Saint Augustine Contra Suicide

The pagan world has always had a love affair with death, a libido moriendi. But Augustine shows that this is not the way for Christians.

Detail from "St. Augustine Reading Rhetoric and Philosophy at the School of Rome" (1464-65) by Benozzo Gozzoli [WikiArt.org]

When it comes to attitudes about suicide, we Americans are Janus-faced. We are shocked and grieved when loved ones or famous people take their lives, and yet we show high approval ratings for euthanasia (72% in one Gallup Poll). We have observed National Suicide Prevention Week every September since 2005, and yet “assisted suicide” is becoming legal in more states and for more reasons. We devote increasingly more resources to mental health and suicide prevention, and yet our devotion to personal liberty and autonomy means we think people should make their own decisions about how to live and when to die. In short, we are horrified by suicide when it comes near us, while our (often unexamined) ideological commitments not only prevent us from taking a strong stand against suicide, but even encourage it.

In the last twenty years, the suicide rate has increased by 33%. Reversing this trend will require a concerted effort and a cultural shift. We must strengthen our communities and friendships, provide better access to mental health resources, continue to remove the stigma about mental illness, decrease access to the means of suicide, resist the spread of euthanasia, reduce our use of social media (which increases anxiety, loneliness, and cyberbullying), and improve our awareness and ability to respond to those in need. Still, our conflicted attitudes about suicide demand an additional solution: we must remind ourselves what is wrong with suicide and why Christians traditionally have opposed it.

This is, I confess, a painful approach to the issue. An increasing number of people have lost someone to suicide, including me. We are used to receiving consolation and not dispassionate analysis. It is difficult to look directly at what suicide is and means without feeling our loved ones are being attacked. While sensitive to these dynamics, this essay is not an attempt to comfort the grieving, but an effort to prevent more suicides by gaining clarity. Also, as will become clear below, a consolation-only approach to suicide has real limitations and even dangers.

Why Augustine on suicide?

This essay focuses on Augustine because he is the first author to systematically explore the question of suicide. He provided the first cogent synthesis of the Christian tradition up to his time, set the course for the next thousand years, and still frames much of the debate today. His most extended treatment of suicide occurs in the City of God where he argues that suicide is always wrong and there is no reason that could justify taking one’s own life.

In brief, Augustine’s argument looks like this: suicide violates the divine law against killing (Ex 20:13) and the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Mk 12:31). It violates the natural law to seek the good, particularly, the good of existing. And it violates human laws against murder which are a reflection of the divine and natural law. His argument, though, is not simply legalistic. For Augustine, suicide is an attempt to control contingency and escape suffering. Therefore, it is a rejection of God’s plan for creation and redemption. As an alternative to suicide, Augustine presents the example of Christ’s suffering and exhorts us to imitate his patience and cultivate a society that empowers the sufferer to live with dignity.

Divine, natural, and human law

For Augustine, suicide is self-murder: “anyone who kills himself is certainly a murderer” (City of God, 1.17). The fifth commandment, “Thou shall not kill” (Ex 20:13), applies as much to oneself as to one’s neighbor. This is why there is no specification at the end of the command: it applies to the murder of any human being. Augustine argues that this command is intrinsically related to the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18; Mk 12:31). The love of neighbor takes its measure from the love of self. Suicide violates, indeed, undermines this command by destroying the foundation on which it is built. Suicide, then, is a sin against charity since it harms not only the victim (oneself), but also one’s neighbors who are harmed by the violence done to the bonds of love which make up the fabric of society.

This divine law is manifest in both natural and human law as well. Nature recoils from non-existence. Indeed, all things have a natural ‘desire’ to exist. Augustine approvingly quotes the Stoics who argue that

“the first and greatest urging of nature is that a man should be at one with himself and therefore should instinctively flee from death, that he should be so thoroughly a friend to himself that he vehemently wishes and desires to be alive, a living being, and to stay alive in this conjunction of body and soul” (City of God, 19.4).

