Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey 9780271089140

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Ivan Illich

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Ivan Illich: 21st-Century Perspectives

Ivan Illich (1926–2002), a theologian, philosopher, and historian, is best known as a trenchant social critic of the 1970s. His broad and incisive thinking shakes the foundations of such modern certainties as education, medicine, gender, the professions, and even modes of perception. Illich’s deep roots in Western culture lend a historian’s perspective to his acute critiques of the Church and other modern institutions. This series is devoted to recalling Illich’s work and thinking through his perspective for the present and the future. Series Editors Sajay Samuel, The Pennsylvania State University Samar Farage, The Pennsylvania State University Editorial Board Dean Bavington Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

Fabio Milana Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose “Giovanni XXIII,” Italy

Humberto Beck El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico

Giovanna Morelli Independent Scholar, Lucca, Italy

Silvia Grunig Universitat Oberta de Cataluyna, Spain

Simon Ravenscroft University of Cambridge, England

Kostas Hatzikiriakou University of Thessaly, Vólos, Greece

Almantas Samalavičius Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania

Dougald Hine Independent Scholar, Ängelsberg, Sweden

Silja Samerski University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer

Other Books in the Series Ivan Illich, The Powerless Church and Other Selected Writings, 1955–1985

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Ivan Illich An Intellectual Journey

David Cayley

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cayley, David, author. Title: Ivan Illich : an intellectual journey / by David Cayley. Other titles: Ivan Illich: 21st-century perspectives. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2021] | Series: Ivan Illich: 21st-century perspectives series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Examines the life and writings of Roman Catholic Church reformer Ivan Illich (1926–2002) in the context of the wider field of cultural criticism that took shape in the 1960s and beyond”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020049112 | ISBN 9780271088129 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Illich, Ivan, 1926–2002. | Sociology—­ Philosophy. | Culture—Philosophy. Classification: LCC HM479.I45 C38 2021 | DDC 301.01—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049112 Copyright © 2021 David Cayley All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

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To Jutta and Sajay First readers, fellow travelers

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The light shines in darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. —John 1:5 Carry a candle in the dark, be a candle in the dark, know that you’re a flame in the dark. —Ivan Illich On the table . . . there is always a candle. Why? Because the text that shaped my understanding was . . . a treatise on spiritual friendship by the twelfth-century abbot Aelred of Rievaulx. . . . It begins with the words “Here we are, you and I, and, I hope, also a third who is Christ.” If you consider his meaning carefully, you understand that it could be Christ in the form of Brother Michael. In other words, our conversation should always go on with the certainty that there is somebody else who will knock at the door, and the candle stands for him or her. It is a constant reminder that the community is never closed. —Ivan Illich

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Contents Introduction: Ivan Illich as I Knew Him / 1 Prologue: Early Life / 27 1. Exile / 35 2. Cuernavaca / 49 3. Church / 62 4. Deschooling Society / 94 5. Illich as Revolutionary  /  119 6. Disabling Professions / 151 7. Certainties / 171 8. Gender / 200 9. Embodiment/Disembodiment / 244 10. “A Bulldozer Lurks in Every Computer”: On Reading, Writing, and Language  /  278 11. To Hell with Life  /  314 12. Corruptio Optimi Pessima / 349 13. Apocalypse / 388 14. Illich’s Way of Life  /  417 Epilogue: The Art of Suffering  /  443 Conclusion: An Intellectual Journey / 449 Notes / 469 Index / 539

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Introduction Ivan Illich as I Knew Him “Call me Ivan,” said the gaunt, hawk-nosed man, as he extended his hand to those who had come to join us for dinner at our downtown Toronto commune in the fall of 1970. He indicated the correct Slavic pronunciation—Ēvän—rather than the English version of his name, by which we had come to know him. There were no chairs in the room where we were eating, just mattresses covered with Indian ­bedspreads. The deep-blue walls were decorated with posters from the Russian and Cuban revolutions. But our guest seemed right at home, hunkered down with us on the floor. He had come to Toronto to address a teach-in called “Crisis in Development” that a group of us had organized, and later that evening we would have to turn people away from the 600-seat auditorium we had booked for the occasion. Ivan Illich was then on the cusp of a period of worldwide celebrity. The two books he had published that year—Celebration of Awareness and The Church, Change and Development—were already being widely read and reviewed, his ideas were discussed at dinner parties, and his lectures, as we learned, were mobbed. These were what he called his “campaigning” years. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1950, he soon became an advocate of “a new Church” and a radical critic of the existing institution, which he put “on a par with the General Motors ­Company and the Chase Manhattan Bank”—“a giant,” he wrote, “that begins to totter before it collapses.” In the 1960s, he became an opponent of most American missionary activities in Latin America, arguing that what was being called “mission” had more to do with exporting dysfunctional institutions and shoring up a church fatally allied with corrupt political establishments than it did with preaching the Gospel. These efforts antagonized powerful elements in the Church, and, in 1968, he was subjected to formal inquisition in Rome. The following year the Vatican put a ban on the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC), the institute that he then

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directed in Mexico. Illich reluctantly withdrew from Church service and turned his full attention to those modern institutions, like education, medicine, and law, that he believed were directly descended from the Church. The modern world, he said, had reached its last ditch and was facing a now-or-never moment, a final chance to set firm limits to technological and institutional overreach. Seizing the opportunity created by his fame, he crisscrossed the world like a jetage St. Paul, spreading his gospel of degrowth and conviviality, the name he gave to that spirit of celebration within defined horizons that he wanted to foster. Celebration of Awareness, The Church, Change and Development, Deschooling Society, Energy and Equity, Tools for Conviviality, and Medical Nemesis, the books he published between 1970 and 1975, all warned of a world on the edge of an abyss and about to descend into terminal “counter-productivity.” By this he meant two things. The first was that contemporary institutions were on the brink of becoming so big, so presumptuous, and so total that they would begin to get in their own way and defeat their originally more limited purposes. The second was that elementary human actions—learning, loving, healing, mourning, dying—were increasingly being brought under professional tutelage and even replaced altogether by more expertly designed versions. Without degrowth, de-professionalization, and a rebalancing of existence, he argued in these books, humankind would soon “find [itself ] totally enclosed within [its] own artificial creation with no exit . . . a prisoner in the shell of technology.” I had become aware of Illich in the summer of 1968, when I read a talk he gave that year in Chicago to a group of young American Catholics about to offer their services to Mexico as “volunteers” in development. Illich praised their spirit but questioned their motives. In what way, he asked, could unformed, unskilled young Americans “help” Mexicans, except as “demonstration models for high service consumption”? At the time, I had just returned from two years in the eastern Malaysian state of Sarawak, in northern Borneo, where I had been a volunteer teacher in a Chinese middle school. The experience had unsettled me and raised large questions about the international development crusade in which I had, if only half-consciously, enrolled when I joined the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), the agency that had sent me to Sarawak. Illich’s talk addressed these questions with impressive cogency and conviction but also spoke to me in some deeper, more heartfelt way. Along with other critically minded “returned volunteers,” I began to question the certainties underlying international development. When we were ready to present our teach-in on the subject, Illich was the man we most wanted as our keynote speaker, and that was how he came to be eating dinner in our commune in the fall of 1970.

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Except for a brief encounter in Vancouver in 1975, when Illich lectured on his book Medical Nemesis, I did not see him again for seventeen years. I continued to read each new book of his with keen interest, but our paths didn’t cross again until he appeared at a conference on Orality and Literacy that was held at the University of Toronto in June 1987. Illich was about to publish, with Barry Sanders, a book called ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, a study that ranged over changing styles of literacy—from the introduction of the alphabet in ancient Greece to modern information technologies. By then, I had been, for many years, a broadcaster and was covering the conference for Ideas, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio series where I worked for many years. One of the things that had drawn me to this conference was the hope of reconnecting with Illich. I intended, by agreement with the organizers of the conference, to report on the proceedings by recording short interviews with the participants. With that end in view, I approached Illich in the lobby of his hotel. He told me emphatically that he had, for years, refused all interviews and would do one with me only reluctantly and as a courtesy to his hosts. We recorded the interview. I tested my recorder before beginning and monitored its display meter while we spoke, but when I later tried to play it back, I found nothing on the tape. Embarrassed, I approached Illich again. He intimated that he had hexed the recording. I had no other explanation, and his magus-like appearance lent his account a certain plausibility, but I had a job to do, and so for the next two days I doggedly pursued him until he finally consented to do a second interview. During this conversation, a rapport began to develop, and I plucked up enough courage to present him with a plan I had been incubating to do a radio series about him. However, despite the friendlier atmosphere and his obvious interest at learning that my three younger children were, at that point, unschooled, he still insisted that a long interview between us was quite out of the question. When the conference concluded on Sunday afternoon, some of the participants lingered in the sunshine outside Emmanuel College, where we had been meeting. My wife, Jutta, and our three children arrived to meet me. I introduced them to Illich, and then, before we parted, he told me that I might, if I liked, send my proposal to interview him to his colleague Wolfgang Sachs. Several months later I received a short, carelessly typed letter from Illich, saying that I was welcome to come to State College, Pennsylvania, the home of Penn State University, where he was then giving a course of lectures during the fall semester. He promised, mysteriously, his “obedience.” The following year, I drove to State College from my home in Toronto. When I arrived, I checked in at the Hotel State College, which Illich had described to

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me over the phone as an establishment of “Franciscan simplicity.” I had imagined cloistered courtyards and cowled monks in rope-cinched habits. In fact, as the price should have indicated, I found myself in a threadbare room, directly above the town’s main intersection, where, later, a riotous victory celebration by fans of the vaunted Penn State football team kept me awake for most of the night. The next day I moved to a different hotel. I found Illich in the middle of what he called a “living room consultation,” a small gathering in which food, drink, and friendship were the setting for intellectual interchange. Illich taught, on and off, at universities for much of his life, but he generally camped at their margins, refusing any regular appointment and, as he said, “soberly milking that sacred cow” in order to support the more intimate and convivial academic style that he preferred. The meeting then in progress was called “After Development, What?” It was one of a series of discussions that would lead to the publication a few years later of The Development Dictionary, a set of articles on key concepts of “the age of development” that were intended to mark, and hasten, its passing. I set up my tape recorder and microphones in Illich’s room, and he withdrew from the discussions downstairs once or twice a day so that we could talk. We sat on the floor with a low table between us, the situation in which he was most comfortable, and continued in that way for eight days. Slowly I began to understand the nature of the obedience he had offered me in his letter. Clearly it did not mean meekly following my instructions. He often took my questions to destinations I had not foreseen and, at one point, punctured my dignity by referring to my recorder as a “keyhole” before which we were exhibiting ourselves to strangers. But it did involve an extraordinarily alert and responsive attention and presence. Seeing me with my family outside Emmanuel College, he later told me, he had sensed something that made him turn toward me. And, in turning to face me, he opened himself to whatever adventure might follow. This reflected what he called his “hope of . . . being surprised” and the lifelong willingness to follow sudden inspirations that this hope encouraged. Once the door was open, it stayed open, and he gave himself to the situation I created with my microphones and my dogged, carefully premeditated questions in a way that seemed at once openhearted and critical. Often his answers surprised both of us. The interview that we recorded in the fall of 1988 became, first, a five-hour radio series called “Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman: Conversations with Ivan Illich,” which was broadcast on Ideas the following year. (The image, in the title, occurs in a poem by Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro. Illich thought it caught, quite precisely, the strangeness of his situation as, on the one hand, a man sustained

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Introduction / 5

by Christian faith—a faith as mysterious to most of his contemporaries as the moon—and, on the other hand, a “pamphleteer,” as he called himself, shilling for social reform in the marketplace of ideas.) These conversations showed a different character than Illich had revealed in his more formal, and sometimes more forbidding, books. Occasional rebukes to my vanity and journalistic pretensions notwithstanding, the spoken Illich was friendlier, more confiding, and more inviting than the exacting and rhetorically compact writer. Lee Hoinacki, who had been Illich’s friend, collaborator, and confidant for thirty years, immediately perceived this ­difference and wrote to me asking if he could have the unedited tapes of the entire conversation. Hoinacki’s seraphic smile and straightforward manner had eased my way into the Illich milieu the year before, and I sent them off at once. Some months later, I got back a complete and careful transcription and the suggestion, from Hoinacki, that it be published. He had written an introduction in which he explained that Illich’s “inner biography,” as it emerged in our interviews, provided a context in which Illich’s work as a whole could be understood and appreciated in a new way. In 1992, Hoinacki’s transcription, re-edited and introduced by me, was published as Ivan Illich in Conversation. Reaction to the book fully justified Hoinacki’s intuition that it would shed new and clarifying light on what he would later call Illich’s “trajectory.” Illich never read the work or listened to my radio programs, but he did profess amazement that even old friends had come to him, after reading Ivan Illich in Conversation, and said that they, at last, understood what he was saying. The greatest and most consequential of the surprises that I received during my first recorded conversations with Illich came toward the end. I had asked him about a remark Lee Hoinacki had made to me the day before. All of Illich’s work, Hoinacki had told me, could be understood as an attempt to “do theology in a new way.” Yes, Illich replied, Lee is right, I have only tried “to walk beneath the nose of God.” Then, after joking that God must have “a nose as big as mine,” he added: “ . . . my work is an attempt to accept with great sadness, the fact of Western culture. [Historian Christopher] Dawson has a passage where he says that the Church is Europe and Europe is the Church, and I say, yes! corruptio optimi quae est pessima [the ­corruption of the best is the worst]. Through the attempt to insure, to guarantee, to regulate Revelation, the best becomes the worst.” I didn’t know it at the time, but he had stated the same thesis in a sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church in downtown Chicago the year before. On that occasion he began, “I want to explore with you a phenomenon that I consider constitutive of the West, of that West which has shaped me, body and soul, flesh and blood. This central reality of the West is

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­ arvelously expressed in the old Latin phrase: Corruptio optimi quae est pessima— m the historical progression in which God’s Incarnation is turned topsy-turvy, inside out. I want to speak of the mysterious darkness that envelops our world, the demonic night paradoxically resulting from the world’s equally mysterious vocation to glory.” I found this idea both strange and compelling. I was familiar, of course, with the idea that the West had “secularized” its Christian heritage, even if I had never thought deeply about how this mysterious transformation was effected, but Illich was saying something I had never heard or thought: that modernity was ­Christianity turned inside out and that this was not merely a benign transformation, in which the kernel was kept and the husk discarded, but a perversion that maintained a mysterious proportionality with its source. There was no chance, at the end of what had already been a very long interview, to pursue this idea, but, happily, the following summer, Illich came to Toronto to address a conference organized by the Fourth World Review and stayed with my family and me for several days. There was a lot of opportunity to talk during this visit, and one of the things I most wanted to talk about was his idea that modernity is best understood as a corruption of the best, which is the worst. Why, I asked Illich, had he never made this the subject of a book? As we parted, he promised me that the next time we met he would have “several chapters” of this book ready for my perusal. We met as often as I could manage it during the ensuing years, particularly when he was relatively nearby in State College, where he continued to teach and assemble a scene every fall through 1996, but I never got those chapters. There were several reasons for this. One was the pain he felt from the tumor that was, by then, swelling and stretching his right cheek. (This tumor—tiny at first—had appeared ten years earlier, and Illich, for reasons I will explain later, had decided to leave it untreated.) He controlled the pain as best he could by smoking opium—a relatively mild drug in its raw state despite the fearsome reputation its more refined forms have given it—but even his formidable powers of concentration were somewhat undermined as the pain got worse, which it steadily did. Another was the demands on his time made by his many friends. German historian Barbara Duden, whose house in Bremen, Germany, was Illich’s home during the winter months from 1991 until his death in 2002, recalled in a letter to me how he “gave his precious hours in philia [friendship] to whomever came.” And, finally, there was a certain reticence in the face of so explosive a theme—a reticence that was reinforced by some of his counselors. I recall, for example, the disapproval of Muska Nagel, an old friend of his who had become a cloistered nun at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, following the death of her husband.

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She took the view that, with the Church as battered by scandal as it already was in the 1990s, this was no time for Illich to publicize views that could so easily be mistaken and misappropriated. Lee Hoinacki, to whom he often referred doubtful decisions, was also hesitant. I don’t think these reservations among his friends were necessarily decisive, but I do think they strengthened the reluctance he already felt. By the mid-’90s I had realized that the book I wanted to read was never going to be written, so I proposed an alternative: I would record interviews with Illich on the theme of corruptio optimi pessima with a view, initially, to making another radio series and perhaps eventually a book. This gave him the opening he needed. All his life Illich wrote only when he thought some definite occasion demanded it of him. It might be the request of a friend, or it might be his intuition that contemporary institutions were about to lapse into terminal counterproductivity, but there was always some exigent circumstance that led him to write. He intended no system of thought or literary monument. My urgent and sincere desire that he speak on this subject provided the necessary occasion. This has always seemed to me both remarkable and exemplary—not just that he would respond to my request but that, if there had been no request, he might have let his thoughts go unexpressed. This was also part of his obedience—to trust the occasions that presented themselves and be guided by them. And so, in the spring of 1997, I spent two weeks with Illich in Mexico, in the village of Ocotepec on the outskirts of Cuernavaca. During the years between 1961 and 1976, Illich had lived in Cuernavaca as the presiding spirit of the Centre for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC). After CIDOC closed its doors, he had become a wanderer but had always spent part of the year in the household he had established with his old CIDOC colleague Valentina Borremans in Ocotepec. The “interviews” we conducted during those days were often more like dictations. I might sometimes follow up with questions, but he basically expounded his subject as he saw fit. Often, I learned the night before what we would talk about the next day. I assimilated these interviews as well as I could, in the midst of my other work at the CBC, and two years later returned to Ocotepec for another two weeks of recording. These really were interviews in which I prodded Illich for clarifications and elaborations of what he had laid out for me two years before. From these two sets of recordings, I composed a five-hour radio series called “The Corruption of Christianity,” which was broadcast on Ideas in early 2000—a resonant date, even if quite fortuitous. These broadcasts, and the transcript that was made of them, did not allay the ambivalence among some of Illich’s friends about my project. I remember Lee

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Hoinacki in particular frowning over the transcript and worrying about the ways in which Illich’s unpolished and unsystematic presentation might be vulnerable to misinterpretation. Illich too was hesitant about taking the further step of turning our interviews into a second book. He had told me, in 1992, with respect to his idea that modern certainties have their “historical source . . . in a perverse transmutation of . . . Christian vocation,” that he had “not even found a first conversational partner within any of the established churches.” Nothing had happened in the intervening years to change his sense that he was talking to the wind. To take just one example, he had tried in the year before he died to open a conversation with the Catholic archbishop of Oakland. At the time Illich was the guest of his friend Jerry Brown, a former governor of California, who was then the mayor of Oakland and who would later serve two more terms as governor. In an obituary for Illich, Brown recalled what followed: [Illich] invited the local archbishop to discuss matters of Catholic theology that greatly troubled him. Before he died, Illich wanted to engage ecclesiastical representatives in a conversation about corruption in the early church and the evolution—as he saw it—of Christian charity from a personal act to planned institutional services. This he called the corruption of the best becoming the worst—Corruptio optimi quae est pessima. His interlocutors arrived at my loft and were ushered into the library. Illich spoke at length, summoning up his vast store of Church history. He tried one subject, then another, but the bishop and his clerical assistants seemed nonplussed, even uncomfortable. Soon the conversation was over and our guests excused themselves and left. I am sure they were wondering what in the world Illich was getting at.

This failed encounter summed up the apparent indifference of the Church he had once tried to reform and the oblivion into which his name had fallen within that Church. It also suggested that the book I proposed was likely to have no better reception. Then, later in the same year that he mystified the archbishop, Illich began to change his mind. He learned, while in Bremen, that Klaus Baier, a Lutheran pastor and lecturer in theology at the nearby University of Oldenburg, had made a ­German translation of the transcript of our radio series “The Corruption of ­Christianity” and established a study circle to discuss it. This lively interest shifted Illich’s perspective and made him begin to see the good that a book based on our interviews might do. I had a transcription made of all that had been said in both our 1997 and 1999 sessions, and a plan to publish them began to take shape. Illich

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and I agreed to meet early in 2003 in order to go over the manuscript and revise it for publication. On December 2, 2002, he died in Bremen. I proceeded with what I had and, in 2005, published The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich. The origins of the present book lie in that one. What I dared to call Illich’s testament—a name some thought presumptuous—was at the same time something vulnerable, exigent, and unfinished. There were reasons, after all, why Illich had maintained his discreet silence on the subject of the Church for so long, reasons why only his trust in me had finally allowed him, as he put it, to “stammer . . . what I have avoided saying for thirty years.” At various points he speaks of what he is telling me as no more than a “hypothesis” or, again, as a set of “possible research themes.” What I had asked for asked something of me in turn. A hypothesis needs testing; research themes need to be followed up. When Illich completed his “stammered” testament in 1997, he said, “I leave it in your hands to make sure that my intention . . . of speaking in gratitude and fidelity to the one behind this candle, which is burning here while I’m talking to you, was not a betrayal of his touching tenderness but a truthful statement, chosen once in my life.” The one behind the candle was always, finally, Christ. His charge was weighty, and in the intervening years, I have felt its insistent weight, even if with gratitude. With this book I offer my answer. In its pages I try to see Illich whole—understanding his various beginnings in the light of what he said to me at the end—and I try to say what I think the example of his life and thought means for our time. What I have written, though entirely personal and attentive to the incidents of Illich’s life as well as his thought, is not a biography. Like the nineteenth-century English novelist George Meredith, who wrote in a letter to a friend, “Horribly will I haunt the man who writes a memoir of me,” Illich would have haunted me had I attempted the synoptic gaze by which the biographer typically tries to surround and comprehend his subject. His biography, he once told me, could never be written because it was “hidden.” Some of this hiding was deliberate, arising from the circumstances in which he had worked as the director of CIDOC in Mexico in the 1960s and early 1970s. Beginning in the later years of the 1960s, when CIDOC was associated with various currents of revolutionary thought in Latin America, Illich had been “shot at and beaten up with chains” by enemies of his institution. Because of the threat to Illich and his collaborators, correspondence and other documents were often destroyed or simply not kept, and the habit of keeping few records and effacing his traces persisted after CIDOC closed in 1976. Consequently, the potential biographer of Illich will have to deal with a very sparse

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paper trail. But the implications of “hidden” go much further. He also meant that his story would remain secluded in the recollections of those with whom he had known a unique vis à vis. Such relations were, in his word, “shaded” (i.e., known only to the friends themselves). That it should be so, he went on, was a dictate of “chastity,” a virtue he thought of in unusually large terms. A dictionary will tell you that chastity is a synonym of celibacy, but for Illich it meant that state of self-­possession and self-control that allowed him the freedom to give himself to whatever or whomever claimed him at a given moment. Each relationship was unrepeatable and, in a deep sense, unknowable. Indeed, a certain refusal to know, and thus put himself “above” his friend or interlocutor, was a condition of the kind of dialogue Illich tried, throughout his life, to create. He spoke about it in a lecture he delivered in a Presbyterian chapel in Chicago in November 1988: When I submit my heart, my mind, my body, I come to be below the other. When I listen unconditionally, respectfully, courageously with the readiness to take in the other as a radical surprise, I do something else. I bow, bend over toward the total otherness of someone. But I renounce searching for bridges between the other and me, recognizing that a gulf separates us. Leaning into this chasm makes me aware of the depth of my loneliness, and able to bear it in the light of the substantial likeness between the other and myself. All that reaches me is the other in his word, which I accept on faith.

It might be said that Illich believed that one can know another only by first unknowing them. Biography, in the usual sense, cannot be written from this position—from “below,” as he says, or from within the state of ignorance implied by “tak[ing] in the other as a radical surprise.” “You cannot write the biography of a friendship,” he said on another occasion. “It’s too deeply personal,” a word that for him signified not just something private but something singular and unspeakable. Consider the almost impossibly stringent conditions that Illich sets out in this quotation. To take in someone as “a radical surprise” means to have no expectations whatever of them—I can’t be surprised by what I expect—but expectation is the very bread and butter of everyday life, its sine qua non. Even helpless infants, at their birth, are primed with expectations. And then there’s the renouncing of bridges—I recognize “a substantial likeness,” but I must renounce all the usual concepts and categories by which I explain the other one and assign them to a class or position. The “gulf ” between us must be respected and only “leaned into.” And, finally, there’s faith, by which I accept the other at their word. Obviously, this means something more than playing mindlessly along with the other’s social

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­ resentation or listening endlessly to their chatter—Illich did not always suffer p fools gladly—but it clearly refers to some inviolable and unsurpassable ultimacy in each human person. In a later conversation, Illich tried to explain further what it means to know by faith and to take the other at their word: Faith is a mode of knowledge which does not base itself on either my worldly experience or the resources of my intelligence. It founds certainty on the word of someone whom I trust and makes this knowledge which is based on trust more fundamental than anything I can know by reason. This, of course, is a possibility only when I believe that God’s word can reach me. It makes sense only if the One whom I trust is God. But it also rubs off on my relationship to other people. It makes me aim at facing people with a willingness to take them for what they reveal about themselves—to take them, therefore, at their word—and not for what I know about them. And this is very difficult to do after a hundred years of psychoanalysis . . . The contemporary sociological assumption, whether psychoanalytic or Marxist, is that the other’s sense of himself is an illusion shaped by ideology, by social condition, by upbringing, and by education. Only by taking the predictability out of the face of the other can I be surprised by him.

Surprise is often praised, and as often simulated, but rarely welcomed. Surprise, like hope, cannot grasp its object—this object must remain unknown until, suddenly, it appears. Since none of us could live for five minutes without expectations, a taste for surprises must refer to a practice of tempering expectation rather than overcoming it altogether. Modernity clearly tends in the opposite direction— toward what philosopher of science Ian Hacking calls “the taming of chance.” When Francis Bacon announced what his posterity has come to call the “scientific revolution,” he declared his purpose to “hound [nature] in her wanderings” and “bind her to [our] service.” He prophesied a more predictable world, and a more punctual, more standardized, more reliable world has followed. In a commodity-intensive and highly institutionalized society, where unexpected events are usually met with a law or a protocol designed to prevent any recurrence, surprise is the enemy, the sign that the system has failed. The only surprises we like are those that aren’t, in any deep sense, surprises at all, just the occurrence of something expected at an unexpected time or place. Illich’s preference for surprise, his regard for what remains “shaded” in our relationships, his attempt to “take the predictability out of the face of the other”— all speak against any attempt at definitive biography. So, in Illich’s view, does the New Testament. As he understood it, the Gospel clearly renounces the shapely

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12 / Ivan Illich

and self-evident life that one would expect to find related in a modern biography. When Jesus bumps into the brothers Peter and Andrew, fishing, he says only, “Follow me.” They receive no other explanation or instruction as to why they should, on the instant, turn their lives upside down. In the Bible, Illich says, a peremptory summons of this kind is “the primary form of ‘causation.’” Things happen neither by chance nor by necessity but in response to a call—a call that is often heard only by the one to whom it is addressed. Everything depends on that disposition to listen and to respond, which Illich calls obedience. A life lived, or even attempted, in this way remains out of reach—its reasons hidden in the communion of friends and, finally, in communion with that One whom Illich would name only reluctantly. “A . . . life of any worth,” the English poet John Keats wrote, “is a continual allegory—and very few eyes can see the mystery of [such a] life—a life like that of the scriptures, figurative.” An allegory is a story with a meaning different from its literal sense. Keats says that very few can discern what is going on at this level because the allegory is written in figures that can only be interpreted from a point of view to which we have no access. Illich said something similar to me with reference to the New Testament parable of the Samaritan who binds the wounds of a stranger who has “fallen among robbers.” (Illich considered this parable a paradigm, or type, of the entire New Testament.) “What happens between the [beaten man] and the Samaritan is a seed,” he told me. “When it grows up, it will be buffeted, and perhaps the stem will even be broken, and it will never come to flower. What we hold on to is the seed.” He went on to say that all the gifts of the spirit are “like seeds, no matter what happens historically, biographically, to them.” Their meaning can only be understood apocalyptically. “The apocalypse is the moment at which the meaning of my own life will be revealed to me,” he said finally. “That’s something totally different from autobiography or, even worse, biography.” This moment of seeing is what Jesus refers to in his parable of “the wheat and the tares.” (We would say weeds today, but the parable is still known to many, and certainly to me, by the King James Bible’s archaic word tares.) In this parable, he compares the kingdom of heaven to a field in which a householder has sown good seed, only to have an enemy come in the night and sow weeds, which grow up with the grain. The householder’s servants ask him whether they should try to weed the field, and he says, “No, lest in gathering the weeds, you root up the wheat along with them.” They can be separated, he says, only “at the harvest.” Biography, if we apply this image, recounts the everyday life in which the wheat and the weeds are inextricable and, often, indistinguishable. Only at the harvest, the moment Illich calls apocalypse, will the meaning be apparent.

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In the year before he died, the English poet William Blake left his autograph in the album of his friend William Upcott: “William Blake,” he wrote, “Born 28 Nov. 1757 and has died several times since.” These deaths were what Blake also called Last Judgments. “Whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth,” he wrote in his commentary on his painting of that name, “a Last Judgment passes upon that individual.” Blake provides another example of the view that our lives harbor what Illich calls “a mysterious historicity”—a significance lying below the biographical surface in the form of what Illich calls “seeds,” or Keats, “allegory.” “The ruins of time,” Blake says, “build mansions in eternity.” The point is not that we can know nothing of others but that what we can know depends on how, and from where, we look. Biography, in the contemporary sense, often presumes that the reality of the biographical subject can be made fully visible and fully available to the biographer’s penetrating and unembarrassed gaze. No “mysterious historicity” needs to be taken into account. That, for the contemporary biographer, would be a defeatist and obscurantist assumption—whatever hides evokes suspicion and demands, for that very reason, to be exposed. Illich has a profoundly different view. He thinks that only death, the final surprise, will disclose the meaning of what has gone before and that he can better understand the one he is facing by first learning to bracket all ready-made explanations. I have dwelt at some length on Illich’s aversion to biography, not only to justify my somewhat circumspect method in the following pages but also as a way of introducing a man who thought outside and against many taken-for-granted modern certainties, as he called them. Certainties are those things that we can’t think about because they are what we think with—they are what lie, Illich says, “beyond the horizon of our attention.” Contemporary critique often revolves in a circle within this horizon—rejecting one assumption only by tightening the grip of some other unthought premise. Illich was more searching in his attempt to uncover the roots of modern ways of life and pathways of thought. Biography, as the assumption of our essential transparency, is a good example. He rejected the world of total visibility, in which each one can and must be made known, and he rejected it in the way he lived as much as in the way he thought. This radicalism should not be taken as implying any affectation on his part or any merely prissy or puritanical distaste for contemporary mores. Illich was a thoroughly modern man, and he lived with his eyes open—alert to his own contradictions as much as to those of others. There was, for example, a quite dramatic contrast between his way of life—he was a “frequent flier” with friends all over the world—and his advocacy of technological restraint, local autarchy, and limits

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14 / Ivan Illich

to speed. He did not try to hide or extenuate such inconsistencies, once joking with me that in getting to and from an upcoming meeting that he was to address in Italy he would “consume as much oxygen as a herd of twenty elephants would consume in their lifetime, and not even produce the shit elephants produce.” “I try to be austere and draw my lines,” he went on, but “you can’t find security in austerity [or] you are really through.” He wasn’t seeking “a lovelier life,” he said, or personal justification. He was seeking, to put it as simply as possible, conditions favorable to “the practice of love.” This certainly involved living within limits and, to that extent, involved austerities or renunciations. Such restrictions, for him, were never ends in themselves but always only preparations for the deeper communion between people that he thought was impeded and often prevented altogether by the glitter and the glut of a technologically unrestrained society. Celebration was always the keynote. “I know only one way of transforming us, us meaning always those I can touch and come close to, and that’s deep enjoyment of being here alive at this moment, and a mutual admonition to do it—please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not a touchy-feely man—in the most naked way possible, nudum Christum sequere, nakedly following the naked Christ which was the ideal of some of the medieval monks whom I read.” This was Illich: an ascetic who counseled enjoyment, a world traveler who inveighed against “the few who get the privilege of being almost omnipresent in the world.” He himself often chose paradoxical or contradictory figures to describe himself—from the sobria inebrietas (drunken sobriety) that he once praised to me to the joyful austerity that he recommends in Tools for Conviviality. My intentions here are similarly contradictory. In line with my previous reflections on the impudence of biography, I want to preserve and protect my subject from explanations that would in any way dissipate the “mysterious historicity” of his life. At the same time, I will have a good deal to say, in what follows, about the various circumstances in which Illich lived. His literary works, as I’ve said, were all, in some sense, occasional, and knowledge of these occasions can certainly improve understanding of them. He was also a man who was profoundly attuned to the significance of the age in which he lived, alert to what Jesus called “the signs of the times,” and so some account of the nature of those times will also aid interpretation. Illich’s work, for example, throws a different light on the 1960s than the prevalent pop-cultural stereotype, and just as his work helps us understand the 1960s, so a deeper understanding of this period can help us understand him in turn. Ivan Illich was my friend, and that is certainly the context in which this book should be read. It continues a conversation that went on for many years.

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­ pprehensive that constant use of the name by which I knew him might seem coy A or cloying, I refer to him here always as Illich, but it should be remembered that I am speaking of a beloved friend whom I obviously called by his first name. This friend was at the same time my teacher—a circumstance that may require brief explanation. I have related my first encounter with Illich’s writing in the summer of 1968, when I was trying to make sense of my previous two years as a very young and rather innocent apostle of international development, and he was the one whose analysis supplied this sense. This pattern would be repeated many times. Deschooling Society (1971) gave me the courage and the conviction to step outside the boundaries of compulsory schooling in the education of my children. Tools for Conviviality (1973) made me see the importance of physical scale in political thought and showed me the hopelessness of trying to plot a responsive contemporary politics on a single left-right axis. Medical Nemesis laid the foundations for various essays in demedicalization—home birth and a continuing attempt to rethink the prevalent image of death-as-enemy are just two of many possible examples. Shadow Work began a questioning of the root assumptions of modern economics that remains, to me, a prerequisite for any political reconstruction. Gender indicated the possibility of a renewed relationship of respect, tact, and admiration between men and women. In the Vineyard of the Text made me understand the real significance of text in the making of the age that is now ending. These are just brief capsules, but they all speak of a writer who thought well ahead of me and well beyond what I would have been capable of without his guidance, someone whose analysis I trusted even when I couldn’t yet fully comprehend it. He was in this sense my teacher and maître à penser. A teacher is a bridge. One doesn’t have to go all the way to “surrendering to the guru,” as some unwise, contemporary Western followers of Eastern religions have done, to recognize that there are times when one must trust the authority of what has shown itself trustworthy. In this sense I took Illich “at his word.” On the other hand, he was, as I’ve said, a friend and, to that extent, an equal. Illich had a magnetic personality and presence. He sometimes rued it, and often tried to veil, counteract, or undermine his influence over others, but it was his fate nonetheless. Happily, I was not much subject to this power. The life of a householder and broadcaster in Toronto kept me out of his orbit, and I was not afraid to disagree with him, even if the occasions for that were few. Likewise, I was able to understand that clairvoyant powers of intellectual discernment could coexist with quite ordinary vanities, fallibilities, errors of judgment, and so on. Perhaps it was this combination—that I loved him but could withstand his melting gaze—that qualified me to be the

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16 / Ivan Illich

amanuensis of his old age and the vehicle for those thoughts that he never quite dared to share in writing. Illich’s career can be divided, roughly speaking, into four periods. It began in New York in 1951, when he became an assistant parish priest at the Church of the Incarnation in the Washington Heights neighborhood. There he became a champion of the Puerto Ricans who were then migrating in large numbers to New York. He was an eager and receptive student of the more communally oriented C ­ atholicism of his Puerto Rican parishioners, and he pressed his sometimes hostile fellow ­Catholics to open their hearts, their minds, and their forbidding, fortress-like churches to these newcomers. His experience of the encounter between American and Puerto Rican Catholicism led him, over time, to elaborate a “­ missiology,” or ­philosophy of mission, which stressed poverty of spirit, listening, and a deep realism about the Church. The Church, he said, is “a sign lifted up among the nations” and “a divine bud which will flower in eternity,” but it is also “a power among powers” and one whose power threatens all the more because of the self-­righteousness with which it is exercised. In this sense, his missiology, like much of his later teaching, was a mixture of hardheaded sociology and mystical theology. He shared it through the Institute for Intercultural Communication, which he founded in Puerto Rico in 1956, after he was appointed vice rector of the Catholic U ­ niversity there, and later through the Center for Intercultural Formation (CIF), which he established in Cuernavaca, Mexico. (CIF was later absorbed into CIDOC.) Beginning in the early 1960s, Illich became an increasingly outspoken critic of American missionary programs in Latin America. This was a time when the ­American church was dramatically expanding its presence there and working in lockstep with the U.S. government’s aid program, the Alliance for Progress. Illich took the view that these missions mainly reinforced corrupt clerical establishments and imposed unworkable attitudes and institutions. He also called for a revolution in Church government, describing the Roman Church as “the world’s largest non-governmental bureaucracy” and advocating its more or less complete ­declericalization. These positions inflamed opposition to him within the Church, and, in 1968, as I mentioned previously, he was summoned to Rome by the Holy Office, the modern descendant of the Inquisition, and asked to respond to a scurrilous questionnaire that detailed his “Dangerous Doctrinal Opinions” and ­“Erroneous Ideas Against the Church.” Illich refused to answer these questions, and the next year, when the Vatican acted against CIDOC, he withdrew from Church service altogether, suspending the exercise of his priesthood, though never ­renouncing it.

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The second phase of Illich’s career consisted of the series of books he published in the 1970s and the almost inhumanly hectic schedule of lectures, i­nterviews, and conferences that he undertook to promote the ideas he put forward in those books. They were, in order, The Church, Change and Developmnent, C ­ elebration of ­Awareness, Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Energy and Equity, and ­Medical ­Nemesis, later called Limits to Medicine. The first two, C ­ elebration of ­Awareness and The Church, Change and Development, collected many of his writings from the 1960s. All the others outlined the constitution of limits that Illich believed contemporary industrial societies must enact in order to retain their humanity. They must decide, he said, on “the roof of technological characteristics under which a society wants to live and be happy.” It was his view that Western ­societies, having made their own “mechanical messiah,” now stood at the threshold of what he called “an artificial creation.” He foresaw ecological catastrophe—“a gruesome apocalypse,” he called it—and warned of an approaching social ­paralysis that he named “­paradoxical counterproductivity.” Beyond a certain intensity, he said, compulsory schooling would foster ignorance and anti-intellectualism, highspeed traffic would induce congestion, medicine would undermine the courage to suffer and die, and so on. Illich’s tone, at this period, was dire, insofar as he was issuing a prophetic warning, but also hopeful—in retrospect, extraordinarily so. He may, at times, have been whistling in the dark, but from his confident statement in 1971 that “rapid deschooling” was already under way to his prediction at the beginning of Limits to Medicine that an “unprecedented housecleaning” was about to begin in the “health professions,” he maintained the view that radical change was not only possible but imminent. The third stage in Illich’s story can be dated from 1976, the year in which he and his colleagues closed CIDOC and he became a wanderer, “tramping,” as he would later recall, on muddy roads “scented by exotic herbs.” His “pamphleteering,” as he called his earlier writings, didn’t end altogether—he still wrote polemical essays and addressed contemporary concerns—but he began to travel on new roads, spending time in India, Japan, and Southeast Asia. He also began to recognize that his efforts at deschooling, demedicalization, deacceleration, and so on had been blocked by myths or certainties lying below the level of everyday thought. He concluded, for example, that deschooling could not occur so long as most remained gripped by “the myth of education,” which he defined as “learning under the assumption of scarcity, learning under the assumption that the means for acquiring something called knowledge are scarce.” So long as people held this belief as an axiom, or first principle, it would seem entirely natural and obvious

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18 / Ivan Illich

that the “scarce means” available for education ought to be carefully husbanded in specialized institutions and learning acquired outside these institutions depreciated. In pursuit of the origins of such modern certainties, Illich returned to a study of history that had already engaged him as a student. He announced that he was undertaking “a history of scarcity”—scarcity having begun to appear to him as the anchoring myth of modernity. The culmination of this period was the lectures Illich gave on gender in ­Berkeley in the fall of 1982 and the book of that name that was published in the same year. Encounters with female historians and reflection on the radical potential of the women’s movement had convinced Illich that the decisive event in the shaping of a modern economic society was the overcoming of gender, which he defined as the division of society into two heterogeneous but complementary spheres. Gender, so defined, was, he said, a human baseline and “a line which ran through every pre-capitalist society” on earth. In societies that were divided in this way, there could be no “labor” in the abstract, no universal circulation, no uniform standard because men and women, insofar as they were gendered, were not of the same kind. They might fight with one another or defer to one another, the degree of patriarchy or matriarchy might vary, but they could not replace one another or compete with one another. So long as the institution of gender prevailed, culture held what we today call economics in check—there were no economic neuters endlessly deciding between the alternative uses of scarce resources, just men and women playing the parts their cultures assigned them. This imposed an inherent limit to growth. Illich was excited by this discovery, not because he thought the vanished world of traditional gender could or should be restored but because it provided an invaluable key to economic history and an inspiration to those in our time who, he wrote, “struggle to preserve the biosphere,” reject “the market’s regime of scarcity,” and “attempt to recover and enlarge . . . the commons.” Neither Illich’s lectures nor his book were well received. No review that I saw really addressed his argument—the headline of one, “Gendered Good Old Days,” more or less captures the tone of skepticism and derision—and his lectures were roundly denounced by the feminists of Berkeley, who staged a formal rebuttal at the conclusion of his presentation. Seven female professors spoke at this ­counter-conference—one even alleging that Illich’s presentation had displayed “all the salient features of modern propaganda, as exemplified in classics of the genre like Mein Kampf.” These critiques were then published as a special issue of the journal Feminist Issues. Thus disgraced, Illich’s book fell into oblivion, where it more or less remains. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in his introduction to

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a recent Italian reissue of Gender, argues that Illich can now be better understood. Illich’s work is reaching, Agamben says hopefully, “the hour of its legibility.” The republication of the book in Italy is certainly one sign that this is true, but it does not yet seem to be the case in North America, where the book continues to be forgotten or overlooked. For example, much has recently been made of historian Joan W. Scott’s 1986 article “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” The essay has been reissued and a whole book devoted to exploring its implications and legacy, but in all this discussion, there has been no mention whatsoever of the historian who, four years before Scott wrote, also found gender to be a useful category of historical analysis. The reaction to Gender was an epoch in Illich’s career and, I will argue, in the history of the social movements whose ear he largely lost as a result of the controversy over the book. His work, in the fourth and final phase of his career, gained much less public attention than his earlier writings. This dimming of his celebrity was, in many ways, a blessing for a man who never wanted to become the captive of what he had written, but it did mean that brilliant work, most notably 1993’s In the Vineyard of the Text, went almost unnoticed. Illich, in this final period, had two central concerns. One was the change he felt had come over his world during the 1980s—a “change in the mental space in which many people live,” he said, and one that “I had not expected in my lifetime to observe.” He characterized this watershed as a passage from an age of instrumentality to an age of systems. In the first age, which he believed extended roughly from the twelfth century to our time, the creation of effective tools had been the leading idea. Society had been increasingly dominated during this time by an “extraordinary intensity of purposefulness.” People had cultivated a detached objectivity that allowed them to make and remake the world around them—readers stood reflectively apart from the texts they read and users of tools apart from the tools they used. (A tool, in the expanded sense Illich gave the word, could as easily be a hospital as a hammer.) In the age of systems, he claimed, this distinction between user and tool, reader and text, had collapsed. People were being “swallowed by the system.” “The computer,” he said, “cannot be conceptualized as a tool in the sense that has prevailed for the last 800 years.” In cybernetic systems, the operator becomes part of the system and people lose the ability to distinguish themselves from the networks in which they are enmeshed. Illich thought of himself as a philosopher of technology—his great theme was the way in which the prosthetic environments humans have created since flint first struck fire shape the way we think, feel, and sense. “The subject of my writing,”

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20 / Ivan Illich

he said, “has been the perception of sense in the way we live.” But now he began to fear that people were losing their senses. “Soul-capturing abstractions,” he wrote, “have extended themselves over the perception of world and self like plastic pillowcases.” Many of Illich’s late writings are meditations on the transition from the age of tools to the age of systems. His approach to this transition, as one who had chosen history as his way of understanding the present, was to study watersheds in the history of literacy in order to shed light on the watershed over which we are now, all too unconsciously, passing. Illich’s second major subject in his final period was his “hypothesis that modernity can be studied as an extension of church history”—the concern he summed up in the Latin adage corruptio optimi pessima. This theme was present in his writing from its beginnings. As early as 1957, when he was made a member of the board that governed all educational institutions in Puerto Rico, he quickly realized that he had entered a milieu that seemed “ridiculously similar to a religious one.” He pointed out this similarity many times in Deschooling Society, calling schooling “a World church,” a “ritualization of progress,” and a continuation of the “church services” instituted in the late Middle Ages. But it was only in the second half of his book Gender that he began the more systematic exploration of modernity’s roots in the Church to which I am referring—another feature of that beleaguered book that was overlooked by its critics. This theme developed throughout the 1980s and was typified in Illich’s saying to me in 1988 that the modern West is “the perversion of Revelation.” The interviews presented in The Rivers North of the Future capped his exploration of this topic but by no means exhausted it. He was not putting forward, he said, a finished theory or a conclusion but only a “research hypothesis,” a light to guide further exploration along a way that he was only able to sketch. The present book, as I’ve said, is part of this continuation. My division of Illich’s career into these much-too-neat periods is intended only to give my reader a rough introductory outline of his life and work and not to arbitrarily partition an oeuvre that, for all its adventurousness and openness to surprise, remains of a piece. The source of this unity was Illich’s having tried, always, to walk “beneath the nose of God” or to “nakedly follow the naked Christ.” He went where he felt he was called to go—by his gifts, by his times, and by the ones whose ways crossed with his—and he taught others, as far as they could, to do the same. His faith was his inspiration but also the source of his tragic awareness that “its institutionalization” had produced “an evil deeper than I could have known with my unaided eyes and mind”—that evil that has led humanity into its present apocalyptic extremity while at the same time blinding us to the revela-

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tion we are perverting. A moment ago, I quoted Giorgio Agamben’s statement that Illich’s work has finally arrived at “the hour of its legibility”—a phrase Agamben borrows from his beloved Walter Benjamin. Agamben goes on to say that our present modernity can be characterized by its endless deferral of judgment—a posture that he thinks originates in the Church, an institution that can only preserve its own existence by endlessly postponing the judgment it announces. Our world is in perpetual crisis, a crisis that never resolves because resolving it would end the game. Crisis is “our normal state,” Agamben says, the consequence of never allowing a final judgment to be reached. Illich, as Agamben sees him, was willing to reach judgment—to face a moment of decision—to speak for that messianic perspective that interrupts the endless line of time and history. There was a moment, now nearly a half century ago, when Illich believed that this time had come historically—a time at which he thought people might suddenly awaken from the impossible dream of endless growth and ever-intensifying institutional care and begin to undertake the renunciations that would allow them to celebrate present abundance. But the moment that Illich had thought “propitious for a major change of direction in search of a hopeful future” passed. The judgment he entered against a society swaddled in counterfeit care and on the brink of terminal social paralysis was again deferred, the crisis prolonged. This does not prove Illich to have been wrong. Indeed, the consequences he foresaw, if people did not undergo that “change of mind” of which the New Testament speaks, have largely come to pass. He predicted in Tools for Conviviality that, should technology not be restrained and the “balances” proper to nature and society restored, the consequence would be an increasingly “uninhabitable” social and natural environment in which personal initiative would shrink, polarization would grow, “all bridges to a normative past” would be broken, and “the world [would be] transform[ed] . . . into a treatment ward in which people are constantly taught, socialized, normalized, tested and reformed.” This seems to me a pretty accurate pencil sketch of the present moment, even if the “uninhabitability” is unevenly distributed. What Agamben means by his claim that “the hour of [Illich’s] legibility” has struck is precisely this: that the future Illich prophesied is more and more present and that this urges a careful rereading of his anatomy of Western civilization. Of particular importance to Agamben, himself a tireless explorer of the theological origins of contemporary habits of thought, is Illich’s claim that “the roots of modernity” lie in “attempts to institutionalize, legitimize and manage Christian vocation”—“Christian vocation” being the calling that is summarized in Jesus’ “commandment . . . to love one another as I have loved you” and “institutionalization”

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22 / Ivan Illich

meaning the perverse attempt to turn this love into an efficient machine that needs no inspiration to deliver its products on time and on budget. In what follows I will unfold Illich’s work, as I understand it, through all of its seasons. I will attend to the times that provoked his thinking and to the “inner biography” of the man who so sensitively registered those times. I will also argue that Illich is an exemplary figure for the present time, and this in spite of his being, as he once remarked to his friend John McKnight, a proscriptive rather than a prescriptive thinker (i.e., one who mostly spoke about what a good society is not rather than what it is and left the rest to “the surprising inventiveness of people”). Example was a word Illich liked and distinguished from imitation. Imitation merely copies, he said, while example lights a way that each follows in their own way. I think Illich gives an example or shows a way to the present moment in several senses. First of all, Illich lived as he taught. Throughout his life he tried to create settings where friendship could flower and head and heart could reunite. It was his view that at the very beginning of that long modernity that he called the age of instrumentality, there was a divorce between the formation of the heart, in the biblical sense of the inward person, and the formation of the analytical mind. Knowledge, as science, was segregated from contemplation, and it came to be widely believed that only thought that is withdrawn, objective, and dispassionate can ever overcome what Francis Bacon called “the idols of the mind” and achieve clarity. Illich tried to create “a new complementarity” between “the practice of love” and “critical habits of thought” while at the same noting that what he proposed was not a restoration of some romanticized past but rather “something profoundly different from any[thing] previously known.” In this sense, Illich gave an example of an integral or reunited life, an example that I believe will prove important for any community that is attempting to keep tradition from drowning in the cascade of novelties that now threaten even the recent past with oblivion and obsolescence. A second important sense in which Illich is exemplary is in his attempt to make visible the religious and ritual aspects of modernity. From his description of compulsory schooling as “a ritualization of progress” to his late remark to me that “risk awareness” is “the most important religiously celebrated ideology today,” Illich treated modern institutions as displaced churches. Each, in its way, evinces the belief that “[it] can do what God cannot, namely manipulate others for their own salvation.” This insight has a number of implications. It suggests first of all that we habitually mistake the nature of the institutions that direct and dominate most of our lives. If you take a school system, for example, as “a practical arrangement for imparting education, or for creating equality,” then you have, according

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to Illich, fundamentally misunderstood its purpose as well as how it came to be in the first place. What school and university systems actually do is to supply credentials for jobs, and often for jobs that don’t even require the training to which the credentials supposedly testify, but education continues to be hallowed by that “ceremonial” or “ritual” quality that, for Illich, constitutes its “hidden curriculum.” This discrepancy between what the institution says it does and what it actually does leads to epidemic lying and disorientation, and this bad faith is characteristic of every major contemporary institution, not just schools and ­universities. Wherever institutions confound their own interests with the salvation that they promise, crippling illusions are generated. Illich urges what his friend Paul ­Goodman called a “new reformation” that would radically curtail the power, scope, and pretensions of modern institutions and set people free from the institutions’ power to prescribe how things shall be done and who has the right to do them. Illich’s critique of modern institutions, and his call for “institutional revolution,” has a further implication. If modern institutions are animated by an unconscious Christian ideology, then many people who think they have repudiated, forgotten, or overcome Christianity remain, in a very practical sense, Christians. They practice rituals that make no sense without reference to their Christian originals, and they practice them, moreover, with a confidence whose source they can never acknowledge inasmuch they have made Christianity, and religion in general, their scapegoat. This is an inherently confusing and contradictory situation. Contemporary discussion of religion often conceives of it as a phenomenon that is confined to its manifest and explicit forms—religion is what calls itself religion and transpires in acknowledged religious settings. If Illich is right that “modernity can be studied as an extension of church history,” then most of religion is invisible—like an iceberg, it carries the majority of its bulk below the water. In this sense, Illich can be seen as an inheritor of theologian Karl Barth, who argued that religion is not a voluntary institution but rather an inescapable human predicament—“a yoke,” Barth said. This yoke cannot be put off. “Man’s perpetual genius,” says Calvin, “is to be a factory of idols,” and in consequence, there is nothing beyond religion but more religion. But the predicament can be recognized, acknowledged, and named. One can, as Illich says, “celebrate awareness.” The contradiction between revelation, which is from God, and religion, which people make and then succumb to, cannot be definitively overcome, but it can be kept in mind, danced with, and laughed about. Illich also adds something to Barth, I think. This is his understanding of just how far “the net of religion” extends and where it is to be found today. (The phrase the net of religion comes from William

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Blake, who prefigures Barth and Illich on this point.). This promises not just an unveiling of the true nature of modern institutions but also a better understanding of religion. It also hints at a renewed Christianity that will no longer embody its faith in the state-like institutional forms of which Illich believes modernity to be a transposition. A final sense in which Illich is exemplary has to do with the contemporary experience of surfeit. Many of the people I know live in a condition in which all spaces seem fully saturated. Education never ends, health is a constant preoccupation, communication is unrelenting. Both speech and thought are continually entrained by careful “messaging,” branding has become a pervasive metaphor, and ready-made figures of speech increasingly inhibit personal expression. Saturation seems a good word for this, inasmuch as it evokes a state of awareness in which every site is preoccupied, every seat taken, every predicament mapped and addressed in advance of its occurrence. This is exactly the condition of which Illich warned when he spoke of the “disabling” effects of professional hegemonies. He spoke of an alienation that would penetrate much more deeply than the estrangement of which Marx spoke when he pointed to the dissociation workers experience on encountering their own products as alien powers. In a society whose primary product is “services,” even the most elementary capacities—to give birth, to die, to love, to grieve—come under management, and it comes to seem obvious that these abilities can all be refined and improved by the relevant expertise. “The mind and the heart” are colonized, Illich says. The answer, for Illich, was not to deprecate all expertise and return to tradition but rather to strike a balance. He wanted to write a constitution of limits that would restrain professional expertise at a politically determined line and allow an opposing space for what he called the vernacular or the homemade. Again and again, he wrote of balances and of complementary domains and denounced what William Blake called “single vision.” “Once thinking becomes a monocular perception of reality,” Illich said, “it’s dead.” We now live after the flood that Illich foresaw—in an age in which it is no longer possible to imagine that compulsory schooling might be dis-established, that a “political majority” might be assembled in favor of what I have called a constitution of limits, that language might once again become a commons and not the plastic medium of professional communicators. Nevertheless, I think Illich’s writings retain a powerful ability to guide, to warn, and to aid understanding for those who are trying to keep their footing in the flood. What cannot be changed can still be withstood. Friendships can be kept free of those therapeutic designs that are antithetical to friendship. Spaces of conviviality and celebration can be

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conserved. Illich shows a way of thinking and a way of living that can still inspire, even if he is speaking only to the incipient neo-monastic culture that will conserve tradition through the new age for which philosopher Catherine Malabou has aptly proposed “plasticity” as the dominant metaphor or image. Two final notes before I begin. The first concerns my religious background. I grew up in a milieu steeped in Anglican Christianity, whereas Illich’s formation was deeply Roman Catholic. A Catholic theologian who read my book before publication noted and questioned my resorting to Protestant thinkers to explicate Illich—for example, my earlier reference to Karl Barth—rather than to his own Catholic sources. This reflects a patchy and eclectic education as much as any Protestant prejudice, but it probably warrants a disclaimer. I have no theological training and an incomplete knowledge of the Catholic milieu in which Illich was formed. The thinkers I cite are often those who have helped me understand Illich and not necessarily those who shaped his thinking. Reader beware. The second note concerns word usage. Grammatical or syntactical conscience is a strange thing, and I find myself on shifting ground with regard to the singular they (i.e. the use of they to refer to a singular general noun, like doctor or teacher, so as not to impute gender to that noun). Sometimes, when it feels acceptable, I use the singular they, and, at other times, when it clangs intolerably, I use he/she. (My preference would be for female writers to use she and males he, but that doesn’t allow the reformed male writer to signify that he knows that all firefighters or fishers or whatever are not male.) I hope my reader will bear with me through this inconsistent usage. In Illich the default male prevails at all times, and I have not tried to change him, though there is a brief discussion of how his habitual recourse to man as the archetype of humanity is to be understood in the age, as it were, after man. Inspired by Ray Monk’s biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, I have eliminated all numbered footnotes from the text. Notes, giving the source of all quotations and references and occasionally elaborating on the main text, can be found at the back. Quotations are identified by their first few words and keyed to the page on which they appear. I hope my readers find this convenient.

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Prologue: Early Life Ivan Illich was born on September 4, 1926, at his grandparents’ house in Vienna. His father, Piero, came from a landed family in Dalmatia, with property in the city of Split on the Adriatic coast and wine- and olive-producing estates on the adjacent island of Brač. The oldest-surviving family document is the grant of a Patent of Nobility by the Doge of Venice in 1729, but the house on Brač dates back, Illich once told me, to “Crusader times.” His mother, Ellen Regenstreif, known as Maexie, belonged to a family of converted German Jews with both Sephardic and A ­ shkenazi roots. In a “Family Chronicle” she wrote for her sons, Ellen recalled her meeting with Piero in the city of Ragusa in Sicily in 1924. “He was the handsomest, most lovable, brilliant and golden human being whom I had ever come across.” They were married the following year and established a home in Split. Three sons were born: first Ivan and, two years later in 1928, his twin brothers Sascha and Mischa. Then, in 1932, the marriage broke down, and Ellen returned with her three sons to her father’s house in Vienna. What happened between them is unclear. Ellen, in her family history, refers only to “certain untransparent events [that] began a rift between us.” Certainly, the times were against them. There was, in those years, a rising tide of anti-Semitism and anti-foreign feeling in Yugoslavia, and Ellen’s father, Fritz Regenstreif, was a wealthy Jewish lumber merchant with extensive holdings in the Yugoslavian province of Bosnia. (Yugoslavia had come into existence at the end of World War I, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.) It was Sascha Illich’s understanding that, during the years after Piero and Ellen were married, the Yugoslavian government was attempting to expropriate Fritz Regenstreif ’s timber leases and arguing its right to do so before the International Court in The Hague. Sascha Illich also suspected that his father put himself forward as “a savior” in the dispute between his wife’s father and the Yugoslavian government. But his grandfather, he said, “had absolutely no intention to appoint his son-in-law as his representative or his agent.”

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Clearly there were tensions within the country, within the Illich family, and perhaps within the Regenstreif family as well. The matter remains, as Ellen said, “untransparent.” The result was that Ivan and his brothers grew up in their ­grandfather’s opulent Art Nouveau villa in the Pötzleindorf section of Vienna. Reconciliation was hoped for—perhaps “Poppy” would recall them to Split or at least come to visit in Vienna—but it never happened. Sascha Illich recalled his older brother Ivan as “you could nearly say obsessed [and] very much weighted down by this absence of the father.” He had been, it seems, cut off, but, in later life, he tended to emphasize his Dalmatian roots over the bourgeois Vienna in which he mainly grew up. This was how he spoke to me about it in 1988: “That island from which I come is one of the very few places where Rome permitted, after the ­Council of Trent, the Roman mass—which was established at the Council of Trent—to be read in Slavonic, in old Slavonic. I’ve increasingly been certain, as I’ve grown older, that it’s good to be very consciously a remainder of the past, one who still survives from another time, one through whom roots still go back, and not necessarily examined roots. I’m aware of the tremendous privilege of coming from certain traditions, and of having been deeply imbued by them.” On another occasion, speaking in Japan in 1982, he recalled the old house on Brač: The man who speaks to you was born 55 years ago in Vienna. One month after his birth he was put on a train, and then on a ship and brought to the island of Brač. Here in a village on the Dalmatian coast, his grandfather wanted to bless him. My grandfather lived in the house in which his family had lived since [the Middle Ages]. [Daily life] had altered little [in] 500 years. The very same olive-wood rafters still supported the roof of my grandfather’s house. Water was still gathered from the same stone slabs on the roof. The wine was pressed in the same vats, the fish caught from the same kind of boat, and the oil came from trees planted when Edo was in its youth. [The Edo period in Japan began in 1603.] . . . When I was born, for people who lived off the main routes, history still flowed slowly, imperceptibly. Most of the environment was in the commons. People still lived in houses they had built; moved on streets that had been trampled by the feet of their animals; were autonomous in the procurement and disposal of their own water; could depend on their own voices when they wanted to speak up.

Brač, in memory and imagination, was the home he would never have. “Since I left the old house on the island in Dalmatia,” he told me, “I have never had a place

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which I called my home. I have always lived in a tent.” Of what this says about the ten years in his grandfather’s magnificent house in Vienna, one can’t be sure. In the home movies that his mother took—now deposited in the film and video archive established by Steven Spielberg at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.—we see a wiry, energetic boy bound from his bed and run to his microscope, a harbinger of the studies in crystallography he would undertake at the University of Florence. His schooling, he recalled, was sporadic, though I cannot say what part his gift for confabulation played in his remembering that, at age six when his mother wanted to put him into school in Vienna, he was found to be “retarded” and so given a two-year reprieve from school and the run of his grandmother’s library, where he “could look up all the interesting things that might intrigue a nasty boy of seven.” Once he also recalled his pleasure in sitting under the dining room table, listening to the adult conversation and already attuned, one imagines, to its nuances. School must have come later because he told his friend Lee ­Hoinacki that after the Anschluss, the unopposed German takeover of Austria in 1938, he was paraded in front of his class by a school official, who pointed to his nose and told the other students that this was “a typical Jewish profile” and a sign of “the blight we must erase from our land.” Vienna Vienna was the capital of the Austrian Republic, a state formed, as Yugoslavia had been, after the disintegration and dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I. In the 1920s, it was governed by the left-wing Social Democratic party and nicknamed Red Vienna because of the government’s policy of progressive taxation, generous social services, and large public housing projects, like the famous and still-functioning Karl Marx Hof. This regime was already embattled when Ellen Illich and her sons returned to Vienna, and, in 1934, rightwing militias instigated a brief civil war that ended with the banning of the Social Democratic Party and the establishment of a right-wing Patriotic Front government— Austrofacism was what the defeated socialists called it. Anti-Semitism came more and more into the open, and four years later Nazi Germany annexed Austria. Illich was twelve years old, and he later recalled a walk he took at that time in the vineyards outside Vienna. “I knew that within days Hitler would be occupying Austria,” he told me, “and I said to myself that, under these circumstances, certain things will happen which will make it impossible for me to give children to these towers down on the island in Dalmatia where my grandfathers and great-grandfathers

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made children.” Perhaps, given his banishment from “these towers,” there was an element of bravado in the young boy’s renunciation of the obligation to give children to the ancestral house, but there’s no doubt that this intuition of a world about to be irretrievably lost would inform Illich’s understanding that his only shelter, in future, would be a tent. Fritz Regenstreif was a wealthy man, and at first, he kept his family safe by paying bribes. While still in his early teens, Illich carried some of these payoffs to an officer of the Gestapo. (Nearly forty years later, in Berlin, this same man knocked at Illich’s door. Illich opened the door, recognized the man, and quickly closed it again, instantly aware that he would not be able to provide the absolution he presumed this man was seeking.) The Illich children were also sheltered by their father’s official status in Yugoslavia—Illich spoke of the “diplomatic protection which being the son of my father afforded.” In 1941 Fritz Regenstreif died, and his magnificent house was sold—a forced sale at a heavily discounted price—to the Nazi Deutsche Arbeitsfront, which had coveted it since the occupation of Vienna. (Magda Goebbels, the wife of Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, particularly admired it.) The next year, with the death of their father, the young Illiches mutated, under Nazi law, from half-Aryans into half-Jews, and the children and their mother “slipped” out of Vienna and returned to Split—to the house they had lived in before their departure for Vienna in 1932, the house where Ellen had spent, she recalled in her Family Chronicle, “the happiest year of my life.” Three months later, on January 14, 1943, she wrote, “we locked up our belongings and left the house convinced we would never want to live there again.” With false travel documents the Illich family obtained for them, they traveled to Florence, where they settled and lived on the proceeds of the sale of the house and some of its more valuable furnishings, which had been shipped to them via Trieste. Sascha recalled that his older brother was “suddenly . . . the father in the sense of having to care for the family . . . and . . . acted as the man in the household with all of the responsibilities and . . . he was very much weighted down by it.” Even as a child Illich stood out. Among his many gifts were a keen intelligence, a discerning eye for the crux of the subjects to which his attention was drawn, and a remarkable facility with languages. This gave him, eventually, an easy mastery over all the major European languages but also allowed him to quickly gain the rudiments of other tongues at need. His friend, the Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie, a truthful man, related that Illich, on a visit to Norway, undertook to learn sufficient Norwegian to read Christie’s untranslated book on schools. Christie, skeptical, tested Illich on his comprehension afterward and found it satisfactory.

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Illich also had that attractive and compelling quality for which the abused and overburdened word charisma will have to serve, since I know no other that comes as close. He knew from the time he was eleven, he told me, that he could exert a powerful influence on others and that he would have to learn to shield this power lest it overwhelm the freedom of those around him. And, finally, he had the gift that the Ignatian tradition, in which he was well versed, calls “discernment of spirits,” or the ability to detect “the motions of the soul.” This sometimes expressed itself as a clairvoyance that is difficult to speak about, without sensationalizing, but that it seems wrong to omit, since it was part of who he was. One form this took was that he would sometimes speak as if he were aware of my state when we were not together. Another was that important relationships might begin in a compressed or visionary apprehension of what I can only call the soul history, or psychic formation of the one he was meeting. He was in this sense, quite literally, a seer—one who took in people and situations at a glance and trusted these epiphanies to guide him. Florence Illich was sixteen when he arrived in Florence with his mother and brothers at the beginning of 1943. In the capsule biography he gave me as part of our first recorded conversation, he says that he “registered in chemistry and finished in crystallography in Florence,” which gave him “legitimacy by obtaining an ID card, which provided me with a false identity, under the Fascists.” (This is obscure, and his Italian biographer Fabio Milana can find no record at the University of Florence. Perhaps, since he speaks of a “false identity,” he registered under an assumed name.) He also played a small role in the resistance, as he told his friend Douglas Lummis: Lummis: You told me as a young man that you were active in the Resistance. Illich: Well, there was no need for me to choose resistance. Because of my Jewish mother I was cast into the role of outsider under Hitler. I had to go . . . underground at the age of seventeen. And with my knowledge of languages, I was able to save some cows. Lummis: Cows? Illich: Yes, the Germans had decided to use a scorched earth policy in Italy as they withdrew, and they were taking the livestock. I was able to get information from the German command about where they would be requisitioning cows, and I would get the cows off to the mountains where the Germans couldn’t find them. It wasn’t tremendously heroic activity, but since then I have been rooted on the outside. Resistance came natural. And it stayed natural.

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After the war, Illich spent some time back in Austria. “I got stuck in ­Salzburg,” he told me. “I wanted a residence permit, and my lawyer advised me that the best thing would be to register at the University. So I went there in order to maintain my legitimacy, and then I got fascinated with two professors, Professor Albert Auer and Michel Muechlin who became my great teachers in historical method.” Both were medievalists. Auer wrote on the theology of pain and suffering in the Middle Ages—traces of his influence can be found throughout Illich’s work in the emphasis on an “art of suffering”—and, under his supervision, Illich wrote a dissertation on Arnold Toynbee’s philosophy of history. Illich described it to me as concerned with “the philosophical and historiographic background of ­Toynbee’s ideas” but denied that he was a “Toynbean,” much less a ­“Spenglerian.” I have not read this dissertation, and those who have had not been able to shed much light on it for me—Fabio Milana found it “hard to interpret”—so I can only speculate about what Toynbee’s ideas may have meant to the young Illich. ­Toynbee held that the only possibility of human progress lies within the sphere of religion. “It looks,” wrote Toynbee in 1948, around the time that Illich would have been studying him, “as if the movement of civilizations may be cyclic and recurrent, while the movement of religion may be on a single continuous upward line.” ­Civilizations rise and fall and are significant mainly as carriers of religions. “When historians look back on the twentieth century,” Toynbee said in the 1930s, “they won’t have much interest in things like communism and capitalism: these will be ripples in the great historical picture. What will be really significant will be the impact of Buddhism as it enters the West.” In the same way, Toynbee felt that Western civilization had mainly served to provide Christianity “with a completely world-wide repetition of the Roman Empire to spread over.” However Toynbee may have influenced, or not influenced, Illich, one can at least conclude that the relationship between religion and civilization was preoccupying him, even at this early date. It was also in Salzburg that Illich met Lenz Kriss-Rettenbeck, a fellow student who would become a lifelong friend. One of the things they shared was an interest in local variations in the way Christian faith was celebrated—the Christliche ­Volkskunde, or folk Christianity, on which Kriss-Rettenbeck would eventually become a noted expert as a curator at the Bavarian National Museum. Illich also remained interested in vernacular Christianity, and his attraction to the unique forms in which Christianity had taken root in Latin America became one of the sources of his opposition, in the 1960s, to American missionary incursions on the Latin American Church.

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Rome After his studies in Salzburg, Illich also completed an advanced degree at the Jesuit Gregorian University in Rome, where he “seriously studied philosophy and theology.” Of these studies he tells us that, within theology, he was particularly interested in ecclesiology, which is concerned with the ways in which liturgical rituals serve as “the womb out of which and within which the Church comes to be in the present.” Theological attention to how the Church is made, Illich says, is “the first attempt to study a social phenomenon which is not the state, nor the law. . . . Ecclesiology, therefore, can be taken, in a funny but very real way, as the predecessor of sociology but with a tradition about twenty times as long as sociology since Durkheim.” Here was the foundation of Illich’s interest in the myth-making rituals that produce and consolidate modern institutions like the school. While studying in Rome, Illich also joined a seminar with French scholar Jacques Maritain on the works of Thomas Aquinas. Maritain was then the French ambassador to the Vatican, and “his imaginative Thomism meant a lot to me,” Illich said. “The Gothic approach, both narrow and precise, and extraordinarily illuminating, which Maritain had to the texts of St. Thomas, laid the Thomistic foundations of my entire perceptual mode . . . I experienced Thomism—no, Thomas—as I discovered him through Jacques Maritain, as the architecture which has made me intellectually free to move between Hugh of St. Victor and Kant . . . or . . . into the world of Islam without getting dispersed.” Elsewhere, he says that “Thomism is like a delicate vase, something glorious, but apt to be broken when it is moved out of its time.” This helps to explain, I think, what he means in speaking of the “architecture” of his thinking: his readings in Thomas were decisive in shaping his mode of thought without “Thomism” becoming the substance of that thought in the way it did for those who subscribed to the neo-Scholastic orthodoxy that governed the Church at that time. Illich was ordained in Rome in 1951 and said his first mass in the catacombs, the underground chambers where many early Roman Christians were buried. Before his ordination he tested his vocation by making a thirty-day retreat in which he followed the methods of self-examination spelled out in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. But about this vocation itself he said little. His brother Sascha remembered him as a devout boy who served at the altar of their church in Vienna, but when I asked Illich himself, in 1988, why he had decided to become a priest, he answered that he didn’t know, just as “I don’t know about most of the important decisions in my life.” He then added that it was “as unreasonable as sitting down with you to do an interview after having sworn in the

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1970s I wouldn’t do such things anymore.” This was partly telling me to mind my own business, but it was also saying something deeper about a willingness to trust inner promptings that he didn’t analyze or second-guess. It locates the decision in an intimate dimension, where description fails and only metaphor can reach. Later, Illich would also use the word flesh to try to capture that mysterious latency, closer than thought, deeper than speech, out of which our actions are born. On another occasion, he expressed his amazement at the impudence of a journalist who had recently asked him how often he prayed by telling me that this gentleman might as well have asked him how often he masturbated. Illich liked to shock, and, in this case, succeeded, but when I think back on his remark today, what strikes me is his attempt to dramatize the mutuality he experienced in prayer by characterizing it as even more “personal” than what would normally be considered the most private and personal of matters. Illich may have said little about the roots of his vocation to the priesthood, but he was clear, from the outset, about what this vocation demanded. He believed that “the priestly office” involved “mak[ing] the otherworldly unity . . . of the liturgy real.” This required that a clear distinction be maintained between the Church-inthe-world and the Church as a focus of “otherworldly” unity. Whatever blurred this distinction, like Church interference in politics, he opposed. As early as 1948, several years before his ordination, when he was still a student at the Gregorian University, he was scandalized when Pope Pius XII intervened in the Italian election of that year, saying that Christians were free to vote for any party except the ­Communists, because the choice of tyranny could not be considered a “free” choice. Illich was part of a group that publicly denounced the pope’s intervention. In Rome, Illich’s obvious abilities and his quite traditional piety marked him out as a potential “prince of the Church” who would, naturally, take his first step by joining the Vatican bureaucracy. His teachers and superiors in Rome urged him to attend the Collegio di Nobili Ecclesiastici, the elite Church institution where one trains for such a career. Giovanni Montini, later Pope Paul VI, asked him to stay on in Rome and work with him in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, where he was then a high official. But Illich “wanted to get away from Rome.” So, on October 27, 1951, he boarded a former troop ship named the USNS General Harry Taylor in Bremerhaven, Germany, and set sail for New York. Many of his fellow passengers were refugees and displaced persons who were still being cleared from German camps.

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1

Exile The peregrinus, or pilgrim, set out on his journey, not in order to visit a sacred shrine, but in search of solitude and exile. His pilgrimage was an exercise in ascetic homelessness and

wandering. He entrusted himself to Providence, setting out with no definite aim, abandoning himself to the Lord of the universe. —Thomas Merton In imitation of Christ the missionary seeks to become an adopted child. . . . His belonging to the community into which he is sent remains precarious and dependent on the arbitrary goodwill of others. Forever he remains a man who is tolerated, a guest marked by the strangeness of his birth. —Ivan Illich

Removal from the family home in Split in 1932 began an experience of exile that would characterize Illich’s entire life. He had lost, he said, not just a home but the very possibility of home. He did tell the mayor of Bremen, on accepting the city’s Culture and Peace Prize in 1998, that he had found in this German c­ ity-​­state ein zipful heimat, “the tail end of a home,” but even then, he dramatized his late attachment to this northern city by pointing out that it came from one “who, as a boy had felt exiled in Vienna, because all my senses were longingly attached to the South, to the blue Adriatic, to the limestone mountains in the Dalmatia of my early ­childhood.” In Vienna, “Grandfather’s house” sheltered him but did not mitigate the feeling of loss. This feeling was further intensified in 1938 when the ­twelve-​­year-​­old boy reflected on the imminent, ­already-​­foreseeable occupation of Austria by the Nazis. The coming storm, he realized, would blow away even the remnants of old Europe and, as I quoted in the previous chapter, “make it impossible for me to give children to these towers down on the island in Dalmatia where my grandfathers and g­ reat-​­grandfathers made children.” Exile from Vienna to Italy followed in 1942.

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Illich’s personal experience resonated with his religious experience. All of the “Abrahamic” f­aiths—​­Judaism, Christianity, and I­slam—​­begin in exile. “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.’” Abraham, as God later renamed him, became the “father of faith” because of his willingness to venture into the unknown in response to God’s promise and in obedience to God’s word. During the later exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, the people were kept alive during their ­passage through the desert only by mysterious manna, the food of heaven that had to be eaten at the moment it was found because it could not be stored. The New Testament repeats the same theme. Jesus’ curt instruction to his first disciples Simon (Peter) and Andrew to “follow me” is the first of many commands to walk away from home without preparation or precaution. When the disciples are sent out to preach, they are told to “take no gold, nor silver, nor copper in your belts, no bag for your j­ourney, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor a staff.” Eternal life is promised to those who forsake “houses, or brothers or sisters, or father or mother, or children or lands for my sake.” In the passage beginning “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” Jesus tells one w ­ ould-​­be disciple whose father has just died to come along and “leave the dead to bury their own dead”—even that most primordial of human obligations must be given up for the sake of the kingdom. Later in this same passage, another aspirant, who wants to follow the Lord but asks if he may first say goodbye to his family is told, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” This pattern culminates in the Crucifixion: Jesus is executed outside the gates of the city, nailed to a cross that excludes him even from his native earth. Exile is in many ways the Christian condition. On earth, says the New ­Testament letter to the Hebrews, we have “no abiding city.” Augustine describes the condition of the Church in this world as “on pilgrimage.” Illich too used the image of pilgrimage to describe both his road in life and his journey in thought. Describing the various talks from the 1960s that were gathered together in 1970 in a volume called The Church, Change and Development, he writes that he was trying “to open a horizon on which new paradigms for thought can appear.” When such a horizon is opened, he says, “we leave home on a pilgrimage. But it is not the pilgrimage of the West which leads over a travelled road to a famed sanctuary. It is the pilgrimage of the Christian East which does not know where the road might lead and the journey end.”

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New York Experience, both spiritual and biographical, of a journey that leads ever farther from home made Illich sensitive to exile as a condition, and this sensitivity was ­immediately engaged on his arrival in New York in November 1951. He told me the story in connection with his departure from Rome. I wanted to get away from Rome. I didn’t want to go into the papal bureaucracy, so I thought of doing a ­post-​­doctoral thesis . . . on alchemy in the work of Albert the Great. There are some very good documents in Princeton, and I had an invitation. But then on the first day in New York, literally on the first evening, with some friends of my grandfather’s, I heard about Puerto Ricans. My hosts, who lived on East 76th Street, in an old, traditional apartment building, said, “We have to move out because all these people are moving in here.” And then the black cook, speaking about her ­family—​­old Southern ­blacks—​­added, “We have to move out of Harlem because these Puerto Ricans are coming in.” So, I spent the next two days up in the barrio on 112th Street and 5th A ­ venue, 112th Street and Park Avenue, beneath the tracks of the New York Central, where they had their market. Afterwards, I went to Cardinal Spellman’s office and asked for an assignment to a Puerto Rican parish.

The Puerto Ricans who were “invading” New York, Illich realized right away, were immigrants of a new k­ ind—“not foreigners, yet foreign” he called them in an essay that was published in Celebration of Awareness: not foreign because Puerto Rico was then, and remains, an “unincorporated territory” of the United States and yet culturally different in ways that none of the previous waves of European immigration had been. Illich recognized them as exiles in the Catholic churches of New York, as much as they were in its wintry streets. Turning, characteristically, on a dime, he abandoned his intended postdoctoral studies in medieval alchemy for a post as an assistant parish priest at the Church of the Incarnation in the Washington Heights neighborhood around 175th Street. It was a long way from the Collegio di Nobili Ecclesiastici. “Ivan Illich . . . What kind of a name is that?” said Monsignor Casey, the parish priest, on meeting his new curate. “It sounds ­Communist. We’ll call you Johnny.” And Johnny or John he became for the next few years. The mission he gave himself was to make the Puerto Ricans welcome in the New York Church, and he began by steeping himself in the Puerto Rican culture. Historian Ana Maria ­Diaz-​­Stevens in her book on the Puerto Rican migration

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to New York, Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue, describes how he proceeded: “In order to practice what he preached, Illich embarked upon a project of immersion into the Puerto Rican culture. During his vacations he travelled to Puerto Rico, where he stayed away as far as possible from the big cities and centers of tourism. Illich would make his way into La Isla, or rural parts of Puerto Rico, knapsack on his back, by foot or horseback or by hitchhiking. He would spend days at a time, sleeping in the open air, on the steps of the barrio chapels, where at sunrise he would offer mass.” Illich too recalled these travels in an early essay called “The American Parish.” The first Mass I said at about six in the morning, after I had slept all night on the altar steps of the chapel, then I traveled on, by horseback, to the next chapel. I heard confessions, said Mass, baptized, married . . . and off I went to the third chapel, on horseback still, where I arrived after noon. People were sitting around in Church eating their bananas and chewing cane, and on the Church steps they had lighted a little fire to cook something. They continued their conversation in Church while I heard confessions; for Mass everybody was silent and most of them knelt on the crude floor while two lonely dogs ran around among them, and when I started to baptize the conversation resumed. In the evening I was amazed at the answer I got from the pastor [I was assisting], a Puerto Rican trained in a United States seminary, as to whether he thought this behavior slightly disrespectful: Our people believe that God is their Father, and they want to behave in Church as they behave in their Father’s house.

As this essay goes on, Illich draws on what he has seen in Puerto Rico and heard from the Puerto Rican pastor to help him understand why Puerto Ricans find the American Church so foreign. He takes the point of view of a young man named Jose whom he had met one Sunday loitering reluctantly outside the forbidding doors of the Church of the Incarnation. There are no ushers in Jose’s Father’s house. Dinner does not start on time, ­probably he has no watch, he goes to Church when everybody else goes to Church. Mass is an important happening in the family’s l­ife—​­a happening which brings him together with all his neighbours. The Church is the center of his village even if he seldom goes into it. The rare Sunday when the priest comes to his chapel, the Mass is a big event, even if he does not attend. He knows almost everybody whom he meets at Mass. Mass is easily understood as a family d ­ inner—​­as the “communion” of the community.

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Through his encounter with the Puerto Ricans of New York and the Puerto Ricans of Puerto Rico, Illich began to consider the questions that would preoccupy him during the next fifteen years: the nature and mission of the Church and the relationship between the Gospel and its diverse cultural containers. He thought that the communal dimension in Puerto Rican worship pointed to something that was being lost in the United States, but he didn’t idealize the Puerto Rican form of Christianity. He saw, for example, that the Puerto Ricans had no greater imaginative grasp of American folkways than the Americans had of Puerto Rican customs. What he wanted, most fundamentally, was that they be able to understand each other in a way that would enlarge the horizons of both communities. The Church, as he understood it, was an institution that had undergone continuous change ever since Jesus first sent his disciples out to preach and one that must never stop changing in the face of new circumstances. For this to happen, he wrote in his essay on “The American Parish,” there must be scope for criticism of the Church as it is. Criticism brings about change either in him who criticizes or the Church criticized. It is always the fruit of hard work and prayer. A critical attitude toward the parish is just one of the areas in which Christian love for the Church can develop. But since criticism is always an implicit invitation to change, we have to pass to the second point and see to what degree the Church, or, concretely, the parish is subject to change. And there are two attitudes to change, equally unchristian, among Christians. One is the refusal of any development. This has its roots in a deep mistrust of human nature, as if God had not entrusted men with the power to make His institutions practicable, as if the mandate given to the apostles had been withdrawn. This mistrust lies in this error: necessary historical developments are taken for divine institutions. M ­ an-​­made frames are taken for divine works of art.

