Paul-Louis (also known as Paul-Ludwig) Landsberg was born in Bonn, Germany, in 1901 to a prominent family. Landsberg became a professor of philosophy at the University of Bonn in 1928. He wrote several works on anthropology and German philosophy, as well as Die Welt des Mittelalters und Wir (c. 1922) (The Medieval World and Us, The World of the Middle Ages) when he was only 21. He left Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power and traveled first to France and Switzerland, before accepting a position in Barcelona, Spain, as professor of philosophy. Landsberg was forced to leave Spain again in 1936 because of the Civil War. He moved to France and began to write for the periodical Esprit—a publication associated with the “Personnaliste,” or Personalist, movement. In 1940, he and his wife were placed in separate internment camps during the German occupation of France. Despite his experiences, he chose to remain in France to support the liberation effort and to aid his wife, who had suffered a nervous breakdown while incarcerated. During this time, Landsberg carried a poison that he intended to use on himself if captured by the Gestapo. He was arrested by German officers in 1943, but he had apparently changed his mind about suicide and had destroyed the poison. He died of exhaustion at a camp in Oranienburg, Germany, in April of 1944.
Landsberg’s philosophy was characterized by a fundamental concern with the nature of human beings and the connections between the body and the soul. He particularly emphasized the importance of the body in relationship with the soul, stressing the need to avoid a complete “abstraction” of the human person as primarily a soul tied to a physical frame. With this complex approach to the human condition, Landsberg addressed the ethical question of self-killing in The Moral Problem of Suicide (published posthumously in French in 1951). In this long essay, excerpted here, Landsberg discusses historical arguments for and against suicide, specifically those associated with Christianity, many of which he finds simplistic. He argues that the issue of suicide is too complex to simply make a universal decree that is applicable to all people and situations. Having found the views of the Church fathers unconvincing, despite his own religious convictions, Landsberg offers his own unique interpretation of suicide and the states of mind leading to it; he sees it as the temptation to complete freedom, a freedom that is often opposed to duty. What is most missing from these early accounts is an example; he finds it in Jesus Christ. Landsberg argues that life is, of necessity, filled with suffering; suffering serves as a purifying process. Happiness is not the goal of life; and the mere prolongation of bodily existence is not of value. A total prohibition of suicide can only be justified because of the “scandal and paradox of the cross”: “live and suffer.” By “paradox,” Landsberg alludes to the perspective of pagan philosophies like Stoicism, which could not understand the Christians’ preference for martyrdom over suicide; he also considers the ways in which Buddhism’s view, though averse to suicide, is deeply different from the Christian view. Suicide, on Landsberg’s view, is unjustified because to throw away one’s life is to throw away one’s suffering, through which the meaning of life is achieved and made evident.
Paul-Louis Landsberg, The Experience of Death and The Moral Problem of Suicide, tr. Cynthia Rowland. (New York: Philosophical Library), 1953, pp. 65-97.
from THE MORAL PROBLEM OF SUICIDE
I shall be told that the problem I propose to discuss simply does not exist or, at any rate, does not exist for Christians. We all that know that Christianity and the Catholic Church in particular, and all moral theologies, whether catholic or protestant, consider suicide to be moral sin, and do not admit that it can be justified in any circumstances whatsoever. All this is quite clear, and there seems nothing more to be said. Suicide is forbidden by divine authority and that ought to be enough. I should like to add that, in my case, there seem to be two particular reasons which indeed make the question of suicide a very real problem, which neither Christian philosophy nor theology has the right to overlook.
- I have been profoundly impressed by the fact that, of all existing moralities, Christian morality is strictly speaking the only one to forbid suicide outright, without willing to allow exceptions. There are, it is true, some philosophers, particularly Plato and the Platonists, who share a certain aversion to suicide. But we have no example of a non-Christian philosopher who considers it to be in every case a grave sin or crime. We do, it is true, finding in the ethics of certain communities a marked disapproval of suicide, for instance, among the Jews of the Old Testament, the Buddhist, and the followers of the orphic mysteries; but here also we find a considerable number of exceptions which are considered to be justified, and there is no question of an intransigent principle. The sacred horror of suicide is a peculiarly and exclusively Christian phenomenon.
- From the philosophic angle, there is always a moral problem wherever there is a temptation latent in human nature itself. It should be enough to point out that cases of suicide have occurred at all times and amongst all peoples, even amongst the so-called “primitives,” to a much greater extent than is generally admitted, to show that it is a temptation of fairly common occurrence.
