It seems that the Roman people, before the influence of Christianity made itself felt, regarded suicide with considerable moral indifference. According to Servius, it was provided by the Pontifical laws that whoever hanged himself should be cast out unburied;166 but from what has been said before it is probable that this practice only owed its origin to fear of the dead man’s ghost. Vergil enumerates self-murderers not among the guilty, but among the unfortunate, confounding them with infants who have died prematurely and persons who have been condemned to die on a false charge.167 Throughout the whole history of pagan Rome there was no statute declaring it to be a crime for an ordinary citizen to take his own life. The self-murderer’s rights were in no way affected by his deed, his memory was no less honoured than if he had died a natural death, his will was recognised by law, and the regular order of succession was not interfered with.168 In Roman law there are only two noteworthy exceptions to the rule that suicide is a matter with which the State has nothing to do: it was prohibited in the case of soldiers,169 and the enactment was made that the suicide of an accused person should entail the same consequences as his condemnation; but in the latter instance the deed was admitted as a confession of guilt.170 On the other hand, it seems to have been the general opinion in Rome that suicide under certain circumstances is an heroic and praiseworthy act.171 Even Cicero, who professed the doctrine of Pythagoras,172 approved of the death of Cato.173

In no question of morality was there a greater difference between classical and Christian doctrines than in regard to suicide. The earlier Fathers of the Church still allowed, or even approved of, suicide in certain cases, namely, when committed in order to procure martyrdom,174 or to avoid apostacy, or to retain the crown of virginity. To bring death upon ourselves voluntarily, says Lactantius, is a wicked and impious deed; “but when urged to the alternative, either of forsaking God and relinquishing faith, or of expecting all torture and death, then it is that undaunted in spirit we defy that death with all its previous threats and terrors which others fear.”175 Eusebius and other ecclesiastical writers mention several instances of Christian women putting an end to their lives when their chastity was in danger, and their acts are spoken of with tenderness, if not approbation; indeed, some of them were admitted into the calendar of saints.176 This admission was due to the extreme honour in which virginity was held by the Fathers; St. Jerome, who denied that it was lawful in times of persecution to die by one’s own hands, made an exception for cases in which a person’s chastity was at stake.177 But even this exception was abolished by St. Augustine. He allows that the virgins who laid violent hands upon themselves are worthy of compassion, but declares that there was no necessity for their doing so, since chastity is a virtue of the mind which is not lost by the body being in captivity to the will and superior force of another. He argues that there is no passage in the canonical Scriptures which permits us to destroy ourselves either with a view to obtaining immortality or to avoiding calamity. On the contrary, suicide is prohibited in the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” namely, “neither thyself nor another”; for he who kills himself kills no other but a man.178 This doctrine, which assimilates suicide with murder, was adopted by the Church.179 Nay, self-murder was declared to be the worst form of murder, “the most grievous thing of all”;180 already St. Chrysostom had declared that “if it is base to destroy others, much more is it to destroy one’s self.”181 The self-murderer was deprived of rights which were granted to all other criminals. In the sixth century a Council at Orleans enjoined that “the oblations of those who were killed in the commission of any crime may be received, except of such as laid violent hands on themselves”;182 and a subsequent Council denied self-murderers the usual rites of Christian burial.183 It was even said that Judas committed a greater sin in killing himself than in betraying his master Christ to a certain death.184

