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.