I had an instructor who said something along the lines that the church did not really condemn suicide until after some mass suicides at some point in history (middle ages iirc). I have found the following which states something similar:
"The first Christian to publicly denounce suicide as a sin was St. Augustine in the 4th Century. The basis of Augustine’s condemnation was the ubiquitous acts of suicide among Christians."
http://crouchfoundation.org/history-of-suicide.html
I am not suggesting that that link is a good source (this is why I come to you), and my prof was a philosophy prof (not history), but I thought I would ask - is it accurate to say there was a lot of suicide from the group around Augustine's time? How likely is it that he was responding to such a situation? What was the early christian stance on suicide (pre compared to post Augustine)?
*edited
There are certainly early condemnations of suicide. Justin Martyr (ca. 100-165) imagined a scenario where a pagan suggests:
But lest some one say to us, 'Go then all of you and kill yourselves, and pass even now to God, and do not trouble us'... We have been taught that God did not make the world aimlessly, but for the sake of the human race; and we have before stated that He takes pleasure in those who imitate His properties, and is displeased with those that embrace what is worthless either in word or deed. If, then, we all kill ourselves we shall become the cause, as far as in us lies, why no one should be born, or instructed in the divine doctrines, or even why the human race should not exist; and we shall, if we so act, be ourselves acting in opposition to the will of God. (bolded for emph).
Tertullian has a book on the matter and I'll summarize because it's long, but he shows the courage of all the pagans who committed suicide for 'worthless' ideas (see the sections on Empedocles and Dido). There's no explicit condemnation of their actions, but he does get sarcastic about it which indicates that he probably thinks it's a waste.
Lactantius (ca. 220-320) has a section in his third book of the 'Divine Institutes', which has a section on suicide (chapter 18), I'll quote the pertinent part:
For if a homicide is guilty because he is a destroyer of man, he who puts himself to death is under the same guilt, because he puts to death a man. Yea, that crime may be considered to be greater, the punishment of which belongs to God alone.
There are quite a few more but that's a good start. There are some Patristics who condoned suicide in one case, that is preserving your chastity (Jerome and Ambrose) but that's the only approving case I know about.
As for ubiquitous suicides, I've never heard of that. Eusibius mentions some (without passing judgement), as does Augustine, who is generally condemning of those who commit suicide to escape persecution and holds up the apostles, prophets, and patriarchs as examples of those who didn't. Augustine is simply developing the earlier opinion that suicide was wrong.