Suicide is Christ-like. It is Christ calling upon you.

In 1937 Germany, with a prescience about National Socialism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes: “You were bought at a price: Christ’s death.” And, “what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.” “Discipleship is not an offer that man makes to Christ. We are bought by his sacrifice …” “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” For Bonhoeffer, this is costly grace. It is the very cost of discipleship.

He continues: “The acts of the early Christian martyrs are full of evidence which shows how Christ transfigures for his own the hour of their mortal agony by granting them the unspeakable assurance of his presence.”

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Scribner, 1963).

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Of course none of this is really the point except for on the question of suicide. Suicide is, but what is suicide?

In certain dialogues written by a philosopher long ago about his society called a polis or city-state, no one really knew what they were talking about, principally about the idea (eidos) of justice, but also about love and wisdom and so on, and this was the problem of knowing the truth of justice by knowing justice’s very eidos, except for that the real problem was not merely knowing justice for what justice really and truly is but truly and actually doing justice, individual and polis, according to what justice truly is because the real problem is not merely knowing or doing justice but doing by knowing so that what justice truly is truly becomes what individual and society truly are. Being by becoming justice through and through.

And so the real problem of an idea (eidos) that truly matters is not merely knowing the idea or even doing the idea but finally being the idea by embodying the eidos according to what the idea truly is. Recall the trailer for the 1995 film Judge Dredd, starring Mr. Sylvester Stallone, that flashes an epigram on the screen attributed to this very same long ago philosopher, which reads, Where there is crime in society there is no justice. I honestly don’t know which dialogue or letter this was taken from but in any case Judge Dredd is not a good movie, although Dredd (2012) is excellent and could have launched a thrilling action franchise that explores more deeply the premise of being judge, jury, and executioner in a world that is basically beyond redeeming. I am the law, Dredd declares, and he acts accordingly.

The epigram simply means that even if justice is somehow known or done by some and in places, when ignorance and injustice remain and endure and inhabit individual and society, then justice is not truly embodied, neither individual nor society, according to the eidos of what justice actually is and thereby what justice truly demands, which is to know justice to do justice so that justice is done, through and through. And so neither individual nor polis is truly just according to the very idea (eidos) of justice in what justice truly is is what I believe the Judge Dredd trailer is trying to say.

For instance, in one dialogue of the long ago philosopher about a trial, the individual judges and the judgment of the city-state, mutually generative and reflective, were by most accounts not just to the philosopher’s philosopher who was on trial for spreading the truth about justice, and who was judged by individuals and the government of the city-state according to their not knowing and thus not doing and thus not embodying justice, individual and society. Perhaps this is why in another dialogue the philosopher’s philosopher who is animated by truth rejects the home he had otherwise never left, except for maybe once and where he didn’t stray far, and elects to exit from the home he knew and from whence he came entirely.

And so can you really know the true idea (eidos) of justice only merely by knowing justice without having done justice so that justice is done so that you own (possess) and embody justice in that justice embodies and possesses you? Truly to know the idea (eidos) of justice is to have done justice so that justice is truly done. What is then is the idea (eidos) of suicide such that suicide is truly to be ideated?