And further, the very way in which the Christian religion opposes suicide by stigmatizing it as an extreme aberration, presumes the existence of such a temptation. But above all, we need only to have lived and to have understood only a little of the human heart, to know that man can welcome the idea of death. And as soon as there is temptation we have a positive meaning which can even serve to make our morality deeper and more conscious. The great temptations are active forces which are necessary to the moral evolution of an extremely imperfect creature that is nevertheless destined to perfection, that is to say, to man. It is not sufficient to point purely and simply to a divine command when humanity is challenged by one of its specific and, so to say, basic temptations. Man has to respond with his whole being, with the weight of his existence, in action, in feeling and also in his intellect. All serious moral philosophy is the theoretical expression of the outcome of such a struggle against temptation latent in the human condition.
In view of this, perhaps I shall be allowed to affirm the existence of an authentic problem and of the philosopher’s right to discuss it. We often find an argument against suicide, which is commonly put forward by the unintelligent. It is very customary to find all suicides condemned as cowards. This is a typically bourgeois argument which I find ridiculous. How can we describe as cowardly the way of dying chosen by Cato, or Hannibal, or Brutus, or Mithridates, or Seneca or Napoleon? There are certainly far more people who do not kill themselves out of cowardice. The argument can only be valid on an entirely different level. It may be that compared with the supernatural courage of Christ and the saints, even the courage of Cato might appear a form of cowardice. But on an ordinary human level it is more frequently the courageous who, in certain circumstances, decide to kill themselves. The Christian religion, which condemns it far more as a sin of Lucifer than a banal cowardice. And further, nothing is more opposed to the spirit of Christianity than to treat the prolongation of empirical existence as an absolute value or even as a value of a very high order. Similarly, there is no weight in the argument that suicide is always proof of a weakness of will. There is a will to live and a will to die, and the latter has to be extremely powerful before it leads to suicide.
And then there are those, on the other hand, who still support the right to a voluntary choice of death by countering the Christians argument as follows: you say that voluntary death is contrary to the will of God who created us. But if this is true, then why did he create us in such a way that we have the capacity and opportunity to kill ourselves. This argument is all too easy to refute, but perhaps it is more important to learn from it. The fallacy of course is obvious. Every crime and sin is in a sense possible to man and the same argument could be used to justify murder and robbery. The whole significance of a moral prohibition is that it is there to guide a man who has the capacity to act otherwise. But in the case of suicide we must dwell for a moment on the importance of the fact that man is a being who can kill himself and may not do so. This is quite different from being incapable of doing so. Temptation is an experience of the difference between the vertigo of power and the decision of duty. The manifold possibilities open the unstable, intelligent, imperfect creature that we are, from the basis of all moral problems. A genuine moral problem is always the immense problem of man taken from a given angle. There are few facts so profoundly characteristic of the abyss of liberty and the power of reflection by which man makes himself, up to a certain point, master of his actions and even of his existence. This is precisely why man lives his moral problems, and he has therefore to live this problem of self-inflicted death. The temptation to suicide is part of the vertigo of his dangerous liberty. If, therefore, the fact of being able to kill oneself is not a justification for suicide; it is nevertheless the basis of a specifically human problem. For the temptation to fathom the full extent of his freedom is one of the profoundest temptations known to man.
It is therefore not surprising that philosophic discussion of the problem has always centered on the problem of liberty. I have no room to do justice to the quality of this discussion. It is no exaggeration to say that the problem of free choice of death is one of the fundamental problems of all the great moral philosophies. All I can do here is to review briefly the stoic point of view, which is particularly important and well-developed. Stoic wisdom did not necessarily entail death, but it depended on a frame of mind in which the whole person has become the free arbiter of his own “living or dying” according to the dictates of reason. The stoic was a man who could die if reason so ordained. The empirical capacity to die which is common to all human beings was transformed in the stoic into a capacity which could function immediately if fate required it of reason. It is not the external act of suicide which is glorified, but rather the inner liberty which permits and insists on it, in certain cases. In such circumstances suicide is the via libertatis. Then the voice of Seneca says to man: “You should not live in necessity, since there is no necessity to live.” It is Cato who will not survive if the Republic has lost its freedom, it is Hannibal who refuses to live as prisoner of the Romans, it is Lucrece who will not survive the dishonor she has suffered. In modern times, it is Condorcet who will not live to see the degradation of the revolution. There are the countless heroes of Plutarch; there is a Chamfort saying good-bye to a world where the heart must break or grow cold—or the suicides after the German defeat in 1918, and more recently after the defeat of France. From the stoic viewpoint the death of Socrates is also voluntary, in the sense that he refuses to live as a fugitive far from the city. This strong-willed and rationalist roman philosophy of the person Sui compos, master of his own life, is the last great philosophy of Greco-Roman antiquity before the victory of Christianity. Stoicism has never completely died out and the conflict between Christianity and morality has continued to disturb the conscience of Europe, particularly since the Renaissance. In any case, what is important here is that it is a philosophy of the autonomy of the reasonable being, the keystone of which is the philosophy of a free choice of death.
