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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.
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!
ReplyDeleteHari OM
ReplyDeleteAs 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
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?"
ReplyDeleteAre we using this phrase wrongly !!!
Btw, I liked the similes in the post, Sir. :)
I have no man. And I'm not successful. So, who's lesson is that?
ReplyDelete