American Society of Church History

Calvin on Suicide
Author(s): Jeffrey R. Watt
Source: Church History, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 463-476
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church
History
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Calvin on Suicide
JEFFREY R. WATT
In October 1555 Jean Jourdain, twenty-six, a humble farmer living near
Geneva, was distraught at having contracted venereal disease, for which he
could not afford medical treatment. On a Sunday morning, rather than going
to church, Jourdain went into the woods where he stabbed himself. Immediately after inflicting the wound, Jourdain heard the ringing of the church bell.
Feeling remorse, he asked forgiveness from God and walked to a nearby village,

where he languished another eight days before expiring. In spite of his

contrition, authorities ordered that Jourdain's body be dragged on a hurdle
and then impaled and left exposed outside the city as a deterrent to others.l In

February 1564 Julienne Berard was most upset about being convoked by
Geneva's Consistory to account for a dispute she had had with her nephew.
According to witnesses, Berard, so frightened by the prospect of facing the
questions of Calvin and other Consistory members, took her life by throwing
herself in the Rhone River. As a result of this self-inflicted death, Berard's body
was also dragged through the streets of Geneva and buried at Champel which,
as the site of executions, was a place of ignominy.2 Over a century later, the

notary Jean Bardin hanged himself because he was devastated by the deaths
from an explosion of three of his young children and by the subsequent
burglary of his house. In spite of the entreaties of his widow on behalf of their

surviving minor children, the Small Council passed an extremely harsh sentence in September 1670, enjoining that Bardin's body be dragged on a hurdle

before burial and that all his assets be confiscated.3

An earlier version of this paper was presented in October 1995 at the Sixteenth Century
Studies Conference in San Francisco. Support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Mississippi's College of Liberal Arts and Graduate School is gratefully

acknowledged. For their invaluable assistance in identifying pertinent sources, I thank the

superb staffs of the Institut d'histoire de la Reformation at the Universite de Geneve and of the

H. Henry Meeter Center at Calvin Seminary. I also thank Paul M. Thayer for his vitally

important help.

1. Proces Criminel (hereafter PC) 552, Archives d'Etat de Geneve (hereafter AEG); and

Registres du Conseil (hereafter RC) 50, AEG, 23v, 25v, 27-28.

2. PC 1179, AEG.

3. PC 4112, AEG; RC 170: 361, 364-365; and MS Hist. 133ter, AEG. Though common

through the early 1600s, this severity was unusual for the second half of the seventeenth
century. By 1670 authorities only rarely ordered the desecration of suicides' corpses and
usually did not order the confiscation of all their assets.

Mr. Watt is associate professor of history at the University of Mississippi, University,

Mississippi.
463

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CHURCH HISTORY

464

These cases offer palpable evidence that into the seventeenth century,
Genevan authorities regularly passed strict sentences against the bodies and
estates of those who took their own lives. These images of strict intolerance of
voluntary deaths cause one to ponder to what extent this abhorrence of suicide
was theologically based. Did the desecration of the cadavers and the seizure of
goods of suicides reflect a morality peculiar to Calvinism? Could it be that
Calvin's Reformation in Geneva introduced an era of severity toward suicide,
similar to that described by Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy for
Reformation England?4
Key to answering this question is of course an examination of the views on

suicide of John Calvin himself. Theologian and lawyer, Calvin exerted an

enormous influence upon the regulation of Reformed morality in Geneva and

elsewhere. One would expect Calvin to have influenced the treatment of

suicide much as he affected decisively the control of marriage in Geneva and
other Reformed areas.5 Calvin's attitudes toward suicide have never been

studied, an omission explained by the fact that he wrote very little about
"self-murder." Indeed, no edition of the Institutes mentions it. A thorough
search of his voluminous works reveals that Calvin discussed suicide only twice,
in sermons that deal with biblical suicides: of Saul and his armor-bearer, who

stabbed themselves rather than be captured by the Philistines (1 Samuel 31);

and of Ahithophel, who hanged himself after Absalom rejected his plan to
assassinate David (2 Samuel 17).6
What do these sermons reveal about Calvin's view of self-inflicted deaths? To

a degree, Calvin saw both suicides as divine punishment. Saul's defeat at the
hands of the Philistines was divine judgment for the Israelites' sins, designed to
bring them back to proper behavior. Saul was punished for his stubbornness,
and the Israelites were all guilty for having waged war, at Saul's instigation,

against David, an innocent man whom God had chosen to be king. Saul's
suicide was, Calvin preached, "the just reward for his cruelty in hunting after

4. Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England

(Oxford, U.K., 1990), pp. 15-106.

5. See Jeffrey R. Watt, "The Marriage Laws Calvin Drafted for Geneva," in Calvinus Sacrae
Scripturae Professor, ed. W. H. Neuser (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1994), pp. 245-255.
6. These sermons are found respectively in Ioannis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia
(hereafter CO), ed. Gulielmus Baum, Eduardus Cunitz, and Eduardus Reuss (Brunswick,

Germany, 1891), 46:712-722; and Supplementa Calviniana, ed. Hanns Ruckert (Neukirchen, Germany, 1961), pp. 511-519. The sermon dealing with 2 Samuel 17 was

delivered Monday, 9 November 1562. The date of the sermon pertaining to Saul's death is
unknown. The original French version of this sermon no longer exists; all that survives is a
Latin translation from the seventeenth century. The most famous suicide in the Bible is of
course that of Judas. In his commentary on Matthew 27:5, however, Calvin showed little
interest in self-murder per se. He was much more concerned with Judas's treason than
suicide; CO 45:747.

