Salvation and Godly Rule

Suicide

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Works

Lesson: Suicide

Genre: Speech

Track: 31

Dictation Name: RR136R31

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture reading is Genesis 9:1-7. Our particular concern is verse 5, and our subject: Suicide. “And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man. And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.”

In 1917, our president was Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was a former university professor and university president turned politician, but as a historian, he was a very poor prophet. He predicted and as president, he operated in the premise that the world was on the dawn of a great and glorious new age, the Christianity, having failed, now humanistic man was going to create a new paradise on earth, they were engaged in a war to make the world safe for democracy, a world which would bring about the end of all war, of oppression, of poverty, and problems. Wilson could not have been more wrong.

At the same time, there was another politician in Czechoslovakia who was also a scholar, Thomas G. Masaryk by name. Masaryk, some years before, in the closing decade of the last century and the first few years of this century, wrote a series of articles and he also wrote a very long, detailed study on suicide, and he declared that suicide, which had been virtually unknown, so rare that it was extremely difficult to find any instance of it throughout the Middle Ages, and during the Reformation era, had suddenly, in the 19th century, become commonplace again. He predicted that the 20th century would be an era of suicidism. Not only a growing suicide rate among peoples, but that there would be a suicidal impulse among nations. As the two men, very clearly, Wilson was totally wrong and Masaryk was very much in the right.

Now, suicide has a long history in paganism. In many pagan cultures, it was recommended by some of their religions. Others regarded it heroic under certain circumstances. It disappeared when Christianity triumphed. Some scholars say they have no record that they have located of suicide during the Middle Ages. This perhaps is to {?} but certainly, during the Middle Ages and the Reformation era, it was virtually unknown. It was also virtually unknown during all of Old Testament history. There are two, possibly three, examples of it. It goes back, of course, not only to the law and to the prophets; Thou shalt not kill was recognized from the beginning as banning suicide, self-murder, but also many passages in the prophets and in the proverbs were seen as declaring that ungodly man is suicidal and suicide is wrong.

For example Proverbs 8:36, “He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul. All they that hate me love death,” and much more, but from the earliest years, the Hebrews recognized that it was Genesis 9:5 that militated against suicide. One of our problems is that sometimes we pick up the carelessness of our age with regard to scripture. We fail to remember that our Lord used the very tense of verbs, their singular or plural form, in St. Paul, to make very far-reaching statements. This was how literally and carefully they read scripture.

Now in Genesis 9:5, the first clause reads, “And surely your blood of your lives will I require.” In other words, your own blood will be required of you yourself. This very clearly bans suicide. Then, God goes on, “At the hand of every beast will I require it.” Therefore, every animal that kills a man is liable. This is why, for centuries, and it’s still on the statute books, as a result of this, not only was suicide illegal, and the surviving suicide whose life was saved was liable to criminal charges, but also any animal that killed a man was put on trial. Such trials have taken place in this country, in my lifetime, because I recall some years ago reading about a trial or two. The animal in question was tried to see was there a provocation? Was the animal being the defender of himself, or the property, or was it a vicious animal which, without any cause, it attacked and killed a man?

Then, God goes on “at the hand of man,” murder. “At the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man.” So, this verse covers a great deal of territory. It bans murder. First of all, suicide. Then, killing of people by animal where it is clearly murder, at the hand of man, and even within a family, not even there, where in ancient times, families were virtually sometimes a law unto themselves, is it permissible. Whoso, anyone, shedeth man’s blood, his own or another’s, “by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God made he man.” But suicide has been commonplace in cultures through the centuries, not only in cultures where it has been a part of the religious faith, but in cultures where it has been banned. When a culture defines, when a civilization is on its last legs, men have seen death as better than life, and as a release from the corruption of the world, in fact, as a form of salvation.