Suicide is deeply unnatural. It does violence to our natural inclination to avoid evil and preserve our own good.

Human law also confirms that suicide is wrong and, in fact, can be considered a crime. According to the law, no one is permitted to kill another on his own private authority. Therefore, “anyone who kills a human being, whether himself or anyone else, is involved in the crime of murder” (City of God, 1.22).

Crime admits of degrees and the gravity of a crime can be increased or decreased by various factors. In suicide, the innocence of the victim makes the crime more serious. The victim, oneself, has committed no crime warranting death nor has he received a fair trial. (Even those guilty of serious offenses should not kill themselves, Augustine says, since they need time to repent and amend their lives.)

Further, many systems of law, including Augustine’s Roman one, judge the gravity of the crime more seriously the more closely the criminal is related to the victim. Augustine expands on this principle of propinquity in his treatise On Patience:

“For if a parricide [one who kills a parent or relative] be on that account more wicked than any homicide, because he kills not merely a man but a near relative; and among parricides too, the nearer the person killed, the greater criminal he is judged to be: without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself”. (par 10)

This principle is an expression of the order of creation where God made the love of self the assumed basis for loving one’s neighbor. The closer the victim is to oneself the more one threatens not only the order of society, but the very order of the world God made. One undermines one’s own existence and the web of relations that flow from it.

Possible justifications for suicide

While the ancient world generally opposed suicide in law and custom, they made exceptions—and even praised and advocated suicide—in certain circumstances. The experience of poverty, mutilation, sickness, sudden misfortune, habitual vice, or disgrace were variously understood to be legitimate reasons to take one’s own life. Augustine, though, does not allow any exceptions.

In the City of God, Augustine considers five possible justifications for suicide: to escape temporal troubles (e.g. torture, poverty, sickness, etc.); to avoid another’s sin (e.g., rape); out of despair for past sins (e.g., Judas); to attain a better life after death (e.g., the ‘philosopher’ Theombratus who took his own life to gain immortality after reading Plato); and, lastly, to avoid falling into sin out of pleasure or fear (e.g., consenting to initially unwanted physical pleasure during rape or offering sacrifice to idols out of fear). For Augustine, none of these justifications holds up under examination.

He argues that we may escape temporal troubles by killing ourselves, but then we may fall into eternal troubles by committing a grave sin ourselves. We might avoid another person sinning against us, but we incur our own sin. We might end the feeling of despair about our past sins, but we cut off the possibility of repentance which we need so that we might not feel despair forever. By killing ourselves, we might think that we will attain a better life, but our sin may very well preclude us from that better life. The last reason—killing ourselves to avoid personally sinning in the future—is the strongest possible justification for Augustine, but it is a reductio ad absurdum. We commit a certain sin now (murder) to avoid an uncertain sin in the future. If this were a legitimate option, Augustine says, then pastors should advise mass suicides right after baptism so that the recently washed and forgiven neophytes might avoid all danger of future sins. “And because it is monstrous to say this,” Augustine concludes, “it is clearly monstrous to kill oneself” (City of God, 1.27).

Better to suffer than to sin

At work in Augustine’s argument is a principle first articulated by Socrates and readily incorporated into Christian morality, namely, that it is better to suffer evil than to commit evil (see Plato, Gorgias, 473a-475e). This principle rests on a couple of key insights. First, the soul is superior to the body (for the soul is immortal while the body perishes). Second, while the evil actions of another can harm the body, they cannot harm the soul of the one who suffers. Only the person herself can harm her own soul by doing something evil. Jesus himself articulates these same principles (albeit in very different contexts) when he says, “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt 10:28) and “it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person…For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander” (Matt 15:11-19).

Thus, it is never right to do evil to avoid suffering evil. Augustine holds up the example of Job who preferred to suffer the loss of property, family, and bodily integrity rather than blaspheme God and die (a form of assisted suicide suggested by his wife). Rather, Augustine says, we should suffer patiently what God wants us to suffer and look to the examples of Christ and his followers.

