The Middle Ages have traditionally been characterized as a period of religious domination, when the arts, science, philosophy, and politics largely stagnated. That assessment has undergone a number of revisions as historians have discovered innovation in those years and connections between the period and the one that followed it, the Renaissance. Still, the Renaissance represents a dramatic efflorescence in almost every aspect of human ingenuity. The painter Giorgio Vasari, looking back in 1550 at the previous two hundred years of Italian art, first termed the period a “rebirth” of culture and of ancient ways of thinking, writing, and making art. The Italian Renaissance is generally dated, as Vasari dated it, from around 1350 to 1550, with the rest of Europe starting later and taking the movement into the seventeenth century.
The Renaissance is best remembered for its changes in art, in the development of perspective and other new artistic techniques, and in the proliferation of superb artists, most notably Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Literature also was revolutionized during the era, as authors began writing in the language of their own countries, rather than in Latin, and subject matter became more inclusive and more personal than it had been since ancient times. Francesco Petrarch, seen by contemporaries as the leader in this change, searched old monasteries and libraries for ancient texts and took as one of his heroes the Roman writer Cicero. Like Cicero’s speeches and writings, Petrarch’s letters and poems were conversational and witty, unlike the stark style of the Middle Ages. Petrarch was also among the first of his age to reject medieval philosophy and to base his philosophical thinking on the views of the ancient world.
As we have seen, medieval punishment for suicide had been intensely cruel, and it became even crueler during the rise of the Protestants. In the late Renaissance, those who took their own lives continued to suffer nasty treatment, but these practices began to be sharply contrasted by philosophical and literary investigation of suicide. In fact, several writers and thinkers of the Renaissance and the early modern period that followed it were fascinated with suicide and looked at it from different angles. Most still came out against suicide, but the reasoning now was based less on church doctrine and more on independent assessment of the situation. The Renaissance was also a time of innovation in diplomacy, economics, and social mores, so it is not surprising to see changes in every aspect of culture, and the new way of looking at suicide was part of these larger cultural and political changes. Petrarch led the way in philosophy and literature: his hero Cicero, we have seen, was at least tolerant and sometimes admiring of certain ancient suicides. Moreover, the printing press, which fueled the Renaissance’s dissemination of knowledge, churned out its first book, the Bible, in 1453, and by 1473 it had printed On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius, named by some as a suicide himself.
The Renaissance brought a revival of many classical authors, whose works had been hard to find for centuries. Through new editions of Plutarch, Livy, and Pliny, the reading public learned of Epicureanism and Stoicism, of Lucretius, Cato, Brutus, and Seneca. Petrarch in 1366 made use of classical texts to write a polemic against suicide. He reprises the classical arguments against suicide, including the ideas that it is not proper to abandon one’s post and that killing oneself is against human nature. Moreover, he adds, in a Christian context, suicide is against God’s will. Of Cato and Seneca he writes, “I grieve to condemn such great men; but I have strangely wondered indeed, how so cruel an opinion could enter into the heart of so worthy a man as Seneca, who does indeed say I will leap out of this ruinous building of my body—but O Seneca, though sayst not well!” Cato, he observes, has been commended by some and “sharply reprehended” by others; he sides with those who see him dying not to defend the Republic but out of envy of Caesar. Petrarch even suggests that perhaps “Cato sought occasion to die, not so much to escape Caesar’s hands as to follow the principles of the Stoics; and by some notable deed to give his name to posterity.”1 Thus are dismissed the heroes of ancient suicides. Petrarch also writes that suicides are caused by anger, disdain, impatience, and “a kind of furious forgetfulness of what thou art.” Of those who procured their own deaths, “how glad would they now be to return into this world again, to abide poverty and all adversity.”2 For Petrarch, suicide is an unmitigated evil.
This attitude was not monolithic. Ten years later, Chaucer’s poem The Legend of Good Women included long sections dedicated to the suicides of Lucretia, Dido, Cleopatra, and Pyramus and Thisbe. Chaucer praises them all. He describes Lucretia after she has told her kinsman what happened to her:
She seide, that, for her gilt ne for her blame,
Her husbond sholde nat have the foule name,
That would she nat suffer, by no wey
And they aswereden all upon hir fey,
That they foryeve hit her, for hit was right;
Hit was no gilt, hit lay nat in her might
And seiden her ensamples many oon.
But al for noght; for thus she seide anoon
“Be as be may,” quod she, “of forgiving,
I wol nat have no forgift for no-thing.”
But prively she caught forth a knyf,
And therwith-al she rafte re-self her lyf
And as she fel adoun, she caste her look
And of her clothes yit she hede took;
For in falling yit she hadde care
Lest that her feet or swiche thing lay bare
So wel she loved clennesse and eek trouthe.
