Searching for God # 127 Part Two

 At the centre of the theologies of all the major world religions is the taboo of suicide. And given the determination to provide ‘certainty’ for their adherents, with the clear and unequivocal “endorsement” from their respective deity, the religious, and now psychological, ethical, moral and socially deviant taboo has enshrined itself at the top of the list of universally forbidden, verboten, and hated evils. Since no ‘normal’ person is socially, politically, ethically, morally or even in some situations legally permitted to consider suicide as a legitimate human decision, the subject has been relegated to the ‘abnormal,’ the ‘psychologically sick,’ the ‘mentally insane,’ and all of these judgements and characterizations are now indelible, almost engraved in cultural and religious granite. We have collectively failed to parse out these characterizations, having integrated, absorbed, and completely conflated as ‘absolute’ all consciousness of suicide. (Excepting those cases prosribed in law for medical assistance in dying.) Suicide, as a subject, occupies the deepest, darkest and least acknowledged corners of our individual and our collective unconscious. In short, the subject is off limits, out of bounds, and forbidden from any and all academic, political, social, and even water-cooler attention and conversation. 

After observing from afar, the suicides of mostly men whom I had known, whose intellect, imagination, sensitivity, creativity, and significant contributions to the human condition were and remain beyond question, I am perplexed, skeptical, dubious and for the first time, publicly, openly questioning the ban on suicide as a legitimate human decision (irrespective of the current debate of Medical Assistance in Dying in the public arena). 

Let’s begin with another insight from James Hillman, from his revolutionary work, Suicide and the Soul, that attempts to put the society, the culture, under analysis, rather than the individual: 

The new opposition, the real one in this generation, is between the soul and all that would butcher or purchase it, between analysis and every official position of medicine, theology, and academic psychology that would encroach upon it, between the analyst and everyone else. Suicide is the issue for laying this conflict bare. 

We are all so sick and have been so long on the edge of mass suicide and are groping so for personal solutions to vast collective problems, that today, if ever, anything goes. The fences are down: medicine is no longer the preserve of the physician, death for the aged, and theology for the ordained....(M)odern medicine excludes the soul from its teachings, requiring the physician to act as if he had none and as if the patient were primarily body. Modern medicine splits the physician off from his own soul. (p. 82-3) 

The literal, empirical perception of reality, linked to the absolutes of religious dogma, myth and the binary Manichean boundary and mind-set between good and evil, leaves humanity hung up on the horns of our own perceptions, many of them illusions, in which we play out our individual lives. Believing, and maintaining that suicide is evil, we set up structures, processes and programs to prevent it, given our shared horror, fear, and ‘unknowing’ as to how anyone could even possibly ‘go there’. Searching for ‘personal solutions to vast problems’ is a pursuit that can, has and will drive any of us into various forms of despair. And yet, we continue to consider that the path to resolving those ‘vast problems’ lies in and through the multiple interventions (medical, legal, religious, academic, economic, political, psychological, pharmaceutical) we have designed as antidotes. Each and every one of these ‘interventions’ is designed, researched, prescribed and administered to ‘the individual’ and then re-evaluated. These interventions, too, have taken on the imprimature, the mind-set, and the conviction that all reality can be empirically, literally diagnosed, when we can all see that underlying many individual lives, most interventions are palliatives, placebos and ameliorations. They definitely address our anxieties, our pains, and even our fears, at least partially. What they cannot begin to ‘touch’ is our individual and collective unconscious. Our shared fear and loathing of uncertainty, both personal and universal, lies sometimes moaning, sometimes screaming, sometimes weeping, and often desperately searching for a ‘fix,’ again in the form of some ‘tangible’ sensate, logical and scientific placation. Of course, none of our ‘fixes’ answers the certainty of death, that phenomenon of ultimately both certainty and uncertainty, that levels all of us on the same field...certainty that it will happen and the most profound mystery of what lies after. For many, death is also one of, if not the most significant factor in every one of our moments, choices and the patterns of our lives. 

The American psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz, writing in the last quarter of the twentieth century, considered psychiatry to be functioning as a modern-day inquisition. As part of that analysis, he is especially critical of what he calls the medicalization of suicide. 