The opposite error, Illich goes on, is the worship of change for its own sake. It is made by those “who are like children who do not want to live in the dusty home that their family built over centuries, and prefer to live in a quickly built shack on the edges of the property.” For both of these errors Illich prescribes “theology and history”—theology to reveal “the seed of divine wisdom” and history to understand how custom can inform and authenticate change rather than just inhibiting it. Already one sees the outlines of Illich’s characteristic position as an advocate, on the one hand, of radical change and a defender, on the other, of the deep and ­trans-​­historical wisdom of orthodoxy. Just as striking is the idea that

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love can flower as criticism. Usually we divide the two, portraying love as partiality and blind attachment and contrasting it with the impartial and dispassionate character of the critical intellect. Illich yokes them together as a fruitful pair. Both positions would prove difficult for his contemporaries to a­ ccept—​­the loving critic as much as the orthodox revolutionary. In New York, Illich worked out various practical ways of accommodating his Puerto Rican parishioners. He encouraged the librarians to acquire Spanish books for the local library and rented a g­ round-​­floor apartment where he established a ­drop-​­in for young mothers called El Cuartito de la Santísima Virgen (the Little Room of the Most Holy Virgin). Among his colleagues he developed a reputation for alarming zeal. His colleague, Father Joseph Connally, later told New Yorker journalist Francine du Plessix Gray that living with Illich was “like riding in a Piper Cub with an atom bomb under the seat.” His parishioners were impressed by his dedication. One of his close associates and friends in the campaign to integrate the Puerto Ricans into the American Church was Father Joseph Fitzpatrick, a professor of sociology at nearby Fordham University. Illich, he told me, was “profoundly revered”: “He became an outstanding figure. The people in the parish just loved him, and the thing that they always remarked was the devotion with which he said his mass. They were most impressed at the evidence of great devotion at his mass. And, secondly, you know, he was very much involved in their lives in a way in which very few . . . priests were involved in their lives at that particular time.” Illich’s work with the Puerto Ricans of New York culminated on June 24, 1956 in a giant outdoor celebration of the Fiesta of San Juan, the national festival commemorating the island’s patron saint. Illich promoted it tirelessly, touring the parish in a sound truck, and when the day came, 30,000 people showed up in the central quadrangle on the Fordham campus for the event. The police, unprepared for the surge when the piñata was broken, unnecessarily whisked ­Cardinal ­Spellman away from the excitement, but as a ­coming-​­out party for the Puerto Ricans of Nueva York, the event was a huge success, and Spellman was pleased. By then the cardinal had concluded, in the words of Francine du Plessix Gray, that Illich “was a key man in his diocese and a key man in the American church.” Spellman was a h ­ ard-​­nosed church politician and a political conservative who would make headlines, ten years later, by blessing the American bombers that were devastating Vietnam, but he had recognized something he admired in Illich, and his loyalty to him never wavered thereafter. A few months after the fiesta he encouraged Illich’s appointment as vice rector of the Catholic University at Ponce

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in Puerto Rico with a mandate to start a training center there that would introduce American priests to Latin American culture. The following year he made Illich a ­monsignor—​­an honorary title in the Roman Catholic ­Church—​­the youngest of such rank in his archdiocese. The Church and Culture In Puerto Rico, Illich carried on the work he had begun in New York. He established, in Ponce, the Institute of Intercultural Communication, where Americans working with Puerto Ricans were “offered workshops combining the very intensive study of spoken Spanish with field experience and with the academic study of Puerto Rican poetry, history, songs and social reality.” Each evening those in the course gathered “for an hour of silent prayer,” which was introduced by someone offering “points for meditation.” Illich reproduced one of his introductory talks in his first book, Celebration of Awareness, under the title “The Eloquence of Silence.” “I believe,” he wrote there, “that properly conducted language learning is one of the few occasions in which an adult can go through a deep experience of poverty, of weakness, and of dependence on the good will of another.” Through the Institute of Intercultural Communication, Illich would develop his missiology, his understanding of the mission of the Church and how it should be carried out. To share the Word of God is the unmistakable and ­often-​­reiterated mandate of the New Testament. The disciples are told by their risen Lord to preach to “all nations.” And, despite his adamant opposition to certain American missionary initiatives in the ’60s, I don’t think Illich ever questioned this command. He is explicit about his commitment in the essay on “The American Parish” from which I’ve been quoting. “If Catholics ever lose their concern for those who do not have God,” he says there, “they lose their charity.” He goes on to criticize the lack of “missionary spirit” among American Catholics. But to say that the Gospel, once believed, must be shared immediately raises a question: What is to be shared? What is the relationship between the Good News and the cultures within which it must find expression? This was the issue faced by the first apostles. They had had their experience at Pentecost of finding themselves mysteriously able to speak “in other tongues” and to have others hear them “each in his own language.” But the Acts of the Apostles makes clear that these others to whom they spoke, even if “devout men from every nation under heaven,” were still Jews who had come to Jerusalem from other places. And Jesus himself had said that he was “sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel” and that he had come “not . . . to abolish

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the Law and the Prophets . . . but to fulfill them.” The first Christians were not yet Christians. They were Jews, and they had to decide, first, whether they should preach to Gentiles at all and, second, whether they should require their Gentile converts to observe the Mosaic Law. What scholars call “the Gentile breakthrough” or the breaking of “the Gentile barrier” occurs in the Acts of the Apostles when the apostle Peter falls into a trance and sees a vision of all the creatures of the earth let down from heaven as if in a “great sheet.” A voice tells him to eat; he protests that he may not eat what is “unclean,” and he is told that “what God has cleansed” he should no longer call “unclean.” He then proceeds to the house of a devout Roman soldier named Cornelius, though he knows that “it is unlawful . . . for a Jew to associate with one . . . of another nation,” and there he announces: “Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” His Jewish c­ ompanions—“believers from among the circumcised”—are “amazed because the gifts of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles.” This does not end the m ­ atter—​­Christianity to this day incorporates the Torah as part of its “Old Testament,” and there is plenty of close reasoning in the letters of the apostle Paul about the relationship between Judaism and the gospel of “Christ crucified”—but a decisive move has been made toward understanding that the new faith could slough off its cultural containment without losing its essential character. The decision taken by the men who had been Jesus’ companions was repeated again and again at new cultural thresholds, as Christianity eventually spread throughout the world. At each threshold the same questions recurred. In time, each new accommodation became canonical and then often resisted further accommodations. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, was already at two removes from the language in which Jesus had announced the gospel, but by the time of the Reformation, it had achieved such unassailable status that, before Henry VIII Anglicized the church, copies of William Tyndale’s English translation were confiscated and destroyed as they entered England, and Tyndale himself was burned at the stake as a heretic. It is within this dialectic of retrenchment and renewal that Illich’s philosophy of mission has to be understood. The Church, as Illich had already written in his essay on “The American ­Parish,” must constantly change and at the same time remain true to its tradition. This was not a contradiction in his opinion because he saw tradition as orienting and anchoring change rather than opposing it. One root of this view was his own ardent love of the Church’s inheritance. In an article that appeared in 1972 called “How Shall We Pass On Christianity?” he remembers himself as a young chorister,

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ready “to throw ashes on my head for having sung a false note or m ­ ispronounced a word.” He goes on to speak of his love of the “detailed rubrics of the liturgy” and of how “a constant n ­ ever-​­changing liturgy” with its “words . . . spoken and pronounced always in the same way” provided an invaluable complement to the ­ever-​ ­changing contexts of Christian celebration. Attachment to tradition as a source of orientation ran deep in Illich, but it was complemented by his urgent sense that the Church must now change radically or risk becoming little more than a picturesque museum. He characterized its peril in dramatic images, calling it “a sinking ship” and a sclerotic “giant” on the verge of “collapse.” The cultural wrappings of the Gospel had always been ­transitory—“Christ did not make the parish,” he remarks succinctly in his article on “The American Parish”—and now they would have to change again. Every Christian Is a Missionary Mission was a field that Illich believed contained seeds of renewal for the Church because mission, properly understood, was a t­ wo-​­way street. The Puerto Ricans, for example, had something to teach American Catholics about the communal dimension of Christian worship. And so did all of Latin America, in Illich’s view. In 1963, he expressed the hope that contact with Latin America might have “a revolutionary impact on Church institutions outside of Latin America.” The roots of this hope lay in the philosophy of mission that he spelled out in papers written in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These were later brought together in a volume called The Church, Change and Development, published in 1970. He believed, first of all, that mission is the very paradigm, or model of Christian life. He defines it as “bringing the church into view as a sign of Christ.” “Every Christian,” he says, “is a missionary who is sent out from the church in one world into another world.” The new world could be a new people but just as easily be “a new scientific milieu or a different social structure.” The Church is expressly portrayed as a “sign” rather than an institution. It points at a reality that it can never fully embody. Elsewhere he calls the Church “a sign lifted up among the nations” and “the worldly sign of ­other-​­worldly reality.” This emphasis on the Church as sign is interesting in two respects: first, as I’ve said, a sign points at something but does not replace it or substitute for it; and, second, a sign is only intelligible from within a given cultural horizon. Mission, therefore, involves making the Church, as a sign, perceptible within a new cultural context. The Gospel arrives, always, with baggage. “Never does the ­missionary bring the Word of God in a way that is abstracted from culture.”

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This was true from the beginning, Christ being “not only an actual person but a Jew . . . [who] lived at a particular time of world history.” Translation is always necessary, and translation may fail if the missionary church tries to preserve its own ­embodiment. “In South America,” Illich says, “it didn’t work; no Indian church was established, but a Spanish church on an Indian ground, and the cultural world of the i­ndigenous people collapsed.” A successful translation requires, above all, a certain poverty of spirit on the part of the missionary. He/she does not know and cannot know what form the church will take in its new surroundings. The new church will be built up “in the imagination and the wishes and the dreams of the community,” and “its structure will be expressed through the people’s own words and gestures.” The missionary, as a stranger and an “adoptee,” has no way of knowing what these dreams and gestures are. He must learn them rather than impose them. The missioner, in Illich’s view, stands at a frontier “between people and people, epoch and epoch, milieu and milieu.” Through him “faith becomes transparent in a new language.” But because the dialogue between cultures takes place in and through the ­missioner—​­it is “his witness [which] forms [the] dialogue”—he is “exposed to a double ­danger—​­either to betray his own past, or to rape the world to which he has been sent.” To walk this k­ nife-​­edge, he must, as T. S. Eliot says, “go by the way of ignorance.” In this voluntary dispossession, Illich says, the missionary imitates Christ. In Christ, God “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.” “To communicate himself perfectly to man,” Illich comments, “God had to assume a nature which was not His, without ceasing to be what He was. Under this light the Incarnation is the infinite prototype of missionary activity, the communication of the Gospel to those who are ‘other,’ through Him who entered a World by nature not His own.” The missioner may receive his own tradition back enriched, but only if he can first learn to bracket it. He may see the Church flourish on its new ground, but only if he allows it to be born ­again—​­a rebirth that may take a form so new and surprising that the Church, as it has been, will have to “strain to recognize her past in the mirror of the present.” Indeed, this changed form is so certain, if it is allowed, that missiology, the science of mission, can be defined as “the study of the Church as surprise, the Church as divinely inspired contemporary poetry; the developing of human society into a divine bud which will flower in eternity.” Because mission lives on the razor’s edge between betrayal and rape, and is therefore a task requiring extraordinary delicacy and tact, Illich proposed quite stringent conditions for judging who was fit to do it. In his long essay “Mission and Midwifery,” he describes several classes of persons through whom m ­ ission may

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“miscarry” and who should therefore be “discouraged from seeking m ­ issionary ­service.” The first he mentions are those who “cannot endure their heritage,” but rather than face their rejection of their inherited way of life, they choose mission as a way of putting “a holy label” on their “psychological escapism.” The second class are the national chauvinists who believe their national church to be the church in its best and final form and “try to sell overseas ‘what has worked so well at home.’” Next are the adventurers “fired by sensuous dreams of a jungle or martyrdom or growing a beard.” These yearnings can be trained and redeployed, Illich says, but instead they are being actively fostered by “the organized promotion of apostolic tourism.” (This was a swipe at programs like the Papal Volunteers for Latin America [PAVLA], which Illich viewed as an unctuous imitation of the Peace Corps.) And, finally, Illich indicts “the ecclesiastical conquistador of modern times . . . who wants to ‘save more souls’ or who derives satisfaction from heaping up baptisms at a rate undreamt of at home.” Illich thought that these “missionary miscarriages,” as he called them, could be avoided in two main ways: first by unsentimentally weeding out the patently unfit, and, second, by offering rigorous training to those who showed more aptitude. This training was offered first through the Institute for Intercultural Communication, which Illich instituted at Ponce after his move to Puerto Rico in 1956, and later at the center he established in Cuernavaca, Mexico, after 1961. It had five basic components. The first, always, was intensive language teaching. The second was transmission of cultural knowledge. The third was a grounding in the sociology of religion. It was sociologists of religion like Will Herberg and Martin Marty who had helped Illich to understand the peculiar form Roman Catholicism had taken in the United States, and he believed that all missioners needed to look “in the mirror which the behavioural sciences can offer to [them.]” Seeing one’s own church dispassionately as a limited and socially conditioned object, he believed, could lead to ­self-​­awareness, critical distance from one’s “inherited social system,” and, most crucially, an ability to distinguish between the church as a divine ordinance and the church as “a power among powers.” The fourth desideratum of missionary training was a certain grasp of religious science. What is necessary, Illich says, is a grasp of “fundamental mythology: the science which studies the way heroes and symbols grow into gods. [The missioner] must do so to understand that one people’s valid representation of the true God [ikons] can easily become another people’s idols, or representations of the psychological experience of s­ ham-​ ­gods.” The final requirement was prayer by which one could begin to understand “the grammar of silence.” The missionary must be silent before a world in which he

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has not yet learned to speak. This is yet another instance of the missionary as the very paradigm of Christian life, for only in silence can any of us face a God who is “infinitely distant, infinitely foreign.” Banished from Puerto Rico The work Illich did at the Center for Intercultural Communication was welcomed by his superiors in New York. The majority who attended were priests or members of religious orders, but teachers and social workers also came, and even, occasionally, firefighters and police officers who worked with Puerto Ricans. And Puerto Rico was another place, like Bremen, for which Illich made a partial exception to his claim of having always lived in a tent. “I felt very much attached to Puerto Rico . . . I would never say, ‘We Puerto Ricans . . . ’ but ‘Here in Puerto Rico, we . . . ’ I wouldn’t say that in the United States, or in Göttingen, or in Marburg, or in Mexico, or anywhere else. I would say, ‘Here people do this.’ But in Puerto Rico I said, ‘Here in Puerto Rico we wouldn’t do that.’” It was also in Puerto Rico that Illich would begin his fi ­ fteen-​­year study of the “phenomenology of school,” as he called the opening chapter of his Deschooling Society, the book that finally r­ esulted—​­a story I’ll tell in a later chapter. Illich’s sojourn on the island of Puerto Rico ended in 1959, when he ran afoul of the two bishops in whose jurisdiction he was working. Here is his freewheeling account of the affair: The two Irish Catholic bishops, Bishop James Davis, a s­ elf-​­seeking vain careerist in San Juan, and Bishop James McManus in Ponce, a ­well-​­meaning . . . turkey, had gotten themselves into politics by threatening excommunication for anybody who voted for a political party which didn’t proscribe the sale of condoms in drugstores. And this was a month before the nomination of a Catholic, John Kennedy, as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. It was not that I wanted to support Kennedy. But I felt that it was highly unsound to allow the religious issue to creep back into American politics, just because Puerto Rico was the only place where two American bishops had an absolute Catholic majority as their subjects. At the same time, with the assistance of the papal nuncio responsible for the area, they had also sponsored the creation of a Christian D ­ emocratic-​­like party on the island. So I had to do something, since most people didn’t take it seriously and those who did would not intervene. I attracted to myself the full odium of exploding that situation. I knew that I was sacrificing any possibility of doing anything publicly in Puerto Rico for many years without being mixed up with the memories of that political intervention.

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Illich gave a second, parallel account of this affair to journalist Francine du Plessix Gray for her 1970 profile of him in the New Yorker: “As a historian I saw that it violated the American tradition of church and State separation. As a politician, I predicted that there wasn’t enough strength in Catholic ranks to create a meaningful platform and that failure of McManus’s party would be disastrous on the already frail prestige of the Puerto Rican church. As a theologian, I believe that the Church must always condemn injustice in the light of the Gospel, but never has the right to speak in favor of a specific political party.” All arguments militated against the position of the Puerto Rican bishops, Illich says. Even if they had been right, they would have been wrong because they hadn’t the strength to accomplish their aim, and, therefore, risked injuring an already “frail” institution. But he believed that they were wrong, and on a question that Illich considered absolutely crucial: the character of the Church. He acknowledged the Church as a social and political fact. At his various institutes, as I pointed out earlier, he devoted considerable attention to the sociology of religion in the hope of cultivating in potential missionaries a hardheaded realism about the Church as a worldly power. But this was something to be recognized, faced, and allowed for in tribute to the undeniable necessities the world imposes. The vocation of the Church was quite the o­ pposite—​­to be a sign of freedom and transfigured vision. The images he uses are of a leaven by which a dough is made to rise and expand, a joke by which a contradiction is turned inside out to reveal the divine humor, a pearl found by surprise in a net. Wendell Berry, at the culmination of his novel Jayber Crow, adds another image that I think Illich would have liked: “This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water.” These are all images of something evanescent or, like the mustard seed, potential. The Church, for Illich, is an ­intimation—​­a whisper, a scent, a smile. As a sociological reality, it can only create a hospitable space for these solicitations and surprises. It cannot command them or guarantee their punctual appearance. But the Church can fatally compromise its vocation, and this, Illich believed, bishops Davis and McManus were doing. His public criticism of them was the second time that Illich had taken a stand as a result of his opposition to Church involvement in politics. The first was his protest, with others, against Pius XII’s intervention in the Italian election of 1948 while Illich was a student. The same stance had also persuaded him when he was first assigned to Puerto Rico as vice chancellor of

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the Catholic University in 1956 that he “should no longer preside over a Christian community as a priest.” I knew that I couldn’t possibly engage in an educational, administrative job there without considering it primarily as a political activity. . . . For my own purposes, and because I liked to do it, I bought a little hut for twenty dollars in a fishing village, Playa Cortada, and I said Sunday mass for them. It was a little village of poor fishermen who earned most of their money working in a sugarcane factory for a couple of months a year. That was a good experience, but the moment I went to Puerto Rico in 1956, I got out of any kind of official relationship to a bishop for whom I would work in the pastoral care of his people. I didn’t want to get mixed up in a conflict between the priestly office of making the otherworldly unity and brotherhood of the liturgy real and my personal stance as a politician.

In the understanding Illich shares with his tradition, a priest acts in persona ­Christi—“in the person of Christ”—or, in an alternative formulation, as an alter ­Christus—“another Christ.” He believed that this part could only be performed by someone who had given himself to it utterly, as he had in New York, and not by someone with the kind of social agenda his station at the university inevitably involved. Later, as we shall see, his insistence on distinguishing and keeping separate these two phases of the Church’s life would become a sticking point in his relations with emergent “liberation theologies” in Latin America when they began to move into an active political role. Meanwhile, Illich was thrown out of Puerto Rico. Historian Todd Hartch gives this account: The last straw came when Illich disobeyed a direct order from McManus forbidding priests from attending a meal with Governor Muñoz. Despite Cardinal Spellman’s continued support, in September Bishop McManus ordered Illich to leave his post at the university. “There is so much evidence that you are still an active element in the opposition to the Christian Party and an active collaborator with those who in the past have been enemies of the Catholic Religion and in the present proclaim heretical doctrine as the official policy and part of their political program,” said the bishop . . . “that I must now consider your presence as dangerous to the Diocese of Ponce and its institutions.” Looking back at the incident a few years later, McManus said, “My opinion is that Illich thinks that he is the messiah, and that only he can save the Church.”

Illich was finished in Puerto Rico. It was time for him to consider his next move.

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Cuernavaca

2

Perhaps no comparable acreage in Christendom has been so thoroughly mauled, mythologized, fretted over, warned against, declared off limits, exorcised, ­deleted—​­and reinstated with honor. So small and modest a place for such loud noises . . .  —Daniel Berrigan

After Bishop McManus ordered him out of the diocese of Ponce in 1959, Illich entered a period of s­ elf-​­questioning. His associates in New York, those with whom he had created the Institute for Intercultural Communication, wanted to expand the scope of the work they had begun in Puerto Rico, by now reaching out to Latin America as a whole. According to one of these colleagues, Father Joseph F­ itzpatrick, a professor of sociology at Fordham and a friend and confidant of Illich’s, they had already realized by 1960 that Puerto Rico was not a suitable base for this enlarged ambition because “the people in Latin America saw it as a little gringoland.” So the question of a new, expanded intercultural institute was in the air. But Illich also seems to have been facing questions about the nature and direction of his religious vocation at this time. Among the strains of ­twentieth-​­century ­Catholicism that attracted him was the movement inspired by the example of Charles de F ­ oucauld (1858–1916). De F ­ oucauld, declared a saint by Pope Benedict in 2005, was a French nobleman who had been a soldier in north Africa and then became a priest and a member of the ­Cistercian Order of the Strict O ­ bservance—​­the Trappists, as they are commonly known. He eventually established a hermitage in southern Algeria and shared the life of the Tuareg people there, learning their language and working on a dictionary and grammar that was eventually published in four volumes after his death. He was killed in 1916 by hostile Bedouins, who dragged him from the fort he had helped build for the protection of the Tuareg and shot him through the head. Several lay and religious fraternities grew up in his memory, including

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the Little Brothers of Jesus, who carried on the new desert monasticism that de Foucauld had inaugurated at Tamanrasset in the mountainous part of the Sahara where he had lived and died. In October 1959, Illich journeyed to Tamanrasset. He arrived there, by his own account, without a word of Arabic and knowing only that he was looking for the house of the Little Brothers. He was eventually led to Carlo Carretto, a man he had known in Rome as a leader of the Italian Catholic movement, which, Illich recalled, “played a frequently sinister role in a­nti-​­communist politics under Pius XII.” This was the very movement Illich had opposed as a ­student. Now ­Carretto was a monk who made his living “cutting up old tires and ­making indestructible sandals.” He showed Illich to the tomb of de ­Foucauld and then to the high mountain cave at Asekrem where de Foucauld had made his retreats. “­ [Carretto] had furnished the cave with a bed of stone,” Illich wrote, “and ­protected it from the icy winds which blow without cease at several thousand feet in the Ahaggar mountains.” There Illich made a retreat of forty days, observing “complete exterior and interior silence.” One of the things on his mind was whether he should himself join the Little Brothers. Something of the character of the ­question he was asking himself can perhaps be inferred from what he says of Carretto, the former political activist who was now “dying to the world of power, the world of good causes, the world of big words and the world of political ­parties.” By the time Illich was ready to return to North ­America, he had decided that ­Carretto’s path was not the one he would take. When he announced his decision to C ­ arretto, the older man took away the rubber tire sandals he had first given Illich and replaced them with a new pair with purple thread at the toes. These were the sandals, he said, of the Little Monsignors of Jesus. (Illich had been made a monsignor by Cardinal Spellman while in Puerto Rico, and the purple thread satirized this exalted rank.) C ­ arretto’s ­gesture was playful but also ominous. However modest their style of life, the Little Brothers were an influential order. One of the founders and the first superior of the order, René Voillaume, was an intimate of Giovanni Montini, who was Pope Paul VI between 1963 and 1978. Voillaume knew Illich and kept tabs on him, visiting him in Puerto Rico and later in Mexico, but there was an underlying testiness to the relationship that was aggravated by Illich’s decision not to join the Little B ­ rothers. When Illich, years later, enumerated for me the reasons why he lost the s­ upport of the Vatican in the later 1960s, he mentioned this uneasy relationship with Voillaume and the Little Brothers as one of the sources of his disfavor.

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Latin America Illich apparently left Tamanrasset with his mind made up. Rather than “dying to the world of power,” as he said of Carretto, he would take up the task his colleagues had projected: to create a new, expanded intercultural institute that could address all of Latin America. He began by undertaking a meandering, unplanned journey of exploration through much of the continent, starting from Santiago, Chile, and ending four months later in Caracas, Venezuela. This trip reinforced and extended the views Illich already held about mission. First, it strengthened his conviction that social service is not the proper task of the Church. In “giving alms,” he says, the Church masks its fear of change by trying to make itself socially useful. But sometimes, he goes on, one has to help by “refusing to give alms,” however hard that may be. He illustrates this point, in his 1967 essay “The Seamy Side of Charity,” with an anecdote from this trip through Latin America. He writes: “I remember once having stopped food distribution from sacristies in an area where there was great hunger. I still feel the sting of an accusing voice saying, ‘Sleep well, for the rest of your life, with the death of dozens of children on your conscience.’ ” Historian Todd Hartch, whose book The Prophet of Cuernavaca is the first f­ ull-​­length study in English of this period in Illich’s life, concludes that the incident in question happened in Colombia, where “[Illich] encountered American priests who distributed U.S. government powdered milk, creating ‘milk Christians’ who saw the church primarily as supplier of material needs.” The story is somewhat obscure, since it is unclear by what authority Illich could have put a stop to this milk distribution if he was just passing through. But if children really did die as a result of his order, it certainly indicates how insistently the idea was growing on him that the Church’s role as a development and social service agency must end, as well as how ruthless he was prepared to be in pursuit of this goal. A second consequence of Illich’s journey was that it brought him into direct contact with American missionaries in Latin America. He did not like what he saw. The American Church, he felt, was imposing itself on the Latin American Church by right of its greater wealth, confidence, and cultural prestige. He feared that the result would be a trampling down of the unique local strains of Christianity that had grown up in Latin America. Illich admired these vernacular forms, though he didn’t idealize them. I’ve already quoted his opinion that the Spanish mission in South America “didn’t work,” producing only “a Spanish church on an Indian ground” and not, as should have happened, a fully Indian church. But even this fundamental colonial deformation did not prevent the Latin American Church

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from beginning to express over time the genius of the various places where it took root. These cultural adaptations were of great interest to Illich and had been since he and his friend Lenz ­Kriss-​­Rettenbeck studied local flowerings of folk ­Christianity in the area around Salzburg in the 1940s. He explained his “hobby” in a lecture he gave at the Colegio de México in the summer of 1983: The library of this institution holds an immense deposit of Latin American superstitions. In thirty years of labor I have helped to amass this stuff. Superstitious religiosity has been for three decades my h ­ obby—​­neither theology, nor just any popular religiosity, but superstition. I learned from K ­ riss-​­Rettenbeck to call superstition the popular beliefs and forms of behavior which came into existence under the aegis, the shield, of a church. Therefore, they can be studied in contrast to the dogmas taught and the rituals propagated by the organization, the ideologies promoted by the Church. In this narrow sense, superstition exists only in the shadow of a powerful church. In this sense, superstition is not just any syncretism [the merging or blending of different religions], but the use popular religiosity makes out of the Church.

Illich’s colleague in “amassing this stuff ” was Valentina Borremans, who for many years traveled throughout Latin America collecting materials that, in her words, “reflected local devotions and . . . syncretist rituals, religious iconography and poetry, and the pastoral campaigns of the various churches and sects.” To speak of these materials as specimens of superstition may seem to denigrate them, but one has to understand the wide scope Illich gives to the term superstition. In the lecture I have just quoted, he talks about the way in which scientific terms with a precise denotation in their original context can turn into superstitions when they become part of popular talk. Medicine and education would be further examples of “powerful churches” under whose aegis popular superstitions proliferate. The superstitions of Latin American popular religiosity are, in this sense, no different from the superstitions to be found in the folk Christianity of the Salzburg region or the more ­up-​­to-​­date superstitions that thrive in the shadows of modern ­mega-​­institutions that are the “powerful churches” of our day. Illich was obviously fond of the popular Latin American religiosity that he had made his hobby, and even as he called it by a blunt name, he saw no reason why this homegrown form should be replaced by the more advanced superstitions of American missionaries. Illich’s journey through Latin America brought him to the conclusion, in Todd Hartch’s summary, “that the missionaries he met during this time conceived of their role as making the Latin American Church look more like the Church in

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the United States, saving Latin America from communism, and building costly schools and church buildings.” Shortly afterward, Hartch continues, Illich told Bishop Manuel Larrain, president of the Latin American bishops’ organization, that he was “prepared if necessary to stop the coming of the missionaries to Latin America.” He was already convinced, based on what he had “learned in Puerto Rico,” that “there are only a few people who are not stunted or wholly destroyed by lifelong work ‘for the poor’ in a foreign country.” Now he had direct evidence that these especially gifted few were not often to be met with among contemporary American missionaries to Latin America. Illich came to this conclusion just as a major American missionary initiative was getting under way. Beginning in the 1950s, the idea had spread within the Church that Latin America was an “­under-​­serviced” area. As early as 1946, John Considine, a member of the missionary Maryknoll order, had written Call for Forty Thousand, a book in which he asked for that number of missionary priests to be sent to Latin America. (By his calculation that was what would be required to bring the region up to the standard of one priest for every thousand believers.) In 1955, Pope Pius XII called for more aid to the region and set up a Pontifical Commission for Latin America to coordinate it. Pope John XXIII, who assumed the papacy in 1958, went further. Under the influence of Considine’s call, he put forward a plan by which the American Church would send 10 percent of its personnel to Latin America. (Ten percent was chosen as the amount of a traditional tithe to the Church.) Both the pope and the Pontifical Commission also supported Considine’s plan for a corps of lay missionaries to be called Papal Volunteers for Latin America (PAVLA). The Development Decade The year 1960, when all this activity was taking place in the Roman Catholic Church, was also the beginning of “the development decade,” though the United Nations General Assembly didn’t officially apply this name until 1962. Development organizations were p ­ roliferating—​­the Peace Corps in the United States, the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO) in Canada, and the Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) in Britain all appeared around the same time that the church was incubating PAVLA. The newly elected Kennedy administration increased American development assistance to Latin America and called it the Alliance for Progress. “Development” had been in the air since President Harry Truman had announced “a bold new program . . . for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas” in 1949. Now it was going into overdrive.

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54 / Ivan Illich

During the later 1950s, Illich had had a f­ ront-​­row seat at the emergence of this new ideology. As both a Latino country and an American territory, Puerto Rico had been something of a laboratory for the economic development policies that were now supposed to drive the development decade. Teodoro Moscoso, the man Kennedy named to coordinate the Alliance for Progress, had made his name in Puerto Rico, where he was the architect of a program of investment, industrialization, and modernization called Operation Bootstrap. Illich had been his colleague on the Consejo Superior de Enseñanza, the council that governed all educational institutions on the island. When Illich joined the council, appointed automatically as the vice rector of the University of Ponce, Moscoso was already its president. Expansion of the educational system was integral to the development push, and Illich at first was enthusiastic: “I had begun . . . as a believer, a rabid fighter for the implementation of the law which said every Puerto Rican had to have at least five years of schooling. And I had carried my support to the point where I had opposed any further public money flowing into the university before enough money was in the public education system to implement that law.” This enthusiasm waned, as Illich grew more curious about what schools actually do when, as he put it, “I put into parentheses their claim to educate.” Skepticism about development grew in tandem with his analysis of schools, and in time he came to see both as elements of “a war on subsistence.” In essays written during the 1960s, he predicted that the package of prefab solutions then being promoted as development would have the perverse effect of “modernizing” poverty, misdirecting aspiration to illusory and unattainable goals, and undermining the culturally shaped ability to thrive and be satisfied within given limits. This detailed analysis of development was still to come in 1960, but Illich was already quite clear, as I have shown, that the Church had no place in politics. “It is blasphemous,” he would write a few years later, “to use the gospel to prop up any social or political system.” This made him suspicious from the outset of the fact that the development decade and the missionary decade appeared to be beginning in lockstep with one another. Illich and his associates sought a place where they could train, influence, and sometimes interrupt this new flow of people and resources from the United States to Latin America. They settled on Cuernavaca, a tourist town south of Mexico City. “The city of eternal spring,” as Alexander von Humboldt had called it, had long been a draw for foreigners, and Illich considered it “a place already so touristy that any damage which outsiders could do to a Mexican town had already been done.” He also had an affinity with its bishop, Sergio Méndez Arceo, who would become a lifelong friend. Illich called

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on him in ­October 1960 and began what Illich told journalist Francine du Plessix Gray would become a uninterrupted ­nine-​­hour conversation by announcing, “I would like to start, under your auspices, a center of ­de-​­Yankeefication.” Don Sergio approved, and shortly thereafter, Illich incorporated the Centro de Investigaciones ­Culturales as the successor to the Institute for Intercultural Communication. The Center for Intercultural Formation What followed was controversial from the start. Todd Hartch, citing Illich’s statement to Bishop Larrain that he was prepared to “stop the coming of the missionaries,” argues that Illich began his institute with the purpose of subverting the Church’s missionary initiative. Illich too sometimes presented the story this way in later years. But, in 1960, John Considine, who had inspired the Church’s missionary program and then stumped for it for fifteen years, still considered Illich the best man to train the Latin ­America–​­bound missionaries. Not everyone agreed: Paul Tanner, the general secretary of the American bishops’ organization, viewed Illich as a loose cannon and said so. But Considine was the director of the Church’s Latin America Bureau, and his view prevailed. Through the offices of Fordham University, a new organization called the ­Center for Intercultural Formation (CIF) was set up with Illich as its director and John Considine on its governing board. Illich was given the formal title of “assistant to the president” of Fordham. He and his colleagues Feodora Stancioff and Brother Gerry Morris found an old hotel, the Hotel Chulavista, once “the best . . . in Cuernavaca,” to serve as their premises. Cardinal Spellman of New York and ­Cardinal Cushing of Boston both gave their blessing. Initial funding came in the form of a $12,000 loan from Fordham and a grant of $40,000 from the Pontifical ­Commission for Latin America. By June 1961, CIF was ready to begin its first ­four-​ ­month course. ­Thirty-​­five lay Catholics and t­wenty-​­seven clergy were enrolled. The curriculum, in addition to intensive Spanish-language training, focused on the history and culture of Latin America and the philosophy and ethics of mission. In choosing Illich to head up missionary training for Latin America, John ­Considine must have been aware of Illich’s view that not everyone who wanted to be a missionary was necessarily fit to be one. Considine admired the training courses that Illich had given in Puerto Rico since 1956, and in those courses Illich had always made it clear that he considered mission an extraordinarily demanding vocation. But it is unlikely that Considine knew the full extent of Illich’s ­misgivings or that Illich shared these with him. It is Todd Hartch’s judgment that

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the Cuernavaca center would not have been “financially viable” without the support of the American Church and that Illich had used “ambiguity, flattery and misdirection” to keep Considine in his camp during the crucial period when CIF was establishing itself. This seems undeniable. When I first heard of John Considine, during interviews I did with Illich in the later 1980s and 1990s, Illich spoke of him as “an American manipulator” whose “ghastly letter” to Pope John XXIII had bamboozled the old pontiff into supporting Considine’s missionary scheme for Latin America. There was no suggestion of a relationship between them, and I would not have ­imagined from what he said that Illich in 1963 would have been writing to Considine about the relationship of “mutual respect” they enjoyed. I can only conclude that ­Considine wasn’t the only one doing the manipulating. Todd Hartch sees the way in which Illich played John Considine as just one instance of Illich’s disingenuousness at this time. For Hartch, Illich was “­anti-​­missionary” from the o­ utset—​­Hartch even speaks at one point of an “­anti-​ ­missionary plot,” as if it had all been carefully planned. I think a clearer distinction has to be drawn between being against mission in general and being against the particular ensemble of missionary programs launched by the American Church in the early ’60s. Illich was certainly against the latter and never really hid it. Looking back in 1967, he wrote: “Throughout the 1960s our experience and reputation in the intensive training of foreign professionals for assignment to South America, and the fact that we continued to be the only center specializing in this type of education, ensured a continuous flow of students through our ­center—​ ­notwithstanding our stated, basically subversive purpose.” That their subversive purpose was “stated” from the outset also bears on any evaluation of Illich’s relationship to John Considine. Illich was hiding in plain sight. Considine chose him anyway, over Paul Tanner’s objections, because of the high standard Illich set for both language and missionary training. Their trajectories were utterly different, but for a time they crossed, and while they did, Considine’s credulity must have been just as great as Illich’s deviousness. It was certainly the case that, from the beginning, Illich and his staff turned away a lot of ­would-​­be missionaries and lay volunteers. Of that first entering class of ­sixty-​ ­two, only ­thirty-​­two got ­through—​­and some complained of harsh treatment. One priest wrote, of Illich: “The Monsignor is aiming too high, too high for me and others of my capacity.” Another unhappy priest was displeased by the “rigorism” of Illich and his staff. A French Canadian woman who attended in 1962 felt that the “program . . . brings students to the edge of hysteria and chase[s] half of them away.” Even those who thought that Illich’s pedagogical methods were for the good

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admitted that he could be a severe and demanding taskmaster. “I love the way he tortures his missionaries,” said his friend Bishop Méndez Arceo. “Sometimes I cry with emotion at watching aged men, elderly priests shed their skin under his care.” Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan, sent to Cuernavaca when his antiwar activities alarmed his superiors in New York, complained of finding in Illich and his colleagues “a lot of intellectual violence aimed at our religious left.” CIF, as Illich had intended, quickly became much more than just a missionary training center. Its library expanded; its journal, CIF Reports, became a voice for various cultural ferments then bubbling in Latin America; and a publishing program was begun. As a result of meetings held under CIF auspices, a separate institute devoted to specifically Latin American pastoral methods was established. Its stated purpose was to foster “vernacular pastoral methods in a prophetic, servant Church of the poor.” This was one of the first stirrings of what became known as “liberation theology,” a movement in which CIF initially played a founding role. Illich later opposed this tendency, insofar as it involved a politicization of the church, but the project of a distinctive Latin American theology was initiated at a meeting he convened at CIF’s Brazilian outpost in Petropolis in early 1964, and CIF Reports was the journal in which its first expressions were exchanged. These developments constituted the positive side of Illich’s program. He wasn’t just trying to keep away missionaries who had an ethnocentric and clerical/bureaucratic conception of the Church; he was also trying to put forward a new image of Latin America as a potential source of renewal. In 1963 he expressed his hope that Latin America, in the sense of both “occupation with it and preparation for it,” would have a “revolutionary influence on Church institutions outside of Latin America.” “We can therefore,” he said, “ever more speak of the responsibility which Latin America has towards the world and which it is exercising though CIF.” Illich, in other words, did not see North America as a rich civilization whose bounty ought to be made to overflow into the lands of its southern neighbors. He saw it as a world itself in need of healing and rededication. Hélder Câmara An important influence on Illich during this period was Brazilian bishop Hélder Câmara. Illich had started an offshoot of CIF in the Brazilian city of Petropolis. (This center later played, according to Illich, “a strange, important role before and after the military takeover [in 1964].” He did not elaborate, and what this role was has never, so far as I know, been told.) Illich went to the new center himself “as the

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first student to learn Portuguese,” and Câmara, then the archbishop of Olinda and Recife, undertook to educate him in matters Brazilian: “He made me read at least one book by a Brazilian author or about a Brazilian author’s work every day . . . and then in the evening he sat down with me and that author for hours of conversation right across the spectrum of Brazilian politics, literary genres, mentalities. He then sent me out, mostly by bus, for a ­two-​­month trip through what he wanted me to know of Brazil before I opened my big mouth. I’ve never had a tutor like that.” Illich described Câmara as “a tiny little guy, almost completely bald, without flesh, skin and bones, with a deeply lined face, radiating goodness, a childlike wizard.” When he became an archbishop, he opened the palace that went with the job to community use and lived in a little sacristy in a suburb of Recife. Illich stayed with him there in “a little room . . . just big enough for two hammocks” and remembered regular visits from prisoners paid by the military regime to come to his door and threaten him. On another, earlier occasion, Illich was staying with Câmara at the Palacio São Jaquim, the palace of the archbishop of Rio de Janeiro to whom Câmara was then an auxiliary. He had an appointment with a general and said to me, “Ivan I want you to sit in the back of the room while I have this meeting.” This general was one of the founding fathers of Pro Familia in Brazil and later on one of the most cruel torturers. Hélder already knew what would happen. He had a conversation with him. After an hour, he let the general out of his study and flopped down on a chair next to me. Complete silence. And then he looked at me and said, “You must never give up. As long as a person is alive, somewhere beneath the ashes is a little bit of remaining fire, and all our task is . . . ”—and then he put his hands, funny, skinny hands, around his mouth and said, “You must blow . . . carefully, very carefully, blow . . . you’ll see if it lights up. You mustn’t worry whether it takes fire again or not. All you have to do is blow.”

Câmara, in his courage, kindness, and simplicity, became, for Illich, “one of the great examples one can emulate.” The spirit that Illich recognized in Hélder Câmara was a spirit he responded to whenever he encountered it, and this, I think, is germane to the question of whether he was, as Todd Hartch says, ­anti-​­missionary. Illich certainly turned some people away from Latin America and, in that sense, took it upon himself to judge who was suitable for missionary service, but I know of no case where Illich failed to recognize true missionary spirit. “I can remember,” he told me, “a dozen or two out of the two thousand whom I personally observed, who were heroic and

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whom, in the Middle Ages, I would have recognized for the catalogue of saints.” He ­continued: There was, for example, a certain Helen, who went with the Papal Volunteers for a period of three years, into the high Andes, and then applied for another three years. She was accused and persecuted by her own organization and the U.S. government, simply for the example she gave. Along with a Peruvian woman, she attended dying people for six years, sitting up with them when they were beyond being able to speak and all they could seek was somebody who held their hand. Well she did this, instead of engaging in community organization, as they wanted her to do. Helen has remained to this day one of the pillars to which I hold on.

Illich was not in favor of the Papal Volunteers. He thought they depressed local initiative and displaced local people, serving, in effect, as cheap labor because their salaries were paid from the United States. And he said so in a public letter to PAVLA’s director, written in 1965, in which he states his view that the organization’s “principal purpose”—to recruit lay Catholic volunteers for Latin ­America—​­is “prejudicial to the Church.” But this opposition in no way impaired his appreciation of Helen. The distinction is crucial. Mission or Collusion? Illich’s criticism of American missions in Latin America rested on three pillars. The first was his understanding that even though the Latin American Church was “a Spanish Church on an Indian ground” rather than a full translation of ­Christianity into terms indigenous to the region, it still had developed distinctive forms of piety and celebration. He felt these forms to be threatened by American missionaries, whose “compulsion to do good” made them blind to their own chauvinism. Lip service might be paid to the idea that one would learn more than one taught, receive more than one gave, and so on, but in the end, the emphasis was not on learning but on helping, teaching, ­sacrificing—​­a “developed” society graciously reaching out to an “underdeveloped” one. Through the American missionary program, the Latin American church was being “return[ed] to what the Conquest stamped her: a colonial plant that blooms because of foreign cultivation.” Native initiative was being dampened and native imagination stunted as American solutions were applied to Latin American predicaments. In some cases, he believed that local people were actually blocked or displaced by the availability of “free” foreign

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help. It was for this that he criticized PAVLA in his open letter to its director. In other cases, he thought the injury was to the inventiveness of the Latin ­American churches: Why devise a new way of doing things when stopgaps are available to prop up and ­prolong the old and ­familiar structures? These difficulties were compounded, in Illich’s view, by the nature of what the American Church was offering the Latin A ­ merican Church. As early as Considine’s “call for forty thousand” in 1946, the problem that was being addressed in the Latin American Church was a manpower shortage, not a spiritual insufficiency. And this shortage itself was rooted in the structure of the Latin ­American Church. “A large proportion of Latin American Church personnel,” Illich wrote, “are presently employed in private institutions that serve the middle and upper classes and frequently produce highly respectable profits . . . [They] are engaged in bureaucratic functions, usually related to peddling sacraments, s­ acramentals, and superstitious blessings.” With missionary help, the Latin Church could avoid reassigning this existing “personnel” to “pastorally meaningful tasks.” The second criticism Illich made of the missionary crusade was the emphasis placed on traditional infrastructure, particularly church buildings and schools. “It is easy to come by big sums to build a new church in a jungle or a high school in a suburb, and then to staff the plants with new missioners. A patently irrelevant pastoral system is artificially and expensively sustained, while basic research for a new and vital one is considered an extravagant luxury.” This approach, Illich thought, encouraged dependency as well as discouraging more adventurous thinking. “Instead of learning how to get along with less money or else close up shop, bishops are being trapped into needing more money now and bequeathing an institution impossible to run in the future.” Preference for the tangible also dovetailed with the contemporaneous development push: school building was a priority of the Alliance for Progress as much as it was part of the Church agenda. The overlap concerned Illich. The Church has become an agent trusted to run programs aimed at social change. It is committed enough to produce some results. But when it is threatened by real change, it withdraws rather than permit social awareness to spread like wildfire. . . . The receiver inevitably gets the message: the “padre” stands on the side of W. R. Grace and C ­ ompany, Esso, the Alliance for Progress, democratic government, the ­AFL-​­CIO, and whatever is holy in the Western pantheon. . . . By becoming an “official” agency of one kind of ­progress, the Church ceases to speak for the underdog who is outside all agencies but is an ­ever-​­growing majority.

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As an example of the Church at first promoting change and then withdrawing when it becomes too “real,” Illich cites “the smothering of the Brazilian radio schools.” This was an attempt to use radio to foster basic education that spread, as Illich says, like wildfire in the early ’60s. Church support was withdrawn when the radical potential of the radio schools began to become clear. The Church in many countries in Latin America played a reactionary political role at this ­time—​­Illich’s many connections to Brazil made him particularly aware of Church complicity with the brutal military junta that assumed power there in 1964—and he felt that missionary aid was helping to sustain and support this role. The third pillar of Illich’s critique was his view that the missionary crusade was distracting attention from the changes that he felt were necessary in the Church. “Exporting church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church,” he wrote. “North and South American authorities, ­differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices of a clerical and irrelevant Church.” I will have more to say in the next chapter about how he i­magined this new Church. The point I want to make here is that he thought that what presented itself as mission was in fact collusion between two obsolete bureaucracies. The American Church felt validated by its heroic charity; the Latin Church, with technical and manpower assistance from the United States, could “transform the o­ ld-​­style hacienda of God . . . into the Lord’s supermarket.” Radical change was postponed. But, according to Illich, only radical change could save the institution. He therefore bent all his considerable rhetorical resources on dramatizing the need for revolution and warning of the danger should revolution be preempted by temporizing reforms. Again and again in his writings of the ’60s he uses the image of a patient in need of surgery who gets only a pill in preference to “the risk of applying the knife.” He says that “a limping ecclesiastical assistance program uses [American missionaries and volunteers] as palliatives to ease the pain of a cancerous structure.” And he predicts that the palliative “will both stop the patient from seeking a surgeon’s advice and addict him to the drug.” None of this, in my view, makes Illich universally “­anti-​­missionary.” In fact, I would say that the problem, for him, was not too much missionary spirit but too little. He imagined mission as a transformative e­ ncounter—​­a willingness to lose oneself in another culture in order to bring the Gospel to light in a new form within that new context. What he found in the papal programs for Latin America was a reactionary defense of the status quo and a holding action against “a new church.” How he conceived this church will be my subject in the next chapter.

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3

Church

It is my thesis that only the church can “reveal” to us the full meaning of development. To live up to this task the church must recognize that she is growing powerless to orient or produce development. The less efficient she is as a power the more effective she can be as the celebrant of the mystery. —Ivan Illich

In the summer of 1968, Ivan Illich was summoned to Rome by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the ­Faith—​­the modern descendant of the I­ nquisition—​­commonly known as the Holy Office. There he was given a questionnaire that required him to answer various accusations that had been made, anonymously, against him. The document was divided into four sections: “Dangerous Doctrinal Opinions,” “­ Erroneous Ideas Against the Church,” “Bizarre Conceptions Concerning the Clergy,” and “Subversive Interpretations Concerning the Liturgy and Ecclesiastical Discipline.” The questions that followed were as tendentious as the four subject headings. What they all had in common was the idea that Illich’s views about the Church were, at least, heterodox, if not actually heretical. Things had come to a strange pass for one who had always insisted on his strict orthodoxy. The keen embarrassment he felt for himself, and even more for his Church, is reflected in his reticence about the whole matter in later years. Just some “silly Roman business,” he said to me twenty years later when I tried to find out what it had meant to him. What Illich’s actual views on the Church were, and how they led him into conflict with the Vatican, is the subject of this chapter. In the period after Illich was sent for by the Holy Office, he spoke extensively to American journalist Francine du Plessix Gray in connection with a profile of him she was preparing for The New Yorker. He told her, among other things, that his attitude toward the Church was informed by “a scrupulous distinction” between what he called “the Church as She and the Church as It.”

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She is that surprise in the net, the pearl. She is the mystery, the kingdom amongst us. The identity of the Church as She will remain through whatever changes She’s currently undergoing, which are no greater than the changes She underwent under Constantine, or in Abelard’s time. Those who believe in Her believe in something that cannot be said in words. No pronouncements, however stupid, be they on birth control or clerical celibacy, can lessen my love for Her, and my faith in Her Mystery. People who leave the Church because of what She says don’t understand love. It, however, is the institution, the temporary incarnational form. I can talk about It only in sociological terms. I’ve never had trouble creating factions and dissent towards the Church as It.

This was not a distinction that Illich’s superiors, broadly speaking, were prepared to recognize. Despite the new tone set by the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, there were still many in the Church who regarded the institution as a precarious and perpetually endangered b ­ astion—​­not the “kingdom amongst us” so much as the kingdom’s last embattled outpost lapped by threatening tides of modernity. This defensiveness had entered an acute phase when Pius IX propounded the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 and then, six years later, refused to leave the Vatican after Italian troops occupied Rome and ended papal rule over central Italy. For the next 59 years the Vatican kept its drawbridge raised, as Pius and four of his successors chose to remain “prisoners” in the Vatican rather than appear to accept the Italian government’s jurisdiction over Rome. In 1910 Pope Pius X required all priests and members of religious orders to swear an “oath against modernism.” The oath committed all “clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in ­philosophical-​­theological seminaries” to the view that Church teaching embodied the “absolute and immutable truth,” whose “meaning” and “purport” never varied through time. This reinforced the impression of an institution under siege. Illich swore the oath himself when he became a priest and, in later years, sometimes joked about his having done so as a badge of pride as well as a sign of his having walked the earth when dinosaurs still roamed. But there is no doubt that the oath, like the papacy’s captivity, signified a profoundly defensive psychology that continued well into the era after Vatican II. In this atmosphere there was not much sympathy for the idea that Illich had promoted in his very first writings, and ever afterward, that “a critical attitude” is “one of the areas in which love for the Church can develop.” Nevertheless, Illich’s distinction between the Church as She and the Church as It was no more than a reformulation of an idea with deep roots in Catholic doctrine. Tyconius in his Liber Regularam (Book of Rules), written in the later fourth cen-

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tury, had supposed that the Church has what he called a “bipartite body” in which good and evil were intermingled. Augustine differentiated the earthly city, where the Church must live, from the heavenly city. The Church ­Militant (on earth) had been distinguished form the Church Triumphant (in heaven), the visible church from the invisible church. In an essay called “The Vanishing C ­ lergyman,” published the year before he was summoned to Rome, Illich had argued that he was putting forward nothing that was “theologically new” in insisting on the difference between the church as the breath of heaven and the church as a contingent sociological construction. He was, rather, merely “spelling out the [contemporary] consequences” of an established view of the Church. Only such a spelling out, he said, could make “a thesis as orthodox as mine” appear radical and worthy of discussion. His thesis was that the Church stood in need of radical renewal, but that this could be brought about without in any way abandoning or compromising the fundamentals of Christian faith. In fact, Illich quite sincerely regarded himself as a traditionalist and theological conservative. For him, tradition was not the antithesis of change but the basis on which it could be freely accomplished. Repetition and renovation had, in his mind, a dialectical rather than an antagonistic relationship. One does the same thing differently rather than somehow conjuring the new out of thin air. It was a posture that was often misunderstood, as a story Illich told me in 1989 will illustrate. He had recently been in Rome, he said, conferring with a group of bishops. Half of these bishops were younger than he and half older. The conference was held at the Almo Collegio Capranica, the Roman College, at which he had lived as a student at the Gregorian University in the late 1940s. On the way up the stairs to the conference room was a landing where a crucifix hung. Those passing, in his student days, had kissed the Lord’s foot as they passed, and this had been going on for so long that a cap had been placed on the foot where it had been worn away by centuries of kisses. Illich kissed it as he passed and immediately perceived that he had scandalized all of his c­ ompanions—​­the younger ones because such devotions were now frowned upon, the older because the younger had convinced them that such practices could impede dialogue with “the world.” The embarrassment of these bishops, in Illich’s view, represented the loss of the crucial idea that tradition, properly understood and freely appropriated, is not an impediment to change. This had been an important idea, in the theological milieu that had formed him, under the name of ­ressourcement—“return to the sources.” It would later be put forward by British theologians John Milbank, ­Catherine ­Pickstock, and Graham Ward under the name of Radical Orthodoxy.

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In order to recover what Milbank called “the unknown future that mankind has missed and must seek to rejoin,” these theologians argued, the postmodern would have to be informed by the premodern. Illich seems to me a pioneer of this view. I can remember him joking in 1970, when he was very much en vogue, that he appeared a­ vant-​­garde to his contemporaries only because his strict orthodoxy had become unrecognizable as such. This was not the whole s­ tory—​­there were critics, as we shall see, who saw him as a c­ rypto-​­reactionary—​­but it is certainly true that many who read him enthusiastically in the 1970s failed to detect his roots in t­ radition. The Vanishing Clergyman Illich’s traditionalism often went unremarked because his thoroughgoing radicalism hid it from those who thought of tradition and change as alternatives. As early as his 1955 essay on “The American Parish,” he argued that the Church, historically, had taken diverse social forms and would certainly take new ones in future. In “The Vanishing Clergyman,” which he says he “drafted” in 1959 but didn’t publish until 1967, he lays out his position more fully. Illich accepted, always, that the Church exists by “divine mandate,” even if he could laugh about the fact that the fallible and inconstant Peter was the “rock” on which it was founded. But he saw no divine ordination in the Church’s current institutional shell. It had become, he said, an obstacle to faith for the many who had begun to “suspect that [the Church] has lost its relevance to the gospel and the world.” Its clergy, as members “of the aristocracy of the only feudal power left in the Western world,” had become, he said, “folkloric phantoms.” He continues: Ecclesiastical employees live in comfortable ­church-​­owned housing, are assured preferential treatment in C ­ hurch-​­owned and operated health services, are mostly trained in ecclesiastical educational institutions and are buried in hallowed ground, after which they are prayed for. The habit, or collar, not competent productivity, assures one’s status and living. An employment market, more diversified than any existing corporation, caters to him, discriminating against laymen who do not share his ritual initiation. Laymen who work in the ecclesiastical structure are recognized as possessing some few “civil rights,” but their careers depend principally on their ability to play the role of Uncle Toms.

“Clerics,” Illich goes on, “are smothered in a scandalous and unnecessary security combined with restrictive controls.” The result, he argues, is infantilization,

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of the laity by the clergy and of the clergy by the bureaucracy, which hampers their initiative even as it “pampers” them. The fact that these clergy are required to be celibate adds a further difficulty: something that can only be, in Illich’s view, a “personal realization of an intimate vocation from God” is made into a professional requirement with devastating results. Those with a vocation to priesthood but not to celibacy are put in the impossible position of having either to “defect,” as so many were doing at the time Illich was writing, or to seek covert sexual satisfaction with consequences that are so well known that it hardly seems an exaggeration to say that the whole Catholic Church now lives in their shadow. Illich’s answer was a radical declericalization of the Church. This, he said, would not be an “essential” change. It would simply bring to a close a thousand years in which “a clerical and celibate priesthood” had defined ministry. He did not challenge the “living authority of the church,” “the prayerful celebration of the liturgy,” or the crucial role of bishops in guiding and unifying the local communities of a diocese. But he did imagine ministry in a very new way: An adult layman, ordained to the ministry, will preside over the “normal” Christian community of the future. The ministry will be an exercise of leisure rather than a job. The “diaconia” will supplant the parish as the fundamental institutional unit in the church. [I take diaconia here to mean people who care for one another as opposed to people assembled in an administrative unit like the parish.] The periodic meeting of friends will replace the Sunday assembly of strangers. A s­ elf-​­supporting dentist, factory worker, [or] professor, rather than a ­church-​­employed scribe or functionary, will preside over the meeting. The minister will be a man mature in Christian wisdom through his lifelong participation in an intimate liturgy, rather than a seminary graduate formed professionally through “theological” formulae. Marriage and the education of growing children rather than the acceptance of celibacy as a legal condition for ordination will confer responsible leadership on him. I foresee the f­ ace-​­to-​­face meeting of families around a table, rather than the impersonal attendance of a crowd around an altar. Celebration will sanctify the dining room, rather than consecrated buildings the ceremony.

This does not mean, he continues, that all churches will be converted into “theaters or real estate white elephants.” For example, he respectfully notes the opinion of his friend Don Sergio Méndez Arceo, the bishop of Cuernavaca, that “Latin American tradition requires the existence of the cathedral church as a kind of testimony in stone, whose beauty and majesty reflect the splendor of Christian

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truth”—a stipulation that would seem to apply wherever Christians have made beautiful buildings and not just in Latin America. All he suggests is that the gathering of friends around a member of their community who they recognize as fit to preside at their celebration should become the primary form of Christian worship and not the assembly of strangers around a tenured and salaried professional. “The Time Is Fulfilled” Behind Illich’s proposal for a radical reform of the Church lay his understanding of the times through which he was living. The 1960s is a period now so encrusted with legend that one barely dares to mention it without scare quotes, but Illich, at the time, saw these years as a moment of what Christian tradition has called kairos. In Greek, the word means “a propitious moment for decision and action.” It is contrasted with chronos, which means merely “sequential” or, as we would say, from the same root, “chronological time.” The word occurs frequently in the New Testament, where it means the appointed time or the time of God. When John the Baptist announces that “[t]he time is fulfilled and the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mark 1:15), the word used in Greek is kairos. Theologian Paul Tillich used the term for moments in history when an opening is created and an existential decision is demanded of each one who perceive the opportunity. German poet Friedrich Hölderlin encapsulated the same thought in his famous verse: “But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” Shakespeare speaks, through Brutus in Julius Caesar, of “a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries.” Illich felt such a moment was at hand in the 1960s. For him an age was ending and a new one trying to be born. This thought is explicit in the “manifesto” that begins his book Celebration of Awareness. Written with two friends, Robert Fox and Robert Theobald, “at the time of the March on the Pentagon” in 1967 and titled “A Call for Celebration,” it urges its readers “to accept responsibility for the future”: “We call you to join man’s race to maturity, to work with us in inventing the future. We believe that a human adventure is just beginning: that mankind has so far been restricted in developing its innovative and creative powers because it was overwhelmed by toil. Now we are free to be as human as we will.” The tone is strikingly unlike that of the later Illich. Here he wants to invent the future; later, as we shall see, he will call the future “a ­man-​­eating idol.” Some of the uncharacteristic language may have been contributed by Illich’s coauthors, but it was he who gave this exhortation the first place in his first book, and I think the

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idea of “a race to maturity” was very much on his mind at this time. The same idea of a world in flux that must find a new configuration or perish is found in essays like “The Church, Change and Development,” “The Powerless Church,” and “The Vanishing Clergyman.” “We stand,” he says, “at the end of a century long struggle to free man from the constraint of ideologies, persuasions and religions as guiding forces in his life.” And, in the same vein: “We have ceased to live in a rigid framework. All enveloping, penetrating change is the fundamental experience of our age.” He speaks of “the process of the world’s progressive socialization.” Sometimes, surprisingly in view of later writings, he even writes positively about “development,” as when he says that “the new era of constant development must not only be enjoyed, it must be brought about.” The thought here is of what German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had earlier called “a world come of age.” Often it is only sketched with abstract and summary words like socialization, secularization, development, and change, but what I think Illich is saying is that in his time modernity is reaching a maximum at which it can and must be transformed. By modernity he understands a multidimensional movement whose components I would enumerate as follows: (1) industrialization, which creates the possibility of abundance and freedom from “toil”—and the threat of slavery if it is not brought under social control; (2) secularization, which absorbs most of what formerly belonged to “religion” into everyday social life; (3) change/development, which dissolves the authority of tradition and replaces it with a demand for personal/existential decision about the meaning of things; and (4) ­psycho-​­social maturation, by which people outgrow the tutelage of institutions and become ­self-​­actualizing. All these trends, in Illich’s view, are reaching a moment of what might be called ­meta-​­stability, a physicist’s term for a precarious condition that can’t last. A pencil balanced on its point or a spinning top is m ­ eta-​­stable. They are poised just for the moment in a vulnerable equilibrium. Great promise and great danger sit side by side. One can follow Illich’s thinking at this time in a transcription of a conference he gave to a group of radical psychiatrists at CIDOC in the late ’60s. Here he portrays his time as reaching a climax of demystification. “We have discovered and lifted the veil from the organisms that produce our idols,” he says. Marxism has laid bare the material interests that animate historical action, psychoanalysis has exposed the economy of desire in the human person, anthropology has unearthed the social roots of religious belief, and science has reduced the cosmos to an empty infinity. “We have learned to deal with every myth, ideology and religion as an

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illusion,” he writes. But at the same time, we know that these illusions may be socially necessary, which makes us “conscious at the same time of the ambiguity of all illusion.” This process, moreover, is progressive and accelerating. “Most of the phenomena that were deemed religious fifteen years ago are no longer included under that name.” These phenomena formerly belonging to religion, he contends, have now been merged into what he calls “a secular stream.” He continues: The struggle against the illusions of the sensibility (imagination), of the heart and the intelligence has constituted, always and for all the traditions, the first stage of change towards perfection: the process of purification, the “night of the senses,” and above all “the night of the spirit,” to follow the great Spanish tradition. I believe that this process of purification today has become accessible to all, even outside of any religious tradition, as a new secular stream. When secularizing the humanist i­ deal—​­making profane, moving away from any ­religiosity—​­the purgative way of the convent has moved to the public school. I might be too optimistic about practice. But I am talking about a matter of principle. The liberation of man from his illusions is a profane task, a commitment that runs so deep among the heroes of our generation that with it we could speak of a new kind of ideology. This secularization of the process of “liberation,” “education,” or “personalization” has been waged against enormous resistance within the Catholic Church.

This resistance within the Church, Illich goes on to say, is perfectly futile and will not help to save “the mystical and ascetical wisdom gathered over the centuries.” “The Catholic Church will save itself,” he concludes dramatically, only “by throwing itself into the saeculum and thus contributing to it.” (I take saeculum here to refer both to “the world” and to this age.) Here Illich again comes close to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In the letters Bonhoeffer wrote from Tegel prison in Berlin between 1944 and his murder by his Nazi captors in 1945, Bonhoeffer several times speculates on the possibility of a “religionless” Christianity: What is bothering me incessantly is the question of what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and ­conscience—​­and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as “religious” do not in any way act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by “religious.”

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Our whole n ­ ineteen-​­hundred-​­year-​­old Christian preaching and theology rest on the “religious a priori” of mankind. . . . ­But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human expression, and therefore man becomes radically religionless . . . ­what does that mean for “Christianity”? It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what up to now has been our “Christianity,” and that there remains only a few “last survivors of the age of chivalry,” or a few intellectually dishonest people, on whom we can descend as “religious.” Are they to be the chosen few? If [not], if our final judgment must be that the Western form of Christianity . . . ­was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians? If religion is only a garment of ­Christianity—​­and even this garment has looked very different at different ­times—​­then what is a religionless Christianity?

Bonhoeffer’s questions here seem to me to be the same questions Illich was posing in the later 1960s. (And Illich had, of course, read Bonhoeffer’s letters.) One might ask, with hindsight and in the light of “the return of religion” in our time, whether Bonhoeffer’s prediction of a religionless age did not overlook the possibility of a revival of religion as well as its migration into myriad secular disguises, but I think his questions remain pertinent, even if religion has revived in some and gone underground in others. The question that particularly concerned Illich, in the presentation I’ve been analyzing, was: What remains when the religious garment drops away? I know that I presented Illich earlier as a strict traditionalist prepared to throw ashes on his head for the slightest deviation from the accepted way of doing things. But here we encounter the other side of the coin, the traditionalist’s complement: a man who was intellectually fearless and remarkably free of any trace of superstition, scrupulosity, or ritualism, a man of whom his friend and colleague Barbara Duden once remarked to me, “A less religious man I have never known.” The Meaning of the Church Illich, like Bonhoeffer, argues that, for many, religion has lost its grip. “We no longer need God to explain myth or mysticism,” he says. These belong to the human as such. Mystical experience, he continues, “is but a particular experience of the real, personally accessible to the mature human being.” It is “the experience the deeply personalized human acquires of his free interdependence within love . . . ­the

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experience of c­ o-​­existence.” Its authenticity can be judged by the absence of “the drunkenness peculiar to illusions.” Today people often speak of this generally accessible realm as spirituality and explicitly distinguish it from r­ eligion—“I’m spiritual,” they say, “not religious.” What then is left of what formerly belonged to religion? Illich’s answer, and Bonhoeffer’s, is faith. “The mystical experience is a fruit of love, and, therefore, it is . . . ­accessible to any lover . . . ­awareness [of ] its meaning is a fruit of faith, and it is accessible only to the believer.” Faith stands beyond experience and supplies its meaning. It consists, Illich says, in “becoming aware of a ­pre-​­conscious tendency,” which is b ­ efore—​­and b ­ eyond—​­thought, and then “assuming . . . ­responsibility [for] the further development of this tendency.” “Faith,” he continues, “is not the acceptance of a doctrine, it is a commitment to search, with dedication and risk, for . . . ­personal and intimate identification with . . . ­another person.” This other person is, ultimately, “Rabbi Jeshua ben Joseph” whom he calls both his “brother and friend” and “the Lord and Son of God.” But it is always the nub of Illich’s faith that the gateway to this ultimate and comprehensive “other person” may be, initially, any other person. From here Illich goes on to talk about how to bring the individual to this faith. To do so, he says, will require him to a use a word even “more corrupted and more equivocal than ‘faith’”: The individual can attain faith only through the Church. Church here means a community of believers. Psychologically this seems clear, it is not about a communication of concepts, nor of images or symbols, but the fraternal identification with the f­ orm-​­of-​ ­life of a brother whose expression is “the Kingdom.” And the Kingdom is a social reality at a transcendental level. Hence it cannot be communicated except by means of a communitarian and fraternal f­ orm-​­of-​­life. Historically, Jesus did so. And today I cannot do this but by means of communion in faith and messianic hope as lived by a fraternal community.

The element of sorority and sisterhood is painfully missing from this passage, but it’s clear nonetheless that what counts for Illich is celebration in community. This is what remains even in a ­post-​­ideological and p ­ ost-​­religious “humanist maturity” that has “put away childish things.” Only by faith can the meaning of the passing show of e­ xperience—​­even mystical e­ xperience—​­be revealed. And only in ­community—​­with and through ­others—​­can faith be attained. (Illich says only through a church but then gives a remarkably o­ pen-​­ended and nonsectarian definition of church as any “community of believers.”)

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The Roman Catholic Church, as Illich saw it, was facing a world on the “threshold of maturity” with an obsolete structure designed to keep its members in childish ­thrall—​­a structure designed to replace the freedom of the laity rather than encourage it. A celibate clergy, for example, answered a predicament the Church had faced a full millennium before. Then there was a real danger of priests becoming a caste and church offices becoming hereditary; by Illich’s time it was, as he said, a dysfunctional relic. Likewise, the Church had become a social agency, providing schools, hospitals, and welfare, at a time when the state did not routinely provide these services. “The development of humanity,” he says, “tends toward the realization of the kingdom.” When this development reaches a certain point, it becomes possible for the Church “to withdraw from . . . ­social initiative,” however difficult this may be, in order to become what it is uniquely fitted to be: the revelation of the “meaning of development.” As I have said, the term development, in the writings of this period, has a much broader reference than it would have later when it named “the war on subsistence” that Illich came to feel was being waged against poor countries in the name of economic growth. In a talk he gave in Puerto Rico in early 1967, for example, development is characterized as “the growing mutual relatedness which results from complexity and specialization.” In the same lecture, “social innovation” is spoken of positively as “an increasingly complex process” that must be undertaken with “increasing frequency and sophistication” by “men who are . . . ­dedicated . . . ­to radically humanist ideals.” The proper relation of the Church to this “development” is not to orient, direct, or organize it. This is what it is finally free not to do, for the first time since the Church began to take on the tasks of government and welfare provision in the late Roman Empire. The world’s “progressive socialization” and “humanist maturity” have set the Church free to do what only it can do. “Only the Church,” he writes, “can reveal to us the full meaning of development.” It can “teach us in liturgical celebration to recognize the presence of Christ in the phenomenon [of growing mutual relatedness]” as well as to recognize “personal responsibility for our sins: our growing dependence, solitude and cravings which result from our ­self-​­alienation in things and systems and heroes.” “The Church interprets to modern man development as a growth into Christ.” How does the Church do this? In Illich’s New Testament imagery, the Church is a seed, a yeast, a “divine bud that will flower in eternity,” “a sign lifted up among the nations,” “the worldly sign of ­other-​­worldly reality.” “What the Church contributes through evangelization is like the laughter in the joke. Two hear the same story, one gets the point. It’s like the rhythm in the phrase that only the

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poet catches.” The images and metaphors he uses are necessarily elusive because he doesn’t believe that the discernment of which faith makes us capable can be reduced to any definite principle or analytic scheme. It is a way of seeing, not something seen. “Faith,” Simone Weil says, “is the experience that the intelligence is enlightened by love.” Illich, I think, agrees. Faith is the light and the conviction that it shows us things as they are. The Church is an object of faith, and faith, as the apostle Paul says, is the substance of hope, the evidence of things unseen. So, the Church about which I have been quoting Illich is never quite the actual institution but always its subjunctive shadow and heavenly complement. The distinction between She and It is germane. But the Church is, nonetheless, a crucial institution, not just an infinitely postponed hope, and an institution, moreover, that Illich regards as Christianity’s defining mark. “Personal maturity, theological precision, contemplative prayer, and heroic charity are not specifically Christian,” he says. The thing that is specifically Christian is “the sensus ecclesiae, the sense of the Church.” “The man joined to this [sense] is rooted in the living authority of the Church, lives in the imaginative inventiveness of the faith, and expresses himself in terms of the gifts of the Spirit.” I read the word sense here in two ways: the sense of the Church is a sensibility, a feel for the glory that lights up in those we love, but also a making sense, a meaning that can only be found in community, in one another. “A New Society Right Now” Illich lived, at this time, in sometimes wild hopes. He felt the novelty of his situation, alive in a world “never before interpreted in the light of the Gospel.” He felt the power of Christian celebration to bring the fluid situation created by “all enveloping change” into a new and surprising order: “Christian celebration renews the whole Church, the whole of humanity,” he says, implying that the two, ultimately, are the same. He sensed “church development” tending, finally, toward a “global divine liturgy.” And he anticipated a “new Church,” already becoming visible at the horizon. Reformers in the Middle Ages had fought for “the liberty of the Church” and had ended up creating a sovereign institution so impressive that it became the model of the modern state. Now a new liberty had become possible. The legal codes and clerical bureaucracies first elaborated in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had long since served their purpose and become a millstone around the Church’s neck. Humanistic maturity and the welfare state, taken together, had made such a Church redundant, and in Illich’s eyes, this was a reason to rejoice. With social

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action and its supporting ideologies secure in secular hands, Christians were now free to celebrate their faith “for no purpose at all.” Faith, no longer enlisted and corrupted in projects of social control, could at last become the very pith of existence; the Church could become the “laughter in the joke.” Illich’s optimism echoed the times in which he was writing. It is not easy now to understand these times because they have been hidden, as I said earlier, under a mystification called “the sixties.” To discuss this mystification here would lead me away from my point, so let me just say that treating this period as nothing more than a brief, discrete episode in the history of aesthetic styles and social mores, as is often done, makes it hard to understand Illich’s position. He saw a culmination and a potential synergy of trends that were in some cases as old as Christianity itself, in others as old as the clerical bureaucracy that had governed the Church since the Middle Ages. A comparable sense of the longue durée characterized his perception of humanist maturity, of growing social interdependence, and of an industrial mode of production poised to produce either freedom or ­slavery—​­all reflected his sense of a time in preparation for centuries. Moreover, he believed that he was pointing to a unique and transient opportunity that would not necessarily recur. A “giant” church that “begins to totter before it collapses” will collapse if its hypertrophy is not addressed. What is hidden, therefore, behind the pop cultural cliché is an apocalyptic moment. I use apocalypse here in its root meaning of revelation and hope that my readers are able to bracket the conventional use of the word to describe ecological devastation, nuclear winter, or some imagined divine vengeance. Illich was apocalyptic in perceiving the ripening and coming together of various historical tendencies, in feeling that this ripening had created a momentary opportunity for that “renewing of the mind” that the New Testament calls metanoia, and in his willingness to make the decisive judgments that he thought this unique conjuncture demanded and made possible. Illich, singular though he was, was very much a man of his times. In fact, I would say that a highly attuned sensitivity to the changing times through which he lived was one of the most marked expressions of his genius. And this was never more true than in the 1960s, when many believed in the possibility of “making a new society right now”: I remember the atmosphere in the ­mid-​­1960s. It’s difficult to make people today believe that this was not sentimentalism, not mere fantasy, not mere escapism, not mere anger and hatred. There was a real sense of renewal then. It was not romantic, in the sense of trying to go back to Paradise. . . . ­And it was not simply Reich’s Greening of America or

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Esalen. There were people who were searching for renewal. They sought this renewal through giving themselves totally to the possibility of making a new society right now.

This sense of “a new society right now” was shaking the Church, as much as any secular institution, at the time he wrote. Many priests were rethinking their vocations and resigning their offices. One of the jokes of the time was that Vatican II had thrown open the windows of the Church . . . ­and then everyone had jumped out. In his essay “The Vanishing Clergyman,” Illich himself wondered: “Should I, a man totally at the service of the Church, stay in the structure in order to subvert it, or leave in order to live the model of the future?” Elsewhere in this essay, he asks, May we pray for an increase of priests who choose “radical secularization”? For priests who leave the Church in order to pioneer the church of the future? For priests who, faithfully dedicated to and loving the Church, risk misunderstanding and suspension? For priests full of hope, capable of such actions without becoming hard and embittered? For extraordinary priests, willing to live today the ordinary life of tomorrow’s priest?

Ressourcement and Renewal At the time Illich was writing, such questions were being asked in every Western Christian milieu. I have already mentioned Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s late intimations of a “religionless” Christianity in “a world come of age.” In the early 1960s, his thoughts were put into wide circulation by John Robinson, an Anglican bishop whose controversial book, Honest to God, published in 1963, was the first many people, including me, had heard of Bonhoeffer. I can also see affinities between Illich and the “existentialist” theology of Paul Tillich, whose book The Courage to Be exercised a comparable influence to Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison at the time. Likewise, there are traces of Harvey Cox’s immensely popular 1965 book The Secular City in Illich’s idea of a secular society that has so completely absorbed the social elements in religion that faith has been set free of its captivity to “social initiative.” Cox and Illich were interlocutors, and Cox more than once visited CIDOC in Cuernavaca. I don’t mean to imply that any of the writers I have mentioned influenced ­Illich—​­that would say more than I ­know—​­but only to point out resonances and crosscurrents within the thought of the time. Someone who I think was an important precursor and inspiration to Illich was Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Swiss Catholic priest and theologian who lived between 1905 and 1988 and who, like Illich, can be understood as both a conservative and a radical. Illich generally said little about his

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contemporary sources, but Italian scholar Fabio Milana, who is preparing a book on Illich’s formative years, has told me that he thinks von Balthasar’s A Theology of History was a constant reference for the young Illich. I can myself remember Illich’s great pleasure, years later, when he discovered that I had been reading von Balthasar. (Another important influence, according to Milana, was Erich Pryzwara; in conversation with me Illich singled out Romano Guardini, with whom he studied briefly in Munich; Jean Daniélou; and Jacques Maritain.) I mention von Balthasar here particularly because of a book he published in 1952 called, when it appeared in English many years later, Razing the Bastions: On the Church in This Age. This book argues in terms strikingly similar to those used by Illich ten years later and, for that reason, is worth considering for a moment here. As his title suggests, von Balthasar imagined a new Church no longer immured behind antique battlements, and, like Illich, he felt the times to be uniquely favorable to its emergence: The intellectual situation of the Church has perhaps never been so open, so full of promise, and so pregnant with the future at any time since the first three centuries. When Christians today take a pause on their pilgrimage and look back at the road they have covered, they see the horizon retreating and closing to form images that can be taken in at one glance and, as the poet says, one can take leave of them with a blessing, rather than a broken heart. The doors stand open for every new commitment, every initiative, especially on the part of the laity.

Illich expresses “the new missionary challenge” of the Church in related terms: in place of Balthasar’s “open door,” Illich imagines that “a strong seed [has] mature[d] in the earth during the winter and now the time has come for it to bud.” Von Balthasar argues that the Church, in its received clerical and bureaucratic form, “is ­super-​­annuated . . . ­superseded . . . ­and . . . ­burdened with [too] much tradition to maintain the freshness and carefreeness of the first youthful Christianity.” Renewal will therefore be up to the laity: The future . . . depends on whether laymen can be found who live out of the unbroken power of the Gospel and are willing to shape the world. It is obvious to everyone who sees clearly that the clergy and the [religious] Orders can no longer suffice for this. They are not at fault; rather, the cause lies in the irresistible process whereby the world has been maturing since the Middle Ages, with an e­ ver-​­clearer distinction between the ­civitas terrena and the civitas Dei. . . . Wherever the world-clock has struck this hour, the emergence of a new form of Christian apostolate is a foregone conclusion.

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Von Balthasar takes a mystical view of the Church. He honors the mystery and seclusion that were traditionally thought to have been prefigured in the Song of Solomon in the verse: “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring s­ hut-​ ­up, a fountain sealed.” But he believes that history has definitively brought the Church’s seclusion to an end. The Church as “closed garden,” the “sealed up spring,” the veiled bride of the thousand monasteries has been opened by force and almost ravaged, now that the feet of the nameless multitudes tramp heavily through her soul. Not only have the enclosures of individual monasteries opened up to the new “religious life of the world,” where now only the individual heart is an invisible enclosure, but a wall has collapsed in the heart of the Church herself, and where previously only stone seemed to meet the touch of the voluntarily cloistered nun, there is now warm and living flesh; the flesh of the unknown brother who sleeps and dwells, works, suffers and dies in the next room.

The wall has been breached, the enclosure opened, and the mystery profaned; the “unknown brother” is already present. Earlier I quoted Illich as saying that in preference to vainly trying to husband and protect “mystical and ascetical wisdom gathered over centuries” the Church ought now to “throw itself into the saeculum.” Von Balthasar took the same view. Once the Church had secrets but no longer. Profound mysteries, things that often only her saints knew, were stolen from her by the Augustinian of Wittenberg [i.e., Luther] and borne off by night from her treasure chamber. Now her goods lie on the open street, for that which calls itself “Church” outside her has no inner room, knows no mystery, is pulled to pieces in the lecture halls; everyone can take his piece of it and gather the new conventicle around it. [A conventicle is a secret meeting of religious nonconformists.] (And Karl Barth may be correct to say the conventicles have often preserved more Christian vitality than the ­so-​­called churches.) In this way the love of the Church has been moved out of her, tragically and often irremediably, often still recognizable in the pieces lying about in front of her doors. But the more they become dissolved in the world, the more unrecognizable they become.

The Church has “dissolved” in the world, von Balthasar says, and its wisdom has become at times unrecognizable in its dissolution. But something else is potentially going on as well. The Church retains its mission to interpret what has occurred and is ­occurring—​­to reveal, as Illich says, “the meaning of development.” And perhaps, von Balthasar hints, the truth once sheltered in the Church and now

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reaching the limit of its secular dispersion may come together again in an unexpected form. The Church suffers what it must judge and “in the hidden interior” begins the return home of all truth to that Una Catholica: the truth of Goethe, the truth of Nietzsche, the truth of Luther, and of all who took up a fragment of the infinite mirror. For all who have erred did at one time intend to speak the truth. And the reconstruction of the smashed mirror is not the outcome of a gaze of patience (like Hegel’s Encyclopedia) but the outcome of the miracle of Easter in which the patient endurance of the Church too plays its part. Rightly the motto of worldly tolerance, “To understand everything is to forgive everything,” has been rejected as superficial. But perhaps the reversal of this motto is valid, at a much deeper point: where everything is first forgiven (on the Cross) even what is most incomprehensible becomes understandable; the hard outer shells of error break open and release the captive kernel of truth.

This is von Balthasar at his most mystical and poetical, but Illich too was a mystical and poetical thinker, even if his manner as a writer sometimes seemed to belie it, and I think von Balthasar’s thought here clarifies and expands the prospect that Illich only sketches of a new age of the Church. Secularization in its largest sense, von Balthasar says, has been a profanation of the ­Church—​­her mysteries “stolen,” the mirror she held up to the world broken into fragments, the “wall . . . ­collapsed,” “the nameless multitudes tramp[ing] heavily through her soul,” and so on. But this movement has reached a maximum, or what von Balthasar’s compatriot C. G. Jung called an enantiodromia, a moment of reversal at which any force at the extremity of its manifestation turns into its opposite. “The return home” of truth, exiled in “error,” is such a thought. So is the “shells of error break[ing] open [to] release the captive kernel of truth.” I cannot say, except in a general way, that Illich was influenced by von Balthasar. But they certainly seem to be thinking along the same lines. Both say that a new Church is urgently necessary, and both say that the times make it eminently possible to “leave the past with a blessing, rather than a broken heart.” Illich’s Radicalism Von Balthasar was not honored by his Church until very late in his life. Like other theologians of ­ressourcement—​­the movement to return theology to early, ­pre-​ ­Scholastic ­sources—​­he was at first held at a distance by the Vatican. He was never

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condemned or censored, as Henri de Lubac for a time had been, but von Balthasar received no invitation to the Second Vatican Council. After the council, his reputation gradually grew, and in 1988, John Paul II announced his intention to make him a cardinal. Von Balthasar died two days before the ceremony was to take place. Illich was not so lucky, and that was partly because he was more of an “activist” than von Balthasar. Again and again, Illich took what he considered to be “the stand demanded by the times.” I have already related two examples: in 1948 he openly opposed the pope’s involvement in the Italian election; and in 1959, he was banished from the diocese of Ponce for opposing his bishop, again on the issue of Church involvement in politics. The next dissent to be enrolled in the catalogue of his “Erroneous Opinions Against the Church” occurred during the Second Vatican Council in 1965. This was how he told me the story: During the Second Vatican Council I worked with a man named Suenens, then the cardinal of ­Malines-​­Brussels. The Pope had asked him to be the president of a group of four cardinals who moderated the Council. Much earlier Suenens had known me pretty well through a variety of circumstances, and he asked me to come to Rome as one of the direct advisors of this committee. We met every day during the second and third sessions. One morning, I asked him if we could have a cup of coffee together up at Quattro Fontane, where he was staying at a little Belgian college. I said to him, “I’m leaving now. Yesterday you proved to me that this Council is incapable of facing the issues which count, while trying hard to remain traditional.” The day before, in the aula of St. Peter’s, the bishops had accepted the fact that the document that would come out on the Church and the world would say that the Church could not as yet condemn governments for keeping atomic bombs, that is, for keeping tools of genocide . . . ­for the moment. It was a wise decision, ­world-​­wise. And I gave Suenens a little caricature which somebody had drawn up for me. In that cartoon you see five popes, with their characteristic noses, one behind the other, all pointing with one finger at one of two objects standing ­there—​­an already slightly flaccid penis with a condom filled with semen hanging on it, and an atomic rocket, ready for ­take-​­off. In the balloon was written, “It’s against nature!” I am proud to have been and to be associated with, and to be loyal to, an agency, a worldly agency, which still has the courage to say, even today, “It’s against nature.” The finger might be pointing at the wrong object.

“The document . . . ­on the Church and the world” to which Illich refers is ­Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), a “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World . . . ­promulgated by Pope Paul VI on Dec. 7, 1965.” In articles 80

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and 81, it deals with the danger of “scientific weapons,” condemning their use and pleading for their elimination but recognizing that practical statesmen will not disarm unilaterally. Illich believed that his Church ought to take “the moral stance which corresponds to the vocation implied in the Gospel.” There were, in his view, no arguments to be made for the maintenance of nuclear arsenals that were not hellish perversions of language and logic, and the Church ought to have said so at all costs. What does the Crucified signify if not “unilateral disarmament”? What the Church faced, he said, was “not a question of democracy, not a question of committee decisions,” but rather “a question of witness.” Later on, as part of his participation in the peace movement that developed in Germany when ­nuclear-​­armed Pershing II ballistic missiles were deployed there in the early 1980s, Illich spelled out the position that had caused his withdrawal from the Vatican Council: What can you say about one atomic bomb in the world except . . . ­a shout? When I began to teach in Germany, at the time the Pershing missiles were to be stationed there, I made myself available to the young people, mostly high school students, who wanted to organize protests. . . . ­And I said, we can’t protest in any other way but by standing there silently. We have nothing to say on this issue. We want to testify by our horrified silence. In horrified silence, the Turkish immigrant washerwoman and the university professor can make exactly the same statement, standing next to each other. As soon as you have to explain, opposition becomes again a graded, an elite affair and becomes superficial. I do not want to take part in a conspiracy of gab about peace but claim the privilege of horrified silence in front of certain things—if I can make my horror visible.

There are, Illich said, “intolerable realities”—things about which it is impossible to reason because they are inherently beyond the amplitude of reason. To argue about them not only diminishes and domesticates the horror they ought to inspire, it can also “burn out hearts.” For him, there were things that could neither be said nor thought without “acceptance of s­ elf-​­destruction,” things answerable only by an absolute, silent no. Stands, like the one he took at the Council, made Illich, in the words of his friend Joe Fitzpatrick, “a sign of contradiction and a focus of controversy.” Some who wrote about him during his years in the public eye suggested that another reason he attracted trouble was a proud, unbending, and sometimes sardonic manner. Historian Todd Hartch, for example, in his study of Illich’s CIDOC years, calls

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him at various points “difficult,” “prickly,” and “confrontational.” Mandarin, aristocratic, and unwilling to suffer fools gladly were also frequent epithets. Journalist Francine du Plessix Gray, in her generally sympathetic portrait of Illich for the New Yorker in 1970, found an element of condescension in his politics. “[He] has the aristocrat’s sentimental ­attraction—​­recalling Tolstoy’­s—​­for cultures of poverty untainted by bourgeois aspiration,” she wrote. Canadian scholar-activist Ursula Franklin, also an admirer, wondered nonetheless if Illich operated too far above the g­ ive-​­and-​­take of everyday political contention. “Does he pontificate on things in which he has no participation?” she once asked me and then added, “I can identify with Illich, but I have no idea whether Illich can identify with me.” These characterizations certainly typify one way in which Illich was seen, and I don’t really want to argue with t­ hem—​­each may, at some moment, have had its point. I knew Illich much later, and in much different circumstances, and I’m sure that during his years as a campaigner he must, at times, have seemed imperious. Perhaps he also sometimes enjoyed being the storm center that he undoubtedly was. Even so, I think his substantive positions are what finally account for his troubles with the Church and not his theatrical personality. “The Vanishing Clergyman” was a particular red flag, as were the brushes with the hierarchy I have mentioned, but it seems clear that the activities of CIDOC and Illich’s “subversion”—his ­word—​­of American missionary initiative in Latin America were the primary reasons for his summons to Rome in 1968. In his writings of the 1970s, Illich outlined a new politics that went beyond the simplifications and overdrawn dichotomies involved in plotting all political judgments on a single l­eft-​­right spectrum, but there is no doubt that in Latin America in the 1960s Illich was seen as a man of the left. He befriended the Colombian priest Camillo Torres, who joined a guerilla group and was killed by government troops in 1966—in an interview with Der Spiegel in 1970 Illich speaks of Torres as a comrade. He was close to Archbishop Hélder Câmara, who courageously opposed the military junta in Brazil after 1964. He sheltered Brazilian exiles like Francisco Julião, the leader of the Brazilian Peasant Leagues, and Paolo Freire, whose radical educational methods had antagonized the regime. CIDOC, moreover, was a center of intellectual ferment, attracting radical thinkers from around the world to its seminars. All this quickly made Illich the bête noire of conservative Catholicism in ­Mexico—​­a paper called Gente, published by the conservative religious order Opus Dei, described him as “a strange, devious, slippery personage crawling with indefinable nationalities.” More than once he was physically attacked.

