Today’s Devil-Inspired Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Nowhere in the New Testament is suicide explicitly condemned. It was not until the fourth century and the invective of St. Augustine that the Christian Church began to denounce suicide as sinful and inspired by the Devil. The suicide’s crime was to have destroyed God’s creation. Indeed, Judas Iscariot’s more heinous sin was not to betray Christ but to hang himself afterwards. Early in its history, the Church’s opprobrium towards suicides was compromised by its need to excuse the ‘voluntary’ suicides of the martyrs, of those devout Christians who accelerated their death by self-deprivation and asceticism, and of women who killed themselves to protect their virginity or chastity. By the end of the fifth century the attitude of the Christian Church had hardened to such an extent that not even the martyr, ascetic or virgin could claim absolution. At the Council of Braga in 563 it was decided that all suicides were to be punished, unless they were proven insane. Such punishment took two forms: indignities perpetrated on the corpse itself, and forfeiture of the deceased’s property. The indignities varied from place to place, each community having its local customs set down for the burial of suicides. In Danzig, for instance, the corpse was not allowed to leave the room through the door but through the window; in some parts of England the body was not allowed to enter the churchyard through the gate but over the wall.
Culled from: Death: A History of Man’s Obsessions and Fears