The Egyptians were not prone to suicide in ancient times, but as their civilization declined, we find that suicide became quite prevalent and idealized. For example, we find these lines in an ancient Egyptian document. “Death is before me today like the recovery of a sick man, like going forth into a garden after sickness. Death is before me today like the odor of myrrh, like sitting under a sail on a windy day. Death is before me today like the odor of lotus flowers, like sitting on the shore of drunkenness. Death is before me today like the course of a thrushet{?}, like the return of a man from the war galley to his house. Death is before me today like the clearing of the sky, like a man filing therein toward that which he knew not. Death is before me today as a man longs to see his house when he has spent years in captivity.” Those words are very revealing. Life has become a burden to such a man.

Now, the interesting thing that Masaryk pointed out in his study of suicidism was this: that the overwhelming majority of suicides in any era are not related to misery, to ugly physical circumstances. A very large percentage of the people who committed suicide in the last century and who commit suicide in this century are people that most of us would envy if we could have their material circumstances. It was not troubles as far as monetary and material circumstances are concerned. It was a loss of the will to live, a loss of meaning in life, and a burden of guilt.

Now, Masaryk stated that suicidism arose suddenly in the early years of the last century. However, if we look back to the 18th century, we find that there was a loss of the will to live then, and a kind of suicidism without an actual killing of oneself. This coincides with the rise and triumph of humanism in the 18th century. To give an illustration of this, one that I cited when we had our seminars on history, Edmund Goss{?}, the scholar, wrote of the poet Thomas Grey, whose dates were 1716-1771, and whose best known poem is the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, graveyard poetry. “He never habitually arose above this deadly dullness of the spirits. His melancholy was passive and under control, not acute and rebellious like that of copper{?}, but it was almost more enduring. It is probably that with judicious medical treatment, it might have been removed, but that’s questionable, or so far relieved as to be harmless, but it was not the habit of the men in the first half of the 18th century to take any rational care of their health. Men who lived in the country and did not hunt took no exercise at all. The constitution of the generation was suffering from the mad frolics of the preceding age, and almost everybody had a touch of gout or scurvy. Nothing was more frequent than for men in apparently robust health to break down suddenly at all points in early middle life. People were not in the last surprised when men like Garth and Fenton died of mere indolence because they became prematurely corpulent, and could not be persuaded to get out of bed. Swift, Thompson, and Grey are illustrious examples of the neglect of all hygienic precaution among quiet, middle class people in the early decades of the century.”

Now, of course, Gosse, who wrote this about forty or fifty years or more ago, was thinking naively when he assumed it was just a failure to exercise. It was a loss of will to live that turned these people, who in an earlier generation, had been country squires and men who enjoyed vigorous exercise into a people who did nothing but eat and drink, and would finally withdraw to the bed and stay there, year in and year out until they died. Life had no meaning for them.

As a result, this deep melancholia possessed the men of the 18th century, particularly where they were the most privileged and the most infected by the humanism of the day. The same was true of the last century, and the early years of this century. Masaryk wrote, “Modern psychosis is just as peculiar as modern suicidism. Statistics show that this psychosis is becoming stronger in so-called advanced countries. The principle centers of culture in civilization are also endemic centers. Suicidum is more intensive in cities. While it is his answer, Thomas so glibly{?} and what does it signify? This, that in the very centers of modern life, there is more psychosis, and there are more suicides. Here, scientific analysis confirms what we continually hear today from all sides, that people are becoming more nervous, more sensitive, and more hyper-sensitive, more exasperated, and more irritable, that they are more or less weak, tired, weary, unhappy, and saddened.

As Masaryk went on and studied thousands upon thousands of cases of suicide, he found that it was a combination of boredom, of a loss of meaning to life, and a bad conscience. Moreover, he found that it was very easy to sum up the mood of the potential suicide. It was very much the attitude of modern man, and he summed it up in these words, “Is there a God? We do not know. Is there a soul? We do not know. Is there life after death? Is there any purpose in life? We do not know. Why am I living? We do not know. Am I living? Do I really exist? We do not know. What then do we know? Is it possible to know anything at all? We do not know. And this systematic, ‘We do not know’ is called science.”

