VALENTINE
Míceál Ledwith.

On February 14^th each year long lines of people filter into a Church in the ancient back streets of central Dublin. They are coming to honor a saint called Valentine, yes, THE Valentine, on whose feast day almost as many greeting cards are sent nowadays as at Christmas. His mortal remains are preserved there in an ornate casket, which is placed in front of the High Altar on St. Valentine's Day.

There are two main Valentines associated with February 14th. Valentine of Terni was a bishop killed under the persecution of the Emperor Aurelian in 197. Valentine of Rome was a priest who was murdered for being a Christian by the Emperor Claudius II. He was buried on February 14th sometime between 269 and 273. But how on earth did his body end up in Dublin? The priest who built the Church where the body is kept, Dr. John Spratt, was visiting Rome in 1835. He was head of the Carmelite Order in Ireland; but was more renowned as a preacher and also for his work for temperance, for orphans and the homeless poor of Dublin. In Rome he was invited to speak at the famous headquarters Church of the Jesuits, The Gesu, so beloved of conspiracy theorists, where a huge congregation awaited him. The Pope of the day, Gregory XVI, was extremely pleased and gave him St. Valentine of Rome, or what remained of him, as a gift and that is how St. Valentine arrived in Ireland.

While Father Spratt was alive the relics had a place of honor in the Church, but after his death in May 1871 they were placed in storage and only emerged again in the early 1960's, in no small way due to the increasing commercialization of St. Valentine's Day. Nowadays couples engaged to be married come to visit the shrine and rings are blessed for them at the main ceremonies on February 14^th which are dedicated to young people and all those in love.

However the plot thickens; very many other early Christian martyrs were also called "Valentine." The name means "worthy one." Up to the reform of the list of recognized saints in 1969 the Catholic Church actually recognized eleven St. Valentines. Three of them are associated with 14 February. The two Valentines who died in Rome were beheaded and very little else is known about them. By the time the notion of romantic love had come to be associated with Valentine in the middle ages all distinction between Valentine of Rome and Valentine of Terni had been lost, and in effect there were rolled into one. And since we are normally trying to get people into a romantic mood for Valentine's Day it is understandable that the gory details of how Valentine passed from this life were glossed over in the popular accounts. But whether there were eleven Valentines or one, and whether the right one, or at least part of him, is in Dublin, it is certain that all of the various Valentines had been dead for over a thousand years before any association with romantic love began to be attached to their name. Be that as it may by the Middle Ages, Valentine was one of the most popular saints in England and France.

The earlier accounts of the life of Valentine come from the sixth or seventh century but these have mainly to do with that judicious blend of miracles and torture that characterize most of the pious legends about the early Christian saints. Needless to say those accounts have nothing to contribute to how we like to think of Valentine in romantic terms today. Some people have speculated that the name "Valentine" was originally "Galantine" signifying "gallant," which is a word with obvious connections to romance. They explain the change to "V" by the way Medieval French peasants pronounced the letter "G." Unfortunately for that explanation there are manuscripts that spell the name with a V long before there were any medieval French peasants with a lisp.

The Golden Legend continues the trend of filling up the gaps where information is scarce. Written by Jacobus de Varagine about 1260 it was a collection of fanciful stories of the lives of ninety saints and when published became The Da Vinci Code of its day. Most of its stories come from sources that at best have to be described as unreliable and many other stories have no known source at all. Accounts of saints' martyrdoms and miracles are often repeated in substantially the same form for many different saints. Despite all of that it became a phenomenal best seller as popular entertainment and after the invention of printing was one of the first books produced by William Caxton after the Bible. Nowadays it is a favorite source to consult for people wanting to discover some new aspect on Mary Magdalene.

But even The Golden Legend makes no connection between Valentine and romantic love. Another medieval account, The Nuremberg Chronicle, (12 July 1493) which set out to be an illustrated world history, says that Valentine was a Roman priest who was killed during the reign of Claudius II the conqueror of the Goths. Valentine was arrested for marrying Christian couples and helping the Christians who were being persecuted.

