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The Adoration of the Magi Neapolitan School* |
The month begins not only with the civil turning of the year, but with the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord (January 1st), the first shedding of Christ’s blood and His submission to the Law. It is a quiet and often forgotten feast, yet it sets the character of the month: redemption enters history not with triumph, but with obedience, pain, and fidelity carried out in silence.
The season of Christmas still endures, and at its heart stands the Epiphany (January 6th): Christ made known to the nations, not as a private consolation but as universal Lord. The homage of the Magi is sober and prophetic. Their gifts acknowledge glory, divinity, and suffering together. January thus reminds us that truth, once manifested, must be lived patiently in a world slow to receive it.
The cold remains firm, the earth does not yet yield, but this persistence is not hostile—it is formative. Growth continues unseen. What appears dormant is being strengthened at the root. January does not hurry renewal; it protects it.
The Feast of Sant’Antonio Abate (January 17th) sanctifies the month’s austerity. Father of the desert, master of ordered withdrawal and disciplined detachment, he teaches that clarity comes through restraint. His fire is not destructive but sustaining—a guarded flame against chaos. In him, January affirms that discipline is not negation, but care of the soul.
Thus the month advances with quiet confidence. It asks less enthusiasm and more constancy. It does not promise immediate warmth, but it offers something more reliable: order restored, perspective regained, hope purified of illusion.
The month also remembers the death of King Louis XVI (January 21st), a ruler brought to the scaffold not for tyranny, but for embodying an order the modern world resolved to erase. His fate stands as a warning, but also as a quiet testimony: that legitimacy, once lost publicly, may still be preserved inwardly through dignity, prayer, and submission to God’s judgment rather than man’s applause.
Coming to a close, January offers a gentler witness in the feast of Blessed Maria Cristina di Savoia (January 31st). Young, pious, and quietly formidable in charity, she governed herself before she governed others. Beloved as la Reginella Santa di Napoli, she spent her brief life in works of mercy and died at twenty-three, having given birth to Francesco II, the future and last King of the Two Sicilies. Her sanctity—domestic, hidden, resolute—softens January’s severity without weakening it.
January’s consolation is understated but real. It steadies the soul, reminding us that perseverance itself is a grace—and that light, once given, is not lost simply because the days remain cold.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, December 31st, Feast of San Silvestro I
* The Adoration of the Magi, tempera on wood, gold ground, ca. 1340-43, Neapolitan follower of Giotto (active second third of the 14th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of New York Scugnizzo.