Now it is interesting that all this came from a man who himself was very much caught up in the modern mood, who was not a Christian, but he recognized very definitely what was involved. He said, in fact, “The statistics of suicides vary with the spiritual and moral religious atmosphere. Suicidism is strongest where the old religious life is most undermined.” He also found, as a result of his study, the greatest single work on suicide ever done, that was closely linked to revolution, to alcoholism, and to prostitution. He was right, therefore, eighty years ago in forecasting that suicidism would be the tenor of life in this century, and it is significant that the age of suicides is dropping continually, but it is beginning to hit the very young.

Moreover, he made this interesting observation, “The modern educated man chases happiness, but catches death.” The mood of the modern world, therefore, can be summed up as suicidism. As a matter of fact, in contemporary poetry and in contemporary novels, the mood is basically suicidal. One reason why a good deal of modern writing is so difficult to read is because it doesn’t have much meaning. The meaninglessness of life is what they’re trying to convey, and their urge is suicidal. For example, one contemporary poet, William Empson, has expressed this mood in these words,

“Shall we go all wild, boys, waste and make them lend,

Playing at the child, boys, waiting for the end?

It has all been filed, boys, history has a trend,

Each of us enisled, boys, waiting for the end.”

What he is saying is that history, as a trend, to isolate man more and more into an island in which there is no contact with any other person, no meaning, no purpose, no direction, nothing to do but to wait for the end.

Moreover, increasingly, many people, unlike Empson, are not waiting for the end. The two novelists who best expressed the modern mood were Hemingway, who used a gun. He could not wait for the end, and Faulkner, who used the bottle and always an alcoholic, finally drank himself to death with a systematic will to die. They refused to wait for the end.

But others have even worse news than Empson, who speaks of waiting for the end, waiting for judgment, or waiting for mass suicide. Wesley Fiedler{?} has written a book on the subject, and his conclusion is, “It is not Armageddon which confronts us, only a long, slow decadence. There is no end,” and this, for these people, is the worse possible news. There is no end. As a matter of fact, we find one modern grief poet, Constantine Cafabe{?} expressing these in a poem in which he compared the modern world to Rome. Rome, in the days before the fall of Rome at the hands of Barbarians, but he feels that our situation is far worse. We don’t have the hope that Rome did. Why? Hope is gone, he says, because “it is night and the Barbarians have not come, and some men have arrived from the Frontiers and they say that there are no Barbarians any longer.” There is no one left to overthrow us, as there was with Rome.

All this is very telling. Suicidism is written into the heart of modern man, and it is modern man who is telling us this continually in his poetry, in his novels, in his {?} works, and in many other ways. Fiedler, whom I quoted a moment ago, has said, “There is a weariness in the West which undercuts the struggle between Socialism, and Capitalism, Democracy, and Autocracy, a weariness with humanism itself, which underlies all the movements of our world, a weariness with the striving to be men. It is the end of man which the school of Burrows foretells, [that is, the writer William Burrows] not in terms of doom, but of triumph.” This should not surprise us.

When God warned Adam and Eve against sinning in Genesis 2:17, He said, “In the day that ye eat thereof, dying ye shall die.” That’s the literal reading in the Hebrew. In other words, the English tends to convey the idea that you’re going to die on that day, but what it says is the process of death, the move to death, the drive to death, will begin. Sin therefore, is the basic cause of suicide. It separates man from God, it destroys meaning and purpose in his life. It denies him faith, and it makes his life meaningless, and therefore, suicidal. Sin is suicide. It is the beginning of the working of death in all our being, in our mind and body, and it works to the radical destruction of the will to live.

In the very early years of the last century, William Haslett recorded an interesting example of this suicidal urge in a Renaissance scholar. Among Renaissance figures, suicidism was very prominent. Haslett wrote, “Anthony {?} Ursais, a most learned and unfortunate Italian, {?} 1446, was a striking instance of the miseries men bring upon themselves by setting their affections unreasonably on {?}. This learned man lived at Forely{?} and had an apartment in the palace. His room was so very dark that he was forced to use a candle in the daytime, and one day, going abroad, careless without putting it out, his library was set on fire, and some papers which he had prepared for the press, were burned. The instant he was informed of this ill news, he was affected even to madness. He ran furiously to the palace and, stopping at the door of his apartment, he cried aloud, ‘Christ Jesus, what mighty crime have I committed? Whom of your followers have I ever injured but you thus rage with an expiable hatred against me?’ and the turning himself to the image of the Virgin Mary near at hand, ‘Virgin,’ says he, ‘hear what I have to say for I speak in earnest, and I humbly entreat you not to hear me nor receive me into heaven, for I am determined to spend all eternity in Hell.’ Those who heard these blasphemous expressions endeavored to comfort him, but all to no purpose, for the society of mankind being no longer supportable to him, he left the city and retired like a savage to the deep solitude of the wood. Ursais{?} withdrew himself from man as well as from God, from life as well as from Heaven.”

