The ancient Roman world in which Christianity emerged prized manly honor and female purity above all else, certainly above longevity. There was no reason for early Christians, at first a sect of Judaism, to suddenly imagine suicide a sin. Judas is the only suicide in the Christian New Testament—there are conflicting accounts, but in Matthew 27 he hangs himself. Many have claimed that Jesus was a suicide as well, including the early bishop of Hippo, Augustine; the later theologian Thomas Aquinas; and the Elizabethan poet John Donne (about whom more later). Jesus certainly fits the criteria of clearly accepting his coming death and of declining to take any of several courses of action that might have saved his life. Like Socrates, he refuses to plead his own case at trial, even seeming to mock and provoke his judges. In the book of John we find Jesus saying: “No man taketh [my life] from me, but I lay it down of myself” (John 10:18).
Christianity evolved and took shape in the Roman Empire. This, we have seen, was a world that accepted suicide as a reasonable or even good response to some situations. Our earliest records confirm that Christians did not consider suicide a sin; indeed, it could be celebrated. For instance, around the year 300 the scholar Eusebius, soon to be a bishop, wrote a book collecting the stories of Christian martyrs whose deaths he had witnessed or heard about. He included the story of a Christian woman and her two virgin daughters who had been arrested for their Christianity. Fearing that the soldiers would rape them and ruin their purity, they instead chose to sneak away and jump into a river to their deaths. Eusebius’s description of the incident incorporates the assumptions of his cultural moment:
A certain holy person,—in soul admirable for virtue, in body a woman,—who was illustrious beyond all in Antioch for wealth and family and reputation, had brought up in the principles of religion her two daughters, who were now in the freshness and bloom of life. Since great envy was excited on their account, every means was used to find them in their concealment; and when it was ascertained that they were away, they were summoned deceitfully to Antioch. Thus they were caught in the nets of the soldiers. When the woman saw herself and her daughters thus helpless, and knew the things terrible to speak of that men would do to them,—and the most unbearable of all terrible things, the threatened violation of their chastity,—she exhorted herself and the maidens that they ought not to submit even to hear of this. For, she said, that to surrender their souls to the slavery of demons was worse than all deaths and destruction; and she set before them the only deliverance from all these things,—escape to Christ. They then listened to her advice. And after arranging their garments suitably, they went aside from the middle of the road, having requested of the guards a little time for retirement, and cast themselves into a river which was flowing by. Thus they destroyed themselves.1
The text focuses on the purity of the mother and her ideals, and the respect her actions merit. Notice that while the daughters are praised for womanly chastity, the mother gets a uniquely ungendered dignity for her uncompromising and courageous act. Eusebius, following one of Christianity’s first theologians, Origen, saw the achievement of the afterlife as a process with steps, something like Platonic stages toward the ultimate “good”; progress on these steps could be lost through sin. Thus for Eusebius it was logical for the women to kill themselves in order to evade the threat of sexual sin, which would have set them back on their path to salvation. Eusebius lived in a dynamic period of ancient Christianity, and the persecutions that he chronicled stopped suddenly in 313, when the emperor Constantine lifted the ban on Christianity. Nonetheless, this episode would be cited in key religious and secular discussions of suicide over the next two millennia.
The period of Christian martyrdom was a remarkable era of people walking into death of their own free will. Martyrdom is usually treated as a willingness to die for one’s beliefs, but there have always been questions about whether some martyrs were actively seeking death for the same reasons that conventional suicides do.
Kalman J. Kaplan, a psychologist and historian of the early Christian period, has written about the nature of martyrdom in history. Kaplan holds that the death of Jesus was voluntary and can be understood as a suicide.2 Kaplan’s bolder statement is that Christians experienced something like a suicide survivor’s guilt, confusion, and anger over Jesus’s decision to die, which they then took out on themselves and, later, on Jews at large. While acknowledging that for martyrs, death was unavoidable, Kaplan finds also “a desire, and indeed, an active pursuit of death.”3 He points to the Donatist heresy as an extreme manifestation of this impulse: “Whole companies of Donatists, for example, threw themselves from rocks.” Donatists would not accept the sacraments from priests who had renounced the faith during the period of persecution. The church accepted such men back into the fold and sanctified sacraments performed even by compromised priests, holding that the office, not the man, conferred their sacredness. The Donatists disagreed and in many cases were more than willing to die in support of their beliefs.
