Suicide is cowardice, shame, and ignominy.

The Athenian of Plato’s Laws asks:

But what about the killer of the person who is, above all, his “nearest and dearest,” as the expression is? What penalty ought he to undergo? I am talking about the man who kills himself, who (a) uses violence to take his fate out of the hands of destiny, (b) is not acting in obedience to any legal decision of his state, (d) whose hand is not forced by the pressure of some excruciating and unavoidable misfortune, (d) has not fallen into some irremediable disgrace that he cannot live with, and (e) imposes this unjust judgment on himself in a spirit of slothful and abject cowardice.[1]

The Athenian inscribes the answer into law: the suicide must be denied burial with his family; he must be buried in disgrace in a wasteland; his grave must not be identifiable. He must be erased from the world.

In The Jewish War, when confronted with the command and invitation for his own suicide, along with his comrades, Josephus argues against it.

Why, my friends are we so anxious to commit suicide? Why should we make those best of friends, body and soul, part company? … I am told it is a glorious thing to die in war. Quite so; but by the laws of war — that is, by the hands of the victors. If I am shrinking from the Roman swords, I fully deserve to die by my own hand; but if they are disposed to spare an enemy, how much more justified should we be in sparing ourselves? It would be absurd to do to ourselves what we are fighting to prevent their doing to us! You say it is glorious to die for freedom; I say so too, but on the battlefield … “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.”[2]

Augustine praises Marcus Regulus, a Roman general during the Punic Wars, who in defeat accepted captivity by the Carthagians, “rather than to put himself beyond their reach by suicide.” Augustine writes: “Patient under the domination of the Carthagians, and constant in his love of the Romans, he neither deprived the one of his conquered body, nor the other of his unconquered spirit.”[3]

By contrast, Augustine condemns Razis, a Jewish elder of Jerusalem, who, facing arrest by the Syrians, and out of “pride and arrogance … preferred to die by his own hand.” In his epistle to Dulcitius, he cites Ecclesiastes 2:4 which exhorts: “Accept everything that is brought on you; endure in pain and when you are humiliated show forbearance.” Razis chose death, Augustine concludes, because “he was too weak to accept humiliation.”[4]

In The City of God, Augustine praises Cato as the learned exemplar of Rome. In the end, however, Cato’s suicide at Utica must be judged as the act of a “feeble rather than a strong spirit, and dictated not by honourable feeling forestalling shame, but by weakness shrinking from hardships.”

For Augustine, Job, who endured dreadful evils in his body rather than deliver himself from all torment by self-inflicted death,” is the true exemplar.[5] Echoing Catholic reasoning, Calvin establishes that suicide flows from impatience and arrogance, as one who “cannot bear disgrace and ignominy.”[6]

In The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant acknowledges the Stoical courage and prerogative “to depart from life at his discretion with peace of soul,” but turns to the greater courage and “still stronger motive no to destroy himself, a being with such powerful authority over the strongest sensible incentives, and so not to deprive himself of life.”

Kant writes: “To annihilate the subject of morality in one’s own person is to root out the existence of morality itself from the world… Consequently, disposing of oneself … is debasing humanity in one’s person …”[7]

In his Commentaries on the Gallic War, Caesar reports that upon defeat, Vercingitorix honorably accepted captivity rather than choosing suicide. Vercingitorix was paraded through Rome like a circus bear upon Caesar’s return, caged for five years, and then executed.[8]

To endure suffering is noble. It is enobling.

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[1] Plato, Laws 873c-d.
[2] Josephus, The Jewish War, 200.
[3] Augustine, City of God, 1.24.
[4] Letters 161, 162 & 204. See, by contrast, 2 Macc 37:46.
[5] City of God, 1.23-4.
[6] Watt, “Calvin on Suicide.”.
[7] Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 176-7.
[8] Caesar, Commentaries, Book VII; and Plutarch’s “Caesar.”