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Saint Valentine

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Saint Valentine
Saint Valentine of Terni oversees the construction of his basilica at Terni, from a 14th century French manuscript (BN, Mss fr. 185)
Bishop and Martyr
Bornunknown
Diedca. 269[1]
Venerated inRoman Catholic Church
Eastern Orthodox Church
Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod
Feast14 February
Attributesbirds; roses; bishop with a crippled or epileptic child at his feet; bishop with a rooster nearby; bishop refusing to adore an idol; bishop being beheaded; priest bearing a sword; priest holding a sun; priest giving sight to a blind girl[1]
Patronageaffianced couples, against fainting, bee keepers, greeting card manufacturers, happy marriages, love, plague, travellers, young people[1]

Saint Valentine (also Valentinus) refers to one of several martyred saints of ancient Rome. The feast of Saint Valentine was formerly celebrated on February 14 by the Roman Catholic Church until a revised calendar was issued in 1969, pursuant to the Second Vatican Council.[2] His feast day is July 30 in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

His birth date and birthplace are unknown. Valentine's name does not occur in the earliest list of Roman martyrs, which was compiled by the Chronographer of 354.

The feast of St. Valentine was first decreed in 496 by Pope Gelasius I, who included Valentine among those "... whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God." As Gelasius implied, nothing is known about the lives of any of these martyrs.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the saint whose feast was celebrated on the day now known as St. Valentine's Day was possibly one of three martyred men named Valentinus[3] who lived in the late third century, during the reign of Emperor Claudius II (died 270):

Various dates are given for their martyrdoms: 269, 270, or 273.[4] The name was a popular one in late antiquity and is derived from valens,(worthy).[5] Several emperors and a pope bore the name,[6] not to mention a powerful gnostic teacher of the second century, Valentinius, for a time drawing a threateningly large following.

That the creation of the feast for such dimly conceived figures may have been an attempt to supersede the pagan holiday of Lupercalia that was still being celebrated in fifth-century Rome, on February 15 is apparently a figment of the English eighteenth-century antiquarian Alban Butler, embellished by Francis Douce, as Jack Oruch conclusively demonstrated in 1981.[7] Many of the current legends that characterise Saint Valentine were invented in the fourteenth century in England, notably by Geoffrey Chaucer and his circle, when the feast day of February 14 first became associated with romantic love.

Earliest church dedications

It is believed that the priest of Rome and the bishop Valentinus are each buried along Via Flaminia outside Rome, at different distances from the city. Their calendar days of martyrdom have been made to coincide.[8] In the Middle Ages, two Roman churches were dedicated to Saint Valentinus. One was the tenth-century church Sancti Valentini de Balneo Miccine or de Piscina, which was rededicated by Pope Urban III in 1186. The other, on the Via Flaminia, was the ancient basilica S. Valentini extra Portam founded by Pope Julius I (337‑352), though not under this dedication.[9] Though the basilica is quae apellantur Valentini, "which is called of Valentinus", early basilicas were as often called by the name of their former patron as by the saint to whom they were dedicated: see titulus.

This, the earlier and by far more important of the churches, is dedicated to the less prominent of the two saints, Valentinus, presbyter of Rome;[10] this was the Basilica S. Valentini extra Portam, the "Basilica of Saint Valentinus beyond the Gate" which was situated beyond the Porta Flaminia (the Porta del Popolo, which was the Porta S. Valentini when William of Malmesbury visited Rome). It stood on the right hand side at the second milestone on the Via Flaminia.[11] It had its origins in a funerary chapel on the site of a catacombs, which Liber Pontificalis attributes to a foundation by Pope Julius I, who served 337-352: the dedications of two basilicas dedicated by Julius are not specified in Liber Pontificalis, however. It was restored or largely rebuilt by Pope Theodore (642‑649) and Leo III (795‑816), enriched with an altar cloth by Benedict II (683‑685) and by gifts of Pope Hadrian I (772‑795), Leo III and Gregory IV (827‑844), so that it had become ecclesia mirifice ornata., "a church marvelously enriched". The monastery of San Silverstro in Capite was annexed to it, and in the surviving epitome of a lost catalogue of the churches of Rome, compiled by Giraldus Cambrensis about 1200, it was hospitale S. Valentini extra urbem, the "hospital of Saint Valentinus outside the city". But in the thirteenth century the martyr's relics were transferred to San Prassede, and the ancient basilica decayed: in Signorili's catalogue, made about 1425 it was Ecclesia sancti Valentini extra portam sine muris non habet sacerdotem, "the church of Saint Valentinus beyond the gate without [enclosing] walls, has no priest".[12]