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CALVIN ON SUICIDE

465

innocent David."7 Likewise, in discussing Ahithophel's suicide, Calvin argued

that in devising a plot to assassinate David, his king, Ahithophel misused the
superior intelligence and wisdom that God had bestowed upon him. When his
advice was not followed, the anguish he suffered was divinely inspired and
ultimately pushed him to hang himself.8

This is not to say that in killing themselves, Saul and Ahithophel were
following God's will. Rather, Calvin avowed, they were simply adding another
sin to those they had already committed.9 The central argument that Calvin

made against suicide is that in taking one's life, one is being disobedient by
refusing to submit to the will of God. God has given life to humans; God alone
has the right to take it away. In depicting voluntary death as usurping God's

powers, Calvin closely followed the logic of Augustine, who in turn drew
inspiration from a selective reading of Plato.10 God has ordered us to be ready
for death at every moment, but it is not up to us to determine when we leave this
life. Calvin declared:

[L] et us wait for the highest commander, who sent us into this world, to call us out

of it. Who, pray tell, would praise the soldier who, having been ordered by his
commander to be on sentry duty, attacked the enemy in order to gain praise for his

bravery? Truly he would be accused of rashness, for which he would be duly

punished. Thus God, having sent us in this world, wishes us to stay in it, and He has
placed us in a post which we must not abandon until God orders us to do so. Since
we have been placed on this duty as in a watchtower, it behooves us to stay watchful,
and always be prepared to move wherever the Commander shall order. This is the
virtue of Christians; this is fortitude and constancy.11

In this passage, Calvin has borrowed the image of the soldier on sentry duty
7. C046:714, 721.
8. Supplementa, pp. 511-512.
9. C046:721.

10. City of God, 1.17-27; compare Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Secunda Secundae, Quaest. 64,
Art. 5. In the Phaedo(62b-c), Plato condemned voluntary death as a form of usurping the
authority of God. Nonetheless, he asserted that taking one's life was justified if God sends
some necessity upon the individual, in effect requiring suicide of him, as in the case of
Socrates. In the ninth book of The Laws (873c), Plato indicated that people mayjustifiably
put an end to their lives if the state orders them to do so or if they suffer an "excruciating

and unavoidable misfortune" or overwhelming shame. Plato in short disapproved of

voluntarily ending one's life without good reason. Augustine may have been influenced
more directly by Neoplatonists who tended to take a stronger stand against suicide than

Plato. In his Commentary on theDream ofScipio, the Neoplatonist Macrobius, a contemporary

of Augustine, wrote that suicides will not have eternal life with God; people must wait for
God to free them from the fetters of the body. This, however, still seemed to allow the
possibility that one could justifiably kill oneself if so ordered by God. The pagan Virgil also

wrote that those who voluntarily take their lives are condemned, describing the melancholic shadows of suicides in hell; Aeneid 6.434-439; Albert Bayet, Le suicide et la morale
(1922; repr. New York, 1975), pp. 300, 387-388, 434-446; and Arthur J. Droge and James
D. Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom Among Christians and Jews of Antiquity (New

York, 1992), pp. 5, 20-22, 41-42.

11. CO 46:718-719.

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CHURCH HISTORY

466

which originated with Pythagoras and served as an important argument for

opponents of suicide for over two thousand years.12
Describing self-murder as "the worst crime," Calvin suggested that suicides
are guilty of hubris. "For the highest and most outstanding virtue, upon which

all others are based," Calvin preached, "is faith, to which hope is joined, to
which humility next follows, to which virtues human cleverness is most contrary.

Whence come the violent deaths that people inflict upon themselves except
from impatience and haughtiness?"13 Saul himself asked his armor bearer to
kill him so that the godless Philistines would not gloat over him and kill him.
Such words belie, according to Calvin, an impatience, an unwillingness to bear

suffering. From such impatience and arrogance, "unbelieving and profane

men inflict death upon themselves because they cannot bear disgrace and
ignominy." For Calvin, such men are "abominable before God."14 Calvin
declared that Christians must subject themselves to God's will and not "quail
from walking through ignominy and infamy, and whatever reproofs and shame

may be hurled upon us, let us learn to bear them patiently, as Paul himself
teaches us through his example."15
To be sure, Calvin acknowledged that the faithful will often pass through
difficult times. In the sermon on Ahithophel, he noted that they may suffer
setbacks, tire of living, and long to be free of this world. Nonetheless they must
not rebel against God or fall into a rage as did Ahithophel. Both good and bad
people will be exposed to temptations. The faithful, however, will always humbly

submit to God's will. If God indeed punishes people-as God punished

Ahithophel through causing his advice to be rejected-it is not to cause them
despair but rather to bring them back to the right path. Like Aristotle, Calvin
believed that true courage meant to endure hardships.16
Calvin was obviously concerned about the physical and spiritual welfare of
the Reformed Christians in France who were suffering harsh persecution. He
probably had them in mind when he urged Christians to be patient regardless
of the perils they faced:
If some faithful man should see some danger of death looming, he shall look
forward calmly to God's will. Also it is right to bear [the cross] for as long as the trial

12. Lester G. Crocker, "The Discussion of Suicide in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of the

History of Ideas 13 (1952): 52. Cicero, for example, employed this analogy; Tusculan

Disputations 1.74.

