John Donne - Delphi Poets Series (45 page)

Only the Jesuits boast of their seeking martyrdom in the new worlds and of their rage until they find it. Scribanius, who has brought them all upon one scene, says that “Alfonso de Castro at his execution in the Molucca was so overjoyed that he forgot his modesty. ‘We snatch martyrdom,’ says he, ‘with a spontaneous rush.’”Further, “One would think it a disease in us, something we do lest the rest of our life should be devoid of merit and lacking in glory.” Again, “We bargain and contract with our profession upon the condition that we squander souls on hostile swords.” Yet again, “We possess no more than such small matters as only serve to cut off our life.” If this desire of dying is against and not agreeable to the nature of man, apparently it is not against the nature of a Jesuit.

Here we end this discussion, which we intended only for the consideration of this desire of martyrdom that swallowed up all the other inducements which, before Christianity contracted them, tickled and inflamed mankind.

Distinction IV

1. There remains for the fourth and last distinction of this first part only to state the reason by which self-homicide seems to me to escape breaking any law of nature. Both express, literal laws and mute law or custom have authorized it, not only by allowing and conniving in it but also by commissioning it.

It is countenanced not only by many flourishing and well-policed states but also by ideal commonwealths that cunning authors have conceived—in which very enormous faults are unlikely to be allowed. Among the Athenians condemned men were their own executioners by means of poison and among the Romans by means of blood-letting. It is recorded of many places that all sexagenarians were by the laws of wise states thrown from a bridge. Pereira has conjectured that this report was occasioned by a custom in Rome, according to which men of that age were not allowed to vote; since the way to the senate was via a bridge [Latin:
per pontem
], those who by reason of that age were not permitted to come to the senate were called “Depontans.”

However that may be, it is more certain that among the Ceans unprofitable old men poisoned themselves; they were crowned with garlands as men triumphant over human misery. The Ethiopians loved death so well that their greatest malefactors, being condemned to banishment, ordinarily escaped it by killing themselves. The civil law, where it appoints no punishment to the delinquent in this case either in his estate or in his memory, punishes a jailer if his prisoner kills himself— out of a prejudice that if the means is afforded them they will all do so.

Do we not see it to be the custom of all nations now to manacle and disarm condemned men, from a prior assurance that otherwise they would escape death by death? Sir Thomas More, a man of the most tender and delicate conscience that the world has seen since Saint Augustine, one who was not likely to write anything in jest or mischievously, says that in Utopia the priests and magistrates used to exhort men afflicted with incurable diseases to kill themselves, and they were obeyed as the interpreters of God’s will; but they who killed themselves without giving an account of their reasons to the priests and magistrates were cast out unburied. Plato, who is usually cited against this opinion, disputes it in a fashion as severe and peremptory as this: “What shall we say of him who kills his nearest and dearest friend, who deprives himself of life and of the purpose of destiny?—who, not urged by any sentence or heavy misfortune or externe shame, but out of a cowardliness and weakness of a fearful mind, unjustly kills himself? What purgatory and what burial by law belongs to him, God himself knows. But let his friends inquire of the interpreters of the law, and do as they shall direct.” You see, nothing is said by him against self- homicide except what is said modestly, limitedly, and perplexedly.

This is all that I shall say of the first member of that definition of sin that I undertook, which is transgressing the law of nature. I claim that I have sufficiently delivered and rescued self-homicide from any such violating of the law as may aggravate the act or make it heinous.

THE SECOND PART: OF THE LAW OF REASON

Distinction I

1.—The part of the definition of sin that we reserved for the second part is that self-homicide is against the law of reason. If we should interpret reason as rectified reason (especially primarily and originally), it would be the same as the law of nature. I rather choose to admit an interpretation that will bring the most doubts under disputation and therefore into clarity.

Reason, therefore, in this place shall signify conclusions drawn and deduced from the primary reason by our discourse and ratiocination. Thus sin against reason is sin against such arguments and conclusions as by sound consequence may be derived from primary and original reason, which is the light of nature.

This primary reason, against which nobody can plead license, law, custom, or pardon, has in us a sovereign and masculine force. It begets conclusions and resolutions through our discourse, which does the motherly office of shaping, delivering, and rearing them.

2.—In earthly kingdoms the king’s children and their posterity, as far as we may reasonably presume any tincture of blood, have many privileges and respects due them, which would be forfeited if there appeared any bastardy or interruption of lawful descent from that root. Although the respect and obsequiousness belong to them so far as they are propagated from that root and so far as some sparks of that sovereignty glimmer in them, their servants and officers take them where they find them and consider them only as dukes or lords and possessors of patrimonial estates. Meanwhile, every man’s heart is directed and fastened upon the prince, and perhaps a step or two lower with a ready and immediate relation to the father and what they have from him.

Just so! When, from those true propositions that are the eldest children and the issue of our light of nature and of our discourse, conclusions are produced, those conclusions also have the nature of propositions and beget more conclusions. To all these there belongs an assent and submission on our part, if none by the way has been corrupted and bastarded by fallacy. Although, as in the other case, men who are of a weak, lazy, or flattering disposition look no farther into any of these propositions than from whose mouth it proceeds or what authority it now has (not from whence it was produced), still, every man’s resolution is fixed upon, arrested by, and submitted to the heir apparent—which is to say, every necessary deduction by natural light. Now human laws, by which kingdoms are policed, are not so very near to this crown of certain truth and first light. If they were necessary consequences from that law of nature, they would not be contrary in various places and times, as we see laws to be. Nevertheless, I justly esteem them nearer and to have more of that royal blood in them than the resolutions of individual men or schools of men.

The first reason is: It is of the essence of all human law that it agrees with nature—I mean obligation in the inner court of conscience. Without this, a law has no more strength than a usurper whom those who obey watch for an opportunity to dispossess.

