SUICIDIO

SUICIDE. — In an etymological sense, it denotes the act by which a man, of his own authority, voluntarily gives himself death. In common usage, however, the term suicide is defined in opposition to those acts of voluntary death which, on account of the nobility of the motives inspiring them, are designated as “sacrifice of one’s life.” Moral theology, considering as absolutely illicit any direct will to procure one’s own death, restricts the concept of “sacrifice of one’s life” to death willed only indirectly for a proportionately grave cause, that is, as an inevitable effect of an act in itself good and directed per se toward procuring a good of such value as fully to justify the resulting loss of one’s life. In this sense, suicide is understood as “the act by which a man of his own authority gives himself death with direct will.”

To bring this scholastic definition into line with common usage, M. Van Vyve (La mort volontaire, in Rev. phil. de Louvain, 41 [1951], pp. 78-107) opposes the term suicide, understood as an act of death directly willed against one’s duty to remain alive, to the double term of active and passive sacrifice of one’s life, according as the death was directly or indirectly procured for the sake of higher goods and thus to fulfill a duty. With this terminology, the moral problem regarding the liceity of active sacrifice clearly remains, a problem toward which Catholic thinkers maintain a decidedly negative position, even though attempts are not lacking to find some justification for it (cf. E. Ranwez, Suicide permis?, in Miscell. Janssen, III, Louvain 1949, pp. 449-58; M. Van Vyve, op. cit.). E. Durkheim, in order to exclude from the definition of suicide any moral evaluation of it, extends its meaning also to cases of death foreseen but for which the subject bears no responsibility; he in fact defines suicide as “any case of death that results, directly or indirectly, from an act, positive or negative, performed by the victim herself and which she knew would produce this result” (Le suicide, Paris 1897, p. 5).

Suicide is the object of study by sociology and psychology, by philosophy, and by criminal law.

I. SUICIDE IN SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY

Sociology considers suicide as a social phenomenon, produced by social causes, and seeks to establish the laws governing its emergence, development, and transformation in the motives for its reprobation by social conscience. For Durkheim, these causes and laws are entirely sociological and irreducible to psychology: there are currents of suicidogenesis in society (ibid., p. 312), and one can establish this law: “suicide varies in inverse ratio to the degree of integration of religious society, domestic society, and political society” (ibid., p. 222). While he regards the integral reprobation of suicide as a normal phenomenon of collective conscience and the temporary expansion of currents of suicidogenesis as a pathological phenomenon.

A. Bayet (Le suicide et la morale, Paris 1922) sees in the uncompromising reprobation of suicide an expression of “simple” or servile morality, proper to a society in which service is considered an inviolable property of the master, against which there continuously opposes, in more or less effective form, the “nuanced” morality, proper to free spirits who consider suicide with indulgence, understanding, and even admiration (p. 23). Human civilization depends on the definitive triumph of this morality, which official Christianity vainly resists, having made this servile morality its own only after St. Augustine (p. 321).

M. Halbwachs (Les causes du suicide, Paris 1930) deepens on a strictly sociological plane the scientific investigation of the determining causes of the phenomenon of suicide according to the statistical constancy it presents in various social groups, according to their religious, cultural, familial, political, and economic situation. To this entirely sociological position psychologists and psychiatrists react (cf. A. Delmas, Psychologie pathologique du suicide, Paris 1932; G. Deshaies, Psychologie du suicide, 1947, Italian trans. Rome 1951); while Ch. Blondel (Le suicide, 1933) seeks to reconcile individual psychological motivation with that deriving from properly sociological elements. Too intimate is the relationship between individuals and associated life not to admit reciprocal influence for the phenomenological explanation of suicide; it is certain that only in subjects pathologically predisposed can the social environment influence the favoring of suicide, which explains the legislators’ concern to establish penal laws, sometimes symbolically extended even to the victims themselves, to reinforce the horror of this crime and thus prevent pathological imitation in the most impressionable subjects. As it is also certain that from the social environment depends that evaluation of values which leads to considering certain acts of voluntary death as heroic sacrifice of life.