Kaplan does not use this terminology, but he implies that the martyrs were a “suicide cluster” that started with Jesus: “What are the potential responses of the Christian survivor to the death of Jesus?” According to Kaplan, “He may choose to die as a martyr-suicide himself. This brings him close to Jesus Christ in two ways: 1) through imitation of the death of his savior and 2) through offering a reunion with Jesus Christ in the next world.”4 Martyrs’ zeal for death can be easily shown—“I am yearning for death with all the passion of a lover,” wrote Ignatius of Antioch—but the idea of an immediate and blissful afterlife provides a radically different context for the question of imitation.5 Still, it is something to consider in our analysis of the ripple-effect repercussions of suicide.
The death of Jesus may have reverberated in the death of the martyrs, yet even in the early days of Christianity, suicidal martyrdom was not recommended as a path by the key figures of the religion. Even Paul, who was fixated on the afterlife, did not advise suicide. He wrote, “For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better: Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you” (Philippians 1:23–24).
Despite Paul’s choice of life, the rage for martyrdom in Christianity, or sects of it, continued after adherents were no longer being persecuted. In fact, the popularity of martyrdom outlasted its usefulness for the movement. As Christianity became more established, martyrdom stopped seeming like a valiant defense of the religion and started to seem like an unnecessary tragedy. Losing its members this way no longer made sense for the church. Efforts to quell the popularity of martyrdom resulted in the first general bans on suicide. In 305 the Council of Guadix amended its list of martyrs by deleting the names of all those who had died by their own hand. The 348 Council of Carthage went farther than the church had before, actively condemning all those who had chosen suicide under the pretext of piety but in fact for personal reasons.
One of the outstanding theologians of this early period of Christianity was Augustine of Hippo, North Africa, whom the church canonized. Saint Augustine made a point of asserting that Jesus’ death was voluntary, writing, “His soul did not leave his body constrained, but because he would and where he would and how he would.” Yet Augustine deprecated other suicides. Writing around the year 400, Augustine considered Eusebius’s story about the pretty virgin girls killing themselves and decided that Eusebius was wrong in his judgment. For Augustine, the sexual act would not have been the girls’ sin. He held that they should not have killed themselves. With that reversal we leave behind the classically inflected sense that honor—or even virtue, or purity, or the absence of sin—ought to decide the matter of guilt. We have arrived at a morality dependent on individual intention.
In his City of God Augustine has no tolerance for suicide, calling it a “detestable crime and a damnable sin.” Augustine’s approach to morality is based on the afterlife, and his ideas about suicide are squarely prohibitive. Consider his certainty and his proclaimed reasons: “This we affirm, this we maintain … that no man ought to inflict on himself voluntary death … that no man ought to do so on account of another man’s sins, for this were to escape a guilt which could not pollute him, by incurring great guilt of his own; that no man ought to do so on account of his own past sins, for he has all the more need of this life that these sins may be healed by repentance. … Those who die by their own hand have no better life after death.”6 It is fascinating that Augustine makes this rather generous plea to the suicidal person who feels guilt and self-revulsion: you must stay here to redeem past sins. Still, for Augustine’s judgment such arguments are secondary; God had issued a command that one must not kill oneself, within the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.”
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 shall not kill.” This is proved especially by the omission of the words “thy neighbor,” which are inserted when false witness is forbidden: “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” … The commandment is, Thou shall not kill man; therefore neither another nor thyself, for he who kills himself still kills nothing else than man.
Augustine finds this injunction so strong that he must hypothesize that Samson had received special orders from God. “Samson … who drew down the house on himself and his foes together, is justified only on this ground, that the Spirit who wrought wonders by him had given him secret instructions to do this.”
