FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - The Greatest Crime

Rant Number 366 6 October 2009

Stumbling through a pathless thicket, you absent-mindedly break a twig off a tree. Then you freeze. In agony, the tree trunk is crying out: ‘You have torn my limb away! Have you no pity?’ Astonished, you behold thick, dark blood dripping away from the broken branch. It is true. The tree is alive!

‘You’ are in fact the poet Dante. Making his way through the second level of the seventh circle of Hell. In a rough wood, Dante comes across the shades of suicides. Changed into the shapes of trees – quite rightly, in the Sorrowful Kingdom those who in life have done violence to their own bodies are denied a human shape. Moreover, fierce harpies pick off their leaves, causing regular, unending torments.

Vivid poetry but only poetry. Mercifully, because I would never wish people like Kerrie Wooltorton to undergo a similar fate in the hereafter. Poor Kerrie was the depressed woman who, according to the Daily Telegraph, took poison after signing a living will. She then called an ambulance and was taken to hospital. There she handed the medics a note – she desired them to make her passing comfortable but not to stop her from dying. So, fearing prosecution or even being struck off if they tried to save her life, the doctors let her die. RIP? Not according to Christian teaching, I fear.

St Thomas Aquinas calls suicide crimen maximum – the greatest crime. First, it is a sin against God, the author of man’s being. Because the creature has no right to dispose of himself arbitrarily, against the will of the Creator. (A similar argument is advanced by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo.) Although the Bible has no explicit divine command against self-killing, the prohibition is implicit. Significantly, the basest figure in the Gospels is a suicide, Judah Iscariot, Christ’s betrayer. His desperate end is emblematic of the depth of his degradation.

Second, suicide is a crime against self. Against the love which naturally every person cherishes for himself. Such love is not to be equated with selfishness. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, the highest moral injunction in the New Testament, presupposes as the highest standard of care a natural inclination to self-preservation. In other words, self-love. A people who regularly and systematically cut off their limbs, starved themselves to death and threw themselves down cliffs, might be the denizens of a science fiction planet – they could not be those we know on planet Earth. That is why self-destruction is deeply unnatural – contrary, opposed to the gregarious social drives which the provident Creator has implanted into human nature.

Third, suicide is a crime against society, or, as they say today, ‘the community’. Against the rampant individualism of our time, this may sound a bit totalitarian but it is not. Himself an inveterate individualist, the priest accepts that man is a social animal. Anyone outside this norm is either a beast or a god, Aristotle affirms. Someone not human. Even if ‘the community’ sounds rather impersonal, think of family, loved ones, friends. Kerrie’s own relations – how have they felt when she took her own life? Was it fair to them?

I myself have known someone who took his own life. His name was Nick Duc. ‘Frank, we failed him’, my friend C. told me at the time. ‘Had we really cared for Nick, had we really shown him our love, he would not have done it.’ Maybe. Or maybe, had Nick cared for us, been aware of our hurt, he might have thought twice about doing what he did, who knows? The point is that no man is an island. Every person fits into a network of relationships. Suicide does not just kill a single person, it wounds, it offends many others. That is what Aquinas meant by a crime against the community.

Dante, note, does not absolutely condemn all suicides. Noble Cato, who stabbed himself to death rather than to survive the destruction of Roman freedom by Caesar’s tyranny (liberta’ va cercando ch’e si cara, come sa chi per lei vita rifiuta), is in Purgatory, not Hell. That means that eventually he will attain salvation. The idea is that freedom is so precious that it is all right to sacrifice your life for it. I agree. For a just cause, a soldier may rightfully die for his country, hearth and home. But Cato’s sacrifice smacks of Stoic pride, ethical aloofness, a sense of inhuman superiority. Liberty being already lost, his sacrifice was for nothing. Dante’s poetic Muse has dimmed the poet’s theology, I feel.

‘...the Office ensuing is not to be used...for any who have laid violent hands upon themselves’ directs the rubric for the Burial of the Dead in the Anglican Prayer Book. The historical doctrine of the Church of England never beat about the bush – self-killing is so absolutely sinful that suicides should be denied burial in consecrated ground. Now the Labour Government has passed the Mental Capacity Act, which makes living wills into law. Another piece of devious secularism, another bit of demolition of this country’s legal safeguards. Consequently, if a physician ignores a living will and saves his patient, he might find himself charged with assault. Did any of the 26 Episcopal bums-on-seats in the House of Lords warn about the unchristian implications of the living wills? The grave perils incumbent upon them, such as abuse by relatives and endless litigations? Did any mitred pate utter any whimper of criticism? I know I am naive but...insh’allah, someone did.

Nick Duc and Kerrie Wooltorton, where are they now? Unbelievers and sceptics will scoff at the very question. Of course, death is the end. Survival is a chimera, an illusion, a savage superstition. The Christian faith disagrees. Kerrie and Nick have not perished. None of us will. (Condemnation is not the issue – besides, the idea that fear of hell would deter anyone from sinning sounds these days as quaint as belief in Red Riding Hood.) But, please, check out the question the grieving children ask of Aliosha Karamazov at the end of Dostoevsky’s great work, Brothers K.: ‘Is what religion teaches true? Is there another world? Shall we meet our dead friends again?’

Check also, pray, Aliosha’s reply.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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