The simplest form of the will to live as physis and psyche is undoubtedly that whose negation or apparent negation may be seen most strikingly in the possibility of suicide. It is the simple affirmation of life, the readiness, indicated by a specific action or nonaction, to continue that movement from the past through the present to the future of which our life-act consists. Quite apart from its creatureliness, and as a sign of this, our life is bordered by death. Beyond this frontier we can seek its reality only in God, who has taken back to himself what belongs to him, and in whom we know that it is not lost as we believe in him. That our willing and doing, our life, is not absolute but relative may be seen palpably in the fact that we can make that simple affirmation of our life only relatively, for “in the midst of life we are in death.”8 Yet we can do it. We have means, effective only in certain connections and only for a while, not absolutely, but still means to evade death. We have also a number of very effective, and even absolutely effective, means to hasten or bring on death. This demonstrates the relative reality of our life, will, and action. The very simple affirmation of our life, or its real or apparent negation, undoubtedly falls already under the command of God. It cannot be said that the affirmation of life is intrinsically good. On the contrary, even this primitive will to live can be the sin, the revolt of the creature against the Creator, who has given us life not that we might affirm it but that in affirming it we might affirm him. |
To affirm life in obedience to the Creator can mean sacrificing it, not evading death, but hastening it and even bringing it on by inaction or action. When Jesus went up to Jerusalem, he obviously chose this possibility in opposition to the “this shall never happen to you” [Matt. 16:22] of his disciple. But obedience to God the Creator will always mean also affirming one’s own life. For only affirmed life can be sacrificed. When we are tired of life (when perhaps whole peoples and cultures grow tired of life), when we think we should consent not to use the provided means of warding off death (there is an apparently purely passive and psychical dying), when we hazard our life (perhaps in sport or a duel or for scientific or technical ends, e.g., oceanic flights), when a whole nation resolves to expose itself to the fire of the cannon of another nation, then, apart from all other questions, there also arises the question what becomes of the affirmation of life which is not left to our own caprice but is required of us by the command of the Creator, and we always have to consider that our life does not belong to us but that in all its relativity it is loaned to us, that it stands at God’s disposal and not at ours. If this “standing at God’s disposal” can mean very concretely that we have to sacrifice it, we cannot sacrifice it unless we have first affirmed it. When men do apparently sacrifice their lives, the question always is whether it is in obedience to the command that they give free rein to death, whether their sacrifice is thus a genuine one, or whether it is not negligence or caprice. Death in an air crash or a mountaineering accident does not fall self-evidently under the concept of sacrifice any more than every simple affirmation of life falls under that of the required sustaining of life. In ethics we do not have to determine whether this or that is the commanded or forbidden affirmation or negation of life. God alone determines that. But we do have to consider the rule that the command of the Creator (even though very concretely it may be: Die!) always includes the command of life, the natural fear of death which even Jesus showed (and was, of course, obedient in so doing), and the avoidance of death that lies within our power. |
In this light the possibility of suicide must not be judged as occurs in most ethics despite all assurances to the contrary, but, more accurately, the divine command must be considered and its relation to this possibility. I do not think it right to say with Schlatter (p. 339) that the destruction of one’s own life is always in conflict with the faith that lays hold of God, since it is a rejection of God’s help, a seizure of unlimited power of control over ourselves, and a rejection of our allotted destiny.9 How do we know whether this applies in an individual case? Are there not instances in which one might ask whether the direct opposite is not true? Since a public and representative figure is at issue, we are not violating the rights of a fellowman if we take the example of Kaiser Wilhelm II and ask (as Reichskanzler Michaelis has asked) whether he would not have done well in the Christian sense to demonstrate his concept of monarchy and people in the autumn of 1918, and perhaps give a different aspect to the whole subsequent course of affairs by seeking death in the nearest trench instead of offering Christian reasons for not doing so. But if we can and must ask in this way on both sides, if we have also to consider that it will not always be easy to differentiate true suicide indisputably from other related possibilities, we have to concede at once to Schlatter and all the other ethicists who make short work of this issue that the obvious question in face of the possibility of suicide will always be whether the command of life is not misunderstood in a more shattering way because the wrong decision, if it be such, is the final decision of the person concerned, a wrong decision on the very threshold of eternity. Does there not lie in the background here an absence of fear of death for which we have neither command nor occasion, a totally useless fear and a forbidden cowardice in face of life? Is not the first thing that God has put in our hands rejected here in a revolt that cannot be excused on the plea that continuation of the life concerned might have to be judged as an even worse revolt? It is precisely when we stand by the position that we should not judge people and actions but consider the command of God that, in face of the possibility of suicide, we cannot see too clearly that even a voluntary death, if it is to be right, must not rest merely on permission—for what does permission mean if we ourselves have to decide?—but must be done in conformity with the command. Even if the most concrete command is: Die! it presupposes the command: Live! Is this command really considered, am I ready to meet what is commanded, if for any reason I must take up my revolver? What does it mean for a nation or for a confession in relation to the ultimate question of its existence if statistics show an increase of this possibility within its ranks? The church’s task in this regard cannot be to set up and propagate the doctrine that suicide is reprehensible and forbidden. If it does not do this, it must also decline to advance the opposing doctrine that suicide is permitted. Its task is to proclaim the command of God the Creator. Genuinely leaving the verdict to him, it has to drive home the point that this command is the command of life, so that people are certainly disobedient to this command if, as obvious suicides or in some other way, they throw life away, if they bring disgrace on what they might, or perhaps should, merely sacrifice, and by doing so evade the sacrifice.
The next and very primitive form of the will to live is that which, according to the familiar formula, arises out of hunger and love. Our life is conditioned by the necessity of metabolism and by sexuality. In view of the unheard-of fact that we spend at least a third of our brief life asleep, I might mention the need of rest as a third primitive motif of life. The form of the will to live triggered by these conditions of existence is not ethically irrelevant and should not be treated as such, for scientifically considered—and there is no reason why it should not be considered scientifically—this is unquestionably the basic form of this will, and any deeper insight into one’s own life, or that of others, or the reality of history, makes it disconcertingly clear how vigorously this form of our will persists and asserts itself in every higher form by means of refined, and even very refined, translations. Not everything, but a great deal in the phenomenon of man both individually and more generally may, in fact, be explained by the fact that we are continually hungry, sexually unsettled, and in need of sleep. Not by this alone, but by this too. And it is, in fact, no indifferent matter whether