The logos of the gift

Lopez ( Gift and the Unity of Being , 25 ) makes the crucial point that “give is also a logos, ‘a word, an invitation,’ that speaks of another.” This is essential to the gift: Quoting Luigi Giusanni, he writes that “the gift whose meaning is not also given is not really a gift.”

This has important implications for understanding gifts: “To say that the gift has its own logos not only means that truth and goodness are coexistent in the singular as it is given to itself and to another. It also means that originary experience, to discover the meaning of any given being or circumstance, must listen carefully to the logos that speaks within and through the gift. Man must not impose an aleatory meaning on his own experience. Just as life is larger than our experience of it, so the logos that speaks in the gift cannot be enclosed in a human concept . . . . The inseparability of gift from its own logos indicates that the mystery pronounces himself to man in infinitely different ways without repetition. Every finite being-gift is a whole, an integral singular being, a word infinitely other than the mystery and yet a word that communicates this mysterious other on which it constitutively depends.”

The connection of gift and logos means that “finite being is a sign, a word-gift” and a communication “that brings man to the transcendent ground of both reality and the human being.” “All is gift” means also “all is sign.”