Here, we touch the heart of the matter. For all eternity, God knew he would create a world which would contain the Fall and all the suffering that entails. He also knew, from all eternity, that Christ would come, suffer for us, and create a path back to God through suffering. For Augustine, suicide is an attempt to avoid the path God established. Suicide calls into question God’s whole project by taking matters into our own hands.

Consolation and eternal damnation

Augustine’s treatment of suicide can sound harsh, especially for those of us who have experienced the suicide of a loved one. We cannot help but ask, “If suicide is self-murder, does this mean that Augustine thinks all suicides are going to hell?” This is certainly a common interpretation. In many places, Augustine says such seemingly categorical things as, “it is a detestable crime and a damnable abomination for a person to kill himself” (City of God, 1.22). Yet, Augustine has the same reserve that the Church has always practiced about whether particular people are in hell and, indeed, he even leaves room for hope, at least in certain cases.

When speaking about women who killed themselves rather than suffer the evil of rape and the consequent experience of shame, Augustine says, “And if, for this reason, some of these women took their own lives rather than suffer anything of this kind, who with any human feeling would refuse to forgive them” (City of God, 1.17)? Augustine understands the psychological devastation that even the threat of something like rape can bring about. He sees this as a possibly mitigating factor in the moral evaluation of suicide. This is a great consolation, especially for the families and friends who have lost someone to suicide.

Imitation and the dangers of consolation

When we talk about suicide today, we tend to emphasize this consoling aspect. We look for mitigating factors and excuses: mental health, stress, depression, isolation, etc. We often blame ourselves for not doing more. There is wisdom and humanity in this approach which, as we just saw, Augustine shares to some extent. We also often hear consoling things like, “Now, he is no longer suffering. He is in a better place.” But, Augustine knows that there is also a real danger in this consolation. Consolation for families and friends can become a consolation, and therefore an enticement, for those currently contemplating suicide. If suicide ends pain and transfers one directly to heaven, then it should be considered a good choice. Why resist the temptation if such positive goods await one after the act?

There are cultural consequences to this attitude as well: consolation can become permission and permission can become an imperative. After his comment about the possibility of forgiveness for the women who killed themselves rather than be violated, Augustine states,

“And if some were not willing to kill themselves, because they did not want to escape another’s shameful act by committing a crime of their own, anyone who makes that charge against them will lay himself open to the charge of being a fool” (City of God, 1.17).

The people who make this charge likely do not do so in explicit ways. Rather, as Augustine knew, the culture of death conspires in a thousand ways to goad us toward death. Without saying anything directly, society can suggest that any number of people would be better off dead (think of pre-natal screening today or these poor women in Augustine’s day). In Augustine’s time at least, there were other subtle pressures for women who had been raped. Suicide heroines like Lucretia (who committed suicide after she was raped) were elevated as paragons of virtue. If violated women wanted to be virtuous, the unspoken logic goes, then they should follow her lead. To not follow Lucretia’s noble example suggests that victim is doing or has done something wrong. Augustine rejects this perverse logic of a perverse society.

Augustine sees another danger in focusing on consolation only: suicide is “contagious” (see here for the modern science around this). The Romans celebrated the exemplary virtue of figures like Lucretia and Cato (who killed himself to avoid having to submit to his mortal enemy). Augustine knew the power of perverse example and the imitation it inspired (see his critique of Roman theater). We know today that suicides tend to happen in clusters, often after the suicide of a famous person. It is as if the example of the one gives permission and encouragement to the next to do the same. The exemplar shows the way and the others follow, imitating what they see. Augustine knew—and wanted to prevent—this mimetic dynamic of death.