Nor, Ursais is a good example of what we are talking about, because it shows carried to the “nth” degree what we all have the seeds of in our self. His basic faith was that his will had to be ultimate. God’s function in his world was to overrule any mistake he made, any carelessness on Ursais’ part. He wanted life on his terms, or not at all, and this is at the heart of suicides, the essence of sin, to be as God, to be your own God, determining all things and good and evil, in terms of one’s self. The suicide justified his act.

One of the most suicidal of writers of the last century was Lord Byron, very well known but basically really a minor poet. Very little of his poetry is worth much, but the bulk of his poetry is very interesting in a study of suicide, and many contemporary scholars have gone to Byron’s poetry to study this subject, and it is interesting to see the drama of suicide that he wrote. Manfred, Cain, Sardanapulis all very revealing. Now, Sardanapulis is one long drama about suicide. Sardanapulis was the last monarch of Assyria. Byron had studied his life. He knew a great deal about Sardanapulis, and it’s interesting that he made Sardanapulis his hero, because Sardanapulis was a most degenerate and decadent man. It is said that it was when some Babylonian officials, including a general, came to pay tribute, because they were a subject people, to Sardanapulis, and saw him with rouge on his features, and lipstick, and wearing a dress, playing as a girl among the women of his harem, and flirting with some of his courtiers, that they decided that Assyria is finished. They went back and prepared themselves for the attack, and overthrew Assyria, Nineveh. When this happened, when the battle was raging against him, Sardanapulis shut himself up in the palace, ordered all the women in the harem killed, and watched them die as the flames finally consumed him.

This was the man Byron chose to be a hero. It’s very interesting because Sardanapulis, throughout, is expressing Byron’s own feelings about himself. There are very many kinds of perversion present in Byron. He was a man who destroyed everything he touched, and tried finally to find death by helping the Greeks in their revolution so that he would at least be remembered as a hero, but the essence of drama, Sardanapulis is, is behind this façade of debauchery and perversion, Sardanapulis is a man who is too good for this world. The essence of his feeling is that he loves peace, and he wants to enjoy life and he wants everybody in the world to enjoy life just as he does, but the world is full of nasty people who are interested in killing and laying down the laws to people who transgress their particular moral hang-ups, and their sexual hang-ups, and so the world finally proves to be impossible for poor Sardanapulis. He is too good for this world.

Now, this is the theme, not only of Sardanapulis, but of every hymn to suicide that Byron wrote, and what comes through is this: before this kind of guilt-ridden humanism, starvation is suicide. It is an act whereby one proves that he is too good for this world. It is an act of self-justification, and so it is that Byron’s heroes, as they prepare the way for their suicide, are busy making a case. This is the way of salvation. This world is not good enough for me, and so I must depart from this life. Who knows? There may or may not be another world that is good enough for me, but in any case, I am too good for this world, and I proved the fact that I am too good for it, by taking my life. It is suicide as salvation. This is the end of the road for humanism. Masaryk himself a humanist, was right. The age of humanism has become the age of suicidism.

