Valentine’s Day Is For The Martyrs
Valentinus, if he existed, was beaten and beheaded for being a member of a minority, Middle Eastern religion in the world’s most powerful empire
Venerated in the Catholic Church — along with some other ones, if you’re not into the whole pope thing — , Valentine was an early Christian bishop and is now the patron saint of fiances, marriages, love, and beekeepers, as well as plague, epilepsy, and fainting. (Insert hacky joke about being lovesick. Hey oh!)
But there’s an important aspect of his life that gets lost among the shitty chocolates and treacly greeting cards: he was tortured and killed on the orders of the head of the world’s most powerful empire at the time — and his crime was being from a minority, Middle Eastern religion that the government claimed was a threat.
The existence of Valentinus is dubious and it may even be that he’s an amalgamation of different early Church figures. However, the apocryphal versions of the story have some commonalities. We’ll ignore the miracles (e.g. curing blindness) and focus on the earthly stuff.
His crimes were essentially a) being Christian and b) proselytizing in Italy. Christians (and this is the important part) were viewed as outsiders, blasphemers, and a threat to traditional religion, and in 64 A.D., under Nero, they were scapegoated for a fire that ravaged the city for five days — a fire some suspect Nero himself may have started. These early Christians, still considered Jews at the time, were an easy target for people’s growing frustrations with the empire. Thus began two and a half centuries of arrests, beatings, property seizures, torture, and executions.
In 313 AD, Emperor Constantine decriminalized Christianity, as he’d embraced the religion during his victory a year earlier at the Battle of Milvian Bridge. He saw a cross in the sky and ordered his troops to fight under the Christian symbol. (This was more likely propaganda than a sign from God, but it worked.)
Constantine’s subsequent patronage of Christianity and relocation of the capital to Byzantium were the most important moments in the history of Christianity. But until then, many more died like Valentinus, who was supposedly beaten with clubs and then finally beheaded.
The modern-day parallels here should be obvious.
“But Christians were peaceful!” you say. But much like the US and Western Europe today, the Romans were involved in occupation and never-ending wars in the Middle East. Until the Second Century AD, Christianity wasn’t individuated from Judaism; it was simply a (possibly heretical) sect. And the Jews were at war with Rome for 70 years, beginning in 66 AD, when they revolted against Nero.
So, sure, most Christians were peaceful, but an uprising in the Levant and being the scapegoat of terrorism meant that a Roman contemporary might say with conviction, “Look how violent these people are! And their religion is more important to them than Rome! How can they be true Romans!” There’s even the line of thought that persecution made Christianity stronger, as martyrdom and a common enemy gave people something to rally behind.
This is all a bit reductive, of course, but then again, so is Islamophobia. The point being that St. Valentine should be a reminder of what happens when you privilege one unprovable belief over another unprovable belief.
Dane A. Wisher is based in Brooklyn.
