The origin and development of the moral ideas

It seems that the Roman people, before the influence of Christianity made itself felt, regarded suicide with considerable moral indifference. According to Servius, it was provided by the Pontifical laws that whoever hanged himself should be cast out unburied;166 but from what has been said before it is probable that this practice only owed its origin to fear of the dead man’s ghost. Vergil enumerates self-murderers not among the guilty, but among the unfortunate, confounding them with infants who have died prematurely and persons who have been condemned to die on a false charge.167 Throughout the whole history of pagan Rome there was no statute declaring it to be a crime for an ordinary citizen to take his own life. The self-murderer’s rights were in no way affected by his deed, his memory was no less honoured than if he had died a natural death, his will was recognised by law, and the regular order of succession was not interfered with.168 In Roman law there are only two noteworthy exceptions to the rule that suicide is a matter with which the State has nothing to do: it was prohibited in the case of soldiers,169 and the enactment was made that the suicide of an accused person should entail the same consequences as his condemnation; but in the latter instance the deed was admitted as a confession of guilt.170 On the other hand, it seems to have been the general opinion in Rome that suicide under certain circumstances is an heroic and praiseworthy act.171 Even Cicero, who professed the doctrine of Pythagoras,172 approved of the death of Cato.173

In no question of morality was there a greater difference between classical and Christian doctrines than in regard to suicide. The earlier Fathers of the Church still allowed, or even approved of, suicide in certain cases, namely, when committed in order to procure martyrdom,174 or to avoid apostacy, or to retain the crown of virginity. To bring death upon ourselves voluntarily, says Lactantius, is a wicked and impious deed; “but when urged to the alternative, either of forsaking God and relinquishing faith, or of expecting all torture and death, then it is that undaunted in spirit we defy that death with all its previous threats and terrors which others fear.”175 Eusebius and other ecclesiastical writers mention several instances of Christian women putting an end to their lives when their chastity was in danger, and their acts are spoken of with tenderness, if not approbation; indeed, some of them were admitted into the calendar of saints.176 This admission was due to the extreme honour in which virginity was held by the Fathers; St. Jerome, who denied that it was lawful in times of persecution to die by one’s own hands, made an exception for cases in which a person’s chastity was at stake.177 But even this exception was abolished by St. Augustine. He allows that the virgins who laid violent hands upon themselves are worthy of compassion, but declares that there was no necessity for their doing so, since chastity is a virtue of the mind which is not lost by the body being in captivity to the will and superior force of another.

He argues that there is no passage in the canonical Scriptures which permits us to destroy ourselves either with a view to obtaining immortality or to avoiding calamity. On the contrary, suicide is prohibited in the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” namely, “neither thyself nor another”; for he who kills himself kills no other but a man.178 This doctrine, which assimilates suicide with murder, was adopted by the Church.179 Nay, self-murder was declared to be the worst form of murder, “the most grievous thing of all”;180 already St. Chrysostom had declared that “if it is base to destroy others, much more is it to destroy one’s self.”181 The self-murderer was deprived of rights which were granted to all other criminals. In the sixth century a Council at Orleans enjoined that “the oblations of those who were killed in the commission of any crime may be received, except of such as laid violent hands on themselves”;182 and a subsequent Council denied self-murderers the usual rites of Christian burial.183 It was even said that Judas committed a greater sin in killing himself than in betraying his master Christ to a certain death.184

According to the Christian doctrine, as formulated by Thomas Aquinas, suicide is utterly unlawful for three reasons. First, everything naturally loves itself and preserves itself in being; suicide is against a natural inclination and contrary to the charity which a man ought to bear towards himself, and consequently a mortal sin. Secondly, by killing himself a person does an injury to the community of which he is a part. Thirdly, “life is a gift divinely bestowed on man, and subject to His power who ‘killeth and maketh alive’; and therefore he who takes his own life sins against God, as he who kills another man’s slave sins against the master to whom the slave belongs, and as he sins who usurps the office of judge on a point not referred to him; for to God alone belongs judgment of life and death.”185 The second of these arguments is borrowed from Aristotle, and is entirely foreign to the spirit of early Christianity. The notion of patriotism being a moral duty was habitually discouraged by it, and, as Mr. Lecky observes, “it was impossible to urge the civic argument against suicide without at the same time condemning the hermit life, which in the third century became the ideal of the Church.”186 But the other arguments are deeply rooted in some of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity—in the sacredness of human life, in the duty of absolute submission to God’s will, and in the extreme importance attached to the moment of death.

