I remembered reading a historical piece on the Coup de grâce. In case you don’t know, it was the final “stroke of mercy” given to the mortally wounded knight in times past. But all I could find on the Coup de grâce was this Wiki article, which doesn’t seem to go into the historical aspect of this practice. Anyways, after digging around on Wikipedia, I found this informative article on the weapon used in this ancient practice, the “misericorde” (from the Latin word for mercy).
As the article states,
So apparently mercy killing was known from quite early on in the Christian world. But how exactly did the church view it? I mean, they were doing it. So the church didn’t try to stop it. (BTW, I support assisted suicide, not active euthanasia. But I want this debate to be a historical one, not a moral one:).)
This doesn’t follow. They were doing murder, adultery, prostitution and a good deal more besides that the church generally tried to stop. So I don’t think we can assume from the fact that people did sometimes administer the coup de grace that the church was OK with that.
But your wider question is a good one; how was the act viewed by Christian moralists at the time?
I had a quick look at the entry in the online Catholic Encyclopedia (dates from 1913) on “Euthenasia”: CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Euthanasia Slightly surprisingly, the focus is on the moral aspect of rendering someone unconscious or insensible when death is approaching, so disabling them from dealing with it as they might need to. The fact that death might be hastened is presented only as a secondary reason for rejecting euthanasia.
Possibly this is simply a question of terminology; “euthanasia” may have had a primary meaning of pain relief in the face of death, rather than of actively seeking death as a means of pain relief, until relatively recently. So perhaps the morality of seeking death to avoid pain or other harm is discussed in the Encyclopedia, but under some other heading. Or perhaps the moral dimension to that was considered so self-evident in 1913 that it didn’t call for much discussion.
The Encyclopedia is only a century old, of course, whereas you are asking about views from many centuries ago. But if the terms in which this topic is discussed can shift so radically in a hundred years, they could well have shifted even more radically over several centuries.
In general, though, the Catholic tradition has consistently opposed the taking of innocent human life, and this goes back to at least Aquinas. (“Innocent” here is used in the sense of “not harmful, not threatening injury”, rather than “free of moral guilt”, which is why Aquinas could accommodate the killing of a soldier in a battle, or the killing of a lunatic whose delusion led him to threaten serious harm to others.) I suspect, then, that Aquinas would have condemned the coup de grace, if asked.
