Valentine's Day: From Pagan to Christian to Cash
Registers
(Illustration by
Mike Miller/The Salt Lake Tribune)
|
BY BOB MIMS THE SALT LAKE
TRIBUNE
From candy, cards
and flowers to the more risque gifts of skimpy boudoir attire
and intimate proposals, Valentine's Day has come to bear
little resemblance to the holy day set aside for its namesake
saint more than 1,500 years ago.
Indeed, were Valentine to see what has become of his feast
day, he might blush with embarrassment, if not fume in
righteous indignation. Then again,
there is a good argument that the secular holiday devoted to
love and lust has long since left its religious forbear in the
dust. Valentine no longer finds a spot on the Roman Catholic
Church's official worship calendar. "There are many more
canonized and recognized saints than there are days of the
year," said Bishop George Niederauer, spiritual leader of
Utah's 200,000 Catholics. "Valentine was on the church's
calendar when I was a boy, but he was removed by the Second
Vatican Council [1962-65]. "His place
was taken by Cyril and Methodius, brothers who were
missionaries to the Slavic countries."
Perhaps it is all for the best. The origins of St. Valentine's
Day have always been a bit murky. Some historians say it was a
Christian appropriation of the Romans' Feb. 14 holiday
honoring the goddess Juno and its subsequent Feb. 15 Lupercian
Festival, a pagan celebration of fertility and courtship.
A custom associated with the festival
called for eligible young men to draw the names of maidens
from a jar, precursor of today's Valentine's cards.
"This is like St. Nicholas," said
Martin Marty, director of the Public Religion Project and a
professor emeritus of Christian History at the University of
Chicago Divinity School. "There's nothing in the Nicholas
legend that makes him the gift giver a la Santa Claus, and
there is nothing in the Valentine story that connects him with
love and letters." Indeed, still in
dispute is which of at least three martyrs named Valentine or
Valentinus associated with the February date is the real
saint. Perhaps the strongest candidate, though, is a Valentine
believed to have been priest in Rome executed Feb. 14, 269
A.D. Tradition says this particular
Valentine defied Emperor Claudius II by performing secret
marriage ceremonies. Claudius, the story goes, had banned
marriages and engagements in Rome because he was having
difficulty recruiting soldiers away from their families for
his unpopular, bloody wars. For
answering the call of love instead of obeying his emperor's
edicts, Valentine was ordered beaten to death and beheaded.
Before he died, however, he purportedly sent a love note to a
young girl -- perhaps the daughter of his jailer-- who had
visited him in prison. Signed "From your Valentine," this
legendary last written communication from the martyred saint
became the first of the millions of "Valentines." Or, at least
that is the legend. The tale is "a
hokey tradition," Marty said. "Who believes it?" More likely,
the church simply "tried to trump a secular lovers' day"
already in existence. The same argument has been advanced to
explain the pagan roots of other Christian holiday selections
including Christmas and Easter.
Whatever the origins of the lovers' holiday, Feb. 14 was added
to the church calendar as a feast day honoring St. Valentine
by Pope Gelasius in 496 A.D. By the Middle Ages, Valentine was
a favorite in France and England, where folk customs also
associated Feb. 14 with birds beginning to pair for spring's
nesting. Chaucer, in his Parliament of
Foules, wrote in archaic Middle English: "For this was sent on
Seynt Valentyne's day, whan every foul cometh ther to choose
his mate." In the United States,
Valentine's Day eventually joined Christmas and Easter as
religious holidays transmuted into buying and gift-giving
seasons to keep shopkeepers' cash registers ringing. The first
commercial Valentines were introduced in the 1800s. The
tainting of yet another religious holiday by commerce does not
overly concern Niederauer, at least in the case of Valentine.
He points out another February holy day, Candlemas --
commemorating the first appearance of the infant Jesus in the
temple and celebrated on Feb. 2 -- has pretty much been
forgotten. It is now devoted to the groundhog and its
purported ability to predict the length of winter.
"I vote that good Catholics send
Valentines, as good Protestants and good Jews send Valentines,
or for that matter bad Catholics and so on," Niederauer
quipped. Marty agreed. After all, he
said, it is love we are inclined to talk about on Valentine's
Day -- and that can't be bad. "I guess
the world is not overweighted with love, so if people who love
each other say so and show it with greetings and gifts and
events, that's better than being indifferent or neglectful,"
he said.
|