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Illich’s Position in the Church When Illich established CIF in 1961, he still enjoyed considerable support within the American Church, but as his “basically subversive purpose” became clearer, this support gradually dissipated. By 1965 John Considine was complaining that Illich was promoting a “philosophy of revolt” as well as undermining the “morale” of potential missionaries. Cardinal Cushing of Boston, another early supporter, was appalled when Illich openly attacked American missions in Latin America at a conference the cardinal hosted in Boston in 1967. Cushing had hoped this gathering would reinvigorate the flagging Latin America missionary initiative within the American ­Church—​­missionaries in Latin America then constituted, by Illich’s count, 0.7 percent of American Church personnel, a far cry from the 10 percent that the pope had originally called for. Illich’s contribution to the conference was to have his associates distribute a thousand copies of an article called “The Seamy Side of Charity,” which he had published the month before in the Jesuit journal America. The article was a ­no-​­holds-​­barred attack on American complacency, telling ­Americans bluntly that “sober, meaningful generosity” to Latin American C ­ atholics was quite impossible so long as the American Church continued to stand, in the formula I quoted in the last chapter, “on the side of W. R. Grace and Co., Esso, the Alliance for Progress, democratic government, the ­AFL-​­CIO, and whatever is holy in the Western pantheon.” For a time Illich believed he had the support of Pope Paul VI. They had known each other in Rome, and the future pope, then one of the joint heads of the ­Vatican’s Secretariat of State, had seen Illich as a potential protégé before Illich decamped for New York. In 1965, Illich wrote to his friend Joe Fitzpatrick that there had been “­top-​­level discussion of his trustworthiness” in Rome and that the pope had told a visitor to “tell Illich to remain steadfast in the manner in which he serves the Church.” But the support Illich hoped for from the pope never materialized. One reason, Illich later supposed, might have been the influence of René Voillaume. Voillaume, the first superior of the Little Brothers of Jesus, was Paul’s confessor, and Illich’s relations with him, though superficially cordial, had been uneasy ever since Illich had considered and then rejected the idea of sharing the life of the Little Brothers following a visit to their retreat in North Africa in 1959. Another reason was surely the weight the pope must have given to the growing number of Illich’s enemies in both the Latin American and the American Church. Whatever was the case, in the year after he wrote his hopeful letter to Joe Fitzpatrick, a request by Illich for an audience with the pope to discuss the missionary question went unanswered, and this silence continued thereafter.

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In late 1967, Illich’s already precarious situation within the Church was pushed to the point of crisis. The precipitating event was the death on December 2 of that year of his last remaining protector within the upper reaches of the Church hierarchy, Francis Joseph Cardinal Spellman of New York. Spellman was the man Illich had asked for an appointment to a Puerto Rican parish in 1951, and he had remained Illich’s ecclesiastical superior throughout his years in Puerto Rico and Mexico. Spellman’s loyalty to Illich, as I said earlier, had been unflinching, and Spellman’s power within the Church was sufficient that, as long as he lived, Illich’s enemies remained at bay. When he died, the consequences were swift. Inquisition The following summer, in June 1968, Illich was summoned to Rome by the Holy Office. He had become, the document drawn up against him claimed, “an object of curiosity, bewilderment and scandal to the Church,” and he was ordered to come and answer questions about his political and doctrinal views. Illich presented himself at the Vatican and was shown to a subterranean room where his judge awaited him. The interview began with a command that he keep the entire proceeding secret under threat of excommunication. Illich refused. The head of the congregation, C ­ ardinal Seper of Yugoslavia, was consulted, and eventually Illich was allowed to leave with a written copy of the accusations against him. This text, as I mentioned at the outset, took the form of a questionnaire, divided into four categories: “Dangerous Doctrinal Opinions, “Erroneous Ideas Against the Church,” “Bizarre Conceptions Concerning the Clergy,” and “Subversive Interpretations C ­ oncerning the Liturgy and Ecclesiastical Discipline.” The questions, as Illich said later, were of the “When did you stop beating your wife?” variety; to have responded at all would have required him to accept numerous unacceptable premises. “What would you answer,” he was asked, “to those who say that you are petulant, adventurous, imprudent, fanatical . . . ­hypnotizing, [and] a rebel to all authority?” The rest of the ­eighty-​­five questions inquired about everything from his views on the doctrine of limbo to his relations with the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz to his supposed role in the recent kidnapping of the archbishop of Guatemala. Taken altogether, the document amounted to an embarrassing farrago of rumor, innuendo, and misinformation. In some of the questions, Illich recognized information from Central Intelligence Agency documents that had been leaked to him earlier. In others the hand of ­right-​­wing Catholic organizations in Mexico was visible. That evening Illich wrote to Cardinal Seper that he would not answer the questions. He preferred, he said, to remain silent, taking as his motto the Gospel

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injunction “If a man asks you to lend him your coat, then give him your shirt as well.” To defend himself would only amplify the scandal his enemies were trying to create and deepen the embarrassment of the Church he loved. He delivered his letter to the cardinal the following morning. Seper received him courteously and then dismissed him with the words “Get going, get going, and never come back.” “It wasn’t until I was walking down the stairs,” Illich said later, “that it struck me that he was quoting the Inquisitor’s last words to the Prisoner in Dostoevsky’s story of the Grand Inquisitor.” In this story, in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov imagines the return of Jesus to Seville at the time of the Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor has Jesus immediately imprisoned and then goes to his cell to explain why the Church has been forced, out of compassion for weak and suffering humanity, to introduce a more practical form of government than the one foreseen in the Gospel. Jesus’ return, the Inquisitor says, can only subvert the Church’s rule, and so he dismisses his Lord with the words Illich recognized on the lips of Cardinal Seper. Illich then returned to Cuernavaca. By this time the main vehicle for Illich’s work was the Center for Intercultural Documentation, or CIDOC as it was known. CIDOC had been established in 1964 as a civil association and a complement to CIF which had its roots in the Church. Through the m ­ id-​­1960s, as missionary training had become only one part of the expanding repertoire of Illich and his associates, it had gradually eclipsed CIF. By 1968 CIDOC had grown into what might be called, in the style of the time, a free university. Spanish language training was still its bread and butter, but it also hosted seminars that gathered ­reform-​ ­minded thinkers from around the world and carried on an ambitious publishing program. (By the time CIDOC closed in 1976, its many series of publications, taken altogether, amounted to a small library.) It was CIDOC, consequently, that became the target of Rome’s next move against Illich. In January 1969 the Holy Office placed the center under a formal ban, which forbade priests and members of religious orders from attending there. This was the last straw for Illich. He made the order public and then wrote a letter to his friend and associate, Sergio Méndez Arceo, the bishop of Cuernavaca, which he also made public. In it he said that he was “deeply saddened” by Rome’s proceeding but affirmed his continuing loyalty to “the great traditions” of the Church. “The roots of my mind and of my heart,” he said, “have taken in the soil of the Roman Church. I am embarrassed by this decision, but my embarrassment will fade, as it has before, in front of her immense contribution to beauty, truth and awareness.” He also regretted the fact that “the Holy Office, which is the supreme

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teaching authority of the Church, [has] launch[ed] a grave and global accusation against a ­non-​­sectarian institution of higher learning without even mentioning a single charge.” The result, Illich said, can only be the instigation of “still another tragic round of disruptive and uncreative uproar within the church.” Six months earlier, after his summons to Rome but before the ban on CIDOC was announced, Illich had written a memo to his trusted friend and colleague Betsie Hollants, who was about to embark on a trip in which she would meet with “ecclesiastic superiors who for years have honored us with their confidence and continue to send members of their religious communities to CIDOC for training or research.” Illich’s expressed purpose, in his memo, was to make sure that ­Hollants fully understood the situation so she could convey it to these friends. He explained first the principle that had guided him since he first went to Puerto ­Rico—​­to exercise no “public ministry” and undertake no pastoral role while he was in the public eye and involved in anything that could be construed as political or controversial. This had already, he said, subjected him “to inquiries about my faith and my canonical position which I judge at least indelicate if not outright offensive.” Similar questions had been raised about “the religious, political and social orthodoxy of [CIDOC] staff.” In effect, his scrupulousness about how he exercised his priesthood had been used against him. Nevertheless, he went on, he would neither contest Rome’s authority nor disobey it: I will not publicly accuse the highest authority in the Catholic Church of patent political misuse of the sacred power and authority which is vested in it. I do not question this authority. I will not contest the illegitimate exercise of this authority. I was called to the Holy Office. The Cardinal Prefect told me before the opening of the trial that he had been instructed by higher authority to proceed against me. I was subjected to a shameful inquisitorial session, and 85 questions were handed to me, most of which are impertinent, political or just plain stupid. I repeated my absolute willingness to retract in public any unorthodox ­statement—​­if I had ever made such . . . ­ Unequivocally the Holy See has informed me that it lacks confidence in me, and this clearly not because of theological errors or disciplinary misbehavior, but because of my educational activity and my personal associations. Under these circumstances the only proper answer on my part must be that of taking a line which is unequivocal and firm; to avoid all and every action which could induce others to believe that I am a spokesman of the Catholic Church or pretend to act as such; that I am in any way whatsoever in the official service of the Church. I must make it clear that I intend to be considered as nothing but a simple, faithful Christian, absolutely loyal and dedicated to his Church.

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Included with this memo were various documents, including the questionnaire with which he was confronted in Rome and asked to keep confidential. Illich authorized Hollants to use these documents “whenever you feel compelled to explain my situation in order to keep CIDOC open to qualified use by Church authorities. I know of the risk that scandal may be given if the extraordinary text prepared by the Holy Office were to become known. I would like to avoid it, but I do not exclude the possibility that you may feel it opportune to divulge it in the very service of the purification of the Church.” Illich was obviously walking a fine line, and his conflicting a­ ims—​­to protect the Church and protest his ­innocence—​­could not both be realized at the same time. In the event, “purification of the Church” won out over his desire to avoid further “uncreative uproar.” Betsie Hollants was a former newspaper editor, and she used the discretion Illich had given her to release the Holy Office’s questionnaire to the National Catholic Register, which immediately published it. Later the Mexican daily Excelsior did so as well. Todd Hartch says judiciously that, given the release of the questionnaire and other documents like Illich’s letter to Bishop Méndez Arceo, “it is difficult to evaluate Illich’s ­oft-​­expressed desire to avoid ­scandal for the Church.” I would say that, in making his case known, Illich did supplement the gentleness of the dove with the wisdom of the serpent. But I would also say that all he did was to make known the way he had been treated and to make sure that people understood that no substantial accusation had even been made, let alone proved, against him. He made no attempt to answer the scurrilous questionnaire or to otherwise engage in controversy with Rome or his religious superiors. He tried, as he told Betsie Hollants, to make it clear that, as the presiding spirit of CIDOC, he was in no way acting as a spokesman or r­ epresentative of the Church but only as a “simple Christian” exercising a lay function. When it became clear that this tactic had failed and the Church had “made a scandal out of [him]” nonetheless, he renounced Church office ­altogether—​­a painful sacrifice that I think justifies his claim that love for the Church was what guided his action during this period. On March 15, 1969, he wrote to Terence Cooke, the new Archbishop of New York: “These proceedings [of the Holy Office] have cast over me the shadow of a ‘notorious churchman,’ and this interferes with my ministry, my work as an educator and my personal decision to live as a Christian . . . ­I now want to inform you of my irrevocable decision to resign entirely from Church service, to suspend the exercise of priestly functions, and to renounce totally all titles, offices, benefits and privileges which are due to me as a cleric.” The wording is important here. Illich neither left the Church nor renounced his priesthood. Rather he “suspended” all exercise of his official functions as a

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priest. The question he asked in “The Vanishing Clergyman”—“Should I, a man totally at the service of the Church, stay in the structure in order to subvert it, or leave in order to live the model of the future?”—had been answered for him. The Church had withdrawn the space in which he could play the part of the obedient son of a wayward ­mother—​­critical and faithful at once. This stance was unrecognizable in the distorting mirror of Roman inquisition. To stay and seek vindication would just perpetuate sterile controversy and further injure the Church. The decision was his, but on his terms, there had really been no choice. The Rules of the Game Throughout his ordeal with the Vatican, Illich insisted on both his orthodoxy and his obedience. While talking freely of cultural and institutional revolution, and even speaking to the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel at one point about his commitment to “radical socialism,” he maintained nonetheless that he was “theologically a profound conservative.” He observed what he described to Francine du Plessix Gray as “the rules of the game.” (Recognizing the significance of the phrase, and just as alert to its subtle irony, in view of how Illich had been treated, she took it as the title for her New Yorker profile.) He explained his view to her when she visited CIDOC: “What makes this place run here is le bon ton, our basically correct behavior, our concern for the garden. I am attacked by both the left and the right because I insist on rigorously correct behavior. I am profoundly opposed to the Underground Church [a name given at the time to ­free-​­form congregations using improvised liturgies] because it is c­ ounter-​­revolutionary. You reform by staying within the system. I believe in good manners, in playing by the rules of the game. If you don’t like the rules of chess, stop playing it.” There may be a touch of smugness here and even of what Daniel Berrigan deplored as Illich’s “intellectual violence” against “our Catholic left.” It is not obvious, presuming that du Plessix Gray got this statement right, that playing by the rules succeeded where burning draft files or joining a guerilla band failed. Nevertheless, Illich did attempt to harmonize revolution and rigorous correctness, uninhibited thought and ardent love of tradition. American writer Robert Inchausti has called this stance “subversive orthodoxy” and ascribed it to many Christian radicals. (In Inchausti’s pages Illich joins a pantheon that includes William Blake, Søren Kierkegaard, and G. K. Chesterton, along with contemporaries like D ­ orothy Day, Wendell Berry, and René Girard.) For me, Illich’s insistence on playing by the rules evokes someone with whom I think Illich has many a­ ffinities—​­Gandhi. Gandhi called the nonviolent struggle he conducted against British rule in India

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satyagraha, literally holding on to truth (satya), or truth force, as it is sometimes rendered. This force is exerted by submission but is never merely “passive resistance”—a definition of satyagraha that Gandhi adamantly rejected. Submission, whether it is to the violence of the opponent or to the law, is always active. It is entered into freely, without animus or attachment, in the hope of converting the other. But for this conversion to take place, there must be an ­agreed-​­upon set of rules of engagement within which the satyagrahi’s commitment can be expressed and the truth given a setting in which to shine, and these rules will inevitably be those dictated by whatever regime is currently in force. In Gandhi’s case, his moral jujitsu depended on holding the British to their own law. His obedience to this law was the very condition of his rebellion against the regime that supposedly embodied ­it—​­the rebel as dutiful son. It was the same, I think, with Illich. He had tried to turn the house upside down, opposing church programs and arguing for a revolutionary declericalization of the Church while at the same time insisting on “his absolutely loyal[ty] and dedicat[ion] to his Church.” This was neither a pose nor even, finally, a strategy but, as with Gandhi, a total personal commitment to engage with the other on the other’s own terms. But, in Illich’s case, the Church that he had challenged would not play by the rules. There was no standard to which he could hold i­ t—​­neither the academic freedom of CIDOC nor his orthodox faith nor his sincere devotion to the Church finally counted. No charge was ever made against ­him—​­he was tried by rumor, innuendo, and private ­accusation—​­and nothing with which he could engage was ever presented to him. With no rules, there was no game, and so, in the end, he could only withdraw. Illich’s resignation from Church service did not change his ecclesiastical position in a formal sense. Years later, when he accepted an invitation to teach at the University of Kassel in Germany in 1978, he found that the first paycheck he received had been made out to the Rev. Monsignor Ivan Illich. He called the bursar’s office for an explanation. The clerk who answered told him that he had wanted to write Illich’s title correctly and, for that reason, had called the office of the papal nuncio in Bonn to ask how Illich was listed in the Annuario ­Pontificio, a directory of the higher ranks of Roman Catholic prelates. He was told that Illich appeared there as a monsignor and had written the check accordingly. What Illich told the public, following his letter to Archbishop Cooke in 1969, was that he would henceforth be plain “Mr. Illich.” He promised the pope that he would “abstain from talking to groups of priests or nuns.” Indeed, he had already gone further than this in a letter to Cardinal Seper, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, asserting that he had “suspended the public celebration of

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the Holy Mass, the publishing of articles concerning theology, public conferences on the same subject, preaching at retreats, etc.” He continues: It’s my intention to maintain this reserve as long as there remains doubt or reservation in the mind of the Superiors about ­me—​­even if it is totally groundless. . . . ­The munus sacerdotale [priestly office] is a free gift of God through the Church: although it remains indelible, in my opinion, it should really only be exercised in the fullness of the communion and even the trust of the Church itself. The clerical state and its powers and duties of external representation of the ecclesiastical institutions are not as indelible and they are strictly conditioned by the Church’s recognition: I don’t feel I should exercise them if the Church does not trust me fully and if it thinks it cannot recognize itself, even for temporary and disputable reasons, in my orientations and attitudes contingent and related to a certain historical situation. Quod gratis ab Ecclesia accepi, semper gratis renunciabo. [What I have freely accepted from the Church, I will freely renounce forever.]

The vows that Illich made at this t­ ime—​­to Cardinal Seper, to Archbishop Cooke, and to Pope P ­ aul—​­constrained him in varying degrees and over varying periods. One he observed absolutely. Though his priesthood was, as he said, “indelible,” he never again acted as a priest in any public or official way. As for teaching or publishing articles concerning “theology,” the case is a little more ambiguous and turns on whether one takes theology to refer to any words about God or only the authoritative pronouncements of authorized theologians. He certainly never claimed the authority of a “Catholic theologian” insofar as this was “an institutional and juridically determined function within the Roman church.” On the contrary, he made it explicit in his last interviews with me, which concerned ostensibly theological matters, that he was “no theologian” and that “through lucky circumstances no one can tell me that I am.” But at no point did he refrain from discussing the Church whether as an object of faith or of historical study. At the beginning of 1971, for example, he wrote a piece for the Jesuit journal America called “Deschooling the Teaching Orders.” In it he spoke of the “delicate balance” the Christian needs to find between an unhealthy dependence on the Church and excessive independence. There is only, he said, a “narrow [way] between apostasy and idolatry.” It is wrong to make a fetish of Church rule but just as bad to reject the Church entirely. In the latter case, he says, the believer is plunged into the anomie of “a ­Churchless void without reference points for personal decision” and so left in no better condition than “the individual who functions as a mere cog in the ecclesiastical machine.” Six months later, he was in Lima, Peru, to address a

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conference of the World Council of Christian Education. There he made it clear that he considered mass compulsory education to be a product of “faith corrupted by inquisition”—a subject I’ll address more fully in the next chapter. Schooling, he argued, possesses a “hidden curriculum” rooted in the old adage that there is “no salvation outside the Church” but now twisted into the new slogan “no salvation outside the school.” “Any further complicity of Christian churches in worship of the idol of progress cannot be tolerated,” Illich declared. He concluded by recommending “the Christian message” as “the most rational policy” in a world in which the rituals of progress continually widen “the gap between rich and poor.” How Shall We Pass On Christianity? The most outstanding example of Illich continuing to write about the Church is an article published in 1972, in The Critic, a publication of the American Thomas More Society. It’s called “How Shall We Pass On Christianity?,” and it sets out the five main difficulties Illich sees as being involved in this task. He begins with a reflection on the paradoxical interdependence of tradition and renewal. Without a certain constancy in the words, gestures, and music that make up “ritual performance,” he says, it will be difficult “to hand on the faith” because such performances are the very “bones and arteries” on which successful renewal will depend. But then he immediately raises a second difficulty connected with talking about the Church of the future at all. Living in the future and trying to plan that future, he says, takes us out of the present and into a projection of our power as planners and administrators. But “we have no idea if there is a future.” The future of the Church is in God’s hands. I am responsible only for my and our past, not for the future of the Church. You must understand and come to understand anew, that the density of the Incarnation, the only time the Lord is present to us is at the present moment at which we celebrate together. We can speak about the Church in the past tense . . . ­but . . . ­only in the present [does] the Lord redeem . . . ­her. We have no idea if there is a future. To live as a Christian means to live in the Spirit of the Maran ­Atha—​ ­the Lord is coming at this moment. It means to live and enjoy living at the edge of time, at the end moment of time.

The Mass, he goes on to say, is always “a gallows meal,” like the Last Supper it commemorates. The Church is poised “at the edge of time,” between the end and the beginning again, remembering, waiting, in the “never and always” that

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is the true present. “I do not see any way we can hand on the faith,” Illich concludes, “unless we hand it on right now and here in the present, and cease to worry about . . . ­what will happen to the Faith tomorrow.” The third difficulty that Illich finds in the way of “passing on Christianity” is “the eruption of the therapeutic imperative into the Church’s life.” In this connection he remembers a retreat he gave for religious superiors in Milwaukee in 1964. In the course of this retreat, he commended the monastic vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity as representing “the three great dimensions of renunciatory ­self-​­definition.” Poverty he defined as detachment from anything that might come between the believer and God; obedience as bowing to and bearing with “the person I am with” out of “profoundest respect for [their] otherness”; and chastity as a freedom from permanent commitment in order to be totally committed in the moment. He was “pretty much surprised,” he says, to find that almost all of the religious superiors he was addressing at this retreat “objected very strongly to such a negative interpretation” of the monastic vows. He then aligns this desire to put a happier face on the Church with the desire to make the Church “a service institution.” The Church, he says, has always sought worldly visibility and tangibility “in political models.” In historical sequence, these have been first “a Byzantine court,” followed by “a feudal system of fiefs” and then a “constitutional monarchy.” Those who reject these models often propose the service institution as an alternative. Illich proposes instead that the Church be given visibility not on the model of political rule or of good works but by manifesting “certain behavioural patterns in prayer.” He continues: I’ll tell you what I would like to do personally during the second half of this decade. I would like to work with a group of people at filling out a matrix listing in one direction certain forms of behavior which in the old way I would identify as explicitly formal prayer forms, such as silence, or waking at night, or abstention or good gourmet eating on certain occasions, feasting or even orgiastic behavior, or common recitation of poems. And along the other line of this matrix I would like to list certain high points in great religious movements, from certain moments in Sufism, or Jewish mystical traditions . . . ­or the end of the 11th century, or even in a certain Baroque movement, and see how in the search for the presence of God, perhaps all over the world, people happen to come back to give the same structural form to their community. . . . ­The aim would be to see if we could not seek the visibility of the Church in the conscious evangelical interpretation of prayer rather than in the evangelical interpretation of some political or organizational structure.

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The ambition expressed here was not, to my knowledge, fulfilled. The term ­matrix—​­borrowed from mathematics in accordance with Illich’s lifelong fondness for mathematical ­metaphors—​­makes the task seem rather technical, but I think the general idea was no more than to discover whether “high points” in the history of religion could be correlated with certain universal “prayer forms.” What I find notable is not just his proposal that the Church should seek a new image of itself in prayer rather than political power or social impact but also the very ample definition he gives to p ­ rayer—​­a definition able to make room for orgy alongside silence and “collective recitation of poems” alongside the monastic tradition of “night prayer” (waking at night). It points, I think, to the adventures in “religionless” Christianity that he would undertake after his Church forced on him “the vocation of testifying to [his] love of the Church . . . ­outside its context” and he moved more and more into milieus that were not explicitly Christian. The fourth obstacle Illich sees to the transmission of Christianity is a rupture between “social criticism and the Christian message.” He had left the Vatican Council in 1964 by drawing Cardinal Suenens’s attention to the abyss separating the Gospel’s proclamation of peace from the council’s carefully qualified position on “tools of genocide.” Here he expands the point. The most pressing task of our time, he says, is to find the limits within which we can prosper and adapt our technologies accordingly. He speaks of getting “majority agreement on the roof of technological characteristics under which a society wants to live and be happy.” But Christians do not generally see this as a Gospel imperative, and that is because “they lack the courage to make that which is most fundamental in the Gospel, the Sermon on the Mount, the principal theme of their prophecies.” This echoes his statement to the Christian educators in Lima that “the Christian message” has now become “the most rational policy.” “For the first time in history,” he continues, “and I will give you only one of the Beatitudes as an example, one will be able to give scientific proof that ‘blessed are the poor’ who voluntarily set community limits to what shall be enough and therefore good enough for our society. Blessed are the poor, because theirs is the earth.” The fifth and final difficulty Illich sees is related to the fourth. One of the reasons for the rupture between social criticism and religious proclamation, he says, is that the Church increasingly embodies the very thing at which social criticism must now aim: the industrial mode of production. This is a term that Illich used at this time to refer not just to overtly industrial enterprises but to the mass production of any and all staple commodities including services like education and medicine. The Church, he says, “has become a service institution” and “there is no

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possibility of handing on a Faith through an institution which is designed in an industrial, managerial mode of production.” “How Shall We Pass On Christianity?” was the last time Illich would “address the Church [he] love[d]” from a stance so engaged and in a tone so direct. In the year before this article appeared, he had published Deschooling Society, a book that considerably expanded both his public and his reputation. The equally celebrated Tools for Conviviality and Medical Nemesis would soon follow. Most of his time as a teacher and lecturer was now taken up with the ostensibly secular themes of these books. Even so, I don’t think one should draw too hard and fast a line between the churchman of the 1950s and ’60s and the public intellectual of the 1970s and ’80s. In “The Vanishing Clergyman,” he had already foreseen that those who would “pioneer the Church of the future” might have to choose “radical secularization” and, in the process, endure exile and misunderstanding. In this sense, one can perhaps see him as exercising the new style of priesthood he had imagined. He had also expressed his hope that the Church might seek a new “mode of visibility” and abandon the “political models” that had guided it since the Middle Ages. But such a new mode of visibility might at fi ­ rst—​­precisely because of its n ­ ovelty—​­be quite invisible. And if the Church’s “mystical and ascetical wisdom gathered over the centuries” was now to be “thrown into the saeculum,” as Illich had dared to say in his conference with the psychiatrists, then where precisely was the boundary between the Church and the world to be drawn? In “How Shall We Pass on ­Christianity?” he had said explicitly that “social criticism” had now become an evangelical desideratum, the Sermon on the Mount a practical proposal. And he had also argued in his reflections on “progressive socialization” and the tendency of “development” toward “the realization of the kingdom” that society was reaching a kind of secular omega at which most of what had been “Christianity” was now submerged and dispersed in ostensibly secular discourses and structures. These cautions should be kept in mind as I now turn to the critiques of secular institutions that would occupy Illich in the years after 1970.

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4

Deschooling Society

The New World Church is the knowledge industry, both purveyor of opium and the workbench during an increasing number of the years of an individual’s life. Deschooling is, therefore, at the roots of any movement for human liberation. —Ivan Illich

Two years after his resignation from Church service, Illich published ­Deschooling Society, the first of a series of works analyzing contemporary institutions. The book was an immediate cause ­célèbre—​­the most widely discussed and debated of all Illich’s writings. A bibliography, compiled by broadcaster and adult educator John Ohliger, lists nearly seven hundred books, articles, broadcasts, and reviews that were devoted to it. The work that created this sudden storm of public interest was many years in the making and was, in a sense, the prototype of the critique Illich would later make of many other service institutions. For that reason, I will look at how this book came to be in some detail in this chapter. The story begins in Puerto Rico in 1956, when Illich was appointed vice chancellor of the Catholic University at Ponce. A year later, in consequence of his position at the university, he became a member of the Consejo Superior de Ensenanza, the board governing all educational institutions on the island. He came to this position with little experience of schools or the philosophy of education. His own schooling had been patchy, and, for himself, he told me years later, he “never took school seriously,” considering it only as an institution that might meet “the needs of others.” This lack of formation would later become a crucial advantage, allowing him to question what others took for granted. Puerto Rico, at the time Illich went there, was something of a laboratory for the development policies that would later spread throughout Latin America. The island’s development plan was called Operation Bootstrap and, under the direction of Puerto Rican businessman and politician Teodoro Moscoso, it was

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intended to transform an agricultural into an industrial economy. The perceived success of Operation Bootstrap, as I noted earlier, would lead to Moscoso’s being made the head of the Alliance for Progress, a master development plan for all of Latin America that U.S. President John Kennedy would announce in 1961. Schooling was considered intrinsic to development, and for this reason, Moscoso also chaired the Board of Education, with Illich deputizing for him during his frequent absences. At first, Illich enthusiastically accepted the need to expand Puerto Rico’s school system. Puerto Rico, like many other jurisdictions, then had a law on its books that required students to receive more schooling than the state was currently providing. Illich, accordingly, campaigned for an infusion of funds into the primary system so that the law requiring that every Puerto Rican citizen have at least five years of schooling could be put into effect. He even went so far as to make himself quite unpopular with some of his colleagues at the university by insisting that university budgets should be frozen until the requirements of that law had been met. This enthusiasm was relatively s­ hort-​­lived. Unhampered by any settled prejudice in favor of schooling, he soon began to notice perverse consequences that others overlooked. He started to “take school seriously” and, in the process, realized that schooling was not what everyone around him said it was: an efficient and equitable procedure for imparting knowledge. He came to the conclusion, eventually, that it was “structured injustice.” All entered school, but few completed ­it—​­at the time Illich began his studies, as I’ve said, even the five years required by law were beyond the country’s means. Schooling was, therefore, “a system for producing dropouts” and one that would inevitably “compound the native poverty of half of the children with a new sense of guilt for not having made it.” (I am, of course, jumping ahead a little in presenting a conclusion that was initially only a suspicion and that took several years of study to confirm.) Illich’s partner in this inquiry was Everett Reimer, who was then the chairman of Puerto Rico’s Human Resources Planning Commission and a man who shared Illich’s quizzical attitude. Together they undertook to discover what schools actually do. This investigation, Illich believed, was without precedent. “So far as I know,” he said, “the procedure of schooling had never been made an object of study in history, anthropology or the social sciences.” The discourse that justified schooling, then as now, was contradictory. On the one hand, education was presented as something good in itself because it led to the more conscious and more critical way of life that is produced by bringing students into contact with some version of “the best that has been thought and said.”

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On the other hand, schooling was said to be governed by much more practical considerations: it was a way of equalizing opportunity, driving economic growth, and fitting people to jobs. Illich and Reimer decided to bracket the loftier a­ ims—​­to ask, as Illich said, “What do schools do if [one] put[s] into parentheses their claim to educate?”—and concentrate on the practical social consequences. How did the results of mass compulsory schooling compare to its justifying rationale? What they found were outcomes that were virtually the opposite of those predicted and apparently intended. After ten years in which Puerto Rico was “the showcase for development,” the poorer half of students still only had a o­ ne-​­in-​­three chance of completing the obligatory five years of schooling. Worse, in Illich and Reimer’s view, the ­two-​­thirds who didn’t get through five years inevitably tended to attribute their social inferiority to their lack of schooling, since, even as they failed, they were being taught to see schooling as the index of success. The same principle holds even for those who drop out at a higher grade. The required amount of schooling demonstrably expands in lockstep with the availability of money to pay for ­it—​­in North America, with postsecondary education well on its way to being considered a right and already mandatory for many jobs, it has now reached sixteen ­years—​­so compulsory education remains “a system for producing dropouts” even if failure occurs after twelve years rather than after three. “The school,” Illich said, “never closes the door,” and, consequently, what constitutes enough education is an e­ ver-​­receding horizon. By its very structure, schooling “will always produce a few successes and a majority of failures.” Such a system, Illich and Reimer concluded, was a stacked lottery, in which “those who those who didn’t make it didn’t just lose what they paid in but were also stigmatized as inferior for the rest of their lives.” The educational system is a ­pyramid—​­everyone enters its wide base, few reach its a­ pex—​­and in poor countries it can be a very steep pyramid indeed. When I taught in the school system of the Malaysian state of Sarawak between 1966 and 1968, placed there by the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), only a handful of students went on to university education overseas or at the country’s one small university, but aspiration, inevitably, had already begun to focus on that summit. (Having seen this firsthand was one reason Illich’s work spoke to me when I first encountered it in 1968.) This need not be true so long as schooling includes everyone for a limited time and a limited purpose. There have certainly been ­times—​­one gets a glimpse of such a time in the novels and stories of Wendell Berry, for ­example—​­when a rural school might teach the rudiments of literacy, numeracy, and history to all without anyone feeling themselves to be a dropout

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for having stopped after six or eight grades. But it ceases to be true as soon as the local system begins to articulate with the worldwide graded curriculum on which all are ranked and by which all are certified. Then the school loses its utility in accomplishing some defined purpose and becomes the hierarchy of educational classes, the system for producing dropouts, that Illich and Reimer began to discern in Puerto Rico. In Deschooling Society, Illich argued that mass, compulsory schooling had become a counterproductive system for rich and poor alike, but, at first, he concentrated on trying to discourage poor countries from investing in schools. Schools are expensive, and expensive in the particular o­ pen-​­ended way of modern institutions of whose services there can never, by definition, be enough. This ­open-​ ­endedness is an escalator to utopia, and Illich warned “developing countries,” as they were then called, to stay off it. In fact, he argued that poorer countries, by mobilizing the ingenuity of their citizens to invent alternatives to costly and o­ pen-​ ­ended institutional treatments, might even help the richer countries to overcome their debilitating addiction to packaged solutions to reified social “problems.” Illich brought his argument to mass attention in an article for The Saturday Review in April 1968 called “The Futility of Schooling in Latin America.” There he argued that intensification of schooling in Latin America, which was then being universally pursued as a primary goal of “development,” would produce perverse consequences quite opposite to this aim: inequality would grow, polarization would increase, and the dropouts with their new “interiorized sense of guilt” would experience a “modernized” poverty much more painful than the poverty from which they were ostensibly being rescued. Better, Illich said, to define how much education a state can afford and then develop new ways of sharing this quantum equally among all citizens. Schooling as Liturgy One of the things Illich brought to his study of schools was an academic background that was somewhat unusual in a school administrator, as he briefly was in Puerto Rico. This background made him sensitive to aspects of schooling that others had not noticed or emphasized in the way that he would. While at the ­Gregorian ­University in Rome in the late 1940s, he had had a particular interest in that branch of theology known as ecclesiology. Ecclesiology studies the church, the ecclesia, the Greek word that the first Christians used for their gatherings and that then passed into L ­ atin—​ ­the same word that had described the popular assemblies that were the principal

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organ of ancient Athenian democracy. At the time of its appearance the church was an institution without precedent insofar as it stood outside the family and the community, as well as outside the state and the law. It was, to speak anachronistically, the first freely formed civil association, and it announced a new universal identity in which there was, as the apostle Paul said, “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor . . . male and female, for . . . all [are] one in Christ Jesus.” This new society claimed allegiance to a heavenly city of which all could be members. (When the Greek philosopher Celsus complained that the Christians were poor citizens because they did not sacrifice to the gods of the cities in which they lived, the church father Origen replied: “We know of the existence in each city of another country created by the Word of God.”) This new identity, created by God rather than by one’s birth, was a radical and disturbing novelty. Ecclesiology studies how such an identity is ­made—​­how is the church brought into existence?—and insofar as today’s inclusive “society” is the descendant of the church, “­ ecclesiology can be taken,” Illich says, “as the predecessor of sociology but with a tradition twenty times as long.” “Within ecclesiology,” Illich goes on, “there is a . . . branch . . . called liturgy [which] can be studied as an intellectual discipline . . . going back to the Roman and Greek church fathers. In the later second and third centuries, this branch of intellectual analysis was concerned with the way in which rituals create that community which then calls itself church and is studied by ecclesiology.” This ­claim—​­that rituals create the ­church—​­has large implications, especially in light of my corollary that the church later gives birth to the modern concept of “society.” To understand it, it is necessary to look past the merely folkloric aspects of liturgy to its generative function. The word itself comes from the Greek leitourgia, which originally meant “a public duty or service to the state undertaken by a citizen.” The wealthy citizen of Athens who endowed a warship or paid the chorus at the theatre was performing his leitourgia. The Christians took over the word for their assemblies and celebrations. The character of these assemblies is vividly described by Aidan Kavanagh (1929–2006), a Catholic priest and theologian, in his book On Liturgical Theology. Early Christian celebration was active, Kavanagh ­says—​­sometimes involving processions that took the whole of an ancient city as their scale. There was no “congregation” meekly seated on rectilinear pews who “followed” the proceedings on printed texts. Liturgy, in Kavanagh’s words, was “primary theology and all of its participants theologians.” What these primary theologians were doing was something very different from what was later done by those who received their theology from licensed theologians. They were actually building the church as a social body and not just reproducing something

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already definitively formed. “Just as a human person in infancy builds their s­ elf-​ ­image into a sort of envelope of sensation,” Kavanagh writes, “so the church builds itself from liturgical acts.” The crucial point is that, through liturgical acts, something is brought a­ bout—​­worship is not just a testimony to what is already known and already experienced. It is not a redundant tribute required by a mighty but insecure king who needs the reassurance of hearing his praises sung. “Christians do not worship because they believe,” says Kavanagh. “They believe because the One in whose gift faith lies is regularly met in the act of communal worship.” The worshippers must create the circumstances in which God can be “met,” they must do it communally, and they must face a certain existential risk in doing so. “The assembly,” writes Kavanagh, “is changed by its liturgy.” Acting by “the power and momentum of its inward flow,” liturgy shapes the church as a river shapes the land through which it passes, and in this way the church as a living community is made. Kavanagh goes on to lament the way in which liturgy as “an enacted style of common life” eventually gave way to much more passive and “didactic” forms of worship. Christians stopped being “primary theologians” and instead went to church to “receive a message.” But his critique of modern worship is beyond my scope here. I am interested in the way Kavanagh’s account of how the early church worshipped reinforces Illich’s claim that liturgical ritual “creates” the church. The key point is that liturgy doesn’t simply enact something that is already fully present, it makes something p ­ resent—​­in this case “the One in whose gift faith lies” and the community that forms and is sealed in this One’s presence. Now what Illich began to notice, as a man “responsible for making . . . very serious decisions . . . touching the education of Puerto Ricans,” was that he “was acting in a context that seemed ridiculously similar to a religious one.” He had observed, first of all, that the institution he was studying was obviously not what it claimed to be: “Quite definitely I was not studying what other people told me this was, namely, the most practical arrangement for imparting education, or for creating equality, because I saw that most of the people were stupefied by the procedure, were actually told that they couldn’t learn on their own and became disabled and crippled. Second I had the evidence that it promoted a new kind of s­ elf-​­inflicted injustice.” School, in Illich’s eyes, was evidently and obviously counterproductive, frustrating and undermining its own stated aims, and yet everywhere an expanding school system was being taken as the sine qua non of social and economic development. This fact, combined with his intuition about the religious character of the context in which he was operating, pushed Illich to the conclusion that he was dealing with something much more similar to a church than to the rational, secular ­procedure

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that was being advertised. Drawing on his background in ecclesiology, he concluded that schooling must be a liturgy, a set of practices that generates and fortifies a belief. Later he would speak of the school as a “­myth-​­making ritual.” (I will use the terms liturgy and ritual as more or less interchangeable. Liturgy is of specifically Christian derivation, and ritual has been the preferred term in anthropology, but both refer to a prescribed sequence of actions carried out in a sanctified context.) At the time that he began to analyze schooling as a ritual, Illich was a keen reader of social anthropologist Max Gluckman, who founded what came to be called the Manchester School of anthropology and wrote extensively on ritual. “Gluckman,” Illich says, “was my hero.” The idea with which Illich credited ­Gluckman is that “rituals . . . have an ability to generate in their practitioners a deep adherence to convictions which may be, internally, highly contradictory, so that somehow, the adherence to the belief is stronger than most people’s capacity to question what they believe.” The way that Gluckman puts it is that “ritual emerges as a result of the ‘moral discomfort’” that will be experienced when “irremediable conflict is felt to exist between the major principles by which the group is organized.” In ritual, “inherent conflicts in the social structure” are “enacted” and somehow mystically relieved or lifted up into a restored unity. “The prescribed statement of conflict procures blessing” is one of Gluckman’s lapidary formulas. Gluckman was writing about small and compact African societies and didn’t believe, as he wrote at the conclusion of his Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society, that “ritualization of social relations [could be found] in any highly differentiated society, particularly where the existing structure is not accepted as hallowed.” This last point was important for Gluckman, who believed that ritual is effective only when “basic social axioms are not questioned” because only then can the enacted conflict resolve into an unquestioned solidarity and unity. Illich disagreed, perhaps because he was more skeptical than Gluckman about the ostensibly rational and secular character of “differentiated society” and therefore more willing to believe that modern societies also ritualize conflict and contradiction. As he often did with his sources, Illich took Gluckman to places the latter had never thought of going, and probably never knew he had been taken, since Deschooling Society is without footnotes. Gluckman emphasizes the way in which rituals make social conflict tolerable by mobilizing “mystical means outside of sensory observation.” Illich puts more stress on how ritual distracts people from what they are actually ­doing—​­an idea I can’t find explicitly stated in Gluckman but that became crucial for Illich. “Ritual,” Illich says, is “a procedure whose imagined purpose allows the participants to overlook what they are actually doing. . . . [T]he idea that the

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rain dance will bring rain eclipses the social cost of organizing the rain dance and makes the dancers feel that if rain doesn’t come then they ought to dance all the harder.” Ritual, when defined in this way, is an undertaking that can’t fail because it is ­self-​­justifying. Its inherited and imputed significance, along with its compelling theatricality, generates a belief that is doubly invulnerable: the belief is usually stronger than any confounding empirical evidence, but should any empirical evidence leak through, then the performance of the ritual itself can be faulted. Schooling obviously was a ritual of a new ­kind—​­a “rain dance which is w ­ orld-​ ­wide,” as Illich said. How could it achieve such power and carry such conviction? Illich’s growing “suspicion that I was standing in front of a secularization of ­Catholic ritual” helped him to answer this question. The Church made attendance at various rituals compulsory. It set out schedules of specific days when attendance was required and defined the violation of such prescriptions as sin. For the clergy the breviarium, the shortened form of monastic prayers, was made obligatory by the Council of Trent. For the simple Christian there was the requirement of going to Mass every S­ unday—​­otherwise you go to h ­ ell—​­or of going to confession once a year. The elaboration of this legal organization, and this legal imposition, which defined missing out on services as a sin, immediately preceded the epoch in which the state, the new ­Church-​­like state . . . began to introduce its own rituals.

The Church was alma mater (nourishing mother) long before school and university took over this name. It was brought into existence in the first place by a ritual act, the Eucharistic meal by which a new kind of community remembered the Last Supper. As it evolved, the Church developed a more and more comprehensive regulation of the lives of its ­members—​­Illich speaks of “an intensity of ritual behavior for which I don’t find precedents or examples in other cultures.” And this was what created the cultural space, so to speak, into which the school would fit. “The modern mania for education,” Illich says, “can [only] be explained is as the fruit of a 2,000-year institutionalization of the catechetical and instructional function of the Christian community.” Deschooling as a Constitutional Proposal Illich’s recognition of the ritual and C ­ hurch-​­like character of schooling led him to propose, in Deschooling Society, that the institution should be disestablished. This was not well understood by many readers, who assumed that what he was

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proposing was to get rid of schools. (His title may, in this respect, have been misleading.) Illich himself always protested that he was not against schools as such: “I never wanted to do away with schools . . . I’ve nothing against schools! . . . Schools that are freely accessible allow the organization of certain specific learning tasks that a person might propose to himself.” Illich’s Center for Intercultural Documentation in Mexico was built on the proceeds of the intensive schooling in spoken Spanish that it offered. What he was against was compulsory schooling as a legal monopoly of educational services, able to confer and withhold social privilege. The first chapter of Deschooling Society, accordingly, is titled “Why We Must ­Disestablish School.” The echo of the struggle to disestablish religion is intentional and explicit. The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1791, states that “the Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” It goes on to guarantee freedom of speech and assembly and a free press, but the prohibition of religious establishments comes first. No church could be favored over any other nor any preference given to members of a particular church. “A wall of separation” was to be established, Thomas Jefferson said, “between church and state.” Illich argued that modern school systems have become q ­ uasi-​­churches in several senses: first, they are agencies of indoctrination that claim the right to teach on any subject, including religion, even against the objection of parents; second, their services are ­compulsory—​­just as once there was no salvation outside the church, now there is no salvation outside the school; and finally, accreditation by an educational ­institution is required for even the most basic work, regardless of competence. You can’t be required to be Baptist or Roman Catholic if you want to empty garbage cans into a smelly truck, but you can be required to have a high school diploma. Illich made three simple constitutional proposals: states should make no law “respecting the establishment of education”; discrimination in “hiring, voting or admission to centers of learning based on prior school attendance should be outlawed”; and each citizen should be entitled, by right, to “an equal share of public educational resources.” In other words, let schools flourish, insofar as they serve the purposes of any citizen or group of citizens, but do not make them a precondition for any position or privilege and recognize that competence is competence, however achieved. Illich, whatever else he might have been, was profoundly a liberal. I know it’s a m ­ uch-​­abused word and hard to parse in a world where liberals who advocate a reduced state are called conservatives and conservatives who argue for the preservation of common goods are called liberals, but I mean it in its root sense of recognizing freedom as the highest good. He was also a liberal in a second sense: he proposed legal and easily legislated means to achieve his ends.

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Enacting the three simple proscriptions he proposed may have been unimaginable for a majority of his contemporaries, but they had precedent and clear legal definition and were within the accepted scope of existing legislative assemblies. Crucial to Illich’s argument was the idea that schools share many properties “common to powerful churches throughout history.” He did not call for the disestablishment of the post office or the public libraries. He claimed that the school made itself a sacred cow by means of rituals and incantations that were structurally the same as the liturgical practices by which the church is created. In this sense, I believe he was the precursor of a style of analysis that has taken hold much more strongly in recent years than it was able to at the time he wrote. What Bruno Latour calls “the modern constitution” has broken down. This constitution consisted of a set of clarifying separations. Religion was set apart from the secular, nature distinguished from society, fact opposed to value, and so on. Many of these distinctions are now in tatters. In what Latour, with others, calls the Anthropocene, the era of ­man-​­made nature, no one can say whether climate change belongs to nature or culture because, as a natural phenomenon with human causes, it plainly belongs to both. The secular as a watertight compartment has fared just as badly. This is not just a result of the vaunted “return of religion” and the shattering of modern sociology’s confident prediction that modernization would eclipse religion. More significant from my point of view is the recognition that the secular itself is a myth and not some rational residuum that remains when all mythology has been scraped away. This is the “subtraction narrative”—just take away religion and you’re left with the ­secular—​­that Charles Taylor refutes in his A Secular Age. The secular is a product of ­religion—​­a precarious result of Christianity’s battle against religious ­superstition—​­and, as such, embodies religion. In the same way, according to Illich, modern institutions reflect church originals. And the secular is not only a product of religion but is itself often adhered to religiously just because it is in the nature of humans to continually reproduce a sacred dimension. These are points that I will argue in more detail later on, but what I want to say here is that, for me, Illich is a crucial pioneer of the view that the secular is itself a myth and a religious achievement rather than the setting aside of mythology and r­ eligion—​ ­crucial because he shows what so many miss: that institutions like schools can only be persuasively accounted for when they are seen as perverse liturgies or mythopoetic rituals. What is the myth that schooling makes? Well, first of all, that learning is the product of teaching. Second, that learning is ­accumulation—​­we accumulate information and credits, and they become our property. Third, that learning is a package

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deal. “Curriculum production,” Illich writes, “looks like any other modern staple. It is a bundle of planned meanings, a package of values, a commodity whose ‘balanced appeal’ makes it marketable to a sufficiently large number to justify the cost of production.” If you want any part of the package, you must accept the whole package. You can’t study chemistry until you have first completed algebra. Fourth, that learning is competitive and hierarchical: success is judged relative to others and to one’s advancement up a graded ladder. And finally, that learning can be standardized so that all can pursue variations of the same curriculum. What this amounts to, taken altogether, Illich says, is a “ritualization of progress.” “School is a ritual of initiation,” he writes, “which introduces the neophyte to the sacred race of progressive consumption, a ritual of propitiation whose academic priests mediate between the faithful and the gods of privilege and power, a ritual of expiation which sacrifices its dropouts, branding them as scapegoats of underdevelopment.” (This is a fair sample of the boldness of Illich’s rhetoric as well as of the depth of his conviction that the school functions as a religious cult.). The way this ritual functions is by the steady ­drip-​­drip-​­drip of daily exposure that eventually turns the myth it makes into a kind of common sense, though a common sense, it must be said, that is often at odds with experience. For example, most people know, by experience, that primary learning is not the result of teaching but of doing something oneself, with teaching at best playing a secondary, even if crucial, orienting role. Likewise, many recognize that learning is not cumulative. Indeed, we forget most of what we are taught, retaining only what we can assimilate to some lively and continuing story or interest. So our experience is often at odds with schooled forms of common sense. We can sustain this dissonance and overcome our native common sense, according to Illich, only because the school acts on us in such a powerful, persistent, and prolonged way. This new “common sense,” he says, “drips to the rock bottom . . . into the cave where the inevitable takes shape. . . . [It] sinks deeper and deeper below the surface of awareness until it becomes impossible to dig up its stereotypes for examination in the light of day. It becomes almost impossible to sift intuition from common sense, critical judgment from accepted opinion, anguished feeling from complacency . . . the stereotypes . . . grow into convictions which colour all perception of reality.” School, Illich claimed, casts the spell that holds contemporary society in thrall, and for this reason, “deschooling [must be] at the root of any movement for human liberation.” Such a claim gives g­ reat—​­and, it might be thought, e­ xaggerated—​­importance to schooling, so it should be borne in mind that when Illich spoke of school, he spoke not of the relatively modest institution that had historically gone by this

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name but of something new that he saw emerging at the time he w ­ rote—​­not just a “World Church” or, worse, “a w ­ orld-​­wide ‘cargo cult’” but an institution that “by its very nature tends to make a total claim.” He felt, for example, that the teacher increasingly combined the roles of “custodian, preacher and therapist.” The ­teacher-​­as-​­custodian acts as a master of ceremonies, who guides his pupils through a ­drawn-​­out and labyrinthine ritual. He arbitrates the observance of rules and administers the rubrics of initiation to life. At his best, he sets the stage for the acquisition of some skill as schoolmasters always have. Without illusions of producing any profound learning, he drills his pupils in some basic routines. The ­teacher-​­as-​­moralist substitutes for parents, God, or the state. He indoctrinates the pupil about what is right or wrong not only in the school but in society at large. He stands in loco parentis for each one and thus ensures that all feel themselves children of the same state. The ­teacher-​­as-​­therapist feels authorized to delve into the personal life of his pupil in order to help him grow as a person. When this function is exercised by a custodian and preacher, it usually means that he persuades the pupil to submit to a domestication of his vision of truth and his sense of what is right.

Teachers may smile to hear that anyone ever thought that they possessed such virtually pontifical powers, even in earlier, more idealistic times, so I should reemphasize that, for Illich, the teacher stands for the school and the school for the society. His analysis, though often pointed and sharply observed, does proceed by what Max Weber called ideal t­ypes—​­hypothetical figures in which much is condensed and summarized. The teacher, thus understood, is an instance of an unlimited and unconstitutional power, a type of power whose only precedent lies in the Roman church: The child must confront a man who wears an invisible triple crown, like the papal tiara, the symbol of triple authority combined in one person. For the child, the teacher pontificates as pastor, prophet and ­priest—​­he is at once guide, teacher and administrator of a sacred ritual. He combines the claims of medieval popes in a society constituted under the guarantee that these claims shall never be exercised together by one established and obligatory ­institution—​­church or state.

“The claim that a liberal society can founded on the modern school is paradoxical,” Illich concludes.

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The Institutional Spectrum In Deschooling Society, Illich places the school at one extreme of what he calls an “institutional spectrum.” At one end are true utilities, at the other establishments that “invite compulsively repetitive use and frustrate alternative ways of achieving similar results.” A library, a telephone exchange, or an a­ ll-​­purpose road are examples of utilities that cluster at the convivial end of this s­ pectrum—​­they are available for use, but the user decides what use to make of them and for what purpose. The compulsory school is assigned to the opposite end, among “manipulative” and “total” i­ nstitutions—​­it determines almost entirely how you will use it, to the point where it is effectively using you. The school moreover constitutes “a perfect system of regressive taxation, where the privileged graduates ride on the back of the entire paying public.” Drivers pay at least some of the cost of untolled roads through taxes on vehicles and gasoline; the prestige of the education system as an instrument of equality allows it to spread its costs over all citizens while concentrating privilege in the hands of the few who make it to the top of the greasy pole. Illich’s proposal was to move education to the convivial end of the institutional spectrum by turning it into a utility that all could use when and how they liked. With education disestablished and demonstrated competence, not accreditation, made the criterion of employment, he reasoned, education could actually become the leisurely and disinterested pursuit that is idealized in school mottos and university crests. The key idea was to allow each citizen an equal share of whatever were determined to be a given jurisdiction’s total educational resources to be used whenever and however that person saw fit. He also proposed various means whereby people with similar interests could find one another and potential teachers could seek students. Ivan Illich was a scholarly man and entirely committed to the traditions and standards that underpin intellectual inquiry. His critique of schools was not intended to unleash a generation of uncultured autodidacts. Quite the opposite. Illich felt that this was what was already being done by an endlessly growing and ever more amorphous education system in which many universities had become little more than extensions of high school and curricula had become increasingly elastic. “Now that I’m back in the United States after t­ wenty-​­five years, and again have to do with student populations,” he told me in the fall of 1988, while he was teaching at the Pennsylvania State University, “I sometimes am so sad in the evening that I have trouble falling asleep.” Schools, when they are ­compulsory—​­as we see at this moment in the United ­States—​ ­create a dazed population, a “learned” population, a mentally pretentious population,

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such as we have never seen before. . . . The college and university systems . . . have become like television. There’s a bit of this and a bit of that and some compulsory program with its components connected in a way that only a planner could understand. It creates students who have gotten utterly used to the fact that what they learn they must be taught, and nothing they are taught must really be taken seriously.

Compulsory schooling, in Illich’s view, was an a­ nti-​­intellectual procedure. And it had become more so, as new mandates had been added to the education system. There is little that is not now expected of schools, of universities, and increasingly of day cares and preschools as well. It was already surprising to me t­wenty-​­five years ago, as a father of children who were not sent to school, that people again and again would express anxiety to my wife and me about the “socialization” of our children. No one expressed concern about their ­education—​­I think because most knew that this could go on as well or better outside ­school—​­but many worried that they would be misfits. The school is an agency of social and economic adjustment. Education is just the “free lunch”—the offer that gets you in the door. What counts is what Illich called “the hidden curriculum,” the way the ritual is structured and repeated until it induces a sense of inevitability. Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent. Everywhere this same curriculum instills in the pupil the myth that increased production will provide a better life. And everywhere it develops the habit of ­self-​­defeating consumption of services and alienating recognition of institutional rankings. The hidden curriculum of school does all this in spite of contrary efforts undertaken by teachers and no matter what ideology prevails.

School, in other words, makes you need more school, and more of its many cognates. Education is not the point and, for the majority, will be actively discouraged. This will occur in two ways: the dropout will believe that he/she has failed and that education is out of reach; the graduate will often mistake his/her certification for an achieved education and stop at the certificate. Both will have confused, as Illich says, “process with substance.” The protean character of the educational system makes education a vexed and vexing word, but clearly one of its meanings is the achievement of a certain critical distance from the shibboleths of one’s own society as well as a sense of the limitations of one’s own knowledge. This is not an exhaustive definition, but these two extremely ­hard-​­won ­achievements—​­call them humility and ­perspective—​­are

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often what is intended in calling someone educated. The education system basks in their prestige and threatens their loss should funding be cut. But Illich argued that these ideals would not suffer from deschooling. He himself was often called an educator and sometimes called himself one. For example, in his 1969 letter to his archbishop in which he “resign[s] entirely from Church service,” he cites as one of his reasons the shadow that Church proceedings against him had thrown on his “work as an educator.” He regarded education in this sense as an immeasurable good but also as something only to be undertaken as a voluntary and personal commitment. Mastery of a tradition, in his view, depended on prior submission to it, something that cannot be commanded without corrupting the very idea of education. The point of deschooling was to disentangle education as personal formation from all the antithetical social objectives with which the school currently packages it. The Reception of Deschooling Society Deschooling Society was a widely read but also widely criticized book. Several strands of critique can be distinguished. One of its reviewers was Sidney Hook, then the chairman of the Philosophy Department at New York University. He had been a student and later an inheritor and advocate of the philosophy of John Dewey, which had exerted a strong influence on teacher training in the United States. A Communist in his youth, Hook had become, by the time he reviewed Illich, more social democratic in his politics. Hook took the book as a specimen of “revolutionary extremism,” paralleling in the field of education the “extremist position and inflated rhetoric” of the New Left. He argued that mass compulsory schooling, whatever its faults, was a precious democratic achievement and an indispensable shared ground of citizenship and civic discourse. Illich, in his view, had completely avoided “the basic question in education,” which is “what should individuals learn?” Where Illich imagined free citizens meeting of their own volition to play chess or read Baudelaire, Hook, a man frightened by the implosion of his youthful ­Communist utopia, foresaw chaos. With no one able to authoritatively determine what should be taught, intellectual life would dissolve. “Like so many other contemporary reactionaries on the new Left, Illich talks a great deal about freedom but neglects the principles of i­ntellectual authority and organization necessary to negotiate the conflicts of freedom.” Other voices on the left were equally critical. Bruce Kidd, writing in Canadian Forum, complained that Illich “doesn’t offer any strategy for change. His critique

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may be devastating, his alternatives sensible but the road from here to there is missing. As a result, there’s no apparent need to worry about a constituency.” He goes on to say that without such a road map the only likely effect of Illich’s work will be to “give ammunition to those who would greatly reduce public expenditure on education.” Economist Herb Gintis contributed a classic, Marxian analysis in a ­twenty-​­seven-​­page review essay for the Harvard Educational Review. His critique echoed Marx and Engels’s attack on the “utopian socialists”—those who minimize class antagonism, reject political revolution and, in the words of the C ­ ommunist Manifesto, “wish to attain their ends by peaceful means . . . endeavor[ing] by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.” As an example of this utopianism, Gintis cites Illich’s statement that “[e]ach of us is personally responsible for his or her own deschooling, and only we have the power to do it.” This evokes Gintis’s scorn. Illich, he says, “posits [an] individual outside of society” who is able to use “social forms as instruments [for] his/her preexisting ends.” But this concept of the “individual prior to society is nonsense,” Gintis says. He rejects the idea that the school can be analyzed outside the context of the capitalist mode of production as a whole. The school is not a dysfunctional and manipulative bureaucracy whose effect is to induce addiction and psychological impotence; it’s an “integral link in the larger institutional allocation of unequal power and income.” In other words, the school is a rational and intentional element in the overall system of capitalist social ­relations—​­irrational though that system may ­be—​­and cannot be changed without changing the entire system. “The school system,” Gintis writes, “fulfill[s a] functional role in reproducing a properly socialized and stratified labor force.” When this role requires readjustment as a result of alterations in the productive system, the school system changes. It does not change because individuals wish to deschool themselves. As Gintis sees him, Illich is in the grip of the petty bourgeois illusion that a transformed consciousness can, by itself, renovate the social order. He prescribes and administers a strong dose of historical materialism. Sociologist Daniel Bell, writing about Illich in his influential The Coming of ­Post-​­Industrial Society, finds Illich to be “a romantic ­Rousseau-​­ian” who employs the same “farrago of rhetoric” as Rousseau and who places a similar emphasis on “authenticity of ­being—​­those cant words of modernity which can never be defined.” Moreover, he finds Illich “­anti-​­intellectual” because, in Bell’s view, Illich regards “experience alone as truth rather than disciplined study.” Thinking is difficult, Bell says, standards hard to maintain, and a recognized authority essential. He finds Illich wanting on all counts. I believe that Bell misread Illich, or perhaps

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didn’t read him very carefully, but I find his critique worth mentioning for two reasons. The first is Bell’s characterization of Illich as R ­ ousseau-​­ian. This was common at the ­time—​­I remember Illich telling me, for example, that Robert Hutchins had described him in the same way. (Hutchins was president of the University of Chicago, where he introduced one of the first Great Books curricula and later founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, where Illich was sometimes a guest.) Illich can be seen as a romantic, if one takes that term in its largest and best sense, but he is certainly not a romantic in the casual and pejorative sense in which Bell uses the term and even less a ­Rousseau-​­ian. The second notable element in Bell’s critique is his failure to recognize the conservative element in Illich, though Bell saw himself as cultural ­conservative—“socialist in economics, liberal in politics, conservative in culture” was how he put it. Illich was trying to preserve ­self-​­government and to restrain and limit totalizing systems, which might have been seen as conservative objectives, but this was rarely ­noticed—​­I suppose because the paradox of revolutionary conservatism was no more thinkable in educational circles than it had been in the Church. The last critique I want briefly to look at is Neil Postman’s contribution to a book called After Deschooling, What? Winsomely titled “My Ivan Illich Problem,” Postman’s essay begins ironically: “To you Ivan Illich may be the most exciting social critic since Marshall McLuhan swept down from the North Country; but for someone like me . . . Ivan Illich is a big headache.” He goes on, still tongue in cheek, to say that Illich’s radicalism has made mere reformers like him seem “conservative and obtuse.” However, when he gets around to confronting his “Ivan Illich problem,” it turns out that in Postman’s eyes Illich is “a mystic . . . a utopian . . . [and] an authoritarian.” The problem with Illich’s being a mystic, for Postman, is that he fails to “acknowledge the realm in which he dwells,” presenting his deschooling proposal instead as if it were a practicable policy suggestion. Postman demurs. “In proposing a deschooled society, Illich offers an alternative that, like the City of God, is invulnerable to criticism. It is invulnerable because it does not exist and, in the form he proposes, has never existed. Thus, once we have gone beyond the boundaries of faith how can we say that a deschooled society is either good or bad, or even somewhere in between? We cannot say . . . ” Postman, moreover, finds Illich utopian in his rejection of all tinkering and piecemeal ­change—​­what Postman calls “experimentation and innovation.” Illich, he says, “is a totalist, not an experimentalist. He is offering a new order, a complete package, which requires the restructuring not merely of education but of all other social and political institutions.”

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The third charge is authoritarianism. This is inferred rather than proved from any statement Illich actually makes. Illich, Postman writes, “proposes no strategies, rules of discourse, questions, restraints, modes of conduct, or anything else that would help to achieve a change of such a magnitude.” And Illich undertakes to speak for others, against their liking: “Consider, for example, his attitude towards the poor. Illich is certain that the present schooling process conspires against the poor and disenfranchised. . . . But this is not how the poor see i­ t—​­at least not those I have spoken with . . . They will tell you that what they want is better schools and better teachers, and control over both.” From these two imputed s­ tances—​ ­that Illich thinks he knows others better than they know themselves and that he is uninterested in the process by which change might o­ ccur—​­Postman deduces that Illich must intend to accomplish his goal through the force of his superior understanding alone. His eye is “firmly fixed on the goal,” and this “fixation is the essence of authoritarianism.” Postman then concludes by s­ aying—​­sincerely, I ­think—​­that Illich is an “inventive poet” with a shrewd eye for the folly perpetrated by schools in the name of education but that “insofar as he means to be taken literally, his proposal is irrelevant. It is roughly analogous to one’s saying that the ­Vietnam war would end tomorrow if only we Americans would take the message of Christ seriously. That is undoubtedly true. But it ain’t gonna happen, so we’ll have to find another way.” Illich, Postman says, will be the Tolstoy, not the Lenin, of any educational revolution and “the deschooled society . . . a metaphor, an image, an ideal” rather than a “serious political proposal.” A Response to Illich’s Critics These critiques are interesting to me in several ways. They certainly involve serious m ­ isreadings—​­one can see easily enough in retrospect that Illich was neither a “­Rousseau-​­ian” nor a utopian, nor had he any notion of providing “a new system” for which he had culpably failed to provide instructions for assembly. But it is also true that to a certain extent he laid himself open to these misreadings by presenting deschooling as both a practicable proposal and an imminent prospect. For example, in an article for the Jesuit journal America, he wrote, “I am certain that in 1971 many people will suddenly come to share the insight that our societies are in the midst of rapid deschooling. Until now most of us somehow believed, if only tenuously, that radical changes in teachers, pupils, tax structures and programs could save the system. Within the next few months, this last strand of hope will unravel completely.” One can understand this as prophecy and as a messianic hope that all

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minds will suddenly converge in “shared insight,” but as prediction it now appears fanciful. One can understand, therefore, that some of his critics didn’t quite know how to take Deschooling Society. The criticisms, as I understand them, break down into four groups: first, that deschooling is an idealism without “constituency”—some class or interest group with a stake in bringing it about; second, that Illich is a romantic who overestimates human nature, fetishes authenticity, and thinks that everyone will spend their time at the library once excused from school; third, that Illich doesn’t see the need for an authoritative ordering of educational standards and goals; and, finally, that Illich doesn’t tell you how to get from here to there. All these criticisms are pertinent in some ­way—“authority” really is the primary issue in education for Sidney Hook, Bruce Kidd really does want a road map for reform, it really does look to Herb ­Gintis as if Illich thinks he can make an omelet without breaking any ­eggs—​­it’s just that they’re not always pertinent to Illich. What the critics miss I think is that Illich is a ­Christian—​­Postman’s hint that Illich is a “mystic” and his quip that deschooling is about as practical as “the message of Christ” are as close as anyone gets. Illich, as I’ve already acknowledged, was partly responsible for this ­misunderstanding—​­not because he is not explicit about his view of the school system as a perverse displacement of Christian religion but because he presents his proposal as politically achievable and does so in language so pointed, so satirical, so assured, and so authoritative as to suggest that he is settling a question for good rather than opening it up for further consideration. The fact that it did not seem politically achievable to his critics sometimes caused them to overlook even what they might have learned from his penetrating “phenomenology” of schooling. And the reception of the book was further complicated by the prophetic and apocalyptic elements that are freely mixed with the more sociological strain in Illich’s analysis. The heady rhetoric that resulted may have initially contributed to the book’s vogue but also made it difficult to assimilate. I’ll conclude this chapter by trying to say briefly what his critics didn’t have “ears to hear.” Neil Postman considers that he has landed a blow by saying that deschooling is about as practicable as trying to end the Vietnam War by invoking “the message of Christ.” In fact it was Illich’s view that the Gospel had, in our time, become practical. Consider a passage I cited earlier from his essay on “How to Pass On Christianity”: “. . . for the first time in history, and I give you only one of the Beatitudes as an example, one will be able to give scientific proof that ‘blessed are the poor’ who voluntarily set community limits to what shall be enough and therefore good enough for our society.” He implies in offering “only one” that others of the

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Beatitudes have become equally susceptible of scientific proof, that the hour has also struck for the peacemakers, the merciful, the pure in heart, and so forth. It was Illich’s view that, in his time, his world had reached and exceeded every proper natural and human scale: this was reflected in atomic weapons, in “development” driving inexorably toward ­eco-​­cide, and in institutions so ambitious and invasive as to amount to an “engineered messiah.” It was in this perspective that he proposed deschooling as “the root of any movement for human liberation.” He did not see his times as ordinary ones calling only for mild and carefully mapped out measures. He saw them in apocalyptic perspective: as a moment of unprecedented peril and of an opportunity precisely proportional to this peril: “The mood of 1971 is propitious for a major change of direction in search of a hopeful future.” One can take issue with this perspective, but I don’t think Deschooling Society can be properly interpreted without taking it into account. Illich saw the school system as a form of idolatry. He speaks of the need to “liberate ourselves right now from our pedagogical hubris, our belief that man can do what God cannot, namely manipulate others for their own salvation.” The contemporary school system, Illich claims, has put itself in the place of God and, to this extent, is not just a failing bureaucracy but a blasphemy. The point is surely debatable, but Illich’s critics did not debate it. They generally assumed that schools continued to be what they had been for a ­century—​­the sometimes ineffective but essentially innocent infrastructure of democracy. Illich, obviously, didn’t think so. Taking the school as an epitome of all modern institutional treatments, he saw an ersatz salvation supplanting and depressing the individual’s ability to work out his own salvation “in fear and trembling.” Some of Illich’s critics see in him a utopian or R ­ ousseau-​­ian belief that education will flower once the duress of a compulsory curriculum is removed. I see him as asserting what might paradoxically be called “a right to sin” rather than claiming that freedom will always go well. No utopia is invoked. In the book’s concluding essay, Illich does affirm his “trusting faith in the goodness of nature” and does suggest that only such faith can replace our “reliance on results that are planned and controlled.” But, to me, this only says that we cannot find out what is possible without the courage to act in a way that is free, spontaneous, and unafraid. Such action may be underwritten by trust in the ultimate goodness of things, but it certainly has no guarantee. In fact, by my reading, Illich announces the end of utopia. Utopia is the claim that a worldwide school system gives all an equal shot at the brass ring and can produce a world in which all, as I once heard, are above average. Illich punctures this dream and suggests that people refuse conscription into it.

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The originality of Deschooling Society lies in its suggestion that schooling be analyzed as a ­myth-​­making ritual rather than as rational method of imparting education. Again, Illich’s critics showed little interest in this aspect of his analysis, though the idea is well developed in the text. “The school system today,” Illich writes, “performs the threefold function common to powerful churches throughout history. It is simultaneously the repository of society’s myth, the institutionalization of the myth’s contradictions, and the locus of the ritual which reproduces and veils the disparities between myth and reality.” Elsewhere the school is “sacred territory,” “the World Church of our decaying culture,” and “the liturgical expression of a ­world-​­wide ‘cargo cult.’” This was an idea to be taken seriously and followed up, but it was generally seen as mere metaphor and not a serious claim that the school is a religious structure. Today, with no immediate prospect whatever of deschooling and a cynical and instrumental attitude toward educational institutions in the ascendant, it may be possible to see things differently. Illich’s Predictions in Retrospect Illich believed that compulsory education could be given up and would be given up because the style of secular society it expressed had reached a m ­ aximum—​­a moment at which it was bound, for good or ill, to turn into something else. No other thought, in my view, can account for Illich’s confident conviction that unstoppable change was imminent. He wrote, for example: “The disestablishment of schools will inevitably ­happen—​­and it will happen surprisingly fast. It cannot be retarded very much longer.” This thought, of a change that will unavoidably happen once the moment of decision is reached, has occurred to many thinkers and taken many forms. Karl Marx says, “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed.” According to him, an order can be changed only at the moment when it simultaneously fulfills and exhausts its possibilities. C. G. Jung, as I mentioned earlier, has the concept of enantiodromia, the Greek term he adopted for the point at which any tendency, pushed to its extreme, will turn into its opposite. The New Testament speaks of kairos, as when Jesus says, “The time is fulfilled.” Illich clearly felt that he was writing at such a moment. The prediction, in Deschooling Society, of a “mechanical messiah” and of the emergence of a world in which people believe themselves capable of engineering their own salvation makes it quite plain. Illich poses an unequivocal either/or. If people do not back away from intrusive and debilitating systems, he says, and begin to explore the freedom that is only possible within voluntary, politically determined

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limits, then a new era will unfold in which reality and artifice will increasingly merge and become indistinguishable. Illich knew that deschooling was “a cause without a party,” but he did specify clear and conceivable political steps by which his proposal could have been realized. That they were not taken does not show, on his terms, that he was wrong, but only that the mechanical messiah won the day. Was the choice as decisive and final as Illich supposed? I think the answer has to be yes and no. It is certainly yes inasmuch as Illich was trying to save a conception of education as personal formation and protect it from the more instrumental goals of education as system. He claimed, for example, that “only a generation which grows up without obligatory schools will be able to ­re-​­create the university.” Today economists measure “returns to education,” university presidents boast of their institutions as engines of economic growth, and the university meshes so smoothly with its economic and social milieu that one can scarcely imagine the community of independent scholars that Illich hoped a deschooled generation would recreate. In that sense, Illich’s view did decisively lose. On the other hand, messianic hope is reborn in each generation, and the last battle is fought again. Things did develop as Illich predicted they would if deschooling did not occur, but as he also recognized, these developments often evoked a saving cynicism and buffering disillusionment that prevented most people from swallowing “the mechanical messiah” whole. The teacher’s aura was tarnished, and tarnished sufficiently that Illich’s portrait of a hierophant combining the authority of “pastor, prophet, and priest” today seems a little overdrawn. Professionalism generally suffered a comparable loss of prestige. The school system stumbled on, but it did so in that peculiar postmodern state of chronic emergency and c­ risis-​­without-​ ­resolution that suggests that many of Illich’s challenges have been neither met nor refused but only postponed. I believe that Illich’s identification of schooling as a perverse liturgy has important and continuing implications for the study of both education and religion. Illich holds that the school system is both “the repository of the society’s myth” and the veil that hides its contradictions. The myth is equality, opportunity, and ­growth—​­the goods you go to school to pursue. Its contradictions are the reality of growing inequality, shrinking opportunity, and the ecological limits to growth that we have yet to face. The veiling occurs by sheer numbing repetition. S­ chooling may concentrate privilege and inhibit learning, but if you invest enough in it, you will eventually be bound to believe that you can’t learn or succeed without it. This way of doing things is just as counterproductive, and even more unsustainable, than when Illich ­wrote—​­more unsustainable because costs keep growing, school

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curricula become more vapid, and universities are increasingly taken over by the same functions Illich ascribed to ­schools—​­training and indoctrination. But all this is hidden, if Illich is right, by the ritual’s s­ elf-​­justifying character. It follows, I think, that bringing this ritual to light and analyzing it as such will be the best way to begin the dismantling of the whole precarious edifice that has been erected under its spell. Understanding schooling as liturgy is significant for the study of religion as well because it shows religion primarily as something enacted rather than as something believed. The school, for Illich, is inseparable from the Church and would not ­exist—​­indeed, would not even be ­conceivable—​­without the pathways first laid down by the Church. This has important implications. It suggests, first of all, that we often look in the wrong places for religion. Its primary locus is not in our heads but in our institutions, where it has been sedimented over centuries. The person who believes himself free of religion, who perhaps even despises religion as a con game, still faithfully attends services, just not in church. The school, as Illich convincingly shows, is “a sacred precinct,” and the ability to create such a space is precisely what defines religion: Durkheim recognized that the ability to divide reality into two realms was the very essence of formal religion. There are, he reasoned, religions without the supernatural and religions without gods, but none which does not subdivide the world into things and times and persons that are sacred and others that as a consequence are profane. Durkheim’s insight can be applied to the sociology of education, for school is radically divisive in a similar way.

He goes on to say that secularization had a salutary effect on Christianity and might have the same effect on education. This was his hope at the ­time—​­that a humanity at the threshold of “maturity” would give up the last vestiges of “the sacred” and experience at last a spiritual life free of ritually generated superstitions. Illich’s hope was not realized, and there are many hints in his later work that he saw the world after 1980 falling into a new phase of religiosity centered on “life”—a subject for a later chapter. Perhaps it is easier to disestablish an overtly sacred institution like the church than it is to end the privileges of those that are, as it were, secretly sacred. The thought of the school as a sacred space is not absolutely ­strange—​­few would blanch at hearing the school system described as a sacred ­cow—​­and yet this sacred and ritual character still remains largely sequestered and unacknowledged.

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Seeing this character, and coming to terms with it, has, for me, a further implication. The c­ hurch-​­like quality that Illich identified in the practice of mass compulsory schooling is just one instance of something larger and more general. For him a corrupted form of the Christian inspiration is diffused throughout our institutions, practices, and ideas. This implies that all those who operate these institutions, and are operated by them, practice a displaced form of the Christian religion and are, therefore, in a quite precise sense, Christians. But at the same time ­Christianity is seen by the majority as something that has been set aside and surpassed. More than that, it has become the last acceptable scapegoat in a world that is otherwise hypersensitive to all forms of victimization. This creates a curious predicament. Christianity, in the form in which it was domesticated and institutionalized by the Church, is the source and animating principle of the world in which we live, but many of the people who live in this world see historical Christianity as a form of violence and hypocrisy that they have now overcome. This creates a kind of willful blindness. The possibility of reforming our institutions would therefore seem to rest on what might be called a ­de-​­repression of ­Christianity—​­an honest facing up to its legacy from which we do not conveniently exclude ourselves. If Illich is right, the gateway to the future may lie in the past, buried under the layers of unexamined religious ideology that secretly fuel our endless pursuit of health, education, safety, and various other phantoms. Second Thoughts on Deschooling Illich, at a certain moment, was remarkably sanguine about the prospect of deschooling, but at the same time he was aware of many difficulties standing in the way. One of these difficulties followed from his recognition of schooling as a religious issue. Even as he threw himself into his deschooling campaign, he could see reasons why a deschooled society could not easily emerge within an order based on schooling. He explained the problem in a television documentary presented on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series “Man Alive” in 1969. Can two societies with entirely different ritual structures ever ­co-​­exist? Is it possible to have a schooled society and an unschooled society ­co-​­exist? I do believe for that purpose we have to look at church history. It was really churches which played this incorporating r­ ole—​­this packaging ­role—​­in old societies. And we have very little evidence that two churches [belonging to different religious systems] can ­co-​­exist in the same territory or in two neighboring countries which have intense cultural relations without

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either one . . . dominating the other . . . or . . . some kind of war starting. This points out to you why the idea of radical alternatives to institutionalized ­education—​­to the present school ­system—​­leads into problems which are confusing to face.

A second difficulty standing in the way of deschooling lay in the fact that what Illich began to call “the myth of education” was no longer confined within the walls of schools and universities but had already begun to exercise a more universal sway. The first to tell him so, he always said, was his student and later friend and colleague Wolfgang Sachs. “In Germany, I met with him and a small group of other students [who] claimed that by making so much of the unwanted side effects of compulsory schooling, I had become blind to the fact that the educational function was already emigrating from the schools and that, increasingly, other forms of compulsory learning would be instituted in modern society.” This insight would eventually lead Illich beyond the school as such and into a deeper inquiry into the peculiar character of modern education. Even as Deschooling ­Society was still in press, he published an essay in The Saturday Review in which he tried to forestall a too narrow interpretation of his as yet unpublished book. “I wrote an article,” he recalled later, “in which I basically said that nothing would be worse than to believe that I consider schools the only technique for creating and establishing and anchoring in souls the myth of education. There are many other ways by which we can make the world into a universal classroom.” He began to ask himself a new question: How can we better understand that societies get a­ ddicted—​­as to a d ­ rug—​­to education? . . . During the 1970s, most of my thinking and ­reflection—​­to put it very ­simply—​ ­centered on the question, How should I distinguish the acquisition of education from the fact that people have always known many things, have had many competencies and, therefore, have learned something? So I then came to define education as learning under the assumption of scarcity, learning under the assumption that the means for acquiring something called knowledge are scarce.

With this definition of education as “learning under the assumption of scarcity” Illich entered a new phase of his research. Deschooling remained a potent metaphor, and his analysis of schooling as a ­myth-​­making ritual continued to inform his later studies, but he realized that if he were really going to unearth the roots of “the myth of education,” he would have to go beyond “rabble rousing” and deep into history. I will examine that turn in chapter 7.

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Illich as Revolutionary

5

We need an alternative . . . to merely political revolution. Let me call this alternative program either institutional or cultural revolution. The political revolutionary wants to improve existing ­institutions—​­their productivity and the quality and distribution of their products. His vision of what is desirable and possible is based on consumption habits developed during the last hundred years. The cultural revolutionary believes that these habits have radically distorted our view of what human beings can have and want. He questions the reality that others take for granted. —Ivan Illich at York University in 1970

In November 1962, Ivan Illich wrote to his friend Joe Fitzpatrick inviting him to come to Mexico and “join the revolution.” Fitzpatrick was a Jesuit priest and a professor of sociology at Fordham University. He and Illich had been allies in the campaign to ­integrate Puerto Rican migrants into the Catholic Church in New York, and Fitzpatrick had also been integral in establishing the Institute for ­Intercultural ­Communication in Puerto Rico and its successor, the Center for I­ ntercultural F ­ ormation in Mexico. Illich now urged him to risk “total involvement.” By “­ abandon[ing] the institutional frameworks which . . . allow you to be courageous,” Illich wrote, “[you would] risk the loss of respectability among your peers” and face “exile,” but “you might be the first North American priest who, with full consciousness of what it involves, joins the revolution.” Fitzpatrick declined, remaining at Fordham until his retirement in 1983, but Illich’s proposal, even if it didn’t suit his friend, tells us a good deal about the man who made it. For it was Illich who had risked exile, foregone r­ espectability, and accepted a h ­ and-​­to-​­mouth existence in various temporary institutions and arrangements of his own devising. From the day of his embarkation for the United States in the fall in 1951 to the day of his death under gray northern skies in Bremen at the end of 2002, he had “take[n] no thought for the morrow,” each new stage of his life a step into the unknown, undertaken without security or guarantee.

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In all of his writings of the 1960s and early 1970s, Illich spoke freely of revolution. His first published book of essays, Celebration of Awareness, was subtitled A Call for Institutional Revolution. In 1973’s Tools for Conviviality, he urged a “revolutionary inversion” in the structure of technological society. An audience at York University in early 1970 heard a plea for “cultural revolution.” What he meant by the word will be the subject of this chapter. He spoke, first of all, of a stance, or sensibility, and one that he himself embodied. Throughout his life he was avid for new adventures, open to new friendships, and capable of sudden changes in direction. He saw his way in the world as both exile and “pilgrimage”—an exile in which home had receded into a past that could not be recovered and a pilgrimage in which the pilgrim “does not know where the road might lead and the journey end.” Revolution, in this sense, was a way of walking, a name for the life he had been given as a refugee from a vanished world and the life to which he was called as a C ­ hristian—​­a life received moment to moment from the hand of God. “If I had to choose a sentence from the Old Testament for my blazon,” he said to me once, “it would be timeo Dominum transeuntem: I fear the Lord is passing me by.” This ­fear—​­the fear of missing the moment of grace and ­opportunity—​­urged a discerning, watchful, and mobile attention. “Could you not watch with me one hour?” Jesus asks his disciples when he finds them asleep during his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. “Watch and pray that you may not be put to the test.” Watchfulness and prayerfulness were crucial elements of Illich’s attitude. He lived, as best he could, on the spur of the moment, and this attitude underlay his attempts to “revolutionize” a society he saw as terminally overplanned, overtooled, and overinsured. Illich’s concept of revolution was deeply rooted in his Christian faith. He believed that Jesus as the Christ had revealed and initiated a way of life in which anyone might at any moment step outside their assigned place and into that mysterious and surprising now that He called the kingdom of God. Illich’s understanding of this new sensibility was deeply indebted, he always said, to ­Austrian-​­American historian Gerhart Ladner, the author of The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers, published in 1959. ­Ladner was a generation older than Illich but came from a similar background: the wealthy, cultivated, and assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie of Vienna. Illich’s family on his mother’s side were already converts to Christianity by the time he was born; Ladner converted as a young man. The two men met at Fordham, the Jesuit university where Illich developed many close connections during his years in New York and where Ladner became a professor in 1952. “One of the great and overwhelming fortunes of my life has been the teachers I’ve had,” Illich told me, “and among

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them Gerhart Ladner is one of the foremost.” With Ladner, Illich learned to think about “the idea of reform,” or the way in which the early Christians opened themselves to a total renovation and remaking of their lives: As Ladner expounds it, reformatio came to refer in the early Christian centuries to a way of behaving and feeling that had never been known before. The classical world had known renewal and rebirth as one phase of the eternal cycling of the stars and the seasons, but this was nothing like the idea which had spread throughout Christendom by the fourth century, of a conversion that would sweep away the culture in which I was born and leave me in an entirely new state. A source I know from this period, for example, relates the story of a family of Irish brothers whose father had been killed. In the society from which they came a son had an absolute duty to avenge a father’s murder, yet these young men forgot their revenge and went to live as monks on a barren island. . . . They were able, suddenly, to step outside the culture which had formed them and lived in peaceful opposition to it.

