Suicide is authorized and commanded by God.

In condemning suicide is the City of God, Augustine explains that Samson was given “secret instructions” for suicide by the Holy Spirit. He acknowledges that during the Roman persecution of Christians, “holy women escaped those who menaced them with outrage, by casting themselves into rivers which they knew would drown them; and having died in this manner, they are venerated by the church catholic as martyrs.”

Augustine concludes that they acted upon “divine authority,” and that suicide is permitted “by general law and special commission.”

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City of God, 1.21-1.26. See Augustine’s “Celebration of Martyrs.”

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Over time this idea of what suicide truly is was adopted and elaborated on and seared into the hearts and minds of individual and society by way of epistles and sermons and disquisition and doctrine and system and canon law to be enforced by the Church, Catholic. And among a welter of stories on rectifying the human condition across fields and genres a veritable game of Suicide BINGO™ will be played over and again across domains of knowing what suicide is based on the formulation of the hippo bishop of North Africa.

Playing the game is easy and time-honored. Always at the center of your BINGO card is the FREE space allowing everyone a real chance to win the game. The space is simply suicide violating authorities, values and roles that are most prized in stories about rectifying the human condition and most often violating them in the most alarming and threatening ways.

As we have just seen, in stories that mark the individual as a creature of the divine suicide is usurpation of divine authority where the creature rises up to choose death over the divine gift of life. In stories of spiritual warfare over the human soul, suicide becomes demon possession and the work of the devil against our better angels. In stories about the inviolate command of self-preservation according to the sweet sweet reason of nature, suicide becomes nothing less than monstrous and unnatural. In stories endowing humans with intelligence and discernment, suicide is folly and error in judgement. In stories that prize rationality as the highest human faculty, suicide is madness or rage that overthrows the moral seat and center of what makes us human. In stories promoting mental health as measure and method for a thriving individual, suicide means mental illness as sickness and disease that consumed all the light possible as a better tomorrow.