The Legend of St. Valentine
The history of Valentine's Day and the story of its
patron saint--is shrouded in mystery. We do know that February has long been
celebrated as a month of romance, and that St. Valentine's Day, as we know it
today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. But who
was Saint Valentine, and how did he become associated with this ancient rite?
The Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred. One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.
Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons, where they were often beaten and tortured. According to one legend, an imprisoned Valentine actually sent the first "valentine" greeting himself after he fell in love with a young girl--possibly his jailor's daughter--who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter signed "From your Valentine," an expression that is still in use today.
The Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred. One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.
Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons, where they were often beaten and tortured. According to one legend, an imprisoned Valentine actually sent the first "valentine" greeting himself after he fell in love with a young girl--possibly his jailor's daughter--who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter signed "From your Valentine," an expression that is still in use today.
Although the
truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories all emphasize his appeal
as a sympathetic, heroic and--most importantly--romantic figure. By the Middle
Ages, perhaps thanks to this reputation, Valentine would become one of the most
popular saints in England and France.
Origins of Valentine's Day: A Pagan
Festival in February
While some believe
that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the
anniversary of Valentine's death or burial--which probably occurred around A.D.
270--others claim that the Christian church may have decided to place St.
Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an effort to
"Christianize" the pagan celebration of Lupercalia.
Celebrated at the ides of February, or February 15, Lupercalia was a fertility
festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the
Roman founders Romulus and Remus. To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at a sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. They would then strip the goat's hide into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood and take to the streets, gently slapping both women and crop fields with the goat hide. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed the touch of the hides because it was believed to make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would each choose a name and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage.
Valentine's Day: A Day of Romance
Lupercalia survived the initial rise of Christianity
but was outlawed—as it was deemed “UN-Christian”--at
the end of the 5th century, when Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St.
Valentine's Day. It was not until much later, however, that the day became
definitively associated with love. During the Middle Ages, it was commonly
believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds'
mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of February (Valentine's Day) should be a day for
romance.
Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages, though written Valentine's didn't begin to appear until after 1400. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. (The greeting is now part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England.)
Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages, though written Valentine's didn't begin to appear until after 1400. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written in 1415 by Charles, Duke of Orleans, to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. (The greeting is now part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England.)
Several years
later, it is believed that King Henry V hired a writer named John Lychgate to
compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois.
In addition to Africa and the United States,
Valentine's Day is celebrated in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France and
Australia. In Great Britain, Valentine's Day began to be popularly celebrated
around the 17th century. By the middle of the 18th, it was common for friends
and lovers of all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or
handwritten notes, and by 1900 printed cards began to replace written letters
due to improvements in printing technology. Ready-made cards were an easy way
for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one's
feelings was discouraged. Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase
in the popularity of sending Valentine's Day greetings. Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began selling the first mass-produced valentines in America. Howland, known as the “Mother of the Valentine,” made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as "scrap." Today, according to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated 1 billion Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year, making Valentine's Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. (An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.) Women purchase approximately 85 percent of all valentines.
Choice in Love
Any person has a capacity to love if he is capable
of behaving at all. But there remains a question of choice upon whom a person
will bestow his power to love, his power to satisfy, make happy, help the other
grow, if he wants to love at all. A person may choose someone on the basis of
certain estimable characteristics. He may choose someone he thinks will give
him much love.
bachelors would each choose a name and
become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in
marriage.
3 Common Criteria for Loving
.
- Helplessness and need - It is easy to love another who is helpless and in need of a loving behavior without expecting anything in return. Hence it is easier to love the children who need care and protection more than the adult. When we love the children, we just give without expecting the same intensity of love we give them.
- Conformity with the Lover's Ideals - It's entirely different when we love as adults. A potential lover must have good appearance, healthy personality, and good behavior which the other must confirm before love is offered. The concept of the "ideal wife" or the "ideal husband" may be a decisive factor in determining whom to select to love. A person may pursue another who shows the beautiful and ideal characteristics as of pleasing personality, tenderness, consideration, moral uprightness, including other complex traits like good health, emotional maturity, stability, and intelligence. Some sociologists gather evidences to show that people select mates on the basis of complimentary needs, like dormant men choose passive women, some men choose less intelligent women or women from lower socioeconomic status who will make them feel superior.
- Ability of the Loved One to Reciprocate- Loving another adult is conditional. A person may not experience the desire to love another person until and unless the other person shows clear signs of a desire to love first. In other words, a person can be moved to love if, and only if, he has been first assured that he is loved. A would-be lover is afraid to take risk of being rejected, or is not willing to love, unless he sees some guarantee that his love will be returned.
