Suicide in the Middle Ages

Source: History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture (Medicine and Culture) (Via http://www.a1b2c3.com )
Credits: Georges Minois
Dated:

Suicide Facts

A Chronicle Of Ordinary Suicide In The Middle Ages

• Pietro Della Vigna, a jurist, poet, and minister to Frederick II, committed suicide. Dante pictures him in hell in the Inferno.

• A Parisian jumped into the Seine. When he was rescued, he took communion before he died. His family claimed the body, arguing that he had died in a state of grace, but because he had attempted suicide and had been in his right mind, as shown by his repentance, the court sentenced his corpse to torture.

• Two women who had lived within the jurisdiction of the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris committed suicide. Their bodies were buried without ceremony (enfouis).

• Pierre Crochet of Boissy-Saint-Léger killed himself while under suspicion of murder. The judicial arm of the Abbey of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés sentenced the body to be dragged through the streets, then hanged.

• A man committed suicide in Reims. The monks of Saint-Rémi had the body dragged and hanged, but the Parlement de Paris ordered them to hand over the cadaver to the archbishop, who alone held the right to hang criminals.

• Philippe Testard, a man a hundred years old who had been prévôt to the archbishop of Paris, got up in the night to urinate out the window and threw himself down to the street below. Brought back to his bed, he received the Eucharist but then stabbed himself. His heirs pleaded his insanity to avoid confiscation of his estate. During the trial twelve witnesses attested to his odd behavior: "He did so many silly things that everyone said he was out of his senses."

• A man living within the jurisdiction of the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris committed suicide, and the abbey had his body hanged. Soon after, the royal prévôt ordered the abbey to repeat the execution, first "dragging the said murderer" through the streets behind a horse, a rite that the abbey had neglected to perform.

• Adam Le Yep, a freeholder in Worcestershire, was reclassified a serf because of his extreme poverty. Rejecting the social demotion, he drowned himself in the Severn.

• Raoul de Nesles rushed headlong into the melee during the Battle of the Golden Spurs at Courtrai, preferring certain death to the humiliation of defeat.

• Jacquet de Fransures, a peasant in revolt, strangled himself in prison "with the rope that tied him around the shoulders, and murdered himself in desperation."

• Several persons were executed following Charles VI's return to Paris. "The wife of one of these," Jean Juvénal des Ursins tells us, "who was great with child, threw herself from the window of her house and killed herself."

• When soldiers pushed him to desperation by their rapacious demands, Jean Lunneton, a tenant farmer of the Abbey of Chaalis, hanged himself. The abbey ordered confiscation of his estate, but eventually permitted his wife to inherit, "in consideration of the fact that one cannot know for sure if the said event occurred because of the desperation of her said late husband or otherwise."

• After several days of illness, Jean Masstoier decided to drown himself in the river. Saved in time but still suffering from "melancholy of the head," he threw himself down a well.

• A pious and wealthy burgher in Strasbourg, Hugelinus Richter, confessed, took communion, then jumped into the Bruche River.

• When his wife fell ill, Pierre le Vachier, a retired butcher from Sarcelles who had been ruined by the civil war and had lost two of his children, not only was left destitute but also felt totally abandoned. He "went to hang himself from a tree, where he died and strangled himself." The chronicle adds that he was obviously "tempted by the enemy [the devil]."

• "By the temptation of the enemy and on the occasion of his said madness and illness," Denisot Sensogot, a Paris baker who had contracted an infectious disease, hanged himself. His case was brought to trial to determine whether his act was to be attributed to the influence of the devil (in which case his body would be dragged, hanged, and deprived of Christian burial, and his goods would be confiscated) or to madness (frénésie), which would exculpate him. His widow, pregnant and the mother of a year-old daughter, petitioned that he be declared mad, as "it would be a very hard thing for the said widow ... to lose their goods and chattels by such a decision; moreover their relatives and friends, people of note and of good family, would be vilified if the body of the deceased were executed."

• Michelet le Cavalier, a Paris embroiderer stricken by an illness that brought him terrible suffering, threw himself out of the window.

• Jeannette Mayard, a shoemaker's wife and a good Catholic but given to drink and jealousy, hanged herself.