He even speaks of the purity of Lucretia:
But all know how loudly they extol the purity of Lucretia, that noble matron of ancient Rome. When King Tarquin’s son had violated her body, she made known the wickedness of this young profligate to her husband Collatinus, and to Brutus her kinsman, men of high rank and full of courage, and bound them by an oath to avenge it. Then, heart-sick, and unable to bear the shame, she put an end to her life. What shall we call her? An adulteress, or chaste? There is no question which she was. Not more happily than truly did a declaimer say of this sad occurrence: Here was a marvel: there were two, and only one committed adultery. Most forcibly and truly spoken.
Even though her body had been violated, Lucretia was chaste, according to Augustine, and no adulteress. Furthermore, in a wonderful turn of phrase: “This crime was committed by Lucretia; that Lucretia so celebrated and lauded slew the innocent, chaste, outraged Lucretia.” The only crime of this celebrated, highly praised woman was that she killed an innocent, pure, and furious woman—herself. He continues:
Pronounce sentence. But if you cannot, because there does not appear any one whom you can punish, why do you extol with such unmeasured laudation her who slew an innocent and chaste woman. … She is among those Who guiltless sent themselves to doom, And all for loathing of the day, In madness threw their lives away.7
Since rape and incest are strong predictors of women’s suicides in our own time, it is useful to know the story of Lucretia and that centuries of thinkers have insisted that what happened to her was not her fault. In his disdain for suicide Augustine was a man of his times—the Christian proscription against self-murder had its philosophical roots in the early Middle Ages—but his reasoning was original.
In the wake of the movement led by Augustine and other church fathers to end voluntary martyrdom, the first legislation in canon law to rule against suicide was passed at the Council of Arles in 452. The logic was similar to the ancient Roman law against slaves committing suicide—that it was a kind of theft—but now the injunction applied to everyone. The Council of Angers reiterated the injunction in 453. The second Council of Orleans in 533 denied funeral rites to suicides who had been accused of crimes. This was generalized by the Council of Braga to all suicides in 563. The Council of Antisidor ruled against churches taking offerings for the souls of suicides in 590.8 Over the succeeding centuries, suicide came to be thought of as the worst sin possible because it stole specifically and entirely from God, and because it left no time for repentance. Interestingly, along with these ideas that suicide was a crime against God, theologians also often mentioned that it was wrong because it was the opposite of perseverance and hope. In some places Christian postmortem punishments were consistent with older practices. Pre-Christian local belief systems regarding suicide had included rites of purification and maiming of the corpse, steps taken to avoid the deceased’s return. This is also the period when suicide becomes firmly connected with the devil.
Islam arose in the seventh century C.E. and was, in its origins, fiercely against suicide. Endurance of an unbearable life was explicitly prized. This point is made clearly in the Koran:
Nor kill (or destroy) yourselves: for verily God hath been to you most merciful! If any do that in rancor and injustice, soon shall we cast them into the fire: And easy it is for God.9
The Sahih al-Bukhari, one of the six major hadiths of Sunni Islam (and considered by many to be the most authentic book after the Koran), states that “whoever commits suicide with something, will be punished with the same thing in the [hell] fire.”10 As the founding sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote, “Nothing, in fact, is more contrary to the general spirit of Mahometan civilization than suicide, for the virtue set above all others is absolute submission to the divine will, the docile resignation ‘which makes one endure all patiently.’”11 Modern mainstream Islam remains squarely antisuicide. An article on the Muslim Public Affairs Council website provides a snap-shot of contemporary attitudes: suicide is “ugly, anti-Islam, anti-nature, and anti-life.”12 The author of another website declares that, even in the case of severe depression, “suicide is a major sin.”13 That essay also draws on the idea above, that Allah will punish the sinner with an endless reprise of the method used to commit suicide. “Whoever drinks poison and kills himself,” for instance, “will be sipping it in the Fire of Hell for ever and ever.” Believers are told to be patient and to remember that they are not the only ones experiencing hardships and calamities. It is ironic that violent and highly visible suicides in the name of Islam have come to be associated with a religion that so emphatically legislates in favor of life, consistent with prizing submission to the will of God.