Conclusion

In the City of God, Augustine shows great compassion for the women who were violated. He insists that their lives are worth living. There is no cause for them to feel shame because of any evil done to them. They are not defiled or tainted. Their purity, their virtue, and, indeed, even their virginity was still intact. The respected place they held in society is the place they should still hold after this awful experience. Nor should they see themselves as mere victims of wicked men or a perverse society. They are moral agents who can still act with courage and dignity. In reading these sections closely, we can hear the pastor Augustine reaching out to his broken flock. “Do not let your lives become a burden to you,” he tells these women (City of God, 1.28). This is true consolation, a consolation that en-courages, that is, that puts the cor (heart) back into those who are suffering so that they might live.

The pagan world has always had a love affair with death, a libido moriendi. But Augustine shows that this is not the way for Christians. While Augustine believes there can still be hope for those who commit suicide, he wants to remove this as an option for those under his care. Rather, Christians live secundum Deum, “according to God.” And God’s way is not the impatient path of self-inflicted death, but the way of patient suffering. This is the alternative example set by Christ and imitated by his followers. It is the path that leads to life and a society that values life.


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About Dr. Jared Ortiz 16 Articles
Dr. Jared Ortiz is Professor of Religion at Hope College and author of You Made Us for Yourself: Creation in St Augustine’s Confessions (Fortress Press, 2016) and editor of Deification in the Latin Patristic Tradition (The Catholic University of America Press, 2019). He is also founder and executive director of the Saint Benedict Institute.

12 Comments

  1. A much needed topic for our times , that need to be esp. taken note of by those who promote the mass murder suicides of our times , by condoning and promoting sins against life as well .
    The point about the criminals being the ones that are seen as deserving of the death penalty also very apt – accusing the baby and the mother as being criminals and intruders, the lie that heaven is what awaits for the baby right away , negating the truth that powers of evil are the ones that have been called forth – Jer . 19 , about same , before the prophet himself falls into despair about the related judgements .
    We are also seeing the drama and the audacity to bring charges against an authority figure , for real or trumped up charges for a minor issue, in comparison , may be also because he has made good efforts to undo the evils in this realm .
    The accusatory spirit that has been at work, since The Garden , esp. so against Father figures as well in our times , not surprising .
    On this Feast Day of St.Jerome , who might have been named after Jeremiah , we are given instances of how that spirit of despair can come in , right along with the spirit of accusation – Prophet Jeremiah , cursing and cursing, even the man who brought the news about his birth ..no wonder those in deliverance ministry mention of need to break the curses , in The Name of The Lord , who took up all such curses upon self , breaking same , even while tasting same , in His trusting love for The Father ,in The Spirit , that we are asked to plead for too , as The Blood and Water .
    Sept. month of Our Lady of Sorrows , a Mother well prepared to deal with
    The Passion , without falling for the fallen traits , thus given us as the aid , for these times afflicted with the families of death spirits that detest life and the relationships that pertain to same –
    https://biblehub.com/job/2-10.htm

    Job as well falls into same, right after his wife shows that attitude of despising the weak and suffering Job – possibly seeing him as a sinner being punished and what the Holy Father mentions as an aspect of clericalism , which can be in any of our own hearts as well . Job, in turn calls her as being foolish , may be an attitude that was in the prevailing cultural mind set for all women and what God was going to undo in Job and through him in others ; his lamentation of own life comes right afterwards , to help us to see the need for compassion and mercy of forgiveness , which the Holy Father too tries to help us to take in more .
    All that , in turn, to help bring the Kingdom of The Father , a Father who patiently works through these powers at work , with the help of the love , in the Heart of a Mother , who brings the light of her compassionate glance and light of the mercy through The Passion , against every accusing spirit , to thus undo same ..
    The miracle of the healing in Rwanda , after the genocide there , through devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows ..
    A blessed month of Rosary , to honor and sing – Ave Maria ..

  2. Thank you, thank you, thank you for this, Dr. Ortiz!

    Blessed be Jesus Christ our good Shepherd, who laid down His Life…and took it up again…for all of us.

