Skip to main content

Valentines

Valentines looking out for imperial moral police 


Valentine was executed because he encouraged love between man and woman. Ironies are aplenty in his death. First of all, he was a celibate Catholic priest. He lived in the Roman Empire in a time when the Emperor believed in stuff like One Nation One Religion, and Valentine was preaching a different religion. Religion is a national affair as far as emperors are concerned. The emperor decides which god you will pray to. What else is a ruler for, if he can’t decide what you will do? So, Claudius II ordered the death of Rev Valentine because Valentine preached love which Claudius didn’t love.

That was way back in the third century CE. There was no social media in those days for young lovers to start a hashtag like #SaveValentineFromBrutalClaudius. Claudius didn’t want young men to marry. He was a champion of Roman masculinity. Men will lose their masculinity if they marry, he believed. Like India’s current Prime Minister.

So Claudius passed a bill in his very own parliament to amend a non-existent Constitution. The young men in his kingdom should not marry. Marriage emasculates men. Young men should be brave soldiers who love their fatherland and motherland. It is believed that V D Savarkar and M S Golwalkar learned macho-ism from Claudius. So, the RSS may soon come out with a new history which will prove that Claudius II was the Chacha of Vatsayana.

Sorry, I’m digressing. The truth is that I was supposed to write this yesterday, Valentine’s Day, especially because I have signed up for Blogchatter’s #WriteAPageADay challenge and my yesterday’s page was to be on Valentine the Reverend celibate who celebrated copular love.

Valentine was a Catholic priest who lived in Claudius II’s Rome. Claudius didn’t like the minority communities, especially Christians. Great rulers are like that: they can’t like some people. By chance if there’s no community to be disliked, these rulers will invent one. They cannot live without some enemies around to boss over.

Moreover, Claudius was macho. He screwed around but he didn’t want the young men of his empire to enervate themselves on women. The new history textbooks being written by NCERT say that Claudius II was a fan of Manu who wrote that excessive indulgence in sensual pleasures, particularly sex, weakens a man's spiritual and physical strength [Manusmriti 2.215]. Semen is macho and young men should retain it within in order to uphold their country’s valour and honour.

Rev Valentine didn’t agree notwithstanding the fact that his Church also considered sex quite a dirty business, though it would take one more century for Saint Augustine to be born and declare sex the original sin. (What's original about it? James Joyce would ask many centuries later.) Valentine was an anachronism, probably. Let us also remember that he lived in a time when Catholic priests didn’t have to be celibates necessarily. In fact, priestly celibacy became a canon in the Church centuries later. Love became a sin in the Church. Today, in India, the right-wing has embraced the Catholic Church’s outlook. In fact, they have gone one step ahead: love is a sin + hate is a virtue. By the way, Islam also has that same views, doesn’t it? No wonder people say that all religions teach the same thing.

That is why, I wasn’t particularly enthused about writing on Valentine yesterday. This morning, when the school is closed for the weekend, the writer in me is aroused by Saint Valentine. Yeah, the Catholic Church declared him a saint some time in history though no one is quite sure whether Valentine really existed. There are many saints in the church like that. Saint George, for example, is a myth. We need myths, of course, to sustain us spiritually.

Let’s return to Valentine. He resisted his emperor’s rule against young men’s marriage. He got the young fellas to marry secretly. That was his crime. Claudius II chopped off his head for that. Very unromantic emperor.

Most emperors are unromantic. Trump is an exception. He has shown that you can have many women in your life and yet be successful. Modi, his counterpart, shows us that you may have no woman in your life at all and yet be successful. What’s wrong with me and probably you is that we have just one woman with us.

So? A Belated Happy Valentine’s Day.

 

Comments

  1. Despite the bitter truth in what you have written, it didn't fail to make me smile at the analogies in every paragraph! Well done!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hari OM
    As to that latter part, it depends what measue one uses for success, I suppose. I have no time at all for the romantic balderdash that abounds. Love, of the universal, "capital ell" kind, though, I have all the time in the world for. That has nothing to do with Rev V or, indeed, Claudius, Mr T or Modimus101. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. Whenever i see someone's social media post tagging someone as "My Valentine" I had this urge to ask them this "is he/she a priest or monk?" or "are you going to behead him/her?"
    Are we using this phrase wrongly !!!

    Btw, I liked the similes in the post, Sir. :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. I have no man. And I'm not successful. So, who's lesson is that?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...