Ecclesiastical suicides were a separate category. The texts tell us that priests and monks rarely committed suicide, but many such cases were undoubtedly concealed or made to seem accidental deaths or deaths by natural causes in order to avoid scandal.

Bernard Paulin states, "People talk about epidemics of suicide in monasteries. Religious of both sexes are said to have fled this world in large numbers, either inspired by mysticism or by despair--the famous acedia. The phenomenon probably existed, but nothing permits us to state that it reached those proportions."

Among the clergy solidarity, a strong group cohesion, and a relatively privileged status probably all helped limit the number of priestly suicides, but a certain number of examples are attested, even among the high clergy, as with the death of Jacques de Chastel, bishop of Soissons during the reign of Louis IX.

The body of a cleric who had committed suicide was not subject to execution by civil justice. In the late fourteenth century the jurist Jean le Coq declared that if a cleric put an end to his days, his corpse must be handed over to the local bishop, even if the suicide had been in possession of his senses.

He added, speaking of a prior of Sainte-Croix who had just committed suicide, "He should not have been hanged, because he was a priest." In 1412 a typical case occurred in Rouen: Jean Mignot, a cleric, hanged himself.

To stifle scandal the judge of the diocesan court (official) gave orders for his body to be buried in the cemetery by night. This was done, but when the affair was discovered, the body had to be disinterred and the cemetery, which had been polluted, had to be reconsecrated. The body was reburied in unconsecrated ground, but the corpse was not dragged or hanged.

Confrontations between civil and ecclesiastical justice did at times arise, especially concerning confiscation of the estate of the deceased, as local custom demanded. Thus a question came up in Anjou concerning a priest, Jean Ambroys, who had stabbed himself to death in Montreuil-Bellay. The bishop of Poitiers and the comte de Tancarville both laid claim to his estate. The 1463 redaction of the Ancienne Coutume d'Anjou seemed to favor the count's claims:

Any person who is homicide of himself must be dragged, then hanged; all his goods and holdings are confiscate to the lord, baron, castellan, or others with rights of justice and entitled to the said confiscation where the said offense was committed and perpetrated--to wit, whoever has full [powers of] justice over his land.

Furthermore, the said custom makes no difference according to the estate [social standing] of the person or to whether he dies intestate or not. Declared by my lord the comte de Tancarville, lord of Montreuil-Bellay, concerning a priest named M. Jean Ambroys, resident in Montreuil-Bellay, who killed himself with a knife, whose goods monsignor of Poitiers attempted to put into question, saying that they belonged to him inasmuch as [the deceased] is a man of the church and died intestate.

Suicide Among Jews And Heretics

Some Jews and heretics were among the suicides of the Middle Ages. It was usually Christian persecution that drove Jews to suicide, particularly in the periods of general excitement preceding and during the crusades. This was the case in Mainz in 1065, as the chronicler Albert d'Aix tells us:

The Jews, seeing the Christians take up arms as enemies against them and their children with no respect for the weakness of old age, armed themselves as well against one another, against their co-religionists, against their wives, their children, their mothers, and their sisters, and massacred one another.

It was horrible! Mothers grasped knives to cut the throats of their nursing babes, and they knifed their other children as well, preferring to destroy themselves by their own hands rather than succumb under the blows of the uncircumcised.

Other mass suicides recalling the massacre at Masada are recorded in 1069, in twelfth-century England, and again in 1320 and 1321.

Heretics committed suicide either because of persecution or as a result of their own particular beliefs. Examples of voluntary immolation following a refusal to abjure or arising from fear of torture are numerous.

Rodulfus Glaber notes several instances during the eleventh century: One occurred in Orléans, where a band of heretics voluntarily went to the stake.

This scene was repeated on several occasions during the Albigensian crusade--for example, when seventy-four Cathar knights threw themselves into the flames. The leaders of the crusade were so persuaded of the Albigensians' steadfastness in their faith that they pushed them to suicide to spare themselves the responsibility for their deaths.

The chronicler Pierre de Cernay tells us that Arnaud d'Amoury, abbot of Cîteaux, "keenly desired the death of Christ's enemies" after the capture of a group of heretics at Minerve, "but as he was a monk and a priest, he did not dare put them to death."

Arnaud offered his prisoners a choice between death and abjuration, knowing well (as he himself told Simon de Montfort) that they would choose death. Although the voluntary self-sacrifice of the Christian martyrs of the heroic centuries was held to be admirable, the Albigensians who marched joyfully to the stake were granted no merit, since their audacity was held to be inspired by the devil: Their acts were identical, but the souls of the early Christian martyrs were saved, while those of the Albigensian heretics were damned.

The Cathars also had a suicidal ritual, the endura--a hunger strike that followed receiving consolamentum, or "heretication." With the consolamentum a Cathar became "perfect" and was expected to die, thus obtaining eternal salvation and avoiding a return under the power of evil by prolonging this terrestrial life.