The Need to Love and to be Loved
When we were born, we were helplessly in need of
love from our parents in order to survive. We receive from them loving care,
emotional displays of affection, and attention to our basic needs. Infants who
were deprived of such, especially of a mother's
personalized attention, grow in deviant ways, compared to infants who grew up
in a foundling home with adequate physical care and adequate mothering.
a child who had not experienced love may grow into a
psychopath who is incapable of active loving and has no conscious longings for
love. If a child has had a taste of love, one that's just enough to feel it as
good, he may develop what Levy called "primary effect hunger" and
pursue love the rest of his life, at any cost.
However, take note… no one is so full that he can
love endlessly without receiving love in return. In mutual love, where the
partners have chosen wisely, each can give freely what the other needs and each
receives in return for the happiness and growth of both.
Valentine’s Day is
coming up. I can smell it. I can smell the fake flowers bought hurriedly by
nervous boyfriends from Shoprite; I can smell the desperation as singletons try
and find someone – anyone – with whom to spend the evening; I can smell the
fear. It is, in all honesty, a terrible day for everybody. Nobody wins, except
perhaps Shoprite again and Deluxe Cinema’s. People who aren’t in a relationship
get an entire 24 hours devoted to rubbing their noses in this tragic fact, and
the people who are get to receive flowers they have no room for, chocolates
they don’t even like, and teddy bears they haven’t appreciated since they were
about 14 (none of which were what they hoped for, because,believe me boys, when a girl says ‘no,
let’s not do presents this year’ she really, REALLY doesn’t mean it).
Unfortunately the presents, bought to spell out ‘I
love you’, very rarely manage to convey such a complex emotion – in fact, they
generally mean something else entirely. Flowers translate as ‘I completely
forgot it was Valentine’s Day so I stole these out of an old lady’s garden when
I was on the way to meet you’; chocolates translate as ‘I literally had no idea
what to get you, so I bought you these’ and teddy bears translate as ‘I’m
totally skint (broke) so here’s an ‘I love you’ teddy you can name after me ….(just
as you named the last after your ex and the one before too…etc)’. Now, should I
receive any gifts this Valentine’s Day – hoards of admirers take note – I
should want something personal, something that says ‘I do actually know who you
are and what you like’. A carton of Le’ roux or Andre, red wine or a keg of palm wine would
be nice, for example. I do like my wine.
Okay,
I lie. That isn’t exactly
how Valentine’s Day originated – it has a much nicer story than that (above).
But the day has certainly been corrupted. These days it’s about proving
yourself and your relationship to everybody else; it’s about not being the only
one in your group of friends that has to spend the day alone; it’s about buying
the biggest and most useless gift for your loved one, when really it should be
about appreciating and celebrating your relationship. Although this in itself
sounds a bit odd – why should we need
Clinton Cards to tell our partners we love them? Surely we should be
doing it every day already?
But I guess the point is that we aren’t. Much as I
would love everybody to live in my world, in which cannabis and booze are good
for you and people say ‘I love you’ all the time, reality just isn’t like that.
Valentine’s Day has been turned into a business, losing much of its charm in
the process, but in essence, I suppose, it might still be necessary. (Though
for the record it is never necessary to buy a card so big it doesn’t fit
through the letterbox – this does not prove your love, only that you don’t
think ahead and like to embarrass your love by making him or her go down to the
post office to collect it.)
The reason Valentine’s Day is such a failure, then,
is because we forget its simple message, hype it up and inevitably get
disappointed. Single people expect to be whisked off their feet (unlikely),
people in relationships expect to be whisked off their feet (even more
unlikely), and everybody forgets what it really means: constant, steady,
reliable, lovely love. Not just romantic love, but every single silly type of
love this world plays host to. The love we have for our
parents, our siblings, our friends, our pets – all are equally important and
equally undervalued in our busy, stressful lives and are the ones (not just a
lover) who deserve appreciation on Valentine’s day, and Every day of our lives
while they are still alive and with us.( I love you Dad)
I started off this article with its history and ended
it wanting to expose Valentine’s Day, but I don’t think it needs exposing – I
think we all know how silly it is. The real point is that even though we know
this, we still partake in it. None of us, me included, are willing to get rid
of it because we all hope that one day we will be whisked away to New York in a
heart shaped plane to be wined and dined and taken shopping. This is a nice dream, but save it for when you’re sleeping. and ask yourself: who do you love? And then tell them. Tell every last one of them because I can guarantee you do not tell them enough, and nothing says ‘I love you’ better than that. Except perhaps heart shaped planes, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. I doubt they’re the right shape for air travel.
I'll talk to you again soon
Your Friend
.....Leonhart
Twitter & Instagram @chrisxleonhart
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