There is forgiveness for Lucretia here, for the crime committed against her, but her final act is taken as the pinnacle of being a “good woman.”
In the late 1500s, there begin to be more suicides in literature, and suicide is often depicted in a positive way.3 For example, in an anonymous English manuscript of 1578, Saul is put on trial for killing himself. Saul boldly defends himself by calling upon the examples of Samson, the Christian martyrs, Socrates, and Cato.
Another somewhat positive take on suicide was written by John Harington, one of the favorite courtiers of Queen Elizabeth I. Harington imagines a dialogue between Samuel, Saul, and Solomon on the question of “Whether it be damnation for a man to kill himself.” Samuel submits a strict religious rejection of all suicide, while Saul offers a contrary argument, praising both Cato and Samson for having avoided abuse by their enemies. As Saul puts it, “Was it not better for me to kill myself, seeing that I see death present before mine eyes, than suffer mine enemies to abuse me ignominiously, to triumph over me despitefully, and to revile me contumeliously? If a man be condemned to die is it any matter whether he or the hangman shall tie the halter about his neck and cast him off the ladder?”4 Then Saul asks, “Did not the martyrs of Queen Mary’s days willingly offer themselves to the flames?” Harington praises Samson, whom God himself gave the prodigious strength necessary to kill himself in his circumstances. He also mentions Socrates as a suicide worthy of praise. Solomon, a symbol of justice, decides the matter without abandoning the notion of religion but with much more sympathy for the idea of suicide. He does not condemn suicide outright. Instead, he says that we must “leave all to the secret judgment of God, referring all to his mercy.” Paintings and literary depictions of suicide also began to change at this time. No longer was the suicidal person being tempted by demons to disobey the word of God. In God’s most secret mind, the judgment, we are told, is likely to be one of mercy.
Cultural sympathies changed as the modern era evolved. In the political realm, individuals gained more rights and more say in government. In the religious realm, chiefly with the rise of Protestantism, there was increased emphasis on the individual’s experience. No longer was the priest the intermediary between a believer and God; now individuals were encouraged to read the Bible for themselves and to personally assess their relationship with God. The individual was appearing for the first time as a human being without a polis, without a household god, without a priest and interceding saints, but with a God of his own, albeit one whose crucial attributes are invisibility and unknowability.
One product of the revival of interest in the ancient world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the appearance of many paintings of Lucretia, her suicide, and the founding of the Roman Republic. The earliest of these paintings we will consider is Sandro Botticelli’s Tragedy of Lucretia, which dates from 1500. Botticelli depicts the heroic suicide already dead, surrounded by a crowd of soldiers, large figures who are themselves dwarfed by the Roman architecture in the background. The imposing scene represents the importance of the state and the citizen’s dedication to it. The woman herself is small, slightly splayed on her funereal slab, neck arched backward in a pose of utter surrender, the dagger that killed her still protruding from her chest. The men around her, all in the partial armor of the Roman soldier, are in an array of poses, but somehow geometrical, as stiff as the architecture around them. This painting has often been interpreted as a portrayal of the pain and beauty of sacrifice to the state. The woman is tiny, the men are large, the buildings of the state are imposing. Lucretia’s ancient story here reminds its viewers of the powerful states that ruled in the late Renaissance. Then things changed.
Botticelli’s work is unusual for showing Lucretia after her suicide, a small part of her context. Many of the later paintings zoom in on the figure of the woman herself, still alive. Often the context is sparse, and the painting or drawing is less about Lucretia’s story than about Lucretia herself. By focusing on her eyes and posture they hint at her inner life, and we now begin to see her as an individual suffering a grave problem, ascertaining the value and meaning of her own life. She is often holding a long dagger and sometimes has already stabbed herself in the belly, or is about to do so. Raphael drew her with spread arms depicted in such vibrant lines that she seemed to be dancing with the knife, barely pointed at her. For this graceful pose she is dressed in a toga, which falls in disarray over her body, one breast exposed, her head back and eyes closed, the emotion of the moment almost lifting her up off the courtyard stones. Raphael drew his Lucretia for a collaboration with printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi, and it became one of the most famous prints of the Renaissance. This Lucretia does not make one think of the state, or even of sacrifice. Instead it is all about the woman pictured, who seems miserable and as yet uncommitted to death.
