Could suicide be seen as something reasonable? asks A.N. Wilson in this extract from his new book, Goethe: His Faustian Life

“Of course, people do kill themselves a good deal, between fourteen and nineteen. It’s an age in life when things are very much out of proportion. Schoolboys kill themselves because they don’t think they can pass examinations and girls kill themselves because their mothers won’t let them go to the pictures with unsuitable boyfriends. It’s a kind of period where everything appears to be in glorious technicolour.” – Agatha Christie, Ordeal by Innocence.

It is difficult to think of any cultural difference more profound than that between societies which approve, and those which abhor, suicide. Imperial Japan, or ancient Rome, saw suicide as noble – certainly more noble than allowing yourself to be humiliated, or to die in disgraceful circumstances. Hence, Seneca, rather than be executed by his pupil Nero, underwent the Stoic’s end, slitting his wrists in the bath, while discoursing on the wisdom of his life and his end.

Christians who believe that life is the gift of God have traditionally seen the wilful taking of one’s own life as a blasphemous rejection of his bounty. Suicides in the past would be forbidden Christian burial, buried at crossroads, even impaled in some countries. I have attended funerals of those who committed suicide where the coffin was not permitted to be brought into the church for the service.

For this reason, in the post-Christian countries of the West, suicide is seen as a manifestation of disease, the result of depression or other mental illness which should be prevented at all costs. Suicide is the twelfth leading cause of death in the United States, with approximately 47,000 deaths per year.

In England and Wales, an average of eighteen people kill themselves every day. In Scotland, for reasons which have not been fully discovered, the statistics are higher – is this because of the shorter days in a Scottish winter, the severity of the winter, the dangerously depressing effect of whisky drinking, as opposed to wine or beer consumption in other countries?

Any article on the subject, whether in specific medical journals or in regular journalism, speaks, understandably enough, of the phenomenon as an undesirable one, something which should be treated as a grave social problem.

But, what if suicide were to be seen in quite different terms, as something reasonable? Sophocles expresses the thought, in Oedipus at Colonus, that not to have been born is best. (Admittedly a different thing from justifying suicide, but one thought could lead to the other.)

We do not know how many of the 47,000 Americans who will commit suicide this year have done so as a result of mental illness, or intolerable sadness of one kind or another, and how many have decided that, from an intellectual standpoint, life is simply not worth living.

Goethe returned to the question at various points in his life and, paradoxically, for a man who held onto existence for over eight decades, he never seems to have varied his Senecan view that suicide is a potentially noble thing. His most famous novel, however, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was accused (on flimsy evidence) of having created an epidemic of suicides in Europe; here the situation is murkier, and harder to disentangle. In this story what begins as a pastoral of unrequited love becomes an anguished cry of fury against life itself. Goethe himself spoke in retrospect of Werther having gone mad.

The origins of the story are well known, and clearly illustrate the manner in which Goethe made use of personal experience and transformed it into art. In his autobiography, he made no apology for this. He recalled being so depressed, as a twenty-three-year-old, that he slept with a dagger beside his pillow and felt tempted to plunge it into himself. With the retrospect of middle age he was able to say that it was a lack of occupation which led to his depression. He was able to “laugh off” thoughts of suicide, once he had transformed the incidents of that summer into art. There is a breezy callousness in this memory of an earlier self which is not present in the novel, where the raw emotions of a man who is governed by passions and violent mood swings is captured with unforgettable sympathy and sharpness.

This is an extract from Goethe: His Faustian Life – The Extraordinary Story of Modern Germany, a Troubled Genius and the Poem that Made Our World by A. N. Wilson (Bloomsbury Continuum). Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

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