It is understandable that the struggle with stoicism should have led the Christian Church to give explicit reasons for its condemnation of self-conflicted death. I believe, however, that the early Christians did not discuss the problem, simply because they considered it had been solved for them by the example of Christ and the martyrs. There are many who kill themselves in order to avoid a certain form of death. Hundreds and thousands of persons have killed themselves in this way, either in the prisons of the inquisition, particularly of the Spanish inquisition in order to escape being burnt, or during the French Revolution, like the Girondins and others, in order to avoid ignominy of the guillotine. Neither is it unknown in our present century, in the prisons of the Tcheka and elsewhere. On the other hand, during the great persecutions, the Christian martyrs underwent the most hideous forms of death in the strength of a triumphant faith, without attempting to kill themselves before-hand.
It seems only fair, however, to put forward my own definition of suicide, which a human being deliberately creates what he considers to be an effective and adequate cause of his own death. The theorists who look at Christianity from outside may, in fact, be easily led astray by the almost total contempt for empirical existence displayed by the martyrs. This fact is important, since it demonstrates once again that Christianity has not been led to condemn suicide from any attachment to earthly life or from any particularly exalted view of its value. In the story of the martyrdom of St. Peter, for instance, we find contempt for death and empirical existence which is inspired by Christ’s example. “My brethren, my children, we must not flee suffering, for Christ’s sake, since He Himself of His own free will, accepted death for our sake.” This is also the significance of the legend of Quo Vadis. But this is far from justifying the fantastic idea which tries to make of Christ a type of suicide. To kill oneself to avoid the cross and to suffer martyrdom on the cross are not exactly the same thing. We should be quite clear that nothing was further from the minds of the early Christians than to condemn a self-inflicted death in the name of any loyalty to our empirical existence. The contempt for earthly life amongst early Christians was so extreme that to modern eyes it might sometimes seem even monstrous. Take, as an example, a passage from the epistle to the Romans of Ignatius the martyr:” let me be fodder for the beasts….I am the corn of God; I must be ground in the jaws of beasts….I hope to meet wild beasts of suitable disposition and, if necessary, I shall caress them, so that they may devour me immediately.” Those who turn Christianity into a sort of virtuous optimism proper to all decent people, will never understand the attitude of true Christians to death, neither, as we shall see, will they understand the deeper reason underlying the Christian rejection of self-inflicted death. The magistrate who said to Dionysius the martyr,” it is good to live”, received the reply, “Far other is the light we seek.” Modern man is not superior, but definitely inferior to the stoics. He has to be reminded that Christianity also condemns all forms of euthanasia, which must indeed be scandalous and hideously paradoxical to all but the heroic cast of mind.
But to return to St. Augustine, who was led to discuss the problem in his arguments with the Donatists, a Christian and belligerent sect which admitted suicide; and above all in his struggle with the Stoics. His admirable text, which is the foundation of all Christian philosophy on this subject, can be found in the first chapter of the Civitas Dei. You will remember the events which gave rise to the book: Rome the Eternal City, The City, in short, the holy capital of civilization and the Empire, had fallen for the first time in 410, to the barbarian invader. She had been partially destroyed and terribly ravaged by Alaric. The bishop of hippo, the apologist of the Church, wrote his great work in order to prove that Christianity was not the cause of this shattering event, and that the fall of Rome was far from implying the fall of the religion which, since Constantine, had been to some extent the Roman religion. So he was compelled to tackle the stoic philosophy from the Christian point of view, since Stoicism had remained to a large degree the philosophy of the Roman nobility, and was apparently being used as the philosophical basis of the argument that Christianity and its slave morality had been responsible for the decadence of Rome. Christian women were, in particular, reproached for not having killed themselves rather then fall into the hands of the barbarians, which inevitably implied the loss of their virginity. St. Augustine replies first of all that the essence of virginity is not a physical state but a moral fact. It can be lost morally without being lost physically but, what is still more important, when a woman loses her physical virginity without any consent of the will, as in the case of the women raped during the sack of Rome, she does not lose her moral virginity; she is innocent and not dishonoured and therefore has no reason to kill herself.
