Suicide and individuality....

 In an earlier piece, we looked at suicide alongside the dogma of the Christian churches, as an act that precludes repentance, and as an act that demonstrates hubris, in that our lives are the creation of God and therefore any decision to terminate a life is NOT OUR’S…

Trouble is, however, that such a dogmatic declaration of the churches’ position that seems to equate God, and all things holy with the LIGHT, while at the same time, denying that darkness in the human soul can be holy and not necessarily sinful. Criminality, perversion and evil, as also legitimate psychological, spiritual, ethical and religious concepts, need not necessarily wrap their arms around the act of suicide. For many that may seem like a division without a difference. However, there are many legitimate observations that warrant consideration from the perspective of “the human soul’s darkness’ as inclusive of, even emblematic of and incarnation the notion of the human being created imago dei, in the image of God.

Is it a stretch too far to contemplate the notion that if and when all hope is/seems/ is perceived to be lost that such a state is by definition evil, not of God’s ordaining, outside the definition of the fullness both of God and of the human being. Would any God, by offering ‘free will’ not be willing and able to include the choice of suicide in that landscape? Indeed, we can read, listen to, and reflect upon the Cri de Coeur on the Cross, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (My God, my God, why has thou  forsaken me?”) as the epic, tragic, and archetypal cry for help that echoes throughout human history.

 As James Hillman writes about this moment:

The cry on the cross is the archetype of every cry for help. It sounds the anguish of betrayal, sacrifice and loneliness. Nothing is left, not even God. My only certainty in my suffering, which I ask to be taken from me by dying. An animal awareness of suffering, and full identification with it, becomes the humiliating ground of transformation. Despair ushers in the death experience and is at the same time the requirement for resurrection. Life as it was before, the status quo ante, died when despair was born. (Hillman, Suicide and the Soul, p. 75)

Hillman’s starting place for entering the experience of one on the brink of taking one’s own life, is that moment when there is no hope, and no God and only nothingness in the darkness of profound suffering. While most of us have not ‘gone there’ or not spoken with one who is at that moment in that blackness, the starting place, for Hillman, is the sine qua non of any psychological relationship with the person in that moment.

And Hillman offers a revealing, even if somewhat upsetting and unsettling paradox about that moment:

As much as worship, as much as love, as much as sex, hunger, self-preservation and dread itself, is the urge toward the fundamental truth of life. If some call this truth God, then the impulse toward death is also toward the meeting with God, which some theologies hold is possible only by death. Suicide, taboo in theology, demands that God reveal Himself. And the God suicide demands, as well as the demon that would seem to prompt the act, is the Deus absconditus (the concept of the fundamentally unknowability of the essence of God) who is unable to be known., yet able to be experienced, who is unrevealed, yet more real and present in the darkness of suicide that the revealed God and all His testimony. Suicide offers immersion in, and possible regeneration through the dark side of God. It would confront the last, or worst, truth in God. His own hidden negativity. (Op. Cit. p. 70)

Is this darkness-of/in/within/inherent to-God compatible with what has come to us as Christians, as a theology of death and resurrection? Clearly, on the surface, “No.” However, is it conceivable that we (collectively, honourably and authentically, as far as we could/would imagine) drew lines around, limits around and circumscribed our picture of the unknowable God? Is the Christian exclusion of suicide as a fundamentally religious, spiritual, disciplined and holy act really justified if God is truly “absconditus”? Is, was our need to put some kind of definition around our discussion, reflection, definition and worship of God instrumental in this exclusion? Has history tried to ‘show’ us how blinkered, with the best of intentions, our theology is and has been?

