Saint Valentine: The Beheaded Patron of Candy Hearts

It is one of the more remarkable achievements of our commercial civilization that we have managed to transform a man who was beaten with clubs and beheaded into a chubby infant with wings who shoots people with arrows. We have taken a third-century martyr who defied the Roman Empire and turned him into a mascot for greeting card companies. We have seized upon a saint who died rather than renounce his faith and made him the patron of chocolate truffles and overpriced roses. If Saint Valentine himself could see what we have done with his feast day, he would likely be more puzzled than offended, rather like a war hero discovering that his memorial has been converted into a theme park.

This is not, let it be understood, an attack upon romance, which is a perfectly splendid thing when properly understood. Nor is it an assault upon chocolate, which seems to me one of the more convincing arguments for the existence of a benevolent Creator. It is rather an observation about that peculiar modern habit of keeping the celebration while forgetting what is celebrated, of preserving the feast while discarding the saint. We have inherited a great cathedral of meaning and converted it into a shopping mall, keeping the soaring architecture but removing all reference to its original purpose.

The Man Behind the Myth

The historical Valentine lived in Rome during the third century, a time when being a Christian was rather more dangerous than it is today, though given the trajectory of our culture, one hesitates to make predictions. He was a priest, or possibly a bishop (the records are somewhat muddled, as they tend to be when dealing with people whom the state was actively trying to erase), who ministered to persecuted Christians under the Emperor Claudius II. This alone would have been enough to earn him a death sentence, but Valentine, like so many saints, seems to have had that magnificently unreasonable streak that refuses to be merely safe when there are souls to be saved.

The legend tells us that Valentine secretly performed Christian marriages for couples, particularly for soldiers who were forbidden by imperial decree to marry. The Emperor, it seems, believed that unmarried men made better warriors, a theory that tells us rather more about the Emperor's understanding of love than it does about military strategy. Valentine disagreed. He understood something that Claudius, with all his legions, could not comprehend: that a man who has something worth dying for fights better than a man who has nothing worth living for.

Here we encounter the first great paradox of Valentine's story. The man we now associate with romantic love was not primarily concerned with romance at all. He was concerned with something far more radical: the sacramental bond of Christian marriage, which he understood to be not merely a social arrangement but a participation in the very love of God. He was not helping young lovers elope because he was sentimental; he was defying an emperor because he believed that what God has joined together, no emperor has the authority to put asunder.

The Scandal of Sacrifice

When Valentine was eventually discovered, for such things always come to light, the truth being a remarkably stubborn thing, he was arrested, imprisoned, and brought before the Emperor. What happened next follows the pattern of so many martyrdom accounts, yet it loses none of its power for being familiar. Claudius, who seems to have been a relatively reasonable tyrant as tyrants go, was initially impressed by Valentine's bearing and attempted to convert him to paganism. Valentine responded by attempting to convert Claudius to Christianity.

One must pause here to appreciate the magnificent audacity of this exchange. Here is a prisoner, already condemned, standing before the most powerful man in the known world, and instead of begging for his life, he is concerned about the Emperor's soul. This is either the height of foolishness or the depth of wisdom, and Christianity has always insisted that these two things are rather closer together than the world imagines.

The Emperor, unpersuaded, ordered Valentine to renounce his faith or face execution. Valentine refused. On February 14th, around the year 269, he was beaten with clubs and beheaded outside the Flaminian Gate. His body was buried along the Via Flaminia, and there a church was eventually built over his grave, one of those peculiarly Christian ironies whereby the place of a man's defeat becomes the site of his victory.

According to one tradition, before his execution Valentine sent a letter to the jailer's daughter, whom he had befriended and perhaps healed during his imprisonment. He signed it "From your Valentine." If this detail is true, it provides a rather different context for our modern habit of sending valentines. The first valentine was not a declaration of romantic affection but a farewell note from a man about to die for his faith, a final witness to love, but a love far deeper and more costly than anything our greeting cards imagine.

What Love Actually Means

And here we arrive at the heart of the matter, which is that our age has managed to get love almost exactly backwards. We speak of love as a feeling, a pleasant emotion that comes and goes like the weather. We treat it as something that happens to us rather than something we choose, as a kind of benevolent seizure that excuses all manner of behavior. "I couldn't help myself," we say. "I fell in love." As if love were a pit one tumbles into rather than a mountain one chooses to climb.

But Valentine knew something different. He knew that love, real love, is not primarily about feeling but about willing. It is not about what happens to us but about what we choose to do. It is not soft and passive but fierce and active. The love that drove Valentine to defy an emperor, to risk his life performing forbidden marriages, to refuse to renounce his faith even at the cost of his head, this was not a pleasant feeling. It was a choice, made daily, to put the good of others above his own safety, to value truth above comfort, to serve God rather than Caesar.