Alternatively, Lucretia was sometimes imagined as the epitome of calm, virtuous and reasonable, as in the work of an unknown Dutch painter of the early sixteenth century. Sometimes she is angry, as in Albrecht Dürer’s 1518 Suicide of Lucretia, which shows her naked and frowning monstrously at the sky. She has already stabbed herself here, and blood spurts out of the wound, but she is still standing and practically growling, a powerful figure seemingly still full of life. This picture has been generally dismissed as Dürer’s worst. The art critic Fedja Anzelewsky has written that Dürer “tried in vain to convey something of the tragic greatness of the Roman heroine through her expression.”5 It is true that she is not beautiful here, but it can be argued that if you approach the picture with an interest in the woman herself in this terrible decision, her anger and her ugliness become singularly appropriate as representations of her inner state.
Titian’s 1517 Tarquinius and Lucretia portrays her earlier in the story, fighting off her attacker. Tarquin is dressed in princely finery—red stockings, red velvet pantaloons—and she is naked save for a wisp of bedsheet across her thigh. Surprisingly, he has a dagger, and she is doing everything she can to keep it away from herself: the image of the archetypical suicidal woman here fights for her life. She is adorned with a bracelet on each wrist, big earrings, a ring, and a necklace of pearls. She has a pretty face, a complex blond hairdo, and a curvaceous body, all of which represent a powerful woman of considerable status, and full of life.
In the 1630s Lucas Cranach the Elder, the preeminent German painter of his age, painted a whole gallery of Lucretias. All are in some stage of undress, most look directly at the viewer, and while each held a dagger to her waist or breast, no one seems hurt. The Flemish artist Joos van Cleve showed Lucretia in Flemish finery, breast exposed, and having already plunged the dagger into her chest. The look on her face is misery. The Italian Baroque painter Guido Cagnacci also has Lucretia alluring in her bare-breasted disrobe, dark of feature and demeanor, having already taken the knife into her side. Cagnacci also painted a poignant Death of Cleopatra, another famous ancient suicide.
Nowhere is Lucretia more powerful and more dreamily contemplative than in Rembrandt’s Lucretia of 1664. For him she is fully dressed and looking European in a noblewoman’s gown and jewels, her blade threatening herself from a good distance. She seems more commanding than vanquished. She is not exactly killing herself anymore, and she seems to be a new, stronger vision of the self. These pictures, by Dürer, Titian, Cranach, van Cleve, Cagnacci, and Rembrandt, provide evidence of a fascination with Lucretia that transcended a range of political and social differences across these historical moments. Taken together—imagined as a composite—they seem to show European culture as a woman tapping on her chest with a tapered dagger, drifting in and out of her clothes, thinking about what she wants to be and how she can wrangle that reality for herself through life and death. This era was not sure whether it liked Lucretia better wounded and dying or still unharmed and very much alive. It was not just Lucretia’s problem but everyone’s. For some it seemed best to die, but for others a kind of resolute determination was the more important character trait.
When the ancients told the story of Lucretia, she always died; they did not pause to capture the moment when she considers killing herself. Indeed, her death had to happen for the real action to get going, the agony of the sacrifice felt by those standing around her; the oath to take power away from their foreign king, and indeed from any king; and then, of course, the fighting and the establishment of a government. But the Renaissance revival of interest in Lucretia was very different. After Botticelli’s, in none of these most famous depictions does Lucretia die. Even when already stabbed, she is yet living. Interestingly, there is a statue in Vienna by the artist Ignaz Platzer called Junius Brutus, Swearing Revenge at Lucretia’s Corpse. Lucretia stands next to Brutus. The conceit is that he is holding her up in one arm while he gives most of his attention to the dagger he is about to swear by, but we cannot help notice that Lucretia even here seems to be standing on her own. Instead of the ancient emphasis only on what comes after, Renaissance sensibilities cannot ignore the live woman contemplating her suicide.
Obsession with Lucretia in this age was not limited to the visual arts. One of the two long poems Shakespeare wrote was The Rape of Lucrece (1594), a rich and beautiful philosophical work wrought in musical language, and full of wrenched emotion. After Lucrece has killed herself, and her father and husband have fallen on her in anguished mourning, Brutus, long known as a joker, a buffoon, in this moment matures and worries that the men will likewise do themselves in. “Seeing such emulation in their woe,” he plucks the knife from Lucrece’s side and then declaims against their prospective suicides and also against Lucrece’s:
“Thou wronged lord of Rome,” quoth he, “arise!
Let my unsounded self, suppos’d a fool,
Now set thy long-experience’d wit to school.
“Why, Collatine, is woe the cure for woe?
Do wounds help wounds, or grief help grievous deeds?
Is it revenge to give thyself a blow
For his foul act by whom thy fair wife bleeds?