• A woman known to be insane got up in the middle of the night. "Her husband asked her where she was going and she answered that she wanted to go relieve herself. Thus the said woman went about the house stark naked, then threw herself into a well a good thirteen arm-widths deep."

• Philippe Braque, a barrister of the Parlement de Paris and a man some fifty years of age, committed suicide in the basement of his house.

• A journeyman in Metz hanged himself after a quarrel over a girl.

 

Fragmentary though it is, this rapid survey of the suicides of ordinary people in the Middle Ages, drawn from memoirs, journals kept by clerics and burghers, and surviving judiciary records, shows that suicide was practiced in all social categories and by both men and women.

Voluntary death was seen as the result of diabolic temptation induced by despair or as mad behavior. The act, condemned as murder, led to savage punishment inflicted on the dead body and to confiscation of the estate of the deceased. At times the judges showed a degree of indulgence by taking into account the circumstances of the death and the family's situation.

Civil and ecclesiastical justice collaborated to repress suicide. Suicides had a variety of reasons for taking their own lives: poverty, illness, physical suffering, fear of punishment, honor, reaction to humiliation, love, and jealousy.

Only an insignificant number of cases appear in chronicles and court records, however. In a ground-breaking article Jean-Claude Schmitt discusses fifty-four cases of suicide over a period of nearly three centuries.

As Schmitt remarks, such a "limited and heterogeneous" sampling "cannot be subjected to the statistical manipulations devised by sociologists." Establishing a suicide rate for medieval Europe that might permit comparison with other ages seems an impossible dream.

Without going as far as Félix Bourquelot, who stated in 1842 that in the twelfth century "a mania for suicide penetrated all classes of society," we can say that there seems to be no evidence that voluntary death occurred any less often in the Middle Ages than in any other period.

To the contrary, the many laws that were passed, both canon and civil, the number of philosophical and theological pronouncements made on the subject, the absence of expressions of surprise in the chronicles, and the dockets of court cases regarding voluntary homicide all show that suicides occurred with some regularity. Moreover, recent sociological studies have shown that the suicide rate remains stable in all types of society.

Noble Substitutes For Suicide In The Middle Ages

Even though the Middle Ages (unlike pagan classical antiquity) stand out as having almost no illustrious suicides, it seems improbable that medieval society was an exception to the rule.

There was no medieval Lucretius, no Brutus, Cato, or Seneca, and the discredit that an omnipresent Catholicism cast on a practice it considered cowardly quite certainly had an effect on the elites--social circles restricted to limited numbers and profoundly marked by clerical influence.

The way of life of the warrior aristocracy, however, did include behaviors that substituted for suicide and were an indirect means of suicide: Tournaments might in many ways be likened to "gaming suicides," as could judiciary duels and the various forms of the judgment of God.

Omnipresent war was both an essential safety valve for suicidal impulses and a deterrent to direct suicide. It is known that the suicide rate declines sharply in times of war, when group cohesion is reinforced and a sense of solidarity, shared emotions, and a desire for victory give life purpose and enhance a taste for existence.

One of the time-honored psychological explanations for suicide is that in the majority of cases individuals turn against themselves aggressive impulses that could not be directed at others in civilized societies.

The Merovingian warrior, the knight of the age of chivalry, and later the mercenary soldier were by no means inhibited by pacifist prohibitions, and free expression of violence against their contemporaries served to diminish their own self-destructive tendencies.

We can see from many examples how the interplay between an externalized aggression and the risking of one's life on a permanent and voluntary basis produced an effective substitute for direct suicide. Jean Froissart tells us that in the fourteenth century ninety knights chose slaughter on the battlefield over retreat before enemy forces.

Similarly, the Chroniques de Flandre recount that at Courtrai in 1302, Raoul de Nesles declared that "he no longer wanted to live when he saw all the flower of Christendom dead." The rules of the chivalric Order of the Estoile founded by King John II (Jean le Bon) forbade flight from battle.

The Crusades provide a long list of similar events. Guibert de Nogent notes that many Christians drowned themselves rather than be taken by the Turks, "preferring to choose their manner of death." Jean de Joinville witnessed similar scenes, which at times involved ecclesiastics.

The bishop of Soissons refused to accept defeat and threw himself at the Turks, meeting certain death. Louis IX's queen, Marguerite de Provence, asked an aged knight to cut off her head should the Saracens threaten to take her. When Joinville and his companions were about to be taken prisoner, one cleric exclaimed, "I am for letting us all be killed if we are going right to heaven!"