13. C046:719.
14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.; compare 2 Corinthians 10 and 11.

16. Supplementa, p. 514. Aristotle wrote, "Courage ... is confident and endures because it is
noble to do so or base not to do so. But to seek death in order to escape from poverty, or
the pangs of love, or from pain or sorrow, is not the act of a courageous man, but rather of

a coward; for it is weakness to fly from troubles, and the suicide does not endure death
because it is noble to do so, but to escape evil"; Nicomachean Ethics 3.7.13. Like Plato,
Aristotle does not seem to be condemning all suicides but rather those committed for the
wrong reasons.

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CALVIN ON SUICIDE

467

lasts, because his single witness is the obedience which, like his soul, he is prepared
to give back to God. On the other hand, the unbelievers at once panic and despair
and try to end their lives, which the faithful, having received from God the creator,
shall give back to Him.... Therefore if God wills to punish me on account of my
sins, whether I be jailed in filth or pelted with a thousand insults, nonetheless I shall
bear them patiently and shall wait for God's judgments.... And if by chance we fall
into the same straits and difficulties as Saul, let us consult God and learn from Him
what should be done. Let us beseech Him to show us a way out. Meanwhile, let us
prostrate and humble ourselves before His majesty, so that whatever kind of death
He may will for us, we may be prepared to undergo it.17

Echoing Augustine, Calvin observed that "nearly all heathen" heaped praise
on those who, like Saul, took their lives rather than suffer the "ignominy and

disgrace" of falling into the hands of their foes.18 Though naming no one,
Calvin was surely thinking above all of the Stoics, aggressive defenders of the
right to end one's life voluntarily, provided one acted rationally. Among the
numerous Roman figures who killed themselves rather than submit to their

enemies, Cato of Utica (died 46 B.C.E.), the Republican hero who stabbed
himself rather than surrender to the forces ofJulius Caesar, served as the model

of the "honorable" suicide. Philosophers such as Seneca, the later Stoic who
was himself forced to commit suicide by the emperor Nero in 65 c.E., described
Cato's demise as a most noble death and exalted suicide as the ultimate

expression of human freedom.19 Calvin alleged that, according to these "pagan

philosophers," Saul would be considered brave and "great in soul."20 Many

pagans saw those who took their lives under these circumstances as magnani-

mous and mocked the fears of those who hesitated to do so.21

Calvin acknowledged, nonetheless, that not all pagans held this view. Al-

17. CO46:719, 721; compare Ecclesiastes 12:7 and 2 Corinthians 11:23-33.

18. CO 46:718; compare City of God 1.22. Ancient pagan authors were not nearly as unified on
the issue of suicide as Calvin and Augustine suggested. Pythagoreans opposed all suicides

and, as noted above, Augustine borrowed heavily from pagan authors, especially from
Plato and Neoplatonists.
19. Seneca described suicide as a means of liberation and proclaimed Cato's death as a "most

glorious and memorable an end"; On Anger 3.15.3-4; and On Providence 2.9-12. Even
Cicero, who generally condemned suicide, lauded Cato, believing he had received divine
approbation for this act; Tusculan Disputations 1.74; Droge and Tabor, Noble Death,
pp. 32-36; Miriam Griffin, "Philosophy, Cato, and Roman Suicide," Greece and Rome 33
(1986): 64-77, 192-202; and Yolande Grise, Le suicide dans la Rome antique (Paris, 1982),
pp. 60-63. Condemning Cato's suicide, Augustine vowed that a more appropriate role
model from pagan Rome was Regulus, who surrendered to the Carthaginians in the First
Punic War and reportedly suffered a most torturous death at their hands; City of God
1.22-23. It must be noted that no philosopher, including Seneca, was actually promoting
suicide. Seneca deplored suicides that were motivated by a simple weariness of living or
that were acts of passion, the consequences of which had not been thoughtfully weighed.
Seneca admired only those suicides that were based on rational reflection and insisted that

people must not take their lives if they could still be useful to others; Nicole TadicGilloteaux, "Seneque face au suicide," L'antiquite classique 32 (1963): 541-551.

20. CO 46:718.

21. Supplementa, p. 513; compare Augustine, City of God 1.21.

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CHURCH HISTORY

468

though he did not mention him by name, Calvin was referring to Pythagoras

when he extolled the pagan author who originated the analogy, described
above, of humans as soldiers on guard duty. According to Calvin, in arguing that

humans are thus entrusted with the preservation of their lives, the pagan
Pythagoras was actually divinely inspired. Calvin alleged that God inspired
Pythagoras to speak thus in order to remove any excuse for killing oneself.22
Calvin insisted that since their lives belong to God, not to themselves, Christians, like the faithful soldier, must remain here on earth until God calls them
home.

Calvin saw no bounds to the degree of patience required of Christians.

