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. magiceyeFebruary 15, 2025 at 11:00 AM

    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. Yamini MacLeanFebruary 15, 2025 at 4:00 PM

    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. sathishFebruary 15, 2025 at 9:27 PM

    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. Liz A.February 16, 2025 at 12:51 AM

    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
47 comments
Read more

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...
11 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

Egregious

·       Donald Trump terminated all trade negotiations with Canada “based on their egregious behaviour.” ·       Pakistan has an egregious record of assassinations among its leaders. ·       Benjamin Netanyahu’s egregious disregard for civilian suffering has drawn widespread international condemnation. Now, look at the following sentences. ·       Archias is an egregious and most excellent man. [Cicero’s speech in 62 BCE] ·       “An egregious captain and most valiant soldier.” [Roger Ascham in 1545] U p to about 16 th century, the word egregious had a positive meaning: excellent or outstanding . Cicero was defending Greek poet Aulus Licinius Archias’s request for Roman citizenship. Archias had left his country out of disgust for the corruption of its Seleucid rulers. Ascham was speaking about the qualities of valiant soldiers when he used the ...
6 comments
Read more