  3. With such possible exceptions as Augustine mentions & others like it, suicide surely is objectively the most monstrous of all crimes. Rape, child & abortion trafficking, broken priestly vows, heresy, all forms of diabolical narcissism, horrendous as they are, yet remain a pursuit of happiness, however perverted. Suicide, again objectively, is a rejection of God & the goodness of His creation in a matter more emphatic than any other crime.
    *
    Nonetheless, since the Church does not forbid praying for a suicide’s soul, & since I have been doing so over decades for the soul my father who died in this manner, I have pondered how it could in any way be possible for his soul to repent between the pulling of the trigger & explosion of the brain.
    *
    And in prayer thus pondering, this came to mind, that: just as eternity extends infinitely outward, so as it were can it contract infinitely, in that each measurement of time, each second, can be halved & then halved again, & then again, ad infinitum – which is say a period of time that the Creator of time could enter quite easily if He so chose, & also therein grant the Grace of repentance & salvation.
    *
    I do not say that this has ever happened; but that it could happen should be obvious. Having no doubts as to the justness of God’s Justice, it is nevertheless to that (infinitely) small period of time that I pray His Mercy entered for my father’s eternal soul.
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    And, over time, began praying thus for the souls of all in need of His Grace in that moment when their journey in this world came to an end.

  4. Jared Ortiz writes well on suicide extensively quoting Augustine’s compassionate take. My critique is “mitigating factors” and awareness of John Paul II’s warning not to make mitigation a theological category that removes responsibility. Condemnation is the standard ‘from’ which mitigating conditions must be assessed taking into account scenarios, persons jumping out of windows 911 [not suicide] to the coward who is fed up, tired of life’s responsibilities [culpable suicide] or worse goes out in a blaze of hatred shooting up school children [culpable suicide – even if mentally compromised in accord with legal opinion coupled with murder of the innocent]. A recent notorious correction facility suicide leaves little reason to expect God’s forgiveness rather than eternal condemnation. Yet we don’t know if at the last breath of life that person expressed sorrow in response to Christ’s grace. Bishop Barron has been the target of criticism for allegedly seeing no fault in hoping Hell is emptied a la Urs von Balthazar. However despite his and von Balthazar’s hope underlying that hope is belief Hell is not empty. Pope Francis would have us believe people are indeed condemned although not eternally punished [God he says is not a torturer] but extinguished. Game over. Although considering his moral priorities, “Pope Francis cannot validly condemn Swedish inventor Sten Gustaf Thulin, the creator of disposable shopping bags, to forever dwell in the abode of the damned” (Dan Millette in 1P5).

  5. Feast of St.Faustina today …a saint who was allowed to taste trials and even despair , to thus empower her for the mission she was entrusted with .
    Interesting how the other great saint of our times , St.Terese the Little Flower also had plenty of tough experiences of life , through own illness in early years too .
    We just had the Feast of the holy angels too and our Lord Himself assuring us how the angels of the little ones behold the Face of The Father ..
    Seeing ourselves and the little ones , being in the company of legions of holy angels , thus reversing the experience of the Gerasene demoniacs – every wound of fear and alienation , to be filled with loving presence of legions of holy angels , the little ones too being seen, in that light of His mercy , from their early days on down , invoking the blessed Mother and saints in the merits of the Immaculate Conception and Incarnation so that the baptismal graces then would empower them too, to have the full access to the related roles ..
    May the prayers of all these saints help persons world over, to be filled with the love and presence of the holy angels , in the Holy Spirit , to join in the ever deeper choir of rejoicing together –
    ‘ holy ..holy ..’

  6. I don’t know if this article saved me single-handedly, but it certainly helped when I was at my lowest. I’ve re-read that closing paragraph often to keep my head up in the last week.

    I cannot thank you enough for this message. The world needs it.

  7. This is the only clear treatment of suicide from the lens of Catholicism that I have ever read. All of the “consolation “ approaches add to the temptation to suicide that I already feel. There is a priest that just spoke about it on the Patrick Coffin show who really undermined the efforts of those of us who struggle with this temptation. I really needed to read this article. Praise God for it and it’s author.