Simply put, they were to endure all sorts of torture, misfortune, and disgrace.

People who have committed grave sins and are rightly subject to capital
punishment, for example, must bear patiently the punishment they deserve. If
they confess their sins and ask for forgiveness, theirs shall be an "honorable"
death in spite of the apparent dishonor associated with such executions. If they
avoid the obstinacy of Saul and Ahithophel in refusing to submit to God's will,
"in place of the everlasting confusion and pains which they had deserved, they
will find grace with God and His mercy will follow."23
In both sermons on suicide, Calvin dealt with the issue of women who,

attacked by marauding barbarians, committed suicide to avoid being raped.

Calvin here addressed an issue that Augustine raised, later commented upon by

Aquinas, concerning Roman women who killed themselves rather than be

raped by invading Goths in 410. Calvin observed that many praised such
women, almost to the point of canonizing them, for having sacrificed themselves in order to remain chaste. For Calvin, however, these women had sinned

in taking their lives. Like Augustine and Aquinas, Calvin maintained that it is
wrong to commit one evil in order to avoid another.24 He described the proper

approach:
If I am in some sort of danger, I must see if God will provide some means of
escape. But if God does not provide a way out and I try to kill myself by jumping

22. Supplementa, p. 513.

23. CO 46:722.

24. Augustine argued that since one does not have the right to kill a guilty person, then one
certainly must not kill innocent people, such as these women who were about to be raped.
He further argued that in killing oneself to avoid another sin, one has committed a sin for

which one cannot do penance. The logical consequence of this endeavor to remain pure
and avoid sin, he asserted, is that the Christian ought to commit suicide immediately after
baptism. He also criticized Lucretia who killed herself out of shame after being raped by
Sextus Tarquinius, declaring that she had punished the innocent victim of rape; City of God

1.16-18, 24, 26. In chapter 25, however, Augustine did acknowledge that it was possible

that some of these early Christian female martyrs may have been obeying a divine order to
take their lives. Aquinas, like Augustine, said that a woman must never commit the greater
sin of voluntary death to avoid the lesser sin of another person. The Bible says, moreover,

that one must not do evil so that good may come; Romans 3:8; and Summa Theologica,
Secunda Secundae, Quaest. 64, Art. 5.

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CALVIN ON SUICIDE

469

from atop the walls or from a high window, ... it is as if I wanted to have more
foresight than God. And that is a form of pride that we must condemn. Thus to
those who say that it is legitimate to kill themselves if that is the only means of
avoiding evil, we always reply that the real proof of our faith is that when we are at
our wits' end, we must say, "God will provide."25

Calvin considered suicide a terribly wicked act not only because it defied the
will of God but also because he deemed it unnatural. This view accounts for

Calvin's description of Ahithophel's death as "detestable, even monstrous," in

spite of the seemingly dispassionate tone of the Scripture passage. Killing

oneself is a sin, he preached, because it violates our natural instinct of
self-preservation:
[I]t is against nature that a man kills himself regardless of the method. We have
this natural sense to flee from death; we have a certain horror of death, which God
has instilled in us. Knowing that death came from God's malediction, we must always

be humble and proceed in great fear. The pagans knew that death is horrible and
that everyone flees it, but they did not know why. [They did not know] that death
came into this world because of sin. They thought that people were born mortal and
were subject to death from the earliest creation. God engraved in the hearts of all
persons this apprehension so that death terrifies and shocks them.26

This repugnance causes us to retreat from death whenever possible. Killing

oneself, Calvin argued, is beneath the animals-even the most savage beasts
invariably try to survive and preserve the state in which God placed them. In
rejecting suicide as contrary to nature, Calvin was reiterating Aquinas's argument that suicide violated natural law in that all things love themselves in the

state of nature.27

Calvin's view that suicide is unnatural closely connects with his belief that
self-murder is caused by diabolical possession. Killing oneself, he declared, is a

brutish, villainous act; people who commit suicide are "possessed by the
devil."28 Though originating among clerics, the notion that suicide was diabolical had not always been prominent among Christian thinkers-neither August-

ine nor Aquinas said anything about the devil causing suicides. By the late
Middle Ages, however, this belief became widely accepted. While the devil was
generally depicted as causing the despair that led to suicide, Calvin blamed the
devil for suppressing the instinct of self-preservation, which God instills in all
creatures. According to Calvin, experience shows that without this diabolical

"fury," no one would ever take one's life. A "drop of natural sense" would
suffice to prevent someone from committing suicide.29 When God gives life to

25. Supplementa, p. 515; compare CO46:722; and City of God 1.16-17.

26. Supplementa, pp. 512-513.
27. Summa Theologica, Secunda Secundae, Quaest. 64, Art. 5; and Bayet, Suicide et morale,

pp.426-428.

28. Supplementa, p. 513.

29. Supplementa, p. 513; MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. 34-76; and Jean-Claude
Schmitt, "Le suicide au Moyen Age," Annales: E.S.C. 31 (1976): 4-5.