His suggestion was not taken, but it illustrates the attitudes of chivalry, when knights refused to see voluntary martyrdom as suicide. The same frame of mind can be seen in certain religious orders: In Seville in the thirteenth century, for instance, Franciscans taunted Muslims by shouting insults about Mohammed.

Medieval chronicles are full of indirect warrior suicides of the sort. At times knights even directly murdered one another. The Miracles de Saint Benoît tells us that Aimo, the archbishop of Bourges, and his companions ran one another through with their swords when they were defeated by Eudes, the seigneur de Déols.

Prisoners, too, might prefer death to humiliation: Regnault, comte de Boulogne, was one; another was Jean de la Rivière, who declared, "No, I will not see the Paris rabble enjoying my ignominious death."

The chronicles also report cases of suicide after a rape that recall the death of Lucretia. Examples include the wife of Jean de Carrouges, as well as some women raped by the Normans. Other women took their own lives out of loyalty to their husbands, still others out of a sense of duty or in an attempt to save the lives of relatives.

The self-sacrifice of the burghers of Calais in 1347 also bears all the signs of altruistic suicide. Even the pious Blanche of Castile flirted with the idea of suicide after the death of her husband, Louis VIII.

At the death of Charles VII in 1461, the rumor circulated that he had deliberately stopped eating. Some claimed that he had been poisoned, but the king, weakened by an abscess on the brain, was in such a sorry state that there probably would have been little point to hastening his death.

Joan of Arc presents a more troubling case. At one point during her imprisonment (and for reasons not clarified) she threw herself from a high tower.

During her interrogation she declared that "she would rather die than live after such a destruction of good folk" (an allusion to a massacre of civilians in Compiègne); on another occasion she responded that "she would have preferred to die rather than fall into the hands of the English, her enemies."

She later contradicted these statements to declare that she had no intention of killing herself. Still, one of the accusations against her was an attempted self-homicide out of despair.

Thus the practice of voluntary death was known in the Middle Ages, but it occurred in very different ways in different social categories. The peasant or the craftsman hanged himself to escape poverty and suffering; the knight or the cleric arranged to get himself killed to escape humiliation and to deprive "the infidel" of a victory.

In the first instance we have direct suicide of what the sociologists call the "egotistic" type; in the second, indirect and "altruistic" suicide. The goal was the same, the means and motivations differed.

The dominant morality (that is, the morality of the elite) sanctioned this difference in motivation and means. Direct, egotistic suicide was considered a cowardly act of avoidance and was severely punished by torturing the corpse, by refusing the body burial in consecrated ground, by promising eternal damnation to the soul, and by confiscating the estate of the deceased.

Indirect, altruistic suicide was considered an act of courage in conformity with chivalric honor, or it was set up as a model and an example of unyielding faith unto martyrdom. Medieval society, which was governed by a military and priestly caste, was consistent with itself when it established the chivalric ideal and the quest for Christian sacrifice as the moral norm.

Voluntary Death In Literature

Literature illustrates the same dual vision of suicide, condemned in some cases and praised in others. Writers (who tended to be clerics or troubadours) usually condemned voluntary death in the name of Christian principles. There is no lack of warnings against suicide in literature. Albert Bayet lists a great many of them.

In Le conte de la belle Maguelonne, Pierre de Provence, unhappy in love, contemplates killing himself, "but as he was a true Catholic, he immediately took hold of himself and turned to the embrace of conscience." In the prose version of Lancelot, Galehaut (Galahad), who has decided to starve himself to death, is warned by priests "that if he died in that fashion his soul would be lost and damned"; the Lady of the Lake warns Lancelot that it would be a "grievous sin" if he killed himself.

In Fergus, when Galiene threatens to throw herself off a high tower rather than marry a prince she does not love, God intervenes, not wishing to lose a soul. Similarly, the lady for whom Guillaume au Faucon wants to die warns him, "Your soul will be lost." Many courtly romances--La Charette, Yvain, Beaudous, Floriant et Florete, Ipomédon, Éracles, L'Escoufle, Manekine, and Amadis et Idoine--express horror at the idea of suicide.

