Filippo Strozzi the Younger killed himself in 1538 after the failure of his republican revolt against Cosimo de’ Medici, the duke of Florence. The contemporary historian Paolo Giovio (1483–1552) described his death like this:
‘When Filippo found out [that he was to be handed over to Cosimo for interrogation]; he laid down his life—no less nobly than impiously—to avoid tortures, endangering his friends by betraying secrets, and meeting a death unworthy of his noble birth. A Spanish jailer had happened to leave a sword behind for him: this Filippo held up to his throat, and leant on it with such a great application of weight that […] when his cell was finally forced open, he was found dead on the blood-sodden floor. A paper in his hand attested that he, knowing not how to live rightly, had put an end to his life and misery in a noble spirit. He was certainly unworthy of such a foul end to his life, for he would surely have been remembered as one who was learned, singularly generous, popular, and graceful; if only he had not been used to thinking wrongly about heaven and hell, and to mocking openly the precepts of Christian teaching; and had he not been believed as well to have indulged the love of Vestal virgins [i.e. nuns] more eagerly than was fitting.’
There’s a lot to reflect on in this passage, but what I’m interested in here is the formula tam generosè quàm impiè: ‘no less nobly than impiously’. This is absurd on its face. Was it good or was it bad for Filippo Strozzi to kill himself? Did Giovio really write this without blinking?
On the one hand, it also goes without saying that suicide was traditionally forbidden by Christianity. The grounds for this prohibition were stated slightly differently over the centuries, but before very recent times it was never seriously questioned that killing yourself was a terrible sin. Already in the Bible, most characters who invite death on themselves are miserable villains, like Saul and Judas. Jonah so much as grumbles that death would be better than life, and God yells at him for this.
A popular literary genre the in Renaissance was the ‘theatre of judgment”. These books assembled instances of God’s judgment of the wicked, and usually included lists of wicked people who had killed themselves after being visited with madness. Giovio’s story of Filippo Strozzi naturally made it onto one such list. Despite his learning and civic virtues, he was more or less an atheist, and his horrible suicide was not so much a sin in itself as a divine punishment for his godless character.
On the other hand, classical antiquity is filled with examples of men and women who killed themselves as an act of virtue. Among many others Seneca, Lucretia and Cleopatra all killed themselves when the alternatives were disgraceful, and they were celebrated by posterity for their fortitude. Pliny (HN 2.27) and Seneca himself (Ep. 70) described it as a perfectly justifiable act in their writings. Aristotle condemned suicide (Eth. Nic. 1138a) as a form of treason against the state, but certainly not as a violation of divine law.
Suicide is perhaps the single ethical point on which the classical and the Biblical models stand in sharpest contradiction. There is really no room for compromise between one system of thought which allowed for it (with varying degrees of approval), and another which took it as a sin or a sign of God’s damnation. Usually it was possible for a Christian scholar to pass judgment on a person’s conduct by adducing both ecclesiastical and profane views, but not here. Hugo Grotius in his De jure belli ac pacis (2.19.5) attempted to justify the Jewish prohibition on burying suicides with certain classical examples: but it must be said that his selection was very one-sided, the result of his sifting out the few profane authors who thought that suicide was cowardly or otherwise distasteful.
Paolo Giovio was more intellectually honest, and made no attempt to resolve this dilemma. In the first place, he wanted to convey the heroic nature of Filippo Strozzi’s suicide, in keeping with his thoroughgoing imitation of Greco-Roman models for his historiography. In fact, the whole passage was borrowed in its matter and phrasing from the Epitome of Book 89 of Livy’s Histories, in which it is told that the praetor Brutus, seeing his fishing boat surrounded by Pompey’s ships, ‘leaned on the tip of a sword that was propped against the thwart of his boat.’
Still, Giovio was equally convinced that a Christian nobleman’s ultimate responsibilities were not the same ones as an ancient pagan’s. Brutus’ suicide had been narrated by Livy as a completely fitting response to military defeat, but the very same act was terrible sin when a modern Christian committed it. Hence the same act was judged against two completely different criteria, kept wholly separate: profane on one side, holy on the other. The results of these judgements were obviously opposed to each other, and Giovio simply set them set side by side in the pregnant and self-conscious formula “noble and impious.”
You can only write such a thing if you know full well that your loyalty is divided; that you are trying to meet the standards of irreconcilable systems thought. Here Giovio made an admission on behalf of the humanists: who, whether they owned it or not, were gazing with Janus’ faces on two constellations at once.