These early Christian communities, “born anew . . . of the spirit,” wanted to live in an atmosphere of contrition and mutual forgiveness. They had “turn[ed] away from their culture and its assumptions and towards the kingdom of God, towards something new, for which they [were] willing to turn themselves inside out.” Reading and studying with Ladner, Illich began to reflect, for the first time, on the radical novelty of Christian ideas, “different from anything known elsewhere or previously.” He also saw the seeds of the modern idea of revolution. Later, in the 1960s, “when the word revolution was in the air,” Illich demanded that “all those ­well-​­meaning people” who wanted to bring up this word in his seminars at CIDOC should read “at least a certain part of Ladner’s book.” Doing Theology in a New Way Illich’s promotion of cultural revolution can also be understood as a transposition of his campaign for a new church. During the 1950s and 1960s, as one can see from the lectures and conferences collected in The Church, Change and Development and Celebration of Awareness, he often addressed fellow Christians with whom he could appeal, if not always successfully, to a common foundation and heritage. This changed with the publication of Deschooling Society in 1971. Now he spoke mainly to secular audiences. “Every Christian,” he had said in 1963, “is a missionary who is sent out from the church in one world into another world,” and this new world

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could as easily be “a new scientific milieu or a different social structure” as a foreign culture. Now he was sent himself into milieus where neither his faith nor his vocation had much resonance. Many remarks that he made late in life suggest that he did not fundamentally reconceive what he was doing. He saw himself as continuing his walk “beneath the nose of God.” He still “follow[ed] the naked Christ.” But now he could neither invoke nor assume the authority of revelation among the varied audiences he addressed. He certainly did not conceal his intuition that the modern institutions he was writing about were secular transpositions of church models, but he based his critique on the social damage done by these institutions and not on their misinterpretation of the New Testament. In “The Vanishing C ­ lergyman,” he had spoken of “priests who leave the church in order to pioneer the church of the future,” and I believe this is precisely what he now began to d ­ o—​­not by making a new institution but by analyzing and criticizing the displaced and degenerated churches that he saw as occupying the very ground on which “the church of the future” would have to grow. Illich was often reticent about his faith during the years after he resigned from church service. Some, like historian Todd Hartch, have seen him as ­disingenuous—​ ­a man with “a hidden purpose” who veiled his theological agenda by using “social and political critique as a sort of code.” I think this is quite wrong. Where Hartch sees dissimulation I see tact and a highly creative determination to frame arguments that did not depend on what some of his listeners and readers might have considered a deus ex machina. He did not, as he said, “start from revelation which you must accept before you can follow me.” Rather, he chose to explore what he would later call “the perversion of Revelation” as embodied in those “secular institutions” that he thought had been “stamped from [the Church’s] mould.” Illich was, as his friend Lee Hoinacki later noted, “doing theology in a new way.” The traditional name for theology that is not theology in the positive sense is apophatic, and this was the name Hoinacki proposed. Rather than pointing to the positive attributes of God, apophatic theology takes the via negative, the negative path. It focuses on what masquerades as God, what deflects attention from God, what blocks the path to God. Illich can be seen in this way as an iconoclast, an image breaker who tries to clear away whatever impedes our openness to one another and, ultimately, to the possibility of “conversion to God’s human face.” But I think the view that Illich’s books can be read as ­theology—​­even as apophatic ­theology—​­can easily be pushed too far. Illich, as a proponent of institutional revolution, asks to be understood as someone who is neither invoking an old religion nor trying to put forward a new one. His concern is just what he says it is: to “find

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the roof of technological characteristics under which a society wants to live and be happy,” to “ordain what is good enough for all,” to write the constitution of limits within which the human adventure can continue. He is explicit about it in Limits to Medicine, where he writes: “Faith . . . cannot be the foundation for an ethical imperative” because faith “is either there or not there”—it is a gift which cannot be presupposed or in any way commanded or required. He sought rather an “ethical awakening” and tried to stimulate it by showing that true freedom is only possible within limits. The Signs of the Times As a revolutionary, Illich was trying to interpret the times through which he was living, and I don’t think his stance can be well understood without considering these times. He was, after all, not the only one calling for revolution in the years between 1965 and 1975. The idea was everywhere, sometimes in debased, trivialized, and commercialized forms, often lacquered with s­ elf-​­conscious irony, but there nonetheless was a sense of something momentous “in the air.” CIDOC became one of the meccas of this spirit during the 1960s, and Illich admired the earnestness and sincerity of those who wanted, as he said, “to make a new society right now.” Those who shared in this hope of r­ enewal—​­without sentimentality, without resentment, and without any utopia up their s­ leeves—​­became Illich’s main constituency. But it is now very difficult to recall that there ever was such an atmosphere or such people. The point is worth exploring a bit further because many hopes lie buried in the mystified memory of “the sixties,” and in some circles, at least, what is left of Illich’s reputation lies there with them. One example that impressed me occurred in a review essay that Rex Murphy, a prominent Canadian journalist, contributed to the Literary Review of Canada in 2005. Speaking of the 1960s in this essay, Murphy invokes Illich as an emblem of the delusional character he imputes to the time, referring to Illich as “that light over a long marsh,” an allusion to the “fool’s fire” that will occasionally appear over a marsh at night as an effect of marsh gas. Murphy gives no evidence of knowing anything about Illich, and yet he evidently feels quite confident that he speaks for the journalistic “mainstream” in classifying Illich with ­bell-​­bottom trousers and lava lamps. The 1960s in popular memory have become a cartoon. This is partly a media effect: the past as a video montage repeated so often that it first displaces history and then becomes itself an unbearable cliché. But it is also an effect of a powerful revisionism that began with the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. That

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year ­American political scientist Samuel Huntingdon, along with two other authors, produced a report for the elite Trilateral Commission called The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies. It diagnosed the clamor that had characterized the previous decade as “an excess of democracy” and prescribed a reinstatement of “the prestige and authority of . . . government institutions.” There followed what Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky called “the reconstruction of imperial ideology.” The process intensified with the Thatcher and Reagan restorations, and in time, a revisionist account of the 1960s replaced the memory of those who had wished “to make a new world right now.” This revisionism had several faces: it denied the judgment that Illich and many others had entered against the technological society and announced a new era of liberal capitalist expansion, it repackaged liberation as a politics of identity, and it incorporated the hedonism of the 1960s in new styles of consumption. So it was that a way of life that lives on borrowed time gained another postponement. The issue of economic and institutional overgrowth that Illich and other ­like-​­minded thinkers had raised was set aside. So was the traumatic memory of societies pushed to the brink of “ungovernability.” This produced, in my view, a sense of suspended animation, of having been turned aside from some great purpose that one could scarcely any longer define. George Steiner in his book In Bluebeard’s Castle writes of a similar aftermath to the upheavals of the French ­Revolution. He calls it “the great ‘ennui,’” a word he uses in the largest possible sense to capture a mood of anomie as much as of boredom. The comparison is hardly exact, but I think the “revolutions” of the 1960s have had a similarly confusing aftermath. Certainly the “culture war” that has raged ever since suggests a lot of unresolved, unclarified, and sometimes unacknowledged issues. Illich’s reputation remains colored by this uncertain memory, as I think my quotation from Rex Murphy shows. This is not surprising. Illich’s proposals were explicitly revolutionary, but the revolution, as he at first imagined it, did not take place. This is not to say that nothing occurred. Illich’s critique of modern institutions corresponded to, and may have played a part in causing, a massive and possibly terminal loss of innocence with regard to these institutions. In this sense, the revolution did happen, but in a cynical, fractured, and incomplete way that is hard to assess or even think about. What then are we to make of Illich’s revolutionary program today? The answer will surely prove complicated, but I think the best way to begin to answer is to try to reconstruct Illich’s proposals, and the main text with which to do that is his book Tools for Conviviality, published by Harper and Row in 1973.

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Tools for Conviviality Illich begins with an oracular introduction in which he announces the end of the industrial age and says that his book will be the first installment of “an epilogue” to this age that he will produce over “the next several years.” He promises a description of “the fading monopoly of the industrial mode of production and the vanishing of the ­industrially-​­generated professions this mode of production serves.” In doing so, he hopes, among other things, “to show that ­two-​­thirds of mankind still can avoid passing through the industrial age by choosing right now a postindustrial balance in their mode of production which the hyperindustrial nations will be forced to adopt as an alternative to chaos.” The assured tone echoes Deschooling Society. Decisive change will certainly come, he argues; the only question is whether it will be adaptive or catastrophic. This idea of a new age, or at least a new phase of modernity, was hardly unique to Illich. American sociologist Daniel Bell published The Coming of ­Post-​­Industrial Society in the same year that Tools for Conviviality appeared. The term postmodern, though not yet current, was on the horizon. Nor was Illich’s dire forecast all that unusual at the t­ ime—​­demographers Paul and Anne Ehrlich had warned in their 1968 best seller The Population Bomb of “a race to oblivion” and predicted mass starvation in the next decade. What was distinctive about Illich’s book was his rejection of all partial or administrative solutions in favor of a revolutionary change in “the structure of tools.” Illich was eccentric in choosing the word tools for the title of a general essay on what had usually been called, in English, technology or technics. Heidegger’s die Technik had been translated as “technology,” as had Jacques Ellul’s la technique. In Canada, philosopher George Grant had titled his reflections on this theme ­Technology and Empire. Illich chose the term tools because he wanted to disaggregate his subject and at the same time to increase the reach of his master term by including “intangible commodities” within it as well. I . . . include among tools [not only] productive institutions such as factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, [but also] productive systems for intangible commodities such as those which produce “education,” “health,” “knowledge,” or “decisions.” I use this term because it allows me to subsume into one category all rationally designed devices, be they artifacts or rules, codes or operators, and to distinguish all these planned and engineered instrumentalities from other things such as basic food or implements, which in a given culture are not deemed to be subject to rationalization. School curricula or marriage laws are no less purposefully shaped social devices than road networks.

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The term tools gains Illich a number of advantages. He can use it very generally, without needing to enter into a Heideggerian pursuit of its essence. He can include services in accord with his belief, for example, that “deschooling is at the root of any movement for human liberation” because the repetitive rituals of schooling engender the habits and expectations that are fundamental to a commodified way of life. And finally he can suggest the possibility of practical and piecemeal action. Technology sounds ­intractable—​­it evokes, at the least, an overwhelming ensemble. One can imagine retooling. Technology suggests a comprehensive fate. Illich wanted to issue a call to action. His first chapter sets out the theory of “Two Watersheds,” which became fundamental for all of Illich’s thinking around this time. He takes the example of medicine but suggests that other industrial institutions, mutatis mutandis, have passed over the same two divides. The first watershed, in the case of medicine, was the moment at which medical treatments became demonstrably effective and doctors began to be able to show consistently better results than traditional healers. Illich puts it at 1913, without denying that this simplifies the matter somewhat. Around this time, for example, women began to be regularly hospitalized for childbirth even though the hospital was a demonstrably more dangerous environment than the h ­ ome—​­a case of perverse and ineffective medical treatment continuing past this first watershed. But there is no question that medicine did become effective, just as cars did expand mobility and telephones did extend communication. Illich’s first watershed stands for the moment at which this positive difference began to make itself felt. The second watershed was reached when medicine began to display “sickening side effects,” or iatrogenesis, the term he would later use for medically generated harms. By this he meant not just obvious miscarriages like getting the wrong drug or the wrong operation or picking up an infection in a hospital but also the cultural effects of the medicalization of care. “Iatrogenesis,” he writes in Medical Nemesis, “is . . . but one aspect of the destructive dominance of industry over society . . . one instance of that paradoxical counterproductivity which is now surfacing in all major industrial sectors. Like t­ime-​­consuming acceleration, stupefying education, s­ elf-​­destructive military defence, disorienting information or unsettling housing projects, pathogenic medicine is the result of industrial overproduction that paralyzes autonomous action.” The second watershed, in other words, is the moment at which any industrial staple, be it a hospital or a highway system, begins to get in its own way and defeat its declared purpose. The key criterion is “autonomous action”—does the tool enable me to accomplish my own ends, or does it reshape my ends to fit the

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available means? When the second watershed is reached, means become ends. Health becomes the output of the health care system. Keeping the game going becomes the game. Illich did not argue that manifestly industrial activities, like mining or manufacturing, were identical with services like medicine or education, but he did claim that they could all be measured against the same standard and that, for each, a threshold could be found at which the activity would become counterproductive if not restrained. In the preceding quote, he defines it as the point at which a given tool begins to “paralyze autonomous action.” The term is useful insofar as it indicates ­self-​­generated activity and opposes it to manipulated, or heteronomous, activity, initiated by some other who needs me to consume his product, conform to his diagnosis, or depend on his service. But the word autonomous can also sound misleadingly individualistic, given that Illich defines “conviviality” as “individual freedom realized in personal interdependence.” Communities are deprived of their proper purposes by packaged products and services, just as much as individuals are robbed of their s­ elf-​­determined ends, and conviviality, from its Latin roots, means “living together.” Radical Monopoly When tools cross the second watershed they become what Illich calls “radical monopolies,” a concept that he says goes “far beyond what the concept of monopoly usually implies.” The key issue for him is whether one can still find an alternative or decently do without the monopolized commodity. A radical monopoly exists where all alternatives have been rendered either inaccessible or unimaginable. An obvious example is an environment in which one simply can’t live without a car. What Illich calls “natural competence” is ruled out. The ability to walk is of no use if your destination is on the other side of a freeway you can’t get across; your skill in performing a job is of no consequence if you don’t possess the required educational certificate. Radical monopoly also destroys cultural competence. In Tools for Conviviality, Illich takes the example of “the control of undertakers over burial” as an instance of how culturally defined practices can be undermined. A generation ago in Mexico only the opening of the grave and the blessing of the dead body were performed by professionals: the gravedigger and the priest. A death in the family created various demands, all of which could be taken care of within the family. . . . Most of these were of a ritual nature, and carefully ­prescribed—​­different

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from region to region. Recently funeral homes were established in the major cities. At first undertakers had difficulty finding clients because even in large cities people still knew how to bury their dead. During the sixties the funeral homes obtained control over new cemeteries and began offering package deals, including the casket, church service, and embalming. Now legislation is being passed to make the mortician’s ministrations compulsory. Once he gets hold of the body, the funeral director will have established a radical monopoly over burial, as medicine is at the point of establishing one over dying.

Radical monopoly is associated with what Illich calls “overprogramming” of the social environment and “overdetermination” of the physical environment. There is nothing to do that a professional can’t do better, nothing to say for which advertisers, entertainers, and paid helpers can’t supply a formula. Radical monopoly saturates social and personal space. “Man’s poetic ability . . . withers.” People no longer have “the power to endow the world with . . . personal meaning” because the meaning has already been anticipated, planned, and built in. Illich cogently outlines the ways in which tools that are too efficient, too powerful, or too dominant degrade nature, establish radical monopolies, overprogram the built environment, concentrate power, interrupt tradition, and increase frustration. The only way to remedy this damage, he says, is to restore the balance that he feels should characterize the relationship between a culture and its tools. The point at which balance will be achieved is not predetermined. “The human equilibrium is open,” he says, and its “parameters” are “flexible” and “shifting.” However, these shifts can occur only with “finite” limits. “People can change but only within bounds.” Accordingly, he does not try to say at which point exactly the proper balance will be found but only that balance is a perceptible quality once it has been acknowledged as the relevant ideal. People will differ in their detailed judgments about where the balance between tradition and innovation is to be set, about what degree of inequality in income is sustainable, or about what speed limit will best harmonize mobility with a sociable streetscape, but so long as balance is acknowledged to be the goal, there will be a discernible criterion to which differing opinions will ultimately have to bow. Currently, he says, industrial society lives under the sign of the “unlimited” in a condition of “dynamic instability.” It has no ultimate criterion except growth. In arguing for balance as a crucial political consideration, Illich allied himself with those thinkers who had argued that social decisions must respect natural scales. Preeminent among those thinkers, in Illich’s view, was Leopold Kohr,

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the Austrian political theorist whom Illich first met in Puerto Rico. Kohr, in his seminal book The Breakdown of Nations, asserted that there is “one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness.” “Whenever something is wrong,” Kohr wrote, “something is too big.” Illich regarded Kohr as the pioneer of the science that Illich would later call “social morphology.” British biologists D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson and J. B. S. Haldane had studied the close fit between form and size in nature and concluded that natural forms are viable only at the appropriate scale—a hawk’s form would not be viable at the scale of a sparrow or a mouse’s at the scale of an elephant. Kohr was the first to argue that social form and size show the same correlation. E. F. Schumacher would later popularize the argument in his Small Is Beautiful, a book that was published in the same year as Tools for Conviviality. Illich belongs to this barely recognized school of political thought. In Tools for Conviviality, he tries to spell out “the multiple balance” on which conviviality depends. In later works like Gender and his many studies of how technology shapes our senses, he would try to show how a feel for the fit between size and form had been lost. Human Nature and the Crisis of Man In an interview Illich recorded with his friend Douglas Lummis in Japan in the early 1980s, Illich says, “My roots are in natural law. I have grown up in that tradition. I just cannot shed the certainty that the norms with which we ought to live correspond to our insight into what we are.” There is, in other words, a given human nature, just as much as there is a given physical nature, and a society can only be good insofar as its principles are drawn from insight into this nature. Tools for Conviviality had its roots in his fear that the society he was writing about not only threatened human nature but was on the verge of abolishing it altogether. “Engineered obsolescence,” he wrote, “can break all bridges to a normative past,” political discussion is “stunned,” “moral and political imagination” is “paralyzed,” “a total crisis approaches.” The note is the same one sounded earlier in Deschooling Society: “Contemporary man . . . attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally ­man-​­made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it. We now must face the fact that man himself is at stake.” Beyond a certain t­hreshold—​­a threshold defined by the efficient power of tools, including, always, social and institutional i­nstrumentalities—​­the human condition will cease to exist. Humanity will become an endlessly remolded plastic

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element within a world of its own making. The sense of being a created being with a given nature will wither. The chances and necessities of existence will take on the character, merely, of eventualities not yet controlled. God will become redundant, not a name for a will not our own but a comforting fantasy to be deployed ad lib in this or that s­ elf-​­centered “spirituality.” Little will remain that has not been planned or ­designed—​­its meaning ­pre-​­formed according to some commercial, political, or therapeutic agenda. “Man will find himself totally enclosed within his artificial creation, with no exit.” This “artificial creation,” like “the mechanical messiah” of Deschooling Society, is the abyss underlying Tools for Conviviality. The danger is summed up in the saying that man is “at stake.” But who is man? Illich uses the term in what I think can best be described as an archetypal sense. This is the sense of Genesis 1:26–28: “Then God said let us make man in our own image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion . . . over all the earth. So God created man in his own image . . . male and female he created them.” The term, in this usage, is both ­plural—​­let them have dominion, “male and female he created them”—and ­singular—​­it speaks of a common pattern or ground plan that is the imago dei, or “image of God.” Man is a creature with a given nature who receives his being as a free and continuing gift from his/her Creator. He/she has a proper end, purpose, or good, in the old way of speaking. But even at the time Illich was writing, the word man was beginning to fall into disrepute and disuse. American writer Mark Greif has told the story in a recent book called The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973. He argues that, during the period of his title, there was a prolonged panic about the status and the fate of man. Among his examples is Jacques Maritain, Illich’s teacher in Rome in the late 1940s, who wrote, “The only way of regeneration for the human community is a rediscovery of the true image of man.” Many others concurred. Lewis Mumford, reflecting on the threat posed by nuclear weapons, claimed that “it may be necessary to scrap almost everything to save man.” Hannah Arendt, in her essay “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” argued that the projection of technological power, reflected in “the conquest of space,” had not only “lowered . . . the stature of man” but now threatened to destroy it utterly. Herbert Marcuse, in a book that exerted a powerful influence on the New Left of the 1960s, portrayed contemporary man as “­one-​­dimensional.” The Port Huron Statement, the manifesto by which ­Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) announced its arrival on the political scene in 1962, expressed its intention to “counter . . . the dominant conceptions of Man in the 20th century.” Man was ubiquitous in political discourse, and e­ verywhere

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he appeared, according to Greif, he was either at risk or, as in C. S. Lewis’s The ­Abolition of Man (1947), already extinct. Illich is not included in Greif ’s inventory, but readers who have come this far will not doubt that he belongs there along with Maritain, Mumford, Arendt, Lewis, and all the others with intimations of the end of man. Greif sets 1973, the year Tools for Conviviality was published, as the end date of the expiring humanism that he believes was expressed by “the crisis of man.” Its death knell was sounded by thinkers like Claude L ­ évi-​­Strauss, who wrote that “the ultimate goal of the human sciences is not to constitute but to dissolve man.” Michel Foucault, recoiling from “the moralizing pool of humanistic sermons,” claimed that “man is an invention of recent date” and one doomed to be “erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” Man’s pretended universality was unmasked as a disguised form of domination. Feminists began to see something more than grammatical convention in the word’s gender. Man became a white, J­ udeo-​­Christian ­male—“the Man,” whom everyone was trying to get off their backs. The word was used less and less. Illich himself, when I quoted one of his earlier statements about man to him in 1988, said, “I wouldn’t any longer be able to speak so easily of man.” He didn’t repudiate the sense he once gave the term, but he did acknowledge that he could no longer be sure of being understood in this sense when using it. Man is obviously a problematic term. Even in European languages like ­German, where der Mensch doesn’t imply maleness, the word still retains its grammatical gender. It claims universality but, in many of its inflections, indicates a style of subjectivity that is decidedly Western. It condenses all of humanity into a single image and, in this way, displaces and conceals what Christians have called salvation history, in which all are born and die in Adam and all are saved in Christ. (Eve is conspicuously absent from the apostle Paul’s statement that “as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.”) The unity it points to has often been imposed rather than freely achieved. To attempt to restore the term, Greif argues, would be to climb back into the very box we’re trying to climb out of. That seems fair ­enough—​­it’s not a word I want to ­revive—​­but we should notice, I think, what is lost when this word is abandoned. In Illich’s usage, man referred, as I have said, to a created being with a given nature that finds its proper orientation only in relation to its ­source—​­a conception that is arguably universal even if each tradition would define terms like creation, nature, and source in radically different ways. Available replacements for the word ­man—​­humanity, humankind, people, human beings, and so o­ n—​­generally lack this valence. They refer to an ensemble rather than an archetype, a heap but not a whole. The word man, for Illich, implies a limit,

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a nature that cannot be exceeded or ignored without s­ elf-​­destruction, a norm that measures fitness, propriety, and proportion. Even as the term is given up, the question it once answered needs to be kept in mind and held open. What Is Enough? Illich believed that something essential to our humanity was drowning in the flood of goods and services that were replacing even the most basic human capacities. His solution was to “seek majority agreement on the roof of technological characteristics under which a society wants to live and be happy.” He was looking for what his friend and colleague Wolfgang Sachs once called “the virtue of enoughness,” and it is this quest that underwrites his distinctive position within the environmental movement of our time. Illich’s “roof ” is something quite unlike the pollution maximums that have been the focus of a lot of contemporary environmental ­thought—​­to define such a roof, one has to ask, “What is good?” and not just “How much can we get away with and survive?,” which is the question implicit in the idea of sustainability. Defenders of the environment, by and large, have accepted the founding assumption of economic s­ cience—​­that wants are i­ nfinite—​­and then tried to define the boundaries at which these wants must be ­restrained—​­the amount of carbon in the atmosphere must not exceed 350 parts per million and so on. Or they have imagined a new array of nonpolluting “green” technologies. Illich feared these approaches because he thought they would lead to a new net of managerial controls being thrown over the same old society. E ­ co-​­crats would calculate just how far nature could safely be pushed, and this economizing of “environmental services” would push us ever deeper into a conception of nature as a set of scarce resources. Only a society prepared to decide what is enough and not how much it can afford, Illich says, can replace the perception of scarcity with the perception of abundance. The current politics of climate change illustrates everything that Illich ­feared—​ ­policy depends on scientific models that try to comprehend the entire biosphere, everyone pollutes up to and usually over their quota, controls intensify, and the consciousness of living in a world that we have made and now must “save” intensifies. A second striking feature of Illich’s analysis is the lawlike character he gives to many of his pronouncements. Let me take an example from Tools for C ­ onviviality: “Wherever the maximum velocity of any one type of commuter vehicle grows beyond a certain mph, the travel time and the cost of transportation for the median commuter is increased. If the maximum velocity at any one point of a commuter

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system goes beyond a certain mph, most people are obliged to spend more time in traffic jams, or waiting for connections or recovering from accidents. They will also have to spend more time paying for the transportation system they are compelled to use.” Here’s another example from Energy and Equity, which appeared the year after Tools for Conviviality: “. . . equity and energy can grow concurrently only to a point. Below a threshold of per capita wattage, motors improve the conditions for social progress. Above this threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity.” There is a calculable point, in other words, at which energy expenditure ceases to improve conditions for all and begins to concentrate privilege. People on foot are more or less equal, whatever their rank. H ­ igh-​­speed transportation reconfigures social space in ways that continually compound the advantages of the “powerfully rushed” and increase the disadvantages of those who stay put. Motorways expand, driving wedges between neighbours and removing fields beyond the distance a farmer can walk. Ambulances take clinics beyond the few miles a child can be carried. The doctor will no longer come to the house because vehicles have made the hospital into the right place to be sick. Once heavy lorries reach a village high in the Andes, part of the local market disappears. Later, when the high school arrives at the plaza along with the paved highway, more and more of the young people move to the city, until not one family is left which does not long for a reunion with someone hundreds of miles away, down on the coast.

The point is not that everyone should walk or that all trucks should be barred from Andean villages. The point is that there is an ascertainable proportion between energy and equity that can ground social and political decisions about what is enough. Again and again Illich speaks of thresholds, watersheds, quanta, “order[s] of magnitude that [are] theoretically identifiable,” even an identifiable “point” [at which] societies will “collapse into a sociocultural energy coma.” He usually refrains from specifying what these values are out of respect for the fact that “the human equilibrium is open” and that political judgment will always be involved in ascertaining the optimal balance between competing claims. Illich himself, as he freely admitted, belonged to the world of the powerfully rushed, those “few people [who] get the privilege of being almost omnipresent in the world.” But, crucially, he insists that measurable scales, balances, and proportions are involved. Limits are inherent in the nature of things.

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134 / Ivan Illich

A New Political Map Illich’s proposal in Tools for Conviviality is summed up in the word inversion. He calls for a “political inversion” and for an inversion in “the structure of tools.” An inversion is a reversal in which something turns inside out or upside down. It implies, in Illich’s usage, a total change or reorientation. Since such a reorientation has more typically been called conversion, one is again thrown back on the question of whether Illich is writing an encrypted theology or just trying to sugarcoat the sermon. I would prefer to say that inversion restates conversion and tries to spell out, in practical terms, what it means. This is entirely in keeping with Illich’s view that the world has arrived at a point where religion can no longer be kept in a separate compartment, under separate priestly administration, but must now be realized and lived. Recall his statement that the beatitude “blessed are the poor” is now capable of “scientific proof ” because without a style of life that is “simple in means, rich in ends,” there will be no earth to inherit. What would it mean, then, to “invert the structure of tools”? The question essentially is who’s on top, the user or the tool, and this makes inversion quite an apt word. At the moment, Illich says, we do what our tools tell us to ­do—​­we live as they dictate. Later he will explore the even more troubling idea that they also tell us what and who we are, but at this point, he focuses on how tools define the ends we pursue. If we can go to the moon, we should go to the moon. If portable phones can be made, then each of us will inevitably become a mobile communications hub. If hospitals and m ­ ulti-​­versities are a convenient way for doctors and teachers to “deliver” their services, then that is how we will define health and education. Illich suggests that we ask what is good for us as persons and as communities and then develop or adapt existing tools according to their ability to foster this good. Not all tools, however, can be adapted in this way. Illich emphatically rejects the idea that technology is in itself neutral and that everything depends on how it is used, by whom, and for what purpose. “My subject,” Illich says bluntly near the beginning of his essay, “is tools and not intentions.” He is not interested in what we want to do with tools or think we ought to do with them or even what we could do with them if only the right people were in charge. He focuses on the properties of tools and how they turn from means into ends despite our intentions. In this way, he hopes to enlarge the political map. Since the deputies first took their places in the French National Assembly of 1789, with supporters of the king to the right of the chair and supporters of the revolution to the left, politics has focused on the questions that are summed up in the categories of left and r­ ight—​­who’s

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in charge, how are benefits to be shared, will more freedom or more regulation produce the best outcomes? The means of production themselves have been taken for granted. Even Marxists, despite their cogent analysis of how capital alienates labor, were still able to believe that common ownership would solve the problem. Illich belongs to that group of thinkers who recognize that tools have biases that determine the intentions of their users rather than the other way around. “The issue at hand,” he writes, “is not the juridical ownership of tools, but rather the discovery of the characteristic of some tools which make it impossible for anybody to ‘own’ them. The concept of ownership cannot be applied to a tool that cannot be controlled.” The idea that tools, or technology, to use the more conventional term, embody “intentions” that exceed, dominate, and often change the intentions of their users has been patent to many contemporary thinkers. At moments, some of these thinkers have been very much in v­ ogue—​­Illich had his hour in the sun, as did Jacques Ellul and, even more, Marshall McLuhan. But, remarkably, no reorientation of politics has followed. Technology remains largely exempt from political control, and political choices continue to be plotted on a single l­eft–​­right spectrum that accounts only for the balance of power between state and market. Illich proposed a new way of describing political choice. In an essay from the later 1970s called “Three Dimensions of Public Choice,” which builds on his work in Tools for Conviviality, he suggests than even a rudimentary projection of the field of political decision ought to mark out not one but three dimensions. Imagining these dimensions as Cartesian coordinates, Illich speaks of ­x-, ­y-, and z­ -​­axes. The first, or ­x-​­axis, would be the conventional one covering “issues related to social hierarchy, political authority, ownership of the means of production and allocation of resources that are usually designated by the terms ‘left’ and ‘right.’” On the second, or ­y-​­axis, he places the choice of tools, using the word in the expanded sense I have been discussing. Included would be what he calls “the institutional spectrum” in Deschooling Society. At one end would sit the radical monopolies that addict their users and entrain their desires and can be used only in approved ways. At the other end would be those convivial tools, like libraries, that can be used whenever, however, and as much or as little as their users wish. Technical ­choices—​­subways or highways, nuclear plants or solar a­ rrays—​­would also go on this axis. The ­z-​­axis—​­Illich’s most original ­proposal—​­would plot satisfaction and would run from satisfaction in having to satisfaction in doing and being. At the having end would be ­commodity-​­intensive satisfactions involving high levels of consumption of both goods and services; at the doing/being end would be ­subsistence

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activities, like sustenance, sociability, and amusement that communities can provide for themselves with only small supplements from larger systems. With a ­one-​­dimensional map, Illich says, one can only do more of the same because only the same registers. People may have known for a long time that j­ obs-​ ­for-​­all is a pipe dream, that contemporary societies cannot possibly afford all the services their citizens are encouraged to “need,” that economic growth cannot continue forever without eventually chewing up and degrading the entire biosphere; but more jobs, more services, and more growth continue to be the only currency that is accepted in our politics. Tools for Conviviality points to a new path but r­ ecognizes “formidable obstacles” on the way to this “recovery,” as Illich calls it. He enumerates these obstacles as “the idolatry of science, the corruption of ­ordinary language, and loss of respect for the formal process by which social decisions are made.” Conditions for Recovery “Political discussion,” Illich says, “is stunned by a delusion about science.” Science has become “a spectral production agency” whose output is certified knowledge. One accepts it because of the overwhelming authority this certification confers and because not to accept it is to risk the status of heretic. In courts of law, to take one of Illich’s examples, evidence that our legal tradition would formerly have excluded or bracketed as “hearsay” becomes decisive when delivered by a scientific expert. Decisions that belong in the realm of common sense and practical judgment are instead settled by expert opinion: Is the nuclear power plant “safe”? Do studies on ­parent–​ ­child “attachment” authorize early day care? Which diet will produce the biggest payoff in life expectancy? and so on. This “stuns” political discussion in two ways, according to Illich. The first is that science as a process of inquiry is mystified. Gone are the adventures and vicissitudes of trying to stabilize a “fact” along with the very provisional character of this stabilization once achieved. In their place is a monolith: the oracular “Science says . . . ” or “Studies show . . . ” There’s nothing to discuss. “Scientific” findings that amount to little more than gossip when ­de-​­contextualized and stepped down into everyday talk pass from hand to hand, still trailing the aura of the laboratory. The second result, Illich says, is that “people . . . cease to trust their own judgment.” A choice for conviviality requires “a political community [which] choose[s] the dimensions of the roof under which its members will live,” but such a community can only be composed of citizens who believe they have the right, the capacity, and the power to make such a choice.

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The coming to be of such a community did not seem unthinkable at the time Illich wrote. In an essay in his 1981 book Shadow Work, he opposed “research by people” to “research for people.” There he wrote appreciatively of the emergence and flourishing of this new style of inquiry during the 1960s and 1970s and contrasted it with corporate research and development (R & D). Initially, the use of the term “science by people” might be interpreted as sour grapes. It designates research that is done with few or no funds, no sponsorship, no access to publication in the prestigious journals, producing results that are without interest to the supermarket. Yet the people who do it seem neither jilted nor on the make. They do careful, methodical and disciplined research, are fully informed of the R & D in related areas, use these results when applicable, and in only one decade have built up an alternative network of publications which provide a forum for the diffusion and criticism of their efforts. They work alone or in tiny teams, primarily for results that directly shape their mode and style of living, are uninterested in patents and rarely produce finished products for sale. They give no impression of being poor cousins of those working in R & D.

The movement that Illich refers to here was extensive. The Whole Earth ­Catalogue appeared in 1968, offering “access to tools,” and was succeeded by a regular publication called at first CoEvolution Quarterly and later the Whole Earth Review. This was a journal that was very much in tune with Illich’s vision of research by people and tools for conviviality, and Illich often appeared in its pages, as both a writer and a reference point for other writers. Growing Without Schooling, a journal established in 1977 by Illich’s friend, the American educator and writer John Holt, had a similar spirit. In its pages, parents and children who had deschooled shared their experiences and findings with one another. Home birth, which began to increase around this time, provides yet another example. When women gave birth at home, capacities and individual variations that had been suppressed by confining hospital protocols and procedures were discovered and expressed. In all these cases, people were trying to invent new, independent styles of life without at all forsaking the virtues of clarity, discipline, and ­open-​­minded attention that are supposed to characterize science. Illich’s colleague ­Valentina Borremans tried to sum up and map out these new initiatives in 1979 with an annotated bibliography called A Guide to Convivial Tools. (It’s worth noting in passing that today the term citizen science often denotes voluntary help rendered to Big Science by people who gather data for accredited r­ esearchers—​­a usage quite at odds with Illich’s “science by people.”)

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138 / Ivan Illich

The second great obstacle to conviviality, in Illich’s account, is the corruption of ordinary language. This will become a great theme in Illich’s later work. Tools for ­Conviviality provides a first sketch. Language, Illich says, has been so bent out of shape by commercial and institutional imperatives that people can no longer shape it to their own purposes. One crucial aspect of this deformation is what he calls “nominalization.” Active verbs give way to overstuffed nouns. “Industrialized man calls his own principally what has been made for him,” Illich says. “He says ‘my education,’ ‘my transportation,’ ‘my entertainment,’ ‘my health’ for the commodities he gets from school, car, show business, or doctor.” It becomes difficult to speak without invoking what has been p ­ re-​­formed to express some corporate purpose. The repertory of popular talk is regularly restocked with new phrases and figures of speech drawn from the m ­ edia-​­sphere—​­some taken from movies, television shows, and popular music, others put into circulation by pundits, public relations consultants, and pop sociologists. Once again, a critical threshold has been crossed. Commercially and politically manipulated language predominates. Too many of the available words have an undeclared valence that forecloses any fresh or original expression. Obsessive reaching for the subversive, the edgy, the transgressive expresses the frustration but fails to escape the echo chamber and remains reactionary. Illich’s proposal is that communities consciously attempt to become curators of their language and regain the ability to speak in conformity with their own experiences and intentions. Only “the word in its weakness,” he writes, “can associate the majority in . . . convivial reconstruction.” Words must be deflated, he says and their human frailty restored to them so that people can once again find themselves in their speech. Illich’s third condition for conviviality is what he calls “the recovery of legal procedure.” This parallels the other two conditions. Just as he wants to restore to people the capacity to generate knowledge and to give voice to their own condition, he wants to make the law an instrument of popular sovereignty rather than of domination. He believes that the law has two features that make it particularly apt as a convivial tool. The first is its continuity. Unlike many modern institutions, law preserves its past. It places a crucial emphasis on precedent and requires that new law harmonize with existing law and remain within constitutional norms. Conviviality, as Illich imagines it, is both a step forward, into a chastened modernity, and a step back, into cultural practices and popular prerogatives that are currently replaced by commodified services. He thinks that the law, as the repository of common and inherited rights, could be an ally in the effort to reclaim the cultural space that is currently monopolized by institutions. He also points to a second attribute of the law that he thinks might make it a convivial tool, and that is its adversarial character. “The common law,” he writes, “is a tool for the ­understanding

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of mutualities that surface as actual conflicts. It leaves to those directly concerned with a social interest the task of insisting on the protection of their rights or the pursuit of their claims to what they consider to be good.” Illich does not deny, of course, that the legal system can be, and has been, bent to the purposes of the ­production-​­focused society in which it operates. He knows also that vast new powers, like education systems or the media complex, have arisen outside the scope of received law, just as he knows that many common law rights have been abrogated by legislatures eager to entice big corporations into their jurisdictions. But he still insists that formal procedure has both the structure and the inherited authority to become a “tool which is fit to ordain what is good enough for all.” The “formal structure of politics and law,” he says, is “a tool which, like language, is respected by all; a tool which, like language, does not lose its power because of the purpose to which it has been put in recent history; [and] a tool which, like language, possesses a fundamental structure that misuse cannot totally corrupt.” Tools for Conviviality is the closest Illich ever came to a programmatic political statement. Like Deschooling Society, with its invocation of a movement “which we cannot stop,” its tone is bold and assured. But the book, as I’ve indicated, also has a dark undertow, with each confident prediction shadowed by a harrowing alternative. He writes, for example, that “mankind” itself may “wither and disappear” as a result of being “deprived of basic structures of language, law, and myth.” Failure to change, he writes, will set the stage for a “belated technocratic response to disaster,” a response that will amount to “managerial fascism” and be marked by a degree of professional dominance that will smother every remaining vestige of human spontaneity. Sometimes these threats are so vividly and plausibly drawn that they darken the hopefulness that is ostensibly the book’s leading tone. Years later, Illich told me how keenly he himself had felt the sense of alarm he wanted to share with others: “In 1971, when I began to write Tools for Conviviality, on the ­multi-​­dimensional thresholds beyond which human endeavor becomes destructive of a human mode of existence, I broke down. It was the only time in my life that something which is probably called a ‘depression’ has hit me very deeply. I don’t think I would have gone on writing if I had had a son of my own flesh in my arms. I would have had to join the rain dance.” A New Concept of Revolution The cultural or institutional revolution for which Illich argued was not revolution in the commonly accepted sense of an overthrow of the government. His respect for the “formal structure of politics and law,” and his distrust of the “good

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intentions” that revolutionary vanguards typically offer in their place, makes him, in that respect, more of a liberal than a conventional revolutionary. Yet he insisted that what he was promoting was “real” revolution. “Real revolutionaries,” he told Francine du Plessix Gray, are people “who look with a deep sense of ­humor—​­with ­sarcasm—​­upon their institutions. Sarcasm is adult playfulness. Cynicism is its opposite. Instead of freedom and independence, cynicism produces not real revolution but a regressive attachment to slogans and ­self-​­worship.” He deprecated an activism of heroic but isolated gestures, involving what he called the “odd or bizarre event.” This was not because he feared the violence of such gestures but because he saw no power in them to induce a new way of thinking. Illich did unconditionally “condemn . . . all premeditated killing and all physical torture” and prayed that he might “always be ready to die rather take part in either.” But he did recognize that “[a]t times idols must be shattered.” “I do not really like to use the words ‘violence’ and ‘­non-​­violence,’ ” he said. “A flower grows through stone and breaks the stone. Is that violence?” The issue rather was how to encourage people to think and live differently. “True profound heresies to the prevailing religious system,” he said, “are a much more powerful powder keg than any kind of silly activists.” The revolution Illich preached was distinct from a Marxian account of revolu­ tion, and yet it appeared to some at the time to have the same scope as the ­Marxian theory. One such was Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Today he is a professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in his native Portugal and a Distinguished Scholar in the faculty of law of the University of Wisconsin. In 1972, he was a participant with Illich in a CIDOC seminar on “Law in a Convivial Society.” (Illich mentions him in the acknowledgments that begin Tools for Conviviality as one of the many people who helped shape his thinking.) De Sousa Santos’s contribution to this seminar was a paper called “Law Against Law,” which ­compared Illich to Marx. In it he mentions six areas of marked similarity. First, Illich’s t­ heory has a “strong evolutionary tone,” as evidenced by the idea that all modern ­institutions inevitably pass through the two watersheds described previously. Second, it is dialectical. As modern tools/institutions increase in effectiveness, contradictions begin to appear and then intensify until they finally reach a turning/breaking point at which an “inversion” or reversal becomes possible. Third, Illich’s theory resembles historical materialism in its concern with “the means of production.” This is borne out by the statement I quoted earlier: “My subject is tools, not intentions.” Fourth, Illich’s projection of a future overcoming of alienation is m ­ aterialistic—​­something he claims can be done by “inverting the structure of tools” rather than inverting class rule, as Marx proposed. Fifth, the future is seen as an advance rather than a

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retreat. The later Illich can sometimes sound like an ­anti-​­modernist, but at this point, he is clearly arguing for a revamped and retooled modernity. “Tools for a convivial and yet efficient society,” he says, “could not have been designed at an earlier stage of history.” Modern birth control devices provide what he calls “a paradigm.” “They incorporate science in instruments that can be handled by any reasonably prudent and w ­ ell-​­apprenticed person.” And, finally, both Illich and Marx found their hope on “an assumption about human nature” that de Sousa Santos defines as “confidence in the goodness of human nature.” This is easy to prove in Illich. De Sousa Santos quotes the passage from the final section of Deschooling Society in which Illich defines hope as “trusting faith in the goodness of nature.” Marx’s case remains contested with humanists and a­ nti-​­humanists contending for his legacy. The humanists cite his early writings on alienation and claim he never abandoned the stance of his younger years; his ­anti-​­humanist followers place more emphasis on the “scientific” socialism of the “mature Marx.” This is well beyond my scope here, but it’s clear that Illich shared the view of Marx as a humanist that was put forward by his friends Erich Fromm and Theodor Shanin. De Sousa Santos also takes the position that Marx’s ­humanism persists throughout his work. De Sousa Santos goes on to point out two major differences between Illich and Marx. The first is on the control of tools. Marx and his followers right down to the present day have staked everything on a change in the ownership and control of the means of production. Illich, as we have seen, holds that some tools have “characteristics . . . which make it impossible for anybody to own them.” A convivial society can only come into existence when these tools have been identified and replaced by tools that can be controlled. The second major difference is that Illich abandons Hegel and Marx’s idea of a universal class. Hegel imagined that representatives of the state would play the role of a universal class, resolving conflicts of interest and acting for the society as a whole. Marx substituted the proletariat, who have a universal interest because they constitute the base of the social pyramid and are therefore in a position to turn it upside down. Illich can be seen as eliminating this concept inasmuch as he doesn’t specify a revolutionary class. But he can also be seen as extending it. When “Man himself is at stake,” the universal class is everyone and not just the industrial proletariat. Two considerations support the idea that Illich sees himself standing at a frontier at which humanity has become the universal class. The first is that he begins Tools for Conviviality by saying that “above all” he wants “to show that t­ wo-​ ­thirds of mankind still can avoid passing through the industrial age by choosing right now a ­post-​­industrial balance in their mode of production.” This certainly

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s­ uggests a universal revolution. The second is that he sees himself as offering a concept of alienation that goes beyond what can be found in Marx. He spells it out in an article titled “An Expansion of the Concept of Alienation,” which he wrote in the same year as Tools for Conviviality was published. Marxist ideology, Illich says, has emphasized alienated ­labor—​­it shows how the value workers create is confiscated and the products of their labor made to confront them as alien commodities endowed with a life of their own. But in a service society, Illich says, people suffer an even more complete alienation. Not only are they estranged from what they make, they are also estranged from what they do and what they are. Whether one is dying or being born, grieving or making love, a professional is standing by ready to intervene. In a world of programmed wants and invented needs, where all risks have been calculated and every possible action has been foreseen, branded, and supplied with its own professionally supervised protocol, “therapeutic treatment” colonizes the “mind and . . . heart . . . even more completely” than selling away “the fruits of one’s labour.” Illich and Marx De Sousa Santos in the remainder of his “Law Against Law” paper goes on to disagree with Illich on the degree to which law can be a convivial tool, arguing that “formal procedure” does not enjoy the independence from the power structure of capitalist societies that Illich claims for it, even potentially. Formal law, he says, belongs to what he calls the shallow rather than the deep structure of society. Law responds to power, and the working class would never have made the gains it did in Western countries during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries if the threat of more forceful action had not backed up its petition for legal rights. This is a weighty argument, reminiscent of the objection that is often made against any form of nonviolent political a­ ction—​­it works so long as it suits the opponent to play by the rules, but, in extremis, the opponent will always suspend the rules. But whether or not Illich’s revolutionary program has sufficient teeth is a separate question. By the time de Sousa Santos raises this objection, he has made a convincing case that, in the scope, character, and substance of his theory, Illich can profitably be compared to Marx. Further support for this idea comes from the fact that Illich was well versed in Marx’s work and that he expressly wanted to alter and adapt rather than abandon basic Marxian terms like alienation, means of production, and the contrast between exchange value and use value. Illich’s friend, sociologist ­Theodor Shanin, tells a story that bears this out. The event he describes happened at a time

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when Shanin was teaching at the University of Haifa in Israel and just after he and Illich had gotten to know each other. Discovering that his new friend had never visited “the holy land,” Shanin invited Illich, then at the height of his celebrity, to come and lecture in Haifa. The University turned out in strength to see the famous man. I warned him that a group of my brightest students originating in Latin America [would] challenge him from the orthodox Marxist positions in which they were deeply immersed and knowledgeable. Illich grinned and began his address with Volume One of Das Kapital. In the first chapter of this highly important book, he said, Marx singled out two fundamental concepts, “use value” (defined by needs) and “exchange value” (defined by the market). [Illich then] proceeded to develop further the concept of exchange value all the way to the general definition of capitalism. [He] then went on to develop the concept of “use value” towards a parallel ecological and humanist picture of the society in which we actually live. It was a total surprise to those in the audience who had read Das Kapital to understand how much they learned anew, listening in intense silence.

Shanin, who tells this story in a memoir of his friendship with Illich, goes on to say that he thinks Illich was just having a “bit of fun” with Shanin’s solemnly Marxist students. Gustavo Esteva, a Mexican thinker who has been a friend of both men, goes much further. He thinks that Illich “constructed his ideas on Marx.” Illich, Esteva says, “started where Marx ended and followed the direction of Marx’s thinking.” His argument partly depends on a book that Shanin himself brought out in 1983, long after he invited Illich to Haifa, called Late Marx and the Russian Road. In this book Shanin presents the case that Marx, in the last years of his life, abandoned his belief that historical progress unfolds in rigidly determined stages. He had written in Capital, for example, that “the country that is more developed industrially shows to the less developed the image of its own future.” Such a progression, Marx also wrote, was a matter of “natural laws working themselves out with iron necessity.” But Marx, in Shanin’s view, was not the oracle his followers later made of him but a fallible man who learned more as he went along, and in his late years, he was “restive” with the implacable linear scheme he had invented. One reason was his sympathy for the Russian populists, the Narodniki, who celebrated the mir, or ­self-​­governing Russian peasant commune. They argued that an agrarian society like Russia could move directly to socialism without first passing through a capitalist phase. Consequently, Shanin argues, Marx finally adopted the opinion that socialism without capitalism was possible, though Shanin admits

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that, on the evidence, more than one view of the matter is possible and includes contrary opinions in his book. According to Esteva, Illich held the view that Shanin attributes to the late Marx. This is why Esteva claims that Illich followed “the direction of Marx’s ­thinking.” Just as Marx came to see that the move from peasant communism to socialism could be made without capitalism inevitably intervening between them, so Illich argued that ­two-​­thirds of mankind could still avoid “the industrial age” and move immediately to “a p ­ ost-​­industrial balance in their mode of production.” Illich also recognized that the alternative to voluntary adoption of “a p ­ ost-​­industrial balance” was the ecological and social “chaos” that would result from a majority of the rapidly growing human population trying to adopt the ­high-​­consumption style of life characteristic of the “industrial age.” At the time he wrote, stage theories, like the one Marx advanced in Capital, still dominated the discourse of “development.” Influential American economist W. W. Rostow, for example, argued that “traditional societies” could be primed for “­take-​­off ” by fulfilling certain mandatory “­pre-​­conditions” and that takeoff would then launch them along the trajectory he called “the drive to maturity” and into the “age of mass consumption.” Casting Illich as the new Marx is important to Esteva because he thinks that the political left, even when it has abandoned Marxism as a political religion, still often retains elements of a Marxian style of thought that Esteva would like to see replaced. The key elements of this style of thought are, first, what Shanin calls “evolutionism”—the belief that societies evolve through necessary stages and that transformation can only come when all these stages have been c­ ompleted—​­and, second, the idea that progress is measured by the production and distribution of goods and services. These are precisely the faults that Esteva thinks Illich corrects. Marxism, as generally understood, speaks for the development of all the “productive forces” for which a society has room; Illich speaks for their radical curtailment. Marxists have usually preached “the long march through the institutions,” while Illich praises the dropout. And Marx anticipates full enjoyment of the capitalist cornucopia once class rule has ended, while Illich looks forward to an “austerity” that is graceful and “playful” but that still excludes “enjoyments which are destructive of personal relatedness.” This last stipulation may seem more n ­ eo-​­monastic than Marxist, and would, I think, have seemed so to Marx, but Esteva sees Illich as the harbinger of a world that Marx never anticipated, the world “after development” in which capitalism reaches its ecological and human limits long before ripening into communism.

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Illich as the Herald of Commonism According to Esteva, “Illich embraced the socialist ideals formulated by Marx,” although there is, in fact, very little reference to socialism in Illich’s writings. He does speak in Tools for Conviviality of a “transition to socialism” as something that he wishes to effect and for which he stipulates as a condition “a substitution of convivial for industrial tools” as well as “an inversion of our present institutions.” Whether a society of convivial tools and inverted institutions would conform to “socialist ideals” as “formulated by Marx” is moot, as far as I’m c­ oncerned—​­it depends, finally, on whether Marx is still recognizably Marx once one has subtracted his evolutionism, his productivism, his universalism, and whatever else makes him incompatible with Illich. Esteva’s more important point, for me, is that Illich is the herald of what Esteva calls “commonism,” a play on words that ties the hopes once invested in Communism to a contemporary revival of “the commons.” A commons, in its traditional meaning, was the pattern according to which a community shared the use, enjoyment, and stewardship of its lands and waters. Lewis Hyde provides a sketch of the commons of old England in his book Common as Air: Traditional English commons were lands held collectively by the residents of a parish or village: the fields, pastures, streams and woods that a number of people, none of them an owner . . . , had the right to use in ways organized and regulated by custom. Those who held a common right of pasturage could graze their cattle in the fields; those with a common of piscary might fish the streams; those with a common of turbary might cut turf to burn for heat; those with a common of estovers might take wood necessary to heat, furnish or repair their houses. Everyone, the poor especially, had the right to glean after the harvest.

A common was not an exclusive right but one that might overlap other common rights. It was a way of sharing something considered to be sufficient for all rather than a scarce resource subject to potentially unlimited demands. Illich makes this clear in an essay called “Silence Is a Commons”: An oak tree might be in the commons. Its shade, in summer, is reserved for the shepherd and his flock; its acorns are reserved for the pigs of the neighboring peasants; its dry branches serve as fuel for the widows of the village; some of its fresh twigs in springtime are cut as ornaments for the c­ hurch—​­at sunset it might be the place for the village assembly. When people spoke about the commons . . . , they designated an aspect of the environment that was limited, necessary for different groups in different ways, but which, in a strictly economic sense, was not perceived as scarce.

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Other cultures had similar institutions: the Russian mir, mentioned previously, is one; in Mexico, ejido was the name of the village system of communal land tenure; in Japan, where Illich delivered his paper “Silence Is a Commons,” he linked the old English word to a traditional way of sharing and managing forest land that was called iriai; and so on. Almost all of these traditional rights have been extinguished during the past four hundred years, as lands have been “enclosed” and assigned to private ownership. But Illich began to argue, beginning in the later 1970s, when it had already become clear that the political program of Tools for Conviviality would not be adopted in any systematic way, that a revival of the commons was now occurring: “Those who struggle to preserve the biosphere, and those who oppose a style of life characterized by a monopoly of commodities over activities, by reclaiming in bits and pieces the ability to exist outside the market’s regime of scarcity, have recently begun to coalesce into a new alliance. The one value shared by all currents within this alliance is the attempt to recover and enlarge in some way the commons. This emerging and converging social reality has been called ‘the archipelago of conviviality’ by André Gorz.” The expression “bits and pieces” here, like his adoption of Gorz’s image of an archipelago, a chain of islands, suggests that, by the time he wrote Gender at the beginning of the 1980s, Illich had begun to take a new approach to conviviality. Ten years earlier, when he was working on Tools for Conviviality, he later recalled, he “still believed in some big, symbolic event . . . similar to the Wall St. crash” and still hoped that such an impending crisis, if intelligently anticipated, might lead to “a political inversion.” That hadn’t happened, and the result had been “cynicism, confusion and inner void among people who live in an intensely monetarized society like the United States.” But elsewhere, he told me in 1988, “new opportunities for a new way of existence,” had emerged “in Mexico and . . . other places which I know somewhat and can make a judgment about.” People can use the s­ o-​­called benefits of development for their purposes, not for the purposes they were made for. They can cannibalize cars. They can use junk. The educational system in most countries has become so corrupt that they can easily buy certificates and diplomas if they want them for a specific purpose. They don’t have to go to school to learn something. There are other ways to get certificates, and, increasingly, the system accommodates that because it can’t afford the schools. People begin to see that it would be stupid to go to a hospital when you are sick. It’s incredible with what speed all the things which Americans call q ­ uackery—​­from homeopaths to osteopaths to herbalists to vegetarian r­ estaurants—​­have grown up all through Latin America, mainly

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because they’re cheaper. . . . When I wrote Tools for Conviviality, I got very deeply disturbed because I foresaw so clearly trends and the convergence of trends which by now are obvious to everybody. But I was lacking in trust in the extraordinary creativity of people and their ability to live in the midst of what frustrates bureaucrats, planners, and observers. Mexico City, for instance, has grown in these fifteen years from a city of four million to a city of twenty million. A city of twenty million should not be governable. But people still come from all over the world to figure out how Mexico City is governed, instead of trying to figure out how come a city like that can survive without government.

There is some exaggeration here. Estimates vary somewhat, but most sources put the population of the greater Mexico City area at around nine million in 1973, not four million, and it probably didn’t reach twenty million until well after 1988. Likewise, I’m not sure that education systems were then so corrupt in “most countries” that qualifications could be easily purchased or that “people” in general thought it “stupid to go to a hospital when you’re sick.” Nevertheless, Illich is talking about a real trend in a world that doesn’t have, and likely never will have, jobs, schools, hospitals, and so on, for all. And this is the trend that Esteva calls “commonism.” The evidence for it runs from the reemergence of communal institutions in the Zapatista lands of Chiapas, where Esteva has been closely involved, to Via Campesina, the ­international “peasants’ movement,” which federates 164 local and national organizations in s­eventy-​­three countries and claims to speak for some two hundred million small farmers. It includes all the untaxed, unregulated, and unmonitored economic activity that economists assign to the vast “informal sector.” According to ­International Labor Organization statistics cited in the Wikipedia entry on this topic, informal employment currently makes up 48 percent of nonagricultural employment in North Africa, 51 percent in Latin America, 65 percent in Asia, and 72 percent in ­sub-​ ­Saharan Africa. If agricultural employment is included, the percentages rise, in some countries like India and many s­ ub-​­Saharan African countries, beyond 90 ­percent. Also included are the many forms of recycling and mutual aid that allow favelas and shanties to improve themselves and become working communities. After Development During the late 1980s, Esteva and Illich were involved together in a series of discussions that they and their collaborators called “After Development, What?” The result was The Development Dictionary, a series of essays on key words and concepts

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of the “age of development,” which appeared in 1992. The “age of development” was the name the book’s editor, Wolfgang Sachs, gave to the era that had begun with U.S. President Harry Truman’s announcement, in 1949, of “a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” The idea underlying Truman’s project was identical to Marx’s thought in Capital: “The country that is more developed industrially shows to the less developed the image of its own future.” All the nations of the world could be ranked on a common scale, and all were bound for a common destination: the shining city of development. It was the premise of The Development Dictionary, as Sachs says in his introductory essay, that the age characterized by this belief was “coming to an end” and that it was “time . . . to write its obituary.” Commonism, in Esteva’s view, is what will come next for all those who know that they live “after development.” This category includes not just those former believers in development who have begun to read the writing on the wall and not just those excluded from the benefits of development but also those who never believed in it in the first place. This last group would include, among others, those who continued to subscribe to Gandhi’s principles of ­self-​­reliance and ­self-​­sufficiency despite having been sidelined in India’s rush to industrialize after independence. Illich, in 1973, had imagined a convivial society as a coordinated response to some definitive crisis. What happened instead was an ad hoc response to the state of permanent, diffuse crisis that set in when no decisive action was taken to scale back the m ­ ega-​­machine. Commonism, as Esteva sets it out, depends on the regeneration of commons or the establishment of new commons. He uses the word in a way that is nourished by its traditional sense but not restricted by it. A right of turbary or estovers is not of much use in a contemporary favela. A commons is whatever has not been yet been enclosed and dedicated to strictly private ownership or use. A roadway, not taken over by h ­ igh-​­speed traffic, where people can still socialize and do business is a commons. The commons, he says, quoting Peter Linebaugh, “is an activity,” which means also, I think, an attitude or a disposition. So, for Esteva, “friendship is the basic stuff constituting many of the contemporary urban commons.” There is now an extensive literature on new commons and on “commoning,” a word coined in the light of Peter Linebaugh’s idea that what is at issue is an activity and an attitude more than a place or a thing. David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, on behalf of the Commons Strategies Group, have already brought out a set of three books on a movement that now extends from open source software to the Peruvian “potato park” where 2,300 varieties of potatoes are still husbanded and

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grown. Esteva has also been a chronicler of this movement in many books and articles. I will say no more about it here but rather focus on Esteva’s claim that Illich is its p ­ recursor—​­a Marx for the age after development. Leaving aside the merely tactical element in Esteva’s comparing Illich to ­Marx—​­to get the attention of the many lapsed Marxists in his political milieu in M ­ exico—​­I think there is a lot in what he says. Tools for Conviviality may have failed as a prospectus for the “modern society of responsibly limited tools” that Illich at first envisioned, but its ideas remain invaluable for those trying to improvise a decent way of life amid the ruins of development. Esteva quotes a saying of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas: “to change the world is very difficult, perhaps impossible; what seems feasible is to create a whole new world.” This, I think, is entirely consonant with Illich. Illich advocated deschooling, not school reform. He called for “alternatives to economics, rather than an alternative economics.” He encouraged the cultivation of a virtue of “­enough-​­ness” and asked people to explore the ways in which they might be happier with less rather than more. He tried to redraw the political map rather than accommodate himself to the existing diagram of political choices. Tools for Conviviality presents itself as a prologue to “social reconstruction,” written as a guide for those seeking a new way of life in the face of “the fading monopoly of the industrial mode of production.” But the book ends with a puzzling confession that I quoted in part earlier: “I feel almost unbearable anguish,” Illich writes, “when faced by the fact that only the word recovered from history is left to us as the power for stemming disaster. Yet only the word in its weakness can associate the majority of people in the revolutionary inversion of inevitable violence into convivial reconstruction.” He does not identify “the word.” Perhaps it is his own frail text, trying to make itself heard above the din of progress. Perhaps it is the Word of God appealing, powerless, from the Cross. Both moods, his hope and his anguish, play through the text. On the one hand there is the bitter sense of a world about to swallow itself, like the “vacuum cleaner beast” in the film Yellow Submarine that sucks up the entire landscape and then finally consumes itself. On the other, there is the hopeful sense of a world whose extremity places it on the very threshold of its potential transformation or “inversion.” This hope, I’ve argued, is comprehensible only in the context of the time at which Illich wrote. And this context itself requires a context in t­ urn—​­the Christian belief in the possibility of rebirth that shaped not just Illich’s personal stance but also the very idea of revolution that so many found persuasive in these years. The moment passed, as so many other revolutionary moments have passed, and left behind a complicated and still largely unclarified legacy. Perhaps there was a revolution, even if

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not the one predicted or the one hoped for. It was always part of Illich’s thinking that if the world didn’t change for the better, it would change for the worse, not stay the same. If a conscious program of deschooling was not adopted, then a more sinister form of deschooling would turn the whole world into a classroom. Without the “­post-​­industrial balance” he called for, there would be “chaos” and the “managerial fascism” it would provoke and so forth. The conscious change that was held up at the front door entered piecemeal, unplanned, and mostly unconscious, at the back. Did Illich believe that a revolution would occur? It’s not a question I find easy to answer. After all, what he called ­revolution—​­cultural revolution, institutional revolution, a revolution defined by its ­sarcasm—​­was not exactly what Lenin or Robespierre, or even Cromwell or Washington, meant by the term. His was a revolution in ­awareness—​­that was why he made “deschooling” its ­precondition—​­and to that extent it is ongoing, as Gustavo Esteva argued earlier in the chapter. Every time someone perceives abundance where before they had seen only scarcity or finds opportunity in place of an institutionally defined “problem,” Illich’s revolution has occurred. As for the hope that a “political inversion” would take place, I think Illich abandoned that very quickly. The institutions he had hoped to revolutionize had proved less tractable and more deeply rooted than he had at first imagined. What had made them so impervious to criticism, he concluded, was the “certainties” on which they were founded. The roots nourishing these certainties will be my subject in chapter 7.

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Disabling Professions

6

One way to close an age is to give it a name that sticks. I propose that we name the m ­ id-​­twentieth century The Age of Disabling Professions. —Ivan Illich

The preceding statement was the opening salvo in an anthology, published in 1977, that took its title from Illich’s proposed epithet for the age. At the time he wrote, others were also arguing that the growing power of professionals was the defining feature of the time. From Philip Rieff ’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic to Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, many of Illich’s contemporaries were worrying about the way in which pervasive professional intervention was undermining moral and social character. Indeed, this note had been sounded as early as 1925, when Alfred North Whitehead, in his Science and the Modern World, had denounced the “professionalizing of knowledge,” arguing that it produced “minds in a groove” and sacrificed reality to the “set of abstractions” characteristic of a given profession. But what was distinctive about Illich’s critique of professional power was his t­ reatment of rampant professionalism as a legal and constitutional problem. In 1970’s D ­ eschooling Society, Illich had already argued that contemporary school ­systems must be ­“disestablished,” by which he meant that their obligatory character should be eliminated and jobs awarded on the basis of competence, not certification. His model was the disestablishment of religion in the U.S. Constitution. He took the same view of other forms of professional power. What had traditionally been called liberal professions, he said, had now become “dominant” professions. Once, these professions had been optional, as the name ­liberal—​­from the Latin liber, “free”—suggests. Their practitioners may have enjoyed statutory recognition and the right to restrict access to their ranks, but the services they offered had not been ­compulsory—​­potential clients were as free to refuse them as the various professionals were to offer them. One could get along without them. Dominant professions, he argued, had become

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compulsory in two senses: eligibility for employment, social benefits, and even elementary forms of social participation had come to require professional supervision and certification, and the social environment had been reshaped so totally as to starve all alternatives to professionally prescribed courses of action out of existence. Alternatives had become unimaginable as well as unviable. To Illich the power concentrated in contemporary professions represented a profound shift in the political structure of modern societies. All liberal polities supposedly rest on two conditions: the existence of a civil society and a government in which power is divided and dispersed. Civil society, in theory, is a sphere outside the state in which people can meet in their “common quality” as free persons and form what the eighteenth century gradually began to call “the public opinion.” When British politician Charles James Fox told the House of Commons in 1792 that he would consider it his duty to give way should his view not coincide with “public opinion,” he was speaking of something that could have been neither named nor imagined a century before. Along with civil society emerged the doctrine of the separation of powers, first enunciated by the e­ ighteenth-​­century French political philosopher Montesquieu in his The Spirit of the Laws. It held that the power to create law should be separated from the power to interpret it and the power to enforce it. The locus classicus of the separation of powers is the Constitution of the United States with its carefully delineated executive, legislative, and judicial branches, each ideally restraining the other, but praise of a “balanced” or “mixed” constitution also echoes through the British parliamentary tradition from the time of Blackstone and Burke down to the present. It is Illich’s claim that these two ideals have been thoroughly extinguished by the hegemony of professionals. They have been able to make their services effectively mandatory. There has been, Illich says, a “collapse of powers” in the person of the professional. Competencies that were once supposed to exercise a “mutual check upon one another” have run together, and this has happened without much acknowledgment or recognition that the political constitution of modern societies has, in fact, decisively changed. Contemporary professionals now legislate by authoritatively imputing to others a “need” for their service; they exercise administrative or executive power by their monopoly on diagnosing and meeting these needs; they acquire judicial status by the penetration and reach of their expert opinions; and on top of all this, they function as priests by controlling, as the Church once did, access to the means of grace or blessedness. They combine in one office pastoral, administrative, and legislative power. What this means is that is there is no longer a civil space in which citizens can use their common sense to arrive at

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a considered opinion because all available spaces are saturated by the prefabricated lingos and ­ready-​­made solutions that characterize professionalized service. Illich gives a striking example of professional power in Limits to Medicine, where he writes of the extraordinary prerogatives conferred on “the medical functionary” by “the ­ritualization of crisis”: “It provides him with a license that usually only the m ­ ilitary can claim. Under the stress of crisis, the professional who is believed to be in command can easily presume immunity from the ordinary rules of justice and decency. He who is assigned control over death ceases to be an ordinary human. . . . Because they form a charmed borderland not quite of this world, the ­time-​­span and the community space claimed by the medical enterprise are as sacred as their religious and military counterparts.” In a footnote to this passage, Illich adds that “he who successfully claims power in an emergency suspends and can destroy rational evaluation. The insistence of the physician on his exclusive capacity to evaluate and solve individual crises moves him symbolically into the neighborhood of the White House.” There is a striking parallel here with the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s claim in his ­Political Theology that the hallmark of true sovereignty is the power to “decide on the exception.” Schmitt’s point is that sovereignty stands above law because in an emergency the sovereign can suspend the l­aw—​­declare an e­ xception—​­and rule in its place as the very source of law. This is precisely the power that Illich says the physician “claims . . . in an emergency.” Exceptional circumstances make him/ her “immune” to the “ordinary rules” and able to make new ones as the case dictates. But there is an interesting and, to me, telling difference between Schmitt and Illich. Schmitt is transfixed by what he calls “the political.” Illich notices that much of what Schmitt calls sovereignty has escaped or been usurped from the political realm and reinvested in various professional hegemonies. Many similar passages to the one just cited can be found in Deschooling Society. He writes, for example, of the teacher as exerting the authority, at once, of “pastor, prophet and priest,” a merging of roles first accomplished by the medieval papacy. The emphasis in this quote is on the spiritual character of professional power, but Illich also emphasizes, as I have already said, the ways in which professionals function as devisors, interpreters, and administrators of policy. And, as these functions pass into the hands of technocrats, Illich says, politics has “withered.” This creates a constitutional crisis, in Illich’s view, because powers have come into existence that were not foreseen when modern states were formed and that remain unrecognized in their formal constitutions. Take the media complex as an example. When gentlemen conversed in coffeehouses and shaped “the public

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opinion” for which Charles James Fox felt such regard, there was no thought of a world in which paid speech would preponderate over the common tongue as it does today. By paid speech, I mean all those discourses, designed by journalists and entertainers, speechwriters and spin doctors, advertisers and public relations consultants, that flood consciousness at all hours and today at all seconds. Under the influence of these professional wordsmiths, the process by which words evolve and change their meaning, by which concepts emerge, and by which archetypes are created is put into overdrive. The popular tongue ceases to be the invention of people “in their common quality” and becomes the endlessly renovated coinage of professionals paid to instruct, entertain, edify, and manipulate. Despite vital pockets of resistance, language ceases to be a commons and becomes an instrumentalized resource, in which “messages” are sent and received. Politics is transformed, with the character, limits, and possibilities of political speech all carefully marked out and policed by the media complex. What the eighteenth century began to recognize as the upstart and still somewhat disreputable power of the “fourth estate” now conditions the entire character of political society. This is why Illich made it a condition of convivial reconstruction that people regain the power of “poetic ­self-​ ­affirmation” through their speech. Those with the professional power to entrain and instruct speech do so according to their interest. The nature of this interest may vary widely, from the basest advertising pitch to the most elevated pedagogy, but the point is that the power resides in a professional sphere that will quite naturally and quite automatically wish to perpetuate its hegemony and its often generous source of livelihood. The vernacular, meanwhile, shrinks, retaining only a furtive and marginal existence in literature, folk musics, and other wildlife preserves of unmanipulated language. This must change, Illich says, in order to make concerted popular political action possible. But the powers that must be limited, though they can be recognized, cannot be easily grasped because they are not part of the formal political constitution of contemporary societies. The media complex, because of its overt and obvious impact on politics, affords an easy example of how professional power changes the political constitution of society. But Illich regarded other professions in the same light, and as is probably already clear, he used the term quite broadly to take in not just the traditional professions but any group capable of gaining a legal mandate, dictating its standards, and disabling popular capacities, from morticians to grief counselors. In Limits to Medicine, he says that the power of “health occupations” is the result of a “political delegation”—a concession of power properly belonging in the sphere of political decision to a largely autonomous professional elite. The province of

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Ontario, where I live, currently spends more than fifty billion publicly appropriated dollars on “health care,” over 40 percent of the government’s total budget, but very little public influence can be exerted on how this money is spent. Decisions about what is fitting and what is enough have passed out of the purview of popular judgment and into the realm of experts. Moral questions about what is good have been overshadowed by technical questions about what is possible. Public discussion has been, as Illich says, “stunned by a delusion about science”—the delusion that knowledge entitled to wear a lab coat should automatically trump common sense. Illich insisted that professional hegemony at the contemporary scale was something radically new, something as little allowed for in Marxist critique as it was in liberal theory. Marxism had identified the alienation of labor as the key mechanism of capitalist society. But dominant professions, Illich said, threatened a deeper a­ lienation—​­an alienation from the very possibility of independent thought or action. This view was often a source of misunderstanding as well as of persistent controversy with Marxist critics. They claimed that the service institutions with which Illich was concerned were only froth on the surface of capitalist society. Change “the relations of production,” they said, and there would be no need to deschool or demedicalize. Illich claimed that socialist schools and hospitals were the same as capitalist schools and hospitals. “Pathogenic medicine,” he said, “is the result of industrial overproduction that paralyzes autonomous action” (my italics). This “frustrating overproduction,” he argued, must be considered in itself and not just treated as an artifact of a larger “capitalist system,” doomed to disappear with that system. What Marxism failed to grasp also eluded the categories of conventional liberal economic analysis, according to Illich. The burden of “paradoxical counterproductivity” was not a question of “declining marginal utility”—the declining benefits to be expected from something in e­ ver-​­increasing supply. Nor was it a question of containing “negative externalities”—those incidental harms caused by the medical system, like antibiotic resistance, medical waste, or illnesses contracted in hospital. Counterproductivity, Illich said, was neither an individual nor a social cost that could be weighed against some countervailing benefit. It was a fundamental derangement that was bound to occur at a certain scale and intensity of intervention. In Tools for Conviviality, he called it “the second watershed.” In his writings on medicine, it became “nemesis”—the symbol in Greek mythology of the divine retribution due to hubris, or overreaching. “Frustrating overproduction” and “paradoxical counterproductivity” were other names for the same syndrome.

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It occurs “whenever the use of an institution paradoxically takes away from society those things the institution was designed to provide.” Nemesis and its several synonyms all suggest the operation of a law or inexorable necessity. Illich was not writing about the disadvantages, disutilities, or unwanted externalities of a way of life temporarily embarrassed by its “downsides.” He thought the human condition itself was being exceeded and that this would inevitably bring sinister consequences. As I noted in the previous chapter, Illich’s roots were in natural law with its “certainty that the norms with which we ought to live correspond to our insight into what we are.” “What we are” is ­malleable, capable of being recast in thousands of different languages, ritual structures, and aesthetic sensibilities, but it has limits. Beyond these limits, it ceases to be what it is and becomes something new. Illich applied various names to this new condition. In Deschooling Society, he called it a “totally m ­ an-​­made environment”; in Tools for Conviviality, an “artificial creation, with no exit”; in Limits to ­Medicine, “a plastic womb”; and in an interview with me, “a cosmos in the hands of man.” All four descriptions point to a ­self-​­enclosed and s­ elf-​­sufficient condition in which humanity is sealed within its own horizon and deaf to any intimation from beyond it. Illich made a number of sustained efforts to analyze disabling professionalism: among them Deschooling Society, Energy and Equity, Limits to Medicine, The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies, and the essay just mentioned on “Disabling Professions.” All these works seek to establish a proportion. In Deschooling it’s between compulsory educational designs and the ­capacity of people to educate themselves. Energy and Equity measures the relationship between energy intensity and social equality. Limits to Medicine examines the ways in which too much “health care” depresses health. “The social commitment to provide all citizens with almost unlimited outputs from the medical system,” Illich writes early in this last book, “threatens to destroy the environmental and social conditions needed by people to live a life of constant autonomous healing.” Of the writings I have mentioned, Limits to Medicine is by far the most ambitious. Energy and Equity began life as a series of articles for the French newspaper Le Monde. Deschooling was a series of linked essays, without footnotes, in a polemical though also poetical style. The fully annotated Limits to Medicine is a much more scholarly essay and, at nearly three hundred pages, almost three times as long as ­Deschooling. It is still directly and provocatively aimed at a major social institution and, to that extent, still falls within Illich’s characterization of his work of this period as “pamphleteering.” But in its later pages particularly, where Illich

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writes extensively on the iconography of death and how the concept of disease has changed over time, the historian is beginning to eclipse the provocateur. Iatrogenesis Illich’s subject was iatrogenesis, a term he popularized and for which, in some circles, he is still remembered, though he did not himself coin it. It means, literally, “­physician-​­caused” and refers to whatever proceeds from the physician and not from the patient. The word is normally used to refer to medicine’s collateral d ­ amage—​ ­death and disease due to misguided or incompetent medical ­care—​­but Illich applies it much more widely to take in all the ways in which medicine reshapes the society it ostensibly serves. He therefore divides iatrogenesis into three branches: clinical, social and cultural. The first, clinical iatrogenesis, refers to what I just called collateral damage and is by far the most familiar. An article in the Canadian ­magazine The Walrus estimates that 7.5 percent of the Canadians who are admitted to hospitals every year will suffer at least one “adverse event” and 24,000 will die as a result of medical mistakes. Ralph Nader, writing in Harper’s Magazine, suggests that the number of people in the United States who die annually as a result of preventable medical errors is currently around 400,000. This is a high but reputable ­estimate—​­no one really knows. Half that amount would be more in line with the Walrus number when adjusted by population. Whatever its extent, the damage done by medicine is now largely taken for granted. It does not shock as it did in 1975, when Illich first made his dramatic claim that “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.” But clinical iatrogenesis was only Illich’s starting point. He went on to social iatrogenesis, which he defined as those “­socio-​­economic transformations” that had been made “attractive, possible or necessary by the institutional shape health care has taken.” He continues, Social iatrogenesis . . . obtains when medical bureaucracy creates ­ill-​­health by increasing stress, by multiplying disabling dependence, by generating painful new needs, by lowering the levels of tolerance for discomfort and pain, by reducing the leeway that people are wont to concede to an individual when he suffers, and by abolishing even the right to s­ elf-​­care. . . . Social iatrogenesis is at work when health care is turned into a standardized item, a staple, when home becomes inhospitable to birth, sickness and death, when the language in which people can experience their bodies is turned into bureaucratic gobbledygook; or when suffering, mourning, and healing outside the patient role are labeled a form of deviance.

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Illich’s final category is cultural iatrogenesis. “It sets in,” he writes, “when the medical enterprise saps the will of people to suffer their reality.” This will, he believes, is rooted in culture which, in its religious aspect, offers “a rationale, a style, and a community setting in which suffering can become a dignified performance.” Contemporary medicine, on the other hand, makes suffering an abomination, even while sometimes increasing it. It does so by declaring “war against all suffering” and thereby turning suffering into a sign of failure or of a problem not yet solved. The constantly reiterated figure of people “battling” diseases evinces the same attitude. Death, likewise, loses its significance as something that belongs to me as my last act. Indeed, it cannot be understood as an act at all, when it is undergone by a patient, someone who, as the word says, is acted upon. Death cannot retain its meaning as life’s complement and completion when it is seen only as the loss of a battle or the termination of treatment. And this is all the more true when the “right to death” is made law, as has happened in Canada, and doctors are asked to administer death as their final professional benediction. Culture withers in the face of this degree of professional power, Illich says, and this inanition of cultural resources is the final stage of what he calls cultural iatrogenesis. Illich knew that his account of death as a personal action and suffering as a valuable cultural ability was bound to be taken as an instance of “superstition, ­sado-​­masochism, and the rich man’s condescension to the lot of the poor.” A friend of Illich’s, Greek mathematician Kostas Hatzikiriakou, tells the story of taking someone to hear Illich lecture on medicine. After the lecture, Hatzikiriakou’s companion turned to him, puzzled, and asked, “What does he want? Let people die?” I imagine that many others have had similar responses. Ever since Francis Bacon, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, proposed to “conquer Nature” in order to bring about “the relief of man’s estate,” the attempt to reduce suffering has been an explicit and defining feature of modernity. Now here was Illich arguing that something crucial had been lost with the undermining of the culturally shaped ability to suffer and die. “Medical civilization is planned and organized to kill pain, to eliminate sickness, and to abolish the need for an art of suffering,” he wrote, and the result is a “progressive flattening out of personal virtuous performance.” This was a dramatic and shocking reversal of the modern view, and it’s no wonder that Hatzikiriakou’s lecture companion was bemused. American scholar Christopher Shannon thinks that this heretical character explains why Limits to Medicine has had so little l­ong-​­term influence despite the brief succès de scandale the book enjoyed. Its readers could not assimilate nor agree with its attitude toward suffering. “Uncomprehending mainstream intellectuals,” Shannon writes,

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“largely rejected Illich’s critique as at best politically irresponsible, at worst morally sadistic.” Scientism The idea that suffering and death are unqualified evils and their postponements unqualified goods is only one of many deeply ingrained beliefs that are mauled in the pages of Limits to Medicine. Another is the attitude toward science that Illich calls scientism. In Tools for Conviviality, he had claimed that contemporary society is “stunned by a delusion about science”—the delusion being that effective action must rely on the certified knowledge produced by “initiates who monopolize the special formula.” In Limits to Medicine, he fleshed out his critique of this delusion. Scientism, for Illich, means two things: first, the erection of a myth in which individual sciences, with their limited and situated bodies of knowledge, are subsumed into an abstract, unconditional, and ­always-​­about-​­to-​­be-​­omniscient wonder tale called Science; and, second, the extension of scientific bodies of knowledge beyond their proper limits. In medical practice, Illich claims, scientism is expressed in what he calls “the divorce between medicine and morality.” This occurs when medicine is taken primarily as a scientific enterprise and not as the moral undertaking that he believes it to be: In every society, medicine, like law and religion, defines what is normal, proper, or desirable. Medicine has the authority to label one man’s complaint a legitimate illness, to declare a second man sick though he does not complain, and to refuse a third social recognition of his pain, his disability, and even his death. It is medicine which stamps some pain as “merely subjective,” some impairment as malingering, and some d ­ eaths—​ ­though not ­others—​­as suicide. The judge determines what is legal and who is guilty. The priest declares what is holy and who has broken a taboo. The physician decides what is a symptom and who is sick. He is a moral entrepreneur, charged with inquisitorial powers to discover certain wrongs to be righted. Medicine, like all crusades, creates a new group of outsiders each time it makes a new diagnosis stick. Morality is as implicit in sickness as it is in crime or in sin.

The word morality here requires broad interpretation. It refers not just to the determination of what is right or wrong but even more to the exercise of political authority. Illich is speaking of morality in the old sense in which what we today call political science was once called moral science. Thus, he demonstrates the

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inherently moral character of medicine by pointing to its ability to say, authoritatively, what things are, why they matter, and how much, relatively, they should count. This is a political power, and as I showed earlier, medicine possesses it, in Illich’s view, by political “delegation.” But both the moral and the delegated character of medicine’s authority are effaced, Illich says, by the claim that “medical categories . . . rest on scientific foundations exempt from moral evaluation.” Scientific medicine hides its moral character in several ways. The first is through its diagnostic categories with their appearance of objectivity and their immense power to capture, reify and slot experience into a set of stereotypes. The second is through the way in which t­echno-​­scientific capabilities determine treatment: decisions will be made on the basis of what can be done, not what ought to be done. And finally, there is the fact that “as a member of the medical profession the individual physician is an inextricable part of a scientific team.” The method of science is experiment, and, therefore, whatever the attitude of the individual physician, “each treatment [will be] one more repetition of an experiment with a statistically known probability of success.” Two consequences follow, according to Illich. First, the experimenter will want to control the variables bearing on the outcome of the experiment, including “that elusive variable which is the patient himself.” And, second, the exigencies of the ongoing experiment will tend to become the medical practitioner’s main concern. As a result, Illich says, “only a high level of tolerance for cognitive dissonance will allow him to carry on in the divergent roles of healer and scientist.” This dissonance has tended to grow worse since Illich wrote, as reform movements in medicine have tried to make the profession more scientific. During the 1960s and 1970s, Illich was only one voice in a chorus of criticism directed at the medical profession, and, unlike Illich, most of these critics accused medicine not of scientism but of a lack of scientific rigor. Too much of medical treatment, they said, rested entirely on the doctor’s “clinical judgment” and had no proven efficacy, except perhaps as ritual. Let me take as an example a statement made by Sheila Kitzinger in a radio series I assembled in 1983 called “Being Born.” Kitzinger was an anthropologist, an educator, and a sometimes flamboyant activist in the cause of demedicalizing childbirth. [Medical staff ] are using intervention as a series of ceremonial rites to turn women into patients and to make them become submissive and compliant. This is happening in our hospitals with a great many rites which have never been properly researched to prove that they are useful, helpful to labour. Things like shaving of the perineum, which reduces a woman to an infantile prepubescent s­ tate—​­she’s got a bottom like a seven

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year old girl. Things like using an enema or s­ uppositories—​­that’s a ritual purging from pollution. Things like immobilizing the woman, tethering her to an intravenous drip or to an electronic monitor, showing her that the shamans and witch doctors, the doctors who have taken over the role of the priesthood, have complete control over the inner workings of her b ­ ody—​­the most intimate workings of her body and that of her baby too. I think, you see, all these rites are being used to show a woman that she is helpless, powerless, to inculcate a learned submissiveness. And I see it as an anthropologist, as having this very important ritual function to enforce the power of the institution. And I think we should question and go on questioning every single one of them, because we need controlled studies, randomized trials to show that these things really are effective, that they really do have use for women and for babies. And at the moment much obstetrical intervention has not been proved useful in this way.

Kitzinger’s satire is bold and nicely observed, and her emphasis on ritualization agrees well with Illich, but there is an ambiguity in what she says. Is she asking obstetricians for a different, less intimidating style of cultural performance, or is she asking for a more scientific medicine that uses only procedures attested by properly controlled studies? Is the standard what we think is fitting or what has proven efficacy? Would Kitzinger want women tied down, if studies showed that it improved outcomes? She was, of course, confident that they wouldn’t. And she was right. All the procedures from the heroic age of obstetrics that she ­mentions—​ ­the enema, the shave, etc.—were shown to be without benefit. But the randomized trial, as the gold standard of what should and should not done in medicine, brought new difficulties. E ­ vidence-​­based medicine, as it is now called, produced the one, best answer for all cases and eliminated the variations that had once called for clinical judgment in its more positive sense. I remember hearing, for example, of a midwife, particularly expert in managing breech presentations, who could no longer exercise her skill because randomized trials had established the single best way to manage such cases. The exception was disregarded, the special skill allowed to atrophy, the intuitive diagnosis ignored. Certain ceremonial “rites,” as Kitzinger called them, were eliminated, but “scientism” tightened its grip. Illich had already warned, in Limits to Medicine, against “equating statistical man with biologically unique men.” In the age of “­evidence-​­based medicine,” this predicament grew more acute, and Illich remains relevant, I think, in asking for a clear distinction between moral and scientific questions. Another aspect of Illich’s critique of scientism is his emphasis on the baleful power of diagnosis. Here, as elsewhere, his thought cuts very much against

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the grain. Most contemporary people, at least those living in fully medicalized societies, actively pursue diagnosis. Again and again I have heard of the relief felt by the mother who finds out that her child has Asperger’s syndrome or the prison guard who learns that his nightmares are a product of ­post-​­traumatic stress disorder. This is easy to understand. The diagnosis recognizes, validates, and normalizes the ­suffering—​­one belongs to a recognized kind, and one, moreover, that p ­ robably possesses certain entitlements. Illich consistently emphasized the shadow of d ­ iagnosis—​­the way in which it denatures and standardizes experience. One of his last public lectures, delivered in Bologna in late 1998, was called “And Lead Us Not into Diagnosis . . . ” In Limits to Medicine, he writes: “Diagnosis always intensifies stress, defines incapacity, imposes inactivity, and focuses apprehension on ­non-​­recovery, on uncertainty, and on one’s dependence upon future medical findings, all of which amounts to a loss of autonomy for ­self-​­definition.” Is Illich unaware, then, in writing of “the stress” that diagnosis “always intensifies,” of how often relief and relaxation seem to follow diagnosis? I don’t think so. I think rather that he is disputing this relaxation into a prescribed course of treatment. He is questioning medicine’s power not just to recognize and certify what is real but also to draw the boundaries of social acceptability. If there is no possibility in my mind that I might choose to bear my own reality, as I am currently experiencing it, rather than to have it folded into a predetermined category, it makes no sense to speak of diagnosis as inducing stress. It is stressful to be in the hands of doctors who determine the meaning of my experience, only so long as I can imagine an alternative. Otherwise I may as well adjust myself in the image of the diagnosis, since it is the only way I can learn what is the case and what courses of action are open to me. Medicine’s Political Power Medicine’s power to define and certify what can claim public recognition and command public resources is exactly what Illich contests, just as he contests the comparable power of other professions to determine what shall count as education, work, or habitation. He traces medicine’s diagnostic power back to the French Revolution, which “gave birth,” he says, to “two great myths: one, that physicians could replace the clergy; the other, that with political change society would return to a state of original health.” At the time, “illness was still personal suffering in the mirror of the doctor’s vision”; few disease entities, beyond the plague and the pox, were identified; and “the idea of using b ­ io-​­medical interventions on people or on

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their environment was totally absent.” But as the hope that the revolution itself was the way to restore health failed, “the task of eliminating sickness [was] turned over to the medical profession.” “The sudden emergence of the doctor as saviour and miracle worker was due not to the proven efficacy of new techniques but to the need for a magical ritual that would lend credibility to a pursuit at which a political revolution had failed. If ‘sickness’ and ‘health’ were to lay claim to public resources, then these concepts had to be made operational. Ailments had to be turned into objective diseases that infested mankind, could be transplanted and cultivated in the laboratory, and could be fitted into wards, records, budgets and museums.” What Illich calls “objective diseases” proliferated. “By 1860,” he says, “even the ordinary citizen recognized the names of a dozen diseases.” How many there are now is anyone’s ­guess—​­certainly thousands, and even tens of thousands according to some reputable estimates. According to Illich, this was a revolutionary transformation. When illness was “personal suffering in the mirror of the doctor’s vision,” what the patient saw in this mirror was still himself or herself. The doctor might give counsel or remedy, his interpretive skills might have been greater than his patients, but he did not know what was “really” wrong. The isolation of disease as a “clinical entity” thus represents “an event in medicine that corresponds to the achievement of Copernicus in astronomy: man was catapulted and estranged from the centre of his universe. Job became Prometheus.” For a lot of people, these many new diseases are unproblematically real, each one the discovery of a new pathogen or a previously unknown malfunction of the organism. For Illich they are “socially created.” This phrase has produced a fair amount of controversy over the years and, during the 1990s, even touched off what became known as the Science Wars. At issue was the question of whether science gives us reality itself or only a contingent and constructed view of it. Historians and philosophers associated with the “constructivist” view were mocked and ­challenged—​­one told ­me—​­to demonstrate their confidence that the laws of gravity are socially constructed by jumping out of a high window. The issue, in my view, is mostly a red herring, even if a very large and influential one. It rests on what Alfred North Whitehead called a “bifurcation of nature,” by which we artificially segregate mind from matter, primary from secondary qualities, the causal from the apparent, being from perceiving. Illich, I think, would agree, and in his later writings, he several times endorsed Whitehead’s claim that we too often endow scientific abstractions with what Whitehead called “misplaced concreteness,” treating them as if they were not abstractions but perceptible common sense objects. Illich was, in this sense, a ­realist—​­he insisted on the primacy of the world as we

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perceive it. In fact, he claimed, as I noted earlier, that his “entire perceptual mode” was rooted in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, whose works virtually defined realism in the Latin Christian tradition. Reality is not what is at issue when Illich calls modern diseases “socially created.” What is at issue is who gets to define reality and whether those destined to live it know how their reality has been made. A disease is “socially created” because it is brought into existence and held in existence through a variety of agencies and interests that are thoroughly social. An extensive literature, following in the tracks of Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and ­Development of a Scientific Fact, now attests to this idea, and I won’t belabor it here. The crucial insight is that a fact is no simple matter and cannot exist by itself, as can a rock or a lake or a tree. It is a node in a network of supporting institutions and concepts and, without these supports, would lose most of its sense, plausibility, and pertinence. There might still be something there, but it would not, as Bruno Latour says, have been “made public” with all that that entails. Illich, at one point, says that “substantive disease”—the understanding of disease as the action of a distinct entity or etiology—is “the materialization of a myth,” meaning, I think, that the concept of disease takes shape in the context of a larger story about what the world is like and how it is to be apprehended. Some of this is, by now, widely accepted. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone contemplating ­Canada’s vast health complex, with more than $200 billion in annual expenditures, would claim that it does not embody powerful and influential social interests. But if we ask the question “Do diseases exist before they are discovered, described, and named?” we are in deeper waters, where philosophers divide and sometimes drown. Those interested in the question still keep alive the memory of an evening in 1951 when the British analytical philosopher A. J. Ayer and the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau Ponty, along with several others, met at a Parisian bar and argued over the question of whether the sun existed before humans did. This is a variation on the question of whether the syphilis bacillus, Fleck’s subject, could be said to exist before the test that identified it was devised or whether the dozen diseases that Illich says were known by their scientific names by 1860 can be said to have existed in 1760 when they were unknown. It seems to me that answers to this question can be arranged along a continuum ranging from a naive scientism, which holds that the world is exactly what current science says it is and always was, to a radical constructivism, which argues that there is no sun without humans because, as Merleau Ponty says, “there is no world without a being in the world.” I would put myself about in the middle of such a continuum, giving both positions a certain credit. I believe that all knowl-

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edge is bent by its circumstances, but I also believe, with caveats, that Galileo’s mechanics of motion are an advance on Aristotle’s, just as Einstein’s cosmology is an advance on Newton’s. Illich, most of the time, I would place closer to the constructivist end of this spectrum. His theory seemed to be that knowledge develops within tightly organized paradigms, in Thomas Kuhn’s word, or épistémès, in Michel ­Foucault’s, and that these regimes are largely incommensurable with one another. He often spoke of “epistemic breaks,” a term coined by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard and continued by Foucault for the radical discontinuity between different systems of knowledge. Illich came to believe in an “epoch specific body” or sometimes a “totally ­epoch-​­specific body,” its feeling and percepts entirely shaped by the assumption of its age, its experiences inaccessible to other epochs. Sometimes I was left with a question about just how malleable Illich believed perception to be. Is “the odor of sanctity” perceived by Christians of the Middle Ages detected by a real sense that we no longer possess? Does the woman of the eighteenth century who conceives her bodily states as a balance of humors effectively lack the internal organs that medical surveillance discovers in a contemporary woman? How deeply does imagination shape experience? How far should scientific “discovery” constrain our understanding and not just be bracketed as one more imagination of the real, with no more claim on us than any other style of knowing? My answers to these questions were not always the same as Illich’s. He was, as I said, closer to the radical constructivist end of the spectrum and sometimes wrote as if the body were a perfectly plastic element within an a­ ll-​­powerful social imaginary and that people in the past might as easily have walked on their hands and breathed through their ears. To me, at times, he seemed almost to fall into ­self-​­contradiction as a historian whose “­epoch-​­specific” understanding ought to prevent him from understanding history at all but somehow didn’t. However, I think this appearance may sometimes be deceptive or at least explainable by Illich’s polemical purpose. He was trying to crack a monolith, a modern medically induced s­ elf-​­image of such overwhelming power and authority that he felt it estranged modern persons not only from the possibility of personal experience but also from the salvation that was given in the body of Christ, a point I will take up later in the book. If he sometimes went further than many of his contemporaries could follow him, I don’t think this impugns the value of his basic ideas: that an understanding of history offers an indispensable perspective on the relativity of contemporary perceptions and that “the recognition that all disease is a socially created reality” is the sine qua non of “a critical, scientifically sound demedicalization of the concept of disease.”

