Writing about the emotionally sensitive topic of suicide within the context of religion left me somewhat perplexed and uncertain as to where I personally stand concerning the controversial act itself.
Before doing such extensive reading on the subject of suicide, I believed passionately that taking one’s own life is always destructive and negative, that it is, in fact, a selfish decision. Now, having reflected upon suicide in a more formal and open-minded way, I find myself holding conflicting opinions on the topic, having realized that it is not a black and white issue. It is, in reality, a very difficult topic to approach, too complex for anyone to glibly assert a definitive position meant to be accepted as a generalized truth.
The subject deals with and revolves around an actual human life. Thus, it can never be simple or straightforward to attempt to sort out one’s opinions or emotions regarding suicide. And yet, when reflecting upon the topic, most people merely assume that life is positive and should be preserved as long as possible, failing to address the facts concerning the type and quality of the life that the person in question is actually living.
There are many masterful voices echoing throughout the corridors of time concerning suicide, the validity and content of which has almost always been highly debated. Each voice has cresendoed increasingly with impeccable, yet diverse polemic. The act of suicide, for the ancient philosophers, consisted of a many faceted phenomenon. The inception of voluntary death and suicide in literature and philosophy arises first in Homer, wherein it was considered venerable. Camus asserted, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”
In recent months and days, however, there have been many instances of suicide occurring by different persons for different reasons that have caused me to think more closely about this controversial act. For instance, a Tibetan monk caught himself on fire to protest the Chinese rule. In Greece, an elderly man killed himself because of the devastating financial crises the country faced. A student at Rutgers University took his own life after his roommate inappropriately taped a sexual encounter he had with another male student. How are we to think about these events? Are they tragic acts of desperation that we should try to mitigate or are they expressions of virtue and beauty that should be emulated?
Historically the dominant voice in favor of voluntary death belonged to Plato, who’s work Phaedo became a foundation upon which all philosophical schools built their ideology concerning the topic. It was not until the time of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, that the honorable act of voluntary death began to seriously diminish in ideological power and materialize as antithetical to normalcy. Augustine’s ecclesiastical power struggles with the Donatists over doctrinal authority and his apologetically loaded polemic against the Pagans reoriented the ancient perception of suicide from an honorable act of self-expression and total freedom to a negative association with self-murder and increased liability to the ramifications of sin. This reality has served as the impetus for the contemporary approach to thinking about suicide.
The penumbra of personalized experience almost overshadows the fundamental issue of suicide. Is it acceptable to want to die? Is it permissible to leave this world for any reason whatsoever? Who actually has the right to tell a person that she has to continue living a life that she does not wish to live? We, as religious dilettantes, often miss a deceased person so greatly that we view her choice to commit suicide in an intensely personal manner. We conclude that we are to blame for her decision, that we could have done more to intervene and to assist. Our love for her, or perhaps for humanity in general, runs so incredibly deep that we cannot cope with the dramatic loss. The truth is that our perception of her life is often utterly different from her own point of view. For all that we know, she may have been carrying a private burden so heavy that no one could have helped her bear it. Death may have been, in her eyes, the only escape and the ultimate blessing in a world filled with pain. Sophocles poetically articulates this notion,
“It is a shameful thing to want to live forever
When a man’s life gives him no relief from trouble.
What joy is there in a long file of days,
Edging you forward toward the goal of death,
Then back a little? I wouldn’t give much for a man
Who warms himself with the comfort of vain hopes.
Let a man live nobly, or die nobly.”
Furthermore, the decision to value life, regardless of the quality, over everything else is based largely upon the thoughts of one man, namely Augustine, whose opinion was cultivated in the attempt to win an argument and to secure his power within the majority religious institution. Can we as intellectuals disregard the wealth of knowledge and abundant powerful opinions of the many great thinkers who saw value and honor in voluntary death and instead assent blindly to one man’s ideology, namely Seneca, Homer, and Plato as well as Tertullian and many other religious and philosophical schools of thought? I should hope not. I hope that we can honestly weigh the value of all of their opinions and try to apply their collective logic to life today.
A person could, for instance, live her life for nothing more than reading and writing books. This very act would thus be the essence of her existence. What kind of life would she have were she forced to exist without being able to do that which she had lived to do? Would she really be living her life or would she merely be going through the motions of eating and breathing?
Through my research on suicide, I have come to believe that happiness can only be defined on an individual basis according to what each person deems valuable and worthwhile within the context of the greater good of society. Therefore, is it not possible that life is over at the moment when a rational person decides that it is or even when circumstances decide so? Is a life without happiness worth living? Furthermore, I now believe that life should be about personalized freedom. No one should have to endure living a life characterized by the dreaded inability to choose what is best for them.
Could I, as a rational human being who strives to see the good in all situations, advocate for suicide as an acceptable act in all circumstances as did some of the voices in antiquity? I am not entirely sure that I could promote such an idea wholesale. I do believe, however, that a person would honestly have to discern each and every case of suicide individually before coming to any sort of conclusion about the choice made by the deceased. As a fellow human being, not only would I earnestly try to understand why a specific individual had wanted to take his own life, but I would also feel compelled to challenge each person affected by the decision in order to be better equipped to offer an opinion on the tragic circumstances.