The story tells of Valentine's arrest and his personal interrogation by the Emperor Caludius II. He tried to convert the Emperor to Christianity, was beaten with clubs and stones for his trouble, and eventually beheaded outside the Flaminian Gate. According to The Golden Legend the night before his execution he is said to have restored the sight of his jailer's daughter.

The great English writer Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his 700 line poem "The Parlement of Fowles" probably in 1382, when the tradition of courtly love began to flourish in Europe, and many claim this is the first reference to St. Valentine's Day being a special day for lovers. The poem was written to celebrate the betrothal of Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia, and a treaty stating agreement to the marriage was signed on 2nd May 1381.

For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.

Most popular writings that you find on Valentine today say that Chaucer is referring to our St. Valentine's Day in these lines and that consequently this is the first time in history we find the idea put forward that 14 February was a special day for lovers. But to say that St. Valentine's Day is the day "when birds choose their mates" is suspicious, since birds in England are more likely to be concerned with surviving frosts, winds, rain and snow at that time of year. It is far more likely that Chaucer is not referring to our St. Valentines Day at all but to the feast of another Valentine, who was bishop of Genoa, and who died about 307. His feast was kept on May 2nd which is the day the treaty arranging the marriage of King Richard to Anne of Bohemia was signed, and which Chaucer's poem was written to commemorate. So with regret we have to conclude that the reference in Chaucer is not to February 14 at all, and despite the numerous claims we read today his poem is not the first place in which romantic love is linked with the Valentine of February 14^th.

Even in the famous fourteenth century French illuminated manuscript, Vies des Saints, in the account of Valentine's life there is no suggestion either that he was a patron saint of lovers or had anything to do with them.

So given that none of the Valentines we know anything about had anything at all to do with romantic love, from where did the image of the man come which inspires the sending of more than one billion Valentine greeting cards every year?

Several parts of the Golden Legend account were elaborated in more modern times to depict Valentine as a priest who refused to obey a law of Claudius that young men remain single. The Emperor believed that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and children and that being married had a bad effect on enlistment in the army. In a later elaboration on the Golden Legend account on the evening before he was to be executed Valentine wrote the first "valentine" himself.

It was addressed to some young girl, who was sometimes identified as the jailer's daughter whom he had healed, sometimes as his own beloved, and sometimes as both. The note read "From your Valentine." The rest, as they say, is history.

Some believe that Valentine's Day was placed in mid-February by the Church to try to counteract the major Roman feast of Lupercal celebrated on 13-15 February.

Lupercal was dedicated to the Roman god of agriculture, Faunus, and to the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. The festival marked the beginning of Spring and was a time for purification and focus on fertility. Houses were cleansed ritually and sprinkled with salt and spelt. To begin the festival proper the priests and young nobles of Rome would gather at the Lupercal Cave where the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, were believed to have been suckled by a she-wolf or lupa. They would sacrifice a dog for purification and a goat for fertility.

Then the young men would cut the goat skin into strips, dip it in the sacrificial blood and run naked through the streets slapping any women they met with the strips of the goat hide, and sprinkling blood on the crops as well to ensure the fertility of both during the coming year.

Later that day the unmarried women of the city would place their names in an urn and the unattached young men would pick a name from the jar. For the following year the couple were to remain matched together and the result of this lottery often led to marriage. Pope Gelasius hated everything to do with the Lupercal Festival. He abolished the Festival itself and declared 14th February to be St. Valentine's Day about the year 498. He also changed the form of the Lupercal Lottery. The names of saints were substituted for the names of the young unattached women and the young men were expected to keep the name of the saint they had drawn from the urn as their role model for the coming year. It is not much of a surprise that many of the young men of Rome considered it was an unfair swap and the custom never really stuck.

