Author: David Banica.

“Why did God make women so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?”

― Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

         Chances are you are either looking forward to a day of chocolate boxes and champagne flutes or wallowing in self-disgust, staring at the abyss called “loneliness”. Regardless of your romantic plans, or lack thereof, chances are you are not planning on becoming a martyr for your faith.  Well, Saint Valentine was faced with this exact predicament.  While the medieval accounts surrounding Saint Valentine become confusing, we should understand that the modern reception of Saint Valentine has a combination of a few hagiographies. Historically, Valentine was a 3rd-century Christian martyr who was martyred for continuing to marry Christian couples, supposedly allowing the husbands to escape from Roman military service. When arrested by the Roman magistrates, he is asked by a Roman judge to heal his adopted daughter of her blindness. Valentine obeyed, and when the girl was healed, he set Valentine free. Eventually, Saint Valentine ended back up in prison, and after refusing to recant and numerous beatings, he was eventually beheaded, becoming a martyr of the early Church

While this seems to be the kernel of the “Valentinian” traditions, later embellishments cement an amorous theme surrounding the hagiography of Saint Valentine. Various French and English sources, beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer, start to associate Saint Valentine’s Day with the courtship of birds in the early springtime. This soon developed into a full-fledged tradition of courtly love, finding its way into the works of John Donne. Through the centuries various traditions of proclaiming love to a fair maiden or strapping lad coalesced into the Victorian tradition of sending anonymous letters to one’s lovers. How exactly we got here does not particularly bother me, after all, I will be doing my due diligence as a husband and showering my wife with love and chocolate. What particularly interests me is the way in which Saint Valentine’s story has been remembered and distilled over the centuries. Colours that one surely signified his bloody execution and martyrdom combined with his saintly work now signify the tender commercialization of that most volatile of human emotions. Now, surely the sanitization of the martyrdom of Saint Valentine provides us with a unique look at the trajectory of Western history, a history that has been especially affected by the social mores of the Enlightenment and the historicist philosophy of the Whigs. Far be it for me to wade into the flood waters of civilizational philosophy, I would ask you to consider what happens to a society that loses the meaning of love. Have we lost what it means to be willing to put one’s neck out on the chopping block for one’s God?  Surely many will dismiss a sentiment like this as barbaric, backward thinking, a vestige that (thank Science) we have long moved past. But what have we replaced it with? The love of an AI-generated partner? Living vicariously through endless consumption of mind-melting reality T.V.?

Hopefully, by now you are feeling some existential dread. You know, that intuition where you feel your soul staring at the abyss? Yes, that’s the one, right about now, a deep sinking feeling sets in. Great! Now you can properly contemplate re-ordering your conception of what love means. If you are a properly modern man or woman, love is usually a rather tedious adventure in emotionalism and rarely more than that. A smutty novel masquerading as teen fiction might be the height of romance for some, for others a vampire movie might do the trick, and still others find the pursuit of romantic love to be fulfilled in endless one-night stands. How many of you would die for those things? Is anyone volunteering to leave this world in the name of a Coleen Hoover novel? I thought not. What my project is, what I am getting at (finally!) is asking you to pursue a deeper notion of love, a concept for which the whole of Western Civilization used to revolve around. Love of God, of one’s kin, of the hearth and the home, these are the very things that stoked the embers of civilization. Love has been integral in the story of the West from the very beginning, the love of Abraham for his God, the romance that laid waste to Troy and led to the founding of Rome, and the message of love by a Man who claimed to God. Monuments to love arose throughout Europe, the skylines of Renaissance cities punctuated by spires and crosses, the court troubadours of Southern France lauding the fairer sex to anyone who would listen. The love of knowledge inspired the intrepid ancient Greeks to probe the depths of the human soul, and contemplation of the inherent beauty of the human form drove art and poetry to newer heights. This is all to say that every monumental discovery, every metaphysical revolution, and everything beautiful that our civilization once begat was an endeavor of love.

Where are we now? We attempt to mirror the effects of love through never-ending consumption. We are sold alternatives to the metaphysical reality of love, a cheap and gaudy shell of the romance that men and women pined away for in those earlier epochs. Yet there remains hope! Every act against the modern paradigm of love is a return to what it means to be truly human. Without that part of ourselves that loves deeply and unashamedly, we simply cannot exist as whole humans. This is not a simple task, it requires overcoming an immense amount of societal pressure. To overcome the wasteland of modern romance, we must recover the suffusive spirituality that every man, woman, and child knew to be an essential part of our cosmos. I will leave you to ponder all these things and more with a singular plea. Do not go gentle into that goodnight. -D.B.

“Without faith, people perish, and they are perishing before our eyes”

― Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

David Banica is an undergraduate student pursuing his B.A. in History. He has a passion for Christian mysticism and the philosophy of Mircea Eliade. If he’s not arguing with you about Plato, he is reading Plato.