‘The Violent against Themselves'

In early modern Europe, paradoxical attitudes towards self-killing appeared during the Renaissance. In his Inferno - part one of the Florentine poet's epic fourteenth-century trilogy, the Divine Comedy - Dante describes a journey through Hell guided by his ancient Roman counterpart Virgil.

Dante drew on rich classical and Christian traditions. From the fifth century Christian teaching on self-killing relied heavily on St Augustine, who advised that violent and illegitimate usurpation of God's dominion over all human life applied equally to self-killing as a form of murder.^{[542] [543]} Augustine drew on Plato's comparison to a cowardly soldier abandoning his post. He condemned self-killing on all accounts, whether to escape shame, expiate sin or to attain eternal reward through martyrdom. Practically, Augustine's disapproval arose from his confrontation with Donatism, an early Christian sect zealously engaged in self-sacrifice as martyrdom during the Roman persecutions. He feared the Donatist emphasis on martyrdom cost the early Christian movement far too many valuable adherents.

As historians, we can never know exactly what motivates another person to end their own life, only how they are judged by contemporaries. Today, suicidologists and journalists still commonly explain suicidality through despair and loss of hope, though these terms have evolved considerably over time. In literature and art, despair already loomed large as the antithesis of hope since antiquity.^[544] Prudentius, a contemporary of Augustine, fused Roman and Christian beliefs about the soul in his Psychomachia (War for the Soul), portraying an endless conflict between right and wrong waged on the battleground of every person's soul. He pitted Hope in mortal combat against the horrible giant Despair.^[545] Prudentius' moral message harmonised with the teachings of St Augustine and resonated through the Middle Ages in depictions of the virtues and vices, notably in Dante's Divine Comedy.

Despair (desperatio), a compound word, combines the Latin preposition ‘from' (de) with the noun ‘hope' (spes). For Christians, it implied a loss of faith in personal salvation and the resurrection at the Last Judgement. Despair remained a common allegorical trope throughout the early modern period, regularly depicted by artists like Giotto as a self-hanged person in juxtaposi­tion to Hope (as in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua) or as Judas. Those judged to have committed suicide in possession of their faculties (compos mentis) were deemed apostates, beyond all hope of salvation. Medieval theology universally condemned desperate self-murder as a heinous sin committed at the behest of the devil.

Renaissance humanists resurrected more ambivalent notions from Greek and Roman philosophy. The ancients eulogised heroic self-sacrifice as valour and praised stoic self-killing to uphold honour. In practice, however, Roman notions of honour remained embedded in class and gender; only free, Roman, male citizens availed themselves of self-killing with honour, while it was frowned upon among the lower classes, women and especially slaves.

Renaissance humanists idealised self-killing in antiquity to promote accep­tance under certain circumstances and admit autonomous free will justifying self-harm. They were aided by resurgent Roman law. By the sixteenth century powerful voices advocated for leniency. One of the earliest is found in Thomas More's Utopia (1516). In book two, More describes the custom of euthanasia on the island of Utopia. He recounts how patients with painful and terminal illnesses were advised by priests and government officials to ‘cut their losses', escape their misery and put an end to their own suffering.^[547] If convinced voluntarily, patients might starve themselves to death or accept an overdose of laudanum and still receive an honourable burial. Patients unwilling to end their lives voluntarily continued to benefit from kind medical attention without prejudice until they expired from natural causes. More realised how controversial such opinions were at the time and protected himself by locating the practice on the far-off satirical island of Utopia (Nowhere). Faithfully cognisant of the dangers for practi­tioners of the recently reinvented and as yet untested genre of satire (More's refusal to take the Oath of Supremacy, recognising Henry VIII as head of the English Church and his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, ultimately cost him his head), he reassured readers that, on the island of Utopia, anyone committing suicide for reasons deemed unworthy by the authorities forfeited their right to a proper burial.

In his Essays, Michel de Montaigne also consigned his philosophical rumina­tions on self-killing to the natives of far-off lands. With copious references from classical antiquity, he justified fearlessness in the face of death and the fortitude to end one's life whenever continued existence became unbearable.

Montaigne's ideas resounded in William Shakespeare's famous commen­tary on self-killing: Hamlet's soliloquy ‘To be or not to be' raises the funda­mental question of human existence:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep No more; and by a sleep, to say we end the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that Flesh is heir to?

... but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of. (Hamlet 3.1)

By the eighteenth century enlightened philosophes could ruminate on suicide as both a social issue as well as a matter of individual conscience. In his essay Of Suicide (1755), David Hume presupposed that while one person might disturb society, the governance of the whole world was beyond one person's violence to the extent that ‘a man who retires from life does no harm to society'.^[549] By then, he could stake his reputation with unflinching assured­ness on the certain belief that, ‘no man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping', thereby effectively rendering the avoidance of suffering, whatever the source, as justification for all suicides. Eighteenth-century physicians went further to promote a pathological view of self-killing, suggesting that all suicides suffered from physical or mental infirmity and were, therefore, non compos mentis. Of course, religious prejudices never disappeared entirely and even if some basic presumptions against self-killing changed, Europeans generally continued to judge suicide pejoratively, albeit it as a sickness to be treated and pitied rather than condemned and persecuted outright.