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The Diagnostic Imperative What the medical paradigm that takes shape after the French Revolution does, according to Illich, is first of all to displace the patient from the center of his or her own experience. Second, a bias toward illness is created: In the detection of sickness, medicine does two things: it “discovers” new disorders, and it ascribes these disorders to concrete individuals. To discover a new category of disease is the pride of the medical scientist. To ascribe the pathology to some Tom, Dick, or Harry is the first task of the physician acting as a member of a consulting profession. Trained to “do something” and express his concern, he feels active, useful, and effective when he can diagnose disease. Though theoretically, at the first encounter, the physician does not presume that his patient is affected by a disease, through a form of ­fail-​­safe principle he usually acts as if imputing a disease to the patient were better than disregarding one. The ­medical-​­decision rule pushes him to seek safety by diagnosing illness rather than health.

This diagnostic imperative, in Illich’s view, renders our ailments both more salient and more painful by making us acutely sensitive to any perceived abnormality or derangement. At the same time, it undermines our capacity to suffer by the priority it puts on prompt and effective treatment. The pursuit of health, as Illich will later say, becomes itself “a pathogen.” The third consequence of medicalization that Illich identifies is that it relocates certain features of an unhealthy social environment within the individual, where it treats these features as diseases. A “­sick-​­making” environment is addressed only in the displaced form of an individual disease. An advanced industrial society is ­sick-​­making because it disables people from coping with their environment and, when they break down, it substitutes a “clinical” prosthesis for the broken relationship. People would rebel against such an environment if medicine did not explain their biological disorientation as a defect in their health rather than as a defect in the way of life which is imposed on them or which they impose on themselves. The assurance of personal and political innocence that a diagnosis offers the patient serves as a hygienic mask that justifies further subjection to production and consumption. The medical diagnosis of subjective disease entities that supposedly take shape in the individual’s body is a surreptitious and amoral way of blaming the victim. The

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physician, himself a member of the dominating class, judges that the individual does not fit into an environment that has been engineered and is administered by other professionals, instead of accusing his colleagues of creating environments into which the human organism cannot fit. Substantive disease can thus be interpreted as the materialization of a politically convenient myth, which takes on substance within the individual’s body when this body is in rebellion against the demands that industrial society makes upon it.

Through the proliferation and reification of diseases, Illich argues, a social or interpersonal reality is made to appear as an entirely individual predicament. Medicine provides the remedy for the debilitation caused by engineered and inhuman social environments as well as the explanation for social conflict. A good current example, I think, is the work a diagnosis of “stress” now does in helping people glide over intolerable circumstances. Until well after the Second World War stress was an ordinary, precise English word mainly used for phenomena like metal f­ atigue—​­airplane wings experienced stress. Then, beginning in the 1950s, A ­ ustrian-​­Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye refashioned the term as a diagnosis. Stress became a biological syndrome, involving glucocorticoids and the ­hypothalamic-​­pituitary-​­adrenal axis. The word acquired a scientific aura that it retained when it slipped back into ordinary speech. Today the term is in such constant use that it covers every possible form of d ­ iscomfort—​­it might mean anger or anxiety, grief or fatigue, but when one says it, one always diagnoses oneself and expresses one’s eligibility for a “stress leave” or some “stress reduction” technique that is covered under the company medical plan or perhaps just a week on the beach in Cuba. It serves as a good example, I think, of the way in which “broken relationships” and taxing environments can be repackaged as diagnostic categories that point at approved therapeutic remedies. One of Illich’s collaborators in the study of medicine as a site of displaced social and political tension was French writer Jean Pierre Dupuy. At the time that they met, Dupuy was studying prescription drug use in France, which then “led the world in the consumption of prescription drugs” with an annual growth in spending of 17 percent. Dupuy was particularly interested in these expensive drugs as “signs”: “a sign that doctors directed to their patients, but also and above all to themselves, a sign that they had heard the plea for help.” It was obvious to Dupuy that a great deal of prescription drug use fit the pattern described by Illich of a “clinical prosthesis” used to replace a “broken relationship.” They became collaborators, and Dupuy, as Illich acknowledges at the beginning of Limits to Medicine,

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became “closely connected with the growth of [the] text.” Together they studied what Dupuy calls “the fuzzy border that separates the natural and the political” and the way in which people become “convinced that, if they do not feel right, it is because there is something disordered inside them, and not because they are manifesting a healthy refusal to adapt to an environment or life circumstances that are difficult and sometimes even intolerable.” Dupuy continues: We know that medical waiting rooms are full of strikers. I don’t necessarily mean labour strikers. There are many other types of strike that the law does not contemplate. To go on strike from one’s role as husband, lover, father, son, teacher or student, manager etc.: all this is permitted by the social fact of illness. It is socially recognized that any problem of ­ill-​­adjustment or malaise, whatever its origin or ­nature—​­bad relations at work or within a couple, children’s difficulties in school, etc.—may give rise to a request for assistance presented to a medical institution. Most of the time, this request is more or less camouflaged in somatic terms, with the active complicity of the doctor. Not that the patient is a faker or the doctor an imposter. Both are simply playing a game whose rules come from the social and cultural context of their relationship. Illness is a form of deviancy that is tolerated, but on condition that it appears as an organic disorder whose etiology cannot be imputed to the patient, nor for that matter to society. The illness acquires an autonomous, detached existence. It is an entity external to individuals and their relationship with their milieu, an entity which happens by chance to disturb their vital functioning. This representation of what is wrong founds the pact between doctor and patient, making their relationship possible.

This passage, I think, gives a brilliant epitome of what Illich also wants to say. Objectified disease provides a cover story by which all parties maintain what Illich called their “personal and political innocence.” Dupuy’s resonant word striker underlines the point. Medicine, according to both Illich and Dupuy, conducts an extensive and largely surreptitious trade across “the fuzzy border that separates the natural and the political.” What Is Good in Modern Medicine Illich could be a very effective satirist, so effective that his mordant wit may sometimes have undercut his influence as a pamphleteer and reformer. No matter how often he proclaimed that he was neither a luddite nor a romantic nor a reactionary, the sheer élan of his critique of modernity tended to overshadow his expressed

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­ urpose—​­to identify and describe the forms of counterproductivity that were turnp ing modernity against itself and making tyrants of techniques that might have served humanity. This is evident, once again, in Limits to Medicine, where he makes it clear that many modern medical innovations could be retained and repurposed in a convivial society: The destructive power of medical o­ ver-​­expansion does not, of course, mean that sanitation, inoculation, and vector control, ­well-​­distributed health education, healthy architecture, and safe machinery, general competence in first aid, equally distributed access to dental and primary medical care, as well as judiciously selected complex services, could not all fit into a truly modern culture that fostered ­self-​­care and autonomy. As long as engineered intervention in the relationship between individuals and environment remains below a certain intensity, relative to the range of the individual’s freedom of action, such intervention could enhance the organism’s competence in coping and creating its own future.

There is praise for China, which showed, during the era of the “barefoot doctor,” “that almost all demonstrably effective technical health devices can be taken over within months and used competently by millions of ordinary people.” He is similarly enthusiastic about a program of the Allende government in Chile in the early 1970s “aimed at reducing the national pharmacopeia to a few dozen items, more or less the same as those carried by the Chinese barefoot doctor in his black wicker box.” This program ended with the coup that brought a military junta to power on September 11, 1973—a less remembered 9/11—and “within a week,” Illich notes drily, “many of the most outspoken proponents of a Chilean medicine based on community action rather than on drug imports and drug consumption had been murdered.” Barefoot doctors also disappeared from China with the d ­ e-​ ­collectivization of agriculture and general privatization of economic life in the early 1980s. Illich’s high regard for experiments of the Chilean and Chinese kind is of a piece with his view that the major determinants of health lie in the realm of public policy and public health conditions rather than private medical care (even if publicly funded). Limits to Medicine is a book well versed in the history of medicine and well informed about contemporary practice, but its target, in the last analysis, is the mythology underlying the medical system. Sometimes Illich also uses the word dream. He says that hospital death “provides each citizen at the last hour with an encounter with society’s deadening dream of infinite power.” He refers to

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­ rancisco Goya’s famous etching of 1786, which shows a man asleep at a desk with F a nightmare of ominous birds above his head and the caption: “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” He tells the myth of Nemesis, which gave his book its first title and the subtitle of its final version. As I said earlier, Nemesis in ancient Greek religion referred to the spirit of divine vengeance or retribution that afflicted whomever succumbed to hubris or envy of the gods. “Myth,” Illich says, “fulfilled the function of setting limits to the materialization of greedy, envious, murderous dreams. Myth assured the common man of his safety . . . if he kept within its bounds. Myth guaranteed disaster to those few who tried to outwit the gods.” Prometheus, the thief of fire, chained to a rock, his liver eaten daily by an eagle, is a victim of Nemesis. But this premonitory and cautionary function of myth is now out of date. We are no longer afraid of the gods. Envy is now the mainspring of economic life. “Nemesis has become structural and endemic,” Illich says. Many contemporary writers respond by calling for a new myth or a new story to ­re-​ ­enshrine nature and restore the sacred aura of mother earth. Not Illich. “At this moment of crisis it would be foolish to found the limits of human actions on some substantive ecological ideology which would modernize the mythic sacredness of nature. The engineering of an ­eco-​­religion would be a caricature of traditional hubris. Only a widespread agreement on the procedures through which the autonomy of ­post-​­industrial man can be equitably guaranteed will lead to the recognition of the necessary limits to human action.” This rejection of a r­ e-​­mythologizing of nature is not a covert call to a C ­ hristian revival, except insofar as Christianity was the original source of the ­­de-​­mythologizing tendency in Western civilization. “Recourse to faith provides an escape for those who believe,” Illich says, “but it cannot be the foundation for an ethical imperative because faith is either there or not there.” His view, in the end, is deeply political, as it was in Tools for Conviviality. “The alternative to a new ecological religion or ideology [must be] based on an agreement about basic values and on procedural rules.” The limits to medicine must be found in the same way as the limits to the “frustrating overproduction” of any other industrial staple. “The point of optimal synergy between industrial and autonomous production”—between what is done for me and what I can, with others, do for myself—is to be found by a process by which “the natural boundaries of human endeavor are estimated, recognized, and translated into politically determined limits.” The alternative, he says, with the same apocayptic flair that I noted earlier in Deschooling Society and Tools for ­Conviviality, is “compulsory survival in a planned and engineered hell.”

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7

Certainties

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. —John Maynard Keynes It is only possible to come to a right understanding and appreciation of a contemporary psychological problem when we can reach a point outside our own time from which to observe it. —C. G. Jung

During the decade extending roughly from 1966 to 1976, Illich was, as he said, “taken up by campaigns.” “When I . . . was offered access to the lecture hall,” he told me many years later, “I grabbed it.” The rapid changes of scene could be disorienting. I can remember going to hear him speak at the Vancouver General Hospital just after Medical Nemesis appeared and being surprised at a remark that indicated that he thought he was in Seattle. Todd Hartch reports that in the three months between September 15 and December 15, 1974, “Illich travelled to Paris, Hamburg, Japan, Dusseldorf, Paris (again), Germany (again), London, York, Geneva, London (again) and New York to give talks, to hold press conferences, and to be interviewed.” This was a daunting pace, even for a man as vital, as disciplined, and as committed as Illich, and, eventually, he admitted, “I came to feel like a jukebox.” CIDOC also made demands, even if Illich, latterly, left most of the administration to others. In the years between 1970 and 1975, he published six books, and much of what they contained was shaped and tested in CIDOC seminars. Limits to Medicine, Energy and Equity, and Tools for Conviviality all begin with acknowledgments of a CIDOC seminar in which the book’s ideas were incubated and developed. Sometimes groups assembled to discuss and advance ideas that Illich had already published. That was the case with the Alternatives in E ­ ducation seminar that was assembled after Deschooling Society was written. It brought together a who’s who of radical thinkers in the field, including, among others, John Holt, Edgar Friedenberg, George Dennison, Paul Goodman, and Jonathan Kozol.

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The participants in these seminars came to CIDOC as invited guests. Others came as students to take the courses that were offered to anyone who wished to enroll. The 1970 catalogue shows a total of 120 short courses, ­forty-​­five offered by instructors living in Cuernavaca and another ­seventy-​­five by visiting teachers. Some students had their expectations ­dashed—​­either because they got less access than they wanted to the invited guests or because they were expecting a freer, less formal atmosphere. One visitor in the later 1960s and early 1970s was Lee Swenson, a friend of Illich’s who was then the director of the Institute for the Study of ­Non-​­Violence in Menlo Park, California. In an interview with me many years later, he remembered CIDOC as “an oasis,” a place of “rich dialogue,” and a seedbed of ideas that sometimes flowered many years later. But he also recalled that its reputation as a “free university” created difficulties: “The problem was . . . the idea that it was free, which people began to think at that time meant no structure, no caring about the little world you were in there. It got abused by the North American invasion and kids coming to look for Don Juan . . . and wanting to be warriors of the spirit, and these gooey things that made it painful to be there in certain ways. But then always there was this other fresh breath of air that was very strong blowing through the halls of the place.” People on the left tended to be particularly disappointed. “What makes the place run here is le bon ton, our basically correct behavior, our concern for the garden,” Illich had told American journalist Francine du Plessix Gray, but “concern for the garden” was not always a priority of the young, ­self-​­identified revolutionaries who were drawn to CIDOC. Illich recalled one incident in which an aspiring anarchist took issue with American writer Paul Goodman, when Goodman spoke about the law in the daily lecture in CIDOC’s central courtyard for which the whole community gathered: There was a little r­ ed-​­haired, w ­ oolly-​­headed kid who felt that anarchistic testimony was very important. I had caught him stuffing forks down into the toilet. I just looked at him and said, “Come, let’s take them out together” and didn’t tell anybody about it. But I knew the guy. Well this guy gets up and says to Goodman, “We had expected something better from you than to talk about the law at a time like this.” He said much nastier things which I can’t remember and won’t repeat. Goodman began to cry. When finally his tears had stopped, he looked at the kid and said, “I guess we have come to the point where you have to be an anarchist to understand the dignity of the law.”

“The ­woolly-​­headed kid” who brought Paul Goodman to tears stands for many others whose expectations CIDOC failed to fulfill. Todd Hartch has gathered a

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fair amount of such testimony in his book The Prophet of Cuernavaca. But a telling story to the contrary comes from Illich’s friend Gene Burkart in a recollection he wrote of his first visit to CIDOC in 1973. Burkart was then a young radical about to enter law school. He approved of CIDOC’s pedagogical ­philosophy—“little administration . . . and no credits or degrees issued”—but he asked himself, “What was its relevance to the poor . . . or for those suffering under oppressive military regimes. Was CIDOC anything more than a privileged enclosure?” In consultation with other aggrieved American students, he decided that “Illich was a phony, someone enmeshed in his own cleverness, a dangerous distraction from the pressing social concerns of the day.” In this mood he went to listen to Illich conduct his seminar “Limits to Growth,” which Illich did while sitting on the wall that enclosed the veranda of the Casa Blanca, the old hacienda that was the heart of the place: As I watched Illich, I felt my anger grow with each word he spoke. And then a strange thing happened: he suddenly turned towards me. To see where I sat he had to turn quite far . . . I wondered, had he sensed my anger? He continued speaking, all the while looking intensely at me, as if he really wanted me to understand what he was saying. I returned his gaze and although I did not understand a word he said, I felt the confusion of my thoughts and feelings inexplicably lifted from me. In those few moments I had the experience of intimately seeing this person, Ivan Illich, for the first time. I then knew he was someone I could trust.

“For many of us at CIDOC,” Burkart goes on to say, “Illich was not what we expected. He did not speak in the usual terms of radical politics; he did not talk much of class struggle, oppressor and oppressed, movement politics. He even seemed to question our good intentions [and] our sense of moral superiority.” Illich became a guide for Burkart, and in time, Burkart became part of Illich’s wide circle of friends. Throughout his life Burkart was a hospitable, generous, and ­public-​­minded member of his community in Waltham, Massachusetts, as well as a lawyer who was available to those who needed his services rather than those who could pay for them, and he often credited Illich as his inspiration. CIDOC Closes CIDOC closed its doors in 1976—for several converging reasons. Illich had come to the conclusion that he had achieved “all that [he] had wished to achieved by starting the center” and that “all that could be [done] had been done.” The logical next

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s­ tep—“­university-​­like institutionalization,” which was already being promoted by “groups of professors from Stanford, Cornell and other universities”—was something that he emphatically didn’t want. Moreover, the place’s “funny image,” Illich said, had “created . . . physical danger to my collaborators.” (“Funny image” here means the widespread perception on the political right in Mexico and Latin A ­ merica that CIDOC was a hotbed of revolution rather than a center of academic study.) Finally, inflation in Mexico was threatening CIDOC’s economic foundation, which had depended on the discrepancy between the cost of living in the United States and Mexico. Formerly, the center had been able to charge enough for Spanish language instruction that it could pay generous wages to its teachers and finance its library, seminars, and publications while still keeping its fees quite affordable for ­Americans. Now the rising cost of living in Mexico threatened that arrangement. All these factors suggested the step Illich took in 1973 of calling together everyone involved in the running of the ­place—​­there were ­sixty-​­three in ­all—​­to discuss what to do. I . . . convinced [them] that it was in their interest to accept my plan that, for the next two years or for as long as it would take, income above expenditure would not be spent on books or airplane tickets but would go into a fund. When the fund reached one and a half times the salary mass of a year, it would be divided into s­ ixty-​­three equal parts, people would go home and we would close the institution. We then did it on the 10th anniversary [of CIDOC’s founding], the first of April, 1976, in a huge fiesta at which hundreds of people from town were also present. Some of the language teachers split up the school into several different ones, the library went as a gift to the most responsible library there, at the Colegio de México, and from one day to the next it was over.

The closing of CIDOC marked the beginning of the end of Illich’s years as a campaigner. He still wrote polemical ­essays—​­1977’s “Disabling Professions” and 1978’s “The Right to Useful Unemployment” are outstanding e­xamples—​ ­and he still hoped to influence the thinking of popular social movements, but his research became increasingly historical. His attention shifted from the reform of institutions to an investigation of the “certainties,” as he said, that had made these institutions so utterly impervious to his criticisms. The times had seemed to him “propitious for a major change of direction in search of a hopeful future,” but no such change had occurred. Movements had sprung up in favor of deschooling, demedicalization, and deacceleration, but no systematic political action had occurred, no constitution of limits had been written, and no “roof ” of

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t­echnological characteristics under which people could thrive had been identified. ­Contemporary institutions, it seemed, were anchored at a depth that “­rabble-​ ­rousing” could not reach, even if it were as lucid and rhetorically refined as Illich’s critiques had been. He called these anchorages certainties. Certainties are what we take for g­ ranted—​­assumptions we don’t question because we are not even aware of having ­them—​­the ground, to use McLuhan’s language, against which figures appear. They are what endow our way of life with an air of plausibility, obviousness, and inevitability. In the case of education, Illich came to the conclusion that the underlying certainty was an unquestioned and unquestionable belief that the means for education are scarce because supply is limited and demand unlimited. A little thought will quickly show that this idea is quite ­absurd—​­many forms of study require nothing more than the time, the inclination, and books that can be borrowed from a public ­library—​­and yet at the same time e­ ndemic—​­there is no longer a state on earth that can afford all the “education” its citizens are thought to require. Because the means required for education are assumed to be scarce, these limited resources must be husbanded in specialized institutions, staffed by trained clerics, and parceled out in carefully graded and ritualized sequences from grade 1 through ­post-​­doc. Once these expensive institutions are established and come to monopolize the definition of education, a postulated scarcity will become an actual scarcity. Unlimited demand will forever exceed the limited supply. There will never, by definition, be enough education. Illich had already implicitly recognized many of the certainties that support and sustain modern institutions. In Deschooling Society, for example, he had written of schooling as a “ritualization of progress” and acknowledged the deep roots of compulsory education in mandatory church services. But now he wanted to undertake a more thorough archaeology, unhampered by any program of reform. At first, he had the whimsical idea of writing the history of Western ideas in an Oriental language. Only from the perspective of a different mental universe, he thought, would it be possible to expose the sheer novelty of modern Western concepts. This idea foundered when he realized he was too old to gain the knowledge of Chinese or Japanese that would be required for so heroic a task. He did, however, spend a good deal of time in Asia after 1976 and, in India, was accorded guru status. Several times the writer Pupul Jayakar brought him into c­ onversation with Jiddu Krishnamurti, the reluctant guru who had shrugged off the title of World Teacher with which the Theosophical Society had tried to invest him and become an independent lecturer. The rather stilted dialogue that resulted at their first meeting, or at least Jayakar’s version of it, is recorded in her biography of

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­ rishnamurti. They also engaged in public dialogues on at least two occasions K that I know ­of—​­at Varanasi on November 27, 1972, and at Madras, together with others, on January 13 and 14, 1978. The Study of History Illich eventually came to the conclusion that the distance he wished to gain from contemporary c­ ertainties—“that Archimedean point outside the present”—was best achieved through the study of history, and especially medieval history where these assumptions could be observed, as he came to think, in embryo. “I went back,” he says, “humbly and happily to my own Latin.” He was well versed in church L ­ atin—​ ­for the previous ten years, he said, he had “kept all my notes in Latin, kitchen Latin, medieval Latin”—and he had a special affection, conceived during his studies at the Gregorian University, for the writers of the early twelfth ­century. ​­Abelard and Héloise, Hugh of St. Victor, Aelred of Rievaulx, and Alain of Lille were all among these favorites. I enjoy that particular generation of people born around 1100, whose teachers made them read classics, even though they were barely capable of writing a decent Latin sentence. Each one of them by 1120, 1130, 1140 had developed his own personal, beautiful Latin style, in a language into which he had not been born. This has always fascinated me. So, I found it very pleasurable to teach the history of pilgrimage to Santiago, or the iconography and architecture of the middle of the twelfth century, to German s­ tudents who were well equipped to follow me. And I found this move into a totally different world an extremely useful way to gain distance from the present.

Illich sought “distance from the present” in order to bring the contemporary world into bolder relief. The tenacious hold modern institutions exercise on our imaginations could not be loosened, he thought, unless the novelty of their submerged assumptions could be made visible. And this required contrast, which he found in trying to bring the twelfth century alive for his students. I tried to get people to understand how immensely distant is the mental world in which the ­twelfth-​­century authors moved. I did this in order to pull the students away from their typewriters, and their f­ elt-​­tipped pens, and the telephone which they have to ­grab—​­to give them the sense of a trip between two space times. And then I tried to keep them there for a while, making them aware what strangers they are and how little

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they can use their own concepts, their own modern German or English or French words to translate these Latin texts. I prepared them to ­re-​­enter the modern world with a crucial question about it and, at the time of r­ e-​­entry, to become aware, for a moment, what a different universe they are entering when they resume the certainties of the world in which they feel at home.

By taking his students out of their time, Illich hoped “to extend their incredulity” by making the present seem as strange as the past. “Discipline” and “good historical method” were certainly preconditions of this time travel, but Illich also recognized elements of a darker art in his practice as a teacher. I study history in the way a necromancer goes back to the dead . . . I w ­ ant—​­if it’s possible at all and always knowing that it’s like switching to a dream ­state—​­to find the dead again. A good necromancer knows how to make them come to life, but he knows how tempting they are. Therefore, he draws a circle around himself, a magical circle, and takes those who engage him into that circle because otherwise he might be taken away by the dead. I would like, as far as it is possible, to be a visitor to that which has been and is no more in order to sharpen my eye for those few things which emerged and became that which I have to live with.

Illich’s quest to “sharpen his eye” made him a historian with a difference. He always insisted that he “hunt[ed] for no lessons in the past” and, equally, that he did “not advocate a return to the past” but rather that he was always on the alert for the stirrings of the present in the past. His friend Ludolf Kuchenbuch, a professional historian with whom Illich collaborated for many years, once compared him to an eagle that soars high above the historical landscape and pounces when he perceives his prey: “those things which emerged and became what I have to live with.” He respected “good historical method” and was always extravagant in his praise of those historians whose original research informed his thinking, but his main quarry was always the present moment. Even in his most original historical ­work—​­1993’s In the Vineyard of the Text, where he examines the reading practices of Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141)—he disavows any intention of making “a learned contribution.” “I wrote it,” he says rather, “to offer a guide to a vantage point in the past from which I have gained new insights into the present.” A second figure, less majestic than the eagle, also illuminates Illich’s historical method. This second ­metaphor—​­the ­crab—​­was Kuchenbuch’s coinage as well. He had noticed that while most animals escape danger by turning around and

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­ eeing, the crab scuttles away sideways with its eyes always fixed on the object fl from which it is retreating. The historian, Kuchenbuch thought, ought to do likewise, keeping his eyes trained on the present while moving backward into the past. Illich enthusiastically adopted this parable of “historiography through the eyes of a crab” as an image for his own work. Rather than looking at the past with the assumptions of today, the historian ought to recede gradually and attentively from the present, all the while becoming aware of how strange, remote, and outlandish once familiar things have begun to look. One should remain alert for the signs of what may grow up to be the present, but without ever losing sight of the immense distance into which it has receded. From the crab’s point of view, it is the present and not the past that is a foreign country. Once Illich had chosen “the study of history as a privileged road” to an appreciation of the novelty of modern ideas, this would be his method. Scarcity Foremost among the certainties that Illich began to study in his pursuit of the origins of modernity’s predicament was the concept of scarcity. Scarcity is the founding assumption of modern economics. British economist Lionel Robbins, writing in 1932, formulated it as follows: “Economics,” he wrote, “is the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between given ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” This is the axiom from which economics begins, and because it is an axiom, it is unquestionable. It forms the very ground of the ­science—​­its vantage point on human behavior, as Robbins ­says—​­and, as the lens through which one looks, cannot itself be looked at. Whether a given thing at a given moment is scarce or abundant is not at issue. Everything is scarce in principle because everything potentially has an “alternate use.” Alternate uses are driven by desire, desire is ­unlimited—​­one can always want ­more—​­and so means are scarce by definition. This is a postulate that absolutely contradicts and denies the hope on which Tools for Conviviality had been ­premised—​­the possibility of finding the roof, the limit, the point of balance at which people could relax into the sense of having e­ nough—​ ­and this is what Illich began to notice more and more. Here surely was the bedrock underlying all the institutions he had criticized and hoped to reform. Illich resolved to write “a history of scarcity.” He announced this intention in the introduction to a collection called Shadow Work, which he published in 1980. The essays in that book, he wrote, were “drafts” toward “a major study on the history of scarcity” that he would present to the public within the next three years.

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This major study never appeared. Shadow Work and its successor, 1982’s ­Gender, remained drafts. What derailed the project, I believe, was the largely hostile reception of Gender, a subject I’ll take up in the next chapter. But, meanwhile, Shadow Work did attempt to introduce a number of crucial concepts and distinctions into contemporary discussion. Two circumstances shaped what Illich wanted to say. The first was the failure of development. By the time he wrote, it was clear that development, understood as a universal “­take-​­off,” had foundered. Some, like Illich, had never thought it feasible, let alone ­desirable—​­as far back as the 1920s, Gandhi had warned that if a society as populous as India ever took to industrialization in the style of Britain, “it would strip the world bare like locusts”—but by the later 1970s, it had become clear even to development’s most ardent proponents that the paradise of worldwide economic modernity for all was not coming. Even the head of the International Labour Organization was warning that j­ obs-​­for-​­all was an unattainable fantasy. Development had produced exactly what Illich had ­predicted—​­enclaves of prosperity for some, modernized poverty for ­most—​­and this dawning recognition was leading development economists to turn their attention to the “informal economies” in which the majority still eked out their livelihoods. This made Illich fear that these still partially independent spheres would now fall into the shadow of s­ carcity-​­based economics. The second circumstance that motivated the writing of Shadow Work was the emergence in more economically developed countries of a growing number of people who were dedicated to a consciously restricted, retooled, and deprofessionalized style of ­life—​­the very path Illich had mapped out in Tools for ­Conviviality. Of these people Illich wrote: In the USA at least four million people live in the core of tiny and highly differentiated communities of this kind, with at least seven times as many individually sharing their ­values—​­women seek alternatives to gynecology; parents alternatives to schools; ­home-​ ­builders alternatives to the flush toilet; neighborhoods alternatives to commuting; people alternatives to the shopping center. In Trivandrum, South India, I have seen one of the most successful alternatives to a special kind of commodity d ­ ependence—​­to instruction and certification as the privileged forms of learning. One thousand seven hundred villages have installed libraries, each containing at least a thousand titles. This is the minimum equipment they need to be full members of Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad, and they may retain their membership only as long as they loan at least three thousand volumes per year. . . . Citizens increasingly use the ballot and the courts, in addition to more traditional interest group pressures, to set negative design criteria for the technology of production.

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The hopes Illich had expressed in Tools for Conviviality are still very much alive in these words, as they are in another extraordinarily optimistic passage from Shadow Work in which he imagines a society in which beauty trumps productivity as a social criterion: “The beauty of a unique, socially articulated image of each society will, hopefully, become the determining factor of its international impact. Aesthetic and ethical example may replace the competition of economic indicators. Actually, no other route is open. A mode of life characterized by austerity, modesty, modern yet ­hand-​­made and built on a small scale, does not lend itself to propagation through marketing.” These sentences, expressing hopes that many others shared, refute any simple chronology in which “the ideals of the ’60s” were dashed in the 1970s and progressively abandoned in the 1980s, when the good ship Western civilization righted itself in the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions and sailed on. Illich was impressed by the first electoral successes of the Greens in Europe, by the numbers of people adopting “alternatives” of all kinds, and by the “aesthetic and ethical example” he felt was being shown by what Theodore Roszak had called “the counterculture.” He was equally struck by the vitality and ingenuity he observed in favelas, shanties, and other informal settlements around the w ­ orld—​­places subsisting largely outside formal economies and established economic categories. But he feared that the achievements of both these groups were threatened by new styles of economic thought. For people in developed economies who were trying to unplug, he thought the threat lay in the “ecological economics” underlying such proposals as Amory Lovins’s “soft energy path.” New energy technologies might enable greater freedom, he said, but they might also induce new forms of expertocracy and commodity dependence. For people subsisting in novel ways in poorer countries, he saw the main danger in what he called “an irresistibly spreading shadow economy.” What needed to be established, in his view, was a distinction between “alternative economics” and “alternatives to economics.” Categories must be revived or created that insulated new ways of life from the denaturing influence of s­ carcity-​­based economics. This was the immediate purpose for which he wrote Shadow Work. The War on Subsistence In that book Illich defines modernity as a ­five-​­hundred-​­year “war against subsistence.” By subsistence Illich doesn’t at all mean what this term sometimes ­denotes—​­the bare minimum required for survival. He uses the word to describe what is produced for its use value rather than its exchange value, for what makes its contribution to

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livelihood rather than to GNP, for what promotes ­self-​­sufficiency rather than market dependence. Subsistence, for him, suggests e­ nough-​­ness and relative freedom from commodity dependence. Its opposite is development, as this concept began to be used in the p ­ ost–​­World War II period. For Illich, the initiation of “international development” marked the final episode in a ­six-​­stage history of “the perception of the outsider as someone who must be helped,” a view of others that he claimed had been “constitutive for Western society.” “The alien,” he wrote, had been viewed “as a burden,” as “someone to be brought in,” and this view had mandated a “universal mission” without which the West “would not have come to be.” This history begins with the mutation of the barbarian, the disregarded and irredeemably strange other of Greek and Roman antiquity, into the pagan, who was defined as one who was “­un-​­baptized but ordained by nature to become ­Christian.” In the Middle Ages, the Crusades and the extension of Muslim dominion into Spain produced the infidel. With colonization, the image of the infidel who threatens the faith was replaced by “the image of the wild man who threatens the civilizing function of the humanist.” Next came the native, who appeared as the subject of colonial tutelage once “the Spanish courts, after long deliberation,” had determined that New World peoples have souls like Europeans but different needs as “fixed by climate, race, religion and providence.” This image was discarded “after World War II . . . when multinational conglomerates were expanding . . . the ambitions of transnational pedagogues, therapists and planners knew no bounds [and] the native’s limited needs for goods and services thwarted growth and progress.” The underdeveloped entered the stage, and development took on the aura and prestige of a new crusade. The rapid penetration of this i­dea—“scarcely twenty years were enough to make two billion people define themselves as underdeveloped”—can be judged from a scene Illich witnessed in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival in 1963. Its theme was “development”—­desenvolvimento—​­and that was “the shout of the dancers while they jumped to the throbbing of the drums.” Development, for Illich, was not just the most recent but also “the most pernicious of the West’s missionary efforts”—pernicious because it evinces “an ecologically unfeasible conception of human control of nature and an anthropologically vicious attempt to replace the nests and snakepits of culture by sterile wards for professional service.” The opposition between “sterile wards” and “nests and snakepits” is telling, I think, inasmuch as the latter sounds almost as unattractive as the former. Illich was promoting a new way of life, not a romanticized past, and he tried to make this as clear as he possibly could. “I do not oppose g­ rowth-​ ­oriented societies to immemorial cultural transmission of patterns,” he wrote.

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“Such a choice does not exist. Aspirations of this kind would be sentimental and destructive.” Rather he wanted to address those vanguards who  . . . conceive technical progress as one possible instrument to support a new type of value, neither traditional nor industrial, but both s­ ubsistence-​­oriented and rationally chosen. Their lives, with more and less success, express a critical sense of beauty, a particular experience of pleasure, a unique view of life cherished by one group, understood but not necessarily shared by the next. They have found that modern tools make it possible to subsist on activities which permit a variety of evolving ­life-​­styles and relieve much of the drudgery of ­old-​­time subsistence. They struggle for the freedom to expand the vernacular domain of their lives.

What Illich here calls “vernacular domain” introduces a second term, alongside subsistence, by which he hoped to hold at bay what French anthropologist Louis Dumont had called ‘the economic ideology.” (Dumont’s explorations of this ideology had a major influence on Illich’s thinking, as did the work of economic historian Karl Polanyi.) The economic ideology, for Illich, comprised everything that exists under the sign of scarcity. Under this sign, in the terms Illich takes over from Karl Marx, “exchange value” trumps “use value”—what something is worth, as determined by it “alternate uses,” becomes more important that its usefulness in some definite circumstance. Commodities become, as Marx says, “fetishes.” They take on “a life of their own” and appear not as our products but as “autonomous figures” able to compel and direct our actions. To oppose this realm of commodity dependence in which autonomous action is paralyzed, Illich adopted and tried to adapt the word vernacular. The term itself traces back to antiquity, when the Latin vernaculum “was used for whatever was homebred, homespun, homegrown, homemade as opposed to what was commercially exchanged.” In the time of Julius Caesar, “Varro picked the term to introduce the same distinction in language. For him vernacular speech is made up of words and patterns grown on the speaker’s own ground, as opposed to what is grown elsewhere and then transported.” Language became the word’s main reference, and the European “vernaculars” were distinguished from what Isidore of Seville (560–636 CE) called “the three sacred languages”: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The word “came into English,” Illich writes, in this “restricted sense,” but “just now,” he goes on: I would like to resuscitate some of its old breath to designate the activities of people when they are not motivated by thoughts of exchange, a word that denotes autonomous,

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­ on-​­market related actions through which people satisfy everyday n n ­ eeds—​­the actions that by their own true nature escape bureaucratic control, satisfying needs to which, in the very process, they give specific shape. . . . We need a simple adjective to name those acts of competence, lust or concern that we want to defend from measurement or manipulation by Chicago Boys [economists trained by Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger at the University of Chicago] or Socialist Commissars. The term must be broad enough to fit the preparation of food and the shaping of language, childbirth and recreation without implying either a privatized activity akin to the housework of modern women, a hobby or an irrational or primitive procedure. Such an adjective is not at hand. But “vernacular” might serve.

By naming a vernacular domain, Illich hoped to do two things: to endow activities undertaken for their own sake with a specific dignity and presence and to distinguish these activities from things done in the shadow of economics. He wanted to highlight that portion of social life that had been, remained, or might become immune to the logic of economization. By offering a name, he hoped to secure for those pursuing alternatives a place to s­ tand—​­a respite from management, economization, and professionalization where new commons could take shape. Illich’s effort to mark out a vernacular sphere was intended to prevent the conflation of genuinely autonomous activity with what he called “shadow work.” This concept, so far as I know, was his own coinage and a product of his characteristic analytic procedure, which involved approaching his object of study from its “shadowy underside.” Modern economies, he said, have “features which escape . . . the categories of formal economics” as well “those which anthropology finds applicable in its study of subsistence cultures.” One of these unremarked features is what Illich calls shadow work. As economic society is “monetized,” Illich says, “a complementary h ­ emi-​­sphere” that is “­non-​­monetized” inevitably comes into existence alongside it. This is the hemisphere of shadow work. It includes everything that is necessary to the functioning of a formal economy but is not part of that economy. Tasks performed by a housewife, in the heyday of the industrial economy and the “family wage,” are a paradigm of shadow ­work—​­they make wage labor possible but are themselves uncompensated. But any activity that supports or enables economic activity without itself being counted as economic activity is shadow work. The term comprehends “the activities connected with shopping, most of the homework of students cramming for exams, the toil expended in commuting to and from the job . . . the stress of forced consumption, the tedious and regimented surrender to therapists, compliance with bureaucrats, the preparation for work to which

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one is c­ompelled, and many of the activities usually labeled ‘family life.’” This is an expansive list, with some surprising and perhaps shocking inclusions, like receiving ­therapy or participating in “family life.” It could, however, be expanded even further. For example, once a country makes a political decision to increase imprisonment, as the United States did in the later 1980s, then being a prisoner can be understood as a form of shadow ­work—​­a role demanded by the expansion of prison capacity, the passing of draconian laws, and the eagerness of local communities for the jobs prisons generate. Prisons, additionally, play an important symbolic role in appearing to shore up a disintegrating order. In this respect too the role of prisoner conforms to Illich’s definition of shadow work as a “necessary complement to the production of goods and services” and as whatever is “required to make ­commodities . . . useful.” Services, for Illich, are just as much commodities as physical ­goods—​­that’s the very nub of his “expansion of the concept of alienation”—and once this is understood, one can begin to see the full scope of his conception of shadow work. How vast this category really is is something we tend not to notice, Illich says, because “euphemism . . . scatters” its pieces and “taboos act against . . . analysis [of these scattered pieces] as a unified entity.” If the pieces were unified, one would see that many things now “count[ed] as satisfaction of needs” are, in fact, shadow work, ­by-​­products of an economic way of life that are necessary only insofar as they perpetuate the economy on which we believe we depend or allow us to adjust to it. Beyond Economics Illich insists that shadow work names something that “escapes the categories of formal economics.” Economics recognizes “disutilities”—the way in which commodities generate d ­ issatisfaction—​­and “negative externalities”—the costs not included in the price of a product such as damage to common goods like air, soil, or w ­ ater—​ ­but these remain potentially countable costs, even if they are, for the moment, unacknowledged and uncalculated. They, therefore, remain within the logic of scarcity and the dominion of prices. Externalities or side effects suggest something only incidental. To address them as such consolidates the existence of the order of which they are mere ­by-​­products or “downsides.” A shadow, on the other hand, is intrinsic to the existence of what casts the shadow and not a mere defect of this existence. This is the point of Illich’s concept of shadow work. He wants to indicate everything that is required for a society operating under the sign of scarcity to exist. Being a prisoner, a patient, a client, or a pupil is not ostensibly an

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economic activity, but vast sectors of economic activity would collapse without people who can be, willingly or unwillingly, drafted to play these parts. What Illich calls subsistence, or alternately the vernacular, is something else altogether. He defines vernacular work as “unpaid activities which improve livelihood” and that are, as I’ve already stressed, “totally refractory to any concept developed in formal economics.” Such work, he insists, must not be thought of only as “the drudgery of ­old-​­time subsistence,” which once imposed itself, but as a path that is open to contemporary reinvention. The “­commodity-​­independent l­ife-​­styles” he imagines are not something imposed but rather a form of life that can be “shaped anew by each small community.” In fact, even the expression “­commodity-​­independent” might be misleading, were it not read in the context of his call in Tools for Conviviality for a retooled and not a detooled modernity. He is not promoting a way of life, lacking in what older English usage called “the commodities of existence,” but rather a d ­ e-​ ­commodification, so to speak, of these commodities. Illich believed his distinction between subsistence and shadow work to be crucially important at the time he wrote because he feared that without it subsistence would be swallowed up in the “irresistibly spreading” shadow of economics and the vernacular would be redefined as an element in an “informal economy.” One of the influences on his thinking was an article by German scholar Claudia von Werlhof in which she claimed that the Third World, as it was then called, was being assigned a position in relation to the industrialized countries that was analogous to the relation of a housewife to her w ­ age-​­laborer husband. The poor countries were undergoing, von Werlhof argued, hausfraulichung (­housewife-​ ­ization), a process by which people in industrialized countries did “productive work in specialized places,” while “work in poor countries became reproductive work, mostly done in or near the home by men and women who were incredibly underpaid compared to what people got in rich countries.” Illich found this argument “new, surprising, imaginative, and historically significant.” A second article by von Werlhof ’s colleague Barbara Duden had a comparable impact. It claimed, in Illich’s paraphrase, that “what others describe as the coming of . . . a capitalist mode of production” could also be accounted for as “a polarization of activities between productive men and reproductive women.” From these two seeds grew the idea that the unequal division of labor between industrial countries and poor countries, like the division between paid work and housework in the modern household, is an element of a “bifurcation of work that is implicit in the industrial mode of production.” This “apartheid,” as he dared to call it, using the Afrikaans word for the legal regime of racial segregation then in force in South Africa, “is

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­ navoidable” because “without apartheid based on sex or pigmentation, on ceru tification or race, or party membership a society built on the assumption of scarcity cannot exist.” So long as livelihood remains embedded in culture and people produce to live rather than living to produce, an integrated way of life is possible. This is so for the recently “unplugged” as much as for older forms of subsistence. But what Illich calls an industrial mode of production separates production from consumption. Scarcity is one of the names of this separation. Something made to be used, whether it is consumed directly or sold, answers a limited need. Whatever is made scarce by its “alternative uses,” or its exchangeability, acquires a life of its own. This is Marx’s principle of alienation, and Illich retains it, even as he sees alienation taking a deeper and more insidious hold on people in the age of services. Once production becomes subject to the inherently unlimited logic of scarcity, the economy must grow, regardless of both the ecological consequences and the moral welfare or those who must grease its wheels and consume its products. The maintenance of such a system will “unavoidably,” Illich says, require some form of ­self-​­division. This is true first of all within the individual who as worker/ producer and consumer becomes two different and even antithetical beings. But external divisions of the same kind will also be required. Nature, for example, will divide, becoming, at one moment, a sustaining mother and, at another, a productive resource. An ­ever-​­growing economy must always generate an Other that it can exploit. This other may be the overseas worker who provides cheap labor, the client whose needs justify expanding services, or the distracted consumer who must buy the latest product. The point, for Illich, is that some sort of estrangement is inherent so long as the presumption of scarcity, rather than of adequacy, rules. Economic Alchemy Scarcity, as a postulate, produces plenty by assuming its opposite. Behind our backs, so to speak, it turns the base metal of envy, desire, and mutual indifference into the gold of abundance and social peace. One of the ways in which Illich sometimes speaks of this is as “Economic Alchemy.” Though never fully developed, alchemy is an important figure in Illich’s writings. As a young man he had studied the works of medieval ­alchemists—​­when he came to the United States in 1951, it was with “the thought of doing a ­post-​­doctoral thesis on alchemy in the work of Albert the Great (1200–1280)”—and, in a number of places, he treats alchemy, with its belief in transmutation, as a matrix of modern thought. He says, for example, in Tools for Conviviality that modern education “is deeply rooted in alchemy” through its

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belief in “successive stages of enlightenment.” In the case of “Economic Alchemy” the magic is attributed to labor. John Locke supposes that commodities acquire almost their entire value from the work that goes into them and allows nature only a meager contribution. Adam Smith holds that “labour . . . is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.” Karl Marx has his “labour theory of value.” “Work is presented,” Illich says, “as the stone of wisdom, the panacea, the magic elixir which transforms what it touches into gold. Nature turns into priced goods and services by its contact with labor which transmutes it.” This hermetic ­thought-​ ­style, which Illich thinks predominates in the “classical economists from Adam Smith and [David] Ricardo to [John Stuart] Mill and [Karl] Marx,” was at first actively resisted by the common people. It “produced,” he says, “no echo from below.” “The plebeians rioted. They rioted for just grain prices, they rioted against the export of grain from their regions, they rioted to protect prisoners and [to] protect . . . their tradition of natural justice. The . . . plebeian crowd defended its ‘moral economy’ as [E. P.] Thompson has called it. And they rioted against the attacks on this economy’s social foundation: against the enclosure of sheep and . . . against the enclosure of beggars. And in these riots the crowd was led, more often than not, by its women.” For a long time, Illich says, the people more or less successfully defended their right to subsistence, which was linked to just prices and access to means of livelihood still in the commons. What turned the tide and succeeded where “poor laws and workhouses had failed” was “the domestic enclosure of women” and the “division of labour into a productive and n ­ on-​­productive kind.” “An unprecedented economic division of the sexes, an unprecedented economic conception of the family, and an unprecedented antagonism between the domestic and public spheres made wage work into a necessary adjunct of life. All this was accomplished by making working men into the wardens of their domestic women, one on one, and making this guardianship into a burdensome duty. The enclosure of women succeeded where the enclosure of sheep and beggars had failed.” For Illich the “economic division of the sexes” is the archetype of many subsequent divisions. So long as work directly produced livelihood, men and women each had their tasks, and neither one was more “productive” than the other. Basing himself on the work of American historian Ann Douglas, Illich provides this thumbnail sketch: In 1810 the common productive unit in New England was still the rural household. Processing and preserving of food, ­candle-​­making, ­soap-​­making, spinning, weaving, shoemaking, quilting, r­ ug-​­making, the keeping of small animals and gardens, all took

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place on domestic premises. Although money income might be obtained by the household through the sale of produce, and additional money be earned through occasional wages to its members, the . . . household was overwhelmingly s­ elf-​­sufficient. Buying and selling, even when money did change hands, was often conducted on a barter basis. Women were as active in the creation of domestic ­self-​­sufficiency as were men. They brought home about the same salaries. They still were, economically, men’s equals. In addition, they usually held the p­ urse-​­strings. And, further, they were as actively engaged in feeding, clothing and equipping the nation during the turn of the century. In 1810, in North America, ­twenty-​­four out of t­ wenty-​­five yards of wool were of domestic origin.

This way of life did not end all at once. Some farms and rural households remained substantially ­self-​­sufficient right into the middle years of the twentieth century. But Illich is surely right that men were “encouraged to revel in their new vocation” as productive workers, while women were redefined as destined by their “nature” for the tasks of reproduction, h ­ ome-​­making, moral uplift, and other “labours of love.” Illich’s account of this transition in Shadow Work is a deliberate and sometimes sensational rewriting of economic history, not just as classical and neoclassical economists have recounted it but also as the story has been told in the Marxist tradition. For example, he asserts that “the [working] man found himself in a conspiracy with his employer” insofar as “both were equally concerned with economic expansion and the suppression of subsistence.” “This fundamental collusion between capital and labour,” he continues, “was mystified by the ritual of class struggle.” The breadth of this claim is quite breathtaking. Marx had asserted that the universal class in which capitalism meets its comprehensive contradiction and potential abolition is the proletariat. Not at all, says ­Illich—​­the proletariat is only an accomplice in the war against subsistence, which is the real site of the contradiction. The novelty that Marx misses or takes for granted is homo economicus, a being who must be “distinguished . . . from all other human beings.” The class struggle is no more than a ritual, and a ritual, as Illich’s defines it elsewhere, is “a procedure whose imagined purpose allows the participants to overlook what they are actually doing.” What the antagonists/accomplices in the class struggle are “actually doing” is making war on subsistence through their joint interest in industrializing every aspect of culture and every element of l­ivelihood—​­the project that marks out homo economicus from “all other human beings.” Marx’s “proletarians” with “a world to win” and “nothing to lose but their chains” are, in fact, tightening their fetters by trying to improve their position in the kingdom of

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scarcity rather than fighting for a restoration of the commons. The true universal class is the shadow w ­ orkers—​­all those who toil “unproductively” in the shadow of production. Restoration of the Commons Restoration of the commons, Illich says in his introduction to Shadow Work, will become the theme of “the third stage into which the public discussion of limits to growth is just now entering.” The first stage, according to him, was awareness that, without a change in “the prevailing trends of industrial production,” “the biosphere might [soon] be rendered uninhabitable.” The second consisted in the recognition that limiting the growth of services was just as urgent as limiting physical exploitation. Now, he writes, a new stage has begun. In characterizing it as a restoration of the commons, he has something more in mind than just a revival of the traditional rights that went by this name. Traditional rights might be invoked by those wanting to garden in vacant lots, keep backyard chickens, or build to their own specifications, but what Illich is referring to more generally is what he describes, in economic lingo, as “the utilization value of the environment.” He continues, Up to now, economic development has always meant that people, instead of doing something, are instead enabled to buy it. Use values beyond the market are replaced by commodities. Economic development has also meant that after a time people must buy the commodity, because the conditions under they could get along without it had disappeared from their physical, social or cultural environment. And the environment could no longer be utilized by those who were unable to buy the good or service. Streets, for example, once were mainly for people. People grew up on them, and most became competent for life by what they learned there. Then streets were straightened and reshaped to serve vehicular traffic. And this change occurred long before schools were abundant enough to accommodate the young who were now driven from the streets. The utilization value of a formerly “common” environment for learning disappeared much faster than it could be replaced by institutions for formal instruction.

“The utilization value” of the environment means many things. In a traditional commons one could fish, collect building materials, find fuel, pasture animals, and so on, according to one’s right. In the new commons that Illich hoped to foster in his “third stage,” the issue was the usefulness, the accessibility, the hospitality, and the transparency of common environments. He was trying to establish a

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direction and a language in which those who wished to take this direction could describe what they were doing. Illich considered the domestic “enclosure” of women to be the decisive move toward a c­ ommodity-​­intensive society. In Gender he would flesh out the idea that so long as men and women were considered to be of different kinds, with each possessing distinct and different tools, spaces, customs, and tasks, a modern economic society based on abstract units of labor was impossible. In Shadow Work, he argued that not only were women required to do the unpaid and unheralded work that made a market society viable, they were also made to sanctify this order in their role as decorative, domestic angels. He therefore considered that the women’s movement was faced with a historic opportunity. The losses women had suffered in the emergence of market societies qualified them to undertake “a radical questioning of economics, of sociology, and of anthropology.” They were, in effect, the vanguard of the universal class of shadow workers. What women were uniquely positioned to understand was something more than just how much unpaid work is required for a w ­ age-​­based, c­ommodity-​ ­intensive, service society to function. The amount of this obvious shadow work is already massive, especially, as I said earlier, if one includes not just commuting, shopping, housework, and assembling IKEA furniture but also the work of the poor, the pupils, the patients, and the prisoners on whose backs the service economy has been erected. But Illich goes further. He claims that “a society built on the assumption of scarcity” will not just be one that demands a lot of unpaid and unrecognized work and a massive change in the physical structure of the world. It will also be psychically destructive. The first of these destructive effects is the dissatisfaction that is generated. The shelves in department stores and supermarkets may groan under the abundance on display, but this does not stop modern consumers from feeling more acutely dissatisfied than those who live in societies where few marketed commodities are available to assuage their “needs.” Scarcity is keenly felt. Cutbacks, shortfalls, and deficits preoccupy us. Time is chronically short for “the powerfully rushed,” and there never seems to be enough of anything, even when there’s a lot. The province of Ontario may allocate an impressive $50 billion to health spending and more than half that to education spending, but this will not prevent “tough decisions” about how competing demands are to be met. However much there is, more is always needed. Scarcity, as an economic postulate, is s­ elf-​­perpetuating—​­actual scarcities may end, postulated scarcity never can. It has been ­forty-​­five years since the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth became a best seller. Tools for Conviviality was just one

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of hundreds of cogently argued calls for economic contraction that were issued in its wake. It is common sense that nothing in the world can grow forever. A merely satisfactory rate of economic growth of 2 percent to 3 percent will double the size of an economy every 25 to 35 years, and one does not have to be expert in mathematics to see that such exponential growth will sooner or later be ruinous. And yet politicians of all stripes continue to promise growth and would be considered hopeless dreamers if they didn’t. Behind this staggering dissonance stands the figure of ­scarcity—​­there is no way in principle that we can ever agree on what is enough, and so the game of scarce means, competing uses, and unlimited needs must continue. Like a blind and ravenous god, scarcity yields its benefits only to those who submit to its discipline. Another of the destructive psychic effects of a modern economy is what Illich calls apartheid. He applies the term to the endless and growing series of divisions that he believes are the necessary condition of such an economy’s existence. First and foremost, as I’ve already said, is the rupture between production and consumption. The household and its surrounding community produce less and less of their own sustenance and amusement. At first, this division of labor, s­ o-​­called, makes a more differentiated society possible. But, as Illich discovered when he tried, unsuccessfully, to establish the concepts of balance, counterproductivity, and limit, scarcity is i­ nexhaustible—​­there is nowhere and no way to stop and rest. As services proliferate and the branding and packaging of commodities intensify, people begin to internalize the “needs” prescribed by those licensed to fulfill them. Thirst becomes “the need for a Coke.” There is no longer anything I can do for myself that does not involve the application of some protocol or procedure that has been designed to meet my needs. This process of s­ elf-​­estrangement reaches its final stage with contemporary ­self-​­service, not just in the banal sense of checking out my own groceries but much more in the sense of being my own doctor, teacher, or consultant. This recasting of the self in the image of the service provider is a terminal horror for Illich because it represents the moment at which shadow work and subsistence fuse and become inextricable. I can no longer distinguish the interest of the professional from my own. Colonization has become total. ­Self-​­Help versus Subsistence This point is worth dwelling on briefly because there is a school of thought that takes Illich for an apostle of s­ elf-​­help and s­ elf-​­service. An egregious example is an article by Charles Leadbeater that appeared in Prospect Magazine a few years ago

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called “The DIY [­Do-​­It-​­Yourself ] State.” The article, briefly summarized, states that because services are overextended and underfinanced, “post industrial institutions should train us for s­ elf-​­management and s­ elf-​­assessment.” The author then claims that it was “Ivan Illich’s genius to realize, 30 years ago, that this would be not just desirable but would become a necessity.” Leadbeater shows no awareness of any distinction between exercising personal initiative and judgment and being trained by an institution to perform its prescriptions on ourselves. But this is precisely the distinction that Illich again and again tried to establish. For him, there is a world of difference between doing it yourself and internalizing professional norms. This is not to say that there mightn’t be something liberating or at least convenient about injecting your own insulin or using an app to monitor your blood sugar levels or even installing “­home-​­based sensors to allow remote monitoring of the movements and health of elderly people”—all examples from Leadbeater’s article. But it begs the question of who decides. Leadbeater is talking about a homogenous world in which professional norms have completely saturated every space, and the only issue is who will apply them, the expensive professional or a patient trained to administer his own care. Illich is recalling, defending, and trying to recreate a sphere of subsistence in which vernacular rather than professional norms would apply. Leadbeater’s characterization of Illich as the herald of the “DIY State” is one index of how unsuccessful Illich was in getting his distinction between the vernacular and the professional, subsistence and shadow work, to stick. He tried to establish this distinction in order to thwart the “colonization of the informal sector” that he believed was under way at the time he wrote Shadow Work. He viewed this colonization as “the last frontier of arrogance,” a phrase that implies that he believed it to be the last battle in “the war on subsistence.” Unless a sphere of vernacular subsistence could be carved out and sustained, the shadow of the economy would finally penetrate everywhere because everything excluded from the formal economy would then be defined and marked by this exclusion: whatever was not in the formal economy would be treated as part of its complement and shadow, the informal economy, and analyzed with the same concepts. As I’ve said, attention to this “sector”—its “colonization,” in Illich’s t­ erms—​­was intensifying in the wake of the perceived failure of development: growth had flagged, “stagflation” had set in, ­jobs-​­for-​­all was a rapidly receding utopia, and the enthusiasms of the “development decade” were cooling rapidly. Economists and development experts were beginning to notice that the greater part of “economic activity” worldwide still took place in what they called, variously, the underground economy or the shadow economy or the informal sector. The terms refer broadly to work that

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is untaxed, unregulated, and uncounted (in GNP). Estimates of its size vary wildly. Colin Williams, a professor of public policy at the University of Sheffield who has devoted a number of books to the phenomenon, draws on International Labour Organization statistics for this current sketch: “In South Asia, 82% of the workforce have their main employment in the shadow economy, 66% in ­sub-​­Saharan Africa, 65% in East and Southeast Asia (excluding China), 51% in Latin ­America and 10% in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.” For Europe, basing himself on ­European Commission sources, he cites figures ranging from 2.6 percent for Malta to 26.2 percent for Latvia. The phenomenon is vast, and even larger when criminal economies are included, but extremely disparate. It ranges from ­low-​­wage sweatshop labor occurring off the books to the roofer who gives you a deal if you pay cash so he can avoid taxes, to the many forms of barter and mutual aid by which people help each other to get by. Illich thought that economists and development experts were turning their attention to informal economies in the hope that they could be made to sustain “a last flurry of growth.” And he feared that attempts to “develop” these economies would erase and eliminate the remaining differences between subsistence and shadow work, since this was a distinction the new development economics did not recognize. People with no hope of incorporation into the formal economy were being urged to help themselves. But this “propagation of s­ elf-​­help,” according to Illich, was “morally unacceptable.” Instead of recovering the dignity of subsistence, people were being offered the status of homo economicus, second class. What is . . . propagated as ­self-​­help is the opposite of autonomous or vernacular life. The ­self-​­help the new economists preach divides the subject of social policy (be it a person or an entity) into two halves: one that stands in a professionally defined need, and the other who is professionally licenced to provide it. Under the policies that are thus labeled ­self-​­help, the apartheid of production and consumption, characteristic of ­industrial economics, is projected into the subject himself. Each one is turned into a production unit for internal consumption, and the utility derived from this ­masturbation is then added to a n ­ ew fangled GNP. Unless ​­ we clarify the distinction between this ­self-​­help and what I . . . call vernacular life, the shadow economy will become the main growth sector during the current stagflation, the “informal” sector will become the main colony which sustains a last flurry of growth. And, unless the apostles of new life styles, of decentralization and alternative technology and conscientization and liberation make this distinction explicit and practical, they will only add some color, sweetener and the taste of stagnant ideals to an irresistibly spreading shadow economy.

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One can see here, I think, just how radical a thinker Illich was. Socialists had dreamed for a century, and more, of gaining control of the industrial economy and putting the cornucopia at the disposal of the people. Illich questioned the very categories of economics and declared them “anthropologically vicious.” He rejected the cornucopia itself as a product of “Economic Alchemy.” And he urged a fundamentally new ­direction—​­on ­back-​­to-​­the-​­land hippies in rich countries as much as on shanty dwellers in poor countries. The starting point was to think differently: to see the difference between subsistence and shadow work and then build on it. The terms, as I said earlier, can be deceptive. Subsistence can be taken as just scraping by and shadow work as just the necessary work of making commodities useful and reproducing what Marx calls labor power. But I think that what subsistence finally means to Illich is freedom: it is freely chosen activity that improves livelihood. And what shadow work finally means is servitude: it is something imposed on you in consequence of the existence of the Economy, the god to which every knee must bow. The shadow is not just the unpaid labor; it is also the obscuring and disorienting effect of economic ideas. The postulate of scarcity is, in this sense, a curse on creation, a turning away from the goodness of given things into the restless and s­ elf-​­defeating project of endless improvement. Critical Technology The alternative to scarcity, according to Illich, is the capacity to know and be satisfied with what is enough. But how is the sense for what is enough to develop in a world where, as Bernard Mandeville wrote long ago, “private vices” yield “publick benefits” and every excess expands the gross national product? Illich, as he once said of himself, is essentially a proscriptive rather than a prescriptive ­thinker—​­he indicates what not to do and leaves it to his readers figure out what would be good to do within that stricture. But there is one essay in Shadow Work in which Illich suggests a positive criterion on which a principle of limitation might be ­founded—​­an essay that I quoted in chapter 6 and would now like to examine in more detail. It’s called “Research by People,” and it turns for guidance to the twelfth-century abbot and author Hugh of St. Victor—​­a man Illich loved and admired and once referred to as “a dear friend of mine.” Later, he would devote a ­book-​­length study, In the Vineyard of the Text, to Hugh’s style of reading. According to Illich, Hugh was one of the first to engage in a “careful, systematic reflection of what constitutes a tool.” Before Hugh’s time, Illich says, tools were so inseparable from their accustomed ­users—​­the forge from the smith, the chisel from the hand of the ­mason—​­that there

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was no general concept for an engineered means to an end. Hugh “placed scientiae mechanicae within philosophy” and reflected on the character of the various arts and the wisdom hidden in each of them. His starting point, Illich says, was the human predicament after the Fall: [Hugh] feels that the worst thing that has happened, as a consequence of disobedience in Paradise, is an obscuring, a shadow, which has fallen between man and the creation in which God has placed him. God made the world in such a way that man would fit into it perfectly. Adam and Eve were the only beings God created who were not protected by thick fur against the cold, and by scales against thorns, and who didn’t have good claws but only hands made for picking fruit. God told them to respect certain rules, or ecological limits, as we would say today. There was one tree they were not to break, because if they broke it, they would ­destroy—​­according to ­Hugh—​­the beautiful harmony and balance of the universe. So what did these two do? According to Hugh, Eve, out of curiosity, and Adam, out of love for Eve, broke a branch from precisely that tree and ate an apple. The consequence, according to Hugh, was foreseeable. The balance of the universe changed, and man was left with a body designed for Paradise. His body “changed” into one which was made to bleed by every thorn and which needed shoes, into one which felt cold and needed spinning and weaving and woolens. So Hugh developed a philosophical theology of technology in which technology is an activity by which man, thanks to what God has given him in creation, recovers part of what he has lost through his ecological intervention, which was sin.

Hugh considers mechanical science to be a remedy for bodily weakness, and Illich sees in the idea the seed of a ­self-​­limiting account of technology and, by extension, economy. Hugh’s idea of remedium, of remedy or recovery, he thinks, could provide a ground on which it would be possible to make out what is enough and what is too much. Is something being restored to its proper dignity, or is it being made subject to an essentially endless and unlimited improvement? “The science of tools,” Illich says, “has no proper name in English.” Technology could serve, if it were taken in its root meaning as the logos of technē, but it has instead come to mean “the tools themselves.” Illich’s proposal is “critical technology,” and he claims Hugh as its ancestor and patron saint. Hugh deserves this honor on three grounds, Illich says: he brought mechanical science into philosophy; he introduced a principle of sufficiency or limitation through his concept of remedy; and he understood that each of the mechanical arts, when properly approached,

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is “a mirror for truth.” Each contains wisdom that is discernible, Hugh says, by its having been “tasted and found pleasing” and that is expressed as beauty and limit. “Critical technology,” as Illich finds it modeled in Hugh’s writings, never really caught on. In fact, Illich considered Hugh as the last as well as the first person in Europe to put forward such a philosophy. “Neither Hugh’s idea of science as remedy, nor his notion of mechanics as part of science, survived him,” Illich says, using the word science in Hugh’s sense in which it refers to knowledge in general, including philosophy. Hugh lived in a time of what Illich calls “accelerated technological development.” Enthusiasm for new tools was sweeping Western Europe, and this enthusiasm was abetted by a fateful decision to exempt them from any philosophical scrutiny. In [Hugh’s] lifetime the number of watermills doubled and the number and variety of new machines powered by these mills grew even faster. Monasteries appeared to be converted into machine parks. The men who built, maintained and repaired all this milling and mining equipment grew larger in number. They were the new kind of artisan and t­ radesman—​­wandering tinkerers and expert miners who did not quite fit former models. Now it was their trades that came to be called the mechanical arts. People tended to look down on the practitioners of such arts as a new kind of rabble. When, two generations after Hugh’s death, both windmills and universities spread throughout Europe, no educated person would have talked about their trades or mechanics as an academic subject.

Uncritical enthusiasm for technology formed a strange alliance, Illich says, with a certain haughty superiority to it in the incipient university milieu. Hugh’s philosophical theology of tools was forgotten, along with his categories of wisdom, beauty, and limit. Eventually they were replaced by a very different account of what humanity lost by its expulsion from Paradise. In Hugh’s story humankind forfeited its ecological fit. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in his call for a new science, gave a very different account of our first parents’ condition. He was interested in “. . . the restitution and reinvestiture of man to the sovereignty and power which he had in his first state of creation in Paradise.” For Bacon, the aim was “to achieve mastery over nature”—“to conquer and subdue her” and even, at one point in the Novum Organum, to “put [her] on the rack” and “make her [a] slave.” The brutality of these ­often-​­quoted phrases has made them a scandal for contemporary ecologists, but their “general optimism,” as Illich puts it, “remains intact.” Illich indicts Bacon more for his “naiveté” than his bluntness. Hugh, he says, faced the ­“traditional naiveté”

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of his c­ontemporaries—​­they couldn’t imagine the need for the general science of tools that Hugh proposed because they still saw tools as inseparable from the places the tools were used and the hands of those accustomed to use them. Bacon’s naiveté was of another kind. It was an attempt to abolish the human condition altogether and to replace it with the godlike condition that he imagined Adam to have enjoyed before the Fall. Hugh sees a creature in relationship to God and nature; Bacon’s paradigm is sovereignty. What Illich feared was that “the new ‘alternative’ sciences” that he saw emerging at the time he wrote Shadow ­Work—​­an example, as I mentioned earlier, is Amory Lovins’s “soft path”—would fail to purge themselves of their Baconian naiveté. They would still do “research for people” but disguise its continuity with the old Baconian project of domination by claiming that they were now “helping people to help themselves.” “From a science which attempts to control external nature, the new R & D [research and development] has shifted toward the search for means which permit the subtle by effective imposition of ­self-​­control on people.” ­Self-​­help remains shadow work if it cannot set itself free from the grip of scarcity and the apartheid of production and consumption. One only adds “color, sweetener, and the taste of stagnant ideals.” Illich’s prescription is “critical technology,” “research by people,” and a principle of ­self-​­limitation for which he nominates Hugh’s concept of remedy. Shadow Work Continues What Tools for Conviviality Began Illich’s concept of critical technology is a continuation of his reflections in Tools for Conviviality on how tools can be made to serve people rather than people to serve tools. Connecting the argument of Shadow Work to Tools for Conviviality helps to flesh out the concept of subsistence and eliminate from it any hint that we are dealing with that “sentimental attraction” to “cultures of poverty” of which Francine du Plessix Gray accused Illich. Illich is easily misunderstood by those who view the past as a museum of outmoded, overcome, and mostly reprehensible practices. Reviews of Gender, the successor to Shadow Work, harped on Illich’s supposed nostalgia for what one writer derisively called “the good old days.” Charles Leadbeater, whose appropriation of Illich as the precursor of “DIY” I cited earlier, thinks that he has “dotty ideas” concerning “the reinvention of preindustrial forms of family life.” Examples could be multiplied. But Illich himself always insisted that he lacked the desire, as much as the ability, to return to the past. I would like to take him seriously. There are certainly touches of romance in his rhetoric concerning the past, just as there are touches of caricature in his satires of contemporary

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life. But I think his distinction between subsistence and shadow work introduces a principle that bears on the future and not the past. “The economy,” as we call it, is not going to save most of the people who are alive in the world today. But it can make their pursuit of livelihood obscure and undignified. With the twin concepts of subsistence and vernacular, it is possible to distinguish what we can do for ourselves from what we are made to do because Moloch will eat us alive if we don’t. These concepts allow us to begin to imagine and build a noneconomic space and to defend such noneconomic spaces as remain from further incursions. They invoke the common sense that people might regain if they resisted the hegemony of professional opinion and began the decolonization of their minds and their mouths. And they create a shelter under which a new way of life might take shape without either succumbing to the gravity of the old way of life or viewing itself in the distorting mirror of the very concepts it is trying to outgrow. A couple of years before he wrote the essays in Shadow Work, Illich published a short book called The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional E ­ nemies. I think it helps to clarify the pertinence of his concept of subsistence, and its contemporary relevance. By the measure of standard categories like the “unemployment rate,” most of the world is and will surely remain unemployed. Those so categorized are not really ­unemployed—​­they just lack jobs that are recognized as part of the formal e­ conomy—​­but if they count themselves unemployed and consent to live in the shadow of that title, then they remain bound to the economic wheel. Perhaps, in wealthier places, they “volunteer.” But this too keeps them in the shadow because the volunteer is only an adjunct with little or no voice in the enterprise he or she serves. Illich wanted to remove the shadow. He was trying to sketch the ideas and distinctions that would need to inform a p ­ ost-​­economic society. Such a society is not imaginable without the continued existence of “the economy.” In Tools for Conviviality, Illich lays out a program for the incorporation of scientifically designed tools in a regime of conviviality, one that puts beauty and sociability first. But, even in such a regime, the tools will still have to be manufactured. The “mechanical donkey” that he imagines as an alternative to the private c­ ar—​­an “­anti-​­car,” he calls i­t—​­is not a handicraft. Nor are the easily used birth control devices whose availability and wide distribution serve as another paradigm of conviviality. Factories would still be necessary, and this implies, at the least, that Illich imagines a society with more than one mode of production. What I think Illich’s subsistence/shadow work distinction allows is the gradual regrowth of a complementary sphere in which economic criteria are not decisive and in which livelihood is the issue, not formal employment. Such a sphere ­cannot

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achieve dignity within the hegemony of economic certainties. “Useful unemployment” implies such a sphere, and not just the opportunity to volunteer or the obligation to work for welfare. Gustavo Esteva, a Mexican thinker who writes on the emergence of “new commons,” stresses the need for “a new legal order” and “a new social frame” to enable the ­post-​­economic or e­ xtra-​­economic existence that is implied in the idea of a commons. Again Illich provides the concepts and the key distinctions that would underlie such a new legal order and social framework.

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8

Gender

I begin, Lord, to behold thee in the door of the coincidence of opposites which the angel guardeth that is set over the entrance into Paradise. —Nicholas of Cusa At the time [Gender] was written . . . I was strongly convinced that out of . . . the women’s studies movement would come a radical questioning of the categories with which society . . . has been examined for the last hundred years . . . —the first [such] chance that I could see . . .  —Ivan Illich

In 1982, Illich published Gender. Like all of his works, it was quite c­ ompact—​­only 179 pages, including the ­footnotes—​­but it was an essay of extraordinary scope and ambition. It ranged freely over numerous academic specialties, from sociology to economics and iconography to church history; it poked at settled and ­quasi-​­sacred certainties like science, equality, and the human; and it issued a dramatic challenge to the popular movements of the time, notably feminism, to radically revise their views of both the past and the future. In Illich’s mind it was a report from the many research fronts at which he was then working and “one more step toward a History of Scarcity that I want . . . to write.” But the work encountered misunderstanding and animosity from its earliest stages, and its publication was answered by almost uniformly hostile reviews. One consequence was that the projected history of scarcity never appeared. Another was that Illich’s reputation on the political left suffered, and his audience there mostly fell away. To this day, the book has not received its due as a contribution to economic history or church history or philosophy, insofar as it presents gender as “a way of knowing.” I have already recounted Illich’s excited discovery of feminist scholarship and the optimistic conviction this discovery provoked: “that out of the women’s . . . movement . . . would come a radical questioning of the categories . . . of economics, of sociology, and of anthropology.” The word categories here should not slip by too

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e­ asily—​­he is not speaking merely of the working concepts of these social sciences but of their way of seeing the world and the joints at which their analyses carve it up. Particularly significant was historian Barbara Duden’s claim that what others called capitalism could equally well be described as the demise of gender. When Illich began to look at the ­pre-​­industrial past through this new lens, he discovered that no matter into which . . . culture I moved, a line ran through the tool kit of every one of these societies, separating tools men may grasp from tools women may grasp. A line ran through all the spaces of daily l­ ife—​­in the house, around the house, in the village. In some spaces, at some hours, you would find only women. It’s possible that at another hour you would find men in spaces which otherwise were occupied by women. But there would be this demanding gender line which runs through every society; and, therefore, in a traditional society, in a ­pre-​­capitalist society, it is impossible to speak about abstract work for which one can just hire workers without regard to whether they are men or women.

Illich came to the conclusion that gender provided “a better heuristic investigating tool” for the exploration of the ­pre-​­industrial past “than anything I have had in hand so far.” Heuristic is, I think, an important if somewhat rarified word here. It means a way of seeing, an educational pathway, or an aid to u ­ nderstanding—​­a flashlight, ­perhaps—​­and it strongly suggests that Illich was not endorsing a historical regime but rather looking for a way of comprehending the contemporary situation. With gender as a “heuristic investigating tool,” he hoped to shed new light on the origins of modernity and to highlight, once again, its character as “a condition . . . without precedent.” Accordingly, the book unfolds on three levels. It is a study in economic history that treats the transformation of traditional gender into modern sex as the crucial condition for the emergence of a modern economic society. Gender stands for a world in which culture contains economics; sex for a world in which economics contains culture. Illich uses the word sex, and occasionally unisex, in a way that greatly expands the word’s normal reference, and I will sometimes italicize it to help the reader keep this special sense in mind. Ultimately, it’s a figure that summarizes an entire social order. Illich deploys the pair sex/gender in the same spirit in which earlier sociologists contrasted society and community (Ferdinand Tönnies), contract and status (Henry Maine), and organic and mechanical solidarity (Émile Durkheim)—something that I hope will become clear as the chapter proceeds. On a second level, the book is an exploration of a way of knowing, with gender taken as the symbolization and incarnation of the

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complementary nature of ­reality—​­the way in which the world presented itself to all ­non-​­modern societies as a set of opposed d ­ omains—​­a here and a beyond, a now and a forever. And, finally, it’s an essay in church history, which examines the role of the Western church and of Christian doctrine and iconography in breaking the power of gender. This scheme was rarely appreciated or even perceived. Typical was the Canadian reviewer who believed, in spite of a clear statement near the beginning of the book that gender, in the traditional sense, is probably “irrecuperable,” that Illich was in fact “advocating a return to a ‘gendered’ way of life involving a total segregation of the sexes.” Gender’s Reception Gender was a badly misunderstood book, and because this hostile reception proved to be a watershed in Illich’s career, I want first to look at how it happened before returning to the book’s argument. The trouble to come manifested itself from the very start of the project. Illich himself concedes in the opening pages of the book that it had not been “easy to spell out what I have to say.” He also adds that “friends and colleagues” attempted to “dissuade” him from taking up the ­subject at all. These reservations were expressed during the year before the book was ­published, a year Illich spent in Berlin as one of the first group of fellows at the newly ­established ­Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Studies). One of his colleagues there was Uwe Pörksen, a novelist and professor of older German literature at the ­University of Freiburg, who would become a close friend and collaborator. In 2014, Pörksen published a memoir of that inaugural year at the ­Wissenschaftskolleg called Camelot in Grunewald. Through its lens one can see how disturbing Illich’s ­colleagues there found his ideas. Illich’s first attempt to share his research on gender with his colleagues, Pörksen says, “sail[ed] hard along the edge of scandal.” P ­ hilosopher and religious scholar Jacob Taubes, a visitor to the lecture, walked out “noisily and ­ostentatiously.” “You turncoat [abtrünniger]!” Pörksen reports him as saying. “You harness your Aztec horses to your Viennese carriage and travel straight into ­fascism.” The feminists who were present were “almost speechless,” and the journalist who was covering the evening titled his piece “the crash of the high flier.” The next year in the fall, Illich, undaunted, presented the same ideas in a series of eight talks he gave as the Regents’ Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. These coincided with the publication of Gender. Earlier in the year, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the American Constitution had failed after a populist a­ nti-​­feminist movement led to its defeat in several crucial state

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l­egislatures. This change in the Constitution had been ardently supported by feminists, and its defeat by “traditionalists” presumably had heightened the sensitivity of its supporters to any sign of further a­ nti-​­feminist reaction. While Illich’s lectures were going on, Arlie Hochschild, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, suggested to some of her female colleagues that they should organize a symposium that would follow his lectures and allow them to present “a feminist response to Illich’s ideas.” Illich agreed to take part, though he objected to the proposed ­format—​­each of the seven professors who wished to respond to him would speak for twenty minutes, while he would have ten minutes to answer all ­seven—​­and later called the whole proceeding “a w ­ itch-​ ­hunting trial.” These seven lectures were then revised for publication in a special issue of the journal Feminist Issues that appeared in the spring of 1983. Gloria Bowles, the coordinator of Women’s Studies at Berkeley, opens this collection with a brief history of how she and her colleagues reacted to Illich. The announcement of Illich as the Regents Lecturer, she writes, produced a double response in her. On the one hand, she was distressed to see this “prestigious and ­well-​­paid” lectureship offered to a man who would address “a field dominated by stunning scholarship by women.” On the other, “Illich had a reputation as a progressive thinker.” But by the time the lecture series reached its midpoint, she writes, “there was a sense of severe disappointment that finally gave way to anger.” And it was not just the lectures themselves that troubled her. Illich had “an international entourage” with him; the lectures were attended by “Illich groupies”; and at the house Illich had rented in the Berkeley hills, “one began to sense a carnival atmosphere, a ‘happening.’” “In fact,” she continued, “it became fascinating to watch just how Illich began to attract so much attention to himself.” Bowles portrays an ­attention-​­seeking prima donna presiding over a carnivalesque scene and taking “the Master stance typical of European university teaching.” In an interview Illich gave to the campus newspaper, The Daily Californian, he spoke about “the medieval university atmosphere” he was attempting to foster in the house he was sharing with friends. This gives a fair measure of the extent of the misunderstanding. Bowles’s colleagues then continue in the same vein. Linguist Robin Lakoff claims that Gender displays “all the salient features of modern propaganda, as exemplified in classics of the genre like Mein Kampf.” Arlie Hochschild, who had started the ball rolling, calls Illich an “ideologue in scientist’s clothing.” (This completely ignores Illich’s critique of ­science—​­quite salient in his ­text—​­as well as his call for “research that is disciplined, critical, ­well-​­documented, and public but emphatically ­non-​­scientific.”) Speaking of ­pre-​­industrial worlds as “gendered,” Hochschild argues, is equivalent to “calling the ­ante-​­bellum South

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‘raced.’” Illich, in other words, is prettying up a r­ egime—​­traditional g­ ender—​­that was tantamount to slavery. Lillian Rubin accuses him of believing that “gender relations were part of the natural order,” though Illich had tried to make it clear that he regarded gender as a universal but highly variable cultural construct in premodern societies. And so, for the most part, it went. This is not to say that all of the criticisms made of Illich were equally ad hominem. Some were ­fair-​­minded and pertinent. Barbara Christian argued that Illich’s ­premise—“women lose when they invade men’s sphere”—“would obliterate my field of study, the literature written by women, especially black women.” “The pen,” she said, has not usually been considered “an appropriate tool” for a woman. Similarly, Clair Brown wondered if industrialization is quite as terrible as Illich seemed to say: “This narrow view of industrialization neglects the fact that mass production and distribution of goods has made a nutritious and diverse diet, warm and comfortable housing, and functional and attractive clothing available to the majority of the people in the developed world.” These are both understandable misapprehensions of a book in which Illich sometimes fails to make it clear that he continues to speak for the moderated modernity he advocated in Tools for Conviviality and not for a return to the past. Best of all among Illich’s critics, in my view, was anthropologist Nancy ­Scheper-​­Hughes. Drawing on her own fieldwork as well as her knowledge of the anthropological literature, she made criticisms of Illich’s research that seem to me both substantive and substantial. Her claim, in summary was that Illich had mistaken the ideology of gender for its practice. Consequently, he had exaggerated the extent to which tasks are gendered in ­pre-​­capitalist society and downplayed the perverse, destructive, and arbitrary elements of gender. “No society or culture could sustain itself for very long,” she said, “under the kind of extreme sexual segregation that Illich posits as characteristic of p ­ re-​­industrial ‘Vernacular Gender’ societies.” ­Scheper-​­Hughes supported her critique with evidence drawn from her own research and dispensed with the loaded arguments and affronted, h ­ ow-​­dare-​­you tone that marred some of her colleagues’ responses. That her criticism never led to a dialogue and to a revision and refinement of Illich’s case epitomizes, for me, the tragedy of the whole affair. What might have been a beginning was instead an ending. The controversy stirred up by Gender in Berkeley followed Illich to other places as well. At the University of Marburg in Germany, where Illich was then teaching, there were demonstrations against the book, featuring a giant golden ­papier-​­mâché phallus that the protesting students deployed as a battering ram. Some of the misreadings of the book were clearly willful. In the passage in which

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Illich speaks of the “colleagues and friends [who] attempted to dissuade him from writing the book,” he speculates that these “interlocutors felt uneasy because my reasoning interfered with their dreams.” This is fair enough. The book, as we will see, is injurious to a lot of dreams. But even if Illich’s critics were sometimes too threatened to see his point, one can also have some sympathy for them insofar as they were confronting a demanding and disorienting text that made few concessions to its readers’ preconceptions. The book’s tone is often polemical and, at times, pontifical. We hear, for example, that “[w]omen academics grab at the semblance of legitimacy that comes from putting on the h ­ and-​­me-​­down Marxoid categories discarded by social historians.” This is said in passing, without qualification or substantiation, and seems unnecessarily abrasive. Other remarks in the book have this same ex cathedra quality which tends to conceal the fact that Illich was, in fact, working, quickly and excitedly, at various intellectual frontiers and reporting what were, necessarily, only provisional conclusions. Then there was the book’s organization. The main text was supplemented by 125 numbered and named footnotes, each one a ­self-​­contained bibliographic essay. Some pages have as few as five lines before the footnote takes over. These excursions are quite condensed, the longest of them perhaps seven hundred words. Many of them open new lines of argument and inquiry that can be tangential as well as supplementary to the main text. Like Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock’s distracted lover, the book “rides madly off in all directions.” Some, like me, found the effect exhilarating, but it was obviously perplexing for many others. One reader of my acquaintance photocopied the whole book and pasted the main text together in order to be able to read it without the dazzling distraction of the notes. On top of the difficulties created by the book’s presentation were those created by Illich’s m ­ anner—​­the manner that made Gloria Bowles feel she was dealing with a haughty European maître à penser. Uwe Pörksen reports that after Illich’s first lecture on gender at the Wissenschaftskolleg in 1981, “a w ­ ell-​­known Berlin author and feminist” stopped him and said, “I don’t understand how one can present such simple facts in such a baroque way.” Illich replied: “You’ll have to ascribe that to my disability (unfähigkeit).” This is an interesting remark and goes with something Illich once said to me when discussing his friend Paul Goodman. Illich remembered Goodman’s telling him that he, Goodman, had never written a line that he could not as easily have spoken. This caused Illich to reflect that he was in exactly the opposite c­ ase—​­he had “never written a line which I have the feeling I could have said.” It was his “destiny,” when speaking publicly, he continued, “to read off

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internal lines.” I suspect that this was the disability of which Illich spoke in Berlin. And I believe he was in earnest in calling it a d ­ estiny—​­something unchangeably ­given—​­as well as a disability. In this sense, the seemingly magisterial manner that irked his critics in Berkeley was not the man himself but rather the habits in which he had been formed. Something similar might be said about his writing s­ tyle—​ ­terse, cogent, brilliant, often witty, but with little of ease or affability about it. Illich, to this extent, was misunderstood. And whether his auditors and readers were willfully obtuse or genuinely confused, it seems clear that most of them couldn’t follow what he was saying or discern why he was saying it. They did not accept his claim that he was using gender as a “heuristic” rather than as a policy proposal; they did not understand that they were being offered an essay in economic ­history—​­an installment in an ongoing history of ­scarcity—​­and they certainly did not grasp the idea, crucial for Illich, of gender as a “mode of perception.” This incomprehension continued when reviews of the book appeared. Not one that I ever saw really dealt with the book on its own terms or even took in what these terms were. To take just one example, which I will develop more fully later on, Illich’s book is a critical investigation of the idea of equality, undertaken in pursuit of a way out of a world of sameness and scarcity. But equality was then the main and even sometimes the exclusive aim of ­feminism—​­the feminism of “difference” still being at most a minor theme in its political melody. How easy it must have been to dismiss Illich as a romantic, a reactionary, and an essentialist rather than carefully listening to what he had to say. Illich’s Excommunication The contretemps over Gender was painful for Illich. Reflecting with me six years later on what had happened, he said, “The exalted feminist professors of B ­ erkeley treated me not simply as a Jew but as a Jew who had engaged in explicitly a­ nti-​ ­Aryan activities. They made me realize why it would have been impossible for a Jew to speak in ­Germany—​­say, in 1934 or 1935—about racism as a category.” And, he added, “I know what it means to be treated as a Jew.” The analogy is inflammatory but still precise. A Jew could not have spoken about racism in Germany because they would have been thought to be speaking “as a Jew.” Illich felt that, in exactly the same way, he had been discounted and disqualified “as a man.” ­Perhaps he also understood that his experience was a sign of things to c­ ome—​ ­that qualifications and classifications of all kinds would soon color how all public speech is received.