Such childish humor from weak minds proceeds;
Thy wretched wife mistook the matter so,
To slay herself, that should have slain her foe.”6
This is not at all what the ancient Roman men and women had thought, of course, when the story was first told. The men gathered in the story were not said to be in danger of responding to her suicide with their own, whereas in Shakespeare’s era it was possible to imagine romance and heartache forcing a man’s hand against himself. Beyond the threat of the men killing themselves, Brutus does not approve of Lucrece’s act; indeed, he calls it mistaken. Shakespeare’s characters counsel that we must meet our psychological and political problems by externalizing our rage, not internalizing it. One element for which Shakespeare is praised is that his works generally incorporate several strong competing perspectives. Often enough, the wisest of perspectives is voiced by a court fool, or someone used to playing the fool. This fool-gone-wise, Brutus, says Lucrece mistook the matter. As we have seen, Chaucer also thought that those around Lucretia would have forgiven her, but her act was elevated as a sign of extreme purity and honor. In Shakespeare’s telling of it, she did the wrong thing, and he exhorts all to eschew her example.
Of course, Lucretia’s story is not Shakespeare’s most famous meditation on self-slaughter. Hamlet was written only a few years later, about 1601, and exquisitely expresses the growing uncertainty about suicide. Early in the play Hamlet declares the wish that “the Everlasting had not fix’d / his canon ’gainst self-slaughter,” but his deeper meditation on the subject comes later. It is among the most beautiful, sad, and intellectually quixotic passages in the English language.
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?7
He is not just asking whether he is too tired and miserable to go on, and he dismisses the question of whether he has something to live for after all. Life is pain, it is slings and arrows. What he asks is: which is more noble, which is more sensible? Fate and fortune are outrageous and batter us and pierce our flesh. Heartache and a thousand normal human shocks are wretched. Yet when he says that death is an ending “devoutly to be wished,” it does sound like he is still trying to convince himself. Even the vibrant line about taking up arms against a sea of troubles shows a kind of severe ambivalence, for swords are not the best way to fight the sea. Hamlet does not kill himself. His answer in that deep but narrow question is “to be.” But in this pivotal moment he does not say that he has to stay here, alive, for any specific reason. He just does not see immediate death as a decisively inviting alternative. Beyond those immortal lines, the Lucretia poem is a better place to go for Shakespeare’s wisdom against suicide. What is certainly clear here is that attitudes were changing, and the church’s argument that God alone is allowed to take a life is given no role in the deliberation.
Note, however, that after Hamlet’s erstwhile love interest Ophelia kills herself, her survivors plead against her being judged a suicide and punished for it. Of Ophelia, one of the gravediggers says, “Will you ha’ the truth on’t? If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o’ the Christian burial.”
Interestingly, in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, Imogen is kept from stabbing herself because of the notion that suicide is forbidden by God.
Against self-slaughter
There is a prohibition so divine
That cravens my weak hand.8
Different characters are given different responses to this complex question. Here, religion’s claim that God rejected suicide clearly had influence on people.
For another of Shakespeare’s meditations on the topic, we turn to Cleopatra. In Shakespeare’s depiction, the queen makes this speech before she presses first one and then another poisonous asp to her breast:
Give me my robe. Put on my crown. I have
Immortal longings in me. Now no more
The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip:
Yare, yare, good Iras! Quick! Methinks I hear
Antony call. I see him rouse himself
To praise my noble act. I hear him mock
The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men
To excuse their after wrath. Husband, I come!
Now to that name my courage prove my title!
I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.9
Consider her “immortal longings” and the image of her already dead lover Marc Antony—recall that he has erroneously thought Cleopatra already dead and killed himself—rousing himself from lounging in the afterlife to praise her “noble act.” The mistake of Marc Antony’s death haunts all suicides, with its reminder that we do not always know where we really are in our story. Consider also Cleopatra’s understanding of the act as one of courage equal to a queen. In the final line we feel we are hearing more from the Elizabethan Englishman than from the ancient Egyptian, for Shakespeare’s beautiful phrase “I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life,” sings of a more modern poetry of death.
Suicide sometimes seems acceptable or even noble in Shakespeare’s works. He lived in a time when people were beginning to question religious intolerance of suicide. Religion’s proscription of suicide surely saved lives, but punishment not only of those who attempted suicide but of even the survivors of suicides struck many as unfair. As we have seen in the Lucretia paintings, suicide was becoming more visible and more tolerated in the early modern period, and literature followed suit: Shakespeare’s works include no fewer than fifty-two suicides.
