The Ethics of Suicide in the Renaissance and Reformation

Abstract

Evolving attitudes towards suicide in early modern Europe can best be understood against the backdrop of the church's traditional opposition to any form of self-destruction. The formulation of the orthodox Christian attitude began with Augustine, who in his City of God (1. 17–27) provided the first extensive discussion of the morality of suicide from a Christian point of view. He viewed suicide as a violation of the sixth commandments and a sin that precluded repentence. It was not justified in any circumstances, he believed, since it was a greater sin than any that it could seek to avoid. Augustine's position became essentially the mediaeval Catholic position, as later amplified by Thomas Aquinas, who suggested three additional arguments: that suicide was contrary to natural law and self-love; that it deprived society of the contribution and activity of an individual; and that it usurped the function of God (Summa Theologica 2–2, 64, 5). At the end of the Middle Ages the Catholic condemnation of suicide was anchored in the belief that suicide contravened the unchanging moral law governing man's relationship to God, who alone gave life and took it. Man's control over himselfz was limited (it consisted of usus rather than dominium) and this limitation did not sanction self-murder. Civil law reflected not only the Christian belief that suicide was a sin beyond forgiveness but the repugnance attached to an act that was widely thought to be unnatural. Primitive customs that probably dated from pre-Christian times involving public desecration of the corpse (e.g., the practice in England of burying suicides at crossroads after a stake had been driven through the corpse) were practiced till the nineteenth century.3 Suicide became a crime as well as a sin and was often punished additionally by confiscation of property and refusal of consecrated ground for burial of the corpse. It was during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the traditional Christian view began to be challenged, at first obliquely but gradually with increasing boldness. In the beginning the attack took place within an assumed Christian context; eventually Christian presuppositions were discarded altogether. By the end of the seventeenth century the `modern' view of suicide had been formulated: that suicide was not an offense against God but merely a matter of personal choice unencumbered by theological or dogmatic considerations and devoid of blame or disgrace.