The Anatomy of Melancholy

Theombrotus of Ambracia persuaded I do not know how many hundreds of his hearers, by an eloquent speech on the miseries of this life and the happiness of the next, to throw themselves to their deaths. Having read Plato’s divine treatise On the Soul, he led the way himself to set an example. That elegant epigram of Callimachus will tell you as much:

As the Ambracian said farewell to the sun, He is said to have leapt into the waters of Styx. He had suffered nothing to deserve death, but happened to read Divine Plato’s remarkable work on dying.

Calanus and his Indians of old hated to die a natural death; the Circumcellions and Donatists, loathing life, compelled others to kill them, and there are many such examples. But these are false and pagan doctrines, profane Stoic paradoxes, wicked examples. It does not matter what pagan philosophers decide in this matter: these doctrines are impious, abominable and founded on error. “No evil is to be done that good may come of it”; “Christ protests, Scripture protests.” God and all good men are against it.

He who stabs another can kill his body; but he who stabs himself kills his own soul. “He does a disservice who gives a beggar something to eat: what he gives is lost, and he prolongs the beggar’s life for misery.” He who gives a beggar alms, as that comic poet said, does harm because he only prolongs his misery.

But Lactantius, On True Worship, book 6, chapter 7, calls it a detestable opinion, and fully refutes it in On Wisdom, book 3, chapter 18; so does Saint Augustine, Letter 52 to Macedonius and chapter 61 to the tribune Dulcitius; and Jerome to Marcella on Blesilla’s death: “I do not receive such souls,” and so forth. He calls such men “martyrs of foolish philosophy.” So too Cyprian, On the Two Kinds of Martyrdom: “If any die in this way, weakness, ambition or madness compels them.” It is sheer madness to do so: “It is madness to die so as not to die.” Aristotle writes to this effect in Ethics, book 3, and Lipsius in his Introduction to Stoic Philosophy, book 3, dissertation 23. But it needs no refutation.

Let me add only this: in some cases those harsh judgments against people who do violence to themselves, or in some desperate fit to others—as they sometimes do by stabbing, slashing and so forth—should be softened. This applies to those who are mad, out of their minds for the time being, or found to have long suffered from melancholy, and who in its extremity do not know what they are doing, deprived of reason, judgment, everything: just as a ship without a pilot must strike the nearest rock or sandbank and be wrecked.