However, I still see the problem with the practicality of a philosophical idealism manifesting itself into a tangible reality. The difficulty is that a belief about the potential virtue of suicide is abstract whereas the act of suicide is devastatingly real. For one to believe hypothetically that it may be completely appropriate to take his own life is different from a person’s actual choice to permanently blot out his own existence.
One can change his opinion over and over again, but a person, once dead, cannot return to life. So how does one know if it is permissible to commit suicide or even to advocate it as an acceptable alternative to life? Can suicide still, at times, be justified after one has differentiated between positive reasons for ending life, such as virtue, piety, and physical aliments and negative reasons, such as mental illness and irrationality? I am not completely certain as to the answer I would give to such an inquiry.
My brief research has led me to the tentative conclusion that there are certain circumstances wherein it is appropriate to commit suicide. In fact, I am tempted to believe, as did the ancients, that there are certain situations in which, a person who radiates a virtue and piety that would only be compromised by a prolonged life, would be better served by premature death. Still, I hope that I am never faced with the dilemma of trying to convince someone not to commit suicide, especially if I feel that he or she has justifiable reasons for wanting to do so.
My thoughts on suicide have also led me to contemplate humanity’s responses and reactions to death itself. What is wrong with death? Why is humanity so afraid of it? The Orthodox faith supposedly teaches that those who have been put on the path to G-d’s salvation can look forward, after death, to encountering the eternal joy and bliss that is found only in the presence or theosis with G-d. Yet, I am willing to argue that most Christians do not, in fact, believe in the afterlife. Most believers are so afraid of death that they will do anything in their attempts to postpone or prevent it. If these individuals had a solid faith in G-d’s provision even after death, there would be no hesitation about leaving this life in order to begin the next. As the Apostle Paul says in,
2 Corinthians 5:1-10, “We know, for instance, that if our earthly dwelling were taken down, like a tent, we have a permanent house in Heaven, made, not by man, but by G-d. In this present frame we sigh with deep longing for the heavenly house, for we do not want to face utter nakedness when death destroys our present dwelling – these bodies of ours. So long as we are clothed in this temporary dwelling we have a painful longing, not because we want just to get rid of these ‘clothes’ but because we want to know the full cover of the permanent house that will be ours. We want our transitory life to be absorbed into the life that is eternal. Now the power that has planned this experience for us is G-d, and he has given us his Spirit as a guarantee of its truth. This makes us confident, whatever happens. We realize that being ‘at home’ (… alive) in the body means that to some extent we are ‘away’ from the Lord, for we have to live by trusting him without seeing him. We are so sure of this that we would really rather be ‘away’ from the body (in death) and be ‘at home’ with the Lord.”
Perhaps it is partly this phobia concerning death that has led to the wholesale condemnation of suicide. It seems natural that individuals with a pronounced fear of death would regard with suspicion anyone who had embraced it prematurely.
I have found my reading about suicide to be extremely valuable, in part because it helped to shed light upon some of my aforementioned questions about life, happiness, and death. However, I am most grateful for the insights I have gained concerning how best to interact with those who have been profoundly impacted by a loved one’s suicide or those who feel so strongly about this issue.
I can, however, assert that historically the act has been considered virtuous and we should factor this into our conversations about suicide. I hear the echoes of the voices of antiquity loudly and clearly. Virtue, to them, was a most valuable and irreplaceable gem that had to be valued more than anything else known to humanity. The examples left to us in Greek and Roman literature illustrate this principle masterfully. Their decisions to commit suicide were based solely upon sound reason and pious prayer, not upon depression, economic instability, or mental illness.
Virtue, I fear, is an element of society that we have misplaced and then replaced with a number of insufficient substitutes. I respect the belief of the ancients that maintaining a virtue or confession was more important than life. We are, in the twenty-first century, sometimes so egotistical; we believe that we ourselves are individually all that matters, without considering the possibility that there exists something greater than us, such as principles, virtues, or even the greater good of humanity and society.
Image taken from Wikimedia Commons, a “media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content.” The image is of Lucretia’s Rape and her Suicide by Sextus Tarquinius.
The link to this image can be found at:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ALucretia’s_rape_by_Sextus_Tarquinius%2C_and_her_suicide.jpg
hey man, amazing article. i found myself getting angry as i read it, and then i realized this meant i was really engaged with it. “Furthermore, I now believe that life should be about personalized freedom. No one should have to endure living a life characterized by the dreaded inability to choose what is best for them” was particularly striking to me.
I kept thinking that this is such an awesome historical, sociological, psychological, mythological take on suicide. But there’s not much nod to its actual manifestation in lived life–in families, in children and parents of suicides, of any and all people scarred hugely or in a small way by the suicide. The devastating wake it leaves, as someone who has been through other people’s suicides, cancels its merit uncomplicatedly for me.
Your article is so beautiful and provocative, but I disagree with it.
Hey Damien,
William Stringfellow wrote some really interesting stuff about suicide in his book “A Simplicity of Faith: My Experience in Mourning.” You might check it out if you get a chance.
