A scarcity of sanctity on Valentine's Day

It's Saint Valentine's Day. The chocolate is flying off the shelves at CVS, and the florists are striking a bonanza. Young love is tempering the chill of winter throughout the campus, yet once again I face the prospect of an empty mailbox. I haven't received an actual valentine card in many a decade. "Valentine's Day" seems mainly to be an American thing; it certainly never enters the mind of my alien spouse. I've been dropping heavy hints to my granddaughters, but so far without success. As for sending out cards, I have never recovered from a traumatic experience in the third grade. My older brother talked me into sending a little poem to my teacher saying "If you will be my concubine, I will be your valentine." I drew a nice heart in magenta Crayola. I didn't know how to draw a concubine, of course, because I didn't know what a concubine was. But it was a great rhyme, and as my brother pointed out, it had to be OK since King Solomon had a bunch of them.

Under these circumstances it is fortunate that, as a professional medievalist, I can easily rise above the disappointment. I have the comfort of knowing that the whole thing is bunkum anyway, because Saint Valentine never existed. He is one of dozens of "etymological" saints of the Middle Ages, that is, words personified by pious thought.

Take Saint Veronica. She is the one who is supposed to have mopped Christ's sweating face with her handkerchief only to find miraculously imprinted upon its cloth the image of his face. But "vera" means true or genuine, and "icon" means picture . . . so you get the really true picture of what happened. And who is gong to believe Saint Scholastica? Valentinus would simply mean something like the strong, the bold, the valiant man. That would describe your typical martyr.

What "saint" means, of course, is "holy." A saint is a holy person. It's a good thing that words can become holy persons, because it's doubtful that many more people will. I fear that, with Mother Theresa gone, there is not much generally agreed-upon sanctity around. According to official doctrine, one of the requirements of canonization is the demonstration of "heroic virtue." There's little space for either heroism or virtue in the postmodern ontology, and requiring both together lengthens the odds nearly beyond the grasp of vision let alone the reach of human aspiration.

This is too bad. It isn't as though the world were suffering from a surfeit of sanctity. We could all use a little more holiness in our daily experience; but people just guffaw at such abstractions as "sacred duty." It's an ill wind that blows no one any good, and the war in Iraq has drawn an intriguing possibility to my attention. I refer to the "holy city." In trying to follow with intelligence the news from Iraq, I repeatedly come across barriers of cultural alterity or strangeness that make the going tough. Have you noticed that every Middlesex village and farm in Iraq seems to be a "holy city?" I can see why Mecca is a holy city, or Jerusalem, and perhaps Lhasa and Benares. Every major religion deserves its holy city, and I for one am even perfectly willing to share mine three ways. Maybe even every country ought to have one. But in my own mind I have always stressed the cardinal number: one. Every other village in Iraq, including many that in newspaper photographs seem distinctly mundane, turns out to be a "holy city": holy city of Fallujah, holy city of Najaf, holy city of Mosul, etc.

It does occur to me, however, that civic sanctification is an idea our own leaders might consider emulating. As things now stand, about all the government ever does along these lines is doom-and-gloom. "Today President Bush declared 17 counties in central Florida as an official disaster area." Disaster area? What kind of a message does that send? Wouldn't it be better if you could pick up your paper and read that "with broad bipartisan support the House today acted to sanctify the city of Gary, Indiana. Meanwhile a bill establishing the sacred status of the holy city of Billings, Montana, is expected to move quickly through committee" ? John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.