In popular drama, mystery and miracle plays directly expressed the Church's moral position in an incontrovertible condemnation of suicide. Works such as Les miracles de Notre Dame present suicide as the result of a despair inspired by the devil. In Les miracles de Sainte Geneviève, for example, a nun declares:

"Je me tuerais volontiers, Mais c'est d'enfer le droit sentier. Dieu, gardez-moi du désespoir!" (I would willingly kill myself, but that is the direct path to hell. Lord, deliver me from despair!).

In Rutebeuf's Miracle de Théophile the protagonist, a wicked character, wonders aloud, "Shall I go drown myself or hang myself?" Three suicides (or supposed suicides), Judas Iscariot, Herod Antipas, and Pontius Pilate, were archetypal villains, true antiheroes who met with damnation in all such plays.

In Le mystère de la Passion the archangel Gabriel declares that Herod (who has stabbed himself) "has died an impetuous, ugly, abominable, and shameful death."

A quite different climate reigns in the chansons de geste. Suicide, of course, remains a sign of failure, whatever its immediate cause or circumstances. People kill themselves because of an impossible love, out of deeply felt sorrow, remorse, or shame, or else to avoid the humiliation that follows defeat.

In short, they kill themselves because they have been vanquished and find it unbearable. The fatal act is prompted by anger or by a fit of jealousy or despair, hence by a sin. Moreover, it is above all the wicked who commit suicide, as does Gaumadrus in Garin de Montglane, who summons demons as he kills himself.

It is often the way defeated infidels die. When this is the case, they are not accorded any admiration: The Muslim who kills himself to avoid captivity, as in La chanson d'Antioche or Guy de Bourgogne, is presented as beneath contempt.

Certain chansons de geste go so far as to recommend that the Christian knight flee rather than put up a desperate resistance. In his Chronique rimée Geoffroy de Paris presents such heroic behavior as tantamount to suicide: "I hold it, to the contrary, as homicide."

In Florent et Octavian two clerics state that war is a form of voluntary death. In other stories (La Châtelaine de Vergy, for example) leaving for a crusade is presented as a worthy alternative to suicide: In this instance the duke, who has killed his wife, leaves in despair for the Holy Land.

In real life the long and perilous journey that was like a "death" for the lord separated from his family and his lands undoubtedly often served as a compensatory act, thus helping to reduce the number of actual suicides in chivalry.

Although at first sight the general tone of the chansons de geste seems hostile to suicide in any form, they repay closer scrutiny. Albert Bayet states that "among the celebrated heroes of the best known chansons, not one is himself the artisan of his own death."

To illustrate his point, Bayet lists the examples of Roland, who fights to the death with no thought of killing himself; Ogier, who asks Turpin to cut off his head when he is taken prisoner because he is loath to strike himself; Braminonde, who cries out for someone to kill him; Florence, who pleads with Miles, "Cut off my head soon"; Jérôme, who, overwhelmed with shame at having involuntarily wounded Huon, tells him, "Take my sword; cut my head"; Garsion, who asks the same service when he mistakenly kills his own brother; and Galienne, who cries out to Charlemagne, "Kill me!" None of these warriors kills himself directly, but in asking for death at the hands of someone else, are they not all committing indirect suicide?

The difference is one of pure form: The intention is the same, and the result is the same; the would-be suicide simply makes use of someone else's hand to commit the deed. All these episodes elicited the admiration of both the author of the work and the medieval listener.

The chansons de geste even include some honorable direct suicides. In Auberi Gauteron hangs himself in his father's stead; after her son's death and her husband's banishment, Béatrice throws herself from a high tower in Daurel et Beton; Dieudonné drowns himself in Charles le Chauve; Florent jumps out of a window in Hernaut de Beaulande; Doraine and Aye d'Avignon kill themselves to escape dishonor in Charles le Chauve and Aye d'Avignon.

Moreover, these examples do not include all the heroes who simply express a desire to commit suicide rather than live on after defeat.

There are many altruistic suicides in courtly literature as well. One such is Lambègue, a knight who delivers himself to the enemy to save a city under siege; another is Perceval's sister, who dies after giving her blood to save a leper woman.

In Lancelot Galehaut starves to death after learning that his friend has killed himself, and the author salutes his death as heroic. Lancelot tries to impale himself on his sword and is saved in extremis by a messenger from the Lady of the Lake.

