Tetralogue II: Suicide

To those who wander, lost and aimless; for the sleepless and the restless.

A continuation of the Tetralogue. Other parts are found here: Part I; Part III; Part IV; n.b. this is the longest part by far.

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Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
- T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

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[A]fter having made the movements of infinity, [faith] makes the movements of finitude.
- Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

This is, of course, a very dangerous word. Just like its first cousin, divorce, it ought never be even uttered except in the most dire times. I find its etymology—or rather, my self-appointed etymology, as I haven’t a clue of what the “official” one is—a helpful reminder of its true meaning. From Latin: sui-, the genitive form of the third person reflexive pronoun (“his self’s”); -cide, I imagine from caedo, caedere, “to cut.” Hence, suicide is the cutting of oneself out of the tapestry of Providence. It is to elide, to bleach out, one’s colors from the Author’s manuscript—or at least, to attempt to.

In Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy writes what follows. Forgive the lengthy quotation; I have condensed where possible.

Thought Experiment: A new cure for depression:
The only cure for depression is suicide.
This is not meant as a bad joke but as the serious proposal of suicide as a valid option. Unless the option is entertained seriously, its therapeutic value is lost. No threat is credible unless the threatener means it.

This treatment of depression requires a reversal of the usual therapeutic rationale. The therapeutic rationale, which has never been questioned, is that depression is a symptom. A symptom implies an illness; there is something wrong with you. An illness should be treated.

Suppose you are depressed. You may be mildly or seriously depressed, clinically depressed, or suicidal. What do you usually do? Or what does one do with you? Do nothing or something. If something, what is done is always based on the premise that something is wrong with you and therefore it should be remedied....

Now, call into question the unspoken assumption: something is wrong with you. Like Copernicus and Einstein, turn the universe upside down and begin with a new assumption.

Assume you are quite right. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth—and who are luckily exempt from depression—would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Begin with the reverse hypothesis, like Copernicus and Einstein. You are depressed because you should be. You are entitled to your depression. In fact, you’d be deranged if you were not depressed....

Now consider, not the usual therapeutic approach, but a more ancient and honorable alternative, the Roman option. I do not care for life in this deranged world, it is not an honorable way to live; therefore, like Cato, I take my leave. Or, as Ivan said to God in The Brothers Karamazov: If you exist, I respectfully return my ticket.

Now notice that as soon as suicide is taken as a serious alternative, a curious thing happens. To be or not to be becomes a true choice, where before you were stuck with to be. Your only choice was how to be least painfully, either by counseling, narcotizing, boozing, groupizing, womanizing, man-hopping, or changing your sexual preference.

If you are serious about the choice, certain consequences follow. Consider the alternatives. Suppose you elect suicide. Very well. You exit. Then what? What happens after you exit? Nothing much. Very little, indeed. After a ripple or two, the water closes over your head as if you had never existed. You are not indispensable, after all. You are not even a black hole in the Cosmos. All that stress and anxiety was for nothing. Your fellow townsmen will have something to talk about for a few days. Your neighbors will profess shock and enjoy it. One or two might miss you, perhaps your family, who will also resent the disgrace. Your creditors will resent the inconvenience. Your lawyers will be pleased. Your psychiatrist will be displeased. The priest or minister or rabbi will say a few words over you and down you will go on the green tapes and that’s the end of you. In a surprisingly short time, everyone is back in the rut of his own self as if you had never existed.

Now, in the light of this alternative, consider the other alternative. You can elect suicide, but you decide not to. What happens? All at once, you are dispensed. Why not live, instead of dying? You are free to do so. You are like a prisoner released from the cell of his life. You notice that the door to the cell is ajar and that the sun is shining outside. Why not take a walk down the street? Where you might have been dead, you are alive. The sun is shining.

Suddenly you feel like a castaway on an island. You can’t believe your good fortune. You feel for broken bones. You are in one piece, sole survivor of a foundered ship whose captain and crew had worried themselves into a fatal funk. And here you are, cast up on a beach and taken in by islanders who, it turns out, are themselves worried sick—over what? Over status, saving face, self-esteem, national rivalries, boredom, anxiety, depression from which they seek relief mainly in wars and the natural catastrophes which regularly overtake their neighbors.

And you, an ex-suicide, lying on the beach? In what way have you been freed by the serious entertainment of your hypothetical suicide? Are you not free for the first time in your life to consider the folly of man, the most absurd of all the species, and to contemplate the comic mystery of your own existence? And even to consider which is the more absurd state of affairs, the manifest absurdity of your predicament: lost in the Cosmos and no news of how you got into such a fix or how to get out—or the even more preposterous eventuality that news did come from the God of the Cosmos, who took pity on your ridiculous plight and entered the space and time of your insignificant planet to tell you something.

The consequences of entertainable suicide? Lying on the beach, you are free for the first time in your life to pick up a coquina and look at it....