Heroic efforts have been made to show that the Church did not introduce St. Valentine's Day to try to stamp our the celebration of Lupercal, but even though Lupercal had far more to do with fertility than with romantic love, and even though what we know of the original St. Valentine had little to do with romantic love either, it is nearly impossible to deny that this was the church's intent. February 14^th became associated with romantic love not because it was the feast of Valentine, but Valentine's feast became associated with romantic love because it was placed on a date that for time immemorial had had an association with fertility rites.

An interesting historical note is that the Lupercal Cave, which had been rebuilt by the Emperor Augustus after it had fallen into decay, was re-discovered in October 2007 by archeologists, about fifty feet below the site of the palace of Augustus.

What may take us closer to the mark as we try to understand the link between Valentine and romantic love are other practices in medieval Western Europe. Among the Druids February marked the beginning of Spring. Their goddess Brigid was renowned as one who could foretell how successful the coming growing season was going to be. Her festival, February 2^nd, was later converted into Groundhog Day, and is known in the Irish language today as Imbolc, one of the four great Celtic festivals of the year.

Reminiscent of the stress Lupercal laid on purification in February, the more modern feast of the Christian St. Brigid was also in Europe devoted to purification, the sprinkling of houses with blessed salt, and the purification of houses and herds by the use of fire. Purification is a necessary precursor to ensuring fertility. Candles were burned indoors to purify the dwellings; cattle and other animals were driven between bonfires outdoors to purify them for the coming year. In the Catholic Church candles and salt are still blessed nowadays on 2nd February even though the original meaning and use has long been forgotten. The same day is also used to celebrate the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, forty days after the birth of Jesus, even though, if you read my Christmas article, you will know it is highly unlikely that Jesus was born on 25^th December.

So it would seem that Valentine's Day eventually became a day for romance and lovers, not because Valentine himself had much to do with either, (despite the best efforts of his PR people a millennium and a half after his death), but because his festival landed in an ancient slot of fertility and romance in the calendar. That would be perfectly consistent with how the occasion is cherished and practiced today.

Valentine's Day had became very popular in England by the middle of the 1600s and by the following century it was the general custom to exchange small gifts and handwritten love notes. The custom had spread to America about the beginning of the 1700s. In the 1840's Esther A. Howland, "the Mother of the Valentine" made the first mass produced valentine cards in America. To day the Festival is celebrated mainly in Canada, Australia, France and Mexico, or in countries strongly influenced by Christianity, though given the deep hold on the human psyche which the elements of this time of the year has it is not surprising to find similar celebrations in almost every country in the world.

It is not surprising that the Valentine celebration should sometimes be regarded by other cultures as a commercialized western custom that is alien to their way of life and belief. Given how much the marketplace has affected the American celebration of all the major holidays, not just religious ones, that is not surprising. Notable opposition to the Valentine celebration have appeared very recently in countries as diverse as Romania, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Given that 85% of Valentine cards are supposedly sent by women according to market research, its interesting to note that opposition to the festival on religious or cultural grounds seems to erupt precisely where the role is women is not as happy as it might be. Last year in Saudi Arabia religious police outlawed the sales of all items traditionally associated with St. Valentine's Day: winged cupids, chocolates in red satin covered heart-shaped boxes, cards, flowers or confectionary appropriately adorned. It was hardly surprising that the main effect of the prohibition was to spark off a lively black market trade especially in roses and red wrapping paper! So on balance we would have to conclude that the festival of 14^th February has much more to do with deeply felt matters inspired by the coming of Spring, than it has to do with an early Christian saint who was a hero among those involved in romantic attachments. In fact the most surprised person of all to learn that Valentine is now the patron saint of lovers would be Valentine himself.

Valentine's Day has much more in common with Lupercal than it has with the historical St. Valentine. So what? In a world where love, tenderness and compassion are in very short supply it is a welcome oasis as we begin our emergence out of winter.

And after all, "Happy Lupercal" could never sound nearly as romantic as "Happy Valentine."

Back to Articles List