And while not technically Orthodox, (but fully, I think, in line with the teachings buzuxi refers to), GK Chesterton offers some serious thoughts on why we have always condemned the act (from what is one of the few most important general Christian books ever written, and a major reason why I don't walk out on the Church):
"Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen,
an argument arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder
one's self. Grave moderns told us that we must not even say
"poor fellow," of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was
an enviable person, and had only blown them out because of their
exceptional excellence. Mr. William Archer even suggested that in
the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which
a man could kill himself for a penny. In all this I found myself
utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and humane.
Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and
absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal
to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man,
kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men;
as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse
(symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage.
For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is
satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime.
He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City.
The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them.
But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it.
He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is
not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer.
When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger
and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront.
Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act.
There often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite.
But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things,
then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the
burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body,
than in Mr. Archer's suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning
in burying the suicide apart. The man's crime is different from
other crimes--for it makes even crimes impossible.
About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker:
he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy
of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the
opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for
something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life.
A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him,
that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something
to begin: the other wants everything to end. In other words,
the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world
or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life;
he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live.
The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being:
he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe.
And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer fact
that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide.
For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr.
Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason,
of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic.
The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness.
They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave
afar off like a field of flowers. All this has seemed to many the
very poetry of pessimism. Yet there is the stake at the crossroads
to show what Christianity thought of the pessimist.
This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity
entered the discussion. And there went with it a peculiarity
of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all
Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one.
The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what
is so often affirmed in modern morals. It was not a matter of degree.
It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the self-slayer
in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer in sadness
just beyond it. The Christian feeling evidently was not merely
that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far. The Christian feeling
was furiously for one and furiously against the other: these two things
that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell.
One man flung away his life; he was so good that his dry bones
could heal cities in pestilence. Another man flung away life;
he was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren's.
I am not saying this fierceness was right; but why was it so fierce?
Here it was that I first found that my wandering feet were in
some beaten track. Christianity had also felt this opposition
of the martyr to the suicide: had it perhaps felt it for the same reason?
Had Christianity felt what I felt, but could not (and cannot) express--
this need for a first loyalty to things, and then for a ruinous
reform of things? Then I remembered that it was actually the charge
against Christianity that it combined these two things which I was wildly
trying to combine. Christianity was accused, at one and the same time,
of being too optimistic about the universe and of being too pessimistic
about the world. The coincidence made me suddenly stand still."
http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/ortho14.txt
