Refuse worker Beethoven, suicide and the parable of the talents
(29 June 2026)
Margaritas ante porcos was merely a symbol so that anyone could grasp the idea: Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.
(There’s really nothing wrong with making a rustic mushroom tart and sharing it with one’s pig, like Chef Feld.)
(30 June 2026)
The tension between margaritas ante porcos and the parable of the talents is one of my utter constants. It transcends all religious belief: simply possessing pearls and talents is enough for one to encounter this conflict. However, I have never seen the matter even crossing anyone else’s mind. It is like being, for the umpteenth time, the man who shot Liberty Valance.
In all the reflections on suicide that I had ever made, it had been assumed that natural death would be preferable in all cases, and that in all cases suicide would be an option to be avoided by all means.
But, in certain cases, a person might well consider suicide an even better option (for himself and for everyone) than natural death, given that natural death would not alter his negligible impact or visible importance in the world, while suicide (a suicide confirmed as such and not concealed) could grant him, his words and his deeds a posthumous relevance that would otherwise be difficult to imagine.
Everybody dies, but not everybody kills himself.
The words of a dead person are no more valuable than those of a living person, but knowing that this person took his own life would undoubtedly invest his words and deeds with a significance.
Would God condemn a suicide not committed out of pride, nor out of rebellion against Him, nor out of simple ‘fear of hardship, suffering, or torture’ — that is, committed not for the mere fact of avoiding further pain?
(As for pride, see: On feeling less idiomatic but more natural — and very little.)
Paragraph 2282 of The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that ‘grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide’. In the case at hand, the mitigating or exculpatory factors would not be the main reasons, but rather the suicidal person would have motives conceived by him as positively noble — and yet, we insist on asking whether God could judge that this person has not committed a sin or that he has committed it but deserves forgiveness.
God (whose existence is the necessary and sufficient condition for a man to endure torment of God’s magnitude) would be able to see exactly what transpired in the man’s conscience at the moment of taking his own life: He could see, if such a thing were to happen, that the cause of the suicide wouldn’t actually have involved any unforgivable mortal sin, but rather a genuine good intention. And it seems certain that God would not condemn a genuine, clean good intention, whatever the action and its consequences.
(See: ‘6. A suffering on the scale of God Himself’, in Hope as evidence — Not about feelings.)
But how could a man — out we to wonder now — be absolutely certain of the clean goodness of such an action? … FIRSTLY, for even though the glory would be posthumous, it can be difficult, even for oneself, to distinguish how much is desire for the objective and universal good and how much is vainglory — and we could give several more examples of this kind: how much there is of desire for the objective and universal good, and how much of mere escape from pain… SECONDLY, for the individual knows the action is explicitly designated as the only unforgivable sin and a near-certain passport to eternal damnation — given the difficulty in repenting.
It is quite a challenge to conceive of such a state of consciousness in a human being, a human being who has not lost his reason or, with it, his freedom and responsibility. (We reiterate that our case study presupposes that the individual in question is not insane, has not lost his freedom or responsibility, and would not be included among those exempted or forgiven that the Catechism offers as examples — all of them based on the loss of the individual’s responsibility for his own actions and on God’s mercy in judging them and him.)
It is, in short, quite hard to be truly certain that one is doing something good by committing suicide: normally, at the last moment, one will be overcome by immense pity and a sudden awareness of the criminal, bad, wrong nature of the act one was about to commit.
(See: On my way home at midday.)
It seems, therefore, that there is no other option than to continue to maintain, at least as a starting point, the belief that natural death would be preferable in all cases, and that in all cases suicide would be an option to be avoided by all means — as far as our ability to avoid it, that is, our freedom, still does allow.
The case we are going to deal with in this article will, nevertheless, make it certainly hard not to return to the question of the beginning.
We will clarify certain points before moving on to the case at hand:
First, this article primarily addresses a case of conscience; it is not an analysis or denunciation of society or ‘the system’.
Second, the case is not a limit-case in the sense of speculative experimental abstraction. It does in fact occur. (See: The world made it clear to me.)
Third, the case does not deny the share of blame that the individual surely must have had in arriving at his situation: we are simply focusing on that present situation, and if it were objected that the individual is solely responsible for it, I would respond that this is an unacceptable rash judgment, detraction and calumny, and that, even on the unacceptable assumption that the individual were solely to blame for his situation, the punishment would be disproportionate to any possible human error committed by him. (See: Let him now come down from the cross. See also: The best of all possible worlds.)
Fourth, the case can and should be studied without needing to know more details about how such a situation arose, but we can still offer real-world examples of possible contextual frameworks surrounding the described case of consciousness (see the second point of this list).
Once again: the individual is neither insane nor disconnected from reality.
In connection with point 5, both the problem and the resulting pain of the individual are not temporary but permanent — in this life, and barring a miracle.
In connection with point 6, the person writing this article accepts the possibility of miracles, but calls for taking into account all the conditioning elements in the case of conscience of the individual.