In the catacombs connected with the basilica of Valentinus, outside the Porta del Popolo, nineteenth-century excavations unearthed two hundred Christian inscriptions.[13] Lanciani reported, from the chronicle of the monastery of S. Michael ad Mosam, an account of a pilgrim of the eleventh century who obtained relics of saints "'from the keeper of a certain cemetery, in which lamps are always burning.'" He refers to the basilica of S. Valentine and the small hypogaeum attached to it (discovered in 1887)"[14]

The earliest written Acta for Saint Valentinus were written in the sixth or seventh century, when the hagiographical genre was well established, with pious accounts of magic and torture shared among many texts and applied to many martyr-saints. The longer of the two is that written of the martyr Valentinus of Terni and his magical cure, through faith alone, of a crippled child. Bede, in the eighth century, knew of both hagiographies and included rescripts of both under 14 February in his martyrology.[15]

In the Golden Legend

The Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, compiled about 1260 and one of the most-read books of the High Middle Ages, gives sufficient details of the saints and for each day of the liturgical year to inspire a homily on each occasion. The very brief vita of St Valentine has him refusing to deny Christ before the "Emperor Claudius"[16] in the year 280. Before his head was cut off, this Valentine restored sight and hearing to the daughter of his jailer. Jacobus makes a play with the etymology of "Valentine", "as containing valour".

The Legenda Aurea does not contain anything about hearts and last notes signed "from your Valentine", as is sometimes suggested in modern works of sentimental piety [1]. Many of the current legends surrounding them appear in the late Middle Ages in France and England, when the feast day of February 14 became associated with romantic love.

Feasts and relics

St. Valentine's Day

Further information: Valentine's Day

Until 1969, the Catholic Church formally recognized a total of eleven Valentine's days. Besides February 14, these include January 7, May 2, July 16, August 31, September 2, October 25, November 1 and November 3, November 11, November 13, and December 16. Valentin Faustino Berri Ochoa, whose saint's day is November 1, lived in the nineteenth century. The Orthodox Church recognizes a somewhat different list of Valentine's days[2].

Jack Oruch has made a well-supported case[17] that the traditions associated with "Valentine's Day", well-documented in Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Foules, and generally set in a supposed context of an old tradition, in fact had no such tradition before Chaucer. The speculative explanation of sentimental customs, posing as historical fact, had their origins among eighteenth-century antiquaries, notably Alban Butler, the author of Butler's Lives of Saints, and have been perpetuated even by respectable modern scholars. Most notably, "the idea that Valentine's Day customs perpetuated those of the Roman Lupercalia has been accepted uncritically and repeated, in various forms, up to the present."[18] In the French fourteenth-century manuscript illumination from a a Vies des Saints[19] (illustration above), Saint Valentine, bishop of Terni, oversees the construction of his basilica at Terni; there is no suggestion here yet that the bishop was a patron of lovers.

