by John Donne
In my understanding, this law has no foundation in natural or imperial law, nor does it receive much force from those three reasons, having by custom alone put on the nature of law, as most of our law has. I believe it was first introduced among us because we were excessive in the natural desire of dying in this way. What has led us back from it is not a better understanding of nature but the wisdom of lawmakers and observers of things fit for the institution and conservation of states.
In ancient commonwealths the numbers of slaves were infinite. Both in Rome and in Athens there were always ten slaves for every citizen. Pliny says that in Augustus’s time Isidorus had more than 4,000 and Vedius Pollio so many that he always fed his fish in ponds with their blood. Since such servitude has eroded, the number of wretched men still exceeds the happy, for every laborer is miserable and beastlike compared to the idle, abounding men. It was therefore thought necessary by laws and by the opinions of religion—as Scaevola is alleged to have said, “One expects states to be deceived about religion”—to take from these weary and mascerated wretches their ordinary and open escape and ease, voluntary death.
Therefore, self-homicide, like hunting and usury, seems to be prohibited, as a lawyer says, “Lest men be enticed.” Thus, to withdraw his nation from wine Muhammad brought them to a religious belief that in every grape there was a devil.
What among us is a natural disease, stealing—for like all others this vice may abound in a nation as well as in a particular man, and Doro- theus relates at length the sickness of one of his friars who could not abstain from stealing, although he had no use for what he stole—has drawn from a Council held at London under Henry III a canon that excommunicates the harborers of thieves, “Who thereby abound in the kingdom of England.” The canon mentions no fault except this one. And from custom, princes, and parliaments come severer laws against theft than are justifiable by nature or by the Jews’ judicial law (Exod. 22:1). For our law hangs a man for stealing in extreme necessity, even though such necessity brings him to consider all things as originally belonging to the community, and even though he is bound in conscience to steal and, according to some opinions, would be a self-murderer if he did not steal.
Duns Scotus, disputing against the laws of those nations that allow the death of a thief who robs by day, because whoever kills such a thief is expressly by God’s law a murderer, asks, Where have you read of excepting such a thief from the law, “You shall not kill” (Exod. 20:13)? Or where have you seen a [papal] bull fallen from heaven to justify such executions? It may be that a natural leaning in our people to such a manner of death weakened the state and might have occasioned severer laws than the common ground of all laws seems to support.
Therefore, when the emperor made a law to stop a common abuse of impious men, decreeing that no man might give anything to the clergy, not even by bequest, Saint Jerome said, “I lament and grieve, not that such a law is made, but that our manners have deserved such a law.” Just so, in contemplating these laws, I mourn that the infirmity and sickness of our nation needs such medicines.
The same must be said of a similar law in the earldom of Flanders. If it is true that they allow the confiscation of goods in only five cases, of which self-homicide is one, thus ranking it with treason, heresy, sedition, and deserting the army against the Turk, then these are strong and urgent circumstances to reduce this desire in men.
2.—Where you find many severe laws against an offense, you do not safely conclude an extreme enormity or heinousness in the fault. You safely infer a propensity of that people at that time to that fault. For this reason, Ignatius and many others—even entire councils—were forced to pronounce that those who fasted on Sundays were murderers of Christ. So in France the laws abound against duels, to which they are head- longly apt. So the resolutions of the Spanish casuists and the bulls of the popes are repeated and exaggerated in that nation against bull-fighting, to which they are so enormously addicted. Still, of itself bull-fighting is no sin, as Navarrus, retracting his opinion after seventy years, at last holds.
These severe laws no more increase a fault than mild punishments diminish it. No man thinks rape a small fault, although Solon punishes it, if the victim is a virgin and free-born, with money that would amount to our five shillings. The Salic Law punishes pecuniarily and at no high price a witch convicted of having eaten a man. Therefore, Bartolus allows that, in cases of public profit or detriment, the judges may extend an odious and burdensome law beyond the letter and restrain a favorable and beneficial law within it, even though this is against the nature and common practice of both these laws.
If, therefore, our law and the Flemish law are severe in punishing self-homicide, and if this argument has more force because more nations concur in such laws, it may well be answered that everywhere men are inclinable to it. This goes far to establish our opinion, considering that none of those laws that prescribe civil restraints from doing it can make it sin. The act is not much discredited if it is evil only because it is so forbidden and if it binds the conscience only to the general precept of obedience to the law or to the forfeiture of goods.
3.—It seems from the practice of the Jews (for Josephus speaks of it as a usual thing) that they did not bury until the sun set those who killed themselves. I do not know upon what law of theirs they grounded this, and I do not find out from writers about their policies since the dispersion. (They have no magistracy but live under the laws of the places into which they are admitted, in all cases except where they are exempted by privilege.) Still, they do testify to a particular detesting of some sins by public penances among themselves. For theft they bind, whip, and enjoin to public confession, and for adultery the offender sits naked for a day—in winter in freezing water and in summer on an anthill or among hives of bees. Although I do not find from Galatino, Sigonio, Buxtorf, or Molther that self-homicide was or is usual among them, still, because Josephus says it (although only oratorically), we shall accept it and believe that it was done for the reason common to almost all nations, to deter men from doing it and not to punish its being done. Of similar use—that is, in deterrence—was the law of the Athenians, who after death cut off the hand that perpetrated that deed, which law Josephus remembers in the same place.