According to the Christian doctrine, as formulated by Thomas Aquinas, suicide is utterly unlawful for three reasons. First, everything naturally loves itself and preserves itself in being; suicide is against a natural inclination and contrary to the charity which a man ought to bear towards himself, and consequently a mortal sin. Secondly, by killing himself a person does an injury to the community of which he is a part. Thirdly, “life is a gift divinely bestowed on man, and subject to His power who ‘killeth and maketh alive’; and therefore he who takes his own life sins against God, as he who kills another man’s slave sins against the master to whom the slave belongs, and as he sins who usurps the office of judge on a point not referred to him; for to God alone belongs judgment of life and death.”185 The second of these arguments is borrowed from Aristotle, and is entirely foreign to the spirit of early Christianity. The notion of patriotism being a moral duty was habitually discouraged by it, and, as Mr. Lecky observes, “it was impossible to urge the civic argument against suicide without at the same time condemning the hermit life, which in the third century became the ideal of the Church.”186 But the other arguments are deeply rooted in some of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity—in the sacredness of human life, in the duty of absolute submission to God’s will, and in the extreme importance attached to the moment of death. The earthly life is a preparation for eternity; sufferings which are sent by God are not to be evaded, but to be endured.187 The man who deliberately takes away the life which was given him by the Creator displays the utmost disregard for the will and authority of his Master; and, worst of all, he does so in the very last minute of his life, when his doom is sealed for ever. His deed, as Thomas Aquinas says, is “the most dangerous thing of all, because no time is left to expiate it by repentance.”188 He who kills a fellow-creature does not in the same degree renounce the protection of God; he kills only the body, whereas the self-murderer kills both the body and the soul.189 By denying the latter the right of Christian burial the Church recognises that he has placed himself outside her pale.

The condemnation of the Church influenced the secular legislation. The provisions of the Councils were introduced into the law-books. In France Louis IX. enforced the penalty of confiscating the self-murderer’s property,190 and laws to the same effect were passed in other European countries.191 Louis XIV. assimilated the crime of suicide to that of lèze majesté.192 According to the law of Scotland, “self-murder is as highly criminal as the killing our neighbour.”193 In England suicide is still regarded by the law as murder committed by a man on himself;194 and, unless declared insane, the self-murderer forfeited his property as late as the year 1870, when forfeitures for felony were abolished.195 In Russia, to this day, the testamentary dispositions of a suicide are deemed void by the law.196

The horror of suicide also found a vent in outrages committed on the dead body. Of a woman who drowned herself in Edinburgh in 1598, we are told that her body was “harled through the town backwards, and thereafter hanged on the gallows.”197 In France, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, self-murderers were dragged upon a hurdle through the streets with the face turned to the ground; they were then hanged up with the head downwards, and finally thrown into the common sewer.198 However, in most cases the treatment to which suicides bodies were subject was not originally meant as a punishment, but was intended to prevent their spirits from causing mischief. All over Europe wandering tendencies have been ascribed to their ghosts.199 In some countries the corpse of a suicide is supposed to make barren the earth with which it comes in contact,200 or to produce hailstorms or tempests201 or drought.202 At Lochbroom, in the North-West of Scotland, the people believe that if the remains of a self-murderer be taken to any burying-ground which is within sight of the sea or of cultivated land, this would prove disastrous both to fishing and agriculture, or, in the words of the people, would cause “famine (or dearth) on sea and land”; hence the custom has been to inter suicides in out-of-the-way places among the lonely solitudes of the mountains.203 The practice of burying them apart from other dead has been very wide-spread in Europe, and in many cases there are obvious indications that it arose from fear.204 In the North-East of Scotland a suicide was buried outside a churchyard, close beneath the wall, and the grave was marked by a single large stone, or by a small cairn, to which the passing traveller was bound to cast a stone; and afterwards, when the suicide’s body was allowed to rest in the churchyard, it was laid below the wall in such a position that no one could walk over the grave, as the people believed that if a woman enceinte stepped over such a grave, her child would quit this earth by its own act.205 In England persons against whom a coroner’s jury had found a verdict of felo de se were buried at cross-roads, with a stake driven through the body so as to prevent their ghosts from walking.206 For the same purpose the bodies of suicides were in many cases burned.207 And when removed from the house where the act had been committed, they were commonly carried out, not by the door, but by a window,208 or through a perforation specially made for the occasion in the door,209 or through a hole under the threshold,210 in order that the ghost should not find its way back into the house, or perhaps with a view to keeping the entrance of the house free from dangerous infection.211

