FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Gary’s Suicide

Rant Number 466 1 December 2011

Why did he kill himself? Popular Wales Football manager Gary Speed was found hanged. General consternation. Fans in tears. English and Welsh alike. Why did he do it, they ask? No apparent, obvious explanation. Yet, suicide is unusual. Even the much-maligned lemmings do not actually rush to self-destruct. So, why did you do it, Gary? Why did you let your family, your children, your fans, the human race down?

People top themselves for reasons as manifold as humanity. Money problems, spite, stupidity, political protest, cowardice, adultery, unrequited love, boredom, anomie (sociologist Emile Durkheim’s useful term), loneliness, unemployment, the law, even philosophy. Cato stabbed himself to death because he did not wish to live under Caesar’s dictatorship. Adolescent Sheilas do it when their little romance cops out. At least one of Schopenhauer’s disciples destroyed himself because metaphysically convinced life is meaningless – the fool! Some crooked bankers do it when caught out –insh’allah. And I have just read of a man who killed himself because he could not stand toothache.

Reasons for suicide may be tragic, deep, or banal, or plainly moronic. Never mind that. Still, people demand a reason, of whatever kind. What they cannot bear is a reasonless suicide. They might never have heard of that clever principle – called indeed the principle of sufficient reason – but unwittingly they do subscribe to it. The principle states that for anything that happens in the cosmos there must be a reason for it. A leaf falling off a tree, a star turning into a supernova, a man scratching his nose, a cat yawning, God commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac – all events that must have a reason why. They must. The principle says so.

Why did poor Gary Speed hang himself? If he had faith and had a confessor or spiritual guide, his priest would know the answer. Of course he could never tell. This particular priest never knew Gary so he knows not, but...let me have a go.

St Thomas Aquinas calls suicide crimen maximum – the greatest crime and he says it is wrong for three reasons. First, suicide is wrong because it is a sin against God, man’s Creator. Second, it is wrong because it a sin against the community, or society, to which a person naturally belongs. Third, it is wrong because it offends against that natural self-love which all living things nurture towards themselves.

Let me take the third reason first. It makes sense. Don’t call it love, maybe, call it self-preservation. Living things always seek to maintain themselves into existence. They resist being eliminated. The tiny moths in my old winter clothes endeavour to escape my efforts to exterminate them. The same runs through the whole natural world. In the film Blade Runner even the Replicants, man-made robots, seek to dodge the in-built programmes that bring their existence to an end.A fortiori true for human beings. Look around you: do you see masses of people blowing their brains out? No. Suicide is an exception, not the rule. Why? Because of that self-preservation built into all living things. That is why suicide is unnatural and it cries out for an explanation.

Second, suicide and the community. That takes us to the heart of the matter. Man is a social animal – Aristotle’s classic, now overdone definition. Aristotle actually speaks of the polis, the small Greek city state of his time, hardly the modern case of social unit. But the point holds. You have to be either divine or beastly not to need society, meaning the family, the town, the state – even Facebook. Monks and hermits also depend on some community near them. Society is man’s natural habitat.

However, there’s the rub. Gary Speed was no hermit. No unsocial loner. No wretched, friendless, jobless weirdo. Instead, he was deeply embedded into his family, his football club, his fans, his friends, his community. Yet, he killed himself. It seems he gave not a damn about his ‘community’. Why?

Again, the priest lacks knowledge. But something can be deduced, perhaps. That the much boasted, ubiquitous, inflated,ad nauseam reiterated word, ‘community’, is all too often...I won’t say ‘phoney’. Not quite enough. Maybe the media, people blabber about community so much because they deep down realise that today, in this crisis-ridden Britain, in this depressing post-Christian Europe, there is not, for the most part, much community. The rich, a breed apart, increasingly live in gated compounds, intent on making loadsofmoney. The poor sulk and despair. People fear the future. They do not know their neighbours. Families are dying. Children shunt their old ones to die away in sinister ‘care homes’. Too many youths are idiotic or feral or squalidly promiscuous. The pleasant, smiling, courteous Englishman of past imagination has been replaced by a sullen, scowling, ugly-looking zombie shut into his iPod-ruled, private world. As philosopher Roger Scruton put it, man is now living in ‘a dark age’.

This is the dreary ‘community’ Gary Speed has stuck his finger to. I am sorry for Gary’s family, fans, friends, the lot, but it looks that way. Is that a sufficient reason? Was he sick of them all? Can a man come to detest even those who love him? Because he can’t stand their mediocre, lukewarm love? Or are there other reasons? If so, only God knows them.

Lastly, God. Suicide is crime against God, Aquinas teaches. But this is easy. Suicide is certainly a sin. Despite that the Bible keeps mum about it – maybe it was too outlandish a sin for ancient Israel, which knew no anomie. But God is used to man’s sins. From the glittering Garden of Eden to our sad time, man’s narrative is a repeat of tired old crimes. God puts up with it – to some extent, remember the Flood. God puts up with sin because of his job, as Talleyrand says.

What job is that? Which is God’s job.

God’s divine, splendid, uplifting job is pardonner. To forgive.

Gary, wherever he is now, I am sure, is forgiven.

May each of us be, at the Last Day.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli