Saint Valentine is not the Christian Cupid

(Written on February 14th, 2018)

The following is a personal attempt a Christian/libertarian to interpret Saint Valentine’s Day and the man “remembered” by it. This is also a public statement of my admiration for the “Dark Ages”, the Middle Ages and tainted glass in churches.

Saint Valentine (226-269 AD, according to church history) was a Christian believer of apparently an important position in the Christian community of the time, later to be considered a personality in the history of Catholicism – at that time not yet the official faith of the Roman Empire. (To be clear, everyone who knows me also knows that I am not against Catholicism, on the contrary; I am just stating it was a later development in history.) Paganism continued being the main faith of the Empire or, better say, the mechanism by which the name “Emperor” was pronounced as “God”. (It is the same nowadays: tons of letters are altered from the word “Christianity”, God and the concepts of sin and eternity are deleted from the word, and thus socialism creeps in and maintains acceptability in the masses.) In Saint Valentine’s times, Claudius II was emperor, a man not too different from Claudius I (the latter can be seen as part of the “unholy trinity” of pagan emperors Caligula, Claudius I and Nero) when it came to his paranoia against Christians and to the drastic measures he took against the spread of Christianity.

Many versions of Saint Valentine’s legend and person exist, but a comprehensive summary would be as follows: the emperor has issued a law suppressing natural and divine law, ordering that his soldiers did not marry, even if they found the girl of their dreams. In his view, an unmarried soldier did not have the concerns of a married one when going to war – he did not fear death the same as a married one would by thinking of his family, and he could belong even more thoroughly to the emperor. (This seems like a pagan misquotation of Saint Paul’s advice to Christians as regards marriage, and we can again see how the emperor confuses himself for God.) Of course, Saint Valentine (I insist on repeatedly maintaining the title of “Saint” in all references to him, because the title is well-deserved to this servant of God who is now in the joy of his Lord’s glory) did not agree and continued in the sacred Judaeo-Christian tradition of civil disobedience when this means opposing cases of divine disobedience. It seems clear he had two principles in mind: that God is the primary authority, and that family coming from marriage is the primary human institution – it stands above the state or any other human group or invention.

Those Christian soldiers and that priest were not dissidents or rebels without a cause – they were faithful servants of the emperor, within the good reason of natural and divine law. Unlike what we see so often nowadays, they did not question the existence of either of them and they knew all too well that the violation of natural law is very often the first step towards violation of divine law, or a reflection of the prior violation of the latter.

This saint put his life in great danger to bless life as dictated by God: the soldiers married their ladies. Saint valentine was arrested shortly, and history gown on telling us the emperor actually starting to like him during his imprisonment. The talks he had with the wise saint were pleasant to him.. until a three-letter title was mentioned, one that threatened with power immeasurably bigger than his own, reminding him that man does not belong to man, be that the emperor himself. This was the point when the emperor sealed the saint’s sentence to Roman death: prolonged tortures before sending him to eternity.

We rightly celebrate romantic love on Saint Valentine’s Day, but we could probably consider going even further. This saint and his example deserve being treated with even greater reverence. Saint Valentine – or at least what we know of him – is more than the Christian alternative to Cupid, which seems to be the way his person is considered today. He is the example of the Christian who is constantly aware of Who is the greatest Love and Whose law is the primary blueprint for life. The commercial treatment of figures like Saint Valentine or Saint Nicholas may have helped keeping alive a resemblance of their distant memory in a culture that is secularised more and more every day as if aiming towards a baseless mass that lacks any genuine individuality and is numb to anything truly spiritual. It is time however that these saints’ family – the church itself – rives their memory to do them justice, be inspired by the real people behind the holiday-makers and, most importantly, vividly restores in the current culture the memory of the One Who made these saints worthy of celebration. It is time also for us to revive in ourselves the principle of God having the first and last word in our lives and that human powers are entitled to obedience as far as this obedience is within the limits of godliness. We are citizens of another kingdom – those borders are the most restricting ones.