After following a long and sometimes contradictory path, Augustine was finally to condemn the taking of one's own life as an absolute sin, an inexpiable crime against God. Born at Mondovi, a village only some 12 miles south of Augustine's Hippo Regius, Albert Camus began his Le mythe de Sisyphe with the declaration:

But Camus’ suicide was very different from Augustine's. For Camus, suicide is provoked, ultimately, by a growing sense of the absurdity of existence. He construed a typical scenario as follows. The stage props of a person's life are present on each ordinary day: “Get up, catch the train, four hours at the office or workshop, dinner, streetcar, four more hours of work, eat, sleep, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, according to the same rhythm. This path is easily followed most of the time. Only, one day, a ‘why’ arises.” A process of the disintegration of the familiar stage-sets of one's life begins, life becomes a stranger to the one living it, and all normal meaning drains from existence.

This is the pathology of one type of self-killing – a peculiar kind of modern despair. But it is not my suicide problem. Nor was it Augustine's. Camus, who wrote his master's dissertation at the University of Algiers on Augustine and Plotinus, examined by no less a figure than Louis Gernet, knew this too. His novel La mort heureuse – A Happy Death – shows that he was alert to these differences, indeed opposites, between his world and that of Augustine – the contrast with the latter's De beata vita. Perhaps because of this awareness, Camus appended a footnote to his text, admitting that his problem of suicide was, after all, historically contingent: “We will not miss the opportunity,” he says, “to note the specific character of this essay. Suicide can in fact be linked to more honorable considerations. One example: political suicides of protest.” It is precisely this type of suicide, relegated by Camus to a footnote, that is our concern here: a kind of honorable self-killing that was motivated not by a sense of “the absurd” or by the meaninglessness of existence, but rather by the precise opposite. It was a self-inflicted death that was interpreted as full of meaning and one that embraced life, indeed a better one without end.