The Blood and the Rose: Anatomy of a Subversion
There is a spot on the Via Flaminia where the dust of ancient Rome drank blood more than once. It is there that a man, one February night seventeen hundred years ago, met his fate. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was another road, another man, another night. The lives of saints are like karst rivers: they disappear, they resurface, they merge in the deep groundwater of legend. All we know for certain is a date, February 14th, and a name, Valentinus. The rest is a polyphony of voices, a choir that through the centuries has tried to give shape to that sacrifice. The acts of his trial, if they ever existed, have been lost. Some say he was a Roman priest, others a bishop who came to Rome from Terni, called to heal the son of a rhetorician. But the story that has washed down to us, with the force of a flood, is another one. It speaks of weddings.
It is said that the emperor, Claudius II, had forbidden young men to marry. Men without ties, without the burden of a family, the imperial ratio dictated, make better soldiers, readier to die for the glory of Rome. A ferocious, geometric logic. And against the ferocious logic of the Empire, one man chose the fragile, irreducible crookedness of love. He performed unions in secret, in the dark, whispering words that bound forever what power wanted to separate. They caught him, tortured him, and one night in the year 273 – or 269, or perhaps 304 – they beheaded him. His disciples recovered his body. The severed head was elsewhere. There is always a head elsewhere, with martyrs.
This is the raw material. A man who ends up under the axe because he insisted on believing that two people choosing each other are worth more than a decree. That the bond of affection is an autonomous jurisdiction, not negotiable with raison d’état. An uncomfortable testimony, in times when the state – any state – tends to occupy all available space, even that of the heart.
A Name, Two Funerals
Today, that name is on the shop windows of every city in the world. Not engraved on a tombstone on the Flaminia, but printed on glossy, heart-shaped paper. The man died to defend love from the polis. And the polis, today, under the friendly guise of the market, has reabsorbed it. It has domesticated it. It has turned it into its exact opposite: a day when affection must be shown, must be bought, must be displayed.
A martyr is one who testifies to the end. But who testifies today? Perhaps the cashier testifies, stacking boxes of unsold chocolates on February 15th; the florist testifies, throwing away withered roses, roses whose price had tripled just twenty-four hours before. They testify, unwillingly, to the ephemeral nature of a rite that claims to celebrate the eternal.
Ritual, as we know, is a powerful mechanism. It needs symbols. And the symbols of this overturned festival are a tin-plated liturgy: the plush heart, the plastic kiss, the fixed-menu dinner. Everything is turned upside down: love, which was daily effort, a fabric of small, unsolicited attentions, becomes a performance. An hour of forced romance, to be photographed, posted, shared. Exhibitionism is the new altar upon which intimacy is sacrificed. And the offering is always the same: money, in exchange for a pre-packaged emotion.
Eros and the Agorà
But there is another story. More subterranean. The story of a love that refuses to be reduced to merchandise. It’s the story of Serapia and Sabinus: she, a Christian woman dying of consumption; he, a pagan centurion. He, for love, gets baptized. She dies in his arms shortly after the wedding celebrated by Valentine. And he, the soldier, the iron centurion, lets himself die of a broken heart immediately after. This is a different economy. An economy of waste, of loss, of excess that doesn’t balance any books. Nothing to buy, nothing to sell. Only the vertigo of a love that does not calculate.
Today, everything is calculated. Those running the fundraiser at the San Antonio Zoo in Texas know this well: for a nominal sum, you can name a rat after your ex and watch it be devoured by a reptile. Revenge transformed into merchandising. Finished love turned into spectacle. Or the new heart-shaped candies with illegible messages, dedicated to “situationships,” those liquid relationships whose nature is never clear, and which the market intercepts with its usual promptness: even sentimental confusion can become a product.
There’s a thread connecting the beheading of a bishop in the 3rd century to a rat being devoured in a Texas zoo in the 21st. It’s the thread of meaning. When a symbol is emptied, only the shell remains. And into the empty shell, anything can fit: the imperative to consume, revenge on an ex, the boredom of a forced dinner. Or even, why not, the desperate search for an emotion in a world that has put them all up for sale.
The Beheading of Meaning
Data from a recent survey conducted in a European country indicates that only between seven and eight percent of respondents still believe that Valentine’s Day is an important holiday for everyone, because it celebrates love itself. A tiny percentage, almost a cult. The others, the vast majority, have understood. They understand it’s a cog in a machine. Yet, many still go along with it. Out of inertia, perhaps. Or because, deep down, even true love needs a celebratory gesture now and then, and if the only gesture the calendar offers is this one, they perform it, with a mix of irony and regret. Merchants know this well: budgets are tighter, people buy a “little thought,” not a grand gift. But they buy. The ritual is celebrated, even at half-mast.
Thus, the figure of Valentine undergoes its second death, more subtle and definitive than the first. The first was violence, this is erasure. His body is no longer killed, his meaning is. He is covered in trinkets, made unrecognizable, transformed into a genial clown handing out chocolate hearts. He is no longer the uncomfortable witness, the disturber of public order. He is the patron saint of consumption, the secular saint of the February GDP.
A Private Matter
Yet, as in all stories of martyrs, something resists. Something that refuses to be beheaded or sold. It’s that fifteen percent who live the day as a private occasion, time dedicated to a loved one without claims of universality. Are they the cynics? Perhaps. Or perhaps they are the realists. Those who understand that true love is celebrated poorly in public, that it needs subtraction, silence, gestures that make no noise.
The challenge, perhaps, is this: to give Valentine back his night. To take him out of the shop windows and bring him back to the Via Flaminia, to that spot where the dust turned red not for a tin foil heart, but for the blood of a man who said no. A no to the Empire. A no to reason that calculates. A no to the separation of what love unites.
His name, today, is still there, on the lips of millions. But it’s an empty name, a container. It’s up to us to decide whether to fill it with meaning again. Whether to remember that the lovers’ holiday, as we celebrate it, is the funeral monument to a man who died for love. Or whether, instead, in that empty tomb, we can still find the courage for a love that cannot be bought, that is not exhibited, that needs no day marked on the calendar to exist. A love that, like Valentine’s, is ready for anything. Even to die, rather than betray itself.
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