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The affair also had an effect on Illich’s reputation, which acquired a shadow even among those who didn’t quite know why. More than once I have had heard Gender denounced by people who freely admitted that they had not read it and who even intimated that this forbearance did them credit. (Who reads Mein Kampf?) Illich never again published with a major trade publisher, and his thought gradually lost its salience for the social movements of the time. He remained an important godfather to some of the European Greens. Journals like Whole Earth Review, New Perspectives Quarterly, and Utne Reader still interviewed him and reported on his work, but on the political left, in the mainstream environmental movement, and among most feminists he was never again taken seriously. Indeed, it’s remarkable, if not terrifying, how completely Illich has been erased from the academic record. At the time Illich published Gender, the word he took for his title was not in wide use. He remembered that when he advised his publisher Pantheon that he intended to write a book with that title, he was told “the only thing anyone understands as gender is the article you put in front of the noun.” “One year after my book was published,” he continued, “the two major indices for scientific literature in the United States introduced . . . as a new word in the subject index, gender.” But that’s not how the story is now told. Today as I said earlier, the credit usually goes to American historian Joan Wallach Scott and to an article she published four years later in December 1986 titled “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical ­Analysis.” Thirty years later the American Historical Review, the journal in which the article first appeared, brought out a special issue to commemorate Scott’s supposedly pioneering essay. The introduction to this special issue describes the article not just as “one of the mostly widely read and cited articles in the journal’s history” but as “canonical.” Scott’s Wikipedia entry adds that it was “foundational in the formation of the field of gender history.” Illich is nowhere mentioned. Nor did the significance that he attributed to gender endure. He had tried “to designate a complementary duality,” in which gender is the opposite of the naturalized and scientized monism of sex. Today gender means, at most, the cultural elaboration of ­sex—​­what Judith Butler calls its “performative” aspect. Often the terms sex and gender are used interchangeably. The reaction to Gender marked an epoch in Illich’s career, but this reaction can also be interpreted in broader terms as a sign of the fragmentation of the social movements that had emerged from the ferment of the 1960s and taken shape during the 1970s. These movements often contained incompatible elements whose clashes had been softened by a common e­ nthusiasm—​­when Gloria Bowles spoke of Illich’s “reputation as a progressive thinker,” she was referring to

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this sense that “the movement” retained some overarching unity. In the milieu in which I lived during those times, one heard a lot of talk about revolution and even the revolution as if it were a definite and ­agreed-​­upon object. But, in fact, what this imminent change would amount to was construed in very different ways, and sometimes by the same person. I wasn’t the only one with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letter and Papers from Prison sitting next to Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 on my desk or the I Ching and The Tibetan Book of the Dead jostling The Wretched of the Earth and The Pedagogy of the Oppressed at my bedside. Some expected a political revolution, some a new age; some preached alternatives, others advocated what German new leftist Rudi Dutschke called “the long march through the institutions.” I have not forgotten the visible distress on the face of an old friend when he learned, around the same time that Gender was published, that my children were not in school. This friend had started a free school in which I was marginally involved in the 1960s but then opted very deliberately for “the long march” by becoming a teacher in a large Toronto high school. He reacted to the news that my wife and I were “­home-​­schooling” in the same way as Marx and Engels had reacted to the “utopian socialists” they excoriated in The Communist Manifesto. How were we to have a disciplined revolution if people like me insisted on “doing their own thing”? The ’68ers, as people of my generation were called in Europe, were definitely not all going in the same direction. In this patchwork, Illich was already one of the most colorful and unusual pieces. He was a radical who wanted to dismantle dominant institutions and professional hegemonies, but he was, at the same time, a man deeply and consciously grounded in tradition. Moreover, he was, from the first, a proponent of economic contraction, not just of limits to growth but of degrowth, as one now says. He belonged to that disregarded strand of political ecology whose roots lie in John Ruskin and ­Mohandas Gandhi, Leopold Kohr and E. F. Schumacher. This did not assort at all well with a feminism whose bid for economic equality depended on a growing economy and an expanding service ­sector—​­how else to radically increase the number of jobs? Illich may have come to Berkeley still thinking he had something to say to “those who struggle to preserve the biosphere and those who oppose a style of life characterized by a monopoly of commodities”—and Gloria Bowles, if she was not being disingenuous, may have sincerely expected a “progressive”—but what was left of the thin consensus uniting “the movement” was shattering fast. In his introduction to Shadow Work, Illich imagined this movement as entering what he called a third stage. He saw the first stage, as I said in the previous chapter, as the discovery of threats to the biosphere and the second as the ­recognition that

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the growth of services threatens the integrity of social life as surely as industry threatens nature. Now “with the [nineteen]eighties,” he wrote, “the discussion on the limits to growth is moving into a third stage [which] is focusing on the commons.” Since Illich knew that this term, for most readers then and for many still, would only evoke antique rights to hunt, fish, harvest, and forage on common lands, he immediately specified that he meant something “more subtle” that he rendered, in economic lingo, as “the utilization value of the environment.” “Economic development,” he said, “[had] always meant that people, instead of doing something, are enabled to buy it.” “Progress” consisted in reducing one’s dependence on one’s surroundings, whether physical or social, and instead relying on private provision. Now, Illich said, the movement to protect nature and decommodify society must reverse this trend and begin to make the world around us vivid, hospitable, and useful once again. It was his recognition of this imperative that made Illich so receptive to Barbara Duden’s statement that the destruction of gender was capitalism’s prime prerequisite. Illich recognized in gender not just “the best heuristic he had yet discovered for the investigation of the p ­ re-​­industrial past” but also the very archetype of a way of life in which there could be no universal circulation of commodities, no abstract unit of labor (e.g., Marx’s “labour power”), and no general equivalence between things according to their “exchange value.” So long as men and women had separate spheres, different tools, and distinct customs, the market remained a contained and controlled institution, restricted to certain times and places. No one could be reduced to an ancillary or merely supportive role, as women were when men became wage laborers and developed a common interest with their ostensible oppressors in “economic expansion and the suppression of subsistence.” Gender was thus synonymous with the containment of economy by culture. In the same way, the loss of gender, and its replacement by sex, was equivalent to what Karl Polanyi had called the “disembedding” of the market from cultural constraint. Gender is Illich’s report on this discovery and on the ambitious research ­program by which he had tried to put flesh on it during his year at the ­Wissenschaftskolleg. A careful reading of the book will reveal, first, that he did not advocate the reinstitution of gender, even if he sometimes spoke of its loss elegiacally; second, that he clearly distinguished between gender and patriarchy; and, third, that he explicitly treated gender as an “ideal type” and as a window into the world of unisex, according to his usual procedure of understanding things through their opposites. None of this was understood, either by his adversaries in Berkeley or by his reviewers. He was accused of the very thing he was trying to ­denounce—​­sexism—​­and portrayed

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as a reactionary ideologue trying to add a nostalgic luster to ­women’s oppression. Some of this understanding can be attributed to m ­ ischance—​­to the ways in which Illich’s magisterial bearing, unruly enthusiasms, and polemical tone misled his auditors and ­readers—​­but much more important, I think, were the manifest differences between him and those who rejected his book. Illich was trying to think the nearly ­unthinkable—​­to question and unsettle the myth of e­ quality;—​­his opponents, on the other hand, were trying to realize it. He was interested in inventing contemporary forms of subsistence that would draw on modern industrial and scientific techniques while at the same time sharply limiting them; his opponents wanted more jobs and more services to support women entering employment. Illich, you might say, was trying to derail the gravy train, while his opponents were hoping to finally claim a decent seat. It was, in all senses, a dialogue of the deaf. Am I justified in calling this a tragedy? Illich, though obviously stung by the scorn of “the exalted feminist professors of Berkeley,” never did. He did see the book as a watershed in his career, writing in the introduction to a revised ­German edition in 1995 that it marked the moment when he turned away from “an aggressive critique of the degrading ceremonies . . . of development” and began to devote himself to research on the history of perception. But Illich, so far as I know, never brooded on the events in Berkeley in 1982 or their sequel. He had other things to do. The history of perception, as he says, became a major concern, as did the watershed between a literate and a cybernetic world ­image—​­a subject I’ll take up later. And yet it is hard not to see a poignant ­might-​­have-​­been both in the abandoned history of scarcity and in the conversation that never developed around Gender. Can this conversation now revive? One hopeful sign is the recent publication of a new Italian edition of Gender under the editorial direction of the eminent Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. In his preface, Agamben makes the remark I quoted in my introduction: that Illich’s work is finally reaching “the hour of its legibility,” a phrase Agamben takes from Walter Benjamin. Perhaps a reconstruction of Gender’s argument will show why this is so. The Argument of Gender Illich, as I’ve said, uses the terms sex and gender as ideal types that summarize an entire worldview. Gender bespeaks a “duality” that characterizes all preindustrial societies and which is “fundamental and in no two places the same.” Sex epitomizes economic society. Gender is treated throughout as a cultural construct. At no point does Illich say what he thinks the native endowments of men and women as

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such have to do with the way in which gender is constructed, and, at times, he is quite savage about what he calls “­socio-​­biological mythology.” By this he means the argument that he finds in “some very articulate feminists” that “males and females are like separate species of humanity whose behavioral style is inherently different, irrespective of their cultures.” In this view he finds, despite acknowledged “good intentions,” “the prick of racism that is implied in ­bio-​­social determinism.” Once he even tried to convince ­me—​­I was ­doubtful—​­that the difference in pitch between men’s and women’s voices is not innate but learned according to gender. (I did a little research on this and discovered that there is an element of sexual dimorphism in the pitch of the v­ oice—​­males have longer vocal c­ ords—​­but wide cultural variation in speech styles.) I argued a little in chapter 7 with Illich’s relentless emphasis on “the social construction of reality” and won’t repeat those arguments. My point here is only that Illich believed emphatically that “gender is culturally determined” and that claims such as Lillian Rubin’s charge in Feminist Issues that Illich thought “gender behavior” was “built into the genetic structure” were, at the least, mistaken. Gender defines what Illich calls vernacular culture. A vernacular culture is composed, he says, of two gendered subsets that consider each other to be of different kinds. Gender, in such a setting, is “substantive.” One is a man or a woman, as one is “a square or a circle”—there is “no way to complain about [it].” Contemporary “sex roles” by way of contrast are much more p ­ lastic—“a corset,” Illich says, “into which [a] genderless libido [is] forced.” “One is,” he says, “born and bred into gender.” These two subsets of humanity, he shows, were distinguished by the tools they used, the way they spoke, the customs they adopted, and the spaces they occupied. They depended on each other but could not, by definition, compete with one another or incite envy and resentment in one another. This does not, by any means, imply that they always got along in sweet accord or that they did not sometimes, as Illich says, tear the shirts off each other’s backs but only that their complementary and heterogeneous spheres kept them from becoming competitors or suffering the modern sting of sexism. Though his critics for the most part failed to notice, Illich tried to distinguish clearly between patriarchy and gender. Gender, he recognized, certainly existed under conditions of patriarchy, but it also existed under conditions of matriarchy and of relative equality. The fact that people universally arranged themselves in complementary and contrasting domains can therefore be considered apart from the predominance of one or the other, even if male predominance was and is more common. Moreover, it is not easy to judge such matters if one accepts

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that gender involves a truly different way of knowing the world and one that cannot ­readily be grasped with contemporary categories. To speak, for example, of a power i­ mbalance between genders implies that that there is a common currency called power that both equally ­seek—​­after all does not Thomas Hobbes “put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death”? But what if there is no such common currency, if there is no power in general, but only powers that women exert and powers that men e­ xert—​­powers that differ in kind as well as in the way they are expressed? Hearing such a question, the contemporary person is likely to smell a rat and s­ uspect condescension toward the other or the sham of “separate but equal” as a way of denying people their rights. That there is one scale of rights, one form of power, one measure of equality is a contemporary ­certainty—​­something that has not only what Illich calls “the appearance of . . .  common sense” but also the force of an unquestionable moral desideratum. Illich asks for a different, more quizzical attitude to the past. He asks his readers, first of all, to make the difficult imaginative effort to understand the past, and then he asks that it be considered in the light not just of what we have gained but also of what we have lost. Gender is ­lost—​­and the loss, Illich says, “might be irrecuperable”—when equivalence is achieved. Men and women as irreducible kinds dissolve into the human, work once within the competence of only one gender becomes generally applicable “labour power,” and all barriers to the free circulation of commodities become permeable. Gender’s replacement is sex. Sex is universal. It exists in many ­varieties—​­male, female, queer, t­wo-​­spirit, etc.—but, for Illich, they are all varieties of the same thing. Where gender was fundamental, sex is secondary and ­mutable—​­a continuum on which one finds a “role.” Men and women, as they become interchangeable, become comparable, and according to Illich, women invariably lose by the comparison. “I know of no industrial society,” he writes, “where women are the economic equals of men. Of everything that economics measures, women get less.” This would be a conventional enough statement if Illich were about to present a plan to fix this inequality. But instead he declares it to be inherent in a unisex regime. Women lose, he says, as a result of “the intrinsically sexist nature of economics as such.” Again and again this point is reiterated. Although a sexist economy is “abhorrent,” he says, “the pursuit of a n ­ on-​­sexist ‘economy’ is absurd.” (Economy gets quotes here because economy, as currently understood, can only exist under the assumption of ­sex—​­that’s why a ­non-​­sexist economy is an ­absurdity, a contradiction in terms.) Later he asserts that “no good

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will . . . no struggle . . . no legislation and no technique” can “reduce the sexist exploitation characteristic of industrial society.” This is a scandalous claim, obviously, insofar as it denies that sexism can ever be overcome, but also a vexing o­ ne—​­what exactly does sexism mean here? To understand this, I think we have to go back to Illich’s basic distinction between gender and sex. He uses the terms, first of all, as “conceptual construct[s] . . . which [are] neither historical reality, nor even ‘true’ reality” but rather are “purely ideal, limiting concept[s] with which the real situation of action is compared and surveyed for the explication of certain of its significant components.” Second, he uses them as opposites. Gender designates “a complementary duality,” while sex describes only “the polarity of a common characteristic.” In a gendered regime men and women are considered to be of different kinds, while in a sexed regime they are the same but with “different plumbing”. Sex, in other words, is “paradoxically genderless” insofar as it is characteristic of all humans. And “the formation of this genderless sexuality,” Illich writes, “is one of the necessary prerequisites for the appearance of Homo oeconomicus [economic man].” Where society rests on two mutually defining, mutually supporting, and mutually limiting styles of being, no such general creature as homo economicus can ­appear—​­he would have nowhere to stand or sit. Nor can what Nietzsche calls “the madness of general concepts” take ­hold—​­there will be no scarcity, no unlimited circulation, no plasticity of supply and ­demand—​­things will be what they are in this place, for these people, without reduction to some more general term. As Illich puts it, gender is characteristic of “a morphological closure of community life on the assumption, implicit and often ritually expressed and mythologically represented, that a community like a body cannot outgrow its size.” In this sense, calling economics “intrinsically sexist” is a simple ­tautology—​­the regime of sex defines economics just as economics defines the regime of sex. Economics is sexist by definition. Of Everything Economics Measures, Women Get Less But sexism of course has a second meaning: discrimination by sex. Here I think Illich’s claims are more problematic. He treats the disadvantage women suffer in economic society both as a matter of fact and as a lawlike inevitability. In other words, he makes an empirical ­claim—“of everything that economics measures women get less”—and a normative ­claim—“no struggle . . . good will . . . legislation . . . or ­technique” can improve their situation. The only way to reduce sexism, he says, is by “the contraction of the cash nexus and the expansion of n ­ on-​­market-related,

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­ on-​­economic forms of subsistence.” Let’s look first at the empirical claim. Illich n told me in 1988 that he believed feminism had “aggravated the wage gap” between men and women: Just as education has produced more stupefied people, and just as medicine has created more complaints, so feminism, as practiced during [the last] twenty years, has aggravated the wage gap. Today, I think, most people admit this. Feminism created new opportunities, new chances, for a small minority to rise, while not changing anything in the basic distance between the rich and the poor, so that by the end of a ­twenty-​­year period of feminist struggle, the distance between the typically underpaid and the typically highly paid woman was as great as that between low-paid men and h ­ igh-​­paid men. I think that discrimination on the job ceased for the few who made it and became more intense and more conscious for those who didn’t make it.

Two things are being said here: first, that the wage gap between men and women has been “aggravated,” and, second, that a new gap has opened between a privileged minority of women and the great majority who now feel their disadvantage more keenly. In the second point, one can recognize the shape of the argument Illich first made about schools: they compound privilege for a few while intensifying the felt inferiority of those who necessarily fail. Feminists who seek to expand opportunities for women on terms set by the market economy are pursuing the same course as those who try to produce equality through more schooling or health through more medicine: the results they achieve will be paradoxically counterproductive. What of the “wage gap” between men and women that Illich also claims has been worsening? This is a tricky point to assess because the wage gap, which measures aggregate differences in male and female earnings, is a big statistical morass. Conservative feminists argue that women are now generally paid the same wages for the same work as men and that differences in earnings for women in comparable fields have to do with the jobs women do, the hours they choose, and the career paths they take. On the left, on the other hand, the wage gap continues to be treated as a question of discrimination. A lot of the difference depends on what is taken into account. For example, an interesting S­ tatistics Canada report from 2013 stated that, by 2011, when all relevant factors were considered, “women’s wages amounted to 92% of men’s” and that “­male-​­female differences in hourly wages have narrowed considerably since the early 1980s, as the hourly wages of women grew at a faster rate than those of men.” On the other

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hand, a report released in March 2016 from Oxfam Canada and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives argued that the wage gap is w ­ orsening—​­in 2009, the report says, women in Canada earned on average 74.4 percent of what men earned; in 2010, it was 73.6 percent; and in 2011, it was 72 percent, roughly where it remains today. My view would be that Illich’s iron law of female disadvantage was wrong in some respects and right in others. He was manifestly wrong when he said to me in 1988 that there might be “a few more women behind the operating table or on the university faculty” but that these were “rare tokens [that] only highlight the persistent discrimination against women as a group.” According to the Canadian Association of University Teachers, “the proportion of women university teachers increased from 16.2 per cent in 1984 to 23.4 per cent in 1994. Since then, the number of male academics increased by about 3,200, while the number of women rose by 4,300. By 2004, nearly a third of all f­ ull-​­time university teachers were women.” In a similar vein, the American Medical Association reports that, in a number of medical specialties, a majority of the residents are now women. These are hardly “rare tokens.” On the other hand, he may be right that, as many have benefited, more have suffered. There has been what some authors call “a feminization of poverty.” Diana Pearce, the writer who first used this expression, in 1978, claimed that fully ­two-​­thirds of the poor over the age of sixteen were women. And there has also been what might be called a transfer of burdens, from richer to poorer women. Working parents, for example, rely on predominantly female day care workers or nannies who generally earn a fraction of what they do. Gender as a Way of Knowing Illich clearly underestimated the extent to which “gender parity,” as it is now called, could be achieved on existing economic terms. The economy proved more prolific, and women more adaptable, than he thought possible. But I’m not sure this really blunts Illich’s critique of sexism as such. Throughout his book, Illich uses this word in two senses. The first is what he calls moral sexism. It refers to the invidious ascendancy of one or the other sex. Male scientists, for example, practice moral sexism when they incorporate “male prejudices . . . into scientific categories.” Often this provokes an answering “female sexism,” and Illich notes its prevalence as “a trendy perspective, adopted increasingly also by men.” But “more fundamental,” says Illich, is what he calls epistemological sexism. He defines it as a stance that has filtered “gender” out of its “concept,” but I think this can be taken to mean any stance that

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pretends to universality or, put a different way, any stance from which culture, history, and embodiment have been erased. Here I think we are at the nub of Illich’s argument and at the reason why I dare call the book’s disappearance from the intellectual record of our time a tragedy. Illich was generally taken as recommending the reestablishment of gender. Even those who recognized that Illich considered gender “irrecuperable” were often misled by his talk of the “sad loss of gender” into seeing his book as a work of nostalgia or lamentation. Few took seriously his claim that he was sketching a path toward a world after economics or his hopeful closing remark: “I strongly suspect that a contemporary art of living can be recovered.” I believe the book can be more easily read in this light today. In our conversations in 1988, Illich told me that when he finished Shadow Work, he “came to the conclusion that [he] had to go one step deeper [and] raise the epistemological issue of modern European modes of perception.” If we read according to this account of what he was trying to do and ignore the polemics and rhetorical provocations that complicate this reading, then it’s easy to see that what matters about gender is not this or that local regime. Illich’s primary concern was not how, in Styria, the sickles used by men differ from the sickles used by ­women—​­of which, in any case, there’s surprisingly little in the ­book—​­but the way in which all premodern societies incarnate a “symbolic duality.” This duality is expressed not just in the form of gender but in many constitutive p­ airs—​­time and eternity, here and beyond, microcosm and macrocosm, and so on. Gender, as Illich’s preferred “heuristic” and his way of adding historical depth to his claim that otherness has disappeared from our world, is, of course, emphasized; but if gender is, finally, an epistemological category and a way of relativizing “modern European modes of perception,” then it has to be seen not just as a given cultural order but just as much as a way of thinking and even as a precondition of thinking. Gender points to something that is larger than gender. I think that part of what Illich was doing, in Gender, was beginning to elaborate a philosophy of complementarity, which holds, in brief, that complete knowledge is not available to a single point of view or, put another way, that only complementary perspectives can comprehend the world as a whole. He mentions that this way of looking at things has sometimes been adopted within contemporary physics to account for the paradoxes of quantum mechanics but that it has failed to penetrate the social sciences where universal categories still ­prevail—​­he cites “concepts such as role, class, exchange, and, ultimately, ‘system.’” “Gender,” he writes, “bespeaks a complementarity that is enigmatic and asymmetrical.” “Only

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metaphor can reach” for this complementarity, Illich says, while “sex can be discussed in the unambiguous language of science.” Gender harbors tact, reticence, and respect for the unknown and the unknowable, while sex plays out in the bare, unshadowed light of accredited knowledge. Illich’s Critique of Science With the “ambiguity” of gender as a foil, Illich further elaborates the critique of modern science he began in Tools for Conviviality and Medical Nemesis. In those books, he argued that science substitutes for and disables judgment, as scientific criteria insinuate themselves into the proper place of moral criteria. In Gender, he adds the idea that science enforces what he calls a “central perspective.” “Central perspective,” as I understand it, is a view from which all particular standpoints have been erased. It is what philosopher Thomas Nagel once called a “view from nowhere”—an ­all-​­seeing eye that sees everything but itself. Gender, for Illich, signifies a situated form of ­knowledge—​­a world of shadows, partial perspectives, and uncertainty, a world in which there is always a domain into which only metaphor can reach, a world above all of limits. Central perspective signifies a position from which I imagine I can see everything. This pretended omniscience still obtains, Illich says, even when women and other previously excluded groups become involved and attempt to create what one writer calls “stereoscopic” or ­two-​­eyed science. One can take up new subject matters, include new categories of experience, and compensate for inherited male bias without ever challenging the underlying presumption that there is one science, one standard of validity, one set of universal categories at play. Gender, as Illich uses the word, involves the recognition that knowledge is always partial and contingent. He therefore ­recommends—​­I’ve quoted the sentence ­before—“that the researcher who wants to avoid the bias implicit in a central perspective ought to identify himself clearly as one engaged in research that is disciplined, critical, w ­ ell-​­documented and public, but emphatically n ­ on-​­scientific.” He wants to retain all the primary virtues associated with science while disowning only the hubris encoded in the name. Illich speaks of central perspective in order to highlight the supposed elimination of all ambiguity from scientific knowledge, but I wonder, otherwise, whether his meaning would have been more or less the same if he had simply said perspective. Perspective, in painting, already refers to a simulated point of v­ iew—​­the creation of something no eyes will ever see, except in a painting. Historically, it was closely allied with techniques of objectivity in natural philosophy. Experimental science “stages” nature in order to demonstrate what is hidden from our senses,

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just as the illusion of perspective in painting shows us a reality quite different than what appears to our sight. Illich’s claim is that, once science ceases to be a supplement to sense and instead replaces it, the faculty of practical judgment is disabled. To forget that science is artificially produced knowledge, valid only on its own terms, he says, is corrosive of common sense. Illich second new claim about science in Gender is that it “naturalizes” its subject matter. By this he means that science insinuates the belief that what it is describing is the true nature of things and not a rather rarified abstraction from things as they actually present themselves to our senses. Scientific facts are a­ rtificial—​­they can be stabilized and sustained only under carefully controlled c­ onditions—​­but they circulate in popular talk as nature. Later on, when Illich came across Alfred North Whitehead’s term “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”—for “the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete”—he enthusiastically adopted the phrase as saying exactly what he had been trying to say. His most extended analysis of this fallacy occurs in a lecture he gave at the Colegio de México the year after Gender was published called “The Social Construction of Energy.” There he shows how the physicist’s “E”—the “E” of e = mc2—a term “beyond imagination”—became conflated with a p ­ reviously ordinary and unassuming English word for vigor or vitality. “E,” as Illich says, is “meaningful only within a formula.” This meaning is elaborated continuously in physics, beginning from the early ­nineteenth-​­century “Laws of ­Thermodynamics.” But “E” doesn’t remain within physics or the formulas that define its meaning there. It spreads and invests the everyday word with its aura. Sociological concepts are made in its image. Work and energy become mutually defining t­erms—​­the most common ordinary language definition of “E” is the capacity to do ­work—​­and Marx soon supposes that “the whole of ­so-​­called world history is nothing more than the production of man through human work.” Libido, in Freud, mirrors “E” in the same way. Every permutation of desire reduces to a concept of thermodynamic equilibrium within the psyche. Economics and ecology, insofar as they map nature and society in terms of “energy flows,” also receive the imprint of “E.” The term even acquires a mystical dimension. German physicist Werner Heisenberg, in his 1955–56 Gifford Lectures, calls it “the substance out of which . . . all things were made . . . that which causes changes, and changes, but is never lost . . . that which can be transformed into movement, heat, light, tension . . . that is energy.” This is what Illich means by ­naturalization—​­the word energy, as transformed by science, functions in ordinary language as “a collage whose persuasiveness rests on the assertion that what it expresses is natural.” The term has all the hallmarks of a myth, a story about the g­ ods—​­obvious enough in the

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Heisenberg quote with its echoes of the prologue to the Gospel of John (“through whom all things were made”) and the Chandogya Upanishad (“All is Brahman.”)— but its scientific pedigree assures us that it expresses only nature. Illich’s rejection of “central perspective,” like much else in Gender, might be taken as lacking nuance. More deliberate thinkers, like philosophers Charles ­Taylor and Hubert Dreyfus in their recent Retrieving Realism, take care to specify the contexts in which scientific knowledge is useful and valid, and those in which what they also call “the view from nowhere” can be mystifying. Science, they say, is t­ rue—​­the atomic weight of gold, in their example, can be shown to be the same everywhere and at all t­imes—​­and science makes p ­ rogress—​­Galileo’s mechanics, they say, are demonstrably superior to Aristotle’s. But then they argue on the other hand that scientific knowledge is of limited validity. They insist, for example, that our primary knowledge of things comes from our direct and primordial contact with the world and that science depends on this embodied knowledge even as it brackets it. Illich does not bother with such stipulations, though as far as I know he accepted them. First of all, he is interested, in the book under discussion, in how science looks when regarded from the standpoint of gender and the fundamental duality it symbolizes. Second, he takes as his starting point a situation in which society is already “stunned by a delusion about science” without pausing to say what the proper uses of science might be were this delusion overcome. What concerned him was a world in which scientific phantoms have taken on the appearance of tangible, everyday realities: where people speak familiarly of their genes, as if they were referring to an ordinary object and not a somewhat blurry theoretical construct; where unthinkably complicated simulations of the earth’s climate drive political decisions; where the womb becomes a public place and families put ultrasound images of the unborn on their mantelpieces and “bond” with them; where the person standing beside you in the street may be conversing with someone on the other side of the world. Illich considered that t­ echno-​­science had eclipsed sense, or what Maurice Merleau Ponty once beautifully called “the soil of the sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body.” This is the context in which Illich wrote, a context that he considered to be a dire emergency because of the speed with which the growing prevalence of scientific and technological abstractions were hollowing out people’s senses. Under these circumstances he didn’t always stop to acknowledge the value or the validity that science might have in a world where it complemented common sense rather than eclipsing it. A second point that is relevant to Illich’s treatment of science in Gender is the book’s rhetorical mode. Uwe Pörksen noted on first meeting Illich at the

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­ issenschaftskolleg that “he sees himself as a prophet.” Illich rejected the ­name—​­he W argued that after the Incarnation the vocation of the prophet was replaced by that of the ­friend—​­and yet there is a sense in which it fits. In his books of the 1970s, it was usually clear that Illich was calling for a moderated and rebalanced modernity. He opposed what he called “idolatry of scientific method” but at the same time recognized that the new forms of subsistence he imagined as “conviviality” would incorporate and depend on the fruits of both science and industry. From Gender onward this is no longer so clear. Illich had become interested in deepening his critique of modern certainties and “modes of perception” and in finding in history the contrasts that would make what is taken for granted in the modern show up. From time to time he would reiterate his hope that a “contemporary art of living can be recovered”—the concluding words of ­Gender—​­but generally he appears to be engaged in such a relentless, r­ oot-​­and-​­branch critique of modernity that what is hopeful or even applicable in his ideas can be hard to see. A quite scathing sarcasm is not uncommon. For example, professionals, in general, are compared to racists because they have in common their propensity to “define deficiencies,” and “the professional and the racist ethos” are said to “converge.” At another point he gives the back of his hand to “conscientization,” a method of education he had praised at the time it was developed by his Brazilian friend and colleague Paolo Freire. In Gender, he calls it, somewhat harshly, “a kind of political s­ elf-​­help adult education organized mostly by clergymen popularizing Marxist categories to help the poor discover that they are ‘humans.’” I mention these provocations once again in order to establish the fact that the book seems to me to invent its own unique genre. Elements of prophecy, satire, and poetry are freely mixed with a formidable but sometimes cursory show of scholarship. A “balanced” view of his subject is, therefore, not to be expected. It is not so much that he has renounced his earlier view that a convivial society can deploy science “effectively” by deflating its pretensions, recognizing its advantages, and assigning it its proper place in the hierarchy of knowledge; it’s more that he has gone beyond this view into new uncharted territories. “Old men ought to be explorers,” T. S. Eliot says, and, although Illich at fi ­ fty-​­six when Gender was published was not that ancient, he certainly subscribed to Eliot’s advice. Sex and Science Sex and science are inextricably linked in Illich’s analysis. Sex, as we have just seen, is one of the children of “E.” It is a universal fluid, circulating in bodies with different plumbing, as Illich says, but common to both. Like science, it ought to have no

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shadows, as these are where repression, ignorance, and misinformation propagate. Modesty and reticence may likewise disguise and embellish repression or domination. Sex is, above all, natural, and contemporary society is committed to fostering this naturalness and encouraging the diverse forms in which it is expressed. Indeed, defining and protecting each kind and degree of sexuality is now one of the leading edges of progressive politics. This entanglement of sex and science is just one instance of how the words sex and gender gather meanings as Gender’s argument develops. Both are, ultimately, paradigms, exemplars, or, as Illich himself concedes, ideal types rather than descriptions of some actual state of affairs. Sex summarizes and stands for modernity, just as gender condenses the premodern world. Sex incarnates the unlimited, while gender stands for limits. These limits are often a­ rbitrary—​­in one valley the women sow and the men reap, in the next the positions may be ­reversed—​ ­signifying a world in which contingency and custom draw the boundaries, not reason. During festive periods, various forms of travesty, inversion, and transgression may turn the whole scheme upside down. Deviance may be allowed and even celebrated, as in indigenous North American traditions of the “two spirit.” The line remains intact. “One is born and bred into gender,” Illich says, while “the sex role is something acquired.” What this represents for Illich is a world in which things have a place, a fit, a proper size, a limit. And this, after all, has been his quest from the beginning: to write a constitution of limits. Throughout all his writings, a principle of order is being sought, and sought outside the institutional sphere in which ­self-​­interested clerisies try to convince us that what is good for them is good for us. Gender provides an image of such an order. This was the way, Illich says, in which communities maintained their proper size, and no one could claim universal competence or a superior position from which to dictate what is good for others. One gender checked, defined, and shaped the other. Gender as Metaphor Illich uses many terms to evoke what interests him about gender. He speaks of ­fuzziness, ambiguity, complementarity, otherness, enigma, metaphor—even, at one point, “the rootedness of gender in the deepest mystical experiences.” All these terms, in one way or another, point at the existence of an inaccessible, opposing ­domain—​­a domain into which only imagination and metaphor can reach. “When I speak in metaphors,” Illich says, “I engage in a deviant discourse; I am alert to my special, odd, startling combination of words. I know that I cannot be understood

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unless he that listens to me is ­wide-​­awake to my intentional use of a term that carries other than literal meanings.” A metaphor identifies two things with each other, and, in this way, goes far beyond a simile which only compares them. Jesus’ saying “I am the vine and you are the branches” is a metaphor. The vine doesn’t stand for something ­else—​­Jesus is the vine. The world evoked by metaphor is like the image from the Buddhist Avatamsaka Sutra of Indra’s net, in which each node or knot is a polished jewel whose surface reflects every other jewel in the net. English poet John Donne in one of his meditations says the same with his image of mankind as scattered pages that will, in the end, all “lie open to one another.” By metaphor things interpenetrate and become, as the apostle Paul says, “members one of another.” But metaphors are, on the other hand, only metaphors. They reach out without achieving or encompassing what they reach for. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” wrote English poet Robert Browning, “Else what’s a heaven for?” (Marshall ­McLuhan, inveterate punster, emended Browning’s question to “What’s a ­meta-​­phor?”) Gender, Illich says, is a metaphor: “It’s a metaphor for the ambiguous symbolic complementarity that constitutes each of the two genders.” And, at the same time, he writes, each of the genders is a metaphor for the other. I realize that the word metaphor is here being stretched almost to its breaking ­point—“What’s a ­meta-​­phor?” as McLuhan ­asked—​­but I think I know what Illich means. Each of the genders, he says in a footnote titled “Metaphors for the Other,” “is muted in relation to the other.” “Muted” here could mean silenced or just damped down, softened, or attenuated, as one might speak of the muting of color in a painting. Illich, I think, draws on this whole range of meanings. Because of this muting, one can speak about but not into the opposite domain, and this requires, Illich says, “a kind of metaphor.” Each gender possesses its own speech form by which it “grasp[s] the world in a ­gender-​­specific way,” and this is why a “a kind of metaphor” is necessary to reach into the domain of the o­ ther—​ ­literal language would represent it as being the same as the speaker’s world and thus misrepresent it. Each gender reaches the other by metaphor but at the same time is a metaphor for the other. “The metaphorical relationship,” Illich says, “can itself be represented in a metaphor.” Here he refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein and his demonstrations of how religious symbols can function in this ­way—​­as compact and irreducible summaries of experiences that are already metaphorical. At this ­point—​­and remember, apropos the difficulty of the book, that I am here explicating a single ­footnote—​­Illich lets his reader know that he is using the term gender “on three distinct levels”: first, “descriptively [to] refer to one of the two

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strong subsets of any vernacular reality”; second, to refer to “the whole” that is “constituted” by “the complementarity of these subsets”; and, finally, “on the level of epistemology,” as I quoted earlier, as “a metaphor for the ambiguous symbolic complementarity that constitutes each of the two genders (in the first sense) as metaphors for each other.” Then, without explanation or elaboration, he adds the kicker: “My thinking on this [last] point is nourished by the scholastic concept of relatio subsistens.” This is so surprising, and so sudden, as to raise the possibility that we might be dealing with an esoteric b ­ ook—​­a book that veils or dissimulates at least part of its purpose. In his book The Prophet of Cuernavaca, historian Todd Hartch argues that Illich was just such a ­writer—​­he speaks of Illich’s intentions as variously “obscured,” “coded,” “camouflaged,” and “hidden.” In a review of Hartch’s book I rejected this imputation as too blunt and too heedless of the explicit meanings of Illich’s work, but in Gender I think we really are faced with what can legitimately be called an esoteric style. If Illich’s concept of gender is “nourished” by a concept in medieval scholastic philosophy that is almost certainly unknown to most of his readers, oughtn’t he to have said what the concept is? Does the book perhaps have a covert theological agenda? Not exactly, in my view, but there is certainly something going on here between the lines. What seems only an aside or an afterthought serves notice that the author is not being fully explicit about everything that informs his approach. The careful reader might wish to explore further or perhaps reread the text in this new light. Those who do go further will discover that relatio subsistens is a scholastic ­re-​­description of the Christian mystery of the Trinity and of its three divine persons who are one and yet distinct. Subsistens is the participle of subsistere, the Latin verb that was used to translate the Greek hypostasis, which means “foundation, substance, or reality”—literally, “what is standing under.” What subsists is thus what has independent existence. Relatio obviously refers to something that is in relationship and therefore not independent, since whatever is in relationship can potentially be altered by that relationship. A subsistent relation is therefore, on the literal level, a contradiction in terms. But that is how the Trinity was understood: as a dependent relation between independent persons. Father, Son, and Spirit are each God, each a hypostasis in its own right, and yet each, in some sense, needs the other, yields to the other, and is defined by the other. In the centuries after this doctrine was first d ­ evised—​­there is no hint of it in the New T ­ estament—​ ­it was sometimes imagined as a dance, or perichoresis. Irish philosopher Richard

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Kearney once delighted me, in an interview I did with him, with the following description: Perichoresis in Greek uses the prefix peri, “around,” as in “periscope” or “periphery.” So, this is a picture of the three persons of the ­Trinity—​­Father, Son, and ­Spirit—​­moving around . . . giving space to the other. . . . In the perichoresis, each person of the Trinity cedes their place to the other. They say, “No, no, you sit there . . . after you,” and they move forward. And then the second person of the Trinity says, “No, no, I won’t sit there. I’m giving it to the third person,” and the third person is in fact the first. So, it’s always giving up your place and moving forward into the place left for you by the other.

As someone upon whom the awful majesty of the Triune God was strongly impressed while growing up, I was very taken with the idea of the Trinity as a dance in which each endlessly gives way to the other. The relatio subsistens is another version of this ineffable idea in which a contradiction in terms is used to name the way in which God can be plural and singular, dependent and independent, related and subsistent at the same time. The relationship of mutual “nourishment” between vernacular gender and the concept of relatio subsistens also shows us how the term gender dramatically enlarges its connotations and range of reference as Illich’s text unfolds. Biblical interpretation during the later medieval period was said to have four ­levels—​ ­Dante speaks of the “fourfold method,” which constitutes “the allegory of the theologians”—and I think Illich can be seen to be speaking on all four of them. These levels are the literal, the formal or typological (how events and figures in the Bible reflect each other), the moral (what it means for how we are to live), and the mystical. On the first, or literal level, Illich is concerned with gender versus sex as ways of constructing social space. On the formal or typological level, he is interested in the correlations of his two ideal types: how, for example, sex reflects science and science sex, as mutually reinforcing monisms or how gender reflects and is reflected by other premodern proportions. The moral level consists in Illich’s reflections on how we live now: how sex allows unlimited competition, unlimited circulation of commodities, and so forth, while gender acts to block and prevent these things. On the mystical level I would place Illich’s insight that gender reflects the divine complementarity evident in the relatio subsistens. These levels of meaning are inclusive rather than ­exclusive—​­like the angels ascending and descending in Jacob’s vision of the ladder, the meanings flow up and down, each level enriching the other.

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In Praise of Otherness “Gender,” Illich writes, “relates two persons to each other who are more profoundly other than r­ ole-​­playing [i.e., modern] individuals could ever be.” This otherness is expressed in different customs, different tool kits, different speech forms, different, though also overlapping, spaces, and so on. At the same time the two are profoundly related not just as parts of a whole that they constitute together but as constitutive of one another. They depend on one another, they define one another, and they stand (as metaphors) for one another. Each can understand itself only by analogy with the other. Each symbolizes for the other a realm into which only imagination can reach, and thus each, in a sense, is imagination or metaphor for the other. The implications reach, as Illich’s invocation of the relation subsistens shows, to the throne of God. Biblical religion, as Northrop Frye has shown so clearly, is a tissue of metaphors. The text is not a finger pointing at an event outside the body of words in which the revelation is conveyed. Religion is an event in ­language—​­a body of words, Frye says, is “all we get.” Imagination is the faculty by which we participate in it, and imagination, Illich seems to say, spreads its wings only across the deep divide that gender both symbolizes and incarnates. Without otherness, there is no imagination because there is no sense of a dimension that, though quintessentially real, can only be imagined. “Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.” Gender, with its mixture of communion and reserve, signifies what Illich thinks is properly true of every relationship. In a statement I quoted in my introduction, he speaks of “the gulf ” that separates any two people and of the need to “renounce searching for [unifying] bridges.” The only thing that is able to cross the gulf, he says, is “the other in [their] word which I accept on faith.” I can reach the other by metaphor and ­analogy—​­Illich speaks of the other’s “substantial l­ikeness”—but I must first give up the illusion that I know more about the other than I actually do. This crucial ­difference—​­the chasm set between ­us—​­is diminished or disregarded altogether, Illich thought, in a modern unisex regime where all are considered to be variations on the same theme. “The other in his word” can no longer reach me because the one facing me is no longer ­an-​­other. Gender, as Illich uses the term in his book, anchors a system of substantial or subsistent differences. Contemporary existence turns on i­dentity—​­an identity of great plasticity that can be molded into endlessly different forms but one in which all are finally the same in their ­difference—​­each just another voice in the great chorus of “likes” (and dislikes). The stock phrases we address to one a­ nother—​­be safe, take care, ­enjoy—​­enjoin duties assumed to be the same for all. We travel to places that have been

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made as much like the place we just left as possible. Goods, messages, and people circulate almost without impediment over the entire surface of the earth. System logics are ­comprehensive—​­resistance is reincorporated as feedback. Even the violent obscenities by which the disaffected try vainly to “make a difference” are soon engulfed and extinguished by ­well-​­meant ­explanations—​­think of how prized and how ineffectual edginess, disruption,and transgression now are. Sameness r­ules—​­everything happens and nothing happens because nothing can happen. Only substantial difference can produce novelty and surprise, and for this, there must be substances—things that can, in the old language, subsist. Gender models, mirrors, and incarnates what can both ­subsist—​­be the foundation of real d ­ ifferences—​­and be in relationship. The term subsistence, as we have seen already, was very important to Illich. He defined modernity as a “war against subsistence,” and he posited a renewed, ­techno-​ ­scientifically supplemented subsistence as the only answer to consumerism, sexism, and environmental destruction. This latter proposal was not well ­understood—​ ­partly, I think, because the word, for most, signified a mean and incommodious existence. Subsistence, in the common understanding, stood for both the stinginess of nature, as described by the theorists of scarcity, and the precariousness of existence where there is no provision against calamity. This is not the only example of Illich’s carefully but eccentrically chosen vocabulary eluding many of his contemporaries, but it is certainly a crucial one. Subsistence, for Illich, meant to stand on one’s own feet, to be able to speak in one’s own voice, and to be free of disabling dependence on commodified goods and services. To call this stance independence would probably be misleading because of the powerful overtones of individualism in that word. Illich could as easily be said to be in favor of dependence inasmuch as he was willing to rely on the fitful and unreliable charity of the other rather than replacing it with the guaranteed response of impersonal systems. I think probably the most important element in the word subsistence is the suggestion of s­ ubstance—​­of something, without going into all the philosophical niceties of the word, that can exist for itself or stand in itself. In the world of what Illich calls vernacular gender, two substantially different beings oppose and support one another, and this underwrites the substantial existence of this world and its immunity to denaturing abstractions. Illich uses various terms to try to describe the relationship he imagines, and that he thinks the historical and anthropological record reveals, between the genders. He speaks of their complementarity as asymmetrical and ambiguous, meaning roughly that their complementarity is approximate and not a precise ­point-​­for-​­point correspondence. He wanted to “convey the sense of difference, the sense of a relationship that can never quite be grasped.” Then he was told by his

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Greek mathematician friend Kostas Hatzikiriakou, a colleague for a time at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), that asymmetry was the wrong word for what he wanted to say. The correct term, Hatzikiriakou said, would be dissymmetry. One can find different definitions of this term, but, roughly speaking, it covers a middle ground between perfect symmetry and the lack of symmetry implied by asymmetrical. Mirror images are dissymmetric, as are “chiral” molecules in chemistry. For Illich it means “different entirely, though almost the same.” He illustrated, for me, with a story. I have this lovely teacher, who died in ’42—1142—Hugh of St. Victor, and in his De ­Sacramentis [Concerning the Sacraments], a book he left unfinished, he comes to the question: Why did God create Adam and Eve? . . . And he comes to the conclusion [that it was] because He had to give to Adam something that he could grasp, in every sense, something which was totally different from him, and different in such a way that he could be wounded by that difference, that he would be vulnerable to that difference. So He created Eve to give Adam a sense of how Creation and God relate to each other. Woman and man are God’s masterpiece, Hugh claims, because they are two entities whose proportionality is constitutive for both.

In this telling, Adam has his traditional priority in ­creation—​­Eve is created for ­him—​­but I don’t think the point of the story actually depends on it. Had Eve been created ­first—​­and Adam added for ­her—​­it would have been to give her the same reminder as she gave him. Each is constituted by the other regardless of priority, and they are each made painfully aware of difference by their sameness and of sameness by their difference. Two Kinds of Duality The word difference here is easily mistaken. Our world, on one level, seems to be one of multiplying differences, marked by nuances of identity, refinements of style, and a proliferation of choices unimagined by our ancestors. But, according to Illich, none of this constitutes difference in the sense of the term that he wanted to highlight in Gender. There are, he says, “two kinds of duality.” This was how he put it in our 1988 interview: I became increasingly convinced that the deepest change I could observe between then and now, between a prescientific, preindustrial past, ­pre-​­commodity-​­intensive past, and

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our present worldview . . . was the transition from one type of duality to another. It is quite clear that “two” can be conceived of in two different ways. When I say one, two can mean primarily, emotionally, conceptually the other, or it can mean one more of the same. . . . It seems to me that in all preliterate societies, or p ­ re-​­alphabetic ­Western ­societies I can study, the first way of conceiving duality shaped the depths of consciousness. There is me and there is the other; there is the m ­ icro-​­cosmos and there is the ­macro-​­cosmos; there is this world and the other world; here are the living and there are the dead; and, in the most profound sense, I am a man, and these others, women, are shaded for me, muted for me, other for me. There might be a search for a distant unity in which the world would disappear. But otherness, even at the height of intimacy, was what gave ultimate consistency to what today we call consciousness, to being here.

Illich goes on to say that with the advent of modernity “the human being, the self, the individual became the model of our thinking.” These are all universal categories. Within them differences, however momentous, are still, in the last analysis, incidental or, as Illich says, “accidental.” Otherness as ontological difference has collapsed. “What . . . is constitutive of all traditional language and culture and thought” has disappeared. “The tension between dissymmetric complementarities” has collapsed into an abstract unity. One is, first and foremost, a human being, to whom various secondary attributes can then be assigned. Illich’s project in Gender singles him out from both the structuralist and the ­post-​­structuralist movements that defined so much of the intellectual landscape of his time. Take, first, Claude ­Lévi-​­Strauss, the influential French anthropologist. ­Lévi-​­Strauss was looking for what one commentator calls “a universal reducible structure, making the Babel of tongues susceptible to the same kinds of diagnostic operations across countless specific instances.” Kinship structures, languages, ­mythologies—​­all exhibited a universal grammar. But within this universality, ­Lévi-​ ­Strauss was a great proponent of protecting and preserving cultural difference. His book Race and History argued that “the barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.” The paradox is resolved when one realizes that what defines the universal is endless difference. Structure is a system of differences that are the same in being different. In the mathematical and computer programming sense of the term, difference is an operator within a ­system—“a difference that makes a difference,” as Gregory Bateson memorably says. The phenomenon arguably intensifies in “­post-​­structuralism.” Jacques Derrida needs to coin a new word, “différance,” a deliberate misspelling of différence, to highlight the play of differences within texts and point to the endless deferral of meaning involved in the slide of significance

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from one term to the next, but he does not challenge the presumed universality of the field in which différance operates. In this sense, as Czech philosopher Erazim Kohak once said, the postmodern is only the reductio ad absurdum of the modern, as ­post-​­structuralism is the reductio ad absurdum of structuralism. Difference, in the contemporary sense, is d ­ ifference-​­within-​­sameness. Variation and diversity are proclaimed and celebrated as the very raison d’être of systems, but the system contains and conditions every difference. Illich is talking about a more fundamental ­difference—​­the difference between me and another who is not a member of the same system or structure as I am and whose being I can only comprehend analogically or metaphorically. No wonder then, as he said himself, that he was not well understood by his auditors in Berkeley, who listened “as engaged members of a movement” while he was trying to question the very foundation on which the movement for equality was premised. Wittgenstein says that our civilization is “characterized by the word progress,” not in the sense that progress is one of its features but because progress is its very “form.” A Sufi story told by Idries Shah moves in the same direction when it defines knowledge as the ability to distinguish between “the container and the content.” Illich was beginning to try to question the form, or container, of his civilization rather than its content or its surface features. Gender and the Church In this respect, the final section of Gender is very important. The form of a civilization is often related to its primary religious inspiration. Historian Arnold Toynbee, whom Illich studied in his youth, says that religion is the “chrysalis” out of which civilization “hatches.” Illich, though explicitly “not a Toynbean,” did increasingly come to think that the form of the modern West, and the certainties buttressing this form, had been shaped by the institutionalization of the Christian gospel. In this sense, he did see the medieval Church as the chrysalis from which modernity hatched. The idea is present throughout his writing. Already in Deschooling ­Society, the school is seen to derive many of its features from the Church. In Shadow Work, the book immediately preceding Gender in Illich’s catalogue, he found the roots of modern “international development” in the Christian view of the other as a “burden” to be “brought in.” Gender develops this idea and takes it much further than Illich had gone before. Illich roughly divided church history into two opposed millennia during which very different accounts were given of what it meant to be a Christian. During the

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first millennium, the Church approached the cultures into which it was inserted in a relatively accommodating spirit. It saw its scope and mission as universal, but it understood this mission as a crucial supplement to existing cultures, not as their replacement. Legend relates that St. Boniface, the ­eighth-​­century “apostle to the Germans,” began his mission by cutting down “the sacred oak” and having a church dedicated to St. Peter built with the wood, but it was Illich’s view that the Church of the first millennium generally showed a surprising hospitality to local spirits and local practices. The churches and cathedrals of the Romanesque period (roughly the sixth through the tenth centuries), he says, contained many mythological figures who “had come into the Church together with their own ‘nation,’ ” when it had been baptized: The furry guardians of local gender, upon arriving in the presbytery [the chancel or sanctuary of the church], were occasionally dressed up in the togas of martyrs or decorated with the insignia of clerical saints. Others found their niche in the ­carved-​­stone foliage, with their horns and scales intact. The young woman who was thrown to the dragon in the legend was now garbed as St. Margaret and placed above the altar, keeping the dragon on a leash. The river gods and satyrs, the kobolds and personified storms, all found their place, one in a capital, another in the bestiary frieze, and many as cornerstones or supports for doorways and chairs. Shaggy northern monsters shared the same column with Sassanian lions, chimeric peacocks recently lifted from a text in the library, and biblical figures in abundance. The Church felt confident of embracing heaven, hell and earth, together with all that could fly or crawl. For five hundred years, its rule of thumb remained: “Ecclesia omnia benedicat”—let the Church bless everything people do, see, or make. In the eleventh century, even the devil had become more of a joke than a threat. Local myths and customs enriched the ritual and made the cathedral a hothouse of old lore. The presence of this host of baptized symbols bore witness to the power of the Church’s message, and to the possibility of an infinite variety of vernacular existence under the shield, the aegis, of faith.

The Romanesque church provided Illich with an image of what Christianity might have been, an image of how the Good News might have been added to vernacular cultures without utterly destroying them. From the very beginning of his ministry to Puerto Rican migrants in New York, and on through his attempts to purge the American church of its imperial pretensions in the 1960s, he had promoted the idea that mission should be no more, and no less, than a leaven to be added to vernacular cultures. He interpreted the Hebrew Bible’s naming of the

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most high as “God of gods and Lord of lords” as indicating a quintessence of divinity rather than a rival conception of it, a conception so serene and exalted that it could comprehend the exuberance of local cultural imaginations of the divine without being threatened by them. One can, of course, counterpose plenty of evidence that the Lord of Hosts was a jealous ­battle-​­god vying for supremacy with rivals gods on their level, as, for example, when Elijah bests “the prophets of Baal” in a contest to see whose god will send fire on command. But Illich is referring, I think, to an emerging possibility within Hebrew monotheism rather than to its more primitive expressions. He translates the Vulgate’s deus deorum as “the Lord of Idols” and takes the phrase as warranting a qualified respect for the divinities who are summarized and completed in what many traditions call the high or ultimate god. “In Mexico, when I say my prayers, I always bow towards Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, the Masters of the Valley in which I live. I want them to behave like the idols or spirits you can see in Romanic churches on the c­ apitals—​­the dragons, the whales, and the mermaids. They are all there in the Romanic church, to carry the building which represents the whole universe, the cosmos, which lies in God’s hands.” This hospitality to local spirits and local customs was gradually lost with the reform of the Church that began around the turn of the millennium. A New Kind of Marriage I will take up the character of this reform, and Illich’s view of it as the mold and matrix of the modern world, in a later chapter. Illich’s view, in brief, was that, beginning in the eleventh century, the Church declared its independence of all cultural and political constraint, uprooting itself from the society in which it had been embedded and restructuring itself as a prototype of the modern corporation. Increasingly, the clergy confronted the faithful as individuals, subject to universal rules, and not as people whose proprieties were properly shaped by their gender. Power passed from the community and its informal “moral economy” to the institution and its formal codes. One instance of this transformation was the reinvention of marriage, first as a sacrament of the Church and second as a legal bond between an individual man and an individual woman. Marriage, up to this time, had been, in Illich’s words, “principally a ceremony to tie together two families related by complex lines of kinship.” It was “a tie creating knots between two webs of gender.” The Church might bless it, but marriage remained embedded in the soil of communal ­relationships—​­an unfaithful or otherwise unsatisfactory husband or wife was subject to community censure in the form of what English tradition called “rough

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music.” Now marriage became, in theory at least, the act of an individual man and an individual woman regardless of their context. Illich’s favorite example was a letter Héloise d’Argenteuil (1101–1164) wrote to Peter Abelard (1079–1142), after she had already become a nun, in which she explained “that she was and would always remain his wife because she had freely consented to their liaison.” “If I had the skill,” Illich told me, I would write a novel about Abelard, and in it there would be a scene in the Paris tavern where Abelard played his songs. Sitting there, by chance, would be the old monk Gratian, who first codified church law; and he would watch as Héloise, having escaped her uncle’s house through a window, entered the tavern and explained to Abelard her revolutionary conception of marriage. It would be from this overheard conversation in a Paris tavern, according to my conceit, that the great lawyer and jurist would take the idea that marriage is created by the free consent of a man and a woman.

Héloise here is a harbinger of a c­ hange—​­it hardly needs s­aying—​­that will unfold over many centuries and against great resistance. Illich’s admiration for her innocent courage is evident. He can see the glorious side of being able to choose your own spouse rather than having the choice imposed, however considerately the elders may do it and however much it may knit up the communal fabric. But what he emphasizes is the way in which the disembedded conjugal couple become subjects first of the Church and then of the state. The new conception of marriage, he says, allows “the welding of two individuals into a taxable unit.” These innovations, according to Illich, impaired the power of gender but did not eliminate it. He refers to the six-­hundred-​­year period between the time when the Church began to remake itself as a legal state and the industrial revolution as the epoch of “broken gender.” The conjugal couple took on a heightened significance, and the state and the Church assumed the power to “assign new gendered functions beyond and against traditional gendered proprieties,” but work remained gendered. “A kind of wedlock spread,” Illich writes, “in which men and women yoked in matrimonial production were kept to their respective gendered tasks.” The couple, as a new economic nexus, transcended gender but, at the same time, remained partly bound by it, and it was this blending of novelty and tradition, according to Illich, that gave Europe its distinctive character and its economic advantage v­ is-​­à-​­vis more purely traditional societies. What Illich means by the assigning of new “gendered functions” that offended tradition proprieties can be seen in the case of changing representations of the Virgin Mary as she moves

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from “Theotokos [­God-​­bearer] in the Greek apsis to the kitsch in a Catholic couple’s bedroom.” “Step by step,” Illich writes, “she became detached from gender and shed both the aura of myth that had been borrowed from the goddess and the series of strong theological epithets with which the Church fathers had adorned her. She turned into a model for ‘woman’ . . . the conscience of genderless man.” The Gothic Housecleaning The reform movement in the Church produced, along with the other changes I’ve been writing about, what Illich calls the “Gothic housecleaning” of Church and cathedral. The “furry guardians of gender” and “shaggy . . . monsters” that had found their place in the Romanesque church were now expelled: The dragons and kobolds, the basilisks and wild men, were squeezed out of the interior, as architecture changed from Romanesque to Gothic. There was no room for them on the tightly bundled, narrow and pointed pillars. Like bats, for a century or more, they continued to cling to the outside of the church. As gargoyles, they stuck out into the air as if they were about to take flight, meanwhile, disgorging water from their mouths or groins. The theologians, wrapped up in conscience, could no longer bless them. As the Renaissance approached, learned men interpreted the memory of this harlequin rabble as emblems, symbols, and cabalistic types. And, as a matter of fact, the gargoyles did take off, roaming around the countryside for the next three centuries as creatures never before seen: defrocked saints, martyrs with club feet, dragons with clipped wings. They behaved like packs of domesticated animals gone wild again, like alley cats in a ­war-​­ravaged town. These strange spirits called forth a new kind of priest, generally called a “witch.”

Illich relates here a profound disturbance in what he calls “religiosity.” In an interesting footnote by this name, he says that he would like to reserve the term religion for “those phenomena that can be perceived from a central perspective and, therefore . . . be the subject of scientific research.” By “religiosity,” on the other hand, he means to refer to “all the gendered acts of prayer and devotion, all the concrete gendered rituals, blessings and songs that express vernacular feeling.” As we have heard, Illich thought that, during the first millennium, popular religiosity had retained much of its character and consistency even as it was brought under the Christian umbrella. The marvelous creatures that he described earlier were welcomed into the Church and, so to speak, domesticated. The Gothic reforms

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that set them loose again can be understood, in Illich’s terms, as the institution of that purified, compact, doctrinally clarified thing that we today call religion. The result, Illich claims, was that Europe became prey to new fears, as these now feral demigods and monsters began to haunt their dreams. The witch as “the priestess of the epoch of broken gender” became their presiding spirit and the epitome of early modern Europe’s fears. Where some have seen disenchantment and the emergence of what Charles Taylor calls “the buffered self,” Illich imagines something more uncanny. Toward a Philosophy of Complementarity Illich’s six-­hundred-​­year epoch of “broken gender” gave way to the industrial revolution. Production and reproduction were polarized, women were sentimentalized and confined to a shrunken domestic sphere, and everything ancillary to production became shadow work. I summarized Illich’s account of these developments in the previous chapter, so I will now turn to the ways in which Gender advanced the project in which I think he had been engaged all along: defining the limits within which people can live, find satisfaction, and be open to the truth of their condition. What Gender adds is the idea of complementarity. One of the ways in which Illich conceived modernity was as an escape from dependence on one another. Contemporary ­persons—​­apprised of their needs, armed with their rights, the world at their ­fingertips—​­exert, by their unprecedented independence of others, a lonely sovereignty. The complementarity of gender provided Illich with a compelling image of mutual ­dependence—​­the image of a world in which my very existence is a gift from the other. I have probably already put enough stress on what everyone, at the time he wrote, seemed to miss: that this was a “heuristic” ­image—​­a way of looking at contemporary ­reality—​­and not a condition he thought it possible or desirable to reinstitute. But it was nonetheless a powerful and suggestive image. Without complementarity, we lose the very otherness of the other. Unless there are things I can only learn through the existence of my other and opposite, there is no real otherness. And, with the loss of otherness, we lose the grounds for imagination. We are reduced to that condition which William Blake calls “single vision”—a state in which the same goes on forever and there is no limit beyond which only the imagination can pass. Boundaries become, as Illich says, “frontier[s] with no beyond.” What is ultimately at stake, for Illich, in the collapse of complementarity into monism, is our access to God, though this is never made explicit in the text. It was his conviction that, by the Incarnation, God had emptied himself into a human

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person and that once God had become present in the world in this way, then God could potentially be met with in the person of any other, even, as Jesus says, “the least of these my brothers.” “Whoever loves another,” Illich says, “loves [the Lord] in the person of that other.” It is only through the other that God’s word can reach us, and for this to happen, there must be an other—someone who resists my prefabricated categories and can be disclosed only by charity and imagination. Complementarity is a mode of a­ wareness—​­Gender, remember, enacted Illich’s sense that he “had to raise the epistemological issue of modern European modes of perception”—and awareness is an important term in Illich’s thought. It’s what he unreservedly recommends in place of programs, plans, and agendas intended to bring the future into line. Part of a philosophy of complementarity is the recognition that we can never apprehend reality as a w ­ hole—​­it will always have aspects that are shadowed and available only to a complementary point of view. This predicament cannot be overcome, but it can be held in awareness. The angel with the flaming sword who guards the way back to Paradise also marks the limits of our knowledge. Such awareness must always be, in some measure, tragic awareness, and it was, for this reason, I think, that Illich so often invoked figures from Greek mythology, like Nemesis, in his writings of the 1970s. This has puzzled some commentators. In an interview broadcast on French television in 1972, for example, his friend ­Jean-​­Marie Domenach expressed surprise that Illich had “talked a lot about these goddesses”—the interview took place in a garden in front of a statue of the Greek goddess P ­ andora—​­but hadn’t “mentioned the name of Christ.” Illich wittily brushed off the question, saying that he preferred “not to speak about my friends in a superficial way” and then added that “nowadays, people tend to use the name of God in vain, usually to justify something.” But had he wished to answer more fully, I think he would have said that Christianity, in its triumphalism, had so completely lost the tragic awareness of Nemesis that Greek mythology was the only remaining resource within his tradition to convey his sense of limits. The philosophy of complementarity that I think Illich was beginning to sketch in Gender has many antecedents in Western thought, though Illich attempts no genealogy. Even a very partial list would have to include G. W. F. Hegel, Nicholas of Cusa, William Blake, C. G. Jung, and Neils Bohr. Another rich source is the Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah, and it is intriguing that one of Illich’s colleagues at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, where Illich did a lot of the research for Gender, was Gershom Scholem, a pioneering scholar of Jewish mysticism, then in the last year of his life. I have no idea what influence, if any, Scholem exerted on Illich’s ­thinking, but it is certainly true that the Kabbalah, as Scholem presented it, is a rich

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source for the philosophy of complementarity that I see taking shape in ­Gender. To take just one example, Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezritch, also known as the Great Maggid, taught that everything not only “contains its opposite” but is “revealed as its opposite.” This, I believe, was also Illich’s view and part of his understanding of complementarity. He called his way of proceeding “walking the watershed”: I like to walk along the watershed and to know that left and right are profoundly different from each other and contradictory to a high degree. The world of sex holds together only because of the rests [i.e., remains] of gender that survive in it and sprout in it. The world of cybernetic modeling, of computers as root metaphors for felt perception, is dangerous and significant only as long as there is still textual literacy in the midst of it. Transportation systems can function only as long as people have legs to walk to the car and open the door. Hospital systems can make sense only as long as people still engage in that totally intransitive activity which is living. I wish I could find a way of never appearing like a preacher who focuses your attention on the scenery on only one side of the watershed. . . . Once thinking becomes a monocular perception of reality it’s dead.

It is the opposite of each thing, in this statement, that gives color, consistency, and outline to that thing. Thinking dies when the opposites are flattened into one. Later, Illich would add another metaphor to this description of himself as one who “walks the watershed.” In a presentation to the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 1996, he called himself a Zaunreiter, a fence rider (and, he added, “an old name for a witch”) with one foot in Catholic philosophy and the other in the mud of the “exotic” roads along which his journey had taken him. Complementarity, in Illich, is not a mechanical principle or a rule. He sees that all things contain their opposites and, if pushed far enough, turn into their opposites, but not in some predictable, p ­ oint-​­for-​­point way. His language of ambiguity, dissymmetry, and metaphor is an attempt to evoke this fuzzy, indistinct, nonmechanical character. In a passage I quoted earlier, he talks about Hugh of St. Victor’s account of the creation of Eve as a being who is the same as Adam and, at the same time, “totally different from him and in such a way that [Adam] could be wounded by that difference.” He adopted the term dissymmetry as a way of speaking about this quality of being the same but different, “corresponding in everything but in everything slightly off the mark: “In German I have a simple way of expressing it: rücken means move, verrücken means moving off [the] mark, out of focus. Now people who are verrückt are ­crazy—​­you know it from Yiddish. So, God created a

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world which is, in the supreme form, to say it in Yiddish, verrückt. And that’s the essence of the world which God has created.” Recognizing this verrückt character in complementarity is a warning, I think, against applying the idea too schematically. Nevertheless, I do think it is a revolutionary principle because of the way in which it challenges the idea of equality as sameness or identity. Illich more than once told the story of a lecture he gave at Harvard in the later 1970s during which he used the expression the human body. Afterward, he was questioned by Norma Swenson, one of the founders of the Boston Women’s Health Collective, which produced the widely read and widely imitated book Our Bodies, Ourselves. “Professor Illich,” she asked, “have you ever seen a human body?” This reminder that bodies are always the bodies of men or of women “hit me,” Illich said, “believe me.” The “considerable influence” Norma Swenson had on Illich is evident in Gender. At the outset Illich deprecates “the abstract genderless norm of ‘the human’” and compares “the struggle to create economic equality between genderless humans of two different sexes” with “the efforts made to square the circle with ruler and straight edge.” But this argument unfolds on two levels, which can easily be confused: on one, the question is whether equality is attainable; on the other, the question is whether it’s desirable. These questions need to be considered separately, I think. For and Against Equality It’s clear that Illich believed that equality was an unattainable mirage for ­women—​­a rigged game, played by men’s rules, in which women are bound to suffer “ever new kinds of defeat.” The evidence on this point, as I’ve said, is ambiguous. On the one hand, there has been more progress toward a rough economic equality between men and women than Illich seemed to believe possible in 1982. On the other, there has been a “feminization of poverty.” Equally significant has been what might be called the naturalization, or perhaps the depersonalization, of sexual relations, as the last vestiges of gendered propriety have been driven from the field. “Genderless modern humans behave almost as apes” is Illich’s tart observation in Gender. (This, I know, is a contested point of view. Many attribute all difficulties between men and women to the continuing effects of patriarchy, but there is also a case to be ­made—​­not h ­ ere—​­that, with the falling away of those old modesties and courtesies that rest finally on an admiring sense of difference, courtship has become ever more nasty, brutish, and short.) Let’s say that the signs here point in opposite

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directions. Whatever is the case, there remains the deeper question not of what is achievable but of what is desirable. This question ought not to be obscured by the rhetorical brio with which Illich argues that women can’t get ahead in a unisex regime. If formal equality were achievable and that style of invidious comparison which Illich calls “moral sexism” could be eliminated, there would still be the “more fundamental” question of what Illich calls “epistemological sexism”—the ironing out of complementarity and its replacement by the monotony of “single vision”. “Take away . . . the otherness of the other,” Illich says, “and both [men and women] cease to be what they are.” The important legacy of Gender, for me, is its challenge to equality as the highest good rather than its demonstration of the perverse consequences that are bound to beset the enforcement of equality between “genderless humans.” But here we have moved onto a new terrain: Illich’s lifelong investigation of the ways in which modernity turns the Gospel inside out. Equality, by many accounts, is the essential Christian idea, summarized in the apostle Paul’s declaration to the church in Galatia that “there is neither Jew nor Greek . . . neither bond nor free . . . neither male nor female . . . for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Paul clearly considered this a messianic dispensation and not an achievable worldly state. The worldly statuses he mentions are mysteriously canceled yet not abolished, for elsewhere he advises the church in Corinth that each should “continue to lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him.” His ­well-​­known opinion that it is “disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church” shows well enough his intention to preserve existing social hierarchies until the approaching end of time when all “shall be changed . . . ” Paul felt that this “day of the Lord” was imminent, but, in time, this feeling faded, and Christians began to realize the truth of Alfred Loisy’s bon mot that Jesus had announced the kingdom but what had arrived was the Church. Equality began its slow but inexorable unfolding as a worldly ideal. The transformation of marriage, from an alliance between families, governed by the proprieties of gender, into a free choice of two individuals, is an epoch in the gradual progress of this idea. (Illich, at one point, uses the interesting figure of “digestion” for the process by which Gospel truths become social projects. At another moment, he speaks of how “religiosity materializes previously ­un-​­thought notions and makes them fleshy and impressive.”) Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835) presents equality as an idea with an overwhelming and irresistible momentum. By his time, it had already become a t­ aken-​­for-​­granted element of what Charles Taylor would later call “the social imaginary,” something that he conceives as lying deeper than any “intellectual scheme” and constituting our basic ­pre-​­theoretical feeling of how things

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fit together and make sense. Illich means much the same thing by ­certainties—​ ­those things that we won’t question because it will never occur to us that they are ­questionable. This brief history is just to indicate the enormity of what Illich was taking on with his challenge to equality, universality, individuality, and “the human.” To ask those who were pursuing equality as an unquestioned good to stop and question it was neither a comfortable nor a popular position. But what exactly was he questioning? A certainty, like an iceberg, has most of its bulk below the water, so it’s probably good to try to qualify the various senses of equality in order to understand more precisely what parts of the term Illich was trying to put into doubt. Equality has two major sets of m ­ eanings—​­one pertaining to justice, fairness, and respect; one pertaining to sameness and commensurability. I would say that it was only in the second sense that Illich argued against equality. Sex, science, and scarcity are all universal concepts thought to bear on a homogeneous field in which they apply without limit. The science of economics holds that all humans show an underlying “propensity”—Adam Smith’s ­word—​­to use a rational means/ends framework to allocate scarce resources to competing uses, even if they can’t display this inclination until the power of priests and other ­self-​­interested cultural authorities is checked and their inner homo economicus is finally able to exert itself. Commensurability has implicitly been there all along. Things can only be compared, exchanged, and made equal when a common standard of value exists. When Hobbes says that “the worth of a man is his price,” he asserts that all can be ranked according to how they are “esteemed by others.” What cannot be compared cannot be exchanged. Illich speaks loudly against equality as sameness. But he also speaks loudly for equality in its sense of equity, arguing that most women suffer irremediable disadvantages in a realm of universal circulation and competition. The two points are connected. Illich claims that idealizing equality may allow some women to rise to new heights of wealth and influence but that it will hurt many ­more—​­by lowering the status of every form of sustenance that occurs outside the cash nexus in which equality finds its measure, by fostering an illusory sense of opportunity, and by inviting those who fail to seize these imaginary opportunities to blame themselves. His analysis of feminism, in this respect, took the same form as his analysis of every other modern institution that he e­ xplored—​­it incites envy and delivers frustration. Only by reversing economic growth, unbuilding the global megalith, and restoring the human scale will the majority of women regain their dignity, he says, because only then will the contribution of those who have been

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shunted aside in the rat race begin to matter. This is the sole sense in which Illich speaks against equality: e­ quality-​­as-​­justice, he says, cannot be achieved without a firm rejection of ­equality-​­as-​­sameness. Fissures in Illich’s Argument Illich, as I began to say earlier, was not read as he wished to be. He recognized the difficulty himself, telling me in 1988—six years after the Berkeley fi ­ asco—​ ­that he still “found it impossible to accept invitations to lecture on what I mean by gender.” He could not make himself understood, he said, because “the category of the human being is such a profound certainty of p ­ ost-​­Enlightenment thought that my claim that this is a recently engineered social construct is simply unacceptable.” This was certainly part of the problem, but not perhaps all of it. Illich had as agile and discerning a mind as I have ever known, but he was not a systematic thinker who worried overmuch about the consistency and completeness of his thought. In 1988, when I tried to get him to revisit the old texts that I had carefully reread in preparation for my first major interview with him, he joked that “in an examination of what Illich has said and meant, you would pass with flying colors, and I wouldn’t get a passing mark.” Perhaps he exaggerated when he went on to tell me that his old books were “dead written stuff of that time [in which they were written],” but I do think he is best understood as a man who faithfully and attentively followed his inspiration wherever it led and then moved on. One cannot be, as he described himself, “a wandering Jew and Christian pilgrim,” who lives in “hope for surprises,” and at the same time steadily plow a single intellectual furrow, as more ­single-​­minded scholars have done. A body of work governed by a spirit of surprise, adventure, and attention to the prompting of the moment is bound to show certain conflicts and tensions. In the largest sense, one can feel a tension between the radical modernist who wants to preserve what is good in modernity by defining the limit at which it will otherwise destroy itself and the Catholic ­anti-​­modernist “who still survives from another time.” In Gender specifically, this translates into a constitutive tension between gender as a ­lens—​­a “heuristic,” as Illich s­ ays—​­to focus contemporary discussion and gender as the sign of a world lost forever. In the first instance, he clearly feels he has something to say to that “new alliance which is struggl[ing] to preserve the biosphere,” trying “to recover and . . . enlarge the commons,” and “reclaiming . . . the ability to exist outside the market’s regime of scarcity.” In the second, the tone is more of lamentation, as Illich confronts what he calls “the sad loss of gender.”

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Another fissure in the book’s argument, and another challenge to its interpreters, runs between Illich’s apparently rigorous constructionism and his ­half-​­hidden essentialism. By constructionism, I mean his forcefully expressed view that gender is a cultural product, an “incarnation of symbolic duality,” in which human sexual dimorphism hardly plays a role. Indeed, as we saw earlier, he harshly denounces the argument that he finds among “some very articulate feminists” that men and women have an “inherently different . . . behavioral style . . . irrespective of . . . culture” and even goes so far as to ascribe “the prick of racism” to this view. (By racism, I think one can understand any view in which biology is destiny.) On the other hand, gender is said to be “substantive.” In contrast with “sex roles” that are merely “acquired” or “assigned,” one is “born and bred” into gender. The word substantive, to me, implies something that can exist in and for itself. Likewise, “born and bred” suggests an inherent property. I know that these usages can be explained away, as referring only to an immutable cultural horizon, and yet I think that they also lead us into a certain ambiguity in the book’s argument. Let me explain with reference to a myth that Illich cites in the essay that concludes Deschooling Society, “The Rise of Epimethean Man.” Illich and the Goddess The Greek poet Hesiod who wrote around 700 BCE tells the tale of two ­brothers—​ ­Prometheus, whose name refers to forethought, and Epimetheus, which means “afterthought” or, by extension, “excuse.” In the story, Prometheus, by far the more celebrated of the brothers, steals the fire that Zeus has withheld from humanity and gives it to the people. Zeus, in retribution, creates Pandora (the a­ ll-​­giver) and sends her into the world with a jar containing various evils. Heedless Epimetheus, against the warnings of his brother, marries Pandora. She then opens the lid of her jar, and all the ills it contains escape. By the time she closes the lid, only hope remains in the jar. That’s Hesiod’s version, but by the time Hesiod wrote his poem, Illich says, “the Greeks had become moral and misogynistic patriarchs, who panicked at the thought of the first woman.” Behind the patriarchal tale of woman as the bringer of evil, Illich discerns a more primordial matriarchal background. Careless Pandora, he says, is a transformation of Gea, or Gaia, the primeval goddess of the earth: From immemorial time, the Earth Goddess had been worshipped on the slope of Mount Parnassus, which was the center and navel of the Earth. There, at Delphi (from delphys, the womb), slept Gaia, the sister of Chaos and Eros. Her son, Python the dragon, guarded her moonlit and dewy dreams, until Apollo, the Sun God, the architect of Troy, rose from the

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east, slew the dragon, and became the owner of Gaia’s cave. His priests took over her temple. They employed a local maiden, sat her on a tripod over Earth’s smoking navel, and made her drowsy with fumes. Then they rhymed her ecstatic utterances into hexameters of ­self-​­fulfilling prophecies. From all over the Peloponnesus men brought their problems to Apollo’s sanctuary. The oracle was consulted on social options, such as measures to be taken to stop a plague or a famine, to choose the right constitution for Sparta or the propitious sites for cities which later became Byzantium and Chalcedon. The ­never-​­erring arrow became Apollo’s symbol. Everything about him became purposeful and useful.

This is the way Illich tells the myth in “The Rise of Epimethean Man.” When people worshipped Gaia, they “trusted in the delphos of the earth” and in “the interpretation of dreams and images.” When the priests of Apollo took over, instrumental rationality put Gaia’s dreams into service. There was “a transition from a world in which dreams were interpreted to a world in which oracles were made.” Illich also discussed this myth with ­Jean-​­Marie Domenach in the interview broadcast on French television that I referred to earlier. There Illich says that the myth, in its original form, is “the best story about the corruption of man.” “In today’s world,” he tells Domenach, “if we don’t turn back to Pandora/Gea, who lived, and I believe still lives, in her cave at Delphos, if we don’t regain our ability to recognize the dream language she can interpret, we are condemned. The world cannot survive.” This is a very strong statement, but not an isolated one. Illich saw Gaia’s transformation into Pandora mirrored in the way Mary “shed the aura of myth that had been borrowed from the goddess and the strong theological epithets with which the Church fathers had adorned her [e.g., theotokos, the G ­ od-​­bearer].” She became “a model for ‘woman’ . . . the conscience of genderless man.” Illich was a s­ elf-​­described “­Mariolator,” who spoke to me of “our lady Mary, this strange girl whom I have not been able to help having as my ideal since I was a boy.” He told the American Catholic Philosophical Association, in an address in 1996, that when he wrote Gender he was “driven by love for Our Lady.” A note in the introduction to Deschooling Society tells us that “The Rise of Epimethean Man” was written as his “afterthoughts on a conversation with Erich Fromm on Bachofen’s Mutterrecht.” Bachofen was a ­nineteenth-​­century German scholar who tried to demonstrate the existence of a primeval matriarchy that preceded the solar patriarchal phase of civilization. In “The Rise of Epimethean Man,” Illich recommends the foolish Epimetheus, clinging only to hope, as a new culture hero, in place of his lionized brother, Prometheus, the planner. And what recommends Epimetheus, above all, is his embrace of Pandora/Gaia. In choosing her, Epimetheus opts for a life lived in

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“the dream of the earth”—the dream only she knows how to interpret. He rejects the future envisioned by Prometheus and the patriarchy for which his f­orward-​ ­thinking brother s­ peaks—​­the patriarchy that replaces the goddess with a drugged and captive girl, whose utterances are rhymed into “­self-​­fulfilling prophecies.” What is revealed here, at the least, is a certain reverence for the feminine. One might speak of an idealization, but I think reverence comes closer to capturing what is more an active attitude than a concept. Does this perhaps underlie Illich’s view that most women are bound to lose in the world of sex? Does he not rather believe that there is something in women that will hold them back from full commitment to a unisex world? He says not. Anatomy, he argues, is a trivial element in the cultural construction of ­gender—​­just a “raw material.” On this reading, there is nothing in women’s nature that would prevent them from taking an equal share with men in the world without limit in which we live. And yet I wonder if a book written for Our Lady isn’t also a call to women to reject a regime that is unworthy of them. Gender, Illich says, “might be irrecuperable.” I have tried to refute the critics who claimed that he wished to reinstate it. And yet questions remain about the book’s implications for how we live today. “The greatest difficulties I encountered” in writing Gender, Illich told me, concerned “how to speak about the rests of gender, those things we can recover in a very personal relationship of friendship, which must replace what was formerly a culturally defined relationship between men and women.” The word rests here does double duty, evoking, on the one hand, what remains of gender in our sensibilities and, on the other, the refreshment from the monotony of sex that we gain in the refuges these remainders provide. “Without the recovery of these gender rests,” Illich goes on, we are “without access to what makes poetry and imagination between the two of us possible.” This chimes with the passage I quoted earlier on “walking the watershed,” where he says that the world of sex can only hold together to the extent that it does because of “the rests of gender that survive . . . and sprout in it.” His testimony on this point is m ­ ixed—“irrecuperable” is, perhaps, somewhat at odds with the idea that a residual sense of gender is all that holds the world of sex ­together—​­but in the book’s final paragraph, he expresses his c­ onfidence—“strong suspicion”—that “a contemporary art of living can be recovered.” What is crucial, he says, is a reduction in the scale of economic activity. “Negative growth,” he says bluntly, “is necessary to reduce sexism.” This is to say that a sense of probity, courtesy, and mutual respect can only regrow in a situation where men and women once again depend on one another rather than acting as competitors for jobs and recognition under conditions of assumed scarcity. In the meanwhile, we have what is already a great boon: the tact that can be recovered in “a very special relationship of friendship.”