The earthly life is a preparation for eternity; sufferings which are sent by God are not to be evaded, but to be endured.187 The man who deliberately takes away the life which was given him by the Creator displays the utmost disregard for the will and authority of his Master; and, worst of all, he does so in the very last minute of his life, when his doom is sealed for ever. His deed, as Thomas Aquinas says, is “the most dangerous thing of all, because no time is left to expiate it by repentance.”188 He who kills a fellow-creature does not in the same degree renounce the protection of God; he kills only the body, whereas the self-murderer kills both the body and the soul.189 By denying the latter the right of Christian burial the Church recognises that he has placed himself outside her pale.

The condemnation of the Church influenced the secular legislation. The provisions of the Councils were introduced into the law-books. In France Louis IX. enforced the penalty of confiscating the self-murderer’s property,190 and laws to the same effect were passed in other European countries.191 Louis XIV. assimilated the crime of suicide to that of lèze majesté.192 According to the law of Scotland, “self-murder is as highly criminal as the killing our neighbour.”193 In England suicide is still regarded by the law as murder committed by a man on himself;194 and, unless declared insane, the self-murderer forfeited his property as late as the year 1870, when forfeitures for felony were abolished.195 In Russia, to this day, the testamentary dispositions of a suicide are deemed void by the law.196

The horror of suicide also found a vent in outrages committed on the dead body. Of a woman who drowned herself in Edinburgh in 1598, we are told that her body was “harled through the town backwards, and thereafter hanged on the gallows.”197 In France, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, self-murderers were dragged upon a hurdle through the streets with the face turned to the ground; they were then hanged up with the head downwards, and finally thrown into the common sewer.198 However, in most cases the treatment to which suicides bodies were subject was not originally meant as a punishment, but was intended to prevent their spirits from causing mischief. All over Europe wandering tendencies have been ascribed to their ghosts.199 In some countries the corpse of a suicide is supposed to make barren the earth with which it comes in contact,200 or to produce hailstorms or tempests201 or drought.202 At Lochbroom, in the North-West of Scotland, the people believe that if the remains of a self-murderer be taken to any burying-ground which is within sight of the sea or of cultivated land, this would prove disastrous both to fishing and agriculture, or, in the words of the people, would cause “famine (or dearth) on sea and land”; hence the custom has been to inter suicides in out-of-the-way places among the lonely solitudes of the mountains.203 The practice of burying them apart from other dead has been very wide-spread in Europe, and in many cases there are obvious indications that it arose from fear.204 In the North-East of Scotland a suicide was buried outside a

churchyard, close beneath the wall, and the grave was marked by a single large stone, or by a small cairn, to which the passing traveller was bound to cast a stone; and afterwards, when the suicide’s body was allowed to rest in the churchyard, it was laid below the wall in such a position that no one could walk over the grave, as the people believed that if a woman enceinte stepped over such a grave, her child would quit this earth by its own act.205 In England persons against whom a coroner’s jury had found a verdict of felo de se were buried at cross-roads, with a stake driven through the body so as to prevent their ghosts from walking.206 For the same purpose the bodies of suicides were in many cases burned.207 And when removed from the house where the act had been committed, they were commonly carried out, not by the door, but by a window,208 or through a perforation specially made for the occasion in the door,209 or through a hole under the threshold,210 in order that the ghost should not find its way back into the house, or perhaps with a view to keeping the entrance of the house free from dangerous infection.211