    • I think it’s sad, even deplorable, that our civilisation has been so heavily influenced by deluded people like Augustine, who think they have special or overriding insights into how humans should and shouldn’t behave. For example, a stage 4 cancer sufferer with 3 months to live, has every right to end their life the way they want, and if it’s of their own doing then that is perfectly fine. There is no immortal soul to be concerned about as we’ve established beyond any doubt that souls quite simply do not exist. Augustine and his views on suicide should be laid to rest in that graveyard we call mythology, and we should ignore his words completely. Don’t try to argue that souls exist unless you have evidence that is concrete, testable, repeatable, and falsifiable, which nobody has. Don’t try to argue against Science either, as it has established souls don’t exist.

  8. Our lawmakers should change laws for the sake of the victims and offenders especially for Child Abusers. Why is that a lot of young people committed suicide. Why is that adults sexually abused have high rate of suicide. Mostly the abused becomes abusers themselves. Remove Statue of Limitation on Child Sexual Abuse.

  9. Very well written article about the nature of suicide as seen from a Christian lens. The part where suicide is equaled to being a way to avoid God’s own chosen path of doing things, despite our not understanding why He does it all the way He does (create humanity just to force them either to run their way to Heaven by suffering for a lifetime or end up in Hell for eternity for not following His commands, no third option) was particularly piercing.

    What I wonder though, is how people who are suffering are supposed to live while they wait for death. It is easy to lecture people on the sinfulness of suicide but who is going to be spending 50 years, 18250 days, 1576800000 minutes in such direful conditions as quadriplegia, blindness, aids, missing important limbs. Can we switch places with those who are genuinely suffering? How is someone with quadriplegia supposed to spend 50 years of their lifetime, if they aren’t allowed to euthanize themselves? By sitting in a room 24/7, sleeping 23 hours a day? How is someone like that supposed to live each day? Doing what?

  10. Augustine’s treatment of suicide (total prohibition) is fallacious on multiple levels:

    1) Nowhere in the Bible (the Old andthe New Testament) is there a clear prohibition on suicide. The suicides that are mentioned are described manner of factly without any discernable moral condemnation. Even in the case of the betrayer of Christ as Judas’ death is simply noted without condemnation: ‘So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.’

    2) To assume the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’ indicates a prohibition of suicide is arbitrary as a) it doesn’t mention suicide (killing oneself) and b) it can only be valid if all forms of killing (murder, suicide, lethal self-defense, war, slaughtering animals) are also condemned. Which Augustine didn’t do.

    Iit’s essentially empty rhetoric and sophistry which served a clear political goal: to discredit the Donatists who were quite fond of throwing themselves off high places in order to get to heaven quicker. Donatism was a threat to the Church of Rome and thus had to be fought using all means available.

    It’s quite useful to know the historical context in which certain arguments are raised. In early Christianity there was no condemnation of suicide and many sought the martyr’s death (essentially suicide by means of others: needlessly antagonising the Roman magistrates who were often reluctant to pronounce the death sentence but were forced to do so by overzealous Christians who were in love with death and wanted to leave their miserable lives behind). It stands to reason that the Church would lose influence and power if too many of its members chose to abandon the earthly plane hence the suicide prohibition.

    To project one’s own views and moral values unto the Bible (especially in order to further a base political goal and increase one’s power) to me is a kind of blasphemy: Augustine is not God so it wasn’t up to him to ‘correct’ or ‘elucidate’ the divine commandments. It certainly wasn’t up to him to threaten others with hell.

    Anyone who professes to be a Christian should follow Christ’s example (up to and including sacrificing oneself) and the divine commandments yet almost no-one actually does. Admittedly to live and die as Christ did is almost inhuman or at the very least superhuman.

    This means respecting the commandments as they were formulated: ‘thou shalt not kill’ implies one should never kill in any circumstance. This means giving up one’s life voluntarily when it is threatened by evil as Christ did yet Christians love their bodies and the earthly pleasures too much so they turn a blind eye to Christ’s message whenever it suits them. They want heaven but not at the cost of earthly delights.

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