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9

Embodiment/Disembodiment

Christians have always believed that the Church itself is a body . . . not a body in the abstract sense . . . but a body of true flesh and blood. —Ivan Illich

In 1985, Illich gave a talk at the Pennsylvania State University called “Twelve Years After Medical Nemesis: A Plea for Body History.” It was, in fact, only ten years since Medical Nemesis had first appeared in 1975, but Illich was often careless about dates and other numerical values. (His friend Joseph Rykwert, a historian and critic of architecture, once joked that, wherever Ivan was, he would always give you three phone numbers, each of which would have one digit wrong.) In this talk, later published in the British medical journal The Lancet, Illich revealed what he thought had been “deficient in his analysis” in Medical Nemesis. He did not renounce what he had said there about ­iatrogenesis—​­the ways, both clinical and cultural, in which medicine harms its ­patients—​­but rather claimed that he had not gone far enough. “I am not dissatisfied with my text, as far as it goes,” he wrote, “but I am distressed that I was blind to a much more profound symbolic iatrogenic effect: the iatrogenesis of the body itself. I overlooked the degree to which, at m ­ id-​­century, the experience of ‘our bodies and our selves’ had become the result of medical concepts and cares.” His statement is typically emphatic and unequivocal, and a careful reader of M ­ edical Nemesis might easily object. That book, after all, is informed by a profound sense of how medicine is reshaping the experience of birth and death, illness and ­suffering—​­all elements of bodily life. And yet Illich still felt that he had not paid enough attention to “the ­body-​­percept itself.” This sense of having missed something crucial had two aspects. First, Illich felt that he had been insufficiently aware of the body as a historical construct. He had taken it, he said, for “a natural fact that stands outside the historian’s domain.” But now, he had come to see how “each historical moment is incarnated

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in an epoch-​­ ­­ specific body.” Each age embodies its experience differently, and so one cannot speak abstractly of an art of living, or of suffering and dying, as Illich had in Medical Nemesis and even still in Gender, without taking account of this variation. Second, Illich felt that he had failed to catch the continuing “metamorphosis” of the body that was already under way when he wrote and had become obvious, to him at least, by time he published his reconsideration. In the famous opening line of his book, he had written that “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.” Now he denounced the very idea of health, as he saw it taking shape around him. The new major threat to health, he said, was “the pathogenic pursuit of health” itself. Health had become u ­ nhealthy—​­the property of a system rather than a person. In Medical Nemesis, Illich had defined health as “the intensity with which individuals cope with their internal states and their environmental conditions.” One coped with a given world, and how well one coped defined health. Now he claimed that the world that had once supplied the measure of health had been swallowed by what he called “an ontology of systems,” a way of thinking in which being itself is conceived as a system, as it is when one speaks of “my system” and its integration within an “ecosystem.” Health now measured the state of such a system rather than the integrity of a person. And what had been lost through this “metamorphosis” was the body itself as a unique, fleshly, and personal mode of being. D ­ isembodiment became Illich’s preoccupation and a recurring theme in much of the writing he did after he published his reconsideration of Medical ­Nemesis in 1985. In what Illich called “system age health care,” he saw the last vestiges of sense draining out of medical diagnosis. His point needs some qualification. Many medical interventions are ­mechanical—​­a broken bone reset, a joint replaced, a hernia ­repaired—​­and, to that extent, ­perceptible—​­something that hurt doesn’t hurt anymore. He himself had surgery, late in life, when a hernia began to make walking difficult. I don’t think that he was speaking at this level but rather referring to a more fundamental sense in people of who and what they are. In Medical Nemesis he had written about the ways in which diagnosis defines patients both physically and socially and teaches them to recognize themselves in the diagnostic mirror. At the time he wrote that book, he thought it was the case that doctors tended to judge their patient’s state according to the measurable physical parameters recorded on their chart and not according to their ­self-​­perception. Experience was, to this extent, already disembodied. And yet a shadow of sense remained. Diagnosis was still “analog” in the sense that physical qualities were still represented, even if they

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were imperceptible. In an analog recording, physical traces captured in a vinyl record’s groove or in the coating of magnetic tape correspond to the ­sound—​­they provide an “analogy,” however unlike the thing represented. In a digital recording, there is no analogy between the waveforms of the recorded sound and the stream of zeroes and ones that represents ­them—​­the link has been broken, the representation is pure pattern, or pure information. Something similar had happened to medicine, Illich surmised, in “the system age.” A person treated according to their “risk,” for example, is being treated not as an embodied person but as an item of statistical information. Risks don’t refer to individuals; they refer to probabilities distributed across a population. My “risk” reveals nothing about me as a discrete ­being—​­it describes only the frequency with which something is apt to happen in the category to which I have been assigned. So, insofar as I am a subject of risk, I have become digital, or disembodied. My experience has been subsumed into a system in which I appear only as an informational a­ bstract—​­a collage of risks and imperatives, bearing on the class in which I have been enrolled. Here was a new “­epoch-​­specific” body and one that Illich had not foreseen. It so little resembled the body of ages past that Illich chose to speak of it as a state of disembodiment. The Age of Systems The change in ­self-​­perception that Illich described in his reconsideration of ­Medical Nemesis was part of something much larger that he had begun to notice around the time that he wrote the article I have been quoting. He would eventually name this new reality “the age of systems” and contrast it with an age in which instrumental rationality had been the dominant note. This required, in his view, a complete rethinking of his position. His books and essays of the 1970s had been written under the assumption of an underlying continuity in the basic character of the civilization he was addressing. As apocalyptic as Tools for Conviviality is in p ­ laces—​­in its prediction, for example, of a withering of humanity itself in the face of an overplanned and overprogrammed social m ­ ilieu—​­it still makes certain assumptions, both about its readers and about the world. Above all, the book takes for granted that its readers are in a position to do something about the technical and institutional overgrow he describes. Whether he is talking about deschooling society, curbing medical nemesis, or drastically reducing dependence on energy slaves, Illich imagines a public that views schools, hospitals, and automobiles as tools (i.e., as means to an end) and that feels responsible for them. But to use a tool, or feel responsible for how it is used, one must stand apart from it. And this critical distance was exactly what

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Illich thought was collapsing in the age of systems. What if social space no longer possessed the clarity, stability, and dimensionality that would allow it to be restructured in the ways he had proposed? Ages overlap, and the problem of knowing where we are is often compounded by the application of old and reassuring names to new and unprecedented realities. When Alan Turing, for instance, imagined what would become the computer as a “universal machine,” he made something utterly and explosively new appear as something of the same kind as a steam engine or a mechanical clock. As something growing within an older form of society and overlapping with it, the age of systems can be seen as foreshadowed throughout the twentieth c­ entury—​­Turing first imagined his s­ elf-​­adjusting “machine” in the 1930s. The age of instrumental rationality, likewise, overlaps into our present time. And yet Illich felt a strong intuition that the new age achieved a critical mass during the 1980s: “I believe that . . . there [has been] a change in the mental space in which many people live. Some kind of a catastrophic breakdown of one way of seeing things has led to the emergence of a different way of seeing things. The subject of my writing has been the perception of sense in the way we live; and, in this respect, we are, in my opinion, at this moment, passing over a watershed. I had not expected in my lifetime to observe this passage.” This watershed, in Illich’s view, marked the end of an age that had lasted eight hundred years. He called it the age of instrumentality, or of tools. The books and articles, essays and addresses that he wrote in the last twenty years of his life are all, in some sense, an attempt to get to grips with this changed reality. The ­body-​ ­as-​­system of which he speaks in his look back at Medical Nemesis was a crucial element of this new epoch, and I will return to that theme in a moment. But first I want to explore Illich’s understanding of the watershed over which he thought his world was passing. To grasp the sheer novelty of the new age, in his eyes, it’s first necessary to understand the character of the age he thought was ending. The idea of a tool as an engineered means to accomplish some end is very often taken as something that is, in Illich’s words, “natural, obvious, inevitable and timeless.” The Stone Age cave dweller that one sees rubbing two flints together in museum dioramas is already ­man-​­the-​­tool-​­user. Paleontologists may even ascribe tool use to the chimpanzee that cracks a nut with a rock. Illich thought this way of speaking anachronistic. According to him, there is no general idea of tools until the early twelfth century when Hugh of St. Victor began to write on the Artes ­Mechicanicae—​­the mechanical a­ rts—​­and his contemporary, the pseudonymous Theophilus Presbyter, produced De Diversis Artibus, a compendium of

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the technical arts then in use. For Aristotle the implements employed by smiths and jewelers, cobblers and potters were indistinguishable from the hands of their users. He called both the tool and the hand that holds it organa. For Illich this is evidence that there was no general concept of t­ool—​­each device was understood separately according to the enculturated pattern of its use and the class of craftsmen to which it was proper. Among the four types of causation that A ­ ristotle ­recognized—​­material, formal, efficient, and fi ­ nal—​­there is no recognition of a mechanical cause that is distinct from efficient cause in general. This changes in the twelfth century, when, as Illich says, “the causa efficiens . . . got, so to speak, a stepchild . . . called the causa instrumentalis.” Illich highlights its novelty by calling it “a cause without intention.” This novelty can be hard to see from the vantage point of the present, when so much of what we do is dictated by the capabilities of our tools, but, in Illich’s view, the idea that there was a c­ ause—​­a ­tool—​­that could be imbued with any intention whatever, according to the purposes of its user, was an absolutely new and previously unthought idea at the beginning of the twelfth century. The age of instrumentality that Illich believed spanned the eight hundred years from the twelfth to the twentieth century was characterized by the clear and fundamental distinction that was made between the tool and its user. Tools were understood during this time as something one can take or ­leave—​­if a bicycle suits my purpose better than a car, then I take my bicycle. I use a hammer, but the hammer does not use me. Marxism speaks of means of production as something that can be conceived apart from any specific purpose and turned, in the right hands, to any purpose. A system, on the other hand, incorporates me when I enter ­it—​­I become part of that system and change its state. I’m speaking of system here in the sense with which the word was endowed by the new science of cybernetics, the sense of a ­self-​­regulating totality that is constantly adjusting to its environment through feedback loops. When the radicals of the 1960s denounced “the system,” they still imagined it, in the image by which Mario Savio defined the Free Speech movement at Berkeley in 1964, as something possessing “gears . . . wheels [and] levers.” The system, as Illich uses the term, has no moving parts. “Please remember,” he says, that the term machine got a completely new meaning when Alan Turing, for lack of another ordinary language term, began to speak about what became the computer, as the universal machine. This is a pure abstraction, a function which adjusts its internal state to its last calculation, a black box. Anybody who wants to use the term machine

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to designate a pen, a watch, a steam engine or a motor and that black box as beasts of the same k­ ind—​­in any way of the same k­ ind—​­hasn’t understood what has happened and has no capacity to understand what has happened.

“We look at the present through a r­ ear-​­view mirror,” Marshall McLuhan wrote in The Medium Is the Massage, and his collaborator, graphic artist Quentin Fiore, illustrated with an image of a stagecoach appearing in the rearview mirror of a car. Those who conceive the computer as a tool make the same mistake, Illich thought. A computer is no more a machine than an automobile is a horseless carriage. Initial Enthusiasm for Cybernetics From the very beginning of his career, Illich had been prescient about computers. In the later 1950s, when he was just beginning his research on schools and the giant ancestors of today’s microprocessors still required a room of their own, he was already taking advantage of the computer’s ability to “gobble up s­ o-​­called data and ­organize them.” In 1971’s Deschooling Society, published at a time when few had given any thought to the ways in which computers might reorganize social existence, he envisioned computer networks as the infrastructure that would allow schools to be replaced by “learning webs.” At CIDOC in the early 1970s, several of the pioneers of cybernetics were prominent ­figures—​­most notably Heinz von Förster, who was a good friend of Illich’s, but also Francisco Varela and Humberto M ­ aturana—​­and Illich initially showed some enthusiasm for this new style of thought. In 1971, a ­six-​­week “research seminar” on “interpersonal relational networks” was held at CIDOC. CIDOC published the papers given at such seminars as Cuadernos, the Spanish word for notebook. Included in the Cuaderno that resulted from this seminar, along with von Förster, Maturana, and Varela, were German composer Herbert Brün, who was then exploring the musical potential of computers; Gordon Pask, who had been in the ­vanguard of cybernetics in Britain; and Illich himself. The influence of this ­consultation is evident in the “Learning Webs” chapter of Deschooling Society, which is still frequently cited by those who see computers as enabling a liberating ­expansion of educational “choices.” Illich, however, gradually changed his mind. Speaking to an audience of nurses in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in June 1994, he explained why. When he had written of “learning webs” in Deschooling Society or defined health as “the intensity of autonomous coping ability” in Medical Nemesis, he told them, he was trying to liberate individuals from oppressive professional hegemonies that depressed their autonomous capacity to learn and heal. He had

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thought that he could adapt the language of s­ elf-​­steering and s­ elf-​­regulation that was developing in the science of cybernetics to this purpose. What he had overlooked, he said, was “the corrupting effect that system analytic thinking” would have on people’s very conception of themselves. Through this system analytic lens, people had begun to see themselves as “­self-​­regulatory, s­ elf-​­constructing system[s] in need of responsible management.” He continued: I wanted to make it plausible to a generation committed to the pursuit of health that throughout history the human condition had been “suffered.” But I was still under ­Gregory Bateson’s influence, believing that concepts like feedback, program, autopoesis, or ­information—​­when shrewdly ­used—​­could clarify issues. I thought I could equate “suffering” . . . with “coping.” I was wrong. As soon as you understand suffering as coping, you already have made the decisive step: from bearing with your rebellious, torn and disoriented flesh, you have moved towards control of yourself conceived as a system.

Illich’s great worry about “system analytic” discourse was what he came to see as its disembodying character. When Norbert Wiener named the new science of systems in 1948, he adapted the ancient Greek word for s­ teering—​­a kybernētēs was the pilot or steersman of a s­ hip—​­and, by extension, governance. Its subject matter was systems of regulation, communication, and control, and its fundamental unit of analysis was bits of information. Cybernetics would study what one of its pioneers, Gregory Bateson, called “the pattern that connects.” According to this view, living things are ­information-​­in-​­action, rendered living by their ­organization—​­the pattern by which each is informed. This emphasis on system, to Illich, threatened depersonalization. A unique, enfleshed, and irreducible person was becoming an item of information, a pattern of risks, a provisional state of immunity. Face was becoming interface. It is important to note here that what Illich eventually understood as depersonalization and disembodiment was the same thing that many people, including Illich himself, had initially greeted as liberation. Systems thinking, it was said, had overcome the alienation characteristic of the modern age by offering a holistic view of things. When Jacques Derrida famously wrote, in Of Grammatology, that “there is no outside text” (il n’y a pas de h­ ors-​­texte), he spoke for everyone who felt themselves to be at the threshold of a new age in which there would be no privileged standpoint, no unquestionable foundation, no unassailable origin. To include oneself as part of the system was simply to acknowledge one’s stake and admit one’s bias. Each of us is inside nature, as we are inside culture, with an inescapable

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horizon that moves as we move. This is postmodern common ­sense—​­evidence of the spirit of humility and tolerance that will be indispensable if humanity is even to ­continue—​­and yet Illich came to the conclusion that “postmodernism is incredibly disembodying” and, for that reason, denounced it unequivocally. Symbolic Fallout of Tools Why he reached this conclusion, and why it so completely outweighed what he had initially appreciated in systems thinking, is something Illich never wrote much about. My reconstruction of his views here mainly relies on the suggestive, but often sparse, remarks he made to me in interviews. It is clear that there was a broad shift in his thinking from concern, in his early work, with what technology does to his later concern with what it says to us about who and what we are. This was how he put it in 1988: “I would like to get . . . people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we can do with them, to look at how tools shape our mind, how their use shapes our perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using them. In other words, I’m interested in the symbolic fallout of tools, and how this fallout is reflected in the sacramental tool structure of the world.” In speaking of the “tool structure of the world” as “sacramental,” Illich seems to me to come quite close to Martin Heidegger, who says that the essence of technology is “nothing technological” but rather that technology is a way in which the nature of things is disclosed—“a mode of revealing,” Heidegger says. A sacrament is a visible sign of an invisible reality, and in that sense, Illich is saying, like ­Heidegger, that technology is a way in which the nature of things is laid open to us. This is what concerned Illich latterly: the “symbolic fallout” of tools. An example of such fallout is the iatrogenic or disembodied body, compounded of digital scans, probability functions, and risk curves. What is at issue is not the effectiveness or accuracy of medical diagnostic technique but what this technique tells us about the kind of stuff we are made of. A second point that Illich often made was that a system, in the cybernetic sense of the term, has no outside. It has no boundary, limit, or clear definition by which I can orient myself in relation to that system or distinguish myself from it. “When you become the user of a system,” Illich says, “you become part of that system.” Beyond this, Illich said little. In trying to understand him, I was aided by American scholar Katherine Hayles’s book How We Became Posthuman (1999). In this work, she tells the story of “how information lost its body”—a consequence, in her view, of a series of “erasures” that took place in the new science of cybernetics. Her account illuminates Illich’s position so well,

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and supports it with so much evidence, that I’d like to examine it for a moment before going on. Cybernetics, Hayles says, emphasizes “reflexivity,” a term she defines as “the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates.” A tool enacts a purpose external to it; a system continuously modifies its own purpose by the incorporation of feedback. A system, likewise, incorporates its users, who become operators within the system, engaged in a continuous process of ­adjustment—​­the system changes its state as they act on it, and they change their state as the system reacts to their intervention. Through the lens of systems the world takes on a fluid, kaleidoscopic character in which even the most permanent structures are only phases of change. Hayles traces cybernetic philosophy through three stages. Her first phase begins with the work of Norbert Wiener and the publication, in 1948, of his C ­ ybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. It focused on the study of homeostasis as the way in which organisms, environments, and intelligent systems maintain their stability, integrity, and direction through feedback. In the second phase, the key concepts were reflexivity and ­autopoesis—​­a term coined by Illich’s erstwhile CIDOC colleagues, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, to capture the productive or creative aspect of systems. (Poesis in Greek means “to make.”) The third phase was concerned with emergence, or the ­process by which novelty appears. “Artificial life” experiments in which virtual worlds are made to “evolve” are one of the paradigms of this third stage. What is consistent across these three phases is the emphasis on pattern rather than on embodied, material form. “We are not stuff that abides,” Wiener wrote, “but p ­ atterns that perpetuate themselves.” Another of the founders of the mathematical theory of information and communication, Claude Shannon, also defined information as pattern. Again, presence is subtracted, as is the underlying material medium. The medium that is the message, in Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, is still a p ­ hysical thing, and this is true not just in McLuhan but in the work of all the founders of “media ­ecology” from Harold Innis and Eric Havelock to ­Walter Ong and Neil Postman. Radio and television, papyrus and clay work their effects through their material character. The cybernetic school tended to leave out m ­ ateriality. F ­ uturist Alvin Toffler, in his Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, announced grandly that “the central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter.” Hayles quotes ­Gregory Bateson as saying, equally bluntly, “We are our epistemology.” To which his daughter and intellectual inheritor Mary Catherine Bateson adds, “Each ­person is his own

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c­ entral metaphor.” This says, first, that how we think is how we a­ re—​­a repetition of the Cartesian cogito in a new ­key—​­and, second, that this pattern, or schematic, doesn’t just stand for me, it is ­me—​­model and reality have collapsed into a single figure in which I am a metaphor. Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in artificial intelligence and a less refined thinker than either of the Batesons, spells it out bluntly: “The most important thing about each person is the data, and the programs that are in the data, that are in the brain. And someday you will be able to take all that data, and put it on a little disk and store it for a thousand years, and then turn it on again and you will be alive in the fourth millennium or the fifth millennium.” Christopher Langton, an American computer scientist, reinforces what Minsky says. His specialty is “artificial life,” a form of computer simulation in which “pure information” replicates and evolves in a v­ irtual space. “The principal assumption made in Artificial Life,” he says, “is that the ‘logical form’ of an organism can be separated from its material basis of construction and ‘aliveness’ will be found to be a property of the former not the latter.” Two points stand out for me in Hayles’s book. One is the way in which reflexivity generates an infinite regress, like the endless replication of images between parallel mirrors. There is no standpoint outside the ­system—​­whatever is pertinent is absorbed. Hayles speaks of an “immanent infinity,” a term with an interesting theological resonance. In theology, God’s transcendence is contrasted with his immanence. Transcendence refers to what exceeds our reach and surpasses our understanding; immanence speaks of God’s pervasive and sustaining presence in the world. An immanent infinity is, in this sense, a­ -​­theistic. It lacks an outside in which any principle external to it can be found. Such a view represents a new phase in the history of science. It has often been said that early modern science developed out of the confidence of natural philosophers like Boyle and Galileo in the stability and intelligibility of the world as a created order. God had made the world from ­nothing—​­it was the product of his intention and therefore consistent, harmonious, and meaningful. “The first scientists,” as Sajay Samuel has put it, “imitated their conception of God as the supreme intellectual who thinks up creation. Just as God knows nature by having made it, they would know nature by remaking it.” God was the guarantor, one might say, of science’s “objectivity.” With cybernetics one reaches the paradox of o­ bjectivity-​­in-​­itself, a science that fully incorporates its own point of view. New virtualities open endlessly within the system, but no stable beginning or end can be imagined. The second point is what Hayles calls “the slippage between mechanism and model”—evident for example in Catherine Bateson’s statement that “each person

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is his own central metaphor.” Reality tends to ­disappear—​­swallowed by its multiplying representations. The icon, once a threshhold at which eternity touched time, becomes not just a portal to virtual worlds but a ­thing-​­in-​­itself. So and so, we say, is an icon. Social media render social life in tiny bytes, distillations, idealizations, and stereotypes that become so pervasive that they tend to displace embodied experience. In medicine, sophisticated visualization technologies increasingly break down the distinction between the experienced body and the CAT scans, ultrasound probes, and MRIs that represent it. Illich spoke of “a collapse of the borderline between . . . process and substance”—substance being what exists in itself, process the pattern that can be abstracted from it. Model and reality merge, the difference undetectable, as the model grows ever more responsive and ever more attuned, systems grow ever more intelligent, and algorithms persuasively simulate ever more of our behavior. The Body Has a History This was why Illich renounced “health” and came to see its pursuit as a pathogen. Health, he thought, had come to mean “the smooth integration of my immune system into a ­socio-​­economic world system.” One of his responses was to take up the field of body history in order first to establish that the body belongs to and varies with its epoch and second to dramatize the aberrant, unprecedented, and highly synthetic character of the contemporary body. Illich did this in two ways. He began a collaboration with German historian Barbara Duden in which they together investigated changes in the perception of women’s bodies. And he undertook a history of the senses, in which he demonstrated how the very stuff of sensation had changed over time. The work he did with Duden was mostly published in her name, though she was always frank about its collaborative character. Illich had seen his argument in Gender violently abused and summarily rejected by most feminists, and he took the view that the work he and Duden did together would be more likely to get a hearing if it was seen to come from her alone. I will treat it here as the product of the collaborative style of research Duden describes in the introduction to her book Disembodying Women when she writes: “I can stand for every sentence in this book, even though in its origin it was a gift.” In 1982, Duden had “happened upon” a historical treasure trove: “eight large volumes entitled Wieberkrankheiten (Diseases of Women)” that had been assembled by Dr. Johannes Storch, a physician in the small German city of Eisenach in the first half of the eighteenth century. Historians of medicine had known of

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these volumes but largely disregarded them on the grounds that Storch had never physically examined his patients and therefore his case notes contributed nothing to the history of gynecology. What Duden found in them, salted away among the “learned references . . . and bits and pieces of medical theory” were the verbatim voices of the women of Eisenach as they had complained to their doctor almost three hundred years earlier. Dr. Storch had not touched his patients, but he had listened to them and carefully written down what they said. His records provided a window onto a body so unlike her own that Duden concluded that she could not “use [her] own body as a bridge into that past.” Few diseases were known or named. Dr. Storch’s patients spoke to him about a body primarily constituted by its inner flows and blockages. Some of their stories sound quite fantastic to a modern ear. One woman, who had complained of a wind in her uterus after her husband had handled her roughly during sexual intercourse, reported a day later that “the wind had all gone out through her ears.” Another applied plasters to a swollen breast and then noted “the returning of her menses, which in every way, in colour, smell and taste, resembled milk.” Duden recognizes that such pathways between breast and womb, womb and ears do not exist in modern bodies, but she is agnostic about the extent to which what is imagined differently can also be embodied differently. Citing French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s studies of “the ­matter-​­generating power of the imagination,” she says that she is willing to “take seriously” the possibility that “the thinkable actually becomes reality.” What is certain is that this body was experienced very differently. From the turn of the nineteenth century on, the body gradually became a layer cake of scientific ­descriptions—​­it was isolated, explored, mapped, and objectified, and modern patients were trained to “experience” the factual but largely imperceptible body that crystallized under this clinical gaze. What thrilled Duden and Illich about the body they discovered in Storch’s memoranda was the way in which it was felt and imagined from the inside rather than ascribed. They recognized, of course, that this ­eighteenth-​­century body was also constructed, according to a venerable set of popular ideas stretching back to the time of Aristotle and Galen and flowing, as Duden writes, “like a stream of dense lava” right into the time of Johannes Storch. That the body is always a mirror of its age is precisely their point. But this body was constructed according to principles largely derived from ­experience—​ ­its humors and flows, blockages and coagulations were a poetical fable, certainly, but one that could still be felt in the flesh. Only the patient could narrate her own condition because only she knew it. For Storch, Duden says, “the essence of the body was the unlimited number of stories it could tell.” Apart from these stories

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the “body had no norm, it was never complete.” Nor could it be fixed. Storch could assist nature with various potions, but he had no power to investigate a patient’s condition outside the terms in which she related it. One of the things that touched Illich about this ­eighteenth-​­century world was the pathos that characterized the encounter between doctor and patient. Speaking about the change in “the attitude of the ­university-​­based and ­university-​­trained healer” that began in the years before the turn of the nineteenth century, he says: When I look at how doctors behave with patients before this change . . . what they do is listen. They listen to a patient’s story and then make an anamnesis, which reflects the patient’s s­ elf-​­awareness, which usually takes the form of complaints. The patient comes to cry on the doctor’s shoulder. And when I analyze what patients tell the doctor, it’s about how they feel, how they feel in a sense of which even modern English retains some traces . . . If I say, “How do you feel?” it still suggests “How do you sit in yourself? How is it today? How is that ‘who’ who you are today . . . ” What the doctor treated was what he got through the verbal confession of the patient.

“It was as if the physician were participating in a Greek tragedy,” Illich said on another occasion, “and, like the spectator in the Greek theatre, reached out through mimesis, sympathy, which became feeling the other.” Illich also explored other avenues of body history, but always with an eye on the present. By observing changes in body percept in the past, he said, “I can train myself to see, within my own generation, similar changes in perception of what the flesh is.” An example is the sudden change that took place in the image of the crucified Christ in the twelfth century: In 1100, the crucified Christ, who is one of the most important representations left to us of what people thought about the body, is still very much the Christ of the first millennium. Now the first three hundred years of Christianity knew absolutely no crucifix . . . he who is on the cross is dressed up as a priest. He is a living person, crowned by the sun, even though his heart is pierced and the blood flows out. You can see that he is fully alive. It’s an icon or an ideogram; it is not a body which is represented. In the ninth century, the clothes slowly disappear from the body, and he’s represented in his nakedness, but still as live body, with eyes that look at you, even if his heart is opened. By the end of the twelfth century, he’s a dead man, his head is inclined, his body tortured. Physical pain is represented as acutely as you can possibly represent it. No wonder that, twenty years later, Francis will go and begin to kiss the wounds of lepers. No wonder

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that the man of Assisi will feel something new, for which even Christianity had no real ­word—​­compassion—​­so strong that the sufferings of Christ will write themselves as stigmata on his hands and feet, and an epidemic of stigmata will appear all over Europe.

Illich also examined many related changes. People lost the sense by which they could test the sanctity of a ­relic—​­the expression “the odor of sanctity” lingers in English as a trace of this lost sense. The elements of the mass suddenly became ­problematic—​­was Christ really physically present in the bread and wine or not? Questions arose as to whether Adam in paradise, being sinless, could produce an erection ­voluntarily—“as he moved his finger,” Illich says. These were all subjects of “massive, widespread reflection in the 12th century.” Illich was interested in them both for themselves and for the way in which they demonstrated the “­epoch-​­specific” character of the body. He believed, for example, that characteristically modern attitudes to the body could not be understood without reference to the changes taking place in the twelfth century. In his view, the transformation of the glorious cosmic Christ Pantocrator of the first Christian millennium into the suffering, human Christ of the second millennium opened a door to a new conception of the body generally. Without attention to this change, he said, “I cannot understand the desire to dissect the body and analyze it, or the desire to distinguish clearly between body and flesh, between objectively viewed body and sensed flesh.” Christ’s glorious body opened the door to heaven; his emaciated and tortured corpse opened the door to the modern hospital. The Gospel and the Gaze During the first half of the 1990s, Illich “focused [his] reading and [his] teaching on the history of the senses.” He wanted to understand the embodied life of people in the past. How could people be “satisfied,” he wondered, “in subsistence cultures where there is practically no money in circulation, and few marketed commodities”? How did “doctors working in the Galenic tradition [make] people feel well without healing their diseases”? The most thorough and finished products of this research were two long essays detailing what Illich called “the history of the gaze.” He begins in antiquity, when Euclid and other authorities supposed vision to be the product of an outgoing and active visual “ray” projected from the eye of the beholder. He then proceeds through the great reversal that led to the modern account of vision as p ­ assive—​­Johannes Kepler, around 1604, is typical in imagining light rays as mounted postal couriers bringing news into the eye. And he ends with the

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contemporary gaze at home in the dimensionless virtual heavens of cyberspace. A major part of this history is the decisive influence of Christianity. The Gospel, Illich says, was born into a world in which “the image [was] not considered a major problem.” Judaism had utterly proscribed the making of ­images—“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth”—and Greek philosophy had also grown skeptical and hesitant about “thinking in images.” Christianity entered a scene, according to Illich, in which “the image ha[d] been rejected, overcome and transcended by philosophers.” But the apostle Paul in his letter to the Colossians insisted that Christ is “the image of the invisible God.” He is, in Illich’s words, “God in the flesh,” and, as such, the first Christians felt not only entitled but impelled to represent Him as “Jesus . . . pantocrator, the Lord and master of all things . . . the redeeming King standing in front of the glorious, golden sign of the Cross.” “In clear contradiction of the Jewish mandate to make no image or likeness . . . they represented the one they worshipped.” Christian churches filled up with images, but for four centuries, Illich continues, no one much noticed “the parallel between Christian imagery and pagan statuary.” Then in the fifth century, Christian thinkers began to notice this similarity. They tried to clarify what distinguished holy images from idols and deceptive appearances. “Reflecting on the nature and import of images became almost a sport in the monasteries of Anatolia.” Matters then came to “an explosive head,” Illich says, in the year 726: It was . . . a time . . . when expanding Islam had become a major threat to the continued existence of Byzantium. Leo III was then the Emperor of Byzantium . . . and he had already won a battle in which he had stopped the iconoclastic, i­ mage-​­destroying ­Muslims. A revival of the Jewish command had come out of Arabia with a vengeance and had swept away the images from the churches with the progress of the Islamic armies from Egypt through Asia Minor into Greece. Right after his victory over these notoriously iconoclastic Muslims, the Emperor went to the bronze main gate of his palace and removed the image of Christ that was above it and replaced it with a simple symbol: a cross. With this ceremony, he started a fierce debate that raged for several generations. Its issue was, can Christians bow and pray before an image? For the first time the question of iconoscepsis, which caused the Greeks to doubt the desirability of speaking of love only in terms of the beautiful deity, became an occasion of civil war.

The battle between the image worshippers, the iconodules, and the image breakers, the iconoclasts, involved episodes of armed conflict in both Greece and

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Italy. The issue was finally resolved at a church council convened at Nicaea in ­Anatolia in 787—the second council to take place in that city. The doctrine that prevailed had been formulated a few decades earlier by John of Damascus, a Syrian monk, later proclaimed a saint. Illich thought he articulated a view that perfectly balanced the glory of the image against its seductive and disorienting power. An icon, John said, is “a threshold.” It is a threshold at which the artist prayerfully leaves some inkling of the glory which he has seen behind that threshold. In John’s language, it is a typos of the prototypos which is in heaven. The icon is a window into eternity where the risen Christ and his mother . . . are already in the glory of the angels. The prayerful person, who bows before the wall of icons which separates the people from the mysterious altar, uses the beauty created by the artist in prayerful painting, in order to step devoutly through the typos to the prototypos. So, although he bows before an image, it is an image which reflects the real flesh of those who have already been incorporated in the body of Christ. By engaging in this devout and pious expression of respect, John explains, the worshipper not only touches, with his eyes, what is beyond the threshold represented by the icon, but he also brings back the mingling of his gaze with the flesh of the resurrected. And by bringing back the flesh of the resurrected he participates in the construction of the Church as a true fleshy body here on earth.

John’s view has been kept alive in the Eastern Church. Illich was once delighted to read, in a report prepared by Soviet art historians, the story of “a particularly beautiful and precious icon [found] in a poor woman’s hut.” The art historians tried to justify its expropriation, telling the woman how many thousands would be able to see and admire its beauty once it was housed in a museum. The woman answered, “An icon is not to be seen but to be prayed with”—precisely summarizing John’s teaching and demonstrating its persistence. But the second Nicene Council’s legitimation of the use of images in worship led down a very different road in the Latin West. In the West, Illich claimed, “this legitimation was the cover under which . . . the picture became a teaching device, an edifying ­aide-​­memoire for Gospel scenery, which could be used to prop up the sermon. In the West after the thirteenth century, pictures are painted as representations of scenes and not as thresholds foreshadowing the glory behind them. The basis had been laid on which our world of objectivity is built.” Contemporary “iconomania,” as Illich calls it, needs no demonstration here. The flood of doubtful and deceitful sights that now pour into all eyes is undeniable. As early as 1961 in his book The Image, American historian Daniel B ­ oorstin

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described the new prevalence of what he called the “­pseudo-​­event.” Jean ­Baudrillard would later write of “the simulacrum” and Guy Debord of “the society of the spectacle.” Today a large and persuasive literature testifies to the deceptive and disorienting character of a society of manufactured appearances. Illich, I think, adds to this literature in two ways. The first is his understanding that it is Christianity that opens the floodgates on this apocalyptic tide through the operation of what he calls corruptio optimi, “the corruption of the best.” The consensus of the second Nicene Council on the status of images was, in Illich’s view, “thoroughly in line with the Christian spirit in the way it links the visible and invisible worlds.” But it also overcame the reticence before images that characterized both ancient philosophy and the other branches of Abrahamic religion and, in this way, prepared what Illich calls “the long d ­ rawn-​­out martyrdom of the image.” There are obviously many steps on the road from Nicaea to phantasmagoria, but they are all taken, in Illich’s view, as a sequence that begins with the angel’s words to Mary: “Do not be afraid.” Again and again in Christian history, the b ­ est—​­fearlessness—​­became the ­worst—​­sheer recklessness. First old cultural limits and reservations melted away in the light of the glorious, resurrected body of Christ, and then, as Christ faded from culture, iconomania was left with an open field. “Faith in the mystery of the resurrection of the body did lead in the course of Western culture to a new respect for the body, but it also tended to destroy the myriad body images that had existed in the world’s different cultures, each with its unique body percept. During the course of Western history these old body cultures have been gradually replaced, or perhaps overshadowed is a better word, by respect for the resurrected body of Christ. But once that respect disappeared, a void space was left, into which you could put any construct.” Toward a New Asceticism The second thing I’d like to highlight in Illich’s history of seeing is his praise of the guardianship of the e­ yes—​­something that was once considered a crucial element of morality. So long as the gaze was considered to be a willed action, it was seen as subject to moral decision, and as capable of being trained as speaking or hearing. Opsis, according to Euclid, is not just an intellectual study but also underpins appropriate moral ­behavior. One learns doubt in the face of appearances. . . . If you open any old book of a­ sceticism, any book which teaches you how to meditate, or how to live in the presence of God . . . the

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custodia oculorum, the guarding of the eye, is always a major chapter. It will tell you how the eye must be guarded from seeing the wrong things, from seeing not interior vision, but what the Greeks called phantasticon, which refers to dreams, a­ pparitions, follies created by my wishes. . . . Today it is very difficult to speak about the guarding of the eyes, or to understand appropriate seeing as part of virtue.

It was Illich’s view that “the guarding of the eyes,” and indeed the guarding of all the senses, was a practice that ought to be revived in what he called “the age of the show.” In a time when everything can be shown, and many argue should be shown, there’s a temptation to cultivate a cynical and amused indifference that allows one to stand in the flood and believe oneself unharmed, so long as undeceived. Others live in a state of permanent ­scandalization—​­exposed but indignant. Some go further into “apocalyptic randiness”—a name Illich borrowed from his friend Freimut Duve, a German publisher and politician, who coined it for the style of conversation in which each participant tries to top the other in reporting on horrors, obscenities, and excesses. In each of these cases, no guardianship of the eyes or the heart or the tongue is believed necessary. No crucial sensitivity is thought to be at risk through carelessly exposing oneself to too many manufactured sights. Illich profoundly disagreed. He believed that a contemporary guardianship of the eyes was both necessary and possible. This was not prudery or scrupulousness. He agreed with his master that it is not “what goes into the mouth [that] defiles a [person] but what comes out.” It was rather a quest for a specifically modern asceticism. In a proposal he sent in 1989 to David Ramage, the president of the McCormick Theological Seminary at the University of Chicago, suggesting a series of lectures on asceticism, he wrote, “The asceticism which can be practiced at the end of the 20th century is something profoundly different from any previously known.” For reasons I don’t know, Illich never gave these lectures. Some remarks he made to me, the year before he made this proposal, may indicate something of what he intended. We are surrounded, he says, by “constructs . . . of an epistemologically explosive nature.” These are, he goes on, “deeply corrupting images.” He mentions, specifically, genetic engineering, nuclear weapons, and “most of what’s going on in b ­ io-​­ethics” but adds that “once you accept that there might be intolerable realities,” there are many other contemporary realities that “come close to these destructive devices.” To meditate on these “corrupting images” and “explosive constructs” is to risk “burning out one’s heart.” They should be “exorcised,” he says, rather than in any way entertained. In support of his view, he cites Robert Jay

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Lifton’s work on the doctors who served in the death camps in Nazi Germany, with its demonstration that the same men who engaged in cruel experiments on prisoners were affectionate husbands and fathers. A version of such “splitting” occurs, Illich says, whenever we temporize with “intolerable realities.” Illich’s insistence on an absolute no to such realities is illustrated by two stands that I described ­earlier—​­his resignation from the Second Vatican Council on the issue of nuclear weapons and his insistence on silent protest during the German peace movement of the early 1980s. There are ways of speaking, he says, from which we can only abstain, words that “do not fit ordinary discourse” and can only corrode it, occasions when we must renounce any participation in the “conspiracy of gab” that makes the intolerable seem tolerable. What is at stake in the renunciations that Illich proposes as part of a new asceticism are certain crucial sensitivities. There are things we should refuse to look at, but not out of s­ elf-​­righteousness or a too tender s­ elf-​­regard, afraid to look the world in the eye. The reason, rather, for guarding the eyes is in order not to allow a callous habituation to impair our ability to see. Illich proposed “a contemporary optics” that would judge the uses of the eyes, according to how these uses affect what I am able to see in others. The icon, I would argue, cultivates my ability to see the misery of a slum, or to be present on a bus, or during a walk through the streets of New York. It allows me to shed, through my gaze, some light from the beyond on those whom I touch. Experiences in the virtual realm, on the other hand, lead me to see what is virtual and disembodied about others. They become clothes hangers so to speak for the abstract “programming” which I bring to my encounter with them. . . . Antique optics is concerned with preparing a virtuous way of seeing and making you aware of the pitfalls into which your visual ray can fall. I think that a contemporary optics ought to do the ­same—​­to make me aware of what happens when I establish the habit of consorting with the seductive ­non-​­entities that are constantly being conjured up all around me and of how this preponderance of the virtual affects my everyday intercourse with others.

The Word Was Made Flesh Illich’s research in body history and the history of the senses arose from his alarmed perception that the contemporary body was “iatrogenic” in a more profound sense than he had realized when he wrote Medical Nemesis. He began to think that contemporary people were living in bodies constructed on entirely artificial

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­ rinciples—​­bodies that were ascribed to them by agencies like medicine rather p than actually experienced. His insight presents a paradox as well as the severe terminological difficulty involved in speaking of something obviously embodied as disembodied. Contemporary people, in their pursuit of health, exercise, and correct nutrition, give every appearance of being preoccupied with their bodies as never before. What can it mean to speak of them as disembodied? What were the qualities and capacities of the bodies of past epochs that Illich feared were now being lost? To answer these questions, one has to begin, I think, from Illich’s sense of the ­Incarnation—​­a word derived from the Latin for “embodiment” or “enfleshment”— and particularly from the statement in the prologue to the Gospel of John that “the Word was made flesh.” Illich believed that the love of God is to be found primarily in and through the ones whom the chances of life make my neighbors. He also thought that, through the Resurrection, the Christian participates bodily in the life of G ­ od—​­that, in the famous formulation of Athanasius, one of the fathers of the Church, “He became as we are that we might become as he is.” The body, after the Incarnation, is the site of the divine ­life—“the human form divine,” as William Blake puts it in his poem “The Divine Image.” Illich spells out his sense of embodied life in his interpretation of the parable of the Samaritan, a story that he took as an epitome of the entire New Testament. In this parable, Jesus relates the encounter between a wounded man, left for dead beside the road, and a passing stranger, the Samaritan. The stranger is moved, the Greek New Testament says, in his splágchnon, “in his guts.” He stops, binds the wounds of the fallen man, and then takes him to an inn where he can recover. Two things stood out for Illich in this tale: first, that this was a bodily e­ ncounter—​­the Samaritan is animated not by a sense of duty but by a stirring in his g­ uts—​­and, second, that it was a chance meeting, unforeseen, unpredicted, unplanned. The Samaritan “establishes a relationship,” Illich says, that is “arbitrary from everybody else’s point of view”—no one but the Samaritan knows why he turned to this wounded man in this ditch on this day. The meeting might be called providential in retrospect, but it presents prospectively as chance. Many other stories in the Bible follow the same pattern. Abraham sees three strangers approaching his tent and has to decide whether to treat them as enemies or friends. Mary confronts a weird messenger who accosts her with the news that she’s going to magically conceive a child who will be “the son of the most High.” If you read backward, understanding the beginning in the light of the end, it’s easy to miss the uncertain character of these occasions for their participants, to miss the moment of indecision that precedes the revelation and is its condition. Before anything else could happen, Mary

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had to adventure her quiet yes, “let it be according to your word,” in the face of the angel’s alarming announcement. If one accepts Illich’s claim that the Incarnation is pure ­gratuity—​­something that is in no sense predictable, necessary, or d ­ eserved—​ ­something that “is a surprise, remains a surprise and could not exist as anything else”—then one perhaps has to think that the Incarnation might not have occurred had Mary said no. In any case “the engendering spirit / did not enter without her consent,” as Denise Levertov writes in her wonderful poem “­Annunciation.” “God waited / she was free.” Philosopher Richard Kearney, ­interpreting the scene of the Annunciation in his book Anatheism, suggests that one way to recapture the t­ error and ambiguity of the moment might be to demythologize it by subtracting the telltale halo and wings from Mary’s uninvited guest. Illich reads the parable of the Samaritan in the same fashion. For him, it’s a story about a moment of decision on which everything might turn but whose outcome is undetermined. The Samaritan, like Mary, might say no. Everything depends on the quality of their attention in the moment when they are called. And this attention is a bodily f­ aculty—​­something unique and immediate to each embodied one. The body, for Illich, is what feels, suffers, responds, and knows. Flesh might sometimes be the better word because body, for many contemporaries, denotes something quite opposite to what Illich means. He is not, for example, speaking of the tradition of “possessive individualism” in which a body is something that I “have” and over which I exert my mastery. This modern body is the vehicle of what Charles Taylor calls “the buffered self.” W. H. Auden, in a comic poem that Illich loved and liked to quote, exactly captures its character. Some thirty inches from my nose The frontier of my Person goes, And all the untilled air between Is private pagus or demesne. Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes I beckon you to fraternize, Beware of rudely crossing it: I have no gun, but I can spit.

The modern person in his “private . . . demesne” is hedged in by a formidable array of rights, choices, and technological capabilities. Some now even claim a right to be “comfortable.” ­Hazards—​­physical, psychological, and ­moral—​­carry prominent warnings. People who regard their identities as fluid and i­ ndeterminate

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feel entitled to specify the pronouns by which they will be known. Broadcasters endlessly flatter their listeners’ sense of sovereignty with references to “your news,” “your traffic,” and the weather for “your weekend.” What is not “beckoned,” as Auden says, is not to approach. “This is Taylor’s ‘buffered self.’” He contrasts it with “the porous self ” that he thinks was characteristic of premodern people. The porous self is not sealed off from its surroundings in the same way. There is no “frontier” to defend, as Auden threatens to do. The body is permeable, open to both the divine and the demonic, liable to states of possession. Occult influences are still feared. People are subject to a living world rather than being the subjects of a chosen existence. The distinction, I think, is important in understanding Illich. A man of his time though he was, he certainly aspired to a condition of much greater porosity than many of his swaddled contemporaries. This has to be born in mind when considering the sensitivities that Illich thinks we are losing to disembodiment. The ­so-​­called mind/body problem, which has haunted modern philosophy since the time of René Descartes, was not a problem for Illich. He distinguished body, mind, and spirit in a rough and ready, everyday sense, but they remained, for him, a unified and interpenetrated complex. Our very “bodiliness,” he says, “[has] a metaphysical quality” that gives it a significance that is “outside the world in which we now are.” In his interpretation of the parable of the Samaritan, he speaks about the Samaritan as “a being drowned in carnality,” and I think the image is t­elling—​­spirit is lost, drowned, overcome in the flesh and is only to be found, revived, and redeemed in the place where it is lost. He believed that the ensarcosis, the enfleshment of the divine Word, implied an apotheosis, a divinization of humanity. Flesh and spirit had interpenetrated in the Incarnation, and their destinies were now mingled and inseparable. The body had become the site of salvation and not an encumbrance or an obstacle to ­it—​­something merely to be mastered and then set aside. Beyond this, I will not try to explain what the resurrection of the body meant to him. He mainly declined to speak about it himself, telling me on one occasion that “I’d rather not speak about things which I understand so little, but which I enthusiastically believe and claim the right not to have to defend.” He certainly knew how explosive and potentially destructive a doctrine it was and sometimes liked to illustrate with the New Testament story of the apostle Paul preaching to the citizens of Athens. Paul told his Athenian audience about the Resurrection, but they were incredulous, and those who didn’t mock him asked him to come back another day with his crazy idea. “How intuitively right these Athenians were” was Illich’s surprising gloss on this story. He knew

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how easily a triumphalist appropriation of the doctrine of Resurrection would overshadow “the myriad body images that had existed in the world’s different cultures” and then, once the idea of resurrection was itself discarded, leave “a void space . . . into which you could put any construct.” Such a doctrine, Illich insisted, could only be propagated with great subtlety, tact, and ­humor—​­exactly the qualities he generally found lacking in his Church. Nevertheless, it was the case that Illich’s sense of the flesh had, as he says of Paul, “exploded to include the enfleshed God,” and I don’t think his writings about the body and its history can be properly estimated without this being taken into account. Illich’s sense of the Incarnation, as I’ve said, was that it allowed God “to be loved in the flesh” and not just in the person of the Christ but in the understanding that “whoever loves another loves [Christ] in the person of that other.” Such love is free, unconstrained, and ­undetermined—​­when, where, and how it will occur cannot be foreseen. Just as the Incarnation is pure gift and obeys no necessity, so the love that it models and inspires. In the parable of the Samaritan, it is the unlikeliest of the three passersby who actually hears the call. And he hears it, Illich emphasizes, in his flesh: God didn’t become man, he became flesh. I believe, as I hope you do, in a God who is enfleshed and who has given the Samaritan, as a being drowned in carnality, the possibility of creating a relationship by which an unknown, chance encounter becomes for him the reason for his existence, as he becomes the reason for the other’s ­survival—​ ­not just in a physical sense, but in a deeper sense, as a human being. This is not a spiritual relationship. This is not a fantasy. This is not merely a ritual act which generates a myth. This is an act which prolongs the Incarnation. Just as God became flesh and, in the flesh, relates to each one of us, so you are capable of relating in the flesh, as one who says ego, and when he says ego, points to an experience which is entirely sensual, incarnate and t­ his-​­worldly, to that other man who has been beaten up. Take away the fleshy, bodily, carnal, dense, humoural experience of the self, and therefore of the Thou, from the story of the Samaritan and you have a nice liberal fantasy, which is something horrible. You have the basis on which one might feel responsible for bombing the neighbour for his own good.

What does the word flesh mean in this passage? I think it refers, first to all, to what is common to human ­beings—​­what comprises all bodies and allows them to vibrate in sympathy with one another. It is, in this sense, prior to body and resists elaboration in the idealized shapes and figures in which the body can be imagined

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and represented. This is consistent with biblical usage. German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, in his Primitive Christianity in Its Contemporary Setting, claims that the idea of mankind as “flesh” is fundamental to the anthropology of the Hebrew Bible and that this idea forms a stark contrast with the luminous and harmoniously proportioned “body” represented by the ancient Greeks. Second, I think that the word flesh refers to a dimension of depth that Illich tries to capture with his image of drowning. The compassion, the suffering or feeling with, that the ­Samaritan experiences is not occurring on the level of ­spirit—“This is not a spiritual relationship”—or on the level of speech or ­thought—​­he is not creating a repeatable ritual by which a myth can be generated or realizing a preexisting idea or “fantasy.” It can be specified only as a “call”—a word that resounds through the length and breadth of the Bible from God’s call to Abraham to Jesus’ peremptory “follow me” to the fishermen Peter and Andrew. As a call, it is both u ­ nique—​­something that has happened only between these two and only at this m ­ oment—​­and arbitrary from any external point of ­view—​­only the Samaritan knows what has happened and what it demands of him. Flesh, I think, names the medium, the only medium, in which such an encounter can occur. Another term that Illich uses and that complements the imagery of depth is density. Astrophysicists say that a collapsing star may eventually reach a density at which not even light can escape its gravity. It becomes a “black hole,” enclosed and imperceptible, except by inference, within an “event horizon.” The encounter between the Samaritan and the wounded man is hardly a black h ­ ole—​­on the contrary, it is resplendent with that special light that biblical tradition calls g­ lory—​­but I find the image evocative all the same. The black hole is unknowable by definition and yet is known. What happens on the road to Jericho has the same character. In its ­density—​­its ­specificity—​­it is known only to those two who, on a moment’s chance, become the “reason” of each other’s existence. It is a “mystery,” Illich says, and “as a possibility of thinking and experiencing” must “remain . . . always somewhat in the shadow, somewhat in the clouds.” And yet it is also “glorious.” Perhaps we could say that it gives and withholds light at the same time. It resists theory, as it resists generalization, and yet it shines. Our Hope of Salvation Lies in Being Surprised Another quality of the flesh is that it holds and names the possibility of surprise. Illich all his life said that he hoped for surprises. Already, in his first book, he writes, “Our hope of salvation lies in our being surprised by the Other. Let us learn always to

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receive further surprises. I decided long ago to hope for surprises until the final act of my ­life—​­that is to say, in death itself.” This might at first seem like nothing more than inspirational b ­ oilerplate—​­of course, we all love s­ urprises—​­but not if one seriously asks, what are the conditions under which surprise occurs? The first and most obvious one is that we cannot be surprised by what we expect. Expectation, however, virtually defines modern existence, and all existence to the extent that people at all times have navigated according to what experience has taught us to expect. Philosopher David Hume’s famous example is our confident expectation that the sun will rise tomorrow. We may have eminently plausible and ­well-​­founded theories as to why it will, but, at bottom, our confidence rests on our experience: it has always come up in the past. A matter of fact, Hume says, is a ­well-​­entrenched expectation. Expectation shapes our perceptual habits. Social matters of fact are equally a product of expectation, but here we encounter a difference from our expectation that the sun will rise. In social life, we are subject to what philosopher of science Ian Hacking calls “the looping effect of human kinds.” The sun would presumably still rise even if we called it by another name, but with social beings classification changes the thing classified. Names, labels, and categories carry with them inducements to subscribe and conform, and their ability to induce what they ostensibly describe loops back, as Hacking says, and reinforces the power and authority of the name. There might be money in adopting the proposed classification or acceptance or just the relief that many profess after receiving a diagnosis. In any case, we expect the world to be as it has been authoritatively described to us. One further consideration is that modernity can be considered as a machinery for suppressing and preventing s­ urprises—​­what Ian Hacking, again, calls “the taming of chance.” It is hard to think of an untoward event with an even remotely social cause that is not met by legislation or some other precaution to prevent its ­recurrence—​­surely tighter security on the road to Jericho would prevent further inconvenience to passing Samaritan businessmen. And what can’t be prevented can be insured against so that the status quo ante can be quickly restored. All this is simply to point out how much we desire and reproduce the expected and how little, therefore, we desire surprise. To hope for surprises, as Illich says he does, is subversive; to cultivate the capacity to receive and welcome them is even more so. Surprise is simply not compatible with the punctual and predictable order that modern institutions produce and reinforce. We want a “school system” and not the myriad, unforeseen paths that curiosity might follow, were we to take Illich’s advice and disestablish this system. Surprise is possible only when expectation loosens its grip.

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This does relate to the flesh, but let me take one more step before returning to that theme. I think surprise in Illich often denotes the messianic. I do not mean that I think it’s a coded r­ eference—​­a secret sign detectable only by those with the appropriate decoder ring. Surprise is rather the structure of messianic experience. In his Parables and Paradoxes, Franz Kafka says, “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.” He means, I think, that the Messiah’s coming, by definition, cannot be a definite expectation, like “the day of his arrival” or the “last day”—both recognizable figures, long hallowed and embellished in the religious imagination. No, he must come when he is not e­ xpected—​­on the “day after his arrival,” which is not the last but the very last. The letter to the Th ­ essalonians in the New Testament says more or less the same: “The Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night [or] like labour pains on a pregnant woman.” One may expect labor but not predict it; no one expects a thief in the night. Illich says relatively little about messianic time in his writings, but I have found some clarification in the writings of Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher who has recognized an affinity between his work and Illich’s. The depth of his sympathy is indicated by a remark he makes in his introduction to a new Italian edition of Gender: “[There is] nothing in the scope of our present knowledge,” he writes, “that was not profoundly renewed by [Illich’s] . . . vision.” Given this rapport, I hope that Agamben’s explorations of the character of messianic time and its “eclipse” in modernity can add something to Illich’s more reticent remarks on this subject. These explorations take place in his book The Time That Remains: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans and in The Church and the Kingdom, an address given in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in 2009 in the presence of the bishop of Paris. Agamben takes his lead from Walter Benjamin, who viewed the messianic as an experience within time rather than as the end of time. “Every day, every instant,” Benjamin wrote, “is the small gate through which the messiah enters.” Agamben expands this thought. “The time of the messiah cannot designate a chronological period or duration but, instead, must represent nothing less than a qualitative change in how time is experienced.” Time takes time to imagine or represent, he says, so there is always a time beyond chronological time, and this is an interior rather than an exterior time. “Messianic time,” he goes on,” is the time time takes to come to an end”—or, put another way, it is the time we take to bring it to an end in achieving a representation of it. To represent something is always to represent it in what Illich called its “metaphysical quality”—its quality of being, at once, in and out of time.

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In what Benjamin called “empty, homogeneous time,” we are separated from ­ourselves—​­impotent spectators, Agamben says, “who look at the time that flies, without any time left, continually missing themselves.” “Messianic time is the time in which we take hold of and achieve our representations of time . . . It is the time that we ourselves are, and for this very reason, is the only time we have.” In his letter to the Romans, Paul speaks of “the time that remains,” an expression that is usually taken to refer to some definite duration between now and the end of things. Agamben interprets it rather as the time that always remains, the time that is left over and will always be left over in any purely chronological reckoning, the time that time takes. It is an inward dimension of time that is neither past nor future because, in it, “the past rediscovers actuality and remains unfulfilled and the present (the incomplete) acquires a kind of fulfillment.” Agamben says that there is a disjunction within time, “a disconnection within the present moment that allows us to grasp time.” And this suddenly seized and gathered now is the only time that can stand against the immense force of the Law and the State. He argues that the contemporary world suffers from what he calls “a hypertrophy of law”—a “legalistic excess” that attempts to anticipate and govern every emergency, every exigency. Consequently, we live in a state of endless deferral. “The crises . . . that the governments of the world continually proclaim” become “states of permanent exception and emergency,” and a permanent state of exception is, of course, no longer exceptional. Crisis is normalized and, in consequence, loses what was formerly its preeminent characteristic. Once, crisis meant a critical or decisive stage in a course of e­ vents—​­a day of j­udgment—​­that must lead to a resolution. A crisis in an illness, for example, was the moment at which a definitive turn toward life or death, improvement or worsening could be expected. A permanent crisis is no crisis at all. It is, Agamben says, “a secularized parody of the Church’s incessant deferral of the last judgment.” The Church, originally, and then the Law and the State act as what the New Testament calls “restrainers”— they hold back the moment at which the Messiah will appear, endlessly deferring this appearance along “the linear and homogeneous line of chronological time”—­ Macbeth’s “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow [which] creeps in this petty pace from day to day.” “Messianic experience” is “eclipsed.” But these two times, the endless and the suddenly seized, the deferred and the instantaneous, are “poles,” Agamben says, and “the only way that a community can form and last is if these poles are present and a dialectical tension between them prevails.” Today, he concludes, “this tension . . . seems to have disappeared.”

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If I am right that what Illich calls surprise resembles what Agamben, following Benjamin, names “the messianic,” then I think one can see how close the two thinkers are. The capacity for surprise is a disposition to allow the world to open and reveal “the small gate through which the Messiah enters.” But this gate closes and hides its entrance with “the complete juridification and commodification of human relations.” The result, according to Agamben, is “confusion between what we might believe, hope and love and that which are obliged to do or not do, say or not say.” Management chokes all spontaneity and, at the same time, in a classic vicious circle, makes us fear the eventualities that we have suppressed, thus fortifying our disinclination to be taken off guard. Only surprise can break the circle, but the ability to be surprised must be “learned,” Illich says, and perhaps prayed ­for—“let us learn,” he ­says—​­because we so resolutely avoid it. Other writers also agree with Agamben and Illich in finding that time opens inwardly. William Blake, in his Vision of the Last Judgment, argues that a last judgment is a moment within time, not at the end of it. “Whenever any Individual Rejects Error and Embraces Truth,” he says, “a Last Judgment passes upon that individual.” Plato, too, refers to time’s paradoxical character in a way reminiscent of Agamben’s definition of “the time that remains” as “the time time takes to come to an end.” In the Parmenides, Plato points out that when rest becomes motion or motion rest, there must be a transition in which the change from one to the other is effected. But when does this transition occur, he asks, since there can be no time when things are not either at rest or in motion? Between them occurs what Plato calls “this queer thing, the instant” that “occupies no time at all.” And this instantaneous occurrence, he says, is true of all transitions, supervening between the many and the one, the like and the unlike, the small and the great, just as it does between motion and rest. A change of state occupies no time, but it occurs in time. Rightly regarded, then, it is always a surprise and, to that extent, a gift. “Time,” Blake says, “is the mercy of eternity.” Flesh as a Faculty How does all this relate to the flesh? Well, it’s my hypothesis that it is in the flesh that the surprising, the messianic, the instantaneous is registered. Flesh, as already suggested, would be, on this account, something different than body, or at least refer to an aspect of bodily experience that is not normally captured by the word body, especially in a tradition as strongly shaped as ours by a dualism of mind and body.

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Once we are in a culture that can formulate a “mind/body problem” or marvel at “the placebo effect” as if it were anomalous that our thoughts and our experiences are compact, we have lost the meaning of body that Illich tried to recover through body history. Flesh, I think, can still hold this meaning, the more so because the Gospel of John says that “the Word was made flesh”—­sarx—​­rather than ­body—​­soma. Flesh, roughly speaking, is the stuff of which the body is made and therefore can stand for our common and underlying ­physicality—​­our ­nature—​­without evoking the carefully toned and intensively monitored vehicle of contemporary experience. Flesh in this sense is the domain of the u ­ nconscious—​­what we know without knowing that we know ­it—​­and the ­intuitive—​­the sympathetic vibration or sudden antipathy that eludes explanation. It can also refer to a certain latency, indeterminateness, or potentiality out of which our experience emerges. In this sense, it would refer to the moment before Abraham recognizes the Lord in the three men who suddenly appear as he sits “by the door of his tent in the heat of the day,” the moment when Mary is “greatly troubled” by the angel’s strange salutation and “consider[s] in her mind what sort of greeting this might be,” the moment between motion and rest that Plato’s calls the “instant.” Flesh, then, names an inchoate dimension of experience that each age constructs differently as its “­epoch-​­specific” body. Such a usage might also address what seems at times to be Illich’s historicism. If the body is, as he says, “not outside the historian’s domain” and if its perceptual experience changes radically from epoch to epoch, then it can seem as if each epoch lives in a world of its own, cut off from worlds before and worlds after by yawning “epistemic breaks.” How can the revelation of the New Testament be available to all times and “all nations” if each time and each nation lives in what amounts to a sealed ­room—​­which body will be resurrected? Flesh names the element of c­ ontinuity—​­the underlying stuff that we are. It is what bears “the image of God” that was impressed into Adam and Eve and what intermingles with God in the Incarnation. Even so, the distinction remains rough and ready, and there is an element of overlap in biblical usage. When it is said that “all flesh is grass” or that “the flesh lusteth against the spirit” or that in marriage two become “one flesh,” it is clear that the term body cannot be substituted. In other cases, as when Paul prays to be delivered from “the body of this death” or when he writes to the Corinthians that they are all members of “the body of Christ,” the meaning seems closer to what I am calling flesh. Sometimes, they refer to different aspects of the same reality. Body history investigates the permutations undergone by flesh, but one would never speak of flesh history. With this proviso, I think the distinction moves us closer to Illich’s meaning.

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I Fear the Lord Is Passing Me By Illich claimed that the contemporary world was undergoing disembodiment. I hope that my excursion on the meaning of flesh has made it a little clearer what he feared was being lost. He believed that salvation is present to us in and through the flesh. He believed that the meaning of each one’s existence can only be discovered and fulfilled through encounters that can be neither planned nor foreseen, only recognized and responded to in the moment. Such encounters require, first, that one be available when events suddenly disclose a new possibility and, second, that one possesses the faculty by which such openings are ­recognized—​­a faculty that belongs to the flesh in the sense in which I have been speaking. In this context, I want to repeat a saying of Illich’s that I quoted earlier. “If I had to choose a sentence from the Old Testament for my blazon,” he told me, “it would be timeo Dominum transeuntem: I fear the Lord is passing me by. I fear that the moment will pass me by, and this extra way in which I can be since the I­ ncarnation will be lost.” The motto on a ­blazon—​­a coat of ­arms—​­consists of words to live by, but often words of an assertive and ­self-​­regarding character, like the famous Dieu et mon droit (God and my right), which appears on the armorial bearings of the British monarchy. Illich’s sentence is more t­entative—​­counseling patient but always alert attention in place of ­self-​­assertion—​­but I think we can take it, from his saying he would have it on his blazon, that he means that this is his fundamental attitude. Fear is a crucial part of this a­ ttitude—​­an idea apt to scandalize a world that asserts a right to be safe and to have a god who’s as nice as we think we are. For Illich, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” He specifies, elsewhere, that the fear he wants to cultivate is “filial” rather “servile” fear (i.e., a fear born out of respect rather than cowed submission), but he also argues that these two are “interdependent on a very deep level.” This suggests that the project of producing an invincible “­self-​­esteem” in our children is dangerously misguided. Without a habit of fear, which must necessarily be a constant wound to my ­self-​­esteem and sense of ­self-​­sufficiency, I will not be able to recognize that my salvation is out of my hands, that it will arrive at an unknown time from an unexpected direction, and that it will reflect a hidden wisdom greater than my own. Illich lived by the motto he proposed for himself. A description of the moment at which his fate and mine were joined will provide an illustration. I told the story in my introduction of my encounter with Illich at a conference in Toronto in 1987, during which he at first adamantly refused my request for the lengthy interview I wanted to do with him and then, on the instant, changed his mind after ­meeting

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my family. This split second changed both of our lives, decisively shaping the course of my work and the reception of his. Of course, this is true of all significant ­encounters—​­a few steps to the left or right, and you fail to meet your spouse, your children are never born, and so on. But, in this case, it was a mere glance that opened Illich to the adventure we shared and that continues as I write this. He might not have attended to whatever prompting he felt, had he not feared that the Lord might be passing him by. Risk and Disembodiment For Illich, the evidence for contemporary disembodiment rested on an unprecedented intrusion of a hypothetical element into everyday experience. The role that probabilities and prospective diagnoses now plays in medicine is probably the best illustration. Illich’s introduction to the subject came through meeting Silja Samerski, later a close friend and colleague, who was studying genetic testing during pregnancy in Germany. German law now requires that all pregnant women be given genetic counseling. Diagnostic tests are not mandatory, but all diagnostic options and all risks must be disclosed. When Illich and Samerski met, she was doing her doctoral research at the University of Tübingen on the consultations between doctors and expectant women that are mandated by this German law. He was appalled at what he learned from her. Women were being presented not with information about their own pregnancies but with “risks”—calculations, as I said at the outset, of how often people in the category to which a woman had been assigned would experience a given difficulty. They were being told, in other words, the odds of their having a child with this or that syndrome or disability. What struck Illich so forcibly was that these women were being asked to make a l­ife-​­and-​­death d ­ ecision—​­continuing or ending the pregnancy being the only ­options—​­on the basis of a statistical probablility. Risk pertains to a population and the frequency with which a given outcome will occur over time in that population. When a woman is told that there is a 30 percent chance that she is carrying a child with this or that condition, nothing is being said about her personally. Something is being said about a statistical c­ onstruct—​­the population with which she shares some set of attributes like age, family history, and so on. Such information is now seen to demand a “decision” that must be taken in view of the risk. According to the German protocol, the freedom of the woman to decide as she sees fit must be scrupulously respected. But there must be a choice, and the choice must be informed by knowledge of the relevant ­risks—​­to simply be “expecting” or “in good hope” is no longer a possibility. “Disembodiment,” in this

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case, is literal. One acts in relation to the etheric body of a virtual baby, whose risks can be ascertained, not the unique ­one-​­to-​­come about whom nothing relevant is yet known. If the risk profile warrants such a decision, the real being can be sacrificed to improve the health of the population. Risk creates a statistical ­doppelgänger—​­an information double who shares certain of our attributes. Such a double now accompanies us in many theatres of contemporary life, but medicine remains the arena where risk considerations produce the most momentous decisions. In pretechnological pregnancy, the expected could only be imagined, awaited, and, at quickening, finally felt. Who or what was there, beyond what could be ascertained by listening and feeling the belly, was disclosed only at birth. Today the one who waits to be born occupies what might be called a hypothetical space. He or she is a compound of probabilities whose admittance to the world rests on an assigned position on a risk curve and on a “decision” made in the face of these risks. That this was a particular horror for Illich should be clear in view of the meaning I have shown that he gave to flesh and our immediate, concrete, and personal experience of it. “Risk awareness,” he argued, was the “most intense” form of disembodiment: If anybody should ask me what is the most important religiously celebrated ideology today, I would say the ideology of risk ­awareness—​­palpating your breast, or the place between your legs, in order to be able to go to the doctor early enough to find out if you are a cancer risk. Why is risk so disembodying? Because it is a strictly mathematical concept. It is a placing of myself, each time I think of risk, into a base population for which certain events, future events, can be calculated. It’s an invitation to intensive ­self-​­algorithmization, not only disembodying, but reducing myself entirely to misplaced concreteness by projecting myself on a curve.

Risk awareness is an attempt to outsmart tomorrow and control what is “to come” as both German (die Zukunft) and French (l’avenir) call the future. It projects a future identical with the past and, in this way, tries to constrain any possible surprise. It replaces the actual fruit of a particular conception with a hypothetical fetus in whom certain irregularities will occur with a predictable frequency. For personal experience it substitutes general experience. This is just one example of what Illich thought had become a normal condition: life in a body generated by “interiorizing” an “ideological construct.” An early intuition of this condition came when a visitor to the house where he was living in State College, Pennsylvania, refused a glass of cider because, she said,

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she had already fulfilled her “sugar requirements” for the day. The offer was entertained not as hospitality but as an occasion for prudent management of her system. He was similarly “struck by the waitress in a quick food shop on the way from ­Philadelphia to State College who presented me with a choice of vitamins and other inputs which a man of my age and my constitution would need.” This was life in a system or life, he sometimes said, as a cyborg (cybernetic ­bio-​­organism), in which one was surrounded and informed by so many hypothetical entities that experience itself had been virtualized. His judgment was apocalyptic: “I have therefore come to the conclusion that when the angel Gabriel told that girl in the town of Nazareth in Galilee that God wanted to be in her belly, he pointed to a body which has gone from the world in which I live.” This same note had been sounded earlier in a book called H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, which began life as a lecture in Dallas, Texas. Illich had been invited to share his reflections on a proposal to construct an artificial lake in central Dallas. The book that grew out of this lecture traced the ways in which water had been ­imagined—​­from the pool of Mnemosyne in ancient Greece, where poets could retrieve the memories washed by the river Lethe from the feet of the dead, to the “recycled toilet flush” out of which Dallas intended to create its sparkling new civic amenity. Illich, strongly influenced by Gaston Bachelard, was interested in “how our imagination gives shape and form” to “the stuff ” of which our world is made. He concludes his ramble through first the ancient and then the modern city by distinguishing H2O from the water that once serve as a vehicle for the imagination. “H2O is a social creation of modern times,” he writes, “a resource that is scarce and that calls for technical management. It is an observed fluid that has lost the ability to mirror the water of dreams. The city child has no opportunity to come in touch with living water.” Unsure of the implications of this conclusion, I asked him in 1988 whether perhaps “baptism can no longer take place because there’s nothing to baptize with.” I could think of no stronger instance of water as an archetypal stuff than the water of ­baptism—“No one,” says John’s Gospel, “can enter the kingdom of heaven unless they are born of water and the Spirit.” Illich strongly denied that this was an implication of his statement that “living water” no longer circulated in the modern city. A few years later, I brought up the matter again. In the meanwhile, a Dutch friend, Reginald Luijf, had read the exchange I just quoted and told me that it still left him with questions. Luijf was a friend of Illich’s and also a keen student of Gaston Bachelard. He wanted to know whether Illich was saying that industrialization had somehow disabled the very being of water or only deadened its

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imaginative resonance. Couldn’t his young son still sit by a fountain and dream? I put this question to Illich, and he answered that it was something he wanted to consider, not to give a judgment about. He then went on to say that he was now more inclined to think that “perhaps the waters of the Ganges that are still bathed in every morning at sunrise for the purpose of purification have lost that power.” And yet, I responded, when I raised the question of whether baptism might lose its effect because of the change in water, you said an adamant no. “The theologian spoke,” he replied. “By now, in 1992, I wonder if God might not have to redeem us by fire because we have done away with water.” One might, of course, think fire just as denatured as w ­ ater—​­it was domesticated and put to use long before water became an industrial solvent and is now, through the burning of fossil fuels, changing the very composition of the a­ tmosphere—​ ­but this would only strengthen Illich’s point. Dallas’s downtown lake, he says, will contain only H2O, a “transmogrified [stuff ] with which archetypal waters cannot be mixed.” He even raises, in passing, the disturbing possibility that “contact with such liquid monumentality might make the souls of Dallas’s children impermeable to the water of dreams.” This obviously echoes the statement I quoted earlier about the Incarnation having taken place in “a body which is gone from the world I live.” And it raises the same unsettling theological question: What is the status of the Gospel in a world where both nature and humanity have lost their creaturely or created character? Is salvation still proclaimed to those with no water in which to be baptized or to those with bodies made of synthetic stuff too ­flesh-​­less for resurrection? In Tools for Conviviality Illich had warned that unless humanity turned back from the brink at which he saw it standing, “Man will find himself totally enclosed within his artificial creation, with no exit.” The words I have been quoting suggest that he later concluded that this “total enclosure in an artificial creation” had happened as he had predicted. I will return to his reluctant theological conclusions.

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10

“A Bulldozer Lurks in Every Computer”: On Reading, Writing, and Language

A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside of it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably. —Ludwig Wittgenstein Without . . . precision of definition [and] setting of bounds or ends to thought, we cannot . . . say what we mean, or mean what we say. —Wendell Berry

In Tools for Conviviality, Illich named “the rediscovery of language” as an indispensable condition for a “recovery” from technological overgrowth. Language, he said, was “the most fundamental of commons”—the very foundation on which common life is even p ­ ossible—​­but it had been colonized and corrupted. “Good old words,” he wrote, “have been made into branding irons that claim wardship of home, shop, store and the space between them.” A new society would become possible only if “the convivial function of language” could be “recuperated” and the stolen power of “poetic ­self-​­affirmation” reclaimed. This theme would remain prominent in all of Illich’s later work. Illich’s concern about language was whether it was fit to express personal meaning. Were people using language, or was language using them? This was not quite the same concern that vexed literary theory at the time he was writing. Illich was not worried about logocentrism, “the death of the author,” intertextuality, or the inherent instability of words. His question was: Who sets the terms on which language is used? “Good old words” are fit to designate personal m ­ eanings—​­they say what people over time have wanted to say. When they become “branding irons,” this power is removed. People can only express the ­pre-​­formed meanings and corporate styles that have been impressed into words at great expense by

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teachers, advertisers, announcers, and a myriad of other paid speakers. The m ­ edia-​ ­saturated modern, Illich says, is “somebody who does not say what he means, but who recites what others have contrived for him.” Illich’s work is marked from beginning to end by his sense that language has become an alien power that, as Nietzsche once wrote, “grabs people with ghostly arms and forces them into places where they don’t even want to go.” The paradigm of this power is what Illich calls an “amoeba word.” He first identified this insidious verbal class in 1971’s Deschooling Society. “Some words,” he wrote there, “become so flexible that they cease to be useful. . . . Like an amoeba, they fit into almost any interstice of the language.” Later essays filled out the concept. In ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988), a book cowritten with Barry Sanders, he gives some examples including “energy, sexuality, transportation, education, communication, information, crisis, problem, solution, role,” and, he adds, “dozens of others.” The common property of these words is their association with a science or a professional domain. They have all, as Illich puts it, “gone through a scientific laundry” and then returned to ordinary use redolent with the fresh scent of expertise. Use one of these terms and you implicitly “bow to a profession that knows more about it than [you] do.” The word may have a clear meaning when used in its professional or scientific c­ ontext—​­a physicist knows what he means when he writes “E” for energy, sexology may map the terrain of “sexuality” with exact ­coordinates—​­but in everyday use it is only a ­puffed-​­up gesture, an empty husk. The meaning has remained behind in the laboratory or professional faculty and survives only as an endless ripple of connotation. The word no long denotes anything precise. It is i­ nert—​­energy or communication, sexuality or stress all signify a range of phenomena so vast and so general as to utterly defeat all ­imagination—​ ­but it retains, nonetheless, an air of significance. “[It] is like a stone thrown into a conversation,” Illich says. “It makes waves but it doesn’t hit anything.” Plastic Words In 1981 Illich found an interlocutor on the subject of “amoeba words”—Uwe P ­ örksen, a novelist and professor of German language and literature at the University of Freiberg. Pörksen was Illich’s colleague that year at the Wissenschaftskolleg in what was then still West Berlin. The two men became close friends, and from their conversations and Illich’s urging grew a f­ ull-​­length study of this phenomenon, which Pörksen published in German in 1988. He called his book Plastikwörter: Die Sprache einer Internationalen Diktatur (Plastic words: The language of an

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international dictatorship). This book added a great deal to Illich’s original concept but remained within its spirit. Illich ever afterward quoted Pörksen when referring to “amoeba words,” but Pörksen dedicated his book to Illich and always credited him as its inspiration. Pörksen isolates some ­forty-​­five terms that he thinks are eligible for consideration as plastic words and then enumerates their characteristics under thirty precise headings. Some of these characteristics I have already mentioned: they confer prestige, evoke science, and make “old words look out of date.” Another, according to Pörksen, is that “the speaker lacks the power to define the word”—no personal intention, inflection, or intonation can be imparted to ­it—​­meaning doesn’t vary with context, as it does with everyday words. A plastic word is “historically disembedded.” Time has been erased. It “grasps history as nature,” Pörksen says. This is the same point that Illich makes when he says that science “naturalizes” the w ­ orld: ​­it makes what was formerly within the domain of culture and history appear as a natural given. “Sexuality” names a natural fact before which culture must bow. Plastic words lend themselves to ­combination—​­development is a process of education, communication is an important factor in sexuality, resource management plays a key role in modernization strategies, and so on. One thinks of the ingenious “engine” that Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver encounters at the Academy of Projectors in Lagado, able to recombine sets of words in endless permutations with just a turn of the forty iron handles fixed around its frame. Pörksen compares the plastic words to Lego b ­ locks—​­each one fits all the others. They are not really intended to say something but rather to do something. One can build with them. Each one is an ­imperative—​­a “dictator,” as Pörksen’s title says, a light that is never turned off, an endless positivity that knows no sleep or shadow. Who can stand in the way of education or development or ­innovation—​­to take a new plastic word of which ­Pörksen was unaware when he wrote in the 1980s. Plastic words lie at the terminus of a tendency that Illich calls “nominalization”—the hegemony of nouns, noun phrases, and what James Thurber once called “great big blockyisms.” Verbs denoting actions tend to give way before nouns that assert a secure and certified possession. Things that can be done are replaced by things that can be owned or acquired. Learning is meted out as education; housing becomes a commodity rather than an activity; work is something that one “has” rather than does. Nominalizations express proprietary relationships. My “education” is a bankable possession whether or not I learn anything. Verbal packages of this kind have something of the character that Marx attributes to commodities. Buried within the commodity is what Marx calls “a definite social relation”—some

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person or some ensemble of people and machines actually made the ­thing—​­but all traces of the circumstances in which it was made, including what Marx calls the “crystallized labour,” have been erased. The commodity appears on the market as if immaculately conceived, displaying only its price and its promise. To find an analogy, Marx says, it is necessary “to take flight into the misty realm of religion.” Only there, where the products of human imagination are endowed with a life of their own as gods, will we find something comparable. The commodity, Marx says, is a ­fetish—​­an idol enlivened by an alienated and mystified power that has become imperceptible to those who worship it. Plastic words have similar characteristics. Pörksen speaks of them as “idols . . . magical and empty” and compares them with Roland Barthes’s “myths of everyday life.” Illich, in a late essay in which he identifies life as another parvenu among the plastic words, calls the word “a prestigious fetish.” Just as commodities disguise a “definite social relation,” in “the fantastic form of a relation between things,” so the plastic words recast human activities as professionally managed packages. Education and health, transportation and law are all words that name package deals. You must buy the package, if you want any part of it, and you will be excluded if you do not buy the package. The education you have acquired may have nothing to do with the job you do, but you can’t get the job without this irrelevant education. A Highly Capitalized Resource Illich saw language as the foundation of professional monopoly. This “most fundamental of commons” had become a highly capitalized resource. “Language,” he wrote, “has become expensive.” Formal education, which in my native province ranks just behind health in its voracious appetite for public dollars, is only the tip of a very large iceberg. In all spheres of contemporary life, from the management of public opinion to the manipulation of consumer taste to the obsessive concern with branding that now marks every public undertaking, language is carefully designed and delivered to suit its occasion. When I began my career at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation nearly fifty years ago, it would have been unthinkable to speak of audiences as targets. The term would have seemed brutal and ­offensive—​ ­we were addressing our fellow citizens, not aiming at them. Today identifying a “target demographic” passes unnoticed and unremarked, and companion terms like brand and human resources affright no one’s ear. “Money is spent,” Illich wrote, “to decide what shall be said, who shall say it, how and when, and what kind of people

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should be reached by the utterance.” And what all this money produces, in Illich’s judgment, is the “dead impersonal rhetoric of people paid to declaim . . . texts composed by others.” Imposed and constantly renovated speech forms make it difficult to speak with clear conviction. The result is the tentative tone that one hears in the extraordinary contemporary prevalence of the word like. When this usage first appeared in the mouths of the beatniks of the 1950s, American writer Paul Goodman, a friend of Illich’s, made the ingenious suggestion, in his Growing Up Absurd (1960), that this expression might be a way, so to speak, of hedging one’s bet. Someone had recently told Goodman that he was going to, like, Chicago, and Goodman speculated that this might be his interlocutor’s way of guarding against the possibility that Chicago might prove a mere simulacrum, an artifice that appeared to be Chicago but was in fact only like Chicago. What was at issue, in other words, was the reality of the ­real—​­its solidity and trustworthiness. Like qualifies one’s commitment and guards against the possibility that the apparently real might prove merely a manipulated appearance. Since Goodman’s time, the word has become epidemic and now aerates contemporary discourse like vermiculite in potting s­ oil—​­an instance of secondhand talk that lacks commitment and originality. Illich, writing at the end of the 1970s, spoke of “the ­self-​­conscious, ­self-​­important colorless mumbling” that “shocked” him on his visits to American colleges and attributed this featureless and derivative speech style to the students’ having had only paid models. Illich’s judgment is harsh, and as someone who was, for many years, a paid speaker on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s national radio network, I might be expected to object to it. I don’t. His opinion is certainly unequivocal, and his “pointed” pen has undeniably sharpened the outlines of his satirical portrait of the modern mumbler, but I think he is substantially right. What is at issue, as it always is in Illich, is balance. If there were a vital vernacular, a realm in which people still minted their own speech, then a certain number of paid s­ peakers—​ ­scholars, broadcasters, and so o­ n—​­might be a complement and even a necessary counterpoise. But this is the age of the speechwriter, when an unvetted, undesigned word might be fatal. Paid speech exercises an almost total monopoly. “The American, French, or German colloquials,” writes Illich, “have become composites made up of two kinds of language: ­commodity-​­like taught uniquack and a limping, ragged, jerky vernacular struggling to survive.” (Uniquack was American newspaper columnist James Reston’s mordant term for monochrome, flavorless talk at a time when the r­oom-​­sized Univac was still the only known computer. Illich enthusiastically adopted the term and used it repeatedly.) Illich’s project was

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to revive the vernacular and “resuscitate some of its old breath.” In this respect he aligns with writers like George Orwell (“Politics and the English Language”), James Thurber (“The Psychosemanticist Will See You Now, Mr. Thurber”), and Wendell Berry (Standing by Words) who have denounced the enervation of language at the hands of those who have enclosed this “most fundamental of commons” for their private purposes. Taught Mother Tongue In the years after CIDOC closed its doors in 1976, Illich turned his attention from the institutional critiques that had occupied him in the first half of the 1970s to historical research on the “certainties” supporting these institutions. One such was what he called “taught ­mother-​­tongue.” What could be more obvious than the fact that each of us has a “­mother-​­tongue” and that each of us needs extensive instruction in its proper use? Illich questioned this unquestionable idea and attributed his quizzical attitude, in part, to the experiences of his childhood. He had spent the first years of his life in Dalmatia. At the end of the First World War, a few years before his birth, this old Roman province had become part of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia, but in Illich’s memory, it retained much of the character of the old ­Austro-​­Hungarian Empire of which it had formerly been a part. There, he says, languages overlapped and interpenetrated: [I] was brought up mentally in the world where the ­Austro-​­Hungarian Empire with its seventeen languages bordered directly on the port of Istanbul, the seat of the sultan. My aunt always called it Czarigrad, the place where the emperor sits, the old Russian Slavonic way of referring to it. This was a ­multi-​­people, ­multi-​­language empire. The idea of Homo ­monolinguis—​­one-​­languaged ­man—​­the idea of children having to grow into one system before we confuse them with another mental system, is an idea with which, unfortunately, many people are brought up now. Today educational tracts, psychological tracts . . . just take it for granted that man is born monolingual and that he would be disturbed if he spoke from early childhood in two languages. . . . As an historian I’m trying to upset this idea, claiming that most people in Africa, in Asia don’t learn language, they learn how to speak, and then they speak differently to their nurse and to their mother.

Illich fills out this distinction between learning a language and learning how to speak in an essay in Shadow Work: “My friend the goldsmith in Timbuktu

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speaks Songhay at home, listens to Bambara on the radio, devotedly and with some understanding says his prayers five times a day in Arabic, gets along in two trade languages on the Souk, converses in passable French that he picked up in the ­army—​­and none of these languages was formally taught to him. He did not set out to learn these tongues; each one is a style in which he remembers a peculiar set of experiences that fits into the frame of that language.” How language as a style of experience and memory becomes language as a highly capitalized resource is the story Illich sets out to tell in a seminal essay called “Vernacular Values.” His hypothesis is that language, as “taught ­mother-​ ­tongue,” did not exist before the period of modern European expansion. He finds the paradigmatic moment of its crystallization in a conference between Queen Isabella of Spain and a grammarian by the name of Elio Antonio de Nebrija. In 1492, with Columbus already on his way to what he hoped were the Indies, Nebrija petitioned the queen for aid and benediction in his project of writing a grammar of the Castilian language. What Nebrija sought to do in Spain, other humanists throughout Europe were doing for their vernaculars. Up to this time only Hebrew, Greek, and L ­ atin—​­the three sacred languages, as Isidore of Seville (560–636) had called them in his encyclopedic ­Etymologies—​­had been thought worthy of grammatical analysis. The men of the Renaissance wanted to give their own vernaculars this dignity and ­standing—​­to turn them, in short, into languages. Nebrija offers the queen many arguments. Most of them turn on the advantages a standardized language will offer her. Her subjects, Nebrija says, now speak in a profusion of unruly tongues and read whatever they like, thanks to the newly invented printing press, which was then flooding Europe with what Nebrija judged to be frivolous and uncontrolled vernacular literatures. A recognized national language, under the edifying tutelage of scholars like himself, would allow her subjects to be trained into approved forms of culture. Moreover, it would provide an instrument of rule over the overseas dominions she was about to acquire. Nebrija says, Now, your majesty, let me come to the last advantage that you shall gain from my grammar. For the purpose, recall the time when I presented you with a draft of this book earlier this year in Salamanca. At this time, you asked what end such a grammar could possibly serve. Upon this, the Bishop of Avila interrupted to answer in my stead. What he said was this: “Soon Your Majesty will have placed her yoke upon many barbarians who speak outlandish tongues. By this, your victory, these people shall stand in a new need; the need for the laws the victor owes to the vanquished and the need for

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the language we shall bring with us.” My grammar shall serve to impart to them the ­Castilian tongue, as we have used Latin grammar to teach Latin to our young.