When discussing the classic instance of Lucrece, St. Augustine insists on the spiritual morality of Christians. But in the main he counters the stoic argument with the assertion that suicide is always and everywhere a crime. The arguments he uses reappear again and again in Christian literature down to our own days. The principal argument is as follows; to kill oneself is to kill a man, therefore suicide is homicide. Homicide is inexcusable and is forbidden in the Ten Commandments. With all respect, I hardly feel that the argument is adequate. The commandment cannot and should not be interpreted to cover every act which involves as a deliberate consequence the death of a man. The Christian tradition, apart from a few sects, has always allowed two important exceptions: war and capital punishment. St. Augustine knows this very well, and therefore he treads warily. He says: “Ubique si non licet privata potestate hominem occidere vel nocentem, cujus occidendi licentiam lex nulla concedit; profecto etiam qui se ipsum occidet, homicida est.” The stress is put on privata potestate and on cases where there is no legal sanction. But the moment we begin to make moral distinctions between the different types of cases which may involve the death of a man, one may just as well make a distinction between suicide and the murder of someone else. In my opinion, it is even necessary to do so. In the first place, if we are deciding something which affects our own life, we are in a totally different position from deciding something which affects the life of another. What would be an act of violent hostility towards another cannot be the same towards ourselves, if it is we who decide on the act. In many cases, the man who kills himself has no intention of destroying his person, but rather of saving it. Rarely, if ever, does he aim at annihilation. There is a smack of sophistry about this moral identification of the two acts when their dissimilarity is so striking. As for the commandment, we must not make it say what it does not say. It is universally accepted that it does not forbid a just war or the death penalty, but it is difficult to maintain that it does condemn suicide, at any rate unconditionally. The Old Testament records as many suicides as it does wars, and some of them are glorified, as in the cases of Samson and Saul. Christians have made out, in the case of these biblical suicides, that a direct and exceptional command from God may hallow acts which are quite immoral in themselves. This is the paradox taken up by Kierkegaard, of Abraham who is prepared, in faith and obedience, to become the murderer of his son. It is Calvin’s justification of political sedition when ordained by God. However, the Old Testament chronicles its suicides without insisting on any such supernatural justification. There is no reason for believing that the Decalogue was intended to cover cases of suicide. And the chain of reasoning which plays such a large part in Augustine’s text, is certainly not an example of his profoundest thinking.
There is an allusion to Job which allows us to suspect that he has not spoken his whole mind. The reason is obvious. He was dealing with Romans. It often happens that the brilliant orator and advocate, the direct descendant of Cicero, gets the upper hand and then he speaks ad extra and ad hominem. Thus, in the middle of his expositions we find a beautiful passage which counters the famous example of Cato, so highly praised by his own master, Cicero, not with a Christian counterpart, but with the example of Regulus, who returned to Carthage in order to keep his word, in the certainty that he would be killed by the Carthaginians.
Unfortunately, I have not the space to analyse Augustine’s text as it deserves, nor to follow up in proper detail the evolution of Christian doctrine with regard to suicide. We find no substantial argument added to the reasoning of the Father of the church in the period between St. Augustine and St. Thomas. But St. Thomas is not satisfied with St. Augustine’s arguments and tries to substitute others. The fresh arguments that he adduces are three:
- suicide is contrary to man’s natural inclinations, contrary to natural law and contrary to charity—to that charity which a man owes to himself. Amor bene ordinatus incipit a semet ipsum. What are we to make of this argument? First of all, if suicide were, in every case, contrary to natural law, it would not occur, or only in a very few exceptional or pathological cases. I must admit I find it difficult to see that something can be against natural law when it is practiced, accepted and often honoured amongst all non-Christian peoples. Suicide is far from being contrary to human nature. The human animal’s will to live is neither unlimited nor unconditional. It remains to be seen whether suicide must, in every case, be contrary to the love we should have for ourselves. Suicide, no doubt, deprives us of that good which is life. But in fact, and from the Christian’s point of view, this good is of highly dubious quality; and, in any case, it is not the highest good and often rather more like an evil. To deprive oneself of a purely relative good to avoid an evil which is expected to be greater, such as the loss of honour or freedom, is not an act directed against oneself. And this is very often precisely the case of the man who kills himself. It would be much more reasonable to say that he kills himself out of too great self-love. Consider also the importance of the almost ontological concept of war in the ancient world and Proteus’s suicide out of friendship. If we interpret it on a deeper level, the argument runs: he who kills himself deprives himself of salvation, which would be the total negation of that charity towards oneself required by the gospels. But in this case we are arguing in circles, since we have an argument which sets out to prove that suicide is a sin, by assuming the premise that suicide is already mortal sin. In fact, the vast majority of those who kill themselves have no desire or intention of forfeiting their salvation. On the contrary, they say, like Doňa Sol to Hernani: “Soon we shall be moving towards fresh light, together we shall spread our wings and fly with measured beat towards a better world.” The case of Kleist and his woman friend is there to demonstrate that the romantic suicide is not a purely literary invention. Man finds, on the other side of the grave, an imaginary home for the hopes which have been disappointed in life. There Werther will meet Lotte once more? “Death, tomb,” he says, “what do such words mean?” In the majority of cases, the one who kills himself seeks neither perdition nor extinction; the life he knows seems less desirable than something which is vague and unknown, but at any rate something. The theological sin of despair is not defined as to the loss of such and such an empirical expectation, but as the loss of that fundamental hope in God and His goodness which is the very life of the human heart. The loss of expectation is even a necessary step in the spiritual journey of the masters. It is therefore false to claim that all suicides are men without hope, in the theological sense. Personally, I go so far as to believe that man never despairs completely, that it is impossible for him and contrary to his essential being, to despair. Desesperare, says St. Thomas, non est descendere in infernum. He does not speak of suicide in his tremendous chapter on the sin of despair. In my view, despair is not a characteristic of man on earth, but perhaps only of Hell and the Devil. We do not even know what it is. The act of suicide does not, to me, express despair, but rather a wild and misguided hope directed to the vast unknown kingdom on the other side of death. I would even venture on the paradox: men often kill themselves because they cannot and will not despair. This is why the idea of Hell, which fills the place of the unknown beyond, is such a strong disincentive to suicide. Even Shakespeare, speaking with the voice of Hamlet, is held back by this dread of the terror of a future existence.
