When he was Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius Claudius (42-270) decided to forbid soldiers to marry: he understood that a warrior without family ties was more courageous, because he was less afraid to risk his life.
It is said that a bishop named Valentín, who believed in love, continued to celebrate marriage ties between soldiers, thus disrespecting the imperial decree.
There are also reports of a religious named Valentín who distributed roses in the streets. And stories that say that there was a Valentine who cut parchment hearts and gave them to the soldiers, so that they could look at those cards and remember their loved ones.
Or even the story that a priest Valentin contradicted the plans of influential relatives and, recognizing that there was a feeling genuine, agreed to formalize the union between a young Christian and his pagan girlfriend.
In the records of Catholic saints, there are eleven named Valentine. And at least three of them —as Hagiography scholar Thiago Maerki, a researcher at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp) and an associate of the Hagiography Society in the United States, points out— are the protagonists of reports with messages of love.
“These three characters are often confused, they mix”, he emphasizes.
“The Saint Valentine celebrated by the Church, the Saint Valentine of Rome, has more to do with the story of a doctor who became a priest and, against the emperor’s law, continued to celebrate weddings between soldiers “.
“But its very existence is disputed,” he points out.
If it is difficult to distinguish one Valentine from another, it is even more difficult prove what really happened and what is nothing more than a legend built up over the centuries.
And, as the figure celebrated by Catholicism the 14 of February is so rich in controversies, given the impossibility of confirming what is reality and what is myth, the Catholic Church itself saw fit to remove it from the calendar traditional liturgical, already in the decade of 488, after the Second Vatican Council.
The masses in his honor ended up being celebrated only in communities where tradition is strong.
Creation of the myth
In the official documents of the Church, the information is succinct and does not allow one Valentine to be differentiated from another.
The Roman martyrology, where the biographies of the saints are found, is brief. The 14 of February, Valentine is mentioned, followed by the brief explanation that he was martyred “in Rome, in Vila Flaminia, by the Milvio bridge.” Nothing more.
“The missal before the Second Vatican Council does not give details either, but it indicates that Valentin was a priest and a martyr, and that his martyrdom occurred around the year 270”, says José Luís Lira, a researcher and student of the lives of the saints, a professor at the Acaraú Valley State University, in Brazil. .
He explains that what defined the imaginary about Valentine’s Day ended up being “oral and written literature”.
“Legends are being created around them, as was the custom of these early Christians. The voice of the people was the one that celebrated its saints. And these cults, popular traditions, gain strength in the Middle Ages. Until what was not official ends, until it is recognized by the Church, which has no choice but to assume the tradition as official”, says Maerki.
In the midst of so many contradictions, the common thread of what could having been the true Saint Valentine is the information that ends up being confirmed by different sources.
Thus, it is possible to locate the saint of love as someone who lived in Rome in the third century of the era current and collided with the government of Emperor Claudius. It is also consistent with the existence of the Milvio bridge, over the Tiber river, mentioned in the martyrology.
“It is from the year 207 approximately”, emphasizes Lira. “It is cited in the course of the Second Punic War, on the occasion of the return from the Battle of Metauro”.
It also makes sense to believe that he was martyred, since this fate was common for the prominent Christians of his time, when Rome saw that group as a threat to order.
The date of 14 of February as the date of his death is possibly a late invention. A convenient invention, by the way, in a process imposed by the Church, when it became the official religion, starting in the fourth century, with the aim of systematically absorbing and resignifying pagan practices.
“Even with Christianity already official, at first the rituals today called pagan, of the Romans, coexisted with Christianity,” says Vatican expert Filipe Domingues, doctor from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and deputy director of the Lay Center of Rome.
“The Church of that time gradually created festivals, memories and practices to suppress even pagan practices. The temples became churches, and the rituals began to resignify themselves”, he adds.
Therefore, in the year 488, Pope Gelasius I (410-196) established that Valentine’s Day should be celebrated on 14 February. The idea was not accidental.
During this period, about a month before the start of spring in the northern hemisphere, ancient Rome had a festival called Lupercalia, a ritual for fertility.
“It was a time when people got together intimately, sexually, as a religious ritual. The period also indicated the beginning of sowing and they asked for the blessing of the gods so that it would be a fertile year, with a lot of production”, contextualizes Domingues.
The Pope wanted to frame what already existed within Christian morality.
“He wanted to put an end to that and so he needed to create a Christian identity for the ritual. He made Saint Valentine the patron saint of lovers, of couples”, points out the Vaticanist.
“The Church did not completely abandon the existing practices but rather aligned them, tried to put a justification to the rites and social relations that were typically pagan“.
In this sense, Domingues comments that the choice of Valentín could have been random.
“There is no reason as far as we know”, he says. And it is possible that later legends full of love stories were created.
(Photo: GETTY IMAGES) “It was at that moment that the memory of Saint Valentine began to be associated with the idea of a saint of the love, of a patron saint of lovers”, says Maerki.
“The Church instituted Saint Valentine promoting a Christian response to an ancient tradition”, sums up the historian Denise Wanderley Paes de Barros , professor at Mackenzie Presbyterian University.
The popular date
The date is seen like this in much of the world and explored by merchants and restaurant owners.
“Interestingly, what was born as a pagan festival and was later absorbed by Christianity, today it has returned to being a secular celebration“, analyzes Domingues. “The name of the saint is used, but it is no longer a Christian holiday”. fictional.
And starting with the Second Vatican Council, there was an effort by the Church “to eliminate the memory of saints that would have a possibly legendary origin; that is to say, that they were nothing more than a mythological construction”, explains Maerki.
“During the Council the need to confirm the existence of of certain saints”, emphasizes Lira.
“As a result, some made the obligatory celebration optional. Saint Paul VI (471-1969), Pope, in 1969, reformed the calendar for the celebration of the saints and the memory of Saint Valentine became optional”.
“This was mainly due to the existence of more than one Valentine in the martyrology and without many details regarding his existence. The record of the martyrdom was in charge of each Church, so it was not possible to give full veracity to the data”, adds the hagiologist.
Much later, there was a concern to have more criteria to declare himself a Christian saint.
Maerki comments that it is “very difficult to say that Saint Valentine did not exist” simply because “as I remember, at least, he existed and exists, since to this day it is celebrated by many groups within the Church.”
Paes de Barros adds that, in At that time, “the Catholic Church realized that all of them they lacked historical value”.
When analyzing the available documentation and reports, historical discrepancies and coincidences were noted in figures buried in different places, for example.
Pilgrimage sites
But if the tombs of the saints end up sien do points of religious pilgrimage, there are at least three important places in Italy when you think of Valentine’s Day.
In Rome, the basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin keeps a skull attributed to Saint Valentine in a reliquary.
The corresponding remains are found in the basilica of Saint Valentine in the city of Terni; one of the historical figures who would become Saint Valentine was Bishop of Interamna, now Terni, in Umbria.
Also in Italy, the Church of Saint George, in Monselice, in the province of Padua has a tomb with mortal remains attributed to another of the Valentines.
Specialist in the facial reconstruction of saints and other ancient personalities, the Brazilian designer Cícero Moraes recreated both Valentines in 3D, from images of their well-preserved skulls.
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