On the acceptance of death

When I was seventeen, I visited the Ranakpur Jain Temple. I learned there of a curious practice not uncommon to this day. Jain monks live a life of silent asceticism. Some of them, upon reaching supreme emancipation, abandon themselves to meditation and into disintegration by means of inanition.

During the same trip, I visited the Jaisalmer Fort, built in the dawn of the second millennia after Christ. During the thirteenth century, succumbing to the siege of the invader Alauddin, while all the women and children committed Jahuar—a ritual practice of mass self-immolation—the few surviving men left the fort to die in battle.

Gödel, who was paranoid, died of inanition out of fear of someone poisoning his food. Yukio Mishima, that exquisite writer, practiced seppuku when his attempted coup d'état failed. Cato the Younger sought death in similar fashion: defeated by Caesar, he plunged his sword into his chest and tore his bowels with his hands. Seneca died a slow and bureaucratic death by command of Nero. The Bolivian agent who executed Che Guevara reported his last words to be: Serénese y apunte bien: va a matar a un hombre. Socrates, out of respect to a ruling which he knew unfair, declined to be saved by his friends; when the time came, he drank the hemlock calmly, and his farewell thought was of a debt he didn't want to leave unpaid.

At the core of the Christian ethos is the willingness to die. God himself became incarnate so as to suffer earthly death. Origen of Alexandria endured two years of torture under Decius: he deemed death a lesser evil than abandoning his faith. The Bible agreed with him: in Mark 14:31 Peter tells Jesus: If I should die with thee, I will not deny thee in any wise. In Chronicles 1:10 we are told that, defeated by the Philistines,

Saul said to his armourbearer: Draw thy sword, and thrust me through therewith; lest these uncircumcised come and abuse me. But his armourbearer would not; for he was sore afraid. So Saul took a sword, and fell upon it.

Saint Hilary of Poitiers, as he was in Syria, learned that his only daughter was pretended by many wealthy and powerful men. Inspired by the idea that no marriage was better for her than one with God, he fervourously prayed for her death. Curiously enough, she died, and he rejoiced in her passing. His wife, who also found bliss in her daughter's union with God, asked him to pray for her death as well. And soon after she died a death of mutual satisfaction.¹

Though we feel certain inclination to regard voluntary death as unnatural, it is in fact surprising how decisively a person can rid itself of the will to live or embrace the will to die. When I was younger, I found it puzzling that a biological being could dispose so readily of the will to perpetuate its own existence (I misunderstood evolution). It is fascinating that nature is complex enough so as to produce agents which seem to contradict it. In this, it resembles a designer which bestows his creatures with the faculty of rebellion, a notion which is the root of the biblical tale, as Milton put it:

Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall:
And some are fall'n, to disobedience fall'n (...).

Many faiths are worse than death, and death is not the worse of evils, if it's an evil at all. Lucretius irrefutably argued out that our feelings towards death should be the same than our feelings towards our non-existence prior to being born. Lucan considered death to be so precious that he deemed unfair that everyone could die. Mass self-immolation is gruesome and tragic, but it seems indisputable that the faith awaiting the women and children in Jaisalmer Fort was worse than death. It's true that most of us feel committed to life, and do not wish to "go gentle into that good night". Yet the examples above show that there is place for gentleness and even satisfaction in that eternal close of day.