Or, maybe I’ll recap the argument in a different comment when I get home to my books.
-Jared
What I find so moving about this piece is your passionate commitment to a process of truth. In my experience, the overwhelming majority of critical studies in the humanities end more or less the way the researcher expected. That is often because there simply isn’t enough time to move from ambivalence to conviction, but it can also be because the scholar misunderstands scholarship as a process of justification, instead of what it is — a process of discovery.
***
As I was reading, I was wondering: odd as this may sound, is it really important for us to judge suicide? Many discussions about suicide become binary decisions about right and wrong: did this person have the right to kill themselves? What if they did it because of depression? What if they did it because of their opposition to the Vietnam War?
I do not believe it is important for us to judge suicide. It is always tragic. If the United States had not begun an unjust and immensely destructive war against Vietnam, the monk could have lived. But if a person commits suicide out of depression, who are we to insist that their state of mind was arbitrary? I really like, on this question, Antonin Artaud’s essay about Van Gogh, “The Man Who Was Suicided By Society”:
My specific reflection on Camus is here, where I go into the vexed question of intentionality and certainty when it comes to “deciding to die.” In a sense, I have a problem with suicide on the grounds that it over-identifies me with myself. When I stab myself, who am I stabbing? Who is making that decision, even? Camus is actually less of an existentialist than his reputation would suggest.
Also, there are different, incompatible worldviews in play here. From a Christian standpoint, the law against suicide is not necessarily an Augustinian invention. Ezekiel 18:32, “For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye.” But no such prohibition affected the ancient Greeks, except in the general sense in which every culture has sought to represent life as a gift from the gods, one which we are not justified in refusing.
We would differentiate between a deliberate sacrifice of one’s own life, for virtuous ends, and a symptomatic suicide that results from mental illness. But how are we to know that a death cannot be both?
The ancient world was smaller than we can imagine; the modern world is bigger than we can comprehend. An act of suicide that had deep and legible meaning in ancient Greece, or ancient Judea, or feudal Japan, would drown in a sea of static today. Suicide is almost always a symbolic act; but, as with everything else, there is no longer a clear frequency for the transmission of the message.
We would object to suicide on the grounds of how it affects others…but, as Artaud points out, they are hardly blameless. (In some cases this is blatant, e.g. Clementi at Rutgers.) Furthermore, from the standpoint of the Other, there are many other things we can do that are just as offensive; otherwise, we would not have traditions of disownment, denunciation, exile, and excommunication. “You are dead to me,” one living person says to another.
Also, speaking of intentionality, what of martyrdom? This is Nietzsche on the death of Socrates:
The two most famous suicides in Western history are probably that of Socrates, and that of Christ. At least Socrates had the courtesy to only die once; Christ renounces his family and birthplace, then tells his followers “whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it,” and then, on top of all that, he goes and gets himself killed in the most protracted (and difficult to sculpt) way possible.
One cannot think through suicides carried out on principle without considering suicide bombings — on their own terms, not merely as acts of immoral carnage. (Not that we can’t arrive at that conclusion eventually, but the phenomenon has to be analyzed more thoroughly than it has been so far.)
We’d like to say that a depressed person kills himself for no reason, but of course that isn’t so: the depressed person, at the very least, believes that life ought to be joyful. They are speaking to us about a happiness they sought and did not find; kindnesses they longed for, and were not granted.
You write:
Is it the case, though, that what Dimitris Christolaus suffered was due to periodic, inevitable economic fluctuations? He killed himself in Syntagma Square, across from Parliament, two months after that body approved the IMF and EU austerity measures by a vote of 199 to 74. He wrote, “This collaborationist government has destroyed all traces of the provisions necessary for my survival, which were based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state […] I can see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance.” The pension cuts included in the new legislation totaled some 300 million euros.
A spokesman for PASOK, the ruling political party in Greece, responded to the news on television. “In cases like these,” he said, “we must be very careful when commenting about anything […] This man was very brave and sensitive. We cannot, however, connect his suicide with the country’s current financial plight. Besides, we do not even know how he amassed such debts, or if his children had a hand in this.”
I have nothing against 2 Corinthians 5, but reading that response called to mind, instead, Matthew 12:5-7:
The simplest answer is… it’s both. suicide can be an elevating, romantic, virtuous and redeeming act. However only those that commit will know how strongly it represented these ethical states. The ultimate sadness is that to everyone else, who is both a cause and a salivation of their act, will only see them as another “blood stain on the street.” Perspective is the problem with human beings and empathy, it can be our greatest strength, but as long as we can never truly experience something from someones else’s eyes, it will continue to be a weakness. In this way it will always turn someones last effort for hope…someone’s means of ending unresolvable pain or preventing this world from turning them into a monster they never wanted to become – will always be seen as a pathetic, disgusting and selfish act that only hurts and burdens the living. Those left here always cry, “how could they do this to everyone” or “they had so much to life for…” which is equally as selfish an act, to assume you could know and fix their pain is a truly disgusting control mechanism. No one person has dominion over your life, the heaven or hell it becomes, but you. This knowledge should be celebrated, not condemned, like the loss or a product or income.