As we enter Holy Week and commemorate the exemplary martyrdom, it seems that martyrdom in general – or a misplaced understanding of it – is reasserting itself.
Last month, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old US airman, doused himself with liquid and set himself on fire outside Israel’s embassy in Washington, DC. In a livestream of the event, he declared: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide”, before crying out “Free Palestine” as the flames consumed him. He was pronounced dead seven hours later.
In his action, Bushnell followed in the footsteps of others who carried out similarly fatal protests, such as Jan Palach who protested the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, those protesting the Vietnam and Iraq wars and the Tibetans who immolated themselves in protest against the Chinese government.
The writer Chris Hedges, a Presbyterian minister, said of Bushnell’s act: “Self-immolation calls us to a different way of being. These sacrificial victims become martyrs.” Bushnell’s sacrifice, according to Hedges, “spoke to our better selves.” Meanwhile, the Mail Online carried the headline: “Leftists PRAISE ‘martyr’ Aaron Bushnell for setting himself on fire outside Israeli embassy and dismiss mental health concerns: ‘He had moral clarity’.”
Was Bushnell’s act the sacrifice of martyrdom, or was it suicide?
The question is worth examining because, to add to the confusion, a concerted push to bring in “assisted dying” legislation in the UK seems to be getting cast – certainly by the media and those celebrities behind it – in a “heroic” light not that dissimilar to martyrdom.
With self-immolation as a political protest, the answer seems fairly clear. Bushnell very deliberately set himself on fire with the intention that he die at his own hand. His further aim was to draw attention to US complicity in Israeli war crimes and influence those complicit by means of his horrifically self-inflicted death. But this further end does not change the fact that his more immediate aim was suicidal – for suicide was his chosen means to bring about his end.
Christian tradition (as well as many other religious and ethical traditions) not only distinguishes between the suicide and the martyr, but places them at sharply opposed ends of the moral prospect.
Yet the distinction can be difficult to grasp, at least if one is unused to making the careful distinctions needed to think in ways fully sensitive to moral reality. The difference between risking one’s life for a higher goal and ending one’s life for a higher goal may be obscure to many. And not all suicide cases may be as clear as Aaron Bushnell’s.
In the early Church, Clement of Alexandria (c.150-c.215 AD) clearly condemned the acts of those whose aim was to meet a fiery death at the hands of persecutors:
“[T]hose who have rushed on death…these, we say, banish themselves without being martyrs, even though they are punished publicly. For they do not preserve the characteristic mark of believing martyrdom, inasmuch as they have not known the only true God, but give themselves up to a vain death, as the Gymnosophists of the Indians to useless fire. But since these falsely named calumniate the body, let them learn that the harmonious mechanism of the body contributes to the understanding which leads to goodness of nature.”
Clement, in condemning what might be termed “provoked martyrdom”, condemns false belief and also notes that calumniation of the body is an offence committed against what might be termed the goodness of being – the grasp of which is our first intimation of God’s eternal law as naturally understood; we draw upon our experience of natural harmonies to understand what is truly good.
The provoking “martyr” also ends up sharing the responsibility for his own murder with that of his persecutor. Cyprian (c.200-c.258 AD), Bishop of Carthage, makes clear that there is all the difference in the world between praying to be worthy of the crown of martyrdom and taking it upon yourself to answer your own prayers.
Once you are convinced that God is calling you to martyrdom you may refuse to flee a risky situation, but you are not permitted to do evil to yourself or intend that others do evil to you. Heretics such as the Montanists became associated with “provoked martyrdoms” and the early Church saw it as crucial to resist those claiming that the “prompting of the Holy Spirit” somehow justified them in such actions.
By the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas had given his own definition of martyrdom, stating “it belongs to virtue to safeguard man in the good of reason [which] consists in the truth as its proper object, and in justice as its proper effect.”
He adds: “And martyrdom consists essentially in standing firmly to truth and justice against the assaults of persecution”. This conception of martyrdom emphasises the patience of the martyr and his or her relation to the order God has willed.
But what of the person who does not believe in God or an afterlife? Aquinas held the – admittedly debatable – view that every human act is willed for the sake of happiness. Given that fact, he asks himself, how can it be that some people do that which leads to their deaths, especially those who have no belief in an afterlife? He comments:
“Some people, without hope of a future life, expose themselves to death…for the sake of virtuous action, [such] as those who have chosen in advance to undergo death that they might save their homeland or that they might avoid some dishonourable thing: and this they ordered toward happiness according to their judgement, not as something resulting after death, but as to be attained at the very moment of the deed; because to perform a perfect act of virtue, which was on the facing of death, was for them the maximally desired object in which they located happiness.”
In contrast, others choose death to escape misery – which Aquinas also holds to be a way, however misguided, of seeking happiness.
Based on Aquinas’s account, someone laying down their life for a higher end may be acting reasonably in some circumstances, even if their death cannot have the significance of Christian martyrdom – a special gift made to God where one is killed specifically for one’s faith.
What is never permissible, however, is suicide, which involves the killing of an innocent (oneself) and the usurpation of God’s judgment concerning who shall live and who shall die.
Aaron Bushnell had been brought up in a strict Christian community and, according to a colleague, he attended some Catholic masses during his basic military training. This colleague said: “Even though I don’t believe that he still believed in the Catholic faith by the time that he died, I know that that upbringing had a profound impact on him, and I’m sure that it influenced his sense of justice.”
The strict prohibition on suicide that Catholicism has always insisted upon is there because the Church recognises that we are made in the image and likeness of God, and that our body as well as our spirit reflects this.
As our culture increasingly rejects even what is naturally known to us about the worth of our bodies, those wishing to promote particular causes are more liable to engage in acts which “calumniate the body”. Failing to see the sanctity of the body, they end up engaging in self-murder or self-degradation for their chosen cause.
As with the heretics of old, a “religious sense” cut off from fidelity to the Creator may result in a warped obsession with a cause which does not equip a person to reject suicide or other forms of degradation in the name of that cause. A revolutionary sense of justice, which draws a person to self-murder, is one that has lost touch with the goodness of Creation guided by a loving Creator who is the source of all justice.
That said, a society which increasingly accepts and legislates in favour of suicidal decisions is in no position to condemn those who choose suicide for reasons others than their own suffering. Nor, for that matter, are those who openly support the evils Bushnell protested. Nonetheless, what Aaron Bushnell did was intrinsically evil.
This Holy Week, we commemorate the very martyrdom which clarifies all others and which is the antidote to the many poisons of our age, not least the emphasis our culture places on self-dominion and its rejection of God’s dominion.
Photo: People place flowers and candles in front of photos at a vigil for US Airman Aaron Bushnell at the US Army Recruiting Office in Times Square, New York City, 27 February 2024. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images.)
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