City of God (Penguin Classics) (14 page)
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Authors: Saint Augustine
We have given clear reason for our assertion that when physical violation has involved no change in the intention of chastity by any consent to the wrong, then the guilt attaches only to the ravisher, and not at all to the woman forcibly ravished without any consent on her part. We are defending the chastity not only of the minds but even of the bodies of ravished Christian women. Will our opponents dare to contradict us? They certainly heap the highest praises for modesty upon Lucretia, a noble Roman matron of antiquity.
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When King
Tarquin’s son had lustfully gained possession of her body and had ravished her with violence, she revealed the villain’s crime to her husband Collatinus and her kinsman Brutus, and constrained them to take revenge. Then she destroyed herself, unable to endure the horror of the foul indignity. What are we to say of her? Is she to be judged adulterous or chaste? Who would regard this as a matter of difficult dispute? Someone puts the truth well in a declamation on this subject: ‘A paradox! There were two persons involved, and only one committed adultery.’ Finely and truly said. The speaker observed in the union of two bodies the disgusting lechery of the one, the chaste intention of the other, and he saw in that act not the conjunction of their bodies but the diversity of their minds. ‘There were two persons involved, and only one committed adultery.’
But how was it that she who did not commit adultery received the heavier punishment? For the adulterer was driven from his country, with his father; his victim suffered the supreme penalty. If there is no unchastity when a woman is ravished against her will, then there is no justice in the punishment of the chaste. I appeal to Roman laws and Roman judges. To execute a criminal without trial was, according to you, a punishable offence. If anyone was charged in your courts with having put to death a woman not merely uncondemned but chaste and innocent, and this charge had been proved, would you not have chastised the culprit with appropriate severity?
That is what Lucretia did. That highly extolled Lucretia also did away with the innocent, chaste, outraged Lucretia. Give your sentence. Or if you cannot do this, because the culprit is not present to receive the punishment, why do you extol with such praises the killer of the chaste and innocent? You certainly have no means of defending her before the judges of the underworld, such as are described in the verses of your poets. She would be set among those who
Hating the light, brought death upon themselves
Though innocent, and hurled away their souls.
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And if she desired to return to the world above,
It is forbidden, the grim lake sets a bound
With its unlovely waters.
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But perhaps she is not there, because in killing herself it was no innocent which she killed, but one conscious of guilt. For suppose (a thing which only she herself could know) that, although the young man
attacked her violently, she was so enticed by her own desire that she consented to the act and that when she came to punish herself she was so grieved that she thought death the only expiation. Yet not even in this case ought she to have killed herself, if she could have offered a profitable penitence to false gods.
However, if such was the case, and if it was not true that ‘there were two persons involved, and only one committed adultery’, but both were adulterous, the one by reason of his open assault, the other by reason of her hidden consent, then she did not kill an innocent, and her literary defenders are free to maintain that she is not in the underworld among those who ‘brought death upon themselves though innocent’. But then her defence is faced with a dilemma. If her homicide is extenuated, her adultery is established; if she is cleared of adultery, the murder is abundantly proved. There is no possible way out: ‘If she is adulterous, why is she praised? If chaste, why was she put to death?’
However, in the case of the noble example of that woman, it is enough for us to quote what was said in her praise: ‘There were two persons involved, and only one committed adultery.’ This suffices to refute those who, because any notion of chastity is alien to them, jeer at Christian women violated in captivity. They believe Lucretia to have been too good to be polluted by giving any consent to adultery. Her killing of herself because, although not adulterous, she had suffered an adulterer’s embraces, was due to the weakness of shame, not to the high value she set on chastity. She was ashamed of another’s foul deed committed
on
her, even though not
with
her, and as a Roman woman, excessively eager for honour, she was afraid that she should be thought, if she lived, to have willingly endured what, when she lived, she had violently suffered. Since she could not display her pure conscience to the world she thought she must exhibit her punishment before men’s eyes as a proof of her state of mind. She blushed at the thought of being regarded as an accomplice in the act if she were to bear with patience what another had inflicted on her with violence.
Such has not been the behaviour of Christian women. When they were treated like this they did not take vengeance on themselves for another’s crime. They would not add crime to crime by committing murder on themselves in shame because the enemy had committed rape on them in lust. They have the glory of chastity within them, the testimony of their conscience. They have this in the sight of God, and they ask for nothing more. In fact there is nothing else for them to do
that is right for them to do. For they will not deviate from the authority of God’s law by taking unlawful steps to avoid the suspicions of men.
20.
Christians have no authority to commit suicide in any circumstance
It is significant that in the sacred canonical books there can nowhere be found any injunction or permission to commit suicide either to ensure immortality or to avoid or escape any evil. In fact we must understand it to be forbidden by the law ‘you shall not kill’,
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particularly as there is no addition of ‘your neighbour’ as in the prohibition of false witness, ‘You shall not bear false witness
against your neighbour
.’
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But that does not mean that a man who gives false witness against himself is exempt from this guilt, since the rule about loving one’s neighbour begins with oneself, seeing that the Scripture says, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’
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Moreover, if anyone who gives false witness against himself is just as guilty as if he did so against a neighbour – although the prohibition forbids false witness against a neighbour and might be misunderstood as implying that there is no prohibition of false witness against oneself – then it is the more obvious that a man is not allowed to kill himself, since the text ‘Thou shall not kill’ has no addition and it must be taken that there is no exception, not even the one to whom the command is addressed.
Hence some people have tried to extend its scope to wild and domestic animals to make it mean that even these may never be killed. But then why not apply it to plants and to anything rooted in the earth and nourished by the earth? For although this part of creation is without feeling, it is called ‘living’, and is hence capable of dying and consequently of being killed, when violence is done to it. And so the Apostle, speaking of seeds of this kind, says, ‘What you sow does not come to life unless it dies’;
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and it says in one of the psalms, ‘He killed the vines with hail.’