Still, many of Shakespeare’s suicides are foolish, mistaken, or wrongheaded. King Lear’s Gloucester is another noble character who seeks to end his life. Gloucester’s world has come down around him in the treachery and infighting that has followed Lear’s unwise division of his kingdom. Gloucester, blinded, miserable, and without hope, asks his beggar friend (his son Edgar in disguise) to lead him to Dover:
There is a cliff, whose high and bending head
Looks fearfully in the confined deep:
Bring me but to the very brim of it,
And I’ll repair the misery thou dost bear
With something rich about me: from that place
I shall no leading need.10
But Edgar tricks him, taking him on a trek to some fields near Dover, where he describes a little rise as if it were a precipice. After sending his friend away, Gloucester takes what he thinks will be a fatal leap and falls flat on his face to the ground. At this point Edgar, no longer disguising his voice, pretends that Gloucester’s leap was real, and that they are at the bottom of the colossal cliffs now; he feigns shock the man is still alive. Edgar suggests that something otherworldly had preserved Gloucester, who vows: “henceforth I’ll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself/‘Enough, enough,’ and die.” The false fall reforms him. It also gives him an opportunity to express the insight that the pain that would inspire suicide will fade if we can wait it out.
A profoundly mistaken pair of suicides in Shakespeare is that of Romeo and Juliet, a reworking, as we have seen, of the ancient story of Thisbe and Pyramus. The underlying cause of the tragedy is the enmity between the young lovers’ families, which puts Romeo and Juliet in an impossible situation in the first place. Yet the immediate cause of their death is brash impatience. If Romeo could have waited just a few minutes more, Juliet would have awakened from her potion-induced sleep, and their world would have changed. Even if one’s beloved is not temporarily in a deathlike trance, waiting can sometimes dull the urgency for suicide.
If Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy is the best-known example of someone weighing suicide, Romeo and Juliet is easily the most famous dramatization of the actual act. For that reason alone, it is worth really considering the extent of the error. Not only was the final moment of each life based on a horrible mistake, but there is also a more encompassing error. At the start of the play, Romeo is pining for a different girl, as certain that she is his true love as he will later be of Juliet. What if he had killed himself over that lost love? As many of us know from experience, when one love is thwarted, another often blossoms in its wake—especially in cases of young love and young lovers.
Shakespeare seems to be warning us that we can misinterpret our situations just as his characters do. Even if your life is not fodder for farce, replete with disguises and secret pacts, even if does not rise to the exalted level of tragedy, your reading of its twists may itself be somehow twisted. In the plays, many characters see their lives through a distorted lens, making it hard to know what course of action is best; Shakespeare, we may surmise, is asking us whether our own lenses give any truer a view.
Another interesting development of this period is the association of the biblical Jonah with suicide. Historian Paul S. Seaver tells us that a future bishop of London, John King, linked Jonah and the sin of suicide in a 1594 sermon. A few years hence the future archbishop George Abbot also preached on Jonah and the sixth commandment, though he speculated that when Jonah threw himself into the sea, he did so with prophetic knowledge of God’s intention to save him, an example that “may not be followed by us.”11
The ingenious author Michel Montaigne (1533–92), who invented the genre of the essay, left us with a legacy on suicide similar to Shakespeare’s. “Essai” means “try” in French, and Montaigne’s essays represent attempts to interpret his own psychology as well as the nature of the world around him. In his most extensive discussion of suicide, he begins by listing quotations from the ancient world in support of the right to take one’s own life. However, he does not let this list pass unchallenged.
For many hold that we cannot abandon this garrison of the world without the express command of him who had placed us in it; and that it is for God who has sent us here not for ourselves alone, but for his glory and the service to others, to give us leave when he pleases, not for us to take it. We are not born for ourselves, it is said, but also for our country; the laws demand of us, for their interest, an accounting of ourselves. … Otherwise as deserters from our posts, we are punished in both this and the other world.12
Montaigne then goes even farther, claiming that “virtue, if energetic, never turns its back under any circumstances; it seeks out evils and pain for nourishment.” Not every person in distress can claim an “energetic” quality of virtue capable of finding nourishment in pain, but Montaigne believes that suffering can be salutary for any person, over time. For Montaigne, as for some other great minds, pain tempers a person’s character, leaving one wiser and often happier for having endured it.
In Montaigne’s time the world was in a turbulent state of change. Whole new worlds had been revealed to Europeans, and in those worlds were new plants, new animals, and new peoples with entirely different cultures. The thinking of the ancient world had been rediscovered as an alternative to the theories and styles of more recent times. Politics, too, was in a state of upheaval. Wars of religion pitted Catholics against Huguenots during the latter half of Montaigne’s life, and across the English Channel, the official government and religion of England had changed several times in his lifetime. Montaigne himself was raised Catholic, but his mother was “New Chris-tian”—her parents had been forced to convert from Judaism. The cultured world was also coming to know of the Copernican model of the solar system, to take it seriously, and to absorb the profound shock that it entailed. Earth had been the presumptive center of the universe, the other planets and the stars lining up in concentric circles around it; now Earth was just one planet among several, orbiting a star. With so many assumptions being reexamined, it was not surprising that people were finding new means of expression and new ways to imagine their lives, and their deaths. In this sense Montaigne was a man of his times, but he was also an original mind of the first order. New, secular ideas about suicide were beginning to emerge, and his strong words reflected and advanced those changes. He made contributions both in his respect for some ancient suicides and in his secular critique of others. For contemporaries, his tolerant retelling of certain ancient suicides was the more striking characteristic of his writing. For our purposes it is most important to note that on balance he rejected suicide and that in his critique of some ancient suicides his displeasure was not about their having sinned but about their having failed to rise to the challenges of life. Contrasting an exemplum of classical suicide with a defeated general who had endured torture and death at the hands of his enemies, he proclaimed: “There is much more fortitude in wearing out the chain that binds us than in breaking it, and more proof of strength in Regulus than in Cato. It is lack of judgment and of patience that hastens our pace.”13 Later in the same text he makes the point again, in memorable terms. “It is an act of cowardice, not of virtue, to go and hide in a hole, under a massive tomb, in order to avoid the blows of fortune. Virtue does not stop on the road or slow its pace for any storm that blows.”
Montaigne enlists Plato in support, writing, “Plato, in his Laws ordains an ignominious burial for the man who had deprived his closest and best friend, namely himself, of life and of his destined course when constrained not by public judgment … but by the cowardice and weakness of a timorous soul.” Montaigne also says it is against nature for one to despise oneself—a sickness peculiar to man and not seen in any other creature.
Montaigne thinks of this self-hatred as a kind of vanity and writes that it is by a similar vanity that we wish to become something other than we are, in this case, he writes, “the desire contradicts.” “A man who wishes to be made into an angel does nothing for himself; he would never benefit from the change. For when he is no more, who will feel and rejoice in this improvement from him?”14 Montaigne then quotes Lucretius on the impossibility of feeling or knowing anything after death, then observes: “The security, the freedom from pain and suffering, the exemption from the ills of this life, that we purchase at the price of death, bring us no advantage. To no purpose does the man avoid war who cannot enjoy peace, and to no purpose does the man flee from trouble who does not have what it takes to relish repose.”15 Thus Montaigne, though he cited God’s disapproval in his list of reasons not to kill oneself, imagines no afterlife and gives this as a reason for a depressed person to eschew suicide. Death is final, bringing no comforting rest, so suicide is a bad idea.
Asking straight out, “What occasions are sufficient to justify a man’s decision to kill himself?” Montaigne muses on the philosophical idea that trivial reasons keep us living so trivial reasons might lead us to death; “still,” he writes, “some moderation is necessary.” “Fantastic and irrational humors” have driven some people to suicide, such as the virgins of Miletus, who in “a mad conspiracy” hanged themselves until threatened with being shown naked to the whole city after death.
Then Montaigne gives a wonderful retelling of the Cleomenes story we encountered in Chapter 1. Here we are told that Cleomenes has fled from an honorable death in a battle he had just lost and Therycion urges him to kill himself to at least prevent his enemies from subjecting him to further shame and probable death. But Cleomenes refuses. With wry humor Montaigne writes that “with Spartan and Stoic courage” Cleomenes refuses this counsel as cowardly. Says Cleomenes, “That is a remedy … which must not be used as long as there is an inch of hope remaining.”16 For Cleomenes, Montaigne tells us, sometimes it is steadiness and valor to live.
“And Cassius and Brutus, on the contrary,” Montaigne declares, demolished the last remnants of Roman liberty, of which they were the protectors, by the rash haste with which they killed themselves.” One of the famous stories Montaigne recounts is of the Island of Cea. There Sextus Pompeius met a ninety-year-old woman who calmly told her fellow citizens that she was ready to die and, having bequeathed her goods and said her goodbyes, was permitted to take her own life. She did so by drinking poison, and “she entertained the company with an account of its progress,” not unlike Socrates. Montaigne was willing to consider the respect that the ancients sometimes afforded suicides, but in his own personal opinion he seems resolutely attached to life. None of his keen awareness of the pain of existence seems equal to his sense that life is worthwhile and worth seeing through. As the Montaigne scholar Hugo Friedrich put it, “Montaigne lets nothing dissuade him from the urgency of thinking about death (not even when later he deliberately transforms this thinking into forgetting), and he lets nothing convince him that death, which annihilates life, therefore makes life worthless.”17
Montaigne even seems to tease some of the famous ancient suicides as not exactly the grand models of calm in the face of death that they were known for being. Of Cato, writes Montaigne, “When I see him dying and tearing out his entrails,” the Roman is enjoying his final drama “more than any other action of his life.” In fact, Montaigne suggests, he might even believe that the ancient Roman “was grateful to fortune for having put his virtue to so beautiful a test and for having favored that brigand in treading underfoot the ancient liberty of his country.”18 Even Socrates is examined in this light. Montaigne asks, “And who that has a mind howsoever little tinctured with true philosophy can be satisfied with imagining Socrates as merely free from fear and passion in the incident of his imprisonment, his fetters, and his condemnation? And who does not recognize in him not only firmness and constancy (that was his ordinary attitude), but also I know not what new contentment, and a blithe cheerfulness in his last words and actions?”19 Socrates was not just accepting his situation, Montaigne suggests; rather, “does he not betray a … sweetness and joy in his soul at being unfettered by past discomforts?” For Montaigne, suicide is never as brave as it may look.
