Suicide requires canon law for proper punishment.

The Council of Arles (452 AD) establishes that suicide is the work of the devil. The Council of Orleans (533 AD) denies funeral rites to a criminal who kills himself. The Council of Braga (562 AD) denies funeral rites to all suicides. The Council of Auxere (578 AD) forbids commemorative offerings and masses sung for suicides. The Council of Toledo (593 AD) excommunicates all attempted suicides thus deterring those who would contemplate suicide and consigning to hell those who would follow through.

Anglo-Saxon penitentials of the eight and ninth centuries excuse suicides if they are insane or demon possessed, and if they lived an honorable life prior. Suicide is condemned, however, if the suicide despaired by doubting God and the healing power of the church.[1] The Frankish synods of the ninth century expanded what suicide is to include death by dual, forbidding them prayer and denying a Christian burial.[2]

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[1] A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, 71.
[2] George Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, 31-4.

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Human are not crabs, some might object, and they would be right. Crabs scuttle as mere instinct- cum-hardwiring, pressed upon and activated by the world around. Humans enjoy consciousness and reflection and proceed intelligently and intentionally. And yet to say a crab merely scuttles is to be certain what a crab is and is not and what it means to the crab to be a crab according to the natural attitude of surviving and thriving and propagating. I am not certain about this crab one way or another. But then to say that human life is solely animated by consciousness and reflection and intelligence and intentionality is not to look around at humans scuttling in spite of themselves to survive and to thrive and to propagate.

Maybe it is enough to identify the natural attitude of human beings as simply being human hunger to survive and to thrive and to propagate — to consume and so to be fed upon more and better human life, individual and society, society and species. Human life as human hunger always toward a better tomorrow of hunger to be satiated. That human hunger is the not without which of human life is an observation so broad and encompassing and obvious as to be as meaningless as gravity itself.