- St. Thomas repeats the argument used by the platonic school, and particularly Aristotle, to discountenance suicide. Plato was, in fact, somewhat opposed to the idea of suicide for reasons not unrelated to the enormous influence of the orphic mysteries on the spirit of his philosophy, and also because of his profound attachment to the idea of the Polis; one has only to read Diogenes Laertius to appreciate that suicide was almost the normal end of all Greek philosophers from Empedocles down to the Hellenistic period. But Plato gives the philosophers a place in the City and advises them not to desert this place. Aristotle turns it into the argument that a man belongs to his country and to society and has no right to deprive them of his presence and activity by suicide. St. Thomas takes up this argument which would, perhaps, have a certain value in an ideal society; but, in reality, people often kill themselves because the very imperfect societies in which they are condemned to live prevent them from leading any form of creative life. So long as societies breed more forms of moral and material misery than need be our lot, it would be highly imprudent to authorise them to condemn those who try to escape from their authority by death. Man did not ask to be born into a society and he does not see why he should not be allowed to leave it by the best door left open, if life in such a society has lost all meaning for him. The argument may be valid in certain cases, where someone may in fact be abandoning an important social duty, but it is clearly inadequate as a general argument against suicide as such. Moreover, the same collectivist premise might lead to the opposite conclusion if an individual could no longer find a social justification for his existence. I would add that, to me, the argument seems inspired by a collectivist outlook, by the atmosphere of the Greek City which is essentially non-Christian. It is purely and simply anti-personalist to try to decide such an intimately personal question as to whether or not I have the right to kill myself, by reference to society. Suppose I die a little sooner or a little later, what has that to do with a society to which, in any case, I belong for so short a space? St. Thomas is taking up one of Aristotle’s arguments, as he often does, without allowing for the profoundly non-Christian outlook which inspires his thinking both in detail and in the whole. The weakness of the social argument can be seen even more clearly in Kant. According to Kant, the man who feels temped to commit suicide should consider whether the principle on which his decision is based could become a principle of general legislation. But man knows very well that he is faced every time with a particular situation, and that he is, as a person, unique. In modern Christian moralists the argument reappears in the form that man has no right to kill himself since this would constitute a crime against his family. But as a general argument, this also fails to convince. First of all, a lot of people have no families, or a shattered or detestable family, and secondly, the question is really far too personal to be decided by such arguments. Everyone dies sooner or later, and society and the family get over it. It is true that those who have a normal family life seldom kill themselves, like those who might happen to live in an ideal society. But all the same, the fact that there are so many suicides proves that many people do not find in their homes what they should find there. One of the most frequent types of suicide is the result of a love affair, often in the form of a suicide pact. It would be ridiculous to try to say to these unhappy creatures that they are proposing to commit a mortal sin because they are neglecting their duty towards their family. Why does no one say the same thing to the young people who go into monasteries, often against the wishes of the family? This is another of those arguments—not St. Thomas’s argument, but that of one’s duty to the family—which reek of complacency. Suicide is often taken to be an act indicative of decadent and anarchistic individualism, overlooking the fact that amongst entirely healthy and even extremely warlike communities it is often considered, in certain circumstances, a social duty. But death is above all so much a personal and individual thing that the problem it creates transcend the social life of this planet.
- By far the most weighty of St. Thomas’s arguments is the third: we are God’s property, just as the slave is the property of his master. Man is not sui juris. It is for God to decide on our life or death.