Overall, the impression one takes from Montaigne is that suicide is a wrong choice. He makes a strong case in pointing out that the nothingness death offers is not peace, and by citing the impossibility of knowing what your future holds. Still, as Shakespeare had done in his plays and his poem on Lucretia, Montaigne opens up the question. Montaigne’s investigation was rationalist rather than religious, praising many of the ancient suicides, mocking others. Still, his granting suicide any tolerance at all was revolutionary. Montaigne’s popularizer Pierre Charron summarized the essayist’s thoughts in a 1601 book called Of Wisdom, which reinforced the idea that rationalism included a shocking tolerance for suicide. In part, Of Wisdom accomplishes this in its keen description of depression: “When once despair takes possession of us, the soul is perfectly put upon the rack; and the thought that we shall never be able to obtain what we aim at, is so torturing and violent, that it bears down all before it; and we lose what we stand actually possessed of for the sake of somewhat which we apprehend impossible to be possessed.”20 Like Montaigne, Charron insists that custom makes most things right or wrong, and that had we lived elsewhere—on the Island of Cea, for instance—we would act according to the customs of that environment.
Around this same time, in 1610, the theologian and poet John Donne wrote Biathanatos, a defense of suicide from a religious perspective. Donne is probably most famous for his Holy Sonnets, especially the one that begins “Death, be not proud,” in which he asserts that death should be humbled by the fact of the afterlife. His Biathanatos, published posthumously, was quite an anomaly. Donne was not cavalier about suicide but did not think that it ought to be subject to the cruel laws of the religious and governmental judgments. Donne left the manuscript to his son, who later confessed that his father’s wishes had “forbid both the press and the fire.” In his preface, Donne admits that he often considered suicide and he was not kept from it by any belief that it was sinful. He insists, “I have the keys to my prison in my own hand, and no remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword.”21 For Donne, this was not an irreligious stance, especially because he saw Jesus as a suicide. “It is a heroic act of fortitude, if a man when an urgent occasion is presented exposes himself to a certain and assured death as he did.”22 Donne saw Jesus as having willingly given his life to redeem humanity, a self-sacrifice that made him a model for the martyr suicides that followed. “Apollonia and others who prevented the fury of the fire, did therein imitate this act of our Savior, of giving up his soul, before he was constrained to do it.”
In 1621 there was another momentous development in the reconceiving of suicide: the publication of the English scholar Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton takes a decidedly and unprecedentedly medical view of self-murder. According to Burton, melancholy is due to an excess of black bile and to circumstances in which susceptible persons find themselves. He writes that the experience of melancholy can leave a person with an exceptional mental profundity, and that for this reason we might compare it to women’s pain in childbirth: stunningly intense, yet not avoided, because of the astonishing good it brings.23 Burton also observes that melancholy characterizes the obsessive ruminations of serious people and that his own melancholy inspired him to write about the subject. “I write of Melancholy,” he explains, “by being busy to avoid melancholy.”24 What with black bile and another of his pet theories, the influence of Saturn, Burton’s ideas do not strike us as scientific today, but his attempt to describe what happened to desperate people represented an advance over theories of demonic possession or the devil’s temptations. Burton takes what had been a religious battle and categorizes it within terms that implied the medical model.