However, side by side with the extreme seventy with which suicide is viewed by the Christian Church, we find, even in the Middle Ages, instances of more humane feelings towards its perpetrator. In mediæval tales and ballads true lovers die together and are buried in the same grave; two roses spring through the turf and twine lovingly together.212 In the later Middle Ages, says M. Bourquelot, “on voit qu’à mesure qu’on avance, l’antagonisme devient plus prononcé entre l’esprit religieux et les idées mondaines relativement à la mort volontaire. Le clergé continue à suivre la route qui a été tracée par Saint Augustin et à déclarer le suicide criminel et impie; mais la tristesse et le désespoir n’entendent pas sa voix, ne se souviennent pas de ses prescriptions.”213 The revival of classical learning, accompanied as it was by admiration for antiquity and a desire to imitate its great men, not only increased the number of suicides, but influenced popular sentiments on the subject.214 Even the Catholic casuists, and later on philosophers of the school of Grotius and others, began to distinguish certain cases of legitimate suicide, such as that committed to avoid dishonour or probable sin, or that of a condemned person saving himself from torture by anticipating an inevitable death, or that of a man offering himself to death for the sake of his friend.215 Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, permits a person who is suffering from an incurable and painful disease to take his own life, provided that he does so with the agreement of the priests and magistrates; nay, he even maintains that these should exhort such a man to put an end to a life which is only a burden to himself and others.216 Donne, the well-known Dean of St. Paul’s, wrote in his younger days a book in defence of suicide, “a Declaration,” as he called it, “of that paradoxe, or thesis, that Self-homicide is not so naturally sin, that it may never be otherwise.” He there pointed out the fact—which ought never to be overlooked by those who derive their arguments from “nature”—that some things may be natural to the species, and yet not natural to every individual member of it.217 In one of his essays Montaigne pictures classical cases of suicide with colours of unmistakable sympathy. “La plus volontaire mort,” he observes, “c’est la plus belle. La vie despend de la volonté d’aultruy; la mort, de la nostre.”218 The rationalism of the eighteenth century led to numerous attacks both upon the views of the Church and upon the laws of the State concerning suicide. Montesquieu advocated its legitimacy:—“La société est fondée sur un avantage mutuel; mais lorsqu’elle me devient onéreuse, qui m’empêche d’y renoncer? La vie m’a été donnée comme une faveur; je puis donc la rendre lorsqu’elle ne l’est plus: la cause cesse, l’effet doit donc cesser aussi.”219 Voltaire strongly opposed the cruel laws which subjected a suicide’s body to outrage and deprived his children of their heritage.220 If his act is a wrong against society, what is to be said of the voluntary homicides committed in war, which are permitted by the laws of all countries? Are they not much more harmful to the human race than self-murder, which nature prevents from ever being practised by any large number of men?221 Beccaria pointed out that the State is more wronged by the emigrant than by the suicide, since the former takes his property with him, whereas the latter leaves his behind.222 According to Holbach, he who kills himself is guilty of no outrage on nature or its author; on the contrary, he follows an indication given by nature when he parts from his sufferings through the only door which has been left open. Nor has his country or his family any right to complain of a member whom it has no means of rendering happy, and from whom it consequently has nothing more to hope.223 Others eulogised suicide when committed for a noble end,224 or recommended it on certain occasions. “Suppose,” says Hume, “that it is no longer in my power to promote the interest of society; suppose that I am a burthen to it; suppose that my life hinders some person from being much more useful to society. In such cases my resignation of life must not only be innocent but laudable.”225 Hume also attacks the doctrine that suicide is a transgression of our duty to God. “If it would be no crime in me to divert the Nile from its course, were I able to do so, how could it be a crime to turn a few ounces of blood from their natural channel? Were the disposal of human life so much reserved as the peculiar province of the Almighty that it were an encroachment on his right for men to dispose of their own lives, would it not be equally wrong of them to lengthen out their lives beyond the period which by the general laws of nature he had assigned to it? My death, however voluntary, does not happen without the consent of Providence; when I fall upon my own sword, I receive my death equally from the hands of the Deity as if it had proceeded from a lion, a precipice, or a fever.”226