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470

CHURCH HISTORY

people, they clearly should preserve it and praise God for it. When, however, a
person goes so far as to hang himself, stab himself, poison himself, or tojump to
his death, he has obliterated this knowledge that God has given him. Such a

person has been degraded. Consequently, "we cannot help but conclude that
the devil has put such a rage in [that man]; such a man is no longer himself and
no longer knows what he is doing and what he is saying."30

The evidence from Geneva's criminal proceedings shows that magistrates

and the rank and file, including even the suicides themselves, shared this
conviction that suicide was diabolical. In 1561 Bonaventure Gronbon jumped
off a bridge to his death to avoid arrest for the capital crime of counterfeiting.
In condemning this act, magistrates emphasized that Satan had incited Gronbon to kill himself.31 In testimony concerning the death of Julienne Berard,

mentioned above, some witnesses reported from hearsay that Berard was a
witch, and one man avowed that Berard jumped in the river at the very spot
where the devil had appeared to Berard's former servant-girl, who had since
been executed for sorcery.32 This association of suicide with witchcraft, the

diabolical act par excellence, underscores the perceived connection between

Satan and self-inflicted deaths. Similarly, in 1547 Perrod Bouloz, a farmer of
about sixty, was accused of witchcraft but refused to confess to sorcery even
under torture. After a torture session, he managed to get hold of a knife and
stabbed himself, dying a few hours later. Before expiring, Bouloz begged God
for mercy and on one occasion screamed, "Devil, get away from me."33 Though
he had emphatically denied under torture that the devil was his master, Bouloz
nonetheless associated self-murder with diabolical possession. Likewise, in the
days after he wounded himself, the aforementioned Jean Jourdain was asked
whether he had given himself to the devil or heard a voice in the woods. The

dying man replied that he had indeed asked the devil to come kill him. He
heard no voice in the woods, however, and the devil did not put him out of his
misery.34Jourdain had so assimilated the belief that the devil was behind suicide
that he called out for diabolical intervention to put an end to his days. In short,

people from different levels of society shared Calvin's belief that suicide
stemmed from demon possession.
In spite of his desire to condemn in the strongest manner self-murder, Calvin
nonetheless rejected an argument against suicide proffered by Aristotle and
adopted by Aquinas. Aristotle declared that suicide offends the state, presum-

ably because it deprives society of one of its members. Calvin found this
reasoning cold and vulgar, declaring that it could just as easily be used in favor
of voluntarily ending one's life. A terminally ill person may be encouraged to
30. Supplementa, p. 514.

31. PC 983, AEG.

32. PC 1179,AEG.
33. PC 2e Serie 745, AEG.
34. PC 552, AEG; and RC 50: 23v.

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CALVIN ON SUICIDE

471

end his or her life in order to avoid being a burden on others. Calvin, however,
saw no justification for such a death, even if caused simply by abstaining from
eating. The key reason not to take one's life is, again, that since God gave life,
God must be the one to take it away. Moreover, Calvin held that one gives better

evidence of obedience to God through long suffering than through dying a

dozen deaths.35

Calvin almost entirely avoided the problem of the seemingly fine line
between martyrdom and suicide among certain early Christians. A number of
early martyrs seemed to court death in a manner that bordered on suicide, an

issue with which Augustine grappled in arguing that Donatists, whom he

considered heretical, were not martyrs, but were responsible for their own
deaths. Calvin's very brief references to martyrdom in his sermons on Saul and

Ahithophel were limited to the apostolic church. On the one hand, Calvin
urged his parishioners to follow the examples of the prophets and apostles who
patiently suffered the most ignominious treatment: "For some were thrown
into irons, others beheaded; some stoned, others cut up; some mocked, others
flayed; some ... were ill-clad."36 Their long suffering for their faith, however,
was ultimately quite ennobling.37
On the other hand, Calvin treaded rather gingerly in referring briefly to the
death of the apostle Peter. The only biblical reference to Peter's death isJesus'
somewhat vague prophecy in the Gospel of John. Since the late first century,
however, Christian tradition held that Peter was killed in Rome as a martyr for
his faith, and the first reference to Peter's upside-down crucifixion dated from
the fourth century. Medieval Catholic tradition held that to be martyrs, Christians had to die of their own free will-if death were inescapable, they had not
voluntarily given their lives and thus did not merit martyrdom.38 Familiar with
these traditions of martyrology, Calvin wrote that Peter "definitely died of his
own volition, presenting himself as a sacrifice. His death would not have been
esteemed as virtuous were it not for the fact that he was impelled to seal the
truth of the Gospel."39 In saying these words, Calvin surely did not mean that
Peter actively sought martyrdom. Rather, Peter's death was voluntary in the
sense that he could have saved his life by renouncing his Christian faith. Calvin

35. Supplementa, pp. 514-515; compare Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.11.1. Citing "the Philoso-

pher" as his authority, Aquinas held that as every person is part of society, by killing

oneself, one injures society; Summa Theologica, Secunda Secundae, Quaest. 64, Art. 5.

36. CO 46:721; compare Hebrews 11:36-40.

37. CO46:722; compare Hebrews 11:35-37 and 2 Maccabees 6-7.

38. The first mention of Peter's martyrdom was by Clement of Rome in the last decade of the
first century (1 Clement 5:1-4, 6:1-2). Clement, however, made no mention of precisely
the method by which Peter died. The first mention of his being crucified upside down was
made in the fourth-century Latin Acts ofPeterwhich, like 1 Clement, has been consigned to
the realm of the apocrypha; Angelo Di Berardino, ed., Encyclopedia of the Early Church (New
York, 1992), s. v. "Peter".
39. Supplementa, p. 513.

