John Donne - Delphi Poets Series (50 page)

Therefore, Bosquier says, “Our savior Christ did not exceed forty days in his fast so he would not seem a self-homicide.” He interprets the words, “He hungered,” to mean, “Then he perceived his body to languish and suffer detriment by fasting.” For, if he had not hungered until then, his fasting would have had no virtue, so that he gave in when he found the state of his body impaired by fasting, still pursuing and imitating the superstition of the philosophers who taught that “While we strengthen the body, we are being made more mortal,” and that “By attenuation we are made like God.” How much the writers in the Roman Church allow and obliquely exhort these inordinate fasts and other disciplines appears from what I cited above from Scribanius—indeed, wherever they have occasion to speak of this matter. On that topic more than any other do they so often inculcate, “It was the practice of the devil to appear to Saint Francis and cry out to him that no man who kills himself with such maceration could be saved,” which Bonaventure relates in his life of Francis.

They teach that we ought to outdo whatever others have done. They say, “The monks in Prester John’s dominions fast strictly for fifty days, standing all the while in water up to the chin.” They find in the chronicles of Konrad of Lichtenau, abbot of Ursperg, the story of a maid who fasted two years and a half after she had received [in communion] the body of our blessed savior. They say a desert monk fasted twenty-two years without eating or drinking anything. They say no fast can be too severe that is undertaken to reduce our body to tameness. Indeed Sayer says, “Although that tameness is already perfectly accomplished, still a man is bound to the fasts that are enjoined.” Aquinas says, “Fasting, even without charity, washes away sin.”

By this rigor of fasting they seem sure that our savior stayed awake all those forty days (Matt. 4:2, Mark 1:13, Luke 4:2), because, says Bosquier, “He who takes bed takes breakfast.” But since it is unlikely that Moses slept in his forty days of conversation with God (Exod. 24:18), it is also unlikely that Christ did any less than he. Saint Francis is extolled by them for observing three Lents every year—just what Saint Jerome so detested in the Montanists—and, although their aims were different, still this shows that to some aims these enormous witherings of our bodies are allowable. For that reason John the Baptist’s austerity (Matt. 3:4) is so much dignified, and Saint Peter’s feeding on lupines, and Saint Matthew’s living without meat. The Emperor Justinian “In an extreme sickness during Lent would take nothing but herbs, salt, and water.” According to the Carthusian rule, even though it appears that meat would save the patient’s life, he may not eat it. According to the Apostolic Constitutions, which Torres extols so much that by them he refuses much of the Beformed Church’s doctrine, “A man must fast to death rather than receive any meat from an excommunicated person.” In another chapter, “In a case of extreme necessity if anything is accepted from such a person, it may be bestowed in full, so that their alms may be burned and consumed to ashes—but not meat with which to nourish ourselves.”

To end this section on desertion: since we may waive our defense that the law gives by leaving our case to a jury; since nature allows us to repel force with force; since I may without fleeing (or eating when I have the means) turn myself over to an executioner or a famine; since I
may
offer my life, even for another’s temporal good, which I
must
do for his spiritual good; since I may give another my board in a shipwreck and so drown; since I may hasten my arrival in heaven by consuming penances; since all that is the case, it is a wayward and ignoble stubbornness in argument to say I must not kill myself but I may let myself die. As to affirmations and denials, of omissions and commissions, of injunctions and prohibitory commands, always the one implies and enwraps the other. If the matter can be resolved and governed only by an outward
act
and always by that, then if I forbear to swim in a river and so perish, because there is no act, I shall not be guilty. But I shall be guilty if I discharge at myself a pistol that I did not know was loaded and intended no harm, because there is an
act.

Mariana the Jesuit seems to be of this latter opinion, as we shall have occasion to note in the next member and species of homicide, which is abstinence.

6. Before we come to that topic, we must consider another species of homicide, which is mutilation or maiming—although it neither is nor naturally could be included in Toledo’s division.