Indeed, Burton includes a classification for what he called “religious melancholy,” to which he devotes a section of his book long enough to have been a book of its own. Burton sees religious melancholy created by excesses of both overpassionate Catholics and overpassionate Protestants. He fulminates against priests who scare their parishioners, adding, “But above all others the dam of that monstrous and superstitious brood, the bull-bellowing Pope which now rageth in the West, that three headed Cerebrus hath played his part.” Meanwhile due to terrifying Protestant preachers, Burton sees many patients who are suicidal because “thinking they are already damned, they suffer the pains of hell and more than possibly can be expressed.” Many had killed themselves, thinking they “hath offended God”; he tells of a woman who threw herself from a window, breaking her neck, some who hanged themselves, some who cut their throats. Burton asks whether such deaths are necessary and answers: “Experience teaches us that though many die obstinate and willful in their malady, yet multitudes again are able to resist and overcome, seek for help and find comfort, are taken from the chops of hell.” He offers much advice, but above all Burton counsels those suffering from religious melancholy to stay away from tracts and sermons that excite these concerns, and for all melancholies he insists, “Give not way to solitariness and idleness. Be not solitary, be not idle.” Burton ends his book with the stirring words: “Hope, ye miserable. Ye happy, take heed.”25
Some kind of deep religious despair was clearly widespread, because, by the turn of the sixteenth century, Calvinist leaders had begun to recognize suicidal crises and to shape a scheme of conversion and redemption protective to the men and women affected. Burton describes such crises as a kind of illness, which the church’s cure only exacerbated. The ministers “making every small fault and thing indifferent an irremissible offence, they so rent, tear, and wound men’s consciences that they are almost mad and at their wit’s ends.”26
Suicide can seem like it is a private matter respondent only to a given person’s internal experience, but historical investigation exposes trends. People hear about ways of responding to their pain and act on them. Before leaving this historical period, we must consider one more variant: suicidal murder, similar to what we today call “suicide by cop.” The phenomenon is examined in historian Vera Lind’s essay “The Suicidal Mind and Body.”27 Suicidal murder describes the actions of a person who seeks to end his or her days by killing someone else in order to be punished by death. Lind, writing about Germanic territories, tells us that the idea attracted people because suicide was considered a worse crime than murder, but also because this method allowed time for penance and repentance, the comfort of a clergyman, and the chance to be forgiven by God and go to heaven. A servant killed a boy in 1752 for no reason other than that the servant himself wanted to die. “Thus he had the chance to die as a ‘poor sinner’—and he wanted to die anyway—because he would have time to show remorse and be comforted by a pastor before his execution. In this way the servant could be sure of dying a ‘good’ Christian death, something that he never could achieve by committing suicide.”28 The problem of suicidal murder was so extensive that in 1767 a law was put into effect that denied the death penalty to people who committed murder with the sole purpose of ending their own life. The rather cruel alternative punishment was life imprisonment.
Details of such trends show us that they were connected to a given age, gender, and life-circumstance of the victims. Historian Arne Jansson’s essay “Suicidal Murders in Stockholm” looks at the early modern period in Sweden’s capital and tells us that while researching violent deaths in Stockholm, he was surprised to find a considerable number of confessed suicidal murderers.29 In the time he studied he found sixty-five such people. Ample evidence suggests a real increase in Sweden’s suicides starting in the late seventeenth century. As in Lind’s essay, we find a rise in a particular idea influencing individuals to arrange their own deaths. In Jansson’s studies, suicidal murder was a method mostly used by women, fifty-three of the sixty-five. Social isolation and poverty seemed to contribute to the phenomenon: of the fifty-three women, only seven were married, and three of those were separated from their husbands at the time of the murder. Some women invented murders by claiming to have given birth and done away with the baby. The courts came to doubt such confessions. Jansson tells us that for men an alternative path to indirect suicide was to falsely confess to bestiality; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at least six hundred people were executed in Sweden for this crime. A considerable number of men apparently confessed without having been accused, and while some may have done so out of guilty feelings for having actually committed the act, others were surely seeking death. Courts had no way of knowing. Jansson adds, “But confessing to a crime that one has not committed came to be popularly known as ‘lying oneself out of life’ and judges became increasingly skeptical of such unsolicited confessions.”
Jansson offers some explanations for the rise of suicidal murders:
Most notably, why did the far northern regions of Europe show a special penchant for such indirect suicides? One factor was surely that of imitation. After committing murder, Christina Johansdotter, for example, had confessed that she was following the example of others in seeking the death penalty for herself. In the years under study, one can speak of clusters of cases of suicidal murder. There were three cases in 1689, five in 1706 and nine in 1709–1710, all of which suggests that imitation was a contributing factor in Stockholm’s plethora of indirect suicides.30
Suicidal murders declined in the eighteenth century. Jansson believes that the Enlightenment helped reduce the fear of old religious arguments, including the anger of God and the fear of hell. Suicide was now more likely to be interpreted through the lenses of mental illness and personal hardship.
Even as art, theater, government, and public opinion began to treat suicide in these complex new ways, most Christian authors still raged at the offense it posed to God. Corpses were still tortured and could not be buried in church grounds. Assets were still seized. The Enlightenment rejection of religion’s prohibition of suicide is the next great change in the story, and it is to that drama that we now turn.