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CHURCH HISTORY

made no mention of the manner in which Peter died, assuming that his
audience knew that the apostle's death, though voluntary, was not by his own
hand. Calvin avoided entirely the issue of whether God might actually order

someone to commit suicide, an issue that Augustine grappled with, rather

unconvincingly, in discussing Samson's death. The reason that Calvin raised the
issue of Peter's death was not to dwell on the distinction between martyrdom
and suicide but rather to insist that even martyrs, such as Peter, experienced the
natural fear of death.40 Calvin preferred to disregard any gray area between
martyrdom and suicide.
Similarly, Calvin dealt with the issue of the burial of suicides only in a rather

tangential manner. Ecclesiastical practice denied burial honors to suicides as

far back as 563, when the Council of Braga denied them the funerary rites of
the eucharist and the singing of the Psalms.41 The desecration of corpses was a

custom of popular origin found throughout much of medieval and early

modern western Europe. Inspired by popular practices, medieval secular law
had included the desecration of corpses in various ways. French customary law
of the high Middle Ages, for example, went beyond simple denial of burial
honors, requiring that the bodies of suicides be hanged, dragged through the
streets, or burned.42 These traditions-the denial of burial rites, the desecration of the corpses, and even the forfeiture of goods-had roots in pagan
antiquity. Plato, for example, advocated burying suicides "in disgrace," separated from others, on the fringe of the cemetery, in unmarked graves.43 By
contrast, though they strongly condemned all suicides, neither Augustine nor
40. Augustine argued that Samson's death, though self-inflicted, was justified because he was
fulfilling an order from God; City of God 1.20. In light of the scriptural passage, however,
this argument is far from convincing. Discussing the scriptural forecast of Peter's death,
Calvin preached, "Peter was not ... without fear. For it was with good reason thatJesus said
to Peter, 'when you were young, you used to get ready and go anywhere you wanted to; but
when you are old, you will stretch out your hands and someone else will tie you up and take

you where you don't want to go.' [John 21:18] Our Lord Jesus Christ thus shows this

natural inclination [to avoid death] was in St. Peter, who had to struggle to overcome this
terror of death. And that is why I have said that it is a monstrous and hideous thing for a
man deliberately to want to die"; Supplementa, p. 513. The next verse from the gospel, not
quoted by Calvin, reads, " (In saying this,Jesus was indicating the way in which Peter would
die and bring glory to God.)"
41. Droge and Tabor, Noble Death, pp. 5, 22.
42. Bayet, Suicide et morale, pp. 387-388, 434-446. Jean Delumeau maintains that such burial
customs for suicides exemplified the Christianization of pre- or non-Christian rituals; La

peur en occident (XIVe-XVIIIe siecles) (Paris, 1978), pp. 84-85. In early modern England,
Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy describe the rites of desecration, which clearly
included pagan elements, as "a genuine demotic custom, performed by laymen without
clerical participation, ... an expression of a deeply held conviction that self-murder was
supernaturally evil"; Sleepless Souls, pp. 44-45.

43. Laws 873c-d. The ancients regularly punished at least some suicides. Thebans and

Romans at times left suicides unburied, while Athenians cut off the suicide's hand that was

responsible for the death. In ancient Rome soldiers, among others, who took their lives
forfeited their goods because they had neglected their obligations to the state in killing
themselves; MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. 17. Romans found death by hanging

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473

Aquinas said anything about burying the bodies of self-murderers. In a similar

fashion, Calvin showed no interest in withholding burial rites to suicides in

order to defame them. He noted that Ahithophel's burial appeared honorable;

he was even buried in the sepulcher of his father. According to popular

opinion, Ahithophel was thus not subject to disgrace. But, Calvin insisted, this is
not to say that he was not punished. God has an infinite number of means of
ruining the enemies of the church. For another enemy, God perhaps would not
allow the body to be buried; another may be allowed to be buried, but not in the
family tomb. We may not always see God's punishments carried out here on

earth, but God will surely impose them, if not in this world then in the

hereafter.44

Preaching about Ahithophel in November 1562, months after the hostilities

of the French Religious Wars were unleashed, Calvin referred to the persecution of the French Reformed in dealing with this issue of burial. Aware of the

desecration of the corpses of Huguenots, Calvin rejected the importance of

burial in the scheme of divine justice and salvation:
[I]f God wants our enemies to be honored even after their deaths, then let them
be buried; or if the poor children of God will be killed and their bodies left exposed,
then we must wait patiently. We must hold to this truth today, especially since we see
our poor brothers, some of whom are burned and whose ashes are then thrown to
the wind; others hanged, others thrown in the water. It would seem as if they were
unworthy to be buried in the earth, or rather that the earth is not worthy to have
them. This scandal of seeing evil folk thus buried with pomp and glory while the

poor children of God are treated with ignominy, could cause us to lose courage

unless we have learned this doctrine well.45

Quite simply, Calvin viewed the treatment of corpses of good and evil people as
ultimately irrelevant.