The medieval period was marked by increasing hostility toward suicide. One reason for this was the decline in Stoicism. More generally, Christian thought on suicide was in part a reaction against ancient paganism. The Greek and Roman heritage was increasingly forgotten and misremembered and distorted, but its examples of those suicides considered noble had been preserved. Throughout the Middle Ages, church leadership took Aristotle and Ptolemy as authorities on cosmology and other sciences, but Greek and Roman thought on moral issues was summarily dismissed. Moral authority was the business of church fathers, councils, theologians, and, above all, the papacy.14 Early medieval punishments were mild enough, forbidding burial rites and the like, but constraints became much more stringent in the high Middle Ages of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. This is when most western European governments promulgated laws mandating the forfeiture of at least some part of the suicide’s estate, and in various regions the practice of desecrating the suicide’s corpse gained increased state sanction.
The style of desecration varied widely from place to place, in part because of the cult roots of the practice, but a common thread was the idea that the suicide’s soul was a danger to the living and had to be ritually disposed of. The self-murderer had to be ostracized from the community in order to prevent a kind of pollution. At Metz and Strasburg, suicides were set adrift on a river. In other areas of France and in Germany, suicides were dragged to a place of execution, hung on chains, and left to rot. In England and elsewhere, suicides were buried at crossroads with stakes through them to help keep their souls from wandering around and harassing the living. The Council of Hertford promulgated a canon in 672 denying self-murderers normal funerals; in 693 the Council of Toledo decided that those who attempted suicide would be excommunicated; and a canon attributed to King Edgar around the year 1000 repeated the prohibition, exempting the mad.15
The next big change in how suicide was discussed in Christianity came in 1271, when the medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas expanded on Augustine’s rule. Aquinas agreed that Jesus had essentially taken his own life, but Christians were not permitted to follow this example.16 Aquinas championed a prohibition of suicide for three reasons: 1) it injures the community of which an individual is a part; 2) it is contrary to natural self-love, whose aim is to preserve us; and 3) it “violates our duty to God”: since he gave us life, only he should be allowed to end it. Aquinas’s first two concerns, for community and for the self, are powerful secular arguments as well, and we will return to them in later chapters to see how they might be applied outside of a religious context. His last argument was so strong in the Christian context that over the years the other two reasons were marginalized. Over time, the idea that God requires one to bear up under one’s burdens and stay alive—no matter what—grew into a significant part of Christian theology. Obedience to God meant that the believer must simply stay and do her part, whatever that part may be.
After Aquinas, throughout Christendom, suicide was regularly understood as sinful. It was not something you could do to escape a sinful life, or to avoid having to succumb to sinful circumstances. In the 1300s, Dante gave enough weight to Aquinas to put (most) suicides in one of the worst circles of hell. Dante has compassion for Dido, the queen of Carthage abandoned in love, and places her in a gentler outer circle. But the devil is at the center of Dante’s hell, and the three-faced devil has a trio of famous suicides in his mouths: Cassius, Brutus, and Judas. Each was condemned for his fatal betrayal, but it is also true that for Dante, suicide was very wrong indeed.
Dante’s devil was huge and had wings (unfeathered, “like a bat”) and chewed on all three of these sinners, crunching them so that they suffered horrendously and constantly. It clawed at them to such a degree that much of their skin was removed. Judas was said to suffer the worst, for his head was in the devil’s mouth, with his legs dangling out. Cassius and Brutus did not have it much better: they were held by their legs with their heads hanging upside-down from the devil’s maw.
In life as well as literature, Christian religious practice in the high Middle Ages was to condemn suicides. Records show families of suicides arguing for leniency for a father or sister, and the pleas of the highborn were sometimes granted. Regardless of rank, though, suicides were increasingly punished.
