But they who have laid violent hands on themselves are perhaps to be
admired for their greatness of soul, though they cannot be applauded
for the soundness of their judgment. However, if you look at the
matter more closely, you will scarcely call it greatness of soul,
which prompts a man to kill himself rather than bear up against some
hardships of fortune, or sins in which he is not implicated. Is it not
rather proof of a feeble mind, to be unable to bear either the pains
of bodily servitude or the foolish opinion of the vulgar? And is not
that to be pronounced the greater mind, which rather faces than flees
the ills of life, and which, in comparison of the light and purity of
conscience, holds in small esteem the judgment of men, and specially
of the vulgar, which is frequently involved in a mist of error? And,
therefore, if suicide is to be esteemed a magnanimous act, none can
take higher rank for magnanimity than that Cleombrotus, who (as the
story goes), when he had read Plato's book in which he treats of the
immortality of the soul, threw himself from a wall, and so passed
from this life to that which he believed to be better. For he was
not hard pressed by calamity, nor by any accusation, false or true,
which he could not very well have lived down: there was, in short,
no motive but only magnanimity urging him to seek death, and break
away from the sweet detention of this life. And yet that this was a
magnanimous rather than a justifiable action, Plato himself, whom he
had read, would have told him; for he would certainly have been forward
to commit, or at least to recommend suicide, had not the same bright
intellect which saw that the soul was immortal, discerned also that to
seek immortality by suicide was to be prohibited rather than encouraged.
Again, it is said many have killed themselves to prevent an enemy
doing so. But we are not inquiring whether it has been done, but
whether it ought to have been done. Sound judgment is to be preferred
even to examples, and indeed examples harmonize with the voice of
reason; but not all examples, but those only which are distinguished
by their piety, and are proportionately worthy of imitation. For
suicide we cannot cite the example of patriarchs, prophets, or
apostles; though our Lord Jesus Christ, when He admonished them to
flee from city to city if they were persecuted, might very well
have taken that occasion to advise them to lay violent hands on
themselves, and so escape their persecutors. But seeing He did not
do this, nor proposed this mode of departing this life, though
He were addressing His own friends for whom He had promised to
prepare everlasting mansions, it is obvious that such examples as
are produced from the "nations that forget God," give no warrant of
imitation to the worshippers of the one true God.