Sanctuary in Our Time
According to a NPR report today, a Protestant Church in the Hague Netherlands has kept a nonstop service since Oct. 26 to protect an Armenian immigrant family from deportation, for what New York Times refers to as “an obscure Dutch law” forbids police from disrupting a church service. This reminds me of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which “sanctuary” protected Esmeralda from the gallows.
The original meaning of sanctuary has indeed become obscure in the Western World. What was once almost universally held sacred is no longer sacred. Gone is the age when sanctuaries provide shelters for the innocent and the beautiful from the depraved. Nothing is sacred and inviolable, except private property, by which I mean whatever a person or people might consider their own.
The Origin of Sanctuary
The ancients, most of whom believed in the existence of divine beings of some sort, were familiar with the custom of taking refuge in the temples of their gods in times of trouble. The idea is that either the gods would protect them somehow or those who sought to kill them would spare them on account of the gods.
There is a story in 1 Kings where King David instructed his son Solomon to kill Joab, commander of the army, for shedding innocent blood. Joab fled to the altar of the Lord, so the man Solomon sent to kill him was hesitant or afraid to touch him. But Solomon assured his man that they had justice, and therefore God, on their side, and then the latter went and executed Joab by the altar.
Augustine cites Aeneid, and other literary works, to explain how it is the custom of war that conquerors have no regard for the sanctuaries in the conquered cities. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, made Priam see his own son’s murder at the altar before killing the old King. When Jerusalem was destroyed, the Temple was looted and burned to the ground by the Romans, as narrated by Josephus in The Jewish War. Some noble Greeks, such as Alexander and Agesilaus, spared the temples in their conquests. The extraordinary clemency of these few noble Greeks were lauded by historians.
During the sack of Rome, the barbarians, spared those people, both Christians and pagans, who took refuge in the Christian churches, contrary to the custom of war. They would not have done so, if they hadn’t believed in the Christian God, or at least had been restrained by pious fear.
The Sanctuary of Man
The Sanctuary is a prominent theme in the Bible. There is Noah’s Ark, which saved the world from utter destruction; the Passover which delivered the Israelites from the Destroyer; Rahab’s scarlet cord which protected her household from the invading army; the cities of Refuge where the manslayer who kills any person accidentally may flee from the avengers.
Augustine started his defence of Christianity with the sanctuary, I think, because the sanctuary has both historical and spiritual significance. Christ is the Sanctuary of mankind, foreshadowed in the Old Testament. He is a Sanctuary, not for the preservation of property, but for the preservation of what is truly sacred, the beatified soul of man, the Image of God.
Augustine might have seen the sack of Rome as the judgement of God, and the fact that the Christian Churches were spared as evidence of divine mercy, and ground for hope. He concludes Book I Ch. 7 with a verse from Psalms, “I will visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquities with stripes; nevertheless my loving-kindness will I not utterly take from them.” (Ps. 89:32-33)
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