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But do we for this reason infer from ‘Thou shall not kill’ a divine prohibition against clearing away brushwood, and subscribe to the error of the Manicheans? That would be madness. We reject such fantasies, and when we read ‘You shall not kill’ we assume that this does not refer to bushes, which have no feelings, nor to irrational creatures, flying, swimming, walking, or
crawling, since they have no rational association with us, not having been endowed with reason as we are, and hence it is by a just arrangement of the Creator that their life and death is subordinated to our needs. If this is so, it remains that we take the command ‘You shall not kill’ as applying to human beings, that is, other persons
and
oneself. For to kill oneself is to kill a human being.
21.
All homicide is not murder
There are however certain exceptions to the law against killing, made by the authority of God himself. There are some whose killing God orders, either by a law, or by an express command to a particular person at a particular time. In fact one who owes a duty of obedience to the giver of the command does not himself ‘kill’ – he is an instrument, a sword in its user’s hand. For this reason the commandment forbidding killing was not broken by those who have waged wars on the authority of God, or those who have imposed the death-penalty on criminals when representing the authority of the State in accordance with the laws of the State, the justest and most reasonable source of power. When Abraham was ready to kill his son, so far from being blamed for cruelty he was praised for his devotion; it was not an act of crime, but of obedience. One is justified in asking whether Jephtha is to be regarded as obeying, a command of God in killing his daughter, when he had vowed to sacrifice to God the first thing he met when returning victorious from battle.
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And when Samson destroyed himself, with his enemies, by the demolition of the building,’
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this can only be excused on the ground that the Spirit, which performed miracles through him, secretly ordered him to do so. With the exception of these killings prescribed generally by a just law, or specially commanded by God himself – the source of justice – anyone who kills a human being, whether himself or anyone else, is involved in a charge of murder.
22.
Is suicide ever a mark of greatness of soul
?
Those who have committed this crime against themselves are perhaps to be admired for greatness of spirit; they are not to be praised for wisdom or sanity.
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And yet if we examine the matter more deeply
and logically, we shall find that greatness of spirit is not the right term to apply to one who has killed himself because he lacked strength to endure hardships, or another’s wrongdoing. In fact we detect weakness in a mind which cannot bear physical oppression, or the stupid opinion of the mob; we rightly ascribe greatness to a spirit that has the strength to endure a life of misery instead of running away from it, and to despise the judgement of men – and in particular the judgement of the mob, which is so often clouded in the darkness of error – in comparison with the pure light of a good conscience. If suicide is to be taken as a mark of greatness of spirit, then Theombrotus will be a shining example of that quality. The story is that when he had read Plato’s book which discusses the immortality of the soul, he hurled himself from a wall and so passed from this life to a life which he believed to be better.
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There was no kind of misfortune, no accusation, true or false, which led him to do away with himself under an intolerable load. It was only greatness of spirit which prompted him to seek death and to ‘break the pleasant bonds of life’. But Plato himself, whom he had been reading, is witness that this showed greatness rather than goodness. Plato would have been first and foremost to take this action, and would have recommended it to others, had not the same intelligence which gave him his vision of the soul’s immortality enabled him to decide that this step was not to be taken – was, indeed, to be forbidden.
‘But many people did away with themselves to avoid falling into the hands of the enemy.’ The question is not only whether they did, but whether they ought to have done so. Sound reason is certainly to be preferred to examples. Some examples are in full harmony with sound reason, and they are the more worthy of imitation as they are more eminent in their devotion to God. Neither the patriarchs nor the prophets acted thus; nor did the apostles, since the Lord Christ himself, when he advised them to escape from one town to another in case of persecution,
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could have advised them to take their own lives to avoid falling into the hands of their persecutors. If he did not order or advise this way of quitting this life, although he promised to prepare eternal dwellings for them after their departure,
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it is clear that this
course is not allowed to those who worship the one true God, whatever examples may be put forward by ‘the Gentiles who have no knowledge of him’.
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23.
The example of Cato’s suicide
Apart from Lucretia, about whom I think I have said enough already, they will not easily find an authoritative example to appeal to, unless it is the famous Cato, who committed suicide at Utica, not because he was the only one to do so, but because he passed for a man of learning and integrity, so that one would feel justified in supposing his action could have been right then, and could be right now.
The most significant point to be made about this act is that his friends, who also were educated men, wisely endeavoured to dissuade him and considered such a course to be a mark of weakness rather than strength of mind, evidence not so much of a sense of honour seeking to avoid disgrace as of weakness unable to sustain adversity. In fact, Cato himself passed this judgement in advising his beloved son to ‘place all his hopes in Caesar’s kindness’. Why did he counsel such a shameful course, if it was ‘shameful to live under the shadow of Caesar’s victory’?
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Why did he not compel his son to the with him? Torquatus is praised because he killed the son who engaged the enemy against his father’s orders, even though his son was victorious;
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then why did Cato, when conquered, spare his conquered son, when he did not spare himself? Was it more shameful to be a conqueror disobediently, than to endure a conqueror dishonourably? It follows that Cato judged it not at all shameful to live under the victorious Caesar; otherwise he would have released his son from this shame with a father’s sword. The truth seems to be that he loved his son, for whom he hoped and wished for Caesar’s pardon, as much as he grudged the praise that Caesar would win by sparing his own life. Caesar is said to have given this explanation;
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perhaps we may put it more gently, and say that Cato would have been embarrassed at receiving Caesar’s pardon.