The ferocity of the response to suicide can seem unbelievable, but examples from across Europe span several centuries. The records of Paris are uniquely comprehensive. When a Parisian man killed himself by plunging into the Seine in 1257, his body was fished out and his case tried. He was found guilty, and his body was sentenced to torture; most commonly, that meant being drawn and quartered, or eviscerated and hanged by the neck before the community and left there until birds and maggots consumed the corpse.17 In 1288 a man committed suicide near the Church of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, and the abbey hanged his body. It was later decided that they had neglected the important rite of dragging his body through the streets behind a horse, so the entire “execution” was repeated, this time with the grisly detail enacted. In 1299 the miller Jean Cliot drowned himself in a river and the abbey ordered his hands to be pierced with wooden stakes before his body was drawn and quartered.
When reasons for these suicides are mentioned, they are generally deep sadness, suddenly dire circumstances, or the devil’s influence. The evidently “mad” were much more likely to be forgiven and given minimal censure. Self-murder was often the recourse of women facing poverty after having lost their husbands, for instance, and of men facing criminal punishment. In the 1300s the idea of despair appears more specifically, as when in 1394 Jean Masstoier threw himself in a river, was saved, and later—still in an anguish of “melancholy of the head”—he drowned himself in a well. In the 1400s, chronicles were likely to add to any reason for a suicide that the person was “tempted by the enemy,” that is, lured by the devil. In 1421, Denisot Sensogot, a Paris baker, hanged himself, and the reason reported was that he did it “by the temptation of the enemy and on the occasion of his madness and illness.” There were odd exceptions: Jeannette Mayard, a shoemaker’s wife and “good Catholic,” in 1426 hanged herself because she was “given to drink and jealousy,” but she was not much blamed for it.18 By and large, sane suicides were discussed as sinners and religious criminals; they were tried, and when found guilty, their bodies were violated, then buried in such places as a “cemetery of the damned,” or, at the very least, just outside the churchyard.
The idea of the devil tempting people to suicide was deeply ingrained and widespread. It had some conceptual advantages in that it allowed people to externalize their most self-destructive impulses, and in a form that they were already conditioned to think of as something to be resisted and rejected. Consider the testimony of one troubled woman:
Then Satan tempted me again and I resisted him again. Then he tempted me a third time, and I yielded unto him and I pulled out my knife and put it near my throat. Then God of his goodness caused me to consider what would follow if I should do so. … With that I fell out a weeping and I flung away my knife.19
Judaism was not as extreme in its punishment of suicide as the Christian Church, but in the Middle Ages, temples too refused suicides burial in Jewish cemeteries. There were (imperfect) Latin versions of the work of Josephus in circulation in the Middle Ages (a better version in Greek was discovered in 1544) and Jews were aware of Josephus’s words against suicide: “It is equally cowardly not to wish to die when one ought to do so, and to wish to die when one ought not. … ‘It is noble to destroy oneself,’ another will say. Not so, I retort, but most ignoble; in my opinion there could be no more arrant coward than the pilot who, for fear of a tempest, deliberately sinks his ship before the storm. No; suicide is alike repugnant to that nature which all creatures share, and an act of impiety toward God who created us. Among the animals there is not one that deliberately seeks death or kills itself, so rooted in all is nature’s law.”20 Also, from at least as early as the tenth century Jews annually studied The Ethics of the Fathers, which dates from between 200 B.C.E. and 200 C.E., and contains such admonitions as this:
Let not your heart convince you that the grave is your escape; for against your will you are formed, against your will you are born, against your will you live, against your will you die, and against your will you are destined to give a judgement and accounting before the king, king of all kings, the Holy One, blessed be He.21
In the Middle Ages and into the early modern age (from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries) the idea of “rites of reversal” arose. Like the long-administered stake through the body of a suicide, the rites of reversal were intended as a hindrance to resurrection. Following these rites, the cadaver of a suicide would be placed in the ground face down, lying north-south, opposite to the normal burial practices. The standard ritual of the stake was also further elaborated during this period: in 1590 the coroner of London ordered that the top of the stake pinning down the corpse of Amy Stokes be left exposed to provide deterrence to other would-be suicides.22 Corpses were hanged by their feet or dragged head down, satisfying the terms both of rites of reversal and of postmortem torture.