4. The reason that is grounded upon the edict of Tarquinius Priscus proves no more than the above. When this desire of death reigned among his men like a contagion, he cured it by an opprobrious hanging up of their bodies and exposing them to birds and beasts. The same holds for the way of restraining the Virgins of Miletus. When they had a wan- toness of dying thus and did it for fashion, they were by decree dishonorably exhibited naked as a spectacle to the people. Neither case prevails farther than the previous argument. Each proves only a watchful solicitude in every state by all means to avert men from this natural love of ease, by which their strength in numbers would have been very much impaired.
So we end this distinction.
Distinction IV
We will now proceed to those reasons that particular men have used for detesting this action. First, we will pay our debt to Gratian by considering the texts he cited. Afterwards in this distinction, the other reasons of authors who were theologians (unless they are grounded in verses of scripture, which we postpone for the last part) shall have their ventilation.
1. The first text is an epistle of Saint Augustine to Donatus the heretic, who, having been apprehended by the Catholics, fell from his horse and would have drowned himself. He afterward complained of violence used toward him in matters of religion, wherein he claims freedom of election and conscience. Saint Augustine answers that we have the power to try to save our souls against our wills, as it is lawful for us thus to save our bodies. If you were constrained to do evil, even so you ought not kill yourself. Consider whether in the scriptures you find any of the faithful who did so when they suffered much from those who would have forced them to do things to their souls’ destruction.
I shall speak a little of Saint Au
gustine in general, because almost all the reasons of others are derived from him. He was writing purposely about self-homicide from the seventeenth to the twenty-seventh chapters of the first book of On the City of God. Now the writers on confession in our times, comparing Navarrus and Soto, two of the greatest casuists, decide sometimes that Navarrus is sounder and more learned but Soto more useful and applicable to practical divinity. Just so, I say that for sharp insight and conclusive judgment in exposition of places of scripture, which he always makes so liquid and pervious, Saint Augustine has hardly been equaled by any of all the writers in the church of God. (Except that Calvin may have that honor, and where it does not concern points in controversy I see the Jesuits themselves often follow him; although they dare not name him, they pay him high respect and reverence.)
In practical learning and moral divinity Saint Augustine was so fastidious, refined, and rigorous a conscience—perhaps to redeem his former licentiousness, for such converts often happen to be extremely zealous—that for our direction in the conduct of this life, Saint Jerome and some others may be thought sometimes fitter to adhere to than Saint Augustine. But I do not say this as though we needed this medicament for this text. For I agree with Saint Augustine that neither to avoid occasion of sin nor for any other cause wherein I myself am merely or principally interested may I do this act, which also serves justly for an answer to the same zealous Father in the other text cited by Gratian. For with him I confess that “He who kills himself is so much the more guilty therein as he was guiltless of the fact for which he killed himself.”
Nevertheless, by the way, this principle may not pass generally without admitting the exception carried by the rule of law on which it is grounded, “No one without guilt ought to be punished unless there is an offsetting cause.” And so, like Saint Augustine, we may say with as much earnestness, “This we assert, this we say, this we approve in every respect, that neither to avoid temporal trouble, nor to remove from others the occasion to sin, nor to punish our own past sins, nor to prevent future sins, nor out of desire for the next life, where these are the only or the principal considerations, can it be lawful for any man to kill himself.” But neither Saint Augustine nor we deny that, if there are cases where the party is disinterested and the glory of God is only or primarily respected and advanced, self-homicide may be lawful.
Valens the emperor surprised Iamblicus when his divining cock had described three letters of the name of the person who would succeed him and slew all whose names were Theodorus, Theodotes, or Theodulus, but he let off Theodosius, who fulfilled the prophecy. In the same way, Saint Augustine has condemned those causes that we do not defend and has omitted those in which it is justifiable.
This case is hard to discern and distinguish from others arising from human infirmity. If the rule that Antonio de Côrdoba gives in cases of simony is, as he says it is, a good guide in all perplexities, it will help very much. He says that in the case of simony many difficulties arise, since not only (by clear and common judgments) temporal reward may be taken for spiritual offices by way of gifts, stipends, wages, alms, sustenance, or fulfilling the law or custom of a place, but also according to some doctors even by way of price and bargain, if not directly for the spiritual part thereof then for the labor necessarily attached to it. Since not every curate can distinguish in these cares, he bids them, “Always do it with an intention to do it as God knows it may be done and as wise men know and would teach that it might be done. For, humbly remitting ourselves to instruction by the learned who are our fathers, whatever defect may be in us, let us be saved by the parents’ faith.” In this way Pindar, making an implicit prayer to God that he would give him what he knew to be best for him, died in that very petition.