The rite was usually administered when the individual was gravely ill and death seemed imminent. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie gives several examples of death by endura in Montaillou in the late thirteenth century. He has also shown that the practice was by no means systematic and that many people abandoned their hunger strike before reaching the point of death.

"With all the good will in the world, and no matter how good a Cathar they may have been, there are good suicides but no delightful ones," Le Roy Ladurie concludes.

Thus the medieval vision of suicide, far from being a monolithic condemnation of suicide, offers various nuances. The personality and social origin of the suicide and his or her motives mattered more than the act itself.

Theory and law, of course, were extremely rigorous, but their application displays an astonishing flexibility. Condemnation of suicide in principle is neither obvious nor original in Christian civilization, and the religious sources of Christianity are either silent or highly ambiguous regarding suicide.

Suicide In The Hebraic World

The Old Testament offers a strictly neutral report of several voluntary deaths. After Saul had lost a battle with the Philistines, he first asked his armor-bearer to kill him; when the man refused, Saul fell on his sword, an event that the Book of Samuel reports without comment: "So Saul took his own sword, and fell upon it" (1 Sam. 31.4). When Abimelech's skull was fractured by part of a millstone thrown down at him by a woman, he told his armor-bearer, "Draw your sword and dispatch me, lest they say of me that a woman killed me" (Judges 9.54).

Samson committed suicide by bringing the Philistines' palace down on his own head and theirs. Eleazar, son of Mattathias, "exposed himself to deliver his people and to get himself an everlasting name" at the battle of Beth-zachariah by throwing himself under an elephant in the army of Antiochus V, slitting the beast's belly, and being crushed as it fell (1 Macc. 6.43). Fleeing before Nicanor's troops, Razis found a spectacular way to kill himself:

Razis, now caught on all sides, turned his sword against himself, preferring to die nobly rather than fall into the hands of vile men and suffer outrages unworthy of his noble birth. In the excitement of the struggle he failed to strike exactly. ... Still breathing, and inflamed with anger, he got up and ran through the crowd, with blood gushing from his frightful wounds.

Then, standing on a steep rock, as he lost the last of his blood, he tore out his entrails and flung them with both hands into the crowd, calling upon the Lord of life and of spirit to give these back to him again. Such was the manner of his death. (2 Macc. 14.41-46)

When Tirzah was besieged, Zimri set fire to the royal palace and died in the flames (1 Kings 16.18). When Ahithophel learned that King David had ignored his advice, he returned home to his own city, where, "having left orders concerning his family, he hanged himself.

And so he died and was buried in his father's tomb" (2 Sam. 17.23). Ptolemy Macron poisoned himself when he was accused of treachery (2 Macc. 10.13). Sarah, the daughter of Raguel, contemplated hanging herself when she was the victim of slander (Tobit 3.10).

Most of these suicides are presented as acts of heroism. This tradition continued into the Jewish Wars of the first and second centuries, when it provided many examples of suicide, both individual and collective.

Flavius Josephus relates some of these heroic gestures: Phasael, in chains and a prisoner of the Parthians, "bravely dashed his head against a rock, as he was not free to use sword or hand." Josephus remarks, "Thus he showed himself a true brother of Herod, and Hyrcanus a cowardly poltroon."

When the Roman army attacked one of the towers of Jerusalem and set fire to it, the trapped Jews rushed to their deaths: "The men on top were suddenly hemmed in by the flames: many of them were burnt to death; many others jumped down among the enemy and were destroyed by them; some turned about and flung themselves from the wall; a few, seeing no way of escape, fell on their own swords and cheated the flames".

When he was surrounded near Scythopolis, Simon, son of Saul, killed his entire family. "Then Simon, having gone through all his family, stood over the bodies in view of everyone, and raising his right hand aloft for all to see plunged the whole length of the blade into his own throat".

The Romans were not to be outdone: Longus "held up his sword in the sight of the opposing lines and plunged it in his heart".

Josephus gives many similar examples, but the culmination of such "heroic acts," as he calls them, was at Masada. In A.D. 73, after a determined resistance, a thousand Jews, who had crowded onto that rocky spur of land, were on the point of succumbing to the Roman attacks.

In an extremely long discourse that ranged far beyond the circumstances at hand, their leader, Eleazar, harangued them and asked them to commit collective suicide. His discourse, a closely reasoned argument that injects Stoic, Neoplatonic, and Hindu elements into the Old Testament context, forms a true apologia for suicide.

Eleazar put forth the classic arguments of philosophical suicide: Death is like sleep and delivers us from a brief and unhappy existence; it is unreasonable to continue to live when all that can be foreseen is further woes; since we all must die one day, why not decide the best moment to do so? Our soul aspires to leave the prison of the body and to enjoy a blessed immortality after this miserable terrestrial life; suicide is the supreme mark of human liberty and permits us to triumph over all ills; God wants to punish us. Certain passages in Eleazar's harangue have a resonance unfamiliar in Jewish thought:

I think it is God who has given us this privilege, that we can die nobly and as free men, unlike others who were unexpectedly defeated. In our case it is evident that daybreak will end our resistance, but we are free to choose an honourable death with our loved ones. ... For those wrongs let us pay the penalty not to our bitterest enemies, the Romans, but to God--by our own hands. It will be easier to bear.