In Woodrow Wilson, it talks about making a world safe for democracy and ending all war, but Wilson himself manifested this strongly suicidal urge. Masaryk, as a humanist, saw the weakness of his own faith, and depicted it tellingly. He also witnessed to the fact that suicidism ended where Christian faith began, that though man found salvation in Jesus Christ, they did not become overwhelmed by this self-pity, this mood to justify themselves in their every sin, and to feel that they were too good for this world. The two plans of salvation, thus, from humanist sources themselves, are dramatically presented to us. Jesus Christ, who declares that He gives us a more abundant life, and man, the humanist, who offers us suicide as the way to salvation. The choice is clear-cut. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we give thanks unto thee that thou, in thy grace and mercy hast preserved us from this urge to self-destruction. Thou hast made us new creatures in Christ, and hast given us the victory in Him over sin and death, and thou hast made us citizens of the new creation, so that in time and in eternity, we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. Our God, we thank thee. In Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions now on our lesson, first of all? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] More people are killed on the roads than are killed in Vietnam, or in Korea, or in our wars. A large percentage of the death by accident have a suicidal motif. Very often the guilty party involved in suicidal. Then when you realize that outright suicides are greater than deaths on the highways, plus the fact that not all suicides are reported, do you realize what the situation is. You see, in many cases, a family doctor will simply cover up the fact that it is suicide, or the family will hide the fact that a large percentage of deaths that are unreported as suicides, are suicides, and many accidents in various fields have suicide as their base. Accident-prone people are suicidal. They just don’t take the direct route.

Incidentally, it’s interesting that the highest rate of suicide in any vocation or profession is among psychiatrists. Yes? Another question?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Two or three times they’ve taken samplings of accidents and traced the background of the guilty driver, and they have found that there has been mental depression, feelings of suicide and the like in his background. Now, this is not true in every case, but in a very significant percentage of cases, this has been found to be true. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. The question with regard to the Poet Cowper{?}, in that day it was pronounced Cooper. I say Cowper{?} all the time, too, because nobody knows him as Cooper today. But Cowper{?} was definitely infected by this spirit. Now, in his case, what you have to say was if here was a person who was very thoroughly infected and virtually destroyed by the spirit of suicidism in his day to the point that he went through periods of serious insanity, and it had a very shattering affect on his mind. He did become a Christian, and after that, his mental health was greatly improved, but he never overcame it. In other words, he became a Christian as something of a cripple, and the result of it was some very great poetry. It is unfortunately that Cowper’s {?} poetry is not better known today. Compared to say, Byron, the superiority of Cowper{?} is tremendous, far, far, superior poet, and yet, relatively unknown. Of course, this is not unusual. John Donne, who is now recognized as one of the great English poets, was virtually unknown until T.S. Elliott and a few others were responsible for a revival of interest in Donne’s poetry, and now not only Donne’s poetry, but his sermons have become very well known, and the number of book titles derived from the writings of Donne, it’s very interesting. Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, is a sentence from a Donne sermon. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Byron is the popular figure, not because of his poetry as much as for what he represents, and it’s amazing the number of books written on Byron, and it is precisely because you might say he was one of the first people in the sexual liberty movement. He was involved in a number of offbeat forms to sexuality, including incest which appeals to modern mind, and in so many ways, he was a very appealing figure to humanist scholars, and still is, but the bulk of his poetry is rather unreadable and childish. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Ben Johnson was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and he lived well beyond Shakespeare’s death. Ben Johnson was a Renaissance figure. He was Anglican to a limited degree, but not particularly interested in religion. He wrote a number of very lovely lyrics, the best known of which perhaps is “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes.” He was primarily a dramatist. One of his best known is “Bartholomew Fair,” which was bitterly anti-Puritan. Another very well-known one which played recently here was “Volpone,” or The Fox, which is a very biting satire on man, and in this respect, while he was a Renaissance figure, he had lost the Renaissance faith in man, and he had been sufficiently influenced by the Reformation in England to have a very low opinion of man, and see man as a sinner, and the whole point of “Volpone” is how the fox uses the fact that everybody is a sinner, and plays on the greed of an assorted group of rascals to milk them of everything.

Well, our time is up. I’d like to remind you that after the benediction, we are going to adjourn to the Hamilton home at 2169 Mandeville Canyon, not too far away. Just take Sunset out the Mandeville and turn right to 2169, and you’re all invited to come, and I believe there will be a plate or something there for donations to cover the cost of some of the things that the Guild had to purchase, so I trust we’ll see all of you there at the Hamilton home. Let us bow our heads now for the benediction.

And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

End of tape