Ritually, almost instinctively, the characters in the romances of the Round Table speak of killing themselves whenever misfortune catches up with them. Tristan throws himself off a cliff rather than submit to torture, and Yseut asks Sandret to kill her rather than allowing herself to be handed over to the lepers.

Suicide for love is even an obligatory gesture when a hero is faced by an insurmountable obstacle: Yvain, banished from his lady's sight, announces his intention to kill himself with his sword, declaring,

Qui perd la joie et le plaisir
par sa faute et par son tort,
moult se doit bien haïr de mort,
haïr et occir se doit

(Whoever loses happiness and comfort because of his own wrongs should hate himself to death. He should kill himself.)

Aucassin announces that he will crack his head open against a wall if Nicolette is taken from him; Gloriandre throws herself from a window rather than marry Clodoveus's son; Pyrame and Thisbé die together, prefiguring Romeo and Juliet; the lady of Coucy starves herself to death; a lady in Lancelot jumps off a cliff rather than live on after her lover's death; when Lancelot believes Geneviève is dead, he prepares to die, passing a rope attached to his saddle pommel around his neck. Innumerable women prefer death to dishonor.

All these suicides, of course, exhibit failure behaviors, and we must agree with Jean-Claude Schmitt that "in literature as well [as life], suicide was a supremely doleful act that could only be dictated by insurmountable grief." Yet in all these aristocratic works suicide appears as a heroic and admirable act, one that the author does not seek to condemn.

Heroes make the supreme sacrifice when it is the only way to compensate for a shameful fault or to overcome an obstacle insurmountable by human means. Through suicide they surpass their mortal condition and rise above ordinary humanity. A Roland who sought to save his skin by fleeing or who handed over his sword to the Saracens would never have become the immortal worthy of the medieval epic.

Here real-life conduct and literature were in total agreement on the distinction between noble suicide and a suicide deserving of scorn: More than the act itself, what counted were the personality and the motivation of the person committing the act.

Both in romance and in life, the peasant who hanged himself as a way out of his misery was a coward whose corpse deserved to be subjected to torture and whose soul was relegated to hell; the impetuous knight who chose death over surrender on the battlefield was a hero deserving of both civil and religious honors.

We cannot find a single instance of judiciary punishment meted out to the corpse of a noble who died by his own hand during the Middle Ages.

 

To Each Class Its Own Suicide

Suicide in the Middle Ages had two faces. It seems to have been rampant among commoners but to have spared nobles, who had compensatory behaviors that enabled them to avoid "self-homicide." Tourneys, hunting, wars, and crusades offered them opportunities to expose themselves to death or to sublimate their suicidal tendencies, but peasants and craftsmen had only the rope or the river if they wished to end their woes. Hence direct suicide was much more frequent among the lower classes.

This distinction can also be traced in the law and in theoretical works on morality. The noble's indirect suicide, whether he sacrificed himself for the cause he was defending or killed himself for love, in a fit of anger, or because he was afflicted by madness, was seen as altruistic.

In all cases it was excusable. What is more, suicide for love and suicide in warfare were both connected with the noble's social function and involved his social entourage, thus diluting his personal responsibility. Since noble suicide was a social act, it was to some extent honorable.

The peasant's suicide, on the other hand, was an isolated act born of egotism and cowardice: When the countryman went off to hang himself in secret, he was fleeing his responsibilities; his motivation was despair, a fatal vice inspired in him by the devil. The noble faced his responsibilities by going to a glorious death.

Allegorical representations in manuscript illuminations, stained-glass windows, cathedral statuary, and frescoes present this same dual view. For the most part these images illustrate the Psychomachia, an allegorical poem by Prudentius composed in the early fifth century in which Ira (anger) plunges a sword into her own body because she is unable to get the better of Patientia (patience, forbearance).

In medieval depictions, however, Desperatio (despair) is the chief cause of suicide, and Anger is shown either defeated by Patience or displaying her frustration by such violent gestures as tearing her clothing. Details in Giotto's decorations for the Arena Chapel in Padua, for example, show Desperatio hanging herself and Ira ripping her dress.

In treatises on moral philosophy, as in manuscript illuminations, anger--a "noble" vice--rarely leads to suicide. Except in cases of madness or "frenzy," suicide arose out of despair.

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.