Here is a sample of the core of Dr. Szasz’s argument from szasz.com: 

In the medieval world Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas had declared that whoever deliberately took the life given to him by his Creator showed disregard for the will and authority of God and was guilty of a mortal sin. In the modern world “self-slaughter” was declared a crime. In Great Britain the crime of suicide was repealed by the Suicide Act of 1961; those who failed in the attempt would no longer be prosecuted. After 1776 the United States adopted English criminal penalties against suicide, but American courts never enforced them. Nevertheless, as late as 1963 attempted suicide still was a felony in six states—North and South Dakota, New Jersey, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Washington. Today, everyone “knows” that suicide is a mental illness, proving the wisdom of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) observation, “In the newspapers and encyclopedias, in schools and universities, everywhere error rides high and basks in the consciousness of having the majority on its side.” Because medicalization suffuses our thinking about all manner of human problems, we bracket the term “suicide” with “prevention,” implying a claim for which there is no evidence—namely, that suicide is a “medical problem.” We prevent diseases but prohibit crimes. Disease is said to be prevented, not prohibited, even when a State mandate is involved, as with vaccination. Driving while intoxicated is a crime though the purpose of the law is to prevent accidents committed by drunk drivers. Suicide prevention ought to be called “suicide prohibition.” Why is this important? Because suicide is action-doing, not disease-enduring, and because the basic tool of the State is coercion not therapy. Preventive measures are aimed at keeping undesirable events from happening, prohibitions at preventing persons from engaging in behaviors defined as “dangerous” to themselves or others. The differences between these two modes of influencing/controlling the conduct of others are illustrated by the differences between the “war on cancer” and the “war on drugs.” The former is fought with money and medical technology, the latter with laws and prisons. The psychiatric perspective on life began to seep into the zeitgeist of modern Western culture in the nineteenth century and was ripe when Freud arrived on the scene in the 1880s. His influence lay mainly in his successful elaboration and popularization of the language of psychopathology and psychotherapy. By the time he died, in 1939, Wystan Auden was moved to offer this marvelously perceptive memorial tribute to him: “. . . if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, / to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives.” 

For our purposes, we are considering if and whether the ‘state of consciousness and unconsciousness’ about suicide (primarily as a verboten, ‘mentally ill state,’ into which only an unbalanced, and ‘mentally deranged’ person would venture) is blinding us to what appears to be a determined, purposeful and sinister both denial of and obsession with our own destruction. If we have obliterated all potential, alternative and even more humane exegesis of suicide, and clung to its ‘medically sick’ diagnosis, its religious prohibition, and its ethical and moral rejection, are we not thereby endangering our shared survival instinct and commitment to our alleged ‘commitment to life’ and our very survival on the planet? ‘Denial, after all, is a lot more than a river in Egypt! Our unacknowledged yet ever-throbbing and ultimately inescapable denial of whatever it is that we must, for whatever reasons, continue to keep ‘off the table’ of our collective consciousness, in our personal lives, as well as in our collective, social, cultural, political as well as our moral and ethical lives, has the potential, if not the actual threat, of sabotaging our shared survival. Remaining adamantinely resistant to consider suicide a ‘legitimate human decision,’ is not only incongruent with our medically-premised ‘prevention’ programs; it also excludes from public debate the option/perspective that through our determined, conscious and public policies, theories and perspectives, that we are, today, this hour and this minute, watching our own ‘collective suicide’ rearing its head before our eyes, our ears, and our desperate fears of annihilation. And that specific fear was born in the womb of the two world wars. 

James Hillman writes succinctly and potently about the truth of death: 

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 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 of suicide demands, as well as the demon that would seem to prompt the act, is the Deus absconditus who is unable to be known, yet able to be experienced, who is unrevealed, yet more real and present in the darkness of suicide than 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. (Hillman, Suicide and the Soul, p 70) 

That last statement of Hillman’s offers a considerable hurdle in both metaphysics and theology for many Christians. First, do many of them believe that God has a ‘dark side’? Unlikely. Secondly, is the depiction of a union with God’s dark side, conceived as a potential in suicide, with the image itself emerging from Hillman’s verdant imagination, even a picture which many can even conjure, never mind actually trusting or envisioning? Doubtful. These may be ‘steps too far’ for many; however, they offer a robust stretch of one’s psyche and faith. 

Furthermore, we live in a world divided about many things, much of it the cumulating consequences of Rationalism and Empiricism. One of the divides that continues, not only between and among different faith communities, is between atheists and theists. Atheists, for their part, argue about the non-existence of God, based primarily on the fact that such existence is defied by science. Theists, on the other hand, continue to think, speak about, write about, and imagine God as the ultimately fulfilment of desire, hope, even, for many utopia. And, borrowing from James Hillman: he has discerned and posited a difference between the ‘spirit’ which continually aspires upwards, as religions have promised for centuries, and the ‘soul’ which he proposes tends downward into the darkness of each of our psyches.  Where he differs from the theists is that this tendency is not, by definition or psychic implications, evil.  

