Suicide as 'ultimate concern'...not as religious or ethical or spiritual evil OR medical illness

 For many, the subject of suicide is so horrendous, somewhat frightening and seemingly too complicated even for more than a passing, empathic glance.

While the numbers of suicides continue to be reported, and the idea of providing services, “mental health” services gathers public attention, much of our public and private ‘talk’ and consideration of suicide comes from the outside observer perspective. We all know people who have or have had cancer, heart attacks, car accidents, drug poisonings, and increasingly in the U.S., more and more people are becoming personally acquainted with those who have died from gun-shot.

While acknowledging that psychology, in this case, examining suicide from ‘within’, is a project fraught with uncertainty, Hillman acknowledged that he is ‘speaking out…in consciousness of folly’. And while more needs to be said about the shadowy aspects of suicide: aggression, revenge, blackmail, sadomasochism, body hatred,.. suicidal moves give us a clue about our ‘inner killer,’ who this shadow is, and what it wants. (Op. cit. prefatory note to Suicide and the  Soul, 1976)

Given that Hillman’s perspective is that of the theoretical and practicing psychologist,  he reminds us, early on, the goal of adaptation to the social order is of the right hand, of conscious counselling. But analysis includes the left as well. It reveals the inferior man where he is awkward and sinister, and where suicide is a real matter….Contrary to popular imaginings, suicide is more likely to occur in the home than in the asylum….In itself, suicide is neither syndrome nor  symptom….The consideration of suicide also brings consideration of the ultimates. Ibid, p.1-2)

Addressing the biblical command, ‘thou shalt not kill’, Hillman quotes the resolution of the American Council of Christian Churches, passed in 1961, favouring repeal of the British laws on suicide that considered suicide a sin, in which event, the Roman Catholic Church denied ecclesiastical burial.

Here is the American resolution:

Death by suicide ends all opportunity for repentance. Almighty God created life. It is His. Murder, including self-murder, is a transgression of His law.

Hillman then goes on to provide his own explication of this resolution’s foundation: The theological point of view arises from the idea of the Creation. ‘Almighty God created life. It is His.’ We are not our own makers. The sixth commandment follows from the first and second, which place God foremost. We cannot take our lives because they are not ours. They are part of God’s creation, and we are his creatures. By choosing death, one refuses God’s world, and denies creatureliness. By deciding when the time has comer to leave life behind, one exhibits the monstrosity of pride. One has set oneself up in the seat of judgement where God alone may reign over life and death. Suicide is therefore the act of rebellion and apostasy for theologians because it denies the very ground of theology itself….When you or I consider taking our lives, listening in our own ways to God, we no longer follow authority. We set ourselves up as theologians, We are studying God independently. This can well lead to religious delusions and to theological anarchy, with each man having his own God, his own sect, his own theology. Yet how else is each to find the God immanent, or experience the theological notion that the human soul is the temple of God within? Theology would have us believe that God can speak only through the events of fortune, because death may come only from without…Is it not hubris from the side of theology to put limits of God’s omnipotence that death must always come in the ways that do not threaten the theological root metaphor? For it is not God nor religion that suicide denies but the claims of theology over death and the way it must be entered. Suicide serves notice on theology by showing that one does not dread its ancient weapons: the hereafter and the last judgement. But it does not follow that suicide because it is anti-theological must be ungodly or irreligious. (Ibid, p.27-28)

From the perspective of human will, and any view that considers and attempts to embody both a relationship with and a worship of God, the psychology Hillman espouses is compelling. It is the underlying assumption within the resolution that God is evident only or even primarily in the empirical, and that worship and the relationship can be undertaken, both in prayer and reflection as well as in action, only or even primarily, by overt, conscious, willful decisions and that there is no option of a relationship or a discipleship from human to/with God from the interior, inner, non-empirical. Herein lies the nexus of the interface of psychology and faith. And, from the perspective of this scribe, the theologians and the institutional church have sabotaged their own enterprise.

