Suicide is martyrdom in error.

Augustine instructs Boniface: “even if you are burnt alive for the name of Christ,” it is in error. Martyrdom may have been fitting pre-Roman church with persecutions, but no longer.

Echoing Tertullian, Augustine distinguishes between true and false martyrs, the faithful and those seeking a martyr’s glory. Suicide is not so much the act. Suicide concerns intention, design, and state of mind. Suicide is authentic or inauthentic.

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Augustine, Letters 178 & 185.

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One story of the story of what the idea of suicide is is the story of stories on human hunger to survive and to thrive and to propagate to rectify the human condition for a better tomorrow and storywriting on what suicide is within these stories. A defining episode in this story of defining suicide in the amorphousness of what is called Western Civilization is a temporal history on the traumatizing fall of empire become a spiritual history of a heavenly domain promising surviving and thriving, if not propagating, within and beyond human life. The story is called the The City of Dog Against the Pagans and it hovers high in the constellation of fanfiction of a particular religion and its version of Holy Scripture. Echoing the fortieth chapter of one story within one book within the holy scripture of this particular religion as its own story of rectifying the human condition, the outrageous strength of worldly dominion, says the theological historian or historical theologian, who was also literally a hippopotamus, pales compared to the promise and power and authority of the divine state of being and becoming. The aim of the story is to assure more and better life even amid the downfall of worldly empire because of the absolutely outrageous strength of a loving god named God. Cast off the shoe and follow the gourd, says the hippo.

In the opening pages of this history of what’s in store for hungry people the hippopotamus declares that suicide is self-murder as a violation of the divine commandment in his holy scripture that Thou shall not murder (non occides). Accordingly, reasons the hippo, suicide is nothing if not murdering oneself.

With the truth firmly established he then proceeds really to lay it on with what suicide means as self-murder which is that suicide presumes to usurp the overriding authority of God in judging oneself on the matter of life and death, and so suicide means rebellion by creature against Creator, and suicide means rejecting the body of Christ in the community of the Church, and so suicide is a mortal sin, meaning suicide is evil, meaning nothing less than suicide meaning eternal damnation.