In connection with the three previous points, there are no official remedies, therapies or medications that can resolve the situation of the individual. Such official, usual, hegemonic remedies presuppose philosophical, psychological and other theories that the author of this article considers flawed and that have proven ineffective even in cases far easier and more solvable than the one at hand.
In connection with point 8, remedies of other sorts, however, could be attempted that would be truly relevant and make sense for the situation under study, although they would be very difficult to implement. (See: On Pascal’s abêtissez-vous.)
The person writing this article admits as participants of the greatest interest interpretations from a Catholic view, but does not accept the term ‘Judeo-Christian’ or the philosophical and anthropological principles that this word implies, and does not accept the ‘sanctification of work’ or ‘sanctification by work’, which belong to branches that are doctrinally compatible with Catholicism but do not exhaust Catholic teaching in any respect. (See: ‘Internal organisation’, Prerequisites for entrance into the Order of Santiago.)
In connection with point 10, we will clarify, for instance, that the person writing this article already knows that Jesus Christ was a carpenter.
The person writing this article invites everyone to consider some other points, in addition to the carpenter point, that many seem to forget or choose not to consider. (See, for example: Matthew 6:25-34.)
It goes without saying that the talents in the parable of the talents are understood here exclusively as talents in the current sense of the word — and not in its original financial sense, the acceptance of which would imply an exaltation of greed that is completely repugnant and incompatible with Catholic doctrine, which is the only Christian doctrine accepted as a valid interlocutor in the present article.
We will assume the premise that no one can seriously maintain that all work is equally dignified and that this Enlightenment slogan can only be uttered from a place of cynicism, hypocrisy, or a desperate attempt to make a virtue of necessity.
— The truth is, rather, that all work is undignified, since anything done for economic reasons (whether for profit or survival) is undignified, and the less ‘work’ an effort or activity contains, the less undignified it is.
(See: Among the most undignified and undesirable jobs, some are necessary — and some should not exist.)
Some of those jobs could be done by anyone; they’re the ones no one wants to do, and they should be assigned to those who can’t do anything someone else can’t.
It is good to HELP and SERVE others, but it’s neither good nor rational that someone who can serve others with things no one else can do should be confined to doing things anyone can do, serving many through jobs that those who can’t do anything else should be doing.
Beethoven, as if applying the mandate of the parable of the talents, served others in the way that was fitting for him, forgoing suicide and giving to humanity what he could and should give.
(See: Ego versus egoism; miserly and ignoble propensities; and megalomania.)
(See also: ABJECTION: vice opposed to HUMILITY by reason of excess.)
The problem arises when a Beethoven (a hypothetical Beethoven, for the sake of clarity and ease) is assigned to serve others through those very things that others, instead, can and should do, making it abundantly clear to Beethoven (through actions, not words) that he can and should shove his talents where the sun don’t shine: BURY them — as the wicked and slothful servant of the parable.
What should, what even could Beethoven do then?
If he were to determine that he had the right to commit suicide, he would probably go to hell, yet not before being informed — at the entrance gate — of the entire perfect universal plan so that he himself would understand that his destiny is the one he has freely sought and deserves, after being judged, for the first time, by a fair, qualified, infallible Judge.
But does it make sense for God to demand such infinite and blind faith; to not give Beethoven, before he died, the slightest hint of the rationality, goodness, perfection of His plan? Wouldn’t that be fair (and what was agreed upon), so that the musician could have exercised his freedom for good or evil with minimal knowledge — which even the fallen angel himself possessed before and as falling?
Beyond whether the talent Beethoven attributes to himself is real or just an illusion of his pride (that perceived his talent as evident, indisputable, as his mission and his way of serving God and neighbour in this life) — can he be expected not to commit suicide when what he is witnessing is that God has not kept his word (expressed, for example, in the parable of the talents)?
Wouldn’t that, if God were to do it, be a monstrous act, like that of a man who physically punishes a cat, knowing that the cat is incapable of understanding the punishment?
We insist that we are not talking about occasional setbacks, injustices, misfortunes and disorder, nor about a temporary, instructive humiliation that a person faces with the due attitude and becomes a better person, nor about an immense but brief and meaningful sacrifice — like that of Christ, who KNEW that his sacrifice had MEANING — but about extreme disorder and humiliation, devoid of any meaning and suffered perpetually, throughout a long life until death… A world perceived as abandoned, obnoxious, unbearable, without any news of God; a world that seems expressly designed to make it impossible to think that it is part of Providence.
Suffering on a God-like scale, but without God.
There is no doubt that God, as conceived by true religion, would forbid suicide for any creature, suicide offensive to the Creator and caused primarily, for instance, by pride. But God would not be God if He did not forgive the suicide of this hypothetical Beethoven, mired in a delusional, totally psychotic environment that forces him to live for a thousand years in the most abject1 slavery, performing tasks unworthy of him, all without the slightest explanation, revelation or rational basis for believing that there is a God as great as his torment and whose existence allows and justifies this dehumanised hypothetical Beethoven accepting it — and even, yes then, dedicating songs of praise to his torment, like the torment praised with songs by the poets2 who know that they are loved, and like those Cantabrians who sang praises to their torment as they died crucified on Mount Irnio.3
Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.4