C. Schüwer (La signification métaphysique du suicide, Paris 1949) considers inadequate the interpretations of suicide given on an empirical plane by sociology and psychology and on a negative plane by identity existentialism, which equates being and nothingness; and attempts to provide a axiological motivation, which, by making of suicide a supreme act of strictly personal choice, permits understanding its intimate human meaning without granting oneself the right to judge it on the basis of one’s own choice against the objective principles of morality. Schüwer, however, does not rise above the relativistic plane of a phenomenological interpretation of subjective conscience.

SUGER

Abbey church of St-Denis, rebuilt by Abbot S. (12th century) with later modifications.

262; S. Mac Knight Crosby, New excavations in the abbey church of St-Denis, in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1914, pp. 115-26). S. enlarged it by taking monolithic columns from Pontoise and beams for the roof from the forest of Yveline. The entrance had bronze doors; the left one belonged to the ancient church and had been donated by a monk Airaudo, represented there on the two leaves in the act of offering the door to St. Denis. The inscription is from the second half of the 11th century and was copied by A. van Bucher of Utrecht in 1585 and better by Peiresc (L. A. van Lantgeraard and A. Vidier, in Mém. de la Soc. hist. de Paris et de l'Isle de France, 26 [1899], pp. 59-195 and B. De Montessus, in Bull. de la Soc. nation. des antig. de France, 1946). S. offered the other two doors in gilded bronze. On the central one the bas-reliefs represented the scenes of the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of the Lord; S. was depicted at the feet of the Lord seated at table with the disciples of Emmaus; he also dictated the relative inscriptions and surrounded the two new doors with sculptures; on the left one he had a mosaic executed. The three doors were removed and melted down by the Revolution (14-20 April 1794). He took the heads of the statues; those saved are now in the Louvre Museum. On the tympanum of the central door was placed the Last Judgment, then the medallions of the Apostles, the resurrection of the dead, the Wise and Foolish Virgins; the signs of the zodiac, the months. Formigè has recently rediscovered these scenes beneath a layer of dust. On 14 July 1140 the first stone of the new choir was laid in the presence of King Louis VII; then the crypt was enlarged by adding radiating chapels; the high altar of the new choir was dedicated to Sts. Denis, Rusticus, and Eleutherius. In the Libellus de consecratione ecclesiae S. Dionisii (ed. Lecoy De la Marche, pp. 211-38) S. described the consecration.

II. Suicide in Philosophy

The justification of suicide, or the celebration of particular types of suicide, is characteristic of many individualistic currents that reduce moral life to hedonism and utilitarianism, or to the expression of the rational autonomy or vital force of the individual, or to the anguish of cosmic pessimism and existential nihilism. Suicide is thus regarded as the choice of a lesser evil that frees one from the pains of life (Cynics, Epicureans, 19th-century materialists), or as the only rational or aesthetic solution to a life in which earthly existence has lost its meaning or given all it could (19th-century Romantic sentimentalism).

It is also seen as an affirmation of spiritual freedom and autonomy against insurmountable social injustices and oppressions (Stoicism and some Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century, such as d’Holbach, and, in some respects, Voltaire), as the victory of liberating rationality over the vital cosmic will (Schopenhauer), as the supreme expression of the vital force of the free self (Nietzsche), or as an indifferent act toward an existence identified with nothingness (nihilism).

Against the justification of suicide, not only has social conscience among all peoples and in all ages reacted, but so too have the greatest thinkers of every era taken a contrary stance. There are, however, frequent uncertainties in evaluation (even if these thinkers often remained uncertain, as indeed public conscience often does) when faced with suicides performed as an active sacrifice of life for noble motives of public good.

