Stephanie Coontz: Valentine's Day (It Wasn't Intended for Love)

Stephanie Coontz, in the NYT (2-14-05):

Stephanie Coontz, a history professor at Evergreen State College, is the author of the forthcoming "Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. "

... For thousands of years, love, passion and marriage were considered a rare and usually undesirable combination. Valentine's Day was originally envisioned by the Roman Catholic Church as a check on sexual passion. Even though young people centuries later turned the holiday into an occasion to celebrate romantic love and sexual attraction, few of them expected to marry on the basis of such irrational emotions. Almost no one believed that falling in love was a great and glorious thing that should lead to marriage, or that marriage was a place to achieve sexual fulfillment.

Before he was either a saint or a holiday, Valentine was a Christian priest martyred in the third century. Some legends said he was executed for defying an edict against conducting marriages for Roman soldiers, whom the emperor believed would fight better without family ties. In one account, Valentine fell in love with his jailor's daughter and wrote her a poignant goodbye letter signed "from your Valentine."

But when the church declared Feb. 14 St. Valentine's feast day in 498 A.D., it was not trying to celebrate romance. Rather, the Church wanted to replace the existing holiday, a festival honoring Juno, the Roman goddess of love and marriage. Church fathers probably hoped as well that a Valentine holiday would undercut the Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia, which began each Feb. 15. According to Roman custom, on Feb. 14 - the night before Lupercalia - boys would draw names from a jar to find which girls would be their sexual partner for the rest of the year.

The church roundly condemned such pagan practices, but not because it idealized love-based courtship.

In fact, Christian veneration of married love is hard to discern in the first 1,500 years of church history. As one 12th-century authority wrote, no one "disapproves" when "a gentle and honest sentiment" softens the bonds of a marriage, but "it is not the role of marriage to inspire such a feeling." Similarly, it was not the role of such tender feelings to inspire marriage.

Although the early church forbade divorce - and even prohibited engaged couples from calling off a match - theologians believed that marriage was only one step above pagan sexual license. In the early sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great wrote that while marriage was not technically sinful, the "carnal pleasure" that husband and wife derived from sex "cannot under any circumstances be without blame." For the church, the message of Valentine's Day was that while marriage had a place in society, although not the highest place, romance had no place in marriage. ...