Nebrija’s petition to the queen did not succeed. Isabella, though a modernizer in other respects, persisted in the view that she hinted at when she asked Nebrija “what end such a grammar could possibly serve.” She held that the speech of her subjects lay within their jurisdiction, not hers. Illich speaks of “the royal respect for the autonomy of her subject’s tongues.” Nevertheless, Nebrija was able to publish his Gramática de la Lengua Castellana in the same year that he sought the queen’s blessing. It has been celebrated ever since as one of the foundation stones of modern Spain, as significant in its way as the two other signal events of that year: the reconquest of Granada and Columbus’s voyage to the West. Illich challenges this view of Nebrija as a hero of humanist scholarship. He sees Nebrija as the enemy of what Illich calls subsistence. By this he means all the elements of culture and livelihood that are proper to a place and that people can provide for themselves without domination or dependency. “In effect,” writes Illich in the conclusion to his essay, “Nebrija drafts the declaration of war against subsistence which the new state was organizing to fight. He intends to replace the vernacular with taught mother ­tongue—​­the first invented part of universal education.” In Nebrija’s project of creating a Castilian of “one standard tenor,” Illich perceives an intention “to engineer, to synthesize chemically a language.” He claims that Nebrija sees the vernacular as “a resource to be mined” and imputes to him the desire to “suppress untutored speech.” “Nebrija,” he says, “clearly showed the way to prevent the free and anarchic development of printing technology and laid down exactly how to transform it into the evolving national state’s instrument of bureaucratic control.” This is a lot to lay at the door of a grammar book, even if the extravagant puffery with which Nebrija courted royal patronage allows Illich to condemn the man out of his own mouth. A little context may be helpful. Nebrija was an acknowledged pioneer of a movement to establish national languages that swept Europe in the years around and after 1500 and involved many humanist scholars. He is often mentioned in the same breath as Desiderius Erasmus, his contemporary whose edition of the Greek New Testament provided the basis on which Martin Luther later rendered it into German and William Tyndale into English. In France a generation later, Joachim Du Bellay in his Défense et I­ llustration de la Langue Française makes similar statements about French as Nebrija does about Castilian. The French language, Du Bellay maintains, is not yet fit to serve as a

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vehicle for the highest forms of poetry, but with refinement it might be brought to this level. Like Nebrija presenting his new Castilian to the queen as an artificio (an artifice), Du Bellay contends that languages are not born but made and can therefore be remade. In England, too, poets like Edmund Spenser are devising homegrown meters and cadences and claiming that they are the equal of classical forms and as fit to convey exalted feeling. These poets and scholars were struggling, as I said earlier, to establish a national language that could be considered to be of the same stature as Greek or Latin. They were also trying to isolate language from the flux of e­ ver-​­changing popular speech so as to make it an object of study and cultivation. Roland Greene, a scholar of this period and professor of English and comparative literature at Stanford, describes the mood of the time this way: It’s a period of ­self-​­consciousness about language. It’s the period in which there i­ s—​ ­much more than in the ­past—​­a ­wide-​­spread awareness that language is not only the personal and the interpersonal property of individuals, which has always been there for everyone, but rather a field of study, something about which it’s possible to theorize, something about which it’s possible to start to construct much more systematic etymologies. It’s the period of the first dictionaries. All of these things emerge in the course of the 16th century, especially the first half of the 16th century. And taken altogether, you see that there is a kind of dawning awareness that language is something about which people can speculate, theorize, [and] disagree, rather than simply live in it. It becomes possible to adopt a standpoint on it, and look at it as if from the ­outside. . . . [One is no longer] simply . . . in it as a fish is in water.

An index of this new ­self-​­consciousness about language is the increasing prevalence of the word itself. In English, language increasing replaces the older word tongue. In French, langue (tongue) becomes langage. In Spanish, lengua turns into lenguaje. This new view of language as a c­ onstruction—​­an ­artificio—​­looks forward to the natural philosophy of Bacon and Galileo and can be seen as one of the first expressions of the new attitude to nature embodied in that philosophy. It also has a utopian dimension. Roland Greene points to the prevalence of the biblical figures of Babel and Pentecost in the writings of those wishing to elevate the European vernaculars to the full dignity of Isidore’s “three sacred languages.” In the story of Babel, in the book of Genesis, it is said that there was a time when “the whole earth had one language and few words.” But then the people attempt “a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens” in order to “make a name” for themselves. God sees

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the tower and concludes that this is “only the beginning of what they will do” and that now “nothing . . . they propose will . . . be impossible for them.” His response is “to confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” and to “scatter them abroad over the face of all the earth.” The story parallels the Greek myth of N ­ emesis—​­the personification of divine retribution against those who succumb to ­hubris—​­on which Illich drew in his writings. Pentecost tells the opposite tale: the spirit descends on the apostles of Jesus, gathered in Jerusalem after the Crucifixion, and they begin to speak in “other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” “The multitude,” who are attracted by the sound, are “amazed” because “each one heard them in his own language.” In the Spirit, the one is again visible in the many, and the confusion of Babel is undone. This story of restored understanding and the overcoming of Babel was influential among Renaissance humanists, Greene says, but not because they waited in hope for a miraculous intervention of the Spirit or because they dreamed of a world language. Rather, they saw the promise of Pentecost realized in their new ­proto-​­science—​­just as Francis Bacon would later promise a restored Paradise through the application of an experimental method able to parse the sentences of the Book of Nature and then rewrite them. Language was to be unified by study of its common features, and in this s­ elf-​­consciousness about language a common language would be born. Scientific method would be the lingua franca. ­Self-​­consciousness about language at this time is also reflected in the emergence of the n ­ ation-​­state as the child of a mother tongue. Formerly only the Church had been called mother. The image appeared in early Christian times and was, in Illich’s view, unique to Christianity. Though it has “yet to be noticed and studied,” he wrote, “no previous community had ever been called mother.” In Christendom this simile became pervasive: The Church conceives, bears, and gives birth to her sons and daughters. She may have a miscarriage. She raises her children to her breast to nourish them with the milk of faith. In [the] early period, the institutional trait is clearly present, but the maternal authority exercised by the Church through her bishops and the ritual treatment of the Church building as a female entity are still balanced by the insistence on the motherly quality of God’s love, and of the mutual love of his children in baptism. Later, the image of the church as a prototype of the authoritarian and possessive mother becomes dominant in the Middle Ages. The popes then insist on an understanding of the Church as Mater, Magistra, and ­Domina—​­mother, authoritative teacher, sovereign. Thus Gregory VII (1073–1085) names her in the struggle with the emperor Henry IV.

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Around the time that Nebrija wrote, the n ­ ation-​­state was beginning to assert its claim on the Church’s maternal role. Illich held the view that the roots of the modern state lie in the Roman Church much more than they do in premodern political institutions. Both in its legal structure and in its concern to regulate and edify its citizenry, the state takes over the novel forms of government that were pioneered in the Church during the period between Gregory VII’s declaration of the supreme authority of the pope (Dicatatus Papae, 1075) and the Reformation. A simple example is the division of the Roman curia into separate congregations, each with a different competence and jurisdiction, which prefigures the departments of a modern cabinet. A secular state, with the legal and bureaucratic character invented at the papal court, was just beginning to emerge at the time of Isabella and Ferdinand in ­Spain—​­a time, Illich says, “when the titled gentlemen with their swords were replaced in royal processions by lawyers with books and pens in their hands.” The word state had formerly meant little more than the condition of the ruler’s p ­ erson—​­its state. Now it began to mean what it means to us today. It is in this broader context that Illich places Nebrija. Nebrija, in his eyes, is proposing something more than a grammatical reform or the cultivation of a language that will prove fit for the pens of Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and the other writers of Spain’s “Golden Age.” Illich sees a modern school system glimmering on the horizon. Illich’s Approach to History Taught mother tongue, for Illich, is the underlying certainty that ties together the whole tissue of assumptions that make modern schooling appear to be a rational procedure. Nebrija lays the groundwork for the creature that Illich called homo educandus, a person born in need of education and one who will be helpless and defective without it. In Nebrija’s petition to the queen, Illich saw this certainty in its germinal state. Such moments, when a w ­ orld-​­to-​­be is visible in embryo, spoke to him, and, as a historian, he searched for them. Illich’s historical method appears here in its starkest light. Nebrija is of interest only insofar as he can be seen as initiating the move to bring the popular tongue under expert tutelage. Other elements of his purpose are disregarded. Neither the move to place the European vernaculars on the same footing as Hebrew, Greek, and Latin nor the desire to make language an object of study is cited in mitigation of the accusation that Nebrija was starting a war. Illich has his eyes fixed, ­crab-​­like, on the present. One could almost call his proceeding typological, after the old style of biblical interpretation in which people

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and events are seen as “types” of one another, linked within a larger pattern of meaning in which the ­still-​­to-​­come is foreshadowed in the present. Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale are a type, a prefiguration, of Christ’s death and resurrection. Illich looks for the future in the past. I think this needs to be borne in mind when trying to understand how I­ llich—​­himself an expert g­ rammarian—​­could find a single Spanish humanist to be pregnant with a five-hundred-​­year war on subsistence. Nebrija is a type, foreshadowing a future in which language has become a ­Lego-​­like construction kit with which paid speakers can shape the world to their purposes. In Nebrija’s first halting steps to bring the vernacular under cultivation, Illich sees a prefiguration of its eventual disappearance. This fixation on the present has always to be kept in mind when interpreting Illich. Otherwise he can be misread as a romantic who imagines that, without interfering grammarians like Nebrija, Spain would have been a nation of noble savages speaking with the power and originality of Adam naming the animals. Illich, in my view, is trying to restore a lost balance, not prettify the past. He confronts a present in which the equilibrium between what grows of its own accord and what is governed by formal rules has been lost. The vernacular, for Illich, is a figure of this lost spontaneity, referring, by definition, to a form of life that can be neither economized nor brought under professional control. Because such forms have only a fugitive existence in the contemporary world, he wants both to reinstate them and to ask how they were lost. Nebrija serves Illich as a type of this loss because Nebrija is so entirely oblivious of the danger. He looks forward to unlimited progress, seeing no shadow of evil in what he intends and no balance between freedom and rule, the wild and the domestic, that might be put in jeopardy. It is his unchecked confidence that makes him a fitting figure of a future in which the common tongue has effectively ceased to exist. Illich also raises the question of whether things might be otherwise than they are. He indicts Nebrija as a forerunner of homo educandus, not because he is against learning or grammar but because he objects to Education as a package that monopolizes our time, our imaginations, and our possibilities. It is of the essence of such a monopoly that it obscures and eliminates alternatives. It makes people believe that the things schools purport to do would not be done if there were no school. So, even if people can see that school does these things wastefully and ineffectively and sometimes not at all, they will still continue to believe that the school is the only way to do it. Nebrija displays this i­dea—​­that people must be trained, tutored, and led into the right paths by their betters or else they will be lazy, frivolous, and d ­ isobedient—​­before it has hardened into a certainty and

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is still in its molten state. It is telling in this respect that the queen is not at all convinced by Nebrija’s arguments, even though, broadly speaking, she’s on the same side of history as he is. Seeing the assumption before it hardens hints at a road not taken. Illich writes, for example, that Nebrija wants to “prevent the free and anarchic development of printing technology” and instead “transform it into the evolving national state’s instrument of bureaucratic control.” Here the road not taken is manifest: What would the “free and anarchic development of printing technology” have been like? We can only imagine, but it’s clear that the alternative to a bureaucratically prescribed and governed language is not that people should remain in some unchanging state but rather that new horizons should open through a “free and anarchic development.” Likewise, Illich says that Nebrija wants to “standardiz[e] a living language for the benefit of its printed form.” This to me does not imply that Illich rejects the printed form. On the contrary, he seems excited about the free and anarchic development that was cut short. What is at issue, rather, is the relative statuses of written and spoken language. Illich was a s­ elf-​­admitted “bibliophile.” He writes in one late paper of “the enormous wealth and beauty of the bibliophilia in which I have grown up and taught.” He was no enemy of the “printed form.” He imagined, rather, a different relationship between this form and vernacular ­speech—​­one in which the printed form flowers but does not dominate or discourage “living speech.” Balance, once again, is the issue. The Past Reveals a New Beginning I have found insight into Illich’s historical method in a book by James Carse called Finite and Infinite Games in which he suggests that the past can “reveal new beginnings.” His book, as its title suggests, distinguishes “two kinds of games.” Finite games are played within definite boundaries and require a decisive w ­ in-​­or-​­lose outcome. An infinite game is played “for the purpose of continuing the play,” and its rules and boundaries evolve in the context of the play so that there can be no winners and losers. One of the crucial criteria by which the two can be distinguished is surprise. Carse writes: “Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue. Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been begun there. With each surprise the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing.”

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This passage helped me understand Illich’s often expressed relish for surprise as well as his attitude to the past. “For the historian,” Illich once wrote, “the present appears as the future of the past.” He continues: History heightens my sensitivity to the time vector hidden in all our terms when we try to discuss public goods. Historical studies make me aware that most of the clear certainties by which I act, think, and even perceive were neither suspected nor imaginable for the authors whose writings are my source. I study history to become sensitive to those modern assumptions which, by going unexamined, have turned into our ­epoch-​­specific, a priori forms of perception. I am neither using history nor do I want to escape into history. I study history to look out of its perspective at the axioms of that mental topology of thought and feeling which confronts me when I write or speak.

The emphasis, as always, is on understanding the present. But implied also in the project of becoming sensitive to “the time vector hidden in all our terms” is the possibility of loosening the grip of what we take for granted. To experience a time when the way we now think and feel was unimaginable is also to know that a different future is possible. Carse says that the infinite player does not “regard the past as having an outcome.” I think he must mean a definitive and determined outcome, since at any given moment some outcome must be in play. If we treat the past only as prologue, this outcome appears to be the one that was inevitable all along. The very purpose of the past must have been to produce it. We often see the past this ­way—“reading the last page first,” as historian of science Lorraine Daston once said to me, so that everything that precedes the last page can be seen as leading inexorably to a foreordained outcome. But to see the present in the strange and bewildering light in which it would appear if we could see it from a vantage point in the twelfth c­ entury—​­to try to explain a machine gun to Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141), as Illich once ­said—​­is to see the present in all its contingency and relativity. It is to begin to realize that the past might contain other beginnings, so far disregarded, and to recognize, in Carse’s words, that we do not know “what has been begun there.” Nebrija is conventionally seen as a hero of Renaissance humanism, a forerunner of the glories of the Spanish golden age, and a pioneer in the science of language. Illich draws a dramatically different portrait of a man whom he sees as having fired the first shot in “the war on subsistence.” Because he is able to find the present surprising rather than inevitable, he is also able to change the past. The apparent solidity of the ­past—​­its seemingly determined ­shape—​­is only the shadow cast by the categories with which we construct

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our genealogies. If Nebrija is different than we thought he was, perhaps we could be different than we think we are. If the present is the future of the past, then a different past evokes a different present, at least in potentia. It is in this sense that Carse says that “the past is always changing.” Illich searches the past, in my view, not just for the origins of those certainties with which we now live but also as a seedbed of so far unimagined possibilities. “With each surprise,” Carse says, “the past reveals a new beginning in itself.” Watersheds in the History of Literacy In the previous chapter, I recounted Illich’s surprised recognition, during the 1980s, that his world was “passing over a watershed”—a “passage,” he said, that “I had not expected in my lifetime to observe.” Language, he thought, was being “mathematized,” as textual literacy subsided into a sea of “information.” Illich, as he had with Nebrija, turned to the past for insight into this new reality. In two b­ ooks—​­ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988), cowritten with Barry Sanders, and In the Vineyard of the Text (1993)—he studied watersheds in the history of literacy. Several crucial essays on the same theme appeared as well in the third section of his In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978–1990. Rather than going over each of these books and essays individually, I will try to sketch the position that emerges from all of them. Illich’s perception that literacy was turning into information processing and letters dissolving into bits pushed him to ask fundamental questions about the nature of literacy and about the great changes in our styles of speaking, reading, and writing that have occurred over time. He was led, first of all, back to ancient Greece and to the extensively studied passage between oral and literate society that began to be crossed, at the latest, in the eighth century BCE when the Greeks adapted Phoenician letters to their own language, creating in this way a recognizable ancestor of the alphabet we still use today. All previous writing systems had required a supplement from their readers. Ancient Hebrew writing is an example. Its alphabet came from the same Phoenician source as the G ­ reek—​­the Hebrew begins alef, bet, gimmel; the Greek alpha, beta, ­gamma—​­but in Hebrew only the consonants were written, with the reader supplying the vowels according to the context. Some interpreters think this style of reading and writing is symbolized in the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of the dry bones. The bones (the letters) can stand up and become living flesh only when the prophet, at God’s command, causes “breath to enter [them].” Meaning entered with the breath. The Greek ­alphabet was a pure

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code, a way of describing sounds that allowed any word whatever to be transcribed and read with no prior knowledge, qualification, or interpretive skill. All that was necessary was familiarity with the sounds represented by the ­twenty-​­six letters. This created a technology of unprecedented power. The spoken word had been inseparable from its s­ peaker—​­words expired as they were spoken and could be recalled only as elements in archetypal stories able to carve a place for themselves in memory. The adoption of the alphabet created what Eric Havelock called “a separation between the knower and the known.” According to Havelock, when words could be made to appear, in stable and relatively permanent form, the qualities represented by the words also acquired this character. Justice, which had referred to a style of behavior manifest in concrete situations, could become an abstract idea. It turned into a subject in its own right, with its own inherent character, and was no longer simply a name for what was justly done. In the same way, psyche, which had referred to the ghosts and shades of the dead, came to mean the self, “that part of us that is more real than our bodily existence, just as Plato’s archetypal forms or ideas are more real than their earthly shadows.” Illich absorbed Havelock’s ideas, along with those of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and the other founding thinkers of the school that is now sometimes called “media ecology.” In ABC, he and Sanders write that “the word is a creature of the alphabet.” They mean, as Havelock does, that in oral society the word cannot stand apart from its speaker or outlive the moment in which it is spoken. One cannot speak of “language”: “Only the alphabet,” Illich and Sanders write, “has the power to create language.” The great point is that there is an abysmal difference between the two ways of knowing the world. “No bridge built out of the certainties inherent in the literate mind,” Illich wrote, “can lead back into the oral magma.” The alphabet was a w ­ orld-​­altering technology, but its power was expressed only gradually. Classical Indian civilization, for example, consciously restricted writing and erected all sorts of prohibitions to guard against its perceived ill effects. In Greece, Plato warned of writing’s destructive potential in the famous passage of the Phaedrus in which he has King Thamus of Thebes tell the god Theuth, the supposed inventor of writing, that his invention will “implant forgetfulness” because people will “cease to exercise memory.” Through writing people will “seem to know much,” the king says, but, in reality, they will be “filled not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom.” Such reservations guided educational practice and made literacy a restricted tool, mainly available to small elites. Technical limitations were also decisive. Writing technologies were cumbersome, and

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words were written continuously, without separation, which usually necessitated reading aloud. Silent reading was uncommon though not unheard of. Augustine in his Confessions describes Bishop Ambrose of Milan as one “whose eyes ran over the page, and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.” This seemed notable enough to Augustine that he devotes a paragraph to speculations as to why this admired man might do such an unusual thing. Lay Literacy and the Visible Text It was Illich’s view that the decisive turn toward the mass literacy characteristic of the modern age began to take shape in the twelfth century. There he finds the first evidence of what he and Sanders call “the alphabetization of the popular mind.” Up to this time, the prevalent style of literacy was what he termed “monkish reading.” It carried on the practices of antiquity, when physicians sometimes recommended reading as a physical exercise as vigorous as walking or games. Reading scripture and its commentaries, during the first millennium of Christianity, was an a­ ll-​­engrossing, bodily pursuit. Words were sounded and savored on the tongue. In monastic scriptoria, readers and copyists buzzed and hummed like bees over the manuscripts. Augustine advised his monks to “read [Scripture] because it is sweeter than all honey, more pleasing than any bread, and you will find it gives more joy than any wine.” Bernard of Clairvaux, employing a figure in common use at the time, compared his brothers, when reading, to cows chewing their cud and exhorted them to become “pure ruminating animals.” Hugh of St. Victor, in his study of reading, recalled that the word pagina (page) means a vineyard, and he compares the voces paginarum (voice of the page) to fruit that he picks and savors. (Illich derives his title, In the Vineyard of the Text, from this metaphor of Hugh’s.) Reading was a pilgrimage, an engrossment of the senses, and a way of life. This began to change, Illich argues, in the early years of the twelfth century. He first laid out this argument in a lecture called “A Plea for Research on Lay Literacy,” which he gave to the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco in 1986. Monkish reading, he said, belonged to the epoch of “clerical literacy.” “Lay literacy” was his description of a new mode of consciousness “in which the book becomes the decisive metaphor through which we conceive of the Self and its place.” Its emergence was stimulated by a whole series of linked changes in the layout of books that, taken altogether, transformed the monkish text into what Illich called “the visible text.” Among these innovations: chapters were distinguished and given titles and subtitles; texts were divided into ­paragraphs; ­quotations

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were marked; tables of contents, alphabetic indexes, and marginal glosses were all added. Word separation became a matter of course. As a result, books could be used for reference as well as reading. Libraries with books set out in an accessible order on their shelves came into existence, and monasteries began to catalogue their holdings. Illich thought that these changes amounted, cumulatively, to a revolution. The book had been an ark, a place of pilgrimage, and, above all, an object that absorbed and included its reader. Now it could be used as a scholarly tool without the reader having to submit to the book’s superior wisdom, mystery, and authority as the monkish reader had done. The shocking novelty of the new situation is illustrated by an anecdote Illich tells about Albert the Great (1200–1280), one of his beloved authors of the time. In a bestiary written in the early thirteenth century, Albert arranges the beasts in alphabetical order but begins with a long and embarrassed excuse for doing so. Such a procedure, he says, is convenient, compellingly so, but still a­ nti-​­intellectual. The beasts, for him, are “the created symbols of certain virtues, the panther of sweetness, the lion of courage [etc.], and they should be ordered according to the virtues they represent, not according to the letter with which [their names] begin.” He stands on what Illich sees as a dividing line. Allowing what we would call “random access” to his book seems overwhelmingly logical to Albert but, at the same, destructive of a more “natural” principle of order to which he still subscribes. Illich describes the difference Albert perceives as one between a “symbol for cosmic reality”—the object of the monk’s lectio ­divina—​­and “a symbol for thought”—the new scholarly text. “The page had lost the quality of soil in which words are rooted,” he says. Initially, this revolution of the page did not produce any great increase in the number of people who could hold a pen or decipher a sentence. Literacy did gradually spread, but long before most people could read, Illich argues, they had already learned to define themselves in literate metaphors. These began to spread irresistibly from the twelfth century on, and it is this metaphorical resonance of the book that Illich tries to catch with his term lay literacy. On the tympanum above the cathedral door appeared the Supreme Judge, reading off the deeds of the faithful passing below him in the Book of Life that he held cradled in his lap. Inside the church sat a “writing devil,” perched on his tail, which had grown thicker for this purpose, and holding a tablet where he was jotting down sins. The book of nature likewise became an important figure of speech. The Inquisition began. Torture was used to open the body and reveal the secrets that were written there. At the end of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Church proclaimed the duty

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of each Christian to make an annual confession in which they would read off to a priest the inner record that their thoughts and deeds had left on their conscience. In all these ways, Illich says, the nonreader knew that somewhere reality was written. Ideas of the self, conscience, memory, and identity all either developed or dramatically changed their inflection under the impress of the new legibility of the book. When Tasks Acquire Symbolic Significance Illich did not argue that the changes in the page caused the emergence of a new style of consciousness in some direct and inevitable sense. His view was subtler than that. Tools are mobilized, he argued, only when the tasks for which they are fit acquire “symbolic significance.” The alphabet provides an example. It is clearly “a tool for recording speech sounds.” And yet, Illich writes, “for one and a half t­ housand years . . .” the Roman letters that we still use were used for “one exclusive purpose: writing Latin.” “During the 650 years when Rome governed the ­Mediterranean world, not one of the tongues of the conquered and governed peoples was ever recorded in Roman letters. The monopoly of Latin over the Roman alphabet was so absolute that it has never been viewed as the result of a ‘taboo’ and has never been ­considered as a surprising historical anomaly. This neglect of an available ­technology seems as impressive as the neglect of the wheel in p ­ re-​­Columbian c­ ultures, where only gods and playthings were ever put in a carriage.” The Greek language exercised the same monopoly over its alphabet. When the Christian missionaries Cyril and Methodius introduced the Greek Bible to the Bulgarians around 850, they created a whole new alphabet, “glagolic,” so called, rather than simple enlarging the Greek alphabet with “the few extra signs needed to record Slavonic sounds.” There were exceptions, Illich concedes, to this monopoly of Latin and Greek over their alphabets, but few enough that they only highlight the privilege that these “sacred” languages enjoyed until the moment at which the floodgates opened, all at once, in the middle of the twelfth century. Only . . . quite suddenly . . . does the alphabet begin to be used by chroniclers and notaries to record actual speech. A recording device available for so long, and known by people born into languages distinct from Latin, was only now routinely used to fix these in written form. From the point of view of the historian of technology this is a privileged instance to test fundamental hypotheses. Instead of confirming the theory that tasks become possible when the tools to perform them become available, or the other

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which says that tools are created when tasks come to be socially desirable, this use of the ABC suggests that an eminently suitable and complex artificial device already available within a society will be turned into a tool for the performance of a task only at the historic moment when this task acquires symbolic significance.

An interesting confirmation of Illich’s idea that tools are mobilized only when what they do is first perceived as meaningful comes from Marshall McLuhan. In a letter to a friend written in 1971, he says, “The study of effects has lately driven me to the study of causality where I have been forced to the observation that most of the effects of any innovation occur before the actual innovation.” McLuhan puts it paradoxically, enjoying the idea that the effect precedes the cause, but I think he is saying exactly the same thing as Illich: the cause will appear only when its ostensible effects, or what Illich calls its “symbolic significance,” are already present. What was the “symbolic significance” that the task of “alphabetizing the popular mind” took on in the twelfth century? I think Illich has in mind the whole complex of changes that made this period, in his eyes, the seedbed of ­modernity—​­the nursery of those incipient certainties that would eventually become, as he says, “that which I have to live with.” A growing scholarly consensus agrees with him. Some authors have spoken of “the reformation of the 12th century,” others of the “papal revolution.” Philosopher Charles Taylor sees what he calls the “Reform Master Narrative” as beginning at this time. What happened, in brief, was that the Church was ­re-​­formed as a legal society, the forerunner of all subsequent “corporations,” and sin was criminalized and made into an offense against Church law. A technological revolution was ­launched—“monasteries,” Illich says tartly, “became machine parks.” And “the moral self,” individualized and alone, precipitated out of the body of “the faithful.” I will have more to say about all these changes when I come to discuss Illich’s hypothesis that the roots of modernity lie in the Church’s attempt to “institutionalize, legitimize and manage Christian vocation.” The point here is that the transformation of the page that led to the emergence of what Illich calls “the visible text” was reciprocally related to an ensemble of changes, each one reinforcing, amplifying, and resonating with all the others. Illich speaks of “the visible text” as a way of dramatizing the fact that the reader could now, in effect, hover above the text rather than being incorporated into its order. A new kind of reading developed. To describe it Illich borrowed the term “bookish reading” from George Steiner. The monkish book was not, in our contemporary sense, a text at all. Hugh of St. Victor compared it, as I’ve said, to an ark, a vineyard, and a site of pilgrimage. Illich calls it “a symbol for cosmic

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r­eality.” However conceived, the book contained and exceeded its r­eader—​­the reader, one might say, was the one being read. The scholarly text, laid open by its new apparatus of chapter and verse, index and inventory, could become what Illich calls “the mirror of [a] mind.” The book became an optical rather than an acoustic technology. The page could be visualized and thus dominated and used in an entirely new way. And because the book to which one formerly had to submit oneself could now be picked up and consulted randomly and at will, the text began to detach itself from “this or that manuscript.” Just as the word justice, when it was written, could become an idea, so text, when it was made accessible, could also become one. The text retained its port and its anchorage in the book, but now it also floated above it as a free and available image of a new self. As the text became visible, Illich says, more and more things were done “by the book.” Writs replaced oaths; written charters replaced spoken agreements. In England in the twelfth century, “the number of charters used in the transfer of properties increased by a factor of one hundred or more.” “The clod of soil which the father had formerly put into the hand of the son whom he had chosen as his heir” gave way to a written testament. These changes, in Illich’s view, reconfigured ­self-​­perception. “The idea of a self,” he writes, “that continues to glimmer in thought or memory, occasionally retrieved and examined in the light of day, cannot exist without the text. Where there is no alphabet, there can neither be a memory conceived as a storehouse nor the ‘I’ as its appointed watchman.” This new self began to take shape, as I have said, even among those who could not yet read, surrounded, as they were, with literate devices and images. It underlay the emergence of the citizen who could join with his fellows to write the charters that created the new towns and cities of the time. And it created the moral subjectivity implied by the reformation of the Church as a legal entity governed by an elaborate and proliferating code of canon law. The ­Twelfth-​­Century Reformation More than once in his writings on the emergence of a new literate self in the twelfth century, Illich explicitly disavows any intention of making “a learned contribution.” Rather he wants “to offer a guide to a vantage point in the past from which I have gained new insights into the present.” There’s no question that this was his sincere and urgent purpose, as I’ll try to show in a moment, but I think, nevertheless, that he did make “a learned contribution” as well, and one that so far has gone largely unrecognized. Canonical works like Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an

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Agent of Change and Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy present Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1439 as the great partition between medieval and modern society. It is moveable types, on this account, that provide what McLuhan called “the technology of individualism.” Illich acknowledges these “rich studies” and others that present the printing press as the technical foundation for modern modes of thought, but he argues that they have “paralyzed research on the earlier cognitive transformation” whose scene was the monastic scriptorium. “Not a single book, nor a sizable article,” Illich wrote in 1993, “deals with the hypothesis that it was a scribal revolution that created the object which, three hundred years later, was fit for print.” So far as I can see, this remains largely true. Again and again, over the past twenty and more years, I have looked in vain for any reference to Illich’s findings in works where I would have thought his claims both relevant and germane. Does it matter that changes in mentality conventionally ascribed to ­Gutenberg’s invention are already evident three centuries earlier as implications of a little known scribal revolution? I think it does. First of all, it undermines the periods into which Western history is conventionally divided: classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment (with a Dark Age sometimes separating late antiquity from the Middle Ages). This is a highly prejudicial scheme. Its main effect, in Larry Siedentop’s words, is to “minimize the moral and intellectual distance between the modern world and the ancient world, while at the same time maximizing the moral and intellectual distance between modern Europe and the Middle Ages.” Classical civilization is idealized. The Middle Ages are treated as an interruption that ends when “scholasticism” is overcome, the dead hand of the Church is forced to loosen its grip, and classical ideals are reborn, literally so, in the Renaissance. Finally, the Enlightenment consolidates the gains of the ­Renaissance and definitively banishes the Church from the main narrative of Western progress. By accepting the narrative encoded in these names, Siedentop says, we become “victims of our own historiography,” committed unthinkingly and in advance to a story that pits religious obscurantism against modern enlightenment. Charles Taylor calls this kind of deep structure, embedded in the very terms we use, a “default mode”—a way of thinking to which we unconsciously revert even after we have been exposed to more persuasive c­ ounter-​­narratives. This is not at all to say that McLuhan, Eisenstein, and others wrote with any ideological intention but only that the story that traces literate mentalities to the flood of writing released by the printing press very conveniently fits the stereotypes I’ve been discussing.

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Hugh of St. Victor Illich’s research on the transformation of monkish lectio divina into the detached scholastic perusal of a visible text belongs to the historiographic revolution that is beginning to find the origins of modernity in the Middle Ages and not with the ­supposed reawakening of classical civilization in the Renaissance. The arc of modernity, seen through Illich’s eyes, spans eight centuries, not just the five normally allotted to it. And, if it’s true, as Eliot says, that “in my beginning is my end,” then where the beginning of the age is set will influence how its end is viewed. In the early twelfth century, Illich found what he calls “a hinge period.” He readily admitted that “it’s the historian who constructs the hinge” but still argued that there are compelling reasons to view the early twelfth century in this light. There, he said, “he could observe the emergence of many of those assumptions that, by going unexamined, have turned into today’s certainties.” “The visible text” is a perfect example of such a certainty. What particularly delighted Illich was to discover these certainties as they were germinating but before they had grown up into a fully determined form. This delight animates his book In the Vineyard of the Text: A C ­ ommentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon. Hugh of St. Victor, as I’ve mentioned before, was a thinker of singular importance to Illich, and Illich sometimes spoke of him as a friend as well as a teacher. Hugh was a member of the then new order of ­Augustinian canons regular and the Master of Studies in the cloister of St. Victor, just outside the walls of medieval Paris on today’s Left Bank. His ­Didascalicon is subtitled De Studio L ­ egendi, literally “on the study of reading,” though Illich thought that the modern word study could not really convey Hugh’s meaning and suggested that effort or even ­commitment might come closer. Illich uses Hugh’s book as a way of trying to understand “what Hugh actually did when he engaged in that activity which he calls reading.” Hugh, in Illich’s view, stands on the very cusp at which monkish reading and bookish reading touch and overlap. His reading still belongs to “the old world,” Illich says. “He still picks and tastes words, like berries. . . . He still . . . conceives reading as a pilgrimage.” But he also looks ahead. Although reading, for him, remains an oral activity, he already lists silent reading, reading for the eyes, as one of the three possible modes of r­eading—​­the first to do so, Illich says. He praises ­learning—“I myself never looked down on anything which had to do with education,” Hugh w ­ rites—​­and was part of a new order of priests, the canons regular, who were “no longer monks, but people who lived in community in town, for the purpose of docere verbo et exemplo, to teach by speaking and giving an example of

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how one lives in a city.” Hugh is also the first Western thinker, according to Illich, who offers a philosophy of tools. From the myriad of devices in artisanal use, he abstracts the general category of tools and reflects on it as such. He thus anticipates the coming age of instrumentality even as he resists it. As I wrote earlier, apropos Illich’s essay “Research by People,” Hugh understands technique as a remedy for the weakened and maladapted state in which fallen humanity finds itself. Made for paradise, we would be pricked by every thorn and bruised by every stone had we no technical arts to protect and sustain us. But these arts should be studied so we can understand “the wisdom hidden” in them. The idea of technology as a remedy and as a repository of hidden wisdom contains a principle of limitation. Reading is similarly understood as what Illich calls “an ontologically remedial technique.” Hugh straddles two ages and offers the best of the age that is dying to the age that is being born. Illich considers this an exemplary stance, and it is one that I think he aspires to ­himself—​­one hears it when he talks of how he likes “to walk along the watershed.” He sees Hugh as possessing an unusual originality and freedom of thought while at the same time cleaving to all that was good in his tradition. In this sense, Hugh represents a m ­ ight-​­have-​­been or a road not taken. His attempt to develop what Illich calls a “critical” philosophy of technology was forgotten, swept aside by “the passions and interests of the age.” His glorious account of reading suffered a similar fate, as scholastic study was increasingly divorced from what Hugh saw as its primary ­purpose—​­the cultivation of wisdom. “Of all things to be sought,” reads the first sentence of the Didascalicon, “the first is wisdom.” Illich sees this divorce of wisdom and learning in the constitution of the new universities that began to appear around Hugh’s time. The University of Bologna, usually called the first Western university, was founded a few years before Hugh’s birth; the second, the University of Paris, was established a few years after his death. These new institutions, in Illich’s view, were the offspring of the visible text. Books had not only become more accessible but also more portable, as a companion revolution in bookbinding made them smaller, easier to handle, and more suitable for private ownership. It was the new style of education that the portable and visible book made possible that led to the creation of universities. Students began to assemble around their teachers in a dramatically different way than they had at the beginning of the twelfth century. At the beginning of the century, the Age of Abelard or Hugh of St. Victor, the teacher is shown at his pulpit with his eyes fixed on the codex, addressing a couple of listeners [who are] glued to his lips. . . . By the end of the century, the miniatures show a different

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scene: a dozen students squat in front of their teacher, each with an opened book on his knees. The teacher looks at the outline of his argument in quaestiones and articuli [articles], distinctiones and responsoria. To be able to follow the complex gothic ordinatio [roughly speaking, the hierarchical structure of the argument] a student simply needs an optical crutch, which he finds in the architecture of the book in front of his eyes.

These new settings for “critical . . . thinking, arguing and learning” became the site of lectio scholastica, scholarly or bookish reading. This new style, according to Illich, brought about “a cultural split . . . schism or rift that has been of deeper cultural consequence in the constitution of the West than any substantive, ‘scientific’ or doctrinal ‘reformation’ since.” A direction was set and maintained for the next eight hundred years. Subsequent “reformations” may have refined or adjusted, speeded or slowed this modern tendency, but its fundamental character was continuous, until, in our time, the book was at last dethroned as our most comprehensive image of how the world is known. The new page had created a new ­possibility—“a fantastic . . . possibility,” Illich ­says—​­but the new universities had “institutionalized and trivialized” it. “The acquisition of knowledge” had been “pried” apart from “advancement in sensual discipline.” Put another way, “the ­ascetical-​­mystical pursuit of prayer” and “the ­intellectual-​­critical pursuit of truth” underwent “institutional segregation.” The university set its sights on what in time would become science in our modern sense. Wisdom fled to whatever refuges it could find. The mind and the heart, intellectual inquiry and prayer, critique and ­self-​­discipline were not cultivated together. The sage and the scholar parted ­company. Illich was an interpreter of images, a man able to discern the long unfolding of an entire epoch in its scattered starting points. The divorce of science and spirit didn’t happen all at once, but Illich, looking from the past to the present, could see what was coming at a glance, as he watched the new capacities created by the portable book and its redesigned page poured into the molds that would shape their history over the next eight centuries. What was lost he called askesis, preferring to retain the Latin term rather than chance the suggestion of hair shirts and n ­ avel-​ ­gazing that he thought haunted the contemporary concept of asceticism. One can see something of his thinking in the proposal for a lecture series on askesis that he sent to David Ramage, the president of the McCormick Theological Seminary, in 1989. In his proposal, which I examined in the previous chapter in relation to his history of the senses, Illich lays out the argument I have just presented: that since the foundation of the medieval university, “the humanist tradition has

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­ reeminently fostered the formation of critical habits” and neglected formation of p the heart and its affections. This neglect, he says, was “a necessary condition for the science which we now have.” Illich does not deprecate this critical ­tradition—​­in fact, he calls it “precious”—but rather calls for its supplementation in the hope of creating “a new complementarity between critical and ascetical learning.” This new asceticism would not in any sense be a return to earlier practices, but it should be informed, he says, by historical study of how the senses have been disciplined in other societies and how they were disciplined in the West before the “cultural split” that he traces to the twelfth century. Crucial, for him, is that attention be paid to the body and to what he calls its ­centers—​­he mentions “the heart, the eyes, the limbs, the stomach, the flesh, the ears and the spirit,” with this last term evidently intended as no less of the body than the others. The senses, he says, must be trained in order not to mortify them but, on the contrary, to enhance them by reducing distraction, desensitization, and glut. The Split in Western Civilization Illich found in Hugh of St. Victor that balance of critical and ascetical habits of thought that might have averted the t­ echno-​­scientific coma into which our civilization has fallen and that might still awaken it. Hugh, as Illich read him, held together all that was about to ­diverge—​­the head and the heart, science and spirit, critique and askesis. He sensed the expansion his civilization was about to undergo and welcomed it, even as he tried to imbue it with the virtues and sensitivities that had been cultivated in the monastic tradition. But Hugh’s example was not heeded, and his voice was drowned in the tide of uncritical enthusiasm that heedlessly embraced new technologies while at the same time excluding them from the university curriculum. What prevailed was a scholastic posture for which “the social pursuit of ‘higher learning acquired a growing independence from the personal commitment to ‘spiritual formation.’” And this split, according to Illich, “goes deeper than what is generally called the onset of ‘secularization.’” “It bespeaks,” he continues, a somatic transformation in our culture: the separation and subordination of the ear in respect to the eye that Jacques Ellul has called the humiliation of the word. It bespeaks the separation of theology from the liturgy. It suggests the disjunction of the practice of a morally engaged personal refinement in attitudes towards the Other from the theoretical advance towards ethical neutrality, one of the presuppositions for the growth of . . . “science” . . . The idea that the artes and scientia could be cultivated apart from

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the pursuit of charity and prayer, that the tradition of learning and that of asceticism could be assigned to distinct loci in society, has been implicit since the founding of the university.

In this passage, Illich finds a whole series of modern fissures beginning to open in the twelfth century. Technology is excluded from ­philosophy—​­a fateful exile still evident today in an attitude that asks only what tools can do for us, not what they mean to us. Critical and ascetical habits of thought diverge. The ear falls under the domination of the eye. And theology declares its independence from liturgy. This last separation has a peculiar importance for Illich because of the significance he assigns to liturgy. Liturgy, for him, is something more than the theatre of worship, with its costumes, implements, and verbal spells. It is, he says, “the womb out of which and within which the Church comes to be.” It is also, according to Aidan Kavanagh, a Benedictine monk and scholar of liturgy, the very soil in which theology g­ rows—“the dynamic condition,” he writes, “within which theological reflection is done.” Thinking about God (theology) follows from the enacting of God’s presence (liturgy is from Greek līetos, “public,” + ergos, “work”). Liturgy is “the work of the people” by which they become something corporately that they have not been by themselves. Any separation of theological reflection from liturgical celebration thus represents a catastrophic collapse of the fundamental condition of Christian life. Illich sees an instance of the “somatic transformation” that he thinks is taking place at this period in a controversy that erupted for the first time during the eleventh century. It was then that a theologian called Berengar of Tours was condemned by a Church council for supposedly raising doubts about the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Berengar’s actual views still provoke ­disagreement—​­after his excommunication and brief imprisonment he made a full confession of his belief that the bread and wine of the communion meal are “the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ”—but what his opponents thought he was saying was that Christ’s presence in the Mass was mystical or symbolic rather than factual. The issue is ­subtle—​­it continued to vex theologians and divide opinion for c­ enturies—​­but what interests Illich about it is why it should arise at all. For a thousand years, he says, Christians had eaten the Eucharistic meal without any record of anyone ever wondering whether the experience was real or symbolic. Then, suddenly. the question of whether the communion bread is really the body of Christ became and remained an issue. For Illich the explanation lies in the emergence of the visible text. In the lectio divina of the

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monk of the first millennium, symbol and reality remain undivided, since a created world is itself symbolic. “All nature is pregnant with sense,” Hugh says, and with this sentence, Illich says, Hugh brings centuries of Christian metaphor to their full maturity. In the lines of the page, the reader enlightened by God encounters creatures who wait there to give birth to meaning. This ontological status of the book yields the key to an understanding of Christian monasticism as a life of reading. The reason why the studium legendi is an effective and infallible search for wisdom is found in the fact that all things are impregnated with sense, and this sense only waits to be brought to light by the reader. Nature is not just like a book; nature itself is a book, and the ­man-​­made book is its analogue. Reading the ­man-​­made book is an act of midwifery. Reading, far from being an act of abstraction, is an act of incarnation. Reading is a somatic, bodily act of birth attendance witnessing the sense brought forth by all things encountered by the pilgrim through the pages.

When the book becomes the mirror of a mind, the sense with which nature had been pregnant withdraws into the mind. With the word made visible and its contours on the clarified page well defined, the discrepancy between the word and the reality at which it points inevitably becomes an issue: signifier and signified draw apart. Issues of interpretation begin to arise as what historian Brian Stock has called “implications of literacy.” The Church settled the Berengarius controversy with a resounding confirmation of the real presence, but the resolution, as Illich says, was “purely philosophical,” distinguishing the communion bread’s “accidental” ­properties—​­its visible appearance as bread which it ­retains—​­from its substance which is invisibly altered. The opposition of the two terms remained, and it was this opposition that was the sign of a new age. Orthodox priest and theologian Alexander Schmemann, writing about the same issue, reinforces Illich’s point. It had once been obvious, Schmemann says, that Christ is “the ­Symbol of all symbols,” the site at which “the reality of the symbol and the symbolism of reality” are held together. Now the real and the symbolic began to exclude one another. This is why Illich speaks of a change deeper than mere “secularization” and calls the t­welfth-​­century revolution “a somatic transformation in our culture.” A new way of perceiving had been born. Illich identifies himself with this new way of perceiving. “The more I reflect on the ­techno-​­genesis of the modern page,” he says, “the [more] clear[ly] I grasp who I am.” Studying “the revolution on the page in the 12th century,” he goes on, made

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him aware of “the unexamined assumptions” that characterized his very “faculty of reasoning.” He was a man, he realized, to whom it seemed “obvious” that text was “the mirror of [his] mind, the anchorage of [his] thought, the map of [his] reflections.” This was a bittersweet recognition, which left him twice e­ stranged—​­as “a creature of a very peculiar epoch” he was both “a foreigner to the teachers of old” and an alien in the new world of ­cyber-​­text. The posture was familiar, of course. Illich had seen himself as an ­exile—​­a man who carried his home on his b ­ ack—​ ­from the age of twelve when he sensed that the world to which he might have belonged was coming to an end. Estrangement was his intellectual s­ trength—​­it is the awareness of the loss of something infinitely precious that makes Illich’s portrait of Hugh of St. Victor so acute and at the same time so poignant. Illich is at home between epochs. He sees Hugh’s world disappearing even as Hugh brings it to its “full maturity.” And, in the same way, he contemplates his own disappearing “island of literacy,” its features fully visible only in its twilight. In “the mirror of the past” he recognizes what was lost, as well as what was gained, when the age of the text, the tool, and the university began in the twelfth century. I will come in a moment to Illich’s claim that the island of literacy is now awash and will soon be submerged in a sea of “communication codes,” but let me first explore a little further into the liminal or transitional character of the moment at which Hugh l­ived—​­a character that Illich also perceived in his own time. In Hugh of St. Victor, Illich discovered a writer who gave a unique theological and philosophical expression to the overlapping of two epochs. He perceived a similar possibility in his own time as the age of instrumentality gave way to the age of systems and a cybernetic ­world-​­image began to overlay and obscure “the visible text.” Old assumptions have loosened their grip, but new assumptions have not entirely taken hold. For Illich there is freedom in such a moment. When ages overlap and w ­ orld-​­images collide, a chance to see without blinders presents itself. In particular, he thought that the spirit of “gratuity” could revive at such a time. The age of instrumentality, whose trajectory ran from Hugh’s time to our own, had been marked by “an extraordinary intensity of purposefulness within society.” Creation was put under renovation and nature rendered serviceable and subservient. In such an age, actions performed for their own sake suffer. “­Non-​­purposeful action . . . performed because it’s beautiful, it’s good, it’s fitting, and not because it’s meant to achieve, to construct, to change, [or] to manage” has a hard time giving an account of itself. But, in the last years of his life, Illich began to meet people, often people younger than he, who he felt had “passed beyond a threshold.” These people were no longer “so deeply imbued by the spirit of instrumentality” and

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could, therefore, he said, “understand what I mean by gratuity.” The assumptions of “the age of systems” were certainly, in his view, settling in ­fast—​­they move “like a smog to engulf us,” he says at one ­point—​­but there was still an opportunity for little ­neo-​­monastic societies, like the ones that he was continually constructing, to revive the spirit of gratuity and surprise. (I use the image of monasticism here advisedly to evoke a community in which something precious is conserved and passed on, not to suggest that Illich and his friends lived according to a monastic rule.) This is well illustrated by his statement, in his letter to David Ramage on askesis, that any contemporary revival of asceticism will be “profoundly different from any previously known.” This sensing of an opportunity and an opening will be important to bear in mind as I now turn to tracing Illich’s often dark reflections on the dawning “age of systems.” You Can’t Turn Me On, Illich Illich wrote In the Vineyard of the Text, he says in the book’s introduction, because he wanted to share “a vantage point in the past from which I have gained new insights into the present.” He believed, as we have already seen, that his world was in the midst of an epochal ­change—​­a change so profound and total that only the introduction of alphabetic literacy in ancient Greece and “the alphabetization of the popular mind” in medieval Europe were even comparable. This was something, he says, that he did not yet fully recognize when he was writing the books that made his name in the 1970s. And yet there had been intimations of the coming change: I still remember a shock I had in Chicago in 1964. We were sitting around a seminar table; opposite me sat a young anthropologist. At the critical point of what I thought was a conversation, he said to me, “Illich, you can’t turn me on, you do not communicate with me.” For the first time in my life I became aware that I was being addressed not as a person but as a transmitter. After a moment of disarray, I began to feel outrage. A live person, to whom I thought that I had been responding, experienced our dialogue as something more general, namely as “one form of human communication.” I immediately thought of Freud’s description of three instances of sickening outrage which were experienced in Western culture: the Kränkungen when the heliocentric system, the theory of evolution, and the postulate of the unconscious had to be integrated into everyday thinking. It is then, ­twenty-​­five years ago, that I began to reflect on the depth of the e­ pistemological break which I . . . suspect goes deeper than the breaks suggested by Freud.

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What was already evident in Illich’s interlocutor’s way of addressing him in 1964 but not fully assimilated until the 1980s was a change in the meaning of text. “The visible text” that had emerged from the revamped page might have hovered above the physical book as an image of thought rather than cosmic order, but it still retained a certain inviolability. The text was still venerated and still always stemmed from an “original.” So, even though it was no longer the site of a pilgrimage, it still kept its integrity as a creature of the alphabet and as the mirror of its writer and reader. Illich goes so far as to say that, as a ­self-​­described “bibliophile,” he “sanctified the text.” The text was a rock that founded and stabilized the book’s many metaphorical extensions in “bookish” society. Both nature, as a legible and lawlike order, and the self, as a narrative structure, partook in this stability. But text, in this sense, has dissolved in our time, Illich says: “Within the last two decades ‘text’ has acquired a new and vague meaning not only in philosophy and science, but also in ordinary speech. It can refer to a paragraph, written in English, a program written in Pascal [a computer language], a characteristic sequence of amino acids in a gene, or the sequence of tones in a bird’s song.” Harbingers of this dissolution of alphabetic text began to appear long before most people had ever seen a c­ omputer—​­a fact that fits Illich’s sense that a task must first acquire “symbolic significance” before it will be executed. An interesting example is German physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s 1943 lecture series at Trinity College Dublin titled “What Is Life?” Schrödinger, so far as I know, was not aware at the time of Turing’s intimations of a Universal Machine or the first stirrings of systems theory, but he laid the foundation for contemporary genetics with his speculation, in Illich’s paraphrase, “that genetic substance could best be understood as a stable text whose occasional variations had to be interpreted as textual variation.” Ten years later James Watson and Francis Crick revealed the “letters” in which they supposed that the genetic code is written. Around the same time that Schrödinger was lecturing in Dublin, Roland Jakobson, a Russian émigré linguist, working in the United States, “cracked the atom of linguistics, the phoneme.” The phoneme, as the basic sound unit of speech, had been taken as irreducible, but Jakobson argued that it was an effect of an underlying set of binary contrasts and not a thing in itself at all. “A phonetic system must therefore be analyzed,” anthropologist Adam Kuper writes, “as a . . . system of relationships rather than as a series of individual sounds.” Jakobson’s finding was a “revelation” to Claude ­Lévi-​­Strauss and many other “structuralist” thinkers in his wake. Not only was language becoming a metaphor for a biochemical code, as with Schrödinger, it was itself decomposing, in the hands of structural linguistics, into a set of patterns

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or relationships. Language, Illich had argued, was an effect of the alphabet, text a consequence of the clarification of the manuscript page in the twelfth century. Now something new was happening. Language, in the older sense of something stable, privileged, and unique, was disappearing. When germ plasm can compose a text with no author and ­Lévi-​­Strauss can stretch linguistic analysis into an account of all the “elementary structures” of society, language has dissolved into code. And this was what Illich claimed had happened: in place of language we have “a communications medium” or an “information process.” Speech and writing have become instances of something more general. The embodied word, capable of expressing a personal intention, has lost its contour. Its defining boundary has been blurred. The text once inscribed on the conscience of the faithful is now written e­ verywhere—​­in the genome, in the kinship structure of Bororo society, in the computer’s binary code. Literacies abound, as print literacy is joined by computer literacy, media literacy, cultural literacy, and so on. Intertextuality links text to text in a blur of interpenetrating tropes. Language is naturalized and deprived of its unique relationship to personality. The term meme sums up this deprivation. Coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, it’s a figure that imitates the word gene and implies that processes analogous to natural selection determine how ideas and expressions spread within a culture. The key concept for Illich is code. Code refers to the medium by which something is conveyed. As a medium or conveyance, it remains quite indifferent to what is conveyed. It might be sticks, letters, numbers, long and short bursts of light or sound, or the hieroglyphics you see when a document comes up on your computer as source code rather than as the “text” you hoped to see. This was what Illich feared that language was becoming. One of his most sustained and alarming treatments of the issue occurs in ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind when he and his coauthor Barry Sanders write about “Newspeak,” the s­ tripped-​ ­down language by which the rule of Big Brother is executed in George Orwell’s novel 1984. Newspeak is thought to have been a parody of Basic English, a simplification of the English language that Orwell had originally promoted, as well as of the propaganda of Communism. But Illich thought that Orwell’s prophetic intuition made it much more than that. Newspeak was, first of all, an “attempt to caricature what happens when speakers of ordinary language treat it as if it can be reduced to a code.” In this sense it is “an ominous parody of the intent to use English as a ‘medium of communication.’” Worse, Illich thinks that Orwell was pointing to the horror of utterance without meaning, “communication without sense.” In 1984’s Oceania “the power implicit in the State is the ultimate reason for

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everything that happens. And the state has turned into a book that is constantly rewritten. Power is no longer at the service of the elite; the elite itself is at the service of power, which is a book.” When Winston Smith, the novel’s antihero, first has to face O’Brian of the Thought Police, he still believes that “what happens makes sense to O’Brian.” Power, Smith thinks, is still being used to some end, however terrible. But O’Brian disabuses him of this idea. “We seek power entirely for its own sake,” he tells Smith. And this is what Smith has to learn: that “O’Brian’s world is senseless, and that he [Smith] must join O’Brian in this powerful nonsense.” “Newspeak,” Illich says, “assumes the existence of plastic human individuals who can be rewritten into any role.” Illich knew that Orwell had no inkling of Turing’s idea of “an algorithm that adapts its state according to the outcome of its last calculation.” Nor was Orwell conversant with the advance, in sociology, of “role theory” and its assumption “that all social relations can be reduced to power or the exchange of information between individual ­role-​­players.” The cybernetic model of communication as an exchange of messages was also entirely unfamiliar. And yet Illich believed that Orwell “was a prophet in the Hebrew sense [of ] one who sees clearly in the present.” Orwell sensed what Illich believed already “hovered in the air.” O’Brian tells Winston Smith that power consists in “tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of our own choosing.” Illich believed that Orwell was offering a preview of what we have arrived at without ever having to pass through “Room 101,” the torture chamber in the basement of the Ministry of Love where Smith’s resistance is broken down in 1984. The Icon and the Sentence Illich once tried to explain to me his horror about what he thought had happened to language by contrasting “icons” and “sentences.” Once, as we have seen, an icon meant a threshold at which one might encounter the divine and glimpse a reality beyond this world; today it refers, in Illich’s scathing definition, to “one of those innumerable minting stocks of public intercourse which completely replace language.” It still points beyond itself, and the “iconic” still evokes a species of blessedness, but now it points not into heaven but into the black box that lies beyond the ­screen—​­into “the system.” These new icons, Illich says, have a stereotypical ­character—​­whatever they represent, they are “frames which I haven’t chosen but somebody else has chosen for me.” “This is not true,” he goes on, “of sentences. . . . My sentences can potentially break the frame that you want to impose on them. I have this extraordinarily beautiful freedom which is implicit in language, and which requires of

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my interlocutor the patience to allow his words to be turned around in my mouth. Icon[s] fix . . . what [they] suggest. . . . They are not within the realm of personal knowledge. They include me, but I cannot include them in what I actually know.” What is crucial here is “personal knowledge.” What defines a person is the capacity to speak their own word and to hear the word of another in turn. No romance of fully transparent or uncontaminated interchange between the one and the other need be ­implied—​­only that each can make a commitment to their word, knowing that it comes from them and is meant by them. American writer Wendell Berry catches the idea in the title of his collection of essays on l­ anguage—​­Standing by Words. It is not possible to design a process within which this will occur, only one that will make it impossible. Freedom is the essential precondition, and freedom cannot be fixed within a frame. The degeneration of letters into bits, words into interlocking Lego pieces, and language into an engulfing smog of “communication without sense or meaning” is an effect, according to Illich, of new knowledge tools. The computer is their epitome, but like the multiple strands tied together in the suddenly visible and perspicuous text of the twelfth century, many new “media” have contributed. Illich studied what he called “the symbolic fallout” of ­tools—​­an expression that plays on McLuhan’s idea of “media fallout.” It points to what tools tell us about who and what we are and makes that just as significant as what tools do. “Lay literacy” is a prime ­example—​­in the wake of the technical transformation of the book in the twelfth century, people began to reimagine themselves in its image. This is not an inevitable effect, in Illich’s view. Hugh of St. Victor, standing at the threshold of the age now ending, was for him a luminous sign of the possibility of a prudent and conscious appropriation of new possibilities. But Hugh’s ideas, as we have seen, were swamped by the reckless technological dynamism that drove Western Latin civilization, all unconscious, into the age of text and tool. Today, the pattern is repeating. In the twelfth century and after, “lay literacy” spread rapidly through a nonreading population who understood, nevertheless, not only that they were governed by “writ” but that they themselves possessed an inner writing by which they could be made known. Today, few doubt that they are “hardwired” for certain behaviors, that they communicate with others in message units, and that their world is a hierarchy of systems. They possess “lay systematicity,” let’s call it, since Illich never gave the new state a name, and they possess it quite apart from whether they are techies or ­techno-​­peasants. Just as the lay literate of the twelfth century learned to read his conscience for the priest at confession, so the new man and the new woman learn to think of themselves as adaptable and attuned nodes in a ­self-​­regulating system. Illich never wrote a Tools for Conviviality for the

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cybernetic age, but had he done so, he would surely have asked first for limits to new media and second for a consciousness of their effects that might help us to withstand, parry, and laugh about them. Here, I need to clear up an ambiguity with regard to the word tool. Illich’s work can be read as a general theory of tools as elements that are “intrinsic to social life” and that inevitably produce “symbolic fallout.” He himself described Tools for Conviviality as an attempt at such a general theory. As such, it should apply to our contemporary circumstances, except that Illich also insists that the new reality that now surrounds us can no longer be properly described by the word tool. To speak of a computer as a machine or to attempt to comprehend its utter novelty within the old sense of the word tool, as a device intentionally applied to a task, betrays a complete inability, he says, “to understand what has happened.” This distinction between tool and system, useful as it is, threatens the general applicability of his theory of tools. One needs, I think, to “disambiguate” and perhaps bring back the fancier word he spurned when he wrote Tools for Conviviality: t­echnology. Then it can be said that the technical infrastructure of the age of systems will continue to produce the cognitive reflex characteristic of all technology, even though it no longer possesses the distinct, instrumental, and intentional character that Illich associates with a tool. Another difficulty in Illich’s account of the great divide that he believed was being crossed in our time lies in his attitude to the coming age. In his accounts of comparable breaks in the past, he often invested the way of life that was vanishing or being marginalized with a touch of romance. His reader is more apt to be drawn to the “winged word” of the oralist or to the lush vineyard in which the monkish reader strolled than to the mental “storage room” of the ancient Greek reader or the variorum edition of the bookish scholar. Nevertheless, there is a certain balance to the account of what lies on either side of the watershed. Illich admits to a bibliophilia that puts him on the side of the bookworm rather than the monk. He cherishes the alphabet that made language, as such, appear in ancient Greece. This balance tends to break down in his account of the current watershed. Bookishness is engulfed by an e­ vil-​­sounding “smog,” minds are “torn to pieces” and reassembled in fantastic new shapes, the possibility of a personal statement is swallowed by the coded gesture whose effects can be measured and enhanced. People are even made physically ill. Among his personal acquaintances, Illich says, “I have observed how six people, all of them learned readers, reacted to their first encounter with the delete key: all were upset, two actually became sick.” I know the experience: when I got my first computer, I also watched apprehensively

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as the deleted letters rushed like lemmings to the margin and disappeared. And, like Illich’s other friends, I noted with dismay that those letters had never actually been there in the first place, not in the sense that text had been present when it still required erasure, ­Wite-​­Out, or the insertion of a fresh page before it could be made to disappear. I still have difficulty believing that the words I read on a screen, words written in light and projected from an underlying matrix of zeroes and ones, can be the same as those more substantial creatures I meet on a page. But are these vertigos and disorientations any different from the embarrassment Albert the Great felt when he reluctantly arranged his bestiary in alphabetic order? Doesn’t the new always look threatening and the old cuddly and reassuring, like the steam locomotive that once tore up the earth and destroyed indigenous ways of life but now is mounted nostalgically on a pedestal in the park? Yes, of course, and Illich did not hide the fact that he felt his “very self threatened by the waning of [literate] space.” But, at the same time, he argued persuasively that, while earlier watersheds might show illuminating analogies with the contemporary transition, the new technical regime is sui generis. I will take just one example. The Word of God was an expression that was intelligible to both the early church and the reformed church of the second Christian millennium, though they understood it differently. Illich feared that today this expression had become unintelligible: the integrity of word, sentence, and text had been shattered. Illich was deeply a media ­ecologist—​­the name Neil Postman gave to the contemporary school that has shown that communications media don’t just carry messages, they generate a characteristic form of social and psychological life. He believed, and tried to demonstrate, that under certain conditions, a new medium, like the transformed book of the twelfth century, could produce a new sense of self. He thought that many of his contemporaries already occupied a new “mental space”—“a conceptual and perceptual topology . . . which . . . is n ­ on-​­continuous with the past.” This realization certainly changed his view of systems theory and deprived it of the charm that it had briefly exerted on him, but it did not make him in any sense a fundamentalist. Indeed, he warns against “­anti-​­computer fundamentalism” and says that for those tempted by it, “a trip through computerland, and some fun with controls, is a necessary ingredient for sanity in this age.” He himself knew a great deal more about computers than most of his friends and even had some rudimentary skill in programming. But what preoccupied him above all was the powerful spell cast by the ­computer—​­its ability to induce what he called the cybernetic dream. “I am concerned,” he wrote, “about how to keep awake in the computer age.”

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11

To Hell with Life

Media vita in morte ­sumus—​­In the midst of life we are in death. —­eighth-​­century Gregorian chant Death . . . gives meaning to life, as birth gives meaning and shape to conception and pregnancy. —Ivan Illich

In 1985, Illich addressed a meeting of social workers in Macon, ­Georgia—​­the only time he ever lectured in the southern United States. When he had finished speaking, he was approached by a man with a knotted walking stick who identified himself as “Will Campbell who has to ask you for a great favour.” Illich g­ asped—​­he recognized the name, as he later recalled, of “the one who animated Martin Luther King.” Illich’s answer was “Do not ask but simply command, I [will] obey.” Campbell told him that he feared that the question of life was “tearing our churches apart.” On issues like nuclear disarmament, abortion, capital punishment, and ecology, he said, Christians were at each other’s throats. He then asked “his great favour.” If he assembled a meeting of church leaders, would Illich come and address them on the subject of life? Illich was immediately apprehensive but bound by his promise to obey. He agreed. The meeting took place within the year in Ohio. The atmosphere was tense. A representative of the Catholic Bishops ­Conference who was present urged Illich to begin with a mollifying prayer. Illich instead began with a solemn curse. Raising his hands, he repeated three times, “To Hell with life!” This dramatic ceremony began Illich’s engagement with what he would later call “the most powerful idol the Church has had to face in the course of her history.” It was not an issue on which he was ever able to make himself widely understood. He twice more addressed Church audiences on this topic, speaking to a convocation of American Lutherans in Chicago in 1989 and then repeating more or less the same lecture for a Lutheran audience in Germany. But “in neither place,” Illich told me, “did I get the impression that one person understood what I was speaking

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about.” Later, I was able to confirm this impression for myself. Galvanized by the manuscript of his lecture in Chicago, I asked Illich if I could interview him about what he had said. He agreed, and in April 1992, I presented an edited version of this conversation to a Canadian radio audience under the title “Life as Idol.” This was at a time when reverence for “life” was fast becoming the last acceptable popular piety, and I was pretty sure that I was dropping a bombshell into public discussion. Not at all, as it turned out. The program passed almost without comment and was, I think it’s fair to say, the least noticed thing I ever did for CBC Radio. This was puzzling, but I concluded that Illich must be right. He couldn’t shock because he couldn’t even be understood. By the time he spoke, life was so entrenched as a supreme and unquestionable good that what had seemed to me a trenchant critique appeared to others as nothing more than mute and mystifying gesticulation. People could see that he was excited but couldn’t quite make out why. With this chapter I will renew my attempt to spell out what he was trying to say. I propose to do this by first exploring Illich’s views on death. Only then will I return to the question of why Illich thought that life had become “the most powerful idol the church has [ever] had to face.” This procedure makes sense, I think, in the light of Illich’s blunt claim that “it is death which gives meaning to life.” This being so, we must first understand how he sees death before we can take up the mysterious and shocking “to hell with life” with which he answered Will ­Campbell’s anguished invitation. Illich’s Theology of Death When Illich was a young parish priest in New York, he wrote occasionally, under the pseudonym Peter Canon, for a Catholic journal called Integrity that published from 1946 to 1956. The magazine had links to the Catholic Worker movement and provided a voice for lay opinion within the c­ lergy-​­dominated Church of the time. Among his essays for that journal is one that appeared in the spring of 1956 called “Rehearsal for Death.” Two years later, when he was the vice rector of the Catholic University at Ponce in Puerto Rico, he wrote a much longer and more detailed essay on the same subject called “The End of Human Life: An Interpretation of Death as the Supreme Form of Prayer.” These writings are little known and played no part in his career as a celebrity intellectual after 1965, but this theme remained, nonetheless, a leitmotif in his work for the rest of his life. Limits to Medicine, for example, contains a major, if disregarded, chapter on the history of Western conceptions of death in which he argues that, in any society, it is always “the dominant image of

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death [which] determines the prevalent concept of health.” Later writings investigated the condition that Illich called ­a-​­mortality, his name for a way of living that is entirely turned away from death and no longer views it as life’s meaning but only as its arbitrary and unhappy termination. “Death,” Illich wrote in the first of these essays, “is a birthday,” the moment when “man . . . awakens to the vision of God” and “is born from the womb of Mother Church into the broad light of the eternal day.” Death “begins in time and ends with eternity and yet,” being the threshold between them, “belongs to neither.” In death we are “neither here nor there but in the door.” It is “that unique last step which is similar in everything to those before it, except that it will never be over.” This step “excludes further becoming . . . In this act man for the first time and forever realizes a past without a future, [a past] which is forever and with which he is identical, something intimately his own which is beyond the possibility of change.” It is a moment of utter loneliness in which we have “neither company nor instruments”—a word that, in this context, should probably be interpreted as referring not just to instruments, in a literal sense, but to all purposeful designs and schemes. Each one, “faced by God,” is “thrown back exclusively upon the resources of [their] own spirit.” It is crucial to Illich’s conception that dying be a free act, a willed consent. If it were not it would be “a violence imposed upon man by God,” and that would be contrary to the entire Christian conception that “grace lifts human activity into the realm of the divine without in any way destroying its humanity,” thereby opening to us a “lifelong participation in divine life.” Death must be the consummation of our participation in “the divine life”—an acceptance of “God’s call” and not a defeated acquiescence in a bitter decree. And this implies a choice. Illich puts it dramatically: “to accept the call of God in an eternal yes or freeze in the immobility of a final no.” “Death,” he says, “cannot be something done to man, but must be something man does; otherwise it would be inhuman. In death man grows to his maturity.” This view of death as an activity, and even as the activity of a free ­person—​­the culmination, completion, and transformation of everything that person has ­become—​­underlay not just Illich’s critique of medicine but his critique of every professionalized sphere insofar as it induces helplessness and passivity. “Man,” Illich writes, “was not meant to die: he was meant to be transformed.” In our original condition, soul and body were not separate. Humans were created in the image of God and lived, before the Fall, in obedient harmony with God. But, even in this unfallen state, “man was meant to come to an end of time [when] he was meant to make a last free decision after which there would be no decision.”

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Humanity, in other words, was made for life in time and was always free to say yes or no to God, but until Adam and Eve said their decisive no by reaching for the tree of knowledge proper only to God, death would have been an untroubled ­transition—“the peaceful ‘passage’ of immaculate nature,” Illich calls it. Only with sin does the transition from time to eternity take on the aspect of a “death.” Soul and body must now be torn apart; and the one dying, his eyes closed in sin, must frame his yes to God in the terrifying terms of a renunciation of everything he or she knows. “Those who claim that death is not ugly, that death is only a blessing, that death is not frightening,” Illich writes, “either do not know what they speak about or refuse to face reality.” They do not face the fact that death means supreme privation in the natural order and the supreme test of faith in the supernatural order. Privation, because the world as we know it will be lost to us together with the image we have painted of God. Privation because our soul, made to know and to love through a body, will be nakedly at the mercy of God. Test of faith, because without support of the senses and concepts which are familiar to us we have to venture into His presence. Leaving behind all that we know we have to realize how terribly unknown He really is to us before His immediacy will fill our being.

Death is fearsome for those who face it without the saccharine comforts of religious sentimentality, but fear, Illich says, “is something rational and can be something holy.” Here Illich distinguishes two types of fear. There is “servile,” or ­self-​­interested, ­fear—​­the fear of hell. And there is “filial” f­ear—​­the apprehension that something may come between me and the beloved and separate us. Illich insisted that these two types of fear are related. The alert, filial fear that “the Lord is passing me by” is unlikely to develop without a foundation of servile fear, or the sense, as he says, “that I really deserve a kick.” Both types of fear, Illich says, can be “a great help to the dying” because they can induce us to turn toward God rather than away from him. Illich also claims that it is possible for us to “rehearse” for death. Such rehearsal stands at the beginning of ­philosophy—​­Socrates, at his trial, explains to his jury that “those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.” Why should those who practice philosophy in this way be “troubled,” he asks, when “what they have actually been looking forward to . . . all their lives” finally comes? Socrates’ spirit was also expressed in Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, but Illich contends

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that “the death of Christ brought a new dimension into man’s dying.” “From that moment on,” Illich says, “faith has helped man to see dying not only as the supreme suffering of man in absolute loneliness facing the infinite . . . but also as the ultimate union with Christ . . . who through his dying destroyed the finality of death.” The form that Christian “rehearsal for death” takes is prayer. Prayer, in the way Illich speaks of it, is both a practice and, by analogy, a way of life “since, for the Christian, every action of life ultimately resolves into prayer.” As a practice, prayer is “a disciplining of the senses” in which one attempts to “leave behind . . . the world of body, time and image and fares out into the light of God.” (At another point he speaks of “faring into the darkness of God”—both images apply in different phases of prayer.) But since in formal attitudes of prayer, we can often be like King Claudius in ­Hamlet—“my words fly up, my thoughts remain below”—I think a broader interpretation of prayer as a posture potentially assumed at any and every moment is helpful. Prayer, in this larger sense, is learning to lose. In an essay called “The Eloquence of Silence,” for example, Illich compares language learning and prayer. Language learning, he says, implies “a deep experience of poverty, of weakness, and of dependence on the good will of another.” And so it is, he continues, in prayer: There is no greater distance than that between a man in prayer and God. Only when this distance dawns on consciousness can the grateful silence of patient readiness develop. This must have been the silence of the Virgin before the Ave which enabled her to become the eternal model of openness to the Word. Through her deep silence the Word could take Flesh. In the prayer of silent listening, and nowhere else, can the Christian acquire the habit of this first silence from which the Word can be born in a foreign culture.

Language learning and prayer, as Illich conceives them, demand that one let go and listen. Both are forms of renunciation, a term that links Illich’s theology of death with the political proposals he made during his years as a pamphleteer. Addressing his fellow Catholics in the 1960s, he invited his Church to renounce power and clerical control in favor of celebration. In his books of the early 1970s, he pointed to the thresholds at which our techniques turn malignant and called for a retrenchment within ­limits—​­another form of renunciation. These proposals were made, finally, in light of “the end of human life,” as he called his essay in ­Horizontes—​­death being, in his eyes, the final frontier at which we gain in losing and receive what we release. The interdependence of renunciation and ­celebration

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is the keynote of Illich’s philosophy. Again and again, the Gospels highlight this relation. It is said, for example, “Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it”; and “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies it bears much fruit.” Death is the capstone, seal, and proof of this faith. People deprived of the possibility of actively dying their own death have, in Illich’s view, lost what is most precious in their inheritance: their freedom. Paul Fletcher’s “Prolegomena” Illich’s theology of death was entirely orthodox and deeply rooted in biblical and patristic sources, but he felt himself nonetheless to be something of a voice in the wilderness in pointing to the contradiction between this theology and the contemporary cult of life. One of my first indications that Illich was not quite as isolated as he might have supposed was a paper that appeared in 2008 by English theologian Paul Fletcher. Titled “Prolegomena to a Theology of Death,” this essay argued in exactly the same vein as Illich had earlier, though it made no reference to him. “The Church,” Fletcher wrote, “must renounce the politics of life.” Since Fletcher’s article appeared, other Christian voices have also spoken out, notably Father John Behr, an Orthodox priest, in a book called The Mystery of Christ: Death in Life. Here I’d like to look briefly at Fletcher’s argument, not just because it agrees with Illich’s view but also because I think it adds a good deal to it. In Christian doctrine and liturgy, Fletcher says, life, death, and salvation are intermingled. But it has become “a modern credo [with which] it is now almost impossible to disagree” that life is the “unsurpassable and supreme” good, “the value of all value.” This view takes death as “at best a terrible nuisance and at worst a definitive failure.” It breaks the link between life and death, and by this break, Christian theology is “eviscerated,” and Christianity itself is “fundamentally displaced.” Fletcher traces the change in the modern view of death back to the ­Reformation when “a momentous liturgical innovation” took place in Tudor England. In the first version of what would become the Anglican Book of ­Common Prayer, the deceased was still addressed, at his or her funeral service, in the second person: “I commend thy soul to God,” said the priest as if addressing one still present. This preserved the medieval conception of the living and the dead as a single community and of death as an interruption rather a definitive ending. But when Thomas Cranmer revised the prayer book in 1552, the corpse was referred to in the third person: our brother or sister “here departed” had

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become him or her. The dead, Fletcher says, were being “marginalized.” Other stories from the time agree. One of the aims of evangelical Protestantism was to sever the connections between the living and the dead. For example, John Stow, a chronicler of London life in the sixteenth century, relates that one night in 1549, during the reign of Edward VI, radical Protestants, with official blessing, pillaged the ossuary in the basement of St. Paul’s Cathedral. (The ossuary, or charnel house, was a repository of bones removed from the churchyard to make room for the newly dead.) One thousand cartloads of bones were hauled away and dumped in a patch of marshy ground on the northern outskirts of the city where they were later covered with sewage and refuse. The objective of these evangelical Protestants was to cleanse the Church of superstitions about the dead, like the doctrine of Purgatory. They wanted to purify faith by depriving it of any material support. This banishment of the dead, Fletcher says, is mirrored in political philosophy. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), for example, argues that the prime necessities instilled in us by “nature” are s­ elf-​­preservation and the avoidance of harm. Our greatest good is to possess and enjoy life. “Death,” Hobbes says, “is that terrible enemy of nature . . . from whom we expect the loss of all power, and also the greatest of bodily pains in the losing.” In order to secure life, we cede sovereign power to the state, whom Hobbes personifies as Leviathan, “the mortal god.” What interests Fletcher about this is the extent to which the mortal god replaces the transcendent God, who is not denied but rather made redundant. Whereas before it was divine grace that interpenetrated and “perfected” nature, it was now the earthly sovereign who raised “graceless nature” into a “civic state of grace.” It is the Leviathan who redeems the w ­ olf-​­man—“man to man is an arrant wolf,” Hobbes s­ ays—​­and brings about what Fletcher calls “a secular transfiguration.” The figure of the sovereign and the figure of God “converge . . . to the point at which sovereignty is almost divinized.” The state becomes “the creator and upholder of life as such” in what Fletcher describes as a move toward “a secular theocracy.” And, insofar as life is “preserved under sovereign power,” “any experience of God is established as all but impossible in the present.” Earthly power governs the present. God becomes thinkable only “in the past and [in] the future.” Christian society, up to the early modern period, had lived in a time framed by ­eternity—​­historical time was felt to be an interval between the coming and the return of Christ, a crossing between now and forever. In the modern period, under the aegis of the mortal god, we live in “an interval that is made permanent.” The Church ceases to be a political community that believes that its faith pertains, in

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every respect, to its actual circumstances. It becomes the site of a religion in the modern ­sense—​­a community whose faith pertains to some other dimension and whose part in social life is more and more restricted to moral exhortation. That part of theology that is concerned with final things, whether the final state of the individual or the final state of the ­world—​­eschatology, it is ­called—​­evaporates. Religion concerns itself with doctrinal and spiritual matters and leaves the here and now to more competent authorities. All this follows when death is “excise[d] from life” and reduced to the insignificance of an inconvenient ­enemy—​­just another of the vicissitudes against which life must “battle.” In other words, life in the “secular theocracy” is a kind of practical atheism, whatever one’s religious or spiritual views. God is due all honor, so long as he sticks to his proper sphere and stays out of the mortal god’s way. It follows, for Fletcher, that without a new “theology of death,” or a revival of the old one, we will continue to “prize . . . [life] as if it were our only true possession.” As such, it will also be our only true God. Death against Death In the essays of the 1950s that I examined earlier, Illich sketched a version of the “theology of death” that Fletcher thinks has been missing in modernity. In Limits to Medicine, Illich added historical depth to this ­theology—​­and told a story very like Fletcher’­s—​­in a chapter called “Death Against Death.” There, Illich traced the images by which death has been portrayed from medieval to modern times. He begins with the strong claim I cited earlier: that, in any society whatever, “the dominant image of death [will] determine . . . the prevalent concept of health.” He then evokes an image painted on a cemetery wall in Paris in 1424, showing “the dance of the dead.” It shows people of all stations, from peasant to pope, each dancing with a corpse that is its mirror image in feature and dress. Death, at this point, was still an intimate and individual companion, a form of s­ elf-​­consciousness. By the next century this image had been replaced by the Danse Macabre (the Dance of Death), which was pictured in the book of woodcuts that became a best seller for Hans Holbein the Younger in 1538. In these pictures, people dance at the behest of a skeleton man, who is no longer each one’s individual complement but an autonomous agent, a force of nature external to the skeletons who dance at his bidding. This is the moment that corresponds with Fletcher’s account of the revision of the A ­ nglican funeral liturgy. In the new way of thinking, eternity is no longer “immanent in history,” and grace is no longer an “indwelling” element” of nature, as Aquinas had supposed. Now Luther asserts that justification in the eyes of God is by “faith alone.” The natural and the

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supernatural begin their long divorce, and death is assigned to nature. Now, Illich says, “the open grave looms much larger than the doors of heaven or hell.” Attitudes begin to shift toward the dissection of ­corpses—​­in the German empire in 1400 doctors were allowed to cut up one corpse per year; by the beginning of the seventeenth century “public dissection became a favoured subject for paintings, and, in the Netherlands, a common event at carnivals.” The corpse had become “a body” and not the unique and privileged form of a particular person. Death became a force external to ­humanity—“a terrible enemy,” as Hobbes ­said—​­but until the nineteenth century, it remained something with which doctors did not directly interfere. Doctors still recognized the “facies Hippocratica,” the facial traits described by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates that indicate imminent death. And whether they withdrew or eased death, they still thought of themselves as working “with nature.” This changed in the nineteenth century when the doctor for the first time is shown in a contest with death. In the twentieth century, the change accelerates:  . . . after World War I . . . we see physicians wrangling with the skeleton, tearing a young woman from its embrace, and wresting the scythe from death’s hand. By 1930, a smiling ­white-​­coated man is rushing against a whimpering skeleton and crushing it like a fly with two volumes of Marle’s Lexicon of Therapy. In other pictures, the doctor raises one hand and wards off death while holding up the arms of a young woman whom death grips by the feet. . . . Others show the physician locking the skeleton into prison or even kicking its bony bottom. Now the doctor rather than the patient struggles with death.

The intervention of the doctor between the patient and his death, and the associated idea that the hospital is the place to die, brought the “epoch of natural death to an end.” Modern people had “lost the right to preside at [their] act of dying.” “Technical [and] mechanical death,” Illich concluded, “ha[d] conquered and destroyed all other deaths.” In later writings Illich would refine this analysis. By the time he published his reconsideration of Medical Nemesis in 1985, for example, he no longer emphasized the role of the doctor as heroic protagonist in the “struggle against death.” By then, he thought, the “health care system” as a whole had assumed the protagonist’s role and the doctor had become nothing more than its functionary. But his basic point remained u ­ nchanged—​­death was no longer a personal act. To dramatize this point he drew on his knack for eccentric vocabularies and adapted a grammatical distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs. Transitive verbs imply a grammatical

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o­ bject—​­if I hit, I must necessarily hit something. Intransitive verbs have no ­object—​ ­living is simply something I d ­ o—​­it would be nonsense to say that I live myself. “Dying,” he said, “is an intransitive word. It’s something which I can do, like walk, talk or think. I can’t be ‘died.’” This intransitivity had already been severely compromised by the doctor’s war on death. In the system age, with people reimagined as lives to be saved, he feared the idea might disappear altogether. “Today,” he wrote in an article for the British Medical Journal, “dying can be practiced only in friendship.” Posthumous Longevity He spelled out what he meant by death “practiced . . . in friendship” in an open letter to a community of cloistered Benedictine nuns. He titled this letter “­Posthumous Longevity,” his term for the twilight inhabited by those who have somehow outlived their death. In it, he tells the story of a friend of his who had ended up in this condition of living death. This friend was a woman who had left Germany “in protest against her philistine family, against the sickness of Nazism and as an alternative to the kitsch in which others of her class and generation tried to save their conscience.” She settled “in the forest of Scandinavia,” where she lived as weaver and a sculptor. When she was in her sixties, there came a time when she felt that she was ready to die. She explained to Illich how this would come about: “[S]he would walk down toward the sea, sit under a tree, drink from a bottle of schnapps, and fall asleep in the snow.” She indicated that she did not need Illich’s help but only his ­blessing—“she wanted to hold me in her heart when the moment had come to step into the darkness.” Illich noticed “an unaccustomed serenity” in his friend on the day that she revealed this intention. Nevertheless, he did not conceal his disapproval of what appeared to be, on its face, a plan to commit suicide. “Looking back,” Illich writes, “I failed my friend . . . I failed to speak to her about Michael and his hosts ready to pick her up from beneath the birch tree, leaving the body behind in the snow. I failed to respond by respecting her freedom. I did not urge her to listen more carefully to what Moses called ‘the rustling.’ I took this headstrong woman’s question as one more attempt to remain in control. I now fear that I discouraged her from listening to the Lord whose calling she might have followed in spite of her complete ignorance of Him.” Faced with his disapproval, Illich’s friend abandoned her plan. Shortly afterward she got ­pneumonia—​­once the “old person’s friend”—but “the caring state could not leave her in peace,” Illich says. “They picked the apartment lock in time to administer antibiotics.” After that, Illich believed, it was too late. “Welfare and

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medicine [had] broken and confused her.” She had become “a frightened woman who shirks death.” After more than sixty years of shaping her own story and leaving “her traces on everything she touched,” she had become a dependent “inmate.” Illich had not attended to “the inkling” he felt as his friend revealed her intention, and in consequence, he feared, the Lord had passed him by. Through his inattention, she had “missed the hour of her death.” In his letter, Illich invites prayer for the friend he felt he had failed, but not just for her. They are “millions,” he says, “in the Newland to which she has moved.” He describes them as “the undead,” a phrase he is unlikely to have used innocently, though I don’t know how much he actually knew of zombies and the colonization of popular culture by this figure from Haitian folk religion. He speaks of a “state of suspension and aimlessness,” of “a spiritually debilitating ­a-​­topia,” of “hovering on the brink of eternity,” of “a new Limbo,” while still confessing himself fundamentally at a loss for words in the face of the novelty created by “society’s recent success in the war on death.” This speechlessness, I think, is more than an affectation. He was trying to move discussion onto a ground that is barely imagined in the contemporary discourses of death. He wanted, on the one hand, to restore the ability to die to each person but, on the other, to avoid the language of both suicide and euthanasia. Illich’s letter begins, “Dear Mother Prioress.” The woman he was addressing, Ana Serna, was an old friend, and he was a familiar and welcome visitor at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, where she was prioress, later abbess, and where he had other old friends as well. I remember how warmly I was received, as a friend of his, when Illich hosted a meeting there in 1992. He spoke to that community first of all because he felt that the question of “posthumous longevity” ought to be addressed in the spirit of contemplative prayer that he associated with the abbey. In cases like that of his friend, he says, the Church is facing something “surprisingly new,” something that will require great discretion. Discretion, he says, quoting Benedict (480–547), the founder of their order, is the “mother of virtues.” It has this superior status because the exercise of any virtue can become a vice if pushed too far, and so the virtues require a mother, who discovers each one’s limits and keeps them in balance. Illich defines discretion as “the measured discernment of unique situations.” He goes on to say that this feel for the uniqueness of each situation is what “makes our obedience the very opposite of regimentation.” To obey, in others words, is not to follow a rule or slavishly comply with orders but rather to pay attention and to follow whatever “rustling” that attention discerns. In individual cases, like that of his friend, discretion is

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required, not because the matter is secret or private but because it is intimate and unique to each one who is trying to make out how to die in a world where “death has died.” These caveats about obedience and discretion become very important in what he goes on to say in his letter. Illich did not want his reflections on the plight of those lost in “posthumous longevity” to be “paralyzed by the issue of suicide.” Not that he was speaking, he insisted, for suicide. What he had owed his friend was not assistance in suicide but “a sign of unconditional trust.” The distinction is subtle and delicate but real. In a later conversation with me about this letter, he explained his view in this way: I will in no way help in a suicide; but, at least three times in my life I have had to tell someone, always different ­people—​­in my way of life this h ­ appened—“I will not open the window for you, but I’