suspended in her jar
I stopped celebrating Valentine’s Day years ago, not because of bitterness at my long-time single state, but because sending cheap chocolates and teddy bears made in China by by underpaid workers strikes me as an odd way to commemorate the life of an early Christian priest who was brutally beaten, stoned, and beheaded for his faith.
The cultural rituals associated with the secular commemoration of the day are not to my taste, anyway (luckily, my husband and I are on the same page on this one: we refuse to celebrate the day; this lets him out of the stereotypical angst that husbands are supposedly experiencing as they rush to buy last minute gifts, if that is a real thing). I can’t stand pink; the only chocolate I’ll eat is super fancy and bittersweet; grown-ups giving one another stuffed animals creeps me out. I do like champagne, but I’d rather drink it at a Gatsy-esque party while dancing in the fountain, than in a packed restaurant filled with people mooning at one another.
This isn’t because I’m not romantic. Romance, after all, technically has a lot more to do with dysfunction, melancholy, danger, and darkness than with pink hearts and slow dances. It’s connected with the Gothic far more than with the sentimental. In the great romances of the Middle Ages, love was associated with a sort of doom, and the great lovers usually ended up sundered forever by some deep taboo (adultery, for the most part, because the fin amour tradition of the chivalric poets was all about cheating). Denis de Rougemont, in Love in the Western World, points to the legend of Tristan and Isolde as establishing the romantic mythos: their love comes upon them as a sort of doom, and is connected less with comedic life-forces of reproduction and social renewal than with anti-social, individualistic, chthonic death-impulses.
The better known story of Lancelot and Guinevere was initially an imitation of the Tristan legend. In both cases the culture of the court, the tropes of courtly behavior, and the socio-economic codes of the chivalric and feudal civilization set up a prime platform for hopeless, doomed, passionate forbidden love – which was, by the way, not at all reducible to sex. In Marie de France’s lai “The Honeysuckle,” Tristan goes through elaborate ruses in order to sail across the sea simply to speak with his lady briefly in the woods: “Great was their joy at being together, with time to talk once more at leisure.” Because the romantic passion was spiritual as well as erotic, intellectual as well as bodily. The forbidden love operated outside of the established structures of social order, but it was serious, long-lasting. Lancelot and Guinevere carry on their clandestine affair well into old age.
The motif of forbidden love has been explored in other ways, as well: Romeo and Juliet draws on the less morally problematic motif of lovers who meet across enemy lines. Romances about lovers who break racist taboos provide a moral commentary that is not present in the orignal adulterous romance. The doomed romance motif has been explored in LGBTQ fiction. Even a story as execrable as Fifty Shades draws on the element of darkness and danger.
So, back to St. Valentine.
Michelle Arnold writes about the origins of St. Valentine’s Day, how it became connected with romantic love, and how a totally separate secular holiday became established:
Early history of the celebrations surrounding either St. Valentine or his feast day, February 14, is sketchy. An ancient Roman fertility festival known as “Lupercalia” was observed from February 13–15, and involved cleansing rituals to purify the city of Rome and to promote health and fertility. The Lupercalia festival was abolished by Pope Gelasius I (492–496), but there is no evidence that the Church replaced Lupercalia with celebrations involving St. Valentine.
The first direct link between St. Valentine and romantic love seems to have been from Geoffrey Chaucer, best known for The Canterbury Tales. In honor of the marriage of Richard II and his wife, Anne, Chaucer wrote, “For this was on St. Valentine’s Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate.” Even here, the links are shaky, and historians believe Chaucer may have had another St. Valentine in mind.
A look into the modern celebration is more telling of romance and love. Our modern customs got their start at the end of the 18th century when an English printing house released a book of sentimental verse for young men to use to woo the young women they were courting. The idea of ghostwritten, pre-printed romantic poetry being offered as a token of romantic affection quickly became so popular that various English printers created cheap cards with these verses printed on them. The cards were called “valentines” and the modern secular celebration of exchanging valentines on St. Valentine’s Day was born.
Back to the omission of “saint.” While I cannot say for certain, it would not surprise me if the “Saint” is commonly dropped from the modern celebration of February 14 because it is not the world’s intention to honor a Christian martyr. Rather, it is an almost entirely secular day for exchanging printed cards called “valentines.” If so, the valentine referred to in “Valentine’s Day” would refer to the cards and not to the saint of the same name.
Arnold concludes, and I believe rightly, that we are looking at two separate holidays here. So while I eschew the one with the crappy high-fructose chcolates and the slave-labor toys, I can still celebrate the feast of an early Christian martyr who gave his life for the highest love of all.
And it strikes me, as a literary scholar, looking back on medieval romances, that those stories with their darkness and sense of death and doom – their breaking of boundaries – are not wholly divorced from the Christian tradition that venerates the martyrs. Romance, understood properly, involves a longing for escape from the confines of the finite. It involves appetites that can never be satisfied by domesticity, comfort, and the ordinary pleasures of life: that’s why the neo-Platonic element crept in, so that the love of the beloved could be attuned to a longing for the eternal. Dante brought this to its apotheosis with is representaiton of Beatrice in The Divine Comedy. At the heart of the romantic tension is a longing for paradise.
And this, in its full and complete religious sense, is what drives the martyr to forsake comfort and normalcy and be willing to suffer, not as a good in itself, but for the higher end of union with God.
For those of us who can’t stand pink fluffy stuff, being more inclined towards the Gothic, the morbid – attuned to an awareness of the connection between desire and death, the ones who are alert to whispers of doom – who “see the skull beneath the skin” – the saints as represented on holy cards may sometimes seem foreign to us. We’re dysfunctional weirdos. We can’t figure out how to be happy. But look at their upturned faces, all so cheery, remote from the troubles of this earth. They have bright eyes and clear complexions. The women are invariably slim and feminine.
The aesthetic is so close to that of the secular Valentine’s celebrations, it should give us pause.
Because the saints were not actually remote and ethereal, separate from the pains of life. They suffered illness, physical and mental. Many of them were well-adjusted and happy, yes – but many others were just plain weird (Christina the Astonishing, anyone?).
They were often persecuted, not only by oppressive governments, but by their own religious communities. They were beaten, raped, stoned, flayed, hanged, beheaded, and burned alive. Frequently the respectable people around them shunned them. Look at Dorothy Day, as a modern example: she was loathed by the bourgeois Catholics of her time, and only now that she’s respectably remote can the bourgeoisie begin to pretty her up (while shunning anyone in their own community who carries on her ministry). In five hundred years will that tough, temperamental Servant of God be presented to us as a pastel figure on a holy card?
Thanks God, for giving us saints who walked through the valley of the shadow, saints who know what it’s like to suffer – saints who sometimes were weird, depressed, angry, and discontented. I can’t celebrate the patron saint of plastic hearts, but the lives of the saints, the real ones, behind their holy-card depictions, help me to find that thread of longing for the infinite, in the midst of darkness and discontent.
image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ignatius_of_Antioch.jpg
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