Leaving aside the comparison with the slave, which invites the stoic reply that it is precisely the free man who can kill himself, there is undoubtedly something strong and cogent in this argument. Suicide may be due to pride. Man can now prove that he can be sicut Deus. Montaigne has replied in defense of the stoic point of view: “God has given us leave enough when He puts us in such a state that living is worse than dying.” The Thomist argument loses much of its value unless it is taken in a specifically Christian sense. If we were dealing with a god who was a tyrant and slave owner, the argument would clearly not suffice.
* * *
I have discussed certain traditional arguments, not really so much for their historic importance as to bring out the enormous complexity and difficulty of the problem. I turned hopefully to the Christian Father for an answer to the question and, in fact, failed to find a really satisfactory reply. I might add that this seldom happens. Neither have I criticized for the pleasure of criticizing such and such an argument, but for a much more serious reason. “We can only discuss something honourably in so far as we sympathise with it”, says Goethe in Werther on the very topic of suicide. Picture to yourself a man who is very much tempted to suicide. Perhaps he has lost his family, or he despairs of the society in which he has to live, or maybe bitter suffering is depriving him of all grounds for hope. His present life is terrible, his future dark and menacing. Suppose you tell him he must live in order to obey the commandment, or in order not to sin against the love of oneself, or to do his duty to society and family, or finally, in order not to decide something himself that only God is entitled to decide: do you think you would convince this man in his misery and suffering?
Of course you would not. He would find your arguments either dubious by technical difficulties, by cowardice or weakness of will, by a certain instinct for life or, as often happen, by an implicit faith in divine protection or by the fear of Hell. But these traditional arguments will probably be ineffective. So what he needs is not so much abstract arguments as an example of Christ. Here we must turn, not to the letter of the old but to the spirit of the New Testament. To understand why Christianity is opposed to suicide, we must recall the fundamental character of Christian life which is, in all its forms, an attempt at the imitation of Jesus Christ.
This effort implies a radical conversion of natural human attitudes, more especially with regard to suffering. The human being has, by nature, a horror of suffering and a desire for happiness. The man who kills himself almost always does so to escape from the suffering of this life toward an unknown happiness and calm. In any case he says in his heart, “I want to go somewhere else. I do not wish to endure this suffering which has no meaning and is beyond my strength”.
It is here that the spirit of Christianity intervenes with its tremendous paradox. Yes, live and suffer. You should not be surprised that you suffer. If happiness were the meaning of life, it would indeed be a revolting and finally improbable condition. But the situation is different if life is a justification, the progress towards a transcendent goal, and if it’s meaning were in fact evident in suffering and achieved through suffering. “Lord, to suffer or to die”, prays St. Theresa. Yes, in spite of all those optimistic believers, life is the carrying of a cross. But even the cross has a sacred meaning.
My belief is, therefore, that far from being one of the so-called natural laws, or the law of some peculiar common sense, the total prohibition of suicide can only be justified or even understood in relation to the scandal and the paradox of the cross. It is true that we belong to God, as Christ belonged to God. It is true that we should subordinate our will to His, as Christ did. It is true that we should leave the decision as to our life or death to Him. If we wish to die, we have indeed the right to pray to God to let us die. Yet we must always add: Thy will, not mine, be done. But this God is not our master as if we were slaves. He is our Father. He is the Christian God who loves us with infinite love and infinite wisdom. If He makes us suffer, it is for our salvation and purification. We must recall the spirit in which Christ suffered the most horrible death. In certain circumstances, to refuse suicide is far from natural. To prefer martyrdom to suicide is a paradox peculiar to the Christian. It was precisely this element in the martyr’s attitude which so profoundly shocked the pagan philosophers. The martyrs refuse suicide, not through a cowardly attachment to life, but because they found a strange happiness in following the example of Christ, and suffering for Him and with Him. It has been quite reasonably maintained that the fact that people are willing to die for a cause argues nothing as to the value of that cause. It is true that a great many persons have died for causes which we find deplorable. So it is in a different sense that the martyrs bear witness to Christianity. They do not prove any given theoretical truth, but they prove by their example that it is possible to live and die in a Christian manner. It is not their death, but their manner of dying which is important. They are witness in a very special way to the fact that Grace may enable a man to follow Christ in His attitude towards suffering and death, which is itself very far from natural. Their blessedness in, and to some extent through, suffering, far exceeds the somewhat frigid heroism of the ancient world. The vast majority of humanity is morally inferior to the Stoics. The Christian martyr is superior. The stoic virtue is perhaps the highest morality known to man outside the sphere of Christian Grace. The hero, master of his own death, stands above the mass of poltroons and slaves. “This noble despair, so worthy of the Romans,” wrote Corneille. The saint is, as it were a super-hero of specifically Christian character. It is his life that in fact demonstrates the argument. He shows that it is possible for man to live out his suffering by discovering a transcendental significance in its very depths. One cannot stress too strongly the paradoxical quality of all this, just as Kierkegaard has so rightly insisted on the paradoxical nature of the whole of Christianity. In order to gauge the paradox, we should remember what suffering is. The word is quickly said, but the subject itself is vast, an authentic mystery. Even physical suffering can take on horrible forms. We are told that it will be limited and that consciousness, the precondition of suffering, fails at a certain level of pain. Perhaps: we know little about it. Man is always mistaken when he thinks he has reached the worst moral tortures. One falls, one falls from abyss to abyss. In periods like our own, one must feel frightened at the immensity of present human suffering. When one reads history, one is overwhelmed by what men have always and everywhere endured. Sickness, death, misery and all manner of peril, surround the human being. The optimists are having a joke at our expense. It is no exaggeration to speak, as Schopenhauer does, of a ruchloser optimismus, a frivolous and criminal optimism.
