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The Savage God
By A. Alvarez
New York, Random House, 1972. 249 pp. $7.95.

In a Darkness
By James A. Wechsler with Nancy F. Wechsler and Holly W. Karpf
New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1972. 160 pp. $5.95.

Simplism has been the bane of much of the moral, psychological, and sociological analysis of suicide. Historically this complex phenomenon has been attributed to black bile, bad weather, scurvy, masturbation, atmospheric pressures, Satan, and socialism. Cold baths and laxatives were persistently seen as the reliable deterrents to the suicidal urge.

The nihilistic movement of Dada saw suicide as an art form and a vocation. Early Freud saw it as transposed murder. Camus called it "a metaphysical crime." President Eisenhower saw Swedish suicide rates as the direful fruit of social welfare. Mostly, suicide has been seen as the mark of mental illness. And, through-

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out most of Christian history, suicide has been considered as faithless sin and sacrilege.

These two books are, in their different ways, antidotes to simplism and reductionism. Both pose a sharp challenge to those who would make a moral judgment on the act by which more than one thousand persons throughout the world put an end to their lives every day.

Alvarez' book is sensitive and well written. His prologue is an account of the suicide of his friend, the poetess Sylvia Plath. His epilogue is an account of his own frustrated attempt at suicide. Alvarez is a poet, author, and literary critic, and much of his historical study of suicide stresses the prominence and treatment of this act in literature.

He touches on the Greco-Roman justification of suicide. Plato justified suicide when life became intolerable, and the Stoics developed and formalized this with what Alvarez calls "a calm, though slightly excessive, reasonableness." As the Stoic documents put it: "Whoever no longer wishes to live shall state his reasons to the Senate, and after having received permission, shall abandon life." The Pythagoreans saw suicide as a violation of the prerogatives of the gods. Alvarez drastically misunderstands the early Christian reverence for martyrdom, and this leads him to the conclusion that "Christian teaching was at first a powerful incitement to suicide." He accurately notes, however, that Donatist excess in the pursuit of martyrdom did provoke Augustine to a strong condemnation of self-killing. Various councils in the sixth and seventh centuries crystallized the mounting Christian abhorrence of suicide.

Literature resonated the horror with which suicide was beheld. Dante devoted one of the grimmest cantos of his Inferno to the grisly afterlife of suicides. Thomas More's ideal republic would have the suicide "caste unburied into some stinkinge marrish."

John Donne was fighting an entrenched tradition when be wrote his Biathanatos. A Declaration of that Paradoxe, or Thesis, That Self-homicide is not so naturally Sinne, that it may never be otherwise (1608). The literary view of suicide did change. Stoked by the attempted suicide of William Cowper, the wildly romanticized suicide of Thomas Chatterton, and by Goethe's trend-setting The Sorrows of Young Werther, the Romantic period lyricized the suicide of the young, the gifted, and the sensitive.

Alvarez, however, does not romanticize suicide. Normally it proceeds from loneliness, depression, and "cold, private despair." In spite of its potential variety, it tends to be prompted by an "obscuring sense of inner chaos and worthlessness." He deplores the clinically uncompassionate and jargonesque suicidology of the

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social sciences. His plea is ultimately for unromantic enlightenment; his study of suicide is valuable.

In his book, In a Darkness, James A. Wechsler traces the agonies of his son Michael, who, after nine years of mental illness killed himself with an overdose of barbituates in his twenty-sixth year. The book is poignant, agonizingly frank, and revealing about both Wechsler and his son. James Wechsler's chronicle of torment is undiluted, and his anger at the psychiatric profession (Michael had eight psychiatrists in nine years) regularly overflows. One comes to share the painful sense of helplessness that grew in the whole family as the tragic drama moved with apparent inevitability to its suicidal conclusion.

Wechsler's courageous account leaves the involved reader with the task of evaluating the human meaning of the final act by which Michael ended his suffering. Michael had received unlimited care from his intensely concerned parents. Yet there is a sinking quality in the long story of his illness. More and more he falls behind his contemporaries; he is detached from his supportive peer social structure; and he is weighed down by the accumulating experiences of failure and relapse. With all the sadness of his death, one feels a sense of relief. Even his father admits that it might have been "selfish" to hope that the doctors could restore him in those minutes before death was pronounced.

Michael's suicide was marked by saneness, calmness, and compassion. There was no drama or posturing poetry in his farewell note. It was, rather, filled with delicacy and concern for his mother, father, and sister. Michaels final action appears to have been very lucid and deliberate.

One of Michael's psychiatrists bad told him that he himself had to decide whether to function in the real world, become a permanent patient, or kill himself. He even advised Michael against jumping to his death since that might result in mere injury and a worsening of his plight. After excruciating struggles to be cured, Michael made the decision that his father would like to believe was "a triumph of courage."

Put in moral terms, it would appear that, given the concrete circumstances of Michael's case, his final act was subjectively and objectively a good act. Suicide was, it would appear, an objectively moral option for him.

The morality of suicide is, of course, a matter of the greatest gravity. As Wittengenstein put it: "If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin." And yet as ethics moves from the simplicity of taboo to the complexity of realism in this area, it

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must face the possibility that the tragic option of suicide may at times be moral. Unless one succumbs to the cryptonominalism of calling suicide intrinsically evil, one must face the possibility of the exceptional case of morally good suicide.

The ethical rubrics which must guide the moral analysis of suicide are existent alternatives and foreseeable consequences. To choose suicide when there are viable alternatives would seem immoral. Likewise, one must assess carefully the potential consequences of a conscious extension of man's moral dominion over death, and weigh these against the consequences for many persons of treating suicide as "a negative absolute." These two books are good material resources for those who would engage in a new moral analysis of suicide.

Daniel C. Maguire
Marquette University
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

CORRECTION

In the April issue, two paragraphs in the article by John J. Carey, "An Overview of Catholic Theology," contained type that was transposed, thereby confusing the meaning. The first instance was the second paragraph on page 35; it should read as follows:

Schillebeeckx has also raised the issue of the importance of dialogue in the church (versus the one-way communication which assumes that truth is already known and simply needs to be passed on) and of the limited role of the magisterium in a secularized and pluralistic world. ¹⁷ In a broad spectrum of Roman Catholic thought today be is a progressive, definitely a force for change, but working within the middle matrix of Catholic theology.

The second instance was the first paragraph in section V on page 40; the correct version is as follows:

This analysis of contemporary Roman Catholic theology has covered a lot of ground and has dealt with more peaks than total terrain. Each category has more representatives and nuances than I could deal with in this limited space; I am particularly aware that if one wanted to consider some strains of Italian and Vatican theologies it would be possible to delineate a fifth category of "reactionary theology," but that would hardly be of interest to Protestant readers.