In 1836, relics that were exhumed from the catacombs of Saint Hippolytus on the Via Tiburtina, then near Rome, were identified with St Valentine; placed in a gilded casket, they were transported to the Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, Ireland, to which they were donated by Pope Gregory XVI. Many tourists visit the saintly remains on St. Valentine's Day, when the casket is carried in solemn procession to the high altar for a special Mass dedicated to young people and all those in love. Alleged relics of St Valentine also lie at the reliquary of Roquemaure in France, in the Stephansdom in Vienna and also in Blessed St. John Duns Scotus church in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, Scotland.[20]

The saint's feast day was removed from the Church calendar in 1969 as part of a broader effort to remove saints viewed by some as being of purely legendary origin.[citation needed] The feast day is still celebrated within the Church on local calendars such as in Balzan and in Malta where relics of the saint are claimed to be found, and also throughout the world by Traditionalist Catholics who follow the older, pre-Vatican II calendar. Prior to the creation of the new calendar, the church in Rome that had been dedicated to him observed his feast day by, among other things, displaying his reputed skull surrounded by roses.

The canonized bishop of Terni continues to be celebrated by the Eastern Orthodox Church on July 6.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b c Jones, Terry. "Valentine of Rome". Patron Saints Index. Retrieved 2007-02-14.
  2. ^ "In 1969 the Vatican cast a critical eye on more than 40 saints and dropped them from the official catalog, or liturgical calendar. Removed were such well-known saints as Saint Christopher... and Saint Valentine." Lo Bello, Nino (1998). The Incredible Book of Vatican Facts and Papal Curiosities. New York: Barnes and Noble Books. p. 195.
  3. ^ Valentine, Catholic Encyclopedia
  4. ^ Jack Oruch, "St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February", Speculum 56.3 (July 1981 pp 534-565) p 535.
  5. ^ IOL, article dated February 09 2001
  6. ^ Oruch 1981:535.
  7. ^ Jack Oruch identified the inception of this fabled connection in Butler's Lives of the... Saints, 1756, and Douce's Illustrations of Shakespeare, and of Ancient Manner. See Oruch, "St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February", Speculum 56.3 (July 1981), pp 534-565.
  8. ^ René Aigrain, Hagiographie: Ses sources, ses méthodes, son histoire, (Paris 1953, pp 268-69; Agostino S. Amore, "S. Valentino di Roma o di Terni?", Antonianum 41.(1966), pp 260-77.
  9. ^ Christian Hülsen, Chiese di Roma nel Medio Evo (Florence: Olschki, (On-line text).
  10. ^ He figures only in the account of the martyrdom of Marius and Martha and their company, Passio SS. Marii, Marthae et socc. §§ 6-10, 15. (University of Manchester).
  11. ^ The later church also dedicated to a Valentinus— the more prominent bishop of Terni, the only Valentinus mentioned in Martyrologium Hieronymianum— was further along, at milestone 64 (Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911; Handlist of Roman martyrs).
  12. ^ Christian Hülsen, Le Chiese di Roma nel Medio Evo (Florence: Olschki) 1927. (on-line text).
  13. ^ Rodolfo Lanciani, Pagan and Christian Rome (English translation, 1892 ([outside the Porta del Popolo On-line text])
  14. ^ R. Lanciani, op. cit.
  15. ^ Oruch 1981:538.
  16. ^ Under the circumstances, the "Emperor Claudius" was a detail meant to enhance verisimilitude. Attempts to identify him with the only third-century Claudius, Claudius Gothicus, who spent his brief reign (268-270) away from Rome winning his cognomen, are illusions in pursuit of a literary phantom: "No evidence outside several late saints' legends suggests that Claudius II reversed the policy of toleration established by the policy of his predecessor Gallienus", Jack Oruch states, in "St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February", Speculum 56.3 (July 1981),p 536, referencing William H.C. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (New York, 1967, p 326.
  17. ^ Oruch 1981:534-565.
  18. ^ Oruch 1981:539.
  19. ^ BN, Mss fr. 185. The book of Lives of the Saints, with illuminations by Richard de Montbaston and collaborators, was among the manuscripts that Cardinal Richelieu bequeathed to the King of France. (Further illuminations on-line.)
  20. ^ "Irish Historical Mysteries: St. Valentine in Dublin".

References

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