorities.” Hamlet, the melancholy Dane, unable to express his anger at his mother for marrying his uncle, turns his rage inward and contemplates suicide. In his famous soliloquy he moves from the religious prohibitions, his dismay that God had “fix’d his canon ’gainst self-slaughter,” to a practical consideration of the pros and cons. Although he admits that exchanging “a sea of troubles” for the “sleep of death” is “a consummation devoutly to be wished,” he hesitates, worried that what comes after death might be even worse than his troubled life.

  In 1608, seven years after Hamlet was first produced and published, John Donne summed up the arguments for and against suicide in Biathanatos, subtitled: A Declaration of that Paradoxe, or Thesis, that Self-homicide is not so Naturally Sinne, that it may never be otherwise. Wherein The Nature, and the extent of all those Lawes, which seeme to be violated by this Act, are diligently surveyed. The first defense of suicide in the English language was as formidable as its title. Its three parts, devoted to demonstrating that suicide does not contradict the laws of nature, of reason, or of God, were a witty, erudite dismantling of the traditional arguments against what Donne called “the disease of head-long dying.”

  Donne concluded his vast and detailed survey of suicide by observing that “in all ages, in all places, upon all occasions, men of all conditions, have affected it, and inclin’d to doe it.” Suicide is universal, as much a part of us as the instinct of self-preservation it seems to deny. Donne’s conclusion rendered the moral question less absolute, affirming that “no law is so primary and simple . . . but that circumstances alter it. In which case a private man is Emperor of himselfe. . . . And he whose conscience well tempred and dispassion’d, assures him that the reason of selfe-preservation ceases in him, may also presume that the law ceases too.”

  Donne’s insistence that each case must be judged individually was probably the result of his own “circumstance.” In the preface to Biathanatos he explained his reasons for writing the book. After describing a man “eminent and illustrious, in the full glory and Noone of Learning,” who was prevented from throwing himself off a Paris bridge, Donne confessed that he had considered suicide himself. “I have often such a sickely inclination,” he wrote, although he could not explain exactly why. “Whensoever any affliction assailes me, mee thinks I have the keyes of my prison in mine owne hand, and no remedy presen’s it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword.”

  In The Savage God, A. Alvarez explored the reasons for Donne’s “sickely inclination.” Donne wrote Biathanatos at the age of thirty-six, when his brilliant career as poet and courtier was at low ebb. Having been dismissed from his post as private secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Donne lived with his wife and children outside London. Unable to write or to find a job, Donne thought of death. In a 1608 letter to a friend he wrote of the “thirst and inhiation after the next life” that often overtook him. But Donne admitted that his suicidal thoughts were not wholly due to his reduced circumstances “because I had the same desires when I went with the tyde, and enjoyed fairer hopes than now.”

  Whatever kept him from “head-long dying” is not known, but that same year Donne wrote Biathanatos. Alvarez has suggested that the book itself saved Donne. “I wonder if Biathanatos didn’t begin as a prelude to self-destruction and finish as a substitute for it,” he wrote. “That is, he set out to find precedents and reasons for killing himself while still remaining Christian—or, at least, without damning himself eternally. But the process of writing the book and marshaling his intricate learning and dialectical skill may have relieved the tension and helped to re-establish his sense of his self.” Although Donne, who took vows to enter the Church in 1615, continued to be preoccupied by death in his sermons from the pulpit as dean of St. Paul’s and in his divine poems, he forbade publication of Biathanatos “because it is upon a misinterpretable subject.” When it was finally published in 1646, fifteen years after his death, it created a storm of comment. But despite its learned discussion of suicide, the book’s main contribution may have been in the simple confession of the preface. Suicide, Donne explained, may be neither a heroic, rational choice nor a sin and a crime, but “a sickely inclination” that can overwhelm a person.

  Donne’s “sickely inclination” sounds like depression. In the seventeenth century it was known as melancholy, a catchall term that described a variety of moods and symptoms. In the Middle Ages it existed as accidie, a sinful malaise born of despair of the grace of God. In “The Parson’s Tale,” Chaucer described how accidie made a man “hevy, thoghtful, and wrawe.” A different sort of melancholy was found in the ballads of medieval troubadours, who sang of dying lovers and the supreme value of love on earth. That romantic seed bloomed in the Renaissance when melancholy stemmed not from the sinner’s horror of death and eternity but from a realization of the brevity of life. In literature and drama, melancholy would become associated with sensitive, thoughtful, superior minds, even genius, and it threatened to become a fashionable affliction.