In civil courts self-maiming is not subject to the same penalty as self- homicide. But if it is accompanied by the same malignity it is in conscience the same sin, especially towards ourselves, because it violates the same reason, that nobody may encroach upon the body over which he has no dominion.

For that reason it is also unlawful for us to deliver ourselves into bondage—which I mention here because it arises from the same ground, and I am loath to accord it a particular section. Yet the holy Paulinus, a confessor and bishop of Nola, than whom I find no man celebrated with more fame of sanctity and integrity, in order to redeem a widow’s son delivered himself as a slave to the Vandals and was exported from Italy to Africa—when as a bishop he was needed in his place, I think, for it happened only five years before his death.

To return to mutilation, it is clear from the canons that with reference to illegality it counts as much and goes as far to have maimed as to have killed. A council at London in 1075 passed a canon that forbids a clergyman to be present at a judgment of death or of mutilation. Among the Apostolic Canons is this one, “He who castrates himself cannot be a clergyman because he is a homicide of himself and an enemy to God’s creature.” In our law, “To castrate is to maim.” In the next canon it is said, “A clergyman who castrates himself must be deposed because he is a self-homicide. For that fault a layman must be excommunicated for three years, because he betrays his own life.” Castration was therefore counted equivalent to killing. Calvin counted it so heinous that he built his argument against divorce on this ground, “God made them one body, and in no case is it lawful for a man to tear his own body.” But if castration is as lawful as divorces are lawful, certainly the peremptory sentence against it must admit of some modification!

There are, of course, examples of holy men who have maimed themselves to disable themselves from taking on the burden of priesthood. One was Saint Mark the Evangelist, who to that end cut off his thumb.

Also, since our savior said, “Many should castrate themselves for the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:12), Athenagoras fifty [actually, 150] years after Christ says that many did it. Apart from these examples, nobody doubts what Sayer says, “That a man unjustly detained to a sure execution may cut off the limb by which he is tied, if he has no other way to escape; or, being surrounded by dogs, he may cut off a hand and cast it to them in order to distract them while he escapes.”

7. The last species of homicide in Toledo’s argument is this: the last act is an actual helping and concurrence to it. Every step and degree conducing purposely to that end is by judges of conscience justly called homicide. So Arduino, reckoning up all poisons that have a natural malignity and tendency to destroy man’s body, does not exclude a flea, although it never kills, because it tries to do so and does all the damage it can. He is diligent in assigning preservatives and restoratives against the flea.

Upon the Amalekite who told David he helped Saul die when he found him too weak to stab himself, David pronounced a judgment of death, for, he says, “Your own mouth has confessed that you have killed the Lord’s anointed” (II Sam. 1:16). Mariana the Jesuit, whom I have cited above, reckons this actual concurring in one’s own death as heavy as the act itself—as it seems, even though the party does not know it. After he decided how a heretical king might be poisoned, he was diligent in this prescription, “The king must not be constrained to take the poison himself, but some other way administer it to him. Therefore, it should be prepared and conveyed in some way other than meat or drink, because otherwise, either willingly or ignorantly, the king would kill himself.” Thus he provides that the king who must die under the sins of tyranny and heresy must still be defended from concurring in his own death, even ignorantly, as though this were a greater sin.

Since, on this reading, the hastening of our death by such an act is the same as complete self-homicide, let us consider how far unreproved custom, example, and law either allow it or command it. That it is allowable seems to me somewhat proved in that “Before any man accuses him, a malefactor may go and declare his fault to the judge,” according to Soto.

Among Italian narratives, the one in Sansovino concerning England has many marks and impressions of malice. He tells of a custom, which he falsely says is observed here. “Men condemned to be hanged are always accompanied to their executions by all their kindred, who then hang on their feet to hasten their end. Also, when a patient is abandoned by the physicians, his nearest kinsman strangles him with a pillow.” The author had this much ground, that ordinarily at executions men, out of charity as they think, do so, and women who despair of sick persons’ recovery used to take their pillows from under them and so let them die sooner. Have they any more dominion over these bodies than the persons themselves? Or if a man were able to do these things to himself, might he not do so? Or might he not with a safe conscience put so many weights in his pockets as would accomplish the stretching? I speak only comparatively; might he not do it as well as they?

