The man named Valentinus (which comes from the Latin valens, meaning “powerful, brave, valiant”) was a martyred Christian of ancient Rome, about whom virtually nothing is known.
His name does not appear in the earliest redaction of Christian martyrs (354 AD), and it was Pope Gelasius who first included Valentinus — or Saint Valentine, as Pope Gelasius canonized him — “among those whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God.”
The origins of the Feast of Saint Valentine’s Day are equally murky, and it’s not actually known for certain if the feast of that day is meant to celebrate one saint or several saints with that same name.
The link between Valentine’s Day and romantic-sexual love probably came about in a time now called the High Middle Ages (HMA), when courtly love and all its dog-and-pony-show rituals propagated like bunny rabbits.
The English word love is sourced in the Old High German (OHG) luba and the Gothic lubo and the Latin lubere — all (like the archaic lief) meaning “pleasing,” “treasured,” “desirous,” “dear.” Even now, the German word liebling, directly related to lief, essentially means that same thing: “dear.”
The word agape, on the other hand, which is the Greek word from which charite ultimately derives, is in Latin caritas, and means “To esteem highly.”
Caritas never really denoted what charity denotes today: namely, giving things away for free.
According to Oxford, caritas meant “Dearness, fondness, affection; love founded upon esteem.”
It was specifically contrasted with amor, a word with a distinctly physical connotation. Oxford goes on to define the original meaning of charite (as opposed to caritas) as “Benignity of disposition expressing itself in Christ-like conduct.”
The word caritas quickly passed out of the monasteries and the churches, where Latin was so frequently used, and into the then more common usage: cheritet or cherite — both deriving from the word cher, meaning “dear,” “dear one,” or “to hold dear.”
Indeed, also to this very day, the word “cherish” means exactly that.
In addition to all this, there was for the same Greek word another Latin word used in those first biblical translations: dilectio.
Like caritas, the word dilectio also meant “To esteem highly.”
Etymologically, this is all significant because later biblical translations, starting in the 16th century, began rendering dilectio as love, and caritas as charity, so that some of the very earliest bibles were already using “love” and “charity” interchangeably, just as the first translators had used caritas and dilectio interchangeably.
Gradually, as the decades and centuries passed and more and more translations were produced, the word love was increasingly substituted for the word charity, until by 1881, the Revised Edition of the King James had completely replaced charity with love. That of course is how it stands today.
Love, in other words, made caritas and dilectio into one.
Remember, though, that these words, as well as the Greek word agape from which they originated, all meant “Dearness, fondness, affection; to esteem highly.”
(It is perhaps worth noting also that decades before the King James translation, there was the William Tyndale New Testament, and Tyndale chose the word love instead of charite.)
From a New Testament perspective, it is, I think, beyond dispute that love is the most important theme that the gospels and the epistles propound. In fact, I believe that if you were to distill the entire New Testament down to its fundamental principle, the one thing that would remain is love. No thinking person, atheist or not, can in my opinion reasonably deny that.
And yet (as I wrote, last Valentine’s Day) if that’s the case, why are we still left feeling slightly unsatisfied about what, precisely, it all means?
Thomas Aquinas, as he so often does, offers some help:
Natural things desire what is in conformity to their nature… Now, in every appetite or desire, love is the principle of the movement that tends toward the end which is loved. In natural appetite the principle of such movement is the connaturality that exists between the one who desires and the end to which he tends. We might call it a natural love.
Natural love is nothing more than the fundamental inclination which is stamped upon every being by the Author of nature.
Thomas Aquinas, like his teacher Aristotle, thought that the highest love was friendship. Both, however, believed that friendship was just a precursor to understanding the love that is, in Aquinas’s words, caritas (charity). One of the first questions Aquinas poses in his tract on charity is whether charity equals friendship. He answers this way:
According to Aristotle (Ethics VIII, 4) not all love has the character of friendship, but only that love which goes with wishing well, namely when we so love another as to will what is good for him. For if we do not will what is good to the things we love but rather, we will their good for ourselves, as we are said to love wine, a horse or the like, then that is not love of friendship but a love of desire. For it would be foolish to say that someone has friendship with wine or a horse.
But benevolence alone does not suffice to constitute friendship; it also requires a certain mutual loving, because a friend is friendly to his friend. But such mutual benevolence is based on something shared in common.
Here are two different translation of what is probably the most famous codification of love:
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth (1 Corinthians 13:4, King James).
And:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails (1 Corinthians, New International ).
Yet in both instances this strikes me not so much as a definition but more as a manifestation — a by-product, a side-effect.
A side-effect of what?
Of happiness, and the verdict in your eyes when you look up at me.
