As Chesterton builds his defense of Christianity he broaches so many subjects that it’s hard to pick out just a few to mention. The following is an excerpt that beautifully demonstrates the parodox of the martyr and the suicide as he reacts to the modernist notion that one ought not pity the man who takes his own life. Have you ever considered why one is a good thing and one is absolutely horrible?
Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all menj; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger, and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront….There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man’s crime is different from other crimes – for it makes even crimes impossible.
So what makes taking ones own life different from willingly laying ones life down?
Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confessis this ultimet link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live.
The main point of this section was to detail a part of his journey to Christianity. He notices a strange paradox within Christianity (this one an others he mentions in a later chapter aptly names “The Parodoxes of Christianity).
I remembered…the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr.
In that later chapter on parodoxes Chesterton points out that these seemingly contradictory truths balance each other out. Christianity doesn’t blend the two together but boldly contrasts them, as it does many other seeming parodoxes, like “hate the sin, love the sinner” which is a topic for another post.