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o’clock on an ordinary morning:

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn’t have to.
- Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos

What is there to say after all of that? Well, I’ve a few things I wish to say. For one, you, friend, are precious and delightful, and so many—least of which, I—would be unspeakably devastated if you elected the Roman option. But the main point, really? Why, it’s that Percy isn’t recommending the Roman option either. Not really. He has read his Kierkegaard, his Dostoyevsky, his Augustine, his Scriptures. He does not wish for anyone to kill himself. He only wishes for us to realize the freedom we have—the freedom we have in Christ, rightly spoken. We are not slaves to sin and violence and horror. We do, in a really real and true fashion, transcend it, if we but allow Christ’s yoke to take supremacy. For it is always a choice, even when we think it is not. That you continue to fall in the evening and rise in the morning is, truly, volitional. You could end it—all—horror of horrors, yes, but true. And you do not. You do not because, in your spirit, there burns yet some fire, on which you’ve never laid eyes, some fierce blaze of Courage and Love and Beauty and Bravery and Righteousness and—and some know it by its name, the Holy Ghost. It is a Pillar of Fire, holding your hand alway, despite what fires of torture and horror you may bear. It is Love, which bears all things. It is Life, that very same miracle which once swept Lazarus onto his feet.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard writes of Knights of the Infinite [Resignation]; men who have surrendered all existential cares and concerns to God; and that they are recognizable by how easily they drift through the world, because to them, in a very real sense, nothing matters (nothing that is mundane). But then: but then he writes further: of Knights of Faith. What does Faith do? Faith goes further. Faith seizes God’s claim that those who Seek First the Kingdom shall have the rest added also. Faith is the total and entire inversion of the Knights of the Infinite, for whom nothing matters; to the Knights of Faith, everything matters. Having given everything up in resignation, they then receive the world in return. All is redeemed, bought [at a price], but then it is not kept in the storehouses of Heaven—no, no, it is poured down, back unto His Faithful. Now, in Kierkegaard’s estimation, for as rare as the Knights of the Infinite are, the Knights of Faith are all the more rare. He describes the latter thus:

He finds pleasure in everything, takes part in everything, and every time one sees him participating in something particular, he does it with an assiduousness that marks the worldly man who is attached to such things.... He goes to church. No heavenly gaze or any sign of the incommensurable betrays him; if one did not know him, it would be impossible to distinguish him from the rest of the crowd, for at most his hearty and powerful singing of the hymns proves that he has good lungs. In the afternoon, he takes a walk to the woods. He enjoys everything he sees... With the freedom from care of a reckless good-for-nothing, he lets things take care of themselves, and yet every moment of his life he buys the opportune time at the highest price, for he does not do even the slightest thing except by virtue of the absurd. And yet, yet—... this man has made and at every moment is making the movement of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, the most precious thing in the world, and yet the finite tastes just as good to him as to one who never knew anything higher, because his remaining in finitude would have no trace of a timorous, anxious routine, and yet he has this security that makes him delight in it as if finitude were the surest thing of all. And yet, yet the whole earthly figure he presents is a new creation by virtue of the absurd. He resigned everything infinitely, and then he grasped everything again by virtue of the absurd. He is continually making the movement of infinity, but he does it with such precision and assurance that he continually gets finitude out of it, and no one ever suspects anything else. It is supposed to be the most difficult feat for a ballet dancer to leap into a specific posture in such a way that he never once strains for the posture but in the very leap assumes the posture. Perhaps there is no ballet dancer who can do it—but this knight does it. Most people live completely absorbed in worldly joys and sorrows; they are benchwarmers who do not take part in the dance. The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have elevation. They make the upward movement and come down again, and this, too, is not an unhappy diversion and is not unlovely to see. But every time they come down, they are unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for a moment, and this wavering shows that they are aliens in the world. It is more or less conspicuous according to their skill, but even the most skillful of these knights cannot hide this wavering. One does not need to see them in the air; one needs only to see them the instant they touch and have touched the earth—and then one recognizes them. But to be able to come down in such a way that instantaneously one seems to stand and to walk, to change the leap into life into walking, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian—only that knight can do it, and this is the one and only marvel.
- Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

And so it may be, dear friend, that, unlike Abraham, about whom Kierkegaard models much of his reasoning in Fear and Trembling, we are not given the command to sacrifice our Isaac; but rather, God simply foregoes the command and translates His Will directly into Creation. And so it may be that we are not asked to resign some fraction of our kingdom; no, that the Kingdom of God, rather than suffereth violence, doeth it, and the resignation is irrespective of our volition.

It may be that we are forced to lose a dear, and good, love.

Towards what end? That is the question. To contemplate suicide, as even Kierkegaard is also writing about—Abraham could have simply killed himself when faced with the Divine imperative of infanticide—to contemplate suicide is to establish the full dominion of our powers. We are less impotent than we think. May I quote myself? This is from AD 2017, to a friend who threw me away during the pandemic. Her name was—is, I suppose—_____. She is a soft materialist and infected with scientism.