This comes as no surprise inasmuch as Calvin would have preferred demystifying burials entirely, which he considered heavily laden with pagan superstitions. Ideally, Calvin would have done away with burial rituals altogether. At
Calvin's own request, no words or prayers were spoken when he was buried in
an unmarked grave. Rites for funerals and mourning, however, were an area in

which Genevans never entirely embraced the Reformed morality of Calvin.

Throughout the early modern period, Genevans remained attached to practices such as the procession to the cemetery replete with black mourning
crepes. At the cemetery, they offered prayers and sang Psalms. That some
suicides were punished by burial outside the cemetery shows that the notion of
hallowed burial ground still resonated among Geneva's rank and file. Certain
popular rituals and attitudes Calvin and his successors simply had to tolerate.

particularly repulsive and denied burial to those who took their lives by this method; Grise,
Suicide dans la Rome antique, pp. 141-149.
44. Supplementa, pp. 517-519.

45. Ibid., p. 519.

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CHURCH HISTORY

The same holds true for desecration rites. In a commentary on Deuteronomy, Calvin deplored the practice of leaving criminals' corpses hanging from
a gibbet, out of concern not for the deceased but for the general public, fearing
they might become insensitive to such "barbaric scenes."46 But as much as he
disliked the punishments inflicted on the bodies of miscreants, Calvin at the

very least tolerated these practices, in spite of their pagan and medieval
Catholic elements. If, as Calvin believed, suicide was tied to diabolical posses-

sion, then he understandably acquiesced in applying these popular punishments which symbolized damnation, the eternal exclusion of the suicide from
the Christian community.47 The harsh treatment of the corpses of Genevan
suicides certainly cannot be attributed to Calvin but rather to popular practices
that predated the Reformation by centuries.
All told, where did Calvin stand on suicide? He categorically condemned it
primarily because it was a rebellion against God, a refusal to submit to God's
will. It was evil because it was unnatural and resulted from diabolical possession.
Calvin's views on suicide are worth studying not because they were original but
because they were representative of his age. He was a most articulate spokesman
who aptly reflected contemporary attitudes towards suicide shared by the elite
and common folk, clergy and laity, Protestants and Catholics. In line with the
most important discussions on the topic since Augustine, Calvin's opinions on
suicide were neither original nor inordinately harsh, sharing views held by late
medieval Catholics.

One can also not help but conclude that in formulating his views on suicide,

Calvin uncharacteristically gave less weight to biblical exegesis than to the

opinions of past authors such as Aquinas and above all Augustine, the thinker
most responsible for Western society's abhorrence for suicide. Neither the Old

nor the New Testament clearly condemns voluntary death. The unqualified
repugnance that Calvin expressed is not found in the scriptural accounts of the
deaths of Saul, Ahithophel, or any of the other half-dozen biblical self-inflicted
deaths. The suicide of Razias is even described as a noble death in 2 Maccabees,
a book which Calvin of course viewed as apocryphal.48 As Augustine argued, the

commandment against killing can be interpreted as forbidding both suicide

46. In his commentary, Calvin discusses the passage in which Moses declared that the bodies
of executed criminals must not be left hanging from a post but rather ought to be buried
the same day of the execution (Deuteronomy 21:22-23). Calvin maintained that Moses was
concerned lest the Israelites become inured to such scenes of barbarism and in turn

become more prone to commit homicide themselves; CO 24:629.

47. MacDonald and Murphy observe with regard to the burial practices surrounding suicides:
"Since the Protestant clergy stressed the supernatural causes of self-murder, they had
either to replace or to tolerate the popular religious practices that dealt with its supernatural consequences. They chose to tolerate them"; Sleepless Souls, p. 44.
48. The Geneva Bible contains the following gloss regarding Razias's suicide: "As this private
example oght not to be followed of the godlie, because it is contrary to the worde of God,
althogh the autor seme here to approve"; The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition,

(Madison, Wisc., 1969), 2 Maccabees 14:41. Notwithstanding Scripture, Aquinas con-

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CALVIN ON SUICIDE

475

and murder; Calvin, however, made no mention of self-murder in a sermon and

commentary on the sixth commandment, discussing only interpersonal violence.49 Moreover, in spite of that commandment, there are many examples of

divinely sanctioned homicides in the Bible. Could there not also be some
exceptional suicides that are divinely approved? In short, Calvin, who rejected

virtually all rituals and doctrines that were not solidly based on Scripture,
ultimately owed more to authors of pagan antiquity than to the Bible in dealing
with the issue of suicide.

Moreover, although he passionately and sincerely believed that suicide was

sinful, Calvin's thoughts on self-murder were limited to these two sermons.
There were two reasons for this paucity of words on suicide. First, it was not an
important issue. Virtually all sixteenth-century thinkers, Protestants and Catholics, agreed that regardless of the circumstances, suicide was clearly wrong.50
Thomas More described voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill in Utopia

and, inspired by Stoicism, Montaigne (died 1591) and Pierre Charron (died
1603) made more serious though still moderate defenses of suicide in the late
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.51 Apart from isolated voices, how-

ever-such asJohn Donne's more radical defense of suicide published posthumously in 1647-one would have to wait for the eighteenth-century philosophes

for an all-out debate over the legitimacy of suicide.52 In Calvin's Europe, a

debate over suicide's legitimacy was no more likely than an argumentjustifying
parricide.
Another reason that Calvin paid little attention to suicide is that it did not
appear to be much of a problem. Suicide in Reformation Geneva, as elsewhere,
was rare. Though the city attained a population of over twenty thousand during

demned Razias's suicide as an act of weakness or cowardice; Summa Theologica, Secunda

Secundae, Quaest. 64, Art. 5.