Let our wives die unabused, our children without knowledge of slavery: after that, let us do each other an ungrudging kindness, preserving our freedom as a glorious winding-sheet. But first let our possessions and the whole fortress go up in flames. ... Which of us, realizing these facts, could bear to see the light of day, even if he could live free from danger? Who is such an enemy to his country, who so unmanly and so wedded to life as not to be sorry he is alive today?

If only we had all died before seeing the Sacred City utterly destroyed by enemy hands, the Holy Sanctuary so impiously uprooted! But since an honourable ambition deluded us into thinking that perhaps we should succeed in avenging her of her enemies, and now all hope has fled, abandoning us to our fate, let us at once choose death with honour and do the kindest thing we can for ourselves, our wives and children, while it is still possible to show ourselves any kindness.

After all we were born to die, we and those we brought into the world: this even the luckiest must face. But outrage, slavery, and the sight of our wives led away to shame with our children--these are not evils to which man is subject by the laws of nature; men undergo them through their own cowardice if they have a chance to forestall them by death and will not take it.

As a result, 960 Jews committed suicide that day.

After the poison comes the antidote: Josephus' Jewish War also contains a counter-argument to Eleazar's discourse. It comes from the author himself.

The situation at Jotapata was delicate: Flavius Josephus and his companions were about to be taken by the Romans, who had promised to spare their lives. He attempted to persuade his companions not to commit suicide. Once again, the discourse reaches beyond the immediate context to take on a more general philosophical and religious dimension.

It includes all the arguments reiterated by adversaries of suicide from that day to our own: Suicide is a cowardly act akin to desertion; it is an act counter to nature, which has endowed humankind with an instinct for survival; it is an affront to God, since He gave us life and is the master of our lives; we do not have the right to deprive God of one of his creatures; those who kill themselves go straight to hell and their bodies will be exposed:

The man who doesn't want to die when he ought is no more cowardly than the man who does want to when he ought not. What keeps us from going up to the Romans? Isn't it fear of death? Well, then, shall we, because we fear possible death at the hands of our foes, inflict certain death on ourselves? "No, it is fear of slavery," someone will say. As if we were free men now! "It is a brave act to kill oneself," another will suggest. Not at all! It is a most craven act.

I think a pilot would be a most arrant coward, if through fear of bad weather he did not wait for the storm to break but sank his ship on purpose. Again, self-murder is contrary to the instincts shared by all living things, and towards the God who made us it is sheer impiety.

Of all living things there is not one that dies on purpose or by its own act; it is an irresistible natural law that all should wish to live. For that reason if men openly attempt to rob us of life we treat them as enemies; if they lay a trap for us we punish them. And do you suppose God isn't angry when a man treats His gift with contempt? It is from Him we have received our being, and it is to Him we must leave the right to take it away.

... If a man throws away what God has entrusted to his personal keeping, does he think the One he has wronged is unaware? To punish runaway slaves is considered right, even if the masters they are leaving are rogues; if we ourselves run away from the best of masters, God, shan't we be judged impious?

... But if men go mad and lay hands on themselves, Hades receives their souls into the shadows. ... The wisest of lawgivers has declared it a punishable offence. Those who destroy themselves must by our rules be exposed unburied till sundown, though even our enemies are thought to be entitled to burial.

In other lands it is laid down that the right hands of those who die thus should be cut off, since they have made war on themselves, on the ground that as the body has been divorced from the soul, so the hand must be divorced from the body. ... I shall not go over to the Roman side in order to be a traitor to myself.

These arguments failed to persuade Flavius Josephus' companions. They drew lots and killed one another, until only Josephus himself and one companion remained. He then won over the other man, and the two of them surrendered to the Romans.

Which version are we to believe, Josephus arguing against suicide when he himself faces death or Josephus pleading in favor of suicide through Eleazar, whose discourse is obviously written by the author? The problem is secondary: What matters is to note that the Jewish world, the direct heir of the Old Testament, had no set position on suicide in the late first century A.D., when Judaism and Christianity parted company.

Josephus presents all the arguments for and against suicide, and up to the twentieth century, moralists, theologians, and philosophers had little to add to them. Historical circumstances tilted the balance to the side of indulgence or rigor because no peremptory argument for or against suicide could be drawn from the biblical texts.

Among the Ten Commandments, Mosaic law obviously prohibits killing, but it does not specify whether that prohibition applies also to taking one's own life. As we have seen, mentions of suicide in the Old Testament are never accompanied by the explicit disapproval that pertains to murder.

Moreover, the commandment against killing admits exceptions, such as killing enemies in wartime, killing in legitimate defense, or executing criminals. Thus medieval Christendom found little to draw on in the inspired texts, a fact that might go far toward explaining the broad variety of interpretations of suicide during the Middle Ages.

info on this page is from history of suicide
by georges minois
© the johns hopkins university press