This is why the early Church understood marriage not as the celebration of romantic attraction but as the creation of a new reality, two people becoming one flesh, united in a bond that mirrors the love of Christ for His Church. Valentine did not perform those secret weddings because he thought the couples deserved to be happy together (though perhaps he did). He performed them because he believed that Christian marriage was a sacred thing, a participation in divine love, and that no earthly power had the right to prevent it.

The Cupid Problem

It is instructive to consider the transformation of Valentine's Day imagery over the centuries. We have replaced the martyr with the cherub, the cross with the heart, the sacrifice with the sentiment. Cupid, that chubby Roman god of erotic love, has somehow become the mascot of a Christian feast day, a substitution so brazen it would be funny if it were not so revealing.

For Cupid represents precisely the opposite of everything Valentine stood for. Cupid's arrows strike randomly, turning love into a matter of chance rather than choice. Cupid's victims are helpless, overcome by forces beyond their control, excused from responsibility by the very intensity of their passion. Cupid's love is fundamentally self-centered (I love you because of how you make me feel) rather than self-giving (I love you and therefore I will serve you regardless of how I feel).

Valentine, by contrast, chose to love. He chose to serve persecuted Christians when he could have lived safely in obscurity. He chose to perform marriages when he could have minded his own business. He chose to witness to Christ before the Emperor when he could have kept his mouth shut. And when the choice came down to his life or his Lord, he chose his Lord. This is not the helpless victim of Cupid's arrow. This is the deliberate soldier of the cross.

What We Have Kept and What We Have Lost

In 496 AD, Pope Gelasius designated February 14th as Saint Valentine's Day, apparently to Christianize the pagan festival of Lupercalia, a rather unsavory Roman fertility celebration. The irony is rich: the Church transformed a pagan feast into a Christian holy day, and our modern world has now transformed the Christian holy day back into a pagan feast, only now instead of sacrificing goats, we sacrifice our wallets at the altar of the greeting card store.

We have kept the day but forgotten the saint. We have kept the association with love but forgotten what love actually costs. We have kept the celebration but forgotten why we are celebrating. And in this, Valentine's Day is merely a particularly obvious example of what has happened to most of our holidays: Christmas without Christ, Easter without resurrection, Thanksgiving without anyone to thank.

The modern world, which has somehow managed to make even pleasure a rather gloomy business, cannot quite understand what to do with the saints. They are too serious to be merely entertaining and too joyful to be merely serious. They make us uncomfortable because they actually believed the things we claim to believe and then had the audacity to live accordingly. Valentine believed that Christ was Lord, that the sacraments were sacred, that love was worth dying for, and then he went and proved it.

The Real Gift

Perhaps this Valentine's Day, alongside the flowers and chocolates and overpriced dinners, we might remember the man behind the madness. Not because there is anything wrong with flowers and chocolates, far from it, but because the flowers mean more when we know what garden they came from, and the chocolates taste sweeter when we understand what has been sacrificed that we might enjoy them.

Valentine reminds us that real love is not about finding the right person but about being the right person, the person who loves not because it is pleasant but because it is right, not because it is safe but because it is true. He reminds us that Christian marriage is not merely a social arrangement for mutual convenience but a sacred covenant that mirrors the self-giving love of God. He reminds us that love, real love, costs something, and that something worth loving is worth dying for.

In the end, the greatest gift we can give our beloved on Valentine's Day is not a diamond ring or a box of chocolates, though these have their place. The greatest gift is the commitment to love as Valentine loved, not with the fickle affection that comes and goes with our moods, but with the steady determination of one who has chosen to will the good of another, come what may, till death do us part. And if such love should cost us something, even everything, then perhaps we are finally beginning to understand what Valentine understood as he knelt before the executioner's sword.

For in the strange economy of the Gospel, nothing freely given in love is ever truly lost. The man who lost his head for love gained a crown. The priest who was beaten and beheaded became a saint whose feast is celebrated around the world nearly two thousand years later. And the love he defended, that sacramental bond between man and woman, that participation in divine love, remains, for all our efforts to cheapen and commercialize it, the most beautiful and terrible thing this side of heaven.

So by all means, buy the roses. Send the cards. Enjoy the chocolate. But remember, as you do, the man whose blood bought you this holiday, and ask yourself whether you love anyone well enough to die for them. That is the question Valentine asks us every February 14th. It is an uncomfortable question, which is why we have buried it under sentiment and sugar. But it is the only question, in the end, that matters.

- The Seeker's Quill

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