Death, for example, is not an evil, as many religions would have us ‘believe’ or at least adhere to the stereotype. It is in what Hillman terms ‘in extremis’ moments, when we silently or screamingly utter, ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!’ In that moment, too,  our perceptions, attitudes, and world view often, if not without exception, undergo a tectonic shift. Many posit that it is only in and through a ‘death experience’ of some kind, whether imaginative or from an ‘in extremis’ moment, that ‘new life’ can arise. The Christian ‘new birth’ is a metaphor for the ‘dying of sin at their forgiveness through a shift in belief. Others, also Christians, consider such shifts to come from many single ‘in extremis’ moments throughout one’s life. Theologians call this ‘shift’ a metanoia, a transformation. And, although different from an ‘aha’ or an ‘overwhelming kind of rapture’ that might stereotypically evoke, invoke and ‘connect’ us to God, such moments are also (or certainly can be) transformative. From a “lay” perspective, why would such ‘moments’ be characterized necessarily as evil, when such moments lie at the core of each human’s soul# biography, the account of the most profound and lasting emotional trauma? What “God” is unaware of, insensitive to, blinded by, or exclusively judgemental of those ‘in extremis’ moments? And why would, at least the Christian theology, relegate such moments as ‘outside the purview’ of one’s relationship to God? Such Manicheanism is long past its overdue date. As are most, if not all, of the binary either-or's of our cultural, conventional, political, rational and ethical perspective. 

(# Hillman suggests this soul biography as different from the ‘biological biography’ which details the levels of accomplishment, degrees, and all those things for which executive search agents and hiring managers long.) 

If Hillman’s imaginative depiction of the dark side of God, (Deus absconditus) has any relevance to both our psychology and our religious faith, (and might even offer a revised, and potentially life-giving opening for faith), it would follow that the ecclesial institution might open to its own ‘dark side’ as a collective unconscious force intimately related to and with that Deus absconditus envisaged of God.  

Let’s pause for a moment, to reflect on the moment in which an individual actually enters the ‘space’ in which the prospect of ending his/her life has taken hold of his ‘mind’. Others might  consider such a moment only and exclusively from the outside, as indicated by the plethora of pages, tomes even, that have been dedicated to attempting to analyze suicide, always from the outside. From the ‘inside’ however, there really are no consolations from either religion or philosophy, for that person. We read this in Hillman’s Suicide and the Soul: 

As Ringel* points out, the intensity of the suicide impulse so grips the soul that whatever ideas are fed into the system will be converted into just that much energy for the suicide fantasies. We do not have before us a ‘logical fallacy,’ but a man in the grip of a symbol. The soul insists blindly and passionately on its intention. It will not be dissuaded: it will have its death---really actually now. It must have its death, if it would be reborn....Nor can we condemn every wish for suicide as an ‘acting out,’ because again he sets up a prevention ban before he can be sure whether the act is necessary for the experience.....The person obsessed with suicide fantasies has not been able to experience death psychologically. He cannot experience the reality of the psyche apart from its projections and therefore concrete reality and physical death are so compelling....The sense of being a burden is already so strong in men who commit suicide, that often the act is done altruistically, to lighten the load for others.....Suicide is the paradigm of our independence from everyone else. It must be that way during the suicide crisis because at this moment everyone else stands for the status quo; for life and the world must be absolutely denied....As paradigm of independence, suicide is also selfishness. The world shrinks to the small measure of ‘me’: my action, my death. Abnegation is simply omnipotence in disguise....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 is my suffering, and full of 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. (p.70-75) 

Hillman is writing primarily for the ‘analyst’ who is envisioned in the same physical space as one actively considering taking his/her own life. And the analyst’s primary support for that person is to set aside all attitudes, perceptions, beliefs, morals, ethics and any religious interferences, in order to be able to empathize as fully as is humanly possible with the ‘other’....in order for the psychic drama to play itself out without interference. Of course, for us lay people such a proposition is highly challenging, if not impossible. It also remains open to  the potential option that the individual will take his/her own life. Hillman is suggesting, if I read him appropriately, that the option of coming to a peaceful resolution is potentially enhanced without interference. 

For some Christians, this moment, (could be hours or perhaps even days) might represent the highest and most challenging of all images of agape love. What could be more embodying of kenosis than to shed/quiet/set aside all emotions and preconceptions, biases and prejudices, and remain neutral in the face of such profound despair? Becoming such a presence would be a kind of sacrificial love, to provide a living, sentient human being as accompaniment for this desperate other. 

*Ringel: Edwin Ringel (1921-1994) An influential Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist who founded the international Association for the Suicide Prevention and pioneered modern crisis intervention. 

Editor’s Note: None of these words or pages are intended as a rationale for or an invitation to anyone who is in despair to commit the act of suicide. Nor are they to be considered as endorsement for all suicides. Terrorists who intend to deliver a political and lethal message are not included here. Neither are those nefarious persons whose taking of their life is a dramatic and manipulative act to abuse and punish another.  

It is our collective blindness to our unconscious denial of suicide that portends our insouciance, ‘ignorance’ and dismissal of the real present dangers and risks to our survival on the planet that begs having light shone on it that is the core of this argument. While those risks are centrally designated as environmental, there are growing signs that our public rhetoric, attitudes, beliefs and even portions of our religious language and desperate pursuit of power under the rubric and aegis of our chosen deity could, taken as a gestalt, bring us ever closer to that midnight clock that was originally designed as a red-flag warning about nuclear holocaust.