It is that time of year again! Roses, chocolates, cards, and tiny pink sugar hearts will be purchased by the gazillions in the upcoming days and given to our loved ones. Across the West, love is in the air as romance is celebrated on February 14, Valentine’s Day. Where does all this hubbub come from?
Who Was Saint Valentine?
A frustrating problem for historians is that we find not one, but at least three Saint Valentines in the early church who were martyred. The name Valentine—from the Latin word valens meaning “strong, vigorous, healthy”—was popular in ancient Rome, and thus it is no surprise to find prominent Christians with the name.
In central Italy we find two martyrs who are the most likely candidates for being the “real” Saint Valentine. One was a priest who ministered in Rome during the reign of emperor Claudius the Goth (AD 268-270). The other was a bishop of Terni, sixty miles to the north of Rome, who may have ministered in the late 200s. Both Valentines were martyred by beheading, both were said to have died on February 14, and both were buried along the Flaminian Way, a major road connecting Rome, Terni, and the Adriatic Sea. The similarities between these two martyrs have led many historians to suggest that they reference the same individual.
That a Valentine cleric existed and was martyred in central Italy is fairly certain. The stories attached to his name, however, are impossible to verify and are, in all likelihood, mythical. Yet we love good stories! And, as is sometimes facetiously said, whoever lets “the facts” get in the way of a good story?
The most popular tale concerns the Valentine of Rome who ministered as a priest in the 260s. It was said that he made a remarkable impression upon emperor Claudius due to his holiness and reported miracles. Yet Valentine soon fell out of favor with the emperor. Claudius had sought ways to strengthen the Roman army and so he implemented a policy forbidding soldiers from marrying due to its many distractions. Valentine strongly opposed this and secretly officiated the marriages of Roman soldiers with Roman women. Another version claims that Valentine secretly married Roman citizens to prevent the men from being conscripted into the Roman army.
Once discovered, Claudius was enraged, and had Valentine imprisoned and sentenced to death. While in prison, he befriended the jailer who had a blind daughter. Valentine prayed for the girl and her sight was miraculously restored. On the night before his execution, he wrote a brief note to the girl whom he had grown fond of. Some versions of the story state that the girl was a young woman whom Valentine had fallen in love with. At the end of his love note, he appended the words “your Valentine.” The next morning, February 14, 269, he was beheaded and buried outside of Rome along the Flaminian Way.
It is not hard to see in these stories the origins of Valentine’s Day: a rebellious priest defying imperial authority by secretly uniting couples in wedlock; a love-smitten priest who expressed his feelings to a young woman just before his martyrdom in a relationship that was never meant to be. Such stories pull at our heartstrings and easily stick in our memories.
Yet, alas, each of these details are the stuff of legend: they give the impression that they were concocted to provide an origin story linking Saint Valentine to the celebration of romantic love. And more importantly, most of the details of these stories were not written down until a thousand years after Valentine’s death! This lack of historical evidence led the Roman Catholic Church in 1969 to remove Valentine’s name from the General Roman Calendar, which lists the official saints that are to be honored by the Roman Catholic faithful.
From Valentine to Valentine’s Day
So how do we go from Valentine the martyr to Valentine’s Day? The history here is also very spotty but there are a few things we know which illuminate how Valentine’s Day came to be.
Why is Valentine’s Day associated with February 14? While Christianity was officially the state religion in Rome by the late 400s, there were still many pagan holdovers observed, including an annual celebration known as Lupercalia. This festival, observed on February 15, featured health and fertility and was intended to purify the city of Rome just before the New Year (which traditionally began on March 1) and the coming of spring (mid-March). Interestingly, the word “February” derives from a Latin word meaning “purification.” From a Christian perspective, Lupercalia was far from purifying: it involved animal sacrifice, large amounts of wine, streaking through the streets, and the pairing of couples by lottery for procreation (though this point is disputed). Pope Gelasius I, bishop of Rome from 492-496, had had enough of this debauchery and waged a relatively successful campaign against its observance. In addition, there is evidence that Gelasius had a hand in instituting February 14 as the feast day for the martyr Valentine. It is unlikely that Gelasius’s promotion of the feast of St. Valentine intended to be a “replacement” for Lupercalia. Even if it was, Gelasius’s advocacy of Valentine would merely have featured his commitment to Christ and martyrdom. The connection between Valentine and romantic love would not come until the Middle Ages.
How did Valentine come to be associated with romantic love? This appears to have taken place in England in the late 1300s. Geoffrey Chaucer, the great English poet, penned a work entitled The Parliament of Fowls (1380s), which featured the pairing of birds on February 14. Many believe that this poem is the earliest explicit text we have linking Valentine’s Day with romantic love. The poem celebrates how, on “seynt Valentines day,” Nature awakens in the weeks leading up to spring, encouraging the birds to pair off and, by extension, human couples as well. This convergence of Saint Valentine’s Day with Nature encouraging romantic union struck a chord with the English and French aristocracy. Soon, poems, love letters, and declarations of affection featuring the beloved as “my Valentine” began to appear in countless writings in the 1400s.
In time, these practices spread across the West. Legends about Valentine were circulated in the late Middle Ages. Later during the 1800s, standard items given on Valentine’s Day came to be fixed in England and the United States. Books on the “language of flowers” became very popular, elevating the red rose as the language of romantic love. In 1868 the first Fancy Boxes—featuring chocolate sweets placed in red, heart-shaped boxes—were sold by Cadbury for Valentine’s Day. And Valentine’s Day cards, with pre-printed rhymes of affection for the poetically challenged, soon came to be exchanged between couples. As commercialization set in, the religious origins of Valentine’s Day faded. Indeed, today the only religious image we associate with the celebration has nothing to do with Saint Valentine himself, but rather with chubby angels aiming their love arrows at unsuspecting young men and women!
Two Takeaways
What can we glean from the story of Valentine’s Day? Two things. First, we all, as human beings, should recognize the fact that we are wired for romance. How many of our cultural productions—songs, movies, novels, and poems—highlight this? We yearn for true, romantic love, and mourn its absence or loss in our lives. When we look in Scripture, we see why this is: God has created us male and female and has hard-wired us for relationship with another in a union of marriage. This is God’s gift not just to Christians but to the entire human race. It is thus right and fitting to celebrate this gift in an annual observance of sorts, even if most of the facts related to the original Saint Valentine are the stuff of myth.
Second, we all, as human beings, love a good story and will embellish facts to tell a grand tale! We have seen this with the transformation of Valentine from a sacrificial martyr to the saintly hero of romantic love. We could list numerous others as well: George Washington and the cherry tree, the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving, and of course St. Nicholas and Santa Claus. Much of this is harmless when we are informing children about the truths behind these stories: honor your founding fathers, celebrate God’s provision with a feast, giving is greater than receiving. But when it comes to the things of God—His nature, His ways, and how we are to worship Him—we should be cautious not to let our propensity for embellishing stories get the best of us. God has given us His Word, a grand narrative full of wondrous stories of His great salvation. What’s more, this Word is true! We therefore should take care that in all our dealings with Him we stick closely to His Word in word, in work, and in prayer.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
