When the good spirit of giving infects the gift
by Luigino Bruni
published in L'Osservatore Romano on January 5, 2026
Carlo Levi, in his Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), recounting Christmas Eve spent in his confinement in Basilicata, wrote: “I too had to receive bottles of oil, wine, and eggs that day, and the donors were surprised that I did not accept them as a mandatory tithe... What a strange gentleman I was, then, if the traditional reversal of the story of the Magi did not apply to me, and one could enter my house empty-handed?” A reversed Gospel tradition, therefore, because while those wise men in Matthew's Gospel brought gifts to a poor family, the Christian lords of Gagliano demanded gifts from the poor and from the women: “But here, where Christ had not come, the three Kings had never been seen either.”
Gifts and presents are not the same thing, because while gifts are experiences of gratuitousness and freedom on both sides of the relationship, presents (regali, from rex, regis) are asymmetrical in nature, where someone richer and greater gives an object to someone smaller or poorer - and vice versa. So presents are not always good things. The gifts of the Magi are therefore presents, but we like them because they are gifts-presents, one of the rare occasions when these two often opposing experiences come together, and the good spirit of the gift infects the present.
Magi is a special word in the Gospels, almost a neologism (a bit like ‘thieves’). From Greek to ancient Italian, via Jerome's Latin, those magoi were not translated as ‘magicians’ but as magi, an Italian word that preserves the Latin lemma and does not have a singular form ‘magio’: ‘They are therefore called magi, that is, wise men’ (Legenda Aurea, 14th century). For many centuries, however, the gifts of the magi remained only in the nativity scene, because the concrete experience of Christian people was the ‘reversed’ one described by Carlo Levi. Gifts were, in fact, those that the poor had to give to the powerful, to the lords, to the priests, or those rare ones that the poor sometimes received from their masters, but at their total discretion: “The gods do not grant gifts to everyone” (Odyssey, VII).
During Humanism and then in the Renaissance, wealthy Italian merchants appropriated certain religious symbols to ethically legitimize their new wealth and emancipate themselves from Dante's judgment: ‘la gente nova e i sùbiti guadagni’ (Inferno XVI,64). Among these, the Magi stand out: those rich lords who became ‘kings’ during the Middle Ages, rich men who worshipped Christ with gold and gifts, were perfect for the new economic ethics of the city's wealthy. In Florence, the prestigious Compagnia dei Magi, an important association of merchants, had been active since the end of the 14th century. In many churches of those centuries, there are frescoes depicting the Magi, including the Dominican convent of San Marco, where the spectacular Epiphany procession ended: ‘Three Magi with a cavalry of more than 200 horses adorned with many magnificences came to offer gifts to the newborn Christ’ (Matteo Palmieri, 1454). The icon of the Magi was therefore central to the first alliance between merchants and Christianity, which is at the origin of Catholic capitalism based more on beauty and magnificence than on God's ‘predilection’, as happened centuries later in the Protestant and Calvinist spheres.
The presence of the Magi in the nativity scene tells us important things about gifts and presents. First of all, gifts, although an expression of asymmetrical relationships, can also be good. An adult can give a nice gift to a child, a wealthy person to a poor person, a wise person to an ignorant person (all asymmetrical relationships); but - another message - the art of gift-giving is very difficult to learn and practice, much more difficult than the art of giving. Too often, in fact, gifts have not been and are not experiences of gratuitousness or freedom, but only of obligation, necessary gifts that reinforced hierarchies, inequalities, and social injustice, which the church sometimes sanctified.
Furthermore, the Magi were men, males who know how to give. And in a time like ours, when a dark fog has gathered around men, preventing us from seeing even the beautiful aspects of masculinity (the word has almost become a swear word), these men who give gifts are a message of hope that one day women will be able to look at men with the same eyes with which Mary looked at those three wise men who came from the East.
Finally, there is the beautiful story The Fourth Wise Man by Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933), the story of a fourth wise man, Artaban, who set out with the other magi with treasures to give to the child, but on the way he stops to help a dying man, loses the caravan, and gets lost. He thus arrives in Bethlehem too late. He searches for Jesus for over thirty years and uses all his treasures to help the poor. He arrives in Jerusalem just as Jesus dies, but does not recognize him. Before he dies, convinced that he has failed in his life, he prays: "Ah, Master, I have searched for you so much. Forget me. Once I had precious gifts to offer you. Now I have nothing left.“ And Jesus said, ”Artaban, you have already given me your gifts.“ Artaban: ”I don't understand, my Lord...“ Jesus: ”When I was hungry, you gave me food; when I was thirsty, you gave me drink... When I was homeless, you took me in.“ Artaban: ”That's not true..." Jesus: “When you did these things for the least, for the smallest of my brothers, you did them for me.”
