Because the days are evil, true blessedness consists in eternal life, and each man ought to redeem his time in hope, enduring the vagaries of earthly existence while purposing both goods and evils to eternal felicity.

In contrast to the lives of all other animals, human life entails the possibility of its negation. Suicide is a perennial human possibility. We tend to think of suicide as resulting from tragic but ultimately irrational conditions, like mental illness. No doubt this is often the case. But Cicero argues in his Tusculan Disputations that suicide can be rational in conditions of extreme suffering. What assumptions about the nature of human flourishing and happiness drive Cicero to this disturbing conclusion? Might we discover, to our horror, that we share them?

At a time of pestilence-induced mass death, economic collapse, and falling life expectancy; at a time when more people are committing suicide and contemplating committing suicide, and when society itself seems intent on self-destruction, we are driven to ask, Why not, like rational stoics, die? And that question, it turns out, leads to another: In what does the happy life consist?

St. Augustine asked this question in circumstances similar to ours. He was writing after the end of a world—the sack of Rome in AD 410. He took up his pen both to rebut pagans who blamed Christianity for Rome’s demise and to reflect on human happiness—that is, on eudaimonia, a Greek word often translated as beatus in Latin: blessed. In what does divine life consist, the worthwhile and rich life, the life that really is life?

This era in Augustine’s life produced two texts that speak to our time particularly well: his Letter 155 to Macedonius and book 19 of the City of God Against the Pagans. In them, Augustine sets forth his vision of the nature of blessedness (or happiness)—of the blessed person, the blessed people, and the blessed ruler.

Augustine’s account is ever relevant and, perhaps, uniquely unpopular in our time. He offers little that can be applied politically, and what he does offer by way of political advice is deeply offensive to American sensibilities. Perhaps even less fashionably, he is uninterested in identifying or fixing anything “structural.” Thus both those who wish to desacralize society so as to render politics ultimate and those who wish to sacralize society so as to render political acts pious will be frustrated. But his is the necessary account for a time like ours, when humanity’s incapacity to secure earthly comforts, stave off earthly pains, and uphold earthly justice has been mercilessly exposed. Our eyes have been opened to our nakedness; St. Augustine would see us clothed in white robes (Revelation 7).

Augustine begins his letter to Macedonius, Roman vicarius (provincial deputy) of Africa, where we began: with the question of suicide. It seems like an odd place to begin. But the context makes sense: the destruction of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. The question Augustine is implicitly addressing is this: Should we not prefer to die rather than live in a world without Rome, without the possibility of earthly happiness? To answer no, Augustine must show that the Christian statesman—the Christian Roman—finds himself in a position entirely different, and with a hope entirely different, than the pagan Romans, even the wisest of them.

The philosophers, Augustine explains in Letter 155, foolishly sought “to create the life of happiness for themselves, and thought it was something they could achieve rather than receive.” And in City of God, he says that some, like Varro, claimed that happiness/blessedness had both a material and immaterial component, consisting in goods of both “the soul and the body.” Cicero even argued that, by pursuing wisdom and detaching the soul from the pleasures of the flesh, one could attain a state “resembling heavenly life” in its tranquility. But, Augustine shows, these accounts drove the philosophers to absurdities. Cicero discusses suicide in book 5 of his Tusculan Disputations, after he has investigated the nature of happiness. The deaf, he says, should take pleasure in sight, the blind in hearing; they have much still to enjoy. But what of one deaf and blind and subject to excruciating chronic pain? Or what, we might wonder, of one suffering unbearably under the suffocating listlessness and isolation that attend this pandemic? “There is a retreat at hand; death is that retreat, a shelter where we shall forever be insensible,” says Cicero.

Both Varro and Cicero, then, concede that physical torment could be so horrible as to warrant ending one’s “blessed state” by suicide. They would seek peace in death, but death will not provide it. “Something that has peace is not nothing; indeed, it is greater than something that is restless. For restlessness generates one conflicting passion after another, whereas peace has the constancy that is the most conspicuous characteristic of Being. So the will’s desire for death is not a desire for nonexistence but a desire for peace. When someone wrongly believes that he will not exist, he desires by nature to be at peace; that is, he desires to exist in a higher degree.” The philosophers desire peace, but they mistakenly believe they can achieve it by pursuing nonexistence.

Summarizing his view of these philosophers, Augustine wrote, “Weighed down by the burden of their corruptible flesh, they still wanted to be authors of their own blessedness.” The root of philosophical suicide is, Augustine argues, a kind of pride: the philosophers attempt to secure their own happiness, but they fail. Happiness cannot consist in things that may change, things that may pass away: if it could, it would not be happiness, because we desire not mere joy but perpetual joy. Indeed, a precarious happiness, Augustine and the Stoics both recognized, was no happiness at all. But Augustine saw to the heart of the matter: all earthly happiness is precarious.

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