of evils, it is foolish and wicked to resort to dying as a refuge
against any other calamity. But this answer proves too much. It would
show that it is never lawful even to wish for death: whereas under
many conditions, such as those now under consideration, death is a
consummation devoutly to be wished, and may be most piously desired,
as a gain and by comparison a good: as Ecclesiasticus says (xxx. 17):
"Better is death than a bitter life, and everlasting rest than
continual sickness." The truth seems to be, that there are many things
highly good and desirable in themselves, which become evil when
compassed in a particular way. The death of a great tyrant or
persecutor may be a blessing to the universe, but his death by the
hand of an assassin is an intolerable evil. So is death, as the
schoolmen say, _in facto esse_, and everlasting rest, better than a
bitter life, but not death _in fieri_, when that means dying by your
own hand. There the unnaturalness comes in and the irrationality. A
mother, watching the death agony of her son, may piously wish it over:
but it were an unmotherly act to lay her own hand on his mouth and
smother him. To lay violent hands on oneself is abidingly cruel and
unnatural, more so than if the suicide's own mother slew him.

5. But though a man may not use actual violence against his own
person, may he not perhaps cease to preserve himself, abstain from
food, as the Roman noble did, in the tortures of the gout, and by
abstaining end them? I answer, a man's taking food periodically is as
much part of his life as the coursing of the blood in his veins. It is
doing himself no less violence to refuse food ready to hand, when he
is starving, on purpose that he may starve, than to open a vein on
purpose to bleed to death. This, when the food is readily accessible:
the case is otherwise when it is not procurable except by
extraordinary means.