Plato (*Phaedo*, VI; *Laws*, IX, 873) regards suicide as opposed to the absolute dominion of God. Aristotle (*Nicomachean Ethics*, III, 8; V, 11) absolutely rejects all suicide as contrary to social good and the natural tendency toward self-preservation. Cicero adopts the religious and social grounds for reprobation (*De finibus*, II, 30; *De re publica*, VI, 10). Neoplatonism (Plotinus, *Enneads*, I, 9; II, 9, 18; Porphyry, *De abstinentia*, II, 47; Apuleius, *De dogmate Platonis*, II, 622; Macrobius, *Commentary on the Dream of Scipio*, I, 13) adds to the religious and social arguments that of the individual duty to fulfill in earthly life all possible progress on which future life depends, while suicide impedes the full liberation of the soul from bodily passions. Yet it is only with Christianity that the motivation for condemning suicide acquires a fully unified meaning, since the three fundamental motives—religious, social, and individual—converge in the vision of a theocentric communal humanism that regards life as a social mission to be fulfilled by expressing, through one’s laborious love for others, all one’s love for God. The Christian solution to the problem of suffering, the doctrine of humility and charity proper to the Christian Revolution, destroys at its roots every apparent reason for justifying suicide.

Lactantius first (*Divine Institutes*, III, 18) and St. Augustine later (*City of God*, I, 17 ff.) adopt the philosophical arguments, framing them within the Christian vision of life, and conclude with the most absolute reprobation of every form of direct suicide. Scholasticism develops the thought of the philosophers and Fathers (cf. Abelard, *Sic et Non*: PL 178, 1603-1606; Alexander of Hales, *Summa Theologiae*, q. 34, a. 2; St. Bonaventure, *Sentences*, III, dist. 28, dub. 2), and it is especially St. Thomas Aquinas who provides a full and definitive formulation: suicide is a sin against the charity that each person owes to himself: *« per comparationem autem ad commutationem et ad Deum, habet rationem peccati, etiam per oppositionem ad iustitiam »* (*Summa Theologiae*, 2a-2ae, q. 64, a. 5; cf. ibid., q. 59, a. 3 ad 2; *In Ethic.*, V, 17).

Among modern philosophers, in addition to all Catholic and Protestant writers, one may recall Descartes (*Letter of January 1646*), Gassendi (*Ethica*, Op. II, p. 672), Malebranche (*Traité de morale*, II, 27, 8-9), Diderot (*Encyclopédie*, s.V. SUICIDIO), Rousseau (*Nouvelle Héloïse*, III, letter 21), who asserts that it suffices to admit the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and freedom to exclude suicide: whoever intends suicide should perform a good deed and will then understand the value of life. Kant (*Metaphysik der Sitten in zwei Theilen*, Leipzig 1867-69, VII, pp. 227-29), after showing that suicide is contrary to duties toward God and neighbor, writes: *« But here the question is only whether suicide is a transgression of the duty toward oneself... Man, as long as he is subject to duty, and therefore as long as he lives, cannot divest himself of his personality; and it is a contradiction to suppose that he can free himself from every obligation, that is, withdraw his acts from every kind of right. To destroy in one’s own personality the subject of morality is, so far as it lies in one’s power, to remove morality itself from the world as regards its existence: morality which is, instead, an end in itself. Consequently, to dispose of oneself for an arbitrary end is to degrade humanity in one’s own person. »* This Kantian approach is developed in contemporary philosophy of values (cf. R. Le Senne, *Traité de morale générale*, 2nd ed., Paris 1947, p. 484 ff.).

The Christian thought on suicide has been profoundly developed in our time not only by countless moral theologians but also by scholars of natural law, cf. V. CATHREIN, VIKTOR, *Moralphilosophie*, II, 6th ed., Freiburg in Br. 1924, p. 61 ff.; Hans Rost, *Bibliographie des Selbstmords*..., Augsburg 1927; J. Leclercq, *Les droits et devoirs individuels*, I, 2nd ed., Louvain 1946, p. 12 ff.; O. Vannini, *Delitti contro la vita*, Milan 1946.

Tullio Piacentini

---

III. Suicide in Canon and Italian Penal Legislation

Suicide is punished by the Church as a most grave crime, especially when it is consummated; but even the mere attempt or frustrated act is struck by severe sanctions.