We know that a vast majority of people, fall into a category of “sensate” as measured by the Myers-Briggs personality assessment instrument. This design holds the view that a sensate personality is someone driven by strong cravings for sensory and sensual satisfaction. (International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, Vol.2, 1992, The Hare Krishna Character Type: A Study of Sensate Personality, (Book) Review: by Christopher Ross, p.65-67) We also know, implicitly, that the world functions at the level of demonstrable actions, words, and sensate experiences. And, it seems reasonable to suggest that, while symbols and images and abstractions and ethereal and ideal notions exist, they belong in a place of religious, spiritual, philosophical and psychological significance and relationship. We employ metaphors to better identify and explain our primary ideas. And, there is a strong theological principle that all “things” are included in what can be considered “ultimate” considerations, in order to bridge the language and epistemological divide between God and man, between the sensate and the intuitive. Nevertheless, there continues to be a deep dark avoidance, and intellectual and emotional antipathy within the churches to the act of suicide.

Life AND Death, however, continue to be regarded as opposites, perhaps even abstract and concrete enemies among conventional thought. Philosophy, however, considers them together.

Hillman again:

To philosophize is partly to enter death: philosophy is death’s rehearsal, as Plato said, It is one of the forms of the death experience. It has been called ‘dying to the world’. The first movement in working through any problem is taking the problem upon oneself as an experience. One enters an experience by joining it. One approaches death by dying. Approaching death requires a dying in soul, daily, as the body dies in tissue. And as the body is renewed, so is the soul regenerated through death experiences. Therefore, working at the death problem is both a dying from the world with its illusory sustaining hope that there is no death, not really, and a dying into life, as a fresh and vital concern with essentials. Because living and dying in this sense imply ach other, any act that holds off death prevents life. ‘How’ to die means nothing less than ‘how’ to live. Spinoza turned the Platonic maxim around saying (Ethics IV,67) that the philosopher thinks of nothing less than death, but this meditation is not of death but of life. Living in terms of life’s only certain end means to live aimed toward death. The end is present here and now as the purpose of life, which means the moment of death-at any moment- is every moment. Death cannot be put off to the future and reserved for old age…..When we refuse the experience of death, we also refuse the essential question of life and leave life unaccomplished. Then organic death prevents our facing the ultimate questions and cuts off our chance for redemption. To avoid this state of soul, traditionally called damnation, we are obliged to go to death before it comes to us. (Op. Cit. p. 51)

Here, redemption, is considered from the perspective of ‘this life’ in the here and now. So, from Hillman, we have already heard the archetypal cry “, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?”) which cries from the heart of the Christian story, and here we have another theological concept, redemption, only this time, not in the afterlife, but in the immediate life. Clearly he is not writing about the eschatological redemption, but rather the redemption from the brink of chosen mortality into a life less impaled, like a ship-wreck on the rocks of despair, into a potential acknowledgment of some raison d’etre that makes sense for the individual. In the previous quote, we read, Living in terms of life’s and only certain end means to live aimed toward death. The end is present here and now as the purpose of life, which means the moment of death at any moment, is every moment.

For this scribe, this concept of living one’s life “aimed toward death” is the book-end to Jurgen Moltmann’s notion of life being aimed also at the eschaton. The psychological perspective on the here and now on the one hand and the theological perspective of some connection to eternity on the other, while obviously both metaphoric and epic, are a stretch for how many of us see ourselves as victims. Victimhood can and often does emerge from a traumatic childhood, from the abuses that others have inflicted and the coldness of the world’s anima mundi. In Hillman’s perspective, such brutality as a run-away capitalism, a consumptive literalism, empiricism and a dogmatic obsession with a rampant morality and judgement are enough to make one deeply depressed. And while he fought, without success, against these behemoths, throughout his life, nevertheless, he persisted. How any moment, and here we are considering that moment in which an individual is poised to terminate his/her life, can be “lived” in the perspective and attitude and choices implicit in the question, ‘how does this moment and decision impact my death,’ is hardly a perspective that many of us have witnessed from our mentors,  teachers, parents and peers.