Since Saint Augustine has in his decision the qualification that a better life never receives a man after a death of which he himself was guilty, we will be as bold with him as one who is more obliged to him than we. Thyraeus, repeating Augustine’s opinion that the devil could not possess a body unless he entered into it by sin, rejects the opinion and says, “The holy Father speaks not of what must of necessity be, but of what for the most part actually is.”
2.—In our case I think we ought to follow Saint Jerome’s temper. In his exposition of the book of Jonah (I wonder why Gratian cited it, being so far from his aim and advantage) he says, “In persecution I may not kill myself unless [original: without this, where] chastity is endangered.” Here I am far from agreeing with Gratian that ‘“without this’ is inclusively spoken and amounts to the phrase, ‘not even if [original: no not though],” for I think that good and learned Father, Jerome, included in the word “chastity” all purity of religion and manners, and to a man so rectified death comes always and in every way seasonably and welcome. For “As death finds a man, so a man finds death.”
3.—From this text Saint Jerome, I believe, and some others whom I perhaps have not read, and from some other texts in others, charitably dissent. Lavater, having profited from all of Peter Martyr’s reasons mostly against self-homicide and adding some of his own when they both handle the duties of Saul, confesses that in this case of preserving chastity Augustine, Chrysostom, Lactantius, and Jerome departed from the opinion of those who condemned this act.
4.—Peter Martyr also presents one other reason of which he seems glad and well contented; namely, that we must not hasten death because death is an evil. But this reason is not worthy of his gravity, especially so long after Clement of Alexandria had so thoroughly defeated that opinion. For even if it is an evil, it is only an evil of punishment, and that is an evil of which God is the author. It is not that evil by which we are evil, neither does it always prove the patient to be evil (although God for all that is always just), for Christ himself said of the man born blind, “Neither he nor his parents have sinned” (John 9:5).
Concerning that evil of punishment, which is deemed the greatest of temporal afflictions in this life because of the close danger of impairing our soul (that is, to be possessed), Thyraeus, drawing on Saint Jerome and Chrysostom, says that it is not always inflicted only for sin but also to manifest the glory of God. The greatest evil of this kind that can be imagined, which is “Damnation, has less of the essence of evil than has the least sin that brings us damnation,” says Aquinas. Death is therefore an act of God’s justice, and when he is pleased to inflict it he may choose his officer and choose me myself as well as anybody else.
Even if it were the worst sort of evil, still, as Saint Augustine says, “In the act of marriage there is a good use of evil, that is of concupiscence, which is an evil adulterers evilly use.” The good Paulinus praises Sulpicius Severus because “He, having the liberty of sinning in marriage, did not depart from his accustomed austerity.” The same may be said of death in some cases, as in martyrdom.
Although Peter Martyr urges further that death is called God’s “enemy” (I Cor. 15:26) and is therefore evil, Musculus says about that text, “Death is often commended in scripture because God uses it for the faithful to good ends and makes it work toward salvation.” By what authority can they so assuredly pronounce that it happens in our case of self-homicide? Besides, death has already lost much of its natural malignity and is not now so evil as it naturally was at first. Calvin notes, “It is already so destroyed that it is not lethal but only grievous.”
5.—Peter Martyr offers another reason of his own, that life is a gift, and because it is the gift of God it may not be refused. When we have agreed with him that it may not be unthriftily and prodigally cast away, how can he conclude from self-homicide such an ingratitude as that I shall forsake God’s glory? May I in no case lay down my life? How can “I may never” follow from “I must not always”?
6.—Lavater, following many others, urges that because judges are established for the purpose, no man should take dominion over himself. But in the Church of England, where auricular confession is neither under precept nor much in practice (the idea that we do not allow it at all or r
eject it as the Waldenses did, although a reverend man said it, is more than I ever knew), who is the judge of sin, against which no civil law provides or of which there is no evidence? May not I accuse and condemn myself to myself and inflict what penance I will to punish the past, avoiding similar occasion of sin?
Upon this reason turns that perplexed question of whether the pope may not give himself absolution from acts and vows, and partake of his own indulgences. By the best opinions it is agreed that to do so is an act of jurisdiction, which by Lavater’s rule no man may exercise upon himself. The imperial laws generally forbid anybody to be judge in his own cause, but all the commentators make an exception of sovereigns. Concerning ordinary judges, all agree with Baldus that “In a notorious deed if the dignity of the judge is concerned, he is the proper judge of it.” He also says, “It belongs to the chief magistrate to judge whether or not such a cause belongs under his judgment.” With a “notwithstanding” to natural law, as the words of the privilege have it, Theodoric allowed bishops to be judges in their own cause. So “If a son who had not been judge in his own cause, had been made consul, he might have emancipated himself or authorized another to have adopted him.”
Moreover, it appears that the popes have exercised jurisdiction upon themselves, even before they were popes. John XXII, having permission to choose one pope, chose himself, which deed Nauclerus relates and justifies. According to canonical rules, it is plain that he may exercise jurisdiction upon himself in any case where there is not a distinction of persons enjoined by the law of God, as in baptism—which will not be stretched in our case.