In my understanding, such an act either by an executioner or a bystander is in no way justifiable, for it is an injury both to the party, whom a sudden pardon might redeem, and to the judge, who has appointed a painful death to deter others from crime. The breaking of the legs of crucified men (John 19:32), which was done to hasten death, was not allowed except by petition. The law might be much defrauded if such violence might be used where the breaking of the halter delivered the prisoner from death, as it does in some places. Good opinions concur that one should always do without doubt whatever makes for easy, or escapes painful, passage out of this life. In such cases a man may do things more allowably by his own act than a stranger may. For the law of nature inclines and excuses him. Others are forbidden by many laws to hasten his death, because they are otherwise interested only as parts of the whole body of the state, and thus it concerns them that justice be executed. We see that this, like the case of withdrawing the pillows, is ordinarily done and counted a pious deed. The Athenian executions were always by the hand of the offender in judgments of death by poison.

In the law of purgation assigned by God to ease a man on whom the spirit of jealousy had fallen, the woman was to take the water of curses and bitterness, which would make her infamous and make her belly swell and her thighs rot (Num. 5:11-22). Those forms of purgation that were called common ones lasted long, even in the church, for there is nothing extant against them until Steven V in the year 885. Charlemagne, in whom the church acknowledged enough piety, introduced one form more severe than the rest, which was to walk on nine burning harrows.

When a bishop named Brito was extrajudicially calumnied by the people for having gotten his laundress with child, after his innocence had prevailed so far with God that the one-month-old child, being adjured in the name of Christ, exonerated him, Brito did not accept it but chose and performed a kind of purgation by carrying burning coals upon his head. Evidently in England both kinds of trial by ordeal, by water and by fire, lasted until King John’s time. Although men were forced to go into the ordeal of boiling water, that was only for the meaner sort, but to carry the three-pound weight of red-hot iron, which was for the purgation of persons of better quality, was an act (as all the foregoing were) in which a man must of necessity do something actually against himself and be the executioner of his own judgment. As long as these forms of purgation—and the other, by battle—were legal, they were lawfully done.

In Saint Dorotheus, who everywhere professed a love of the obedience that he himself called indiscreet, you will read many praises given to men who not only forsook themselves but actually furthered their destruction—although not effectually, which makes no difference, if it is in dangers that men usually do not escape. He praises one friar who, being commanded by his abbot to return one night, when the waters were risen that night committed himself to a raging torrent in such an act of obedience.

Another was bidden by his abbot to go into the town where he suspected he would fall into some temptation by a certain spectacle. He went, but with the protestation that he hoped he was in the protection not of God but of the one who sent him. But the most natural story to our present purpose is this. A hoary old man, seeing his servant mistake poison for honey and put it into his broth, ate it nevertheless and without chiding. When the servant perceived it and exclaimed, “Sir, I have killed you,” he answered, “It’s all the same, for if God would have had me eat honey he would have directed your hand to the honey.” We have sufficient testimony to the holiness of Joseph of Arimathaea who, being sent by the apostles to preach the gospel, among other persecutions was constrained to drink poison, which necessarily involved the act that we now discuss. How much did Saint Andrew contribute to his own crucifixion? How much did Saint Lawrence contribute to his own broiling when he called to the tyrant, “This side is done; turn the other, and then eat”? “Great men make precepts by their deeds,” says Quintilian. These acts of men who otherwise are counted holy may always be good warrants and examples to us, when the cause is not prejudged by any greater authority such as scripture or councils, nor that very act accused by any author.

But to stay no longer with examples, among casuists I observe that the greater number denies that it is lawful for a condemned man to do the last, immediate act that leads to his death, such as the drinking of poison, but they agree that he may do the acts that are somewhat more removed.