Paul Tillich, respected and influential Christian theologian of the twentieth century has written:

Religion, in the largest and most basic sense of the word, is ultimate concern. And ultimate concern is manifest in all creative functions of the human… spirit…whatever concerns a man becomes ultimately god for him. Tillich goes on to articulate the ultimate concern; for example, it is one’s concern about the meaning of life that becomes ‘manifest in the realm of knowledge as the passionate longing for ultimate reality.’ It is also manifest in the ‘aesthetic function of the human spirit as the infinite desire to express ultimate meaning. The ultimate concern is, claims Tillich, overwhelmingly real and valuable. It is numinous or holy, distinct from all profane and ordinary realities. (from Bishop’s Encyclopedia of Religion, Society and Philosophy, the site of James Bishop, the bishopblog.com)

Hillman’s articulation of his position continues;

To decide whether an act is merely a theological sin or truly irreligious depends not upon dogma but upon the evidence of the soul. Dogma has already passed its judgement. Since God is not confined by the dogmas of theologies alone, but may, and does, reveal Himself through the soul as well, it is to the soul one must look for the justification of a suicide. (Ibid, p. 29)

Throughout nearly twenty years of participation in the preparation for, internship for, and actual practice of ministry in the Anglican/Episcopal church, on both sides of the 49th parallel, and from another decade of adherence to and membership in that church, I cannot recall hearing the word ‘soul’ either from the pulpit nor from the prayer desk, nor from the retreat directors, nor from the lecture podium. And while there was (is?) a determined deferral away from the instant ‘born-again’ conversions that are proclaimed in the evangelical churches, the emphasis, the focus and in the determined attentions of those providing mentorship, discipleship and guidance, the seemingly obsessive (compulsive?) interest was on the empirical, the politically correct, the publicly presentable and the profoundly negative attitude to and treatment of anything that smacked of darkness. (Think Jung's Shadow)

Whether individuals were very poor, very poorly educated, unemployed, vagrant, homeless, or imprisoned, so long as they ‘kept to their place’ they were then regarded as objects of pity, even empathy, and perhaps even agape. However, if ever any of them appeared in the formal and holy sanctuary, the derisive attitude that swept over the people in other pews was palpable. ‘How could such people be permitted to come into our holy place?’ was the verbal translation of the body language. Even the cleric who had been engaged with the Canadian prison chaplaincy service, who, after being treated for stage four cancer, and given only a brief time left to live, was depressed because, while still living he had retired from his parish ministry and was therefore of no use, in his own mind and heart and soul. His blindness to the gift to himself and to others of the apparent and surprising lifting of the terminal sentence, was not only surprising but somewhat  disappointing. Apparently, his sole manner of being a discipline of/to/for God, was to be engaged in active ministry.

And the fundamental fact/notion/concept/knowledge remains that the sufferings that we all endure are not amenable, or reducible to behavioral acts nor medical categories, but are ‘above all experiences and sufferings, problems with an ‘inside’. Experience and suffering are terms long associated with soul. The soul has been imaged as the inner man, and as the inner sister or spouse, the place or voice of God within, as a cosmic force in which all humans, even all things living, participate, as having been given by God and thus divine, as conscience, as a multiplicity and as a unity in diversity, as a harmony, as a fluid as fire, as dynamic energy, and so on…..the search for the soul leads always into the depths….The soul as a deliberately ambiguous concept resisting all definition in the same manner as do all ultimate symbols that provide the root metaphors for the systems of human thought. Ibid, pps.37-8-9)

Can or will the theologians’ fraternity, and those engaged in the pursuit of God, in all faiths, including the Abrahamic faiths, read these words of Hillman, in his attempt to walk in the shoes of the analyst who faces a person fully engaged in the ‘ideation' of his/her own suicide, as worthy of serious consideration, without in any way abrogating, betraying, denying or deconstructing the religious instinct? Can the depth of identification with the inner life of the potential suicide, by the analyst, (And by extension, the rest of us) exemplify the most disciplined and the most religious and spiritual empathy of one human being to/for/with another? And can the ecclesial institutions, and their hierarchies deliberately, openly, and courageously begin a process of acknowledging the darkness in their own institution, as well as in the lives of each of their parishioners, as well as in their own lives? If consideration of the choice of ending one’s life is not to be valued as a matter of the ultimate in that person’s life, and thereby worthy of all of the intellectual, emotional, psychological, religious and spiritual attention we can muster, (not merely for prevention, but for the purpose of extending our openness and courage and strength to embrace the whole of being alive), then what can?