49. CO 24:611-613; 26:321-334; compare City of God 1.19.

50. The catechism produced by the Council of Trent condemned all suicides, and a series of

councils in France-Lyon (1577), Bordeaux (1583), Cambrai (1586), and Chartres

(1587)-all forbade the burial of suicides; Bayet, Suicide et morale, pp. 541-542.

51. Charron, De la Sagesse (Paris, 1606), 2.2; Montaigne, "Coustume de l'Isle de Cea," Essais
(Paris, 1595), 2.3; More, Utopia (Louvain, Belgium, 1516), Book 2. Elsewhere, however,
Thomas More condemned suicide in no uncertain terms, writing that the most horrible
fear that one can experience is "where the devill temptith a man to kyll and destroy hym
selfe"; The Complete Works, vol. 12: A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulations, ed. L. L. Marts

and F. Manley (New Haven, Conn., 1976), p. 122; cited in MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless
Souls, p. 90.

52. Donne endeavored to refute Aquinas's arguments that suicide violates the laws of nature,
the state, and God: under certain circumstances, some people naturally desire death;
voluntary death is not contrary to the law of the state so long as the individual is not
motivated by self-interest; the Bible nowhere condemns suicide per se. Donne, Biathanatos:
A Declaration of the Paradox or Thesis That Self-Homicide Is Not So Naturally a Sin That It May

Never Be Otherwise (London, 1647); Droge and Tabor, Noble Death, pp. 7-8. For eighteenth-

century views, see Crocker, "Discussion of Suicide," pp. 47-72; and John McManners,

Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death in Eighteenth-century France (Oxford,

U.K., 1981), pp. 409-437.

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Calvin's lifetime, extant records reveal only eight suicides in Geneva from
Calvin's return in 1541 until his death in 1564.53 Suicide was rare in large part
because everyone shared Calvin's horror of suicide. As noted above, his belief
that suicide resulted from demon possession was shared by common folk and
elites alike. While widespread belief in diabolical power led to a witchcraft craze
in Reformation Europe, the contemporary view that the devil was responsible
for suicide served as one of the most important deterrents to taking one's life.
By contrast, Geneva experienced a veritable explosion in suicides (almost three

hundred) in the second half of the eighteenth century, a period in which a

much more secular atmosphere permeated Geneva. By that time, the intellectual leaders of Europe were not theologians but rather the philosophes, many of

whom, such as Voltaire and Montesquieu, defended under certain circumstances the right to end one's life. In the later 1700s popular belief in and fear
of the devil had waned in Geneva, and suicide accordingly became secularized
and medicalized, as both common folk and authorities attributed self-inflicted
deaths not to demon possession but rather to mental illness. These contemporary changes in the attitudes toward and the frequency of suicide show a vitally
important conjunction between social history and the history of ideas.54
53. From 1540 through 1564, there is also record of three suicides in the surrounding

countryside that depended on Geneva. By comparison, extant records reveal forty-five

homicides, including six cases of infanticide, for the same years. The population of Geneva
fluctuated widely at this time because of the arrivals and departures of large numbers of
refugees, especially from France. Estimates indicate that the city's population was 13,100 in
1550, increasing to 21,400 in 1560 (a peak that would not be matched until the eighteenth
century), and then decreasing to 16,000 in 1570; Alfred Perrenoud, La population de Geneve
XVIe-XIXe siecles (Geneva, Switzerland, 1979), p. 37. The only study thus far that suggests
that suicide was not rare in Reformation Europe is Michael Zell, "Suicide in Pre-Industrial
England," Social History 11 (1986): 303-317.

54. See Michael MacDonald, "The Secularization of Suicide in England 1660-1800," Past and
Present 111 (1986): 50-100. On suicide in eighteenth-century Geneva, see Laurent Haeberli, "Le suicide a Geneve au XVIIIe siecle," in Pour une Histoire Qualitative (Geneva,

Switzerland, 1975), pp. 115-129; Michel Porret, '"Je ne suis deja plus de ce monde': Le
suicide des vieillards a Geneve au XVIIe et XVIIIe si&cles," in Lepoids des ans. Une histoire de

la vieillesse en Suisse Romande, ed. Genevieve Heller (Lausanne, Switzerland, 1994), pp.

67-94; Porret, "Solitude, melancolie, souffrance: Le suicide a Geneve durant l'Ancien

Regime (XVIIe-XVIIIe siecles)," Cahiers Psychiatriques Genevois 16 (1994): 9-21; Watt,

"The Family, Love, and Suicide in Early Modern Geneva," Journal of Family History 21
(1996): 63-86; Watt, "Reformed Piety and Suicide in Geneva, 1550-1800," in The Identity of
Geneva: The Christian Commonwealth, 1564-1864, ed. John B. Roney and Martin Klauber
(Westport, Conn., forthcoming).

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