St Valentine has become one of the more popular saints. But oddly he is more popular with the world than with the Church. This Valentine’s day, would-be romantics will be buying over one hundred and forty five million sentimental cards in the UK. Ten percent of all marriage proposals will take place on February 14th.
The connection between the historical St Valentinus, a Christian priest martyred in 270 and the celebration of romantic love is lost to the dark corners of forgotten history. The first we hear of the connection between Valentine and love is from Chaucer in the thirteenth century.
The Western church has always been very wary of both sex and romantic love. It has come in for a lot of criticism. Except that suddenly, at the beginning of the 21st century, secular society has been captured and colonised by a hyper-sexualisation, which was inconceivable while the influence of Christian morality provided a degree of restraint. Suddenly, the Catholic church’s wariness about sex seems more justified.
Classically, there have been two languages of theology and spiritual experience: the “via negativa” and the “via positiva”, the negative and positive ways, (reflecting apophatic and kataphatic theology). These divide our thoughts on the one hand between those things one cannot say about God because he is beyond thought; of those things we should avoid because they are dangerous; and on the other those concepts we can articulate, and those activities we should practice and celebrate.
The Western church has always been very wary of both sex and romantic love.
St Francis may have been the best example we have of how to do both. But Dante was one of the very few voices that dared pursue the via affirmativa to examine romantic love and suggest a way of understanding how it might serve the kingdom of heaven and the salvation of the soul. In the Divine Comedy, Dante himself begins his journey being led by Virgil. Virgil represents all that is wisest in human intellectual exploration. He represents the journey we make with our informed head, our intelligence.
But there is only so far that the mind can take one on our journey into the presence of God. When he has taken Dante as far as he can, suddenly in Purgatorio Canto 30, someone else takes over. It is Beatrice, the woman that Dante has been hopelessly in love with since his childhood. Beatrice was always more of a figure in the Divine Comedy than a person. In real life Dante only met her twice, and she was married off to another man by her father. But both in real life and in his imagination, he remained deeply in love with her. When she takes over as his guide in Purgatory, Dante wants us to know that it is the heart not the head, love not the intellect that will carry us closer to God. And very daringly, he uses a woman he adores to symbolise that to his readers.
Hans Ur Von Balthazar wrote “Why should a Christian man not love a woman for all eternity and allow himself to be introduced by that woman to a full understanding of what ‘eternity’ means? And why should it be so extraordinary – ought one not rather to expect it – that such a love needs, for its total fulfilment, the whole of theology and Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell?”
Charles Williams, a member of the Oxford Inklings who wrote in the 1940s, developed Dante’s daring celebration of falling in love further still. He suggested that when a man and a woman fell in love, as well as experiencing something romantic, erotic, and psychologically explosive, they were also being given a religious vision. Such a vision brought with it profound spiritual implications and responsibilities. For a moment, for a while, each was given an insight into how profoundly loveable the other was; seeing for a moment more through the eyes of God who created us in His love and generosity, than through the distortion of human perception.
It is the task of marriage to incarnate this vision of who we had it in us to be … This would require patience, endless forgiveness, boundless hope, gritty determination, and all the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
In fact, so profound is this vision, that lovers annoy everyone else round them with praise and delight for characteristics that everyone else “mistakes” for being mundane, un-interesting and ordinary. Like everything else we experience, have and do, if this is surrendered to God and used in order for each to draw the other closer to God it works and lasts. If it becomes an end in itself it goes bad. Mutuality in prayer, penitence, truthfulness, trust adoration and worship keep it good. Self-indulgence works to corrupt it from the centre out.
Williams suggested that it was the task of marriage to incarnate this vision of who we had it in us to be, and like an artist, helping sculpt out the reality of the vision over the years. This would require patience, endless forgiveness, boundless hope, gritty determination, and all the fruit of the Holy Spirit. But each lover should become a kind of guarantor for what they originally saw when they fell in love. We can refuse to abandon the integrity of the vision when, as we all inevitably do, we fall out of the madness of love and the vision dulls down.
What St. Valentine and romantic love have in common is martyrdom. All lovers are called to a martyrdom of a kind, a long drawn out death of the ego. In true love, we do not so much find our real selves, as inspire and accompany our beloved on the long road towards the beatific vision at the end of all time.
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