Suicide in Modern Catholic Literature
By Martin Lockerd.
Cascade Books, 2025.
Paperback, 196 pages, $27.
Reviewed by John Ehrett.
Around the world, assisted suicide—now going under the perverse euphemism “MAID,” or “Medical Assistance In Dying”—has become a progressive cause célèbre with terrifying speed. Not long ago, euthanasia was reserved for the terminally ill. But today, in countries like Canada and the United Kingdom, practitioners offer assisted suicide as the solution to a wider and wider range of conditions, from disability to depression. Proponents justify the practice on humanitarian grounds. The world is cruel. You didn’t ask to be here. Sometimes, the pain is simply too much. It’s your choice.
Despite decades of anti-suicide public messaging insisting that every life matters, and that help is available, this grim narrative has clearly gained cultural traction. For more and more individuals drawn to this way of thinking, to be born into the world is to confront the indifference—or even cruelty—of existence itself. No figure better exemplifies this attitude than Australian philosopher David Benatar, author of the 2006 book Better Never to Have Been. Benatar argues, at length, that since the suffering inherent to the human condition is so great, it is better for persons never to be born—and that procreation as such is an unethical act. Fringe though his views may be in his discipline, Benatar has drawn an audience of sympathetic “antinatalist” hearers online.
And these ideas seem to be breaking containment. Today, the logic of suicide is increasingly reinforced by pop cultural touchstones—ranging from Danny Boyle’s blockbuster zombie thriller 28 Years Later to bestselling video games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33—that valorize “mercy killing” as an appropriate, even moral, response to life’s sufferings.
Isn’t there a better story of our lives than this? Martin Lockerd’s new study Suicide in Modern Catholic Literature takes up that challenge directly—beginning from the premise that the recent rise in suicidality is inextricably linked to the narratives by which human beings interpret reality, and which order and structure their lives. Antinatalism and its bleak view of existence are one such narrative, but there are plenty of others available that offer an alternative to this “sanctity of death.” In particular, Lockerd argues, many of the great Catholic writers of the twentieth century took up the issue directly, exploring in depth why it is good for human beings to live, to carry on, rather than succumb.
Lockerd frames the issue with a treatment of Michel Houellebecq—no orthodox believer, by any stretch, but a clear-eyed observer of the connection between a materialist metaphysics and the plausibility of suicide. If human life is reducible to impersonal matter in motion, why does it matter if the species lives or dies? Or if any individual person does? Houellebecq’s 1998 novel The Elementary Particles, which culminates in humanity’s voluntary self-extinction and replacement by a cloned successor species, chases this logic to its terminus.
Houellebecq’s assessment, then, represents modernity’s ultimate reductio, the challenge to which Christians must rise. And rise they did. Lockerd proceeds to explore the various literary treatments of suicidality—even subtle allusions—across the works of authors Robert Hugh Benson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Walker Percy.
Among these, Lockerd’s reading of Tolkien is particularly arresting. Suicide is a complex question within Tolkien’s project: consider, for instance, the Silmarillion’s Túrin Turambar, who takes his own life after learning he has been beguiled into incest and violence. In some abandoned drafts of Tolkien’s legendarium, Túrin was prophesied to return at the end of time as an avenging hero—a view of moral order that savors more of pagan Valhalla than Christian Paradiso. And indeed, Tolkien left that vision of the eschaton on the cutting-room floor.
Instead, Lockerd shows, Tolkien ultimately chose to heighten the contradictions between pre-Christian and Christian treatments of suicide rather than collapse them. When Denethor, Steward of Gondor, memorably burns himself as the armies of Mordor overrun his city, how does he justify his action? The answer: he “burn[s] like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed hither from the West.” No tomb for him, which might presage resurrection to life; for him, there is the pyre, and annihilation. As Tolkien depicts it, Denethor’s suicide is the act of a figure overcome by despair, who in that despair betrays his own deepest duty: to steward the inheritance of that same West he abjures.
Where Tolkien offers a straightforward affirmation of life, some other Catholic writers—Greene, Spark, and Percy—take more ambivalent tacks, interweaving themes of suicide and martyrdom in ways that complicate easy binaries. Perhaps, Lockerd notes, these works might not be the best remedies for an individual wrestling with suicidal ideation. And yet, for all their thematic darkness, they testify to something true about the twentieth-century condition. In the shadow of world wars and the collapse of old pieties, countless souls found themselves adrift, seeking light in the ashes.
Where does Lockerd’s project ultimately leave us? Some years ago, during a conversation with the prominent Jungian psychologist and cultural critic Jordan Peterson, I asked him about a question that’s always seemed to hover over his work, from his bestselling book 12 Rules for Life to his more recent We Who Wrestle With God: whether, for Peterson, “Being” and “Goodness” are in fact coterminous.
This may sound like an obscure question. But it gets at a central claim of classical Christian theology: that in God, the source and end of all reality, being and goodness are one, and this goodness “overflows” into the world God makes. At the bottom of things, reality is not indifferent or cruel, since its beauty represents God’s own self-disclosure; as Gerard Manley Hopkins famously put it, “nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” From a Christian vantage, our derivative human existence necessarily exemplifies the goodness of God, as hard as that may be to glimpse during the hour of trial.
Peterson’s answer to me was simple: to link Being and Goodness is a wager, a Kierkegaardian act of trust that ultimate reality may, after all, turn out to be good—but this cannot be judged in advance. Of course, some sort of faith is ineluctably part of the human condition, as demonstrated by the subjects of the novels Lockerd takes up. But it seems to me that Peterson’s approach is a cold word to those confronted by the meaninglessness of life. The antinatalists are not yet answered. Nihilism’s abyss still beckons.
Lockerd, drawing on the literary resources of the Catholic tradition, suggests a different tack: perhaps the essential goodness of reality does not always demand a leap into the unknown, a venture of faith against all odds. Rather, that goodness might be glimpsed everywhere around us. That goodness may be disclosed in the simple fact of our own dependent being, to which the contemplation of death should rightly lead: “Were we to draw all sustenance from the self (a relatively shallow well even in the case of the genius), we could not open ourselves to ontological need and truly pursue the ontological mystery. . . . the hope that comes as a gift from the transcendent.”
Buoyed by such a hope, we can endure, even through life’s trials and darkness. And the right kind of literature can help point the way.
John Ehrett (J.D., Yale; M.A.R., Institute of Lutheran Theology) is editor-in-chief of Conciliar Post. His writing has appeared in American Affairs, Public Discourse, and the Claremont Review of Books, among other venues.
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