The Protestant Reformation spread across Europe beginning in the early 1500s, but as Martin Luther and John Calvin wrought revolutionary changes in worship and policy, both followed the medieval Catholic Church’s teachings on suicide. Both held that whatever their suffering, people ought to respect God enough to endure his torments. Rather than soften strictures, the Reformation ramped up religious hostility to suicide. A macabre policy of threats and violent punishments continued for centuries. Calvinist city leaders had bodies of suicides disemboweled and placed naked in the public square. Again, the idea of torture and exposure was punishment for the crime, but was also intended as a deterrent to others, which is why the torture was as visibly repugnant as possible.
Martin Luther saw suicide as the consequence of the devil’s temptation. In 1544, writing about a woman who had killed herself, Luther speculated that she had been possessed and that she might be considered a victim of the devil:
I have known many cases of this kind, and I have reason to think in most of them, that the parties were killed, directly and immediately killed by the devil, in the same way that a traveller is killed by a brigand. … Yet still the civil magistrate is quite right in punishing this offence without exception, lest the devil should make more and more way in this respect. The world merits such warnings, now that it has taken to epicurising, and setting down the devil as nothing.23
So though the devil was the one responsible, people were also responsible because the world had been dismissing God and the devil with him—“epicurising” elegantly laying the blame to that ancient pagan philosophy.
Thus suicide was condemned in the Reformation, but there were complex factors. The anguish suicide brought on the family and the community drew it into sectarian disputes that were rife in the Reformation. Deaths of this manner were used as propaganda between the sects from the beginning of the Reformation and through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Geneva Bible glossed the biblical suicide of Ahithophel to invoke “God’s just vengeance even in this life [which] is powered on … enemies, traitors, or persecutors of his Church.”24 The English historian John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church, later known as the Book of Martyrs (1563), was a wildly popular and gory depiction of the suffering Protestants had undergone at the hands of Catholics. It also told of some “punishments” that befell English Catholics. Many, he wrote, were driven to suicide. For instance, Foxe told of a student of law, Henry Smith who had been raised well by a pious Protestant father, but who, while studying, “was induced to profess Catholicism.” He visited France and returned “with pardons, crucifixes, and a great freight of popish toys.” “Not content with these things he openly reviled the gospel religion he had been brought up in; but conscience one night reproached him so dreadfully, that in a fit of despair he hung himself in his garters.” Foxe held that true believing Protestants never succumbed to despair or suicide.25
Anti-Calvinist writers, on the other hand, charged that the Puritan doctrine of predestination drove the pious into despair and self-destruction. In England’s environment of Puritans versus anti-Puritans, the conversation about suicide began to focus on the pressure of this predestinary doctrine. Especially in early Protestantism, the idea was that from before birth some people were destined to be saved and some damned—since God knew all—and that people could intuit whether they were among the saved. This challenge could be maddening for those who tried to behave as if they were predestined for heaven, and it could be crushing for those who found themselves behaving in ways that made them feel predestined for hell. Within the church and among the lay population, anti-Calvinists blamed predestination for a spate of self-murders.
While the behavior was barbarous, it must be said that the intention may not have been cruel insult to the deceased, but rather just what the authorities were claiming. People across history speak of being haunted by suicides and tempted by them toward the grave. The harsh practices surely would help to make the mind feel sure the person is gone, and would also be a deterrent to further suicides. Postmortem torture and exposure of the corpse has often been explained as expressing supernatural beliefs, but the reasons for some of it may be closer to the ancient Greek story of the virgin suicide cluster and how it was stopped by the threat of a different kind of postmortem exposure.
The macabre abuse of corpses was eventually ended for the same reasons that the practice of torturing live bodies of criminals before their execution came to be seen as barbarous, in part to civilize public space and in part because individual people’s crimes and punishments were increasingly seen as matters belonging to them personally rather than to the community in general. It no longer seemed reasonable to attack a man or woman’s body for the purpose of teaching other people a lesson. Lynn Hunt, in Inventing Human Rights, outlines this process, as a cornucopia of corporal punishments for living and dead dwindle down, over less than a century, to incarceration for the living, with the dead finally escaping further mortification. With the rise of modernity in the sixteenth century, suicides’ corpses were increasingly left in peace.26