In Christian parlance, this “season” in your life is ending. I have grown jaded to that word. I have heard it so many countless times. And so I suggest a new word, one which is a little newer than the word “season,” but one which too has a rich tradition: this chapter is ending.

For if every life is but a story, with God as its resplendent Author, and if all the life and death, every sinner and every stone, are but threads of an enormous coruscating anthology: then do not stories have chapters? Sometimes, the chapters are very long. And they drag on and on, and you start to flip forward through the pages, flicking the slivers of time between your thumb and forefinger, waiting to see what the page number is on which you spy the next bolded number. And that exercise can be what constitutes life: a striving, an existential yearning, towards the future, coming at the expense of flipping past the pages of the present because you need to know when the chapter ends.

But this restlessness is, of course, mere folly. We cannot transport ourselves to the end of a chapter; in fact, our only motile power is to elect the end of our story, spilling blood in order to spill into the Story to come. Nor can we ever wrench ourselves from the threads we inhabit, swooping out over the tapestry to see what textures and harmonies our story is forming with others. No, in the hands of an infinite God, we are in many ways simply one-dimensional beings. We hurtle down this thin black line of Time, and there is nothing but the present. For there is no chapter’s end to peer at—not yet. It has been written, but in the stars, and we have not yet the eyes to see. We know how the story shall end, but never the chapter. We cannot decipher the constellations’ hidden meanings. We are but minuscule points hurtling down the straight and narrow.

How do we cut open that thin black line and divine a method of geometry? For we are to imitate God, and He is the prime Geometer. You know that answer, though—by two different metaphors. The couplets of faith and hope, faith and love, and hope and love—they are mere lines—but faith and hope and love? There shines the bounded area, the triangle, of units squared: there shines an area to cavort in. And of course there is then my metaphor, of the husband and the wife and the life to come therefrom, and the formation thereby of that same healthful, bursting triangle and the cavorting endemic thereto. And when the latter triangle blossoms both from and upon the former, a pyramid is built up and up and up, and from the massing variegation of human existence there springs a perfect cathedral unto Heaven, and the stained glass is human hearts; for those who reflect and refract Christ are but lesser lights which are illumined by the Light, Lux Mundi, and our colors and shapes and images are visible only by the pervading sunlight of Christ’s reign....

And so, _____, I am so thankful for you, and for your present estate, and for your long-borne patient suffering. The placid, noxious death-in-life that sometimes shadows o’er our days just as the lifeless moon eclipses the salubrious sun—it too meets an end. The death-in-life meets death. It crumbles into powerless pieces at the feet of He of Whom it was once written, Fui quod es, eris quod Sum:

As you are, I was; as I Am, you will be.

From glory to Glory, but everything shall be different. The thin veneer we presently tread—this precarious present tense—shall not fully pass away. In the Life to come, everything shall be familiar, but full of so much more. Now, it’s as if we wander darkened streets at night, glimpsing only vague forms and flickering shadows. Then, the light shall be ne’er-ending, and flesh and fullness shall be imputed on the forms and shadows, and everything shall be so familiar, and yet so novel, so exotic, so new. For all shall be made new.

By persevering, by pressing on, by continuing, friend, you are contradicting (Latin: “having said/told against”) suicide. For I hope, by now, you realize that I use the word in a far greater, more sweeping fashion, than does perhaps the DSM-V. And it is only by contradicting suicide that everything else—certainly the Words to follow—becomes possible. I will close this lengthy section with a rather lengthy poem, read aloud once upon a time unto me and others by a very different _____. (And I wish I might have read it aloud to you, friend.) And then I shall say one thing about it, and then we shall be on to greener pastures: that, I promise you.

https://poets.org/poem/suicide [in the manuscript, I rendered the poem here]

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In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton writes of repetition, and how God is so much Younger than us that He can perfectly delight in repetition. Every day, the sun rises, not because of “natural laws,” but because God orders it in mirthful delight: “Again!” Every day, as your eyelids flicker open, and the despair comes crashing down upon you: it is yet a new day, filled with tasks that you—that we—mustn’t lay by. Take heart, friend: for there are yet so many good works for you to do. God yet has, in His own way, need of you. There is yet so much beauty which you may impart on His Creation. What the devil, what all his flies and mongrels and imps and minions seek to do, is to cause us to suicide: to cause us to let go of the scripts which we have had given to us, Written for us, by the Author. But we have, all of us, our parts to play: our characters, written—etched—into the exploding hearts of every star of every constellation—the whole of Creation glows with the script. The blocking, the set changes, every act and every line and every costume change: O, friend, if only we could see it!—but our souls should shatter at the heat, the life, of it all. It has all been Written. We need only labor onwards, following the gentle cues of the Helper, our gift from Christ: the Holy Ghost. Der Geist hilft.

The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean.... When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
- C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces