Nikki’s Reviews > History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture > Status Update

Melancholia, Willis wrote, is "a madness without fever or frenzy, accompanied by fear and sadness.' Animal spirits become "obscure, opaque, shadowy" when they are agitated, and the images they carry to the brain are veiled with "shadows and with shades". The individual grows sad and prone to morbid, even suicidal reactions.

What hold could threats of hell have when people thought life worse than hell? Suicide will disappear when its causes disappear - that is, when the earth is a paradise and happiness reigns undivided. Until that day, it is illusory to believe that reasoning or laws can have any effect on desperate people. What arguments are there to persuade someone whose ultimate argument is that he or she would be better off dead?

(…) the prohibition of suicide entailed a loss of human freedom. Stripping people of their essential right to dispose of their own persons worked to the benefit of the Church, which (…) drew its strength from the numbers of the faithful, and to the benefits of the lords (…), who needed to maintain and increase their labor supply in an underpopulated world (…)

Despair was among the gravest sins precisely because it contested the role of the Church in pardoning faults through absolution (…)

(…) suicide is the supreme mark of human liberty and permits us to triumph over all ills (…)