Smilarly, from the other Moltman perspective of life lived conceptually linked to the eschaton, we are potentially dedicating our lives to another dimension. Without having met, and only read sketchily from both, there seems to be a common note of lifting whatever aspects of ‘repression’ might be impinging one’s life. Here is how Hillman puts it:

We dull our lives by the way we conceive them. We have stopped imagining them with any sort of romance, any fictional flair. ….(T)oday’s main paradigm for  understanding a human life, the interplay of genetics and environment, omits something essential-the particularity you feel to be you. By accepting the idea that I an the effect  of a subtle buffeting and societal forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography in the story of a victim. I am living a plot written by my genetic code, ancestral heredity, traumatic occasions, parental unconsciousness, societal accidents….Victim is flip side of hero. More deeply, however, we are victims of academic, scientistic, and even therapeutic psychology, whose paradigms do not sufficiently account for or engage with, and therefore ignore, the sense of calling, that essential mystery at the heart of each human life….Before it can be lived, raises doubts about another paradigm: time. And time, that takes survey of all the world, must have a stop. It too must be set aside; otherwise the before always determines the after, and you remain chained to past causes upon which you can have no effect….As Picasso said, ‘I don’t develop; I am.’  (The Soul’s Code, chapter 1)

These words are not an attempt to erase the past, nor are they an indictment or contradiction or denial of one’s theology. Indeed, they are compatible with most contemporary theologies, given that they are written and are to be read, from a psychological perspective.

We also ‘dull our lives’ by the fear we have of the archetypal judgement day, emblazoned in the teachings of the church. And, living as a bologna in a time-theological-psychological-moral-ethical sandwich that is defined for many in literal terms, we have lost the lens and perspective of the metaphoric, the imaginal. And the literalists among us will call such a perspective as hypothetical, illusory, delusional, and out of touch with reality. Hillman (and we suggest also Moltmann) are both deploying and exhorting a stretch, in and through the human imagination, that sees “things” from a liberated and liberating perspective, one that accords with any conception of a deity worthy of worship and discipleship.

It was Aristotle who wrote, “The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” The probe of ‘inward significance’ is applicable, not only to those ‘things’ that appear on canvases in galleries. It is even more relevant to the person on the brink of ending his/her life, and there can be little doubt, that even without plunging into the specific darkness of that person, one can speculate that his/her world has ‘closed in and is suffocating him/her’ in ways that only s/he can ‘see’ and feel and articulate.

Hillman offers a clarion call for that moment:

A main meaning of the choice (to commit suicide) is the importance of death for individuality. As individuality grows so does the possibility of suicide. Sociology and theology recognize this….Where man is law unto himself, responsible to himself for his own actions (as in the culture of cities, in the unloved child, in protestant areas, in creative people), the choice of death becomes a more frequent alternative. In this choice of death, of course, the opposite lies concealed. Until we can choose death, we cannot choose life. Until we can say no to life, we have not really said yes to is, but have only been carried along by its collective stream. The individual standing against this current experiences death as the first of all alternatives, for he who goes against the stream of life is its opponent and has become identified with death. Again, the death experience is needed to separate from the collective flow of life and to discover individuality. Individuality requires courage. And courage has since classic times been linked with suicide arguments: it takes courage to choose the ordeal of life, and it takes courage to enter the unknown by one’s own decision. Some choose life because they are afraid of death and others choose death because they are afraid of life…(T)he suicide issue forces one to find his individual stand on the basic question-to be or not to be. The courage to be….means not just choosing life out there. The real choice is choosing onself, one’s individual truth, including the ugliest man, as Nietzsche called the evil within. To continue life, knowing what a horror one is, takes indeed courage. And not a few suicides may arise from an overwhelming experience of one’s own evil, an insight coming more readily to the creatively gifted, the psychologically sensitive and the schizoid. Then who is the coward who casts the first stone? The rest of us brutish men who go about dulled to our own shadows. (Hillman, Suicide and the Soul, p.52-53)

Here we see clearly the link between individuality and redemption, a pursuit in which we are all engaged, whether consciously or not.