The same judgment applies equally to those who immediately try to console you with talk of divine Providence and goodness. There is nothing more paradoxical than this divine love which has, according to Dante, created Hell. Even Providence is another paradox. All that is left is the example of Christ and of those men who were able to follow his example, showing that to do so they needed not to be gods, but only to be granted divine Grace, which is equally promised to us.
All that we can say to the suffering man who is tempted to commit suicide, is this “Remember the suffering of Christ and the martyrs. You must carry your cross, as they did. You will not cease to suffer, but the cross of suffering itself will grow sweet by virtue of an unknown strength proceeding from the heart of divine love. You must not kill yourself, because you must not throw away your cross. You need it. And enquire of your conscience if you are really innocent. You will find that if you are perhaps innocent of one thing for which the world reproaches you, you are guilty in a thousand other ways. You are a sinner. If Christ, who was innocent, suffered for others and, as Pascal said, has also shed a drop of blood for you, how shall you, a sinner, be entitled to refuse suffering? Perhaps it is a form of punishment. But divine punishment has this specific and incomparable quality, that it is not revenge and that its very nature is purification. Whoever revolts against it, revolts in fact against the inner meaning of his own life.”
There is no doubt that there is no justice here below. Criminal monsters carry all before them, and none suffers more then the saint. Here we approach the mystery of sin, which is so closely linked with this other mystery that the Christian finds the meaning of life in and through suffering. Man, we said, was a creature who could kill himself and should not do so. The meaning of this assertion now becomes clearer. The temptation exists, and there is rejection of this temptation. Where this rejection is authentically Christian, it is in the form of an act of love towards God, and towards suffering, not as suffering, which is impossible—algophilia is pathological, and even Christ faltered before His last agony, and prayed that it should be taken from Him—but towards suffering in so far as it contains a remedy desired by God.
Just as there is a qualitative difference between bourgeois and heroic morality, there is an abyss between natural morality on the one hand and the supernatural morality of Christianity on the other. Our reflections on the problem of suicide show this, just as any profound reflection on any moral problem of practical and vital importance must show it. Christianity is a new message. The truth of stoicism lies in its understanding of the close relationship between human freedom and a contempt for death. Whoever is a slave to death is in fact also a slave to all the accidents of life. There is no liberation of the person unless the supreme and universal necessity of this mortal accident is transformed into a free act. But whereas stoicism tries to acquire this freedom through the knowledge of the possibility of suicide, the Christian must acquire it through a loving acceptance of the will of God. He may prefer life to death, or death to life according to the circumstances, but he must place the will of God with absolute sincerity before his own. Death is often a boon, and swift was right o speak of “the dreadful aspect of never dying”, but it is God who must set a term to our suffering.
There are other doctrines beside Christianity, which have given a positive, metaphysical significance to earthly suffering. The orphic mysteries, often considered as an early prototype of Christianity, saw suffering as a way to the liberation from the body. There is Buddhism, and the almost Buddhist philosophy of Schopenhauer. It is significant that these doctrines should be equally inimical to suicide. But there is nothing in these attitudes to compare with the Christian drama. To authentic Buddhism, as to Schopenhauer, suicide is an error, or sort of impasse. What Buddha calls thirst, and Schopenhauer, the will to live, cannot be overcome by suicide. Nor can one escape from existence by such violent means. The suicide transformed, according to his Karma, but he does not attain Nirvana. We have seen, in fact, and I know it to be true in many cases I have known of personally, that the purpose of suicide was not the idea of extinction but of attaining an existence radically different from the one left behind by death. The Buddhist aversion to suicide is naturally not in any way comparable to the Christian rejection. In the first place, genuine Buddhism is far too intellectualized to entertain any general concept of sin. If anyone commits the error of refusing, by such an act of violence, to accept his suffering, he will suffer the consequence according to his Karma, and he will learn. That is all. Finally, and here the comparison may help us to establish an important point, the moment of physical death has not the same quality of metaphysical decision for the Oriental as for the Christian. The stress placed by Christianity on this prohibition of suicide is no doubt partly explained by the idea that everything to do with death has a metaphysical aspect, an idea which is absolutely foreign to the East. What is horrible about suicide to the Christian is that there is little or no time left for repentance after the sin has been committed. In principle, therefore, canon law refuses Christian burial to the suicide, because he died in a state of mortal sin. There are, however, two exceptions: one, if the act is committed in a state or even a moment of mental unbalance, which excludes responsibility; the other, if the suicide can be given the benefit of any doubt; if, for instance, there is any possibility that he may have made an act of repentance. The existence of there two exceptions, and the obvious difficulty of excluding them completely in any particular case, have led the Church, particularly in modern times, to exercise indulgence. Principles cannot be changed, but there are more scruples about the mental health of the suicide, and a reluctance to assert that no act of repentance, which might be something like a lightning flash of conscience, could have taken place. Thus judgment is left to God, that is to say, judgment on the person, not judgment on the principle of the act itself.
Before drawing to a close, I should briefly mention one argument against the Christian point of view. If suffering is sacred and contains the meaning of life, why are we entitled to struggle against it? If we have this right, and even this duty, why should we not have the right to withdraw from suffering by suicide, if there is no other way out? I agree at once that man has the right to struggle against the miseries of existence. The contrary would obviously lead to moral absurdities, such as the immorality of medicine. But we should not overestimate the struggle, neither in its importance nor in its chances of success. It is natural and laudable for man to struggle against sickness, cruelty, misery and the rest. But in point of fact there has been no progress in human happiness in all our history, but rather the reverse. Everything we know leads us to believe that the so-called primitive people are much happier than we are. What is false is not the struggle against suffering, but the illusion that we can destroy it. The means of fighting this suffering is, above all, work, which was given to man both as punishment and cure. But this effort to combat suffering can not be compared with the act of suicide. Suicide is something on its own. It seems to me to be a flight by which man hopes to recover paradise lost instead of trying to deserve Heaven. The desire for death which is unleashed when temptation becomes our master is, psychologically speaking the desire to regress to a pre-natal state. To disappear, to get away from it all. Stekel and others have given us a precise psychological analysis of suicide, the longing for the abyss, the mother, the return. The whole process could be described in Freudian terms. Theologically speaking, there is, in fact, the vague illusion of a return to Paradise. The Rousseau-Werther type of suicide is usually conscious of this obscure motivation. In this connection one could quote many interesting passages from Goethe, Sénancourt, Amiel, and others. But Christ guides us through struggle and suffering towards a brighter light. The god, or rather, goddess, of suicide thrusts us back upon the mother’s breast. In this sense, suicide is an infantilism. It is this quality of regression which prevents any comparison between suicide and man’s normal struggle against suffering. It is the failure of all other means which, in the majority of cases, leads to suicide; it is the universal experience of powerlessness. This convergence of one disaster after the other, destroying all possibility of living and struggling, is the common factor in the biographies of all suicides. Without going into the details of some personal biographies I have myself studied, let me remind you of two great classics: Werther and Anna Karenina. You can see in these two books how life and his own character combine to form a trap for man. And it is precisely what is most noble in man that may urge him to suicide. If you can imagine a Werther or an Anna Karenina who were both slightly more frivolous, you will see that their problems might have been solved. But you will see also that in such cases the only truly positive and honourable solution would be that complete conversion required by Christ.
It is perfectly clear that the Christian apologists were well aware of this real and profound explanation of the Christian attitude to suicide. Saints such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were certainly far better aware of it than I. Why then did they not give it? I think largely because things were taken for granted in that period of militant and heroic Christianity. Do not forget that St. Augustine only mentions this problem when he is addressing Roman pagans, in defense against the charge that Christianity had grown weaker. Nowadays, when it has frequently become painfully mediocre, it is again attacked by a new and fanatical paganism, which also has its moments of heroism. Either Christianity will disappear, or it will recover its original virtues. We do not believe that it can disappear, but it must certainly renew itself by becoming aware of its true nature. It is therefore useful, by dwelling on one specific problem, to show that Christian morality is not some sort of natural, reasonable and universal morality, with perhaps a little more sensation in it than some others, but the manifestation in life of a paradoxical revelation. It cannot be superfluous, either, to remind oneself to-day that Christian morality is not a morality of compromise, but that it requires a heroism more profound, more absurd and, in a way, more intransigent, than any other. In other words, we had to become explicitly conscious of things which in an age still close to the martyrs could be taken for granted.