The second reason is: Assemblies of parliaments, councils, and courts are to be presumed more diligent for delivering and giving birth to those children of natural law. They also give better testimonies than any one man can that no false or suppositious issue is admitted. The law is well called the marriage-contract between the citizens and the republic. That term signifies also that to which they have all betrothed themselves, such as the security and stipulation that the state gives for every man’s direction and assurance in all his civil actions. Since in the first part we thoroughly examined whether self-homicide is always of necessity against the law of nature, it is worthy for the first consideration in this second part to inquire how far human laws have determined against it, before we descend to the arguments of particular authors, of whatever reverence or authority.

3. The third reason is: In this disquisition the most general law has the most force and value, and there is no law so general that it deserves the name of the law of nations, or, if there is, it will be the same (as we said before) as rectified reason and thus not differ from the law of nature.

In my understanding, the civil or imperial law once had the greatest extent. Even now it is not being abandoned in its reason, essence, and nature but only lest accepting it should testify some dependence upon the [Holy Roman] Empire. Thus we owe the first place in this consideration to that law.

What do we call the civil law? Properly speaking, the municipal law of every nation is civil law. However, because Rome’s emperors deemed the whole world to be one city, as Rome’s bishops deem it to be one diocese, the Roman law has won the name of civil law. It is a digest and ordering of all the regal laws, decrees of the senate, plebescites, opinions of experts, and edicts of emperors from 1,400 years before Justinian to as long a time after him as the eastern emperors made them authentic. The civil law is of such largeness that Justinian’s part of it consists of 150,000 distinctions (he calls them verses) and is the sum and marrow of many millions, extracted from 2,000 volumes.

This law is so abundant that almost all the points controverted between the Roman and the Reformed Churches may be decided and resolved by it. This law, I say, which has worked upon individuals, fortunes, and consciences both by penalties and anathemas, has pronounced nothing against the self-homicide that we now have under consideration.

It is true that we find one rescript of Hadrian the emperor, who was about 120 years after Christ, in the body of the law: “If a soldier attempts to kill himself and does not accomplish it, unless he tried it under unbearable grief, sickness, sorrow, or some other cause, he shall be capitally punished.” This rescript is repeated in another title, and there—although the first general clause or some other cause might seem to have gone far enough—are added especially the excusing causes of “weariness of life, madness, or shame.” You see with what moderate gradations this law proceeded. Contending and wrestling (as it seems) with a customary and naturally accomplished act, it does not extend at all to punish self-homicide when it has been done, as the law does in many other crimes by confiscation, by condemning the memory of the delinquent, and by degrading his posterity.

Nor does the rescript embrace all ways of doing it—indeed, hardly any of them, considering how benignly and favorably penal laws are to be interpreted. Nor does it encompass all men, but only those currently in the army, since much disadvantage might befall the army if numbers of them should suddenly be allowed to take this natural, easy way of delivering themselves from painful danger. Just as much damage might befall the state if the enlisted soldiers—to whom there belonged by the laws as many privileges and immunities under the Roman emperors as ever did to the clergy under their Roman bishops—after they had thus maimed themselves and defrauded the state of their service, should by this inherent character of soldiership enjoy all the advantages that the laws afforded them.

One more law in the body of civil law seems to reach farther, because it does not bind itself to any one condition of men; that is, “If a man who, already accused or caught in the act of any crime for which his goods would be forfeited upon conviction, should kill himself before judgment, his goods shall be forfeited.” Or it may
not
reach farther, for the law adds this opinion of the act: “It is not the deed’s evil that is liable to punishment but the guilt of conscience.” It goes on, “He who has reason to die may have an heir.” Thus the law presumes that there
are
just causes to work this effect.

Upon the consideration of this civil law I determined to bestow this first distinction.

Distinction II

1. What they call the canon law is of even larger extent than the civil, for it reaches to bind the princes themselves, at least by their acceptance of and submission to it. As its subject is greater, being people and princes, so is its object, being the next or eternal life. Indeed, it is so vast and unbounded that we do not know in what books to seek its limits nor by what rules to set the landmarks of its jurisdiction.

As for the book, it is evident that the primitive church had canonical codes, which were inserted into the body of the Roman law and had no other existence except as it was incorporated there. Thus Gelasius wrote to Theodoric the Gothic king of Italy, pleading that, just as by his authority the Roman law was observed in civil matters, so it might be the same in ecclesiastical matters. After the expulsion of the Goths, Leo IV pleaded for and obtained the same from Lothair I. From this canonical code the emperors decided and decreed in many ecclesiastical causes. From this code the subsequent councils were governed in making their canons; we may see particular canons of this book cited—the book often called for in councils and commonly named, the Body of the Canon Law. This body consisted of the canons of nine councils authorized by the emperors.

There have been immense additions to it since that time—bulls and decretal letters of popes; decrees of suspicious, partial, and schismatic councils (for nothing is more properly schism and a breach of succession than a rent between the civil and ecclesiastical state, which occasioned many of the later councils); the rags of Fathers excerpted and digested by Gratian plus the glosses on these that became as authentic as the text. I do not see what all these additions have to do with the Body of Canon Law, except where princes have incorporated and naturalized them.

However, since for us to quarrel now with their authority may seem a subterfuge and a shift to turn away from them as though they were heavily against us in the matter at hand, we shall accept them as they are set forth and disguise nothing in them that seems to resist our opinion. In the common usage this law is likely to be severe against self- homicide. The civil laws always content themselves with any excuse or color in favor of the delinquents, because when a fault is proved it is punished severely. But canon laws, which punish only medicinally and for the soul’s health, are apt to presume or believe guiltiness on light evidence, because their punishments always work good effects, whether or not they are just.