  To Robert Burton melancholy was far too painful to consider fashionable. “If there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man’s heart,” he wrote in 1621 in The Anatomy of Melancholy, a chatty, rambling field guide to the species. According to Burton, melancholy was near-ubiquitous, and the fact that his book went through seven editions in forty years may support his claim. A parson and Oxford don who lived, he admitted, “a silent, sedentary, solitary life,” Burton himself suffered from persistent melancholy, which he could sometimes alleviate by going down to the Isis to listen to the shouts and curses of the bargemen. But many melancholics, he wrote, found relief only in death. (Burton was rumored to have hanged himself.)

  Though the parson in Burton dutifully repeated the antisuicide arguments and quoted the laws and penalties against the act, the humanist in him seems to have realized that suicide, like the melancholy from which he suffered, may not be a matter of choice: “In extremity, they know not what they do, deprived of reason, judgment, all, as a ship that is void of a pilot, must needs impinge upon the next rock or sands, and suffer shipwreck.” He questioned the Church’s damnation of suicide and suggested that man himself is in no position to pass judgment. “What may happen to one may happen to another. Who knows how he may be tempted? It is his case, it may be thine.”

  If the Stoics, with their ultrarational approach, had made suicide seem heroic, icy, and a little impersonal, Christianity, by damning and degrading it, had made it seem foul and inhuman. With the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Donne, and Burton managed to humanize suicide, tr
eating it as an object of sympathy rather than of worship or horror. This change was even reflected in the work of several ecclesiastical writers, who, while condemning suicide, admitted to certain exceptions. “There be two sorts of voluntarie deathes,” observed Reverend Tuke in A Discourse on Death in 1613, “the one lawful and honest, such as the death of Martyrs, the other dishonest and unlawful, when men have neyther lawfull calling, nor honest endes, as of Peregrinus, who burnt himselfe in a pile of wood, thinking thereby to live forever in mens remembrance.” Saint Cyran’s “Casus Regius” listed thirty-four situations in which the self-murderer was innocent, and theologians and philosophers of the school of Grotius and Pufendorf condoned suicide when committed to avoid dishonor or sin, to save oneself from death by torture, or to offer up one’s own life to save that of a friend. In 1613, alarmed by a rash of suicides near Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Protestant minister Johannes Neser preached three sermons in which he reiterated that those who committed premeditated suicide when sane were damned. But men who were driven to suicide by intense vexations, chronic sickness, or extreme pain were not damned, he said, because they did not know what they were doing. When in doubt as to a suicide’s sinfulness—as in cases of gout, bladder stone, and urinary gravel, where acute pain might cause temporary derangement—he concluded that the verdict must be left to God.

  In 1637, concerned by an apparent increase in suicide, an English country clergyman named John Sym wrote Lifes Preservative Against Self-Killing. While agreeing with prevailing seventeenth-century opinion that suicide was the devil’s work and “utterly unlawful,” Sym compiled what may have been the first collection of warning signs: “gastly lookes, wilde frights and flaights, nestling and restlesse behaviour, a mindlessnesse and close dumpishnesse, both in company and in good imployments; a distracted countenance and cariage; speaking and talking to, and with themselves, in their solitary places and dumps; reasoning and resolving with themselves about that fact, and their motives to it, in a perplexed disturbed manner, with the like.” If these signs were present, said Sym, the melancholy man must take precautions to keep the devil at bay: “shunning to go upon lawfull calling into solitary retired places; over waters, bridges, upon battlements of houses; or neere steepe downe places . . . shunning to be alone, or in dark places.” Drawing on his experience counseling potential suicides, Sym concluded, “Self-murder is prevented, not so much by arguments against the fact; which disswades from the conclusion; as by the discovery and removall of the motives and causes, whereupon they are tempted to do the same: as diseases are cured by removing of the causes, rather than of their symptoms.”