Indeed, can. 1240 § 1, n. 3 forbids ecclesiastical burial and any public suffrage rite for suicides who did not show signs of repentance before death; it also strikes with excommunication those who impose stars on the fingers or enter into personal interdict from church who voluntarily perform such acts (can. 2339). If death does not ensue, the sin as well as the crime remain: can. 985, n. 5 incurs irregularity, which permanently prohibits the subject’s ordination, and, if ordained, can. 2350 § 2 imposes temporary suspension from every office or benefice that entails the care of souls. For the laity, perpetual deprivation from legitimate acts specified by can. 2256 n. 2 remains in force.

Italian penal law punishes instigation or cooperation in suicide, even if the suicide does not take effect, provided that the attempt results in serious or very serious injury, with increased penalties in particular cases (Italian Penal Code, arts. 579-580) and in all circumstances considered aggravating for homicide (ibid., arts. 580 and 575-577). Ordinarily, however, moral and remote accomplices escape punishment, such as authors of sensationalist chronicles, demoralizing representations, etc., who are nonetheless true moral accomplices.

**

IV. HUNGER STRIKE

It is the voluntary abstention from food undertaken with the deliberate aim of reaching death by this means, in order to draw public attention or the attention of the competent authorities, as a form of passive protest, to a matter deemed unjustly neglected, or to avenge a treatment judged to be unjust.

Therefore, there is no hunger strike when abstention from food is temporary, when it is undertaken for any reason other than protest, such as, for example, loss of appetite, a desire to leave one’s food to others in need, etc., and when the intention of reaching death by this means is absent, should the desired end not be achieved.

Without going too far back into cases from remote antiquity or the practice of the Thugs, for whom hunger strike was the most rational form of escaping the passions and the unhappiness of existence, the most famous cases of hunger strike—some of which ended fatally—occurred in the last century and have recurred in our own. These include the cases of the English feminist E. Pankhurst (v. FEMINISM), Gandhi (v.); the recent cases of Italian emigrants in Australia, found without work due to contractual breaches by the Australian government. But the most sensational case, which sparked lively theological controversy, was that of the Lord Mayor of Cork, MacSwiney, who died after 73 days of hunger strike in protest against the English, oppressors of Ireland. It was one of the rare fatal cases that occurred during the Irish Revolution of 1920.

Setting aside the undoubted good faith of MacSwiney, who died fortified by the Sacraments, the question was then raised, with greater insistence, as to whether such a course of action was licit. It is well known that direct killing is never licit, since man does not have full and absolute dominion over his own life. But the question was—and remains—whether in a behavior such as a hunger strike carried to extremes, one is faced with direct or indirect killing. There is no doubt as to its liceity if the hunger strike is merely simulated and does not cause scandal; that is, if the subject abstains from food only up to the limit of endurance to obtain something that is due to him and which he cannot obtain by other licit means. The question, however, becomes difficult to resolve when the intention of an extreme hunger strike is involved. Regarding MacSwiney, theologians were divided into two schools. Some maintained that it was indirect killing, arguing that in the specific case, the intention did not concern killing itself but another end, namely the liberation of a people from the oppression of civil and political rights; nor, in that case, was death used as a means to achieve the end, since it was not intended but merely permitted. Others, however, noting that in the case at hand death followed from the prolonged abstention from food as an immediate effect, albeit extended over time, concluded that death was not an accidental effect of the hunger strike but a direct one; the hunger strike was therefore an instrument like any other for suicide and thus illicit. These positions have not since been modified, and therefore, given the controversy, hunger strike cannot simply be condemned as such when there are reasonable motives and it is employed as a last resort to obtain a great good of public interest. On the other hand, given the ongoing controversy, it does not seem prohibited for a physician to intervene to sustain the striker by resorting to forced feeding (through a tube, nutrient enema, or similar means), especially since, in doing so, the physician does not negate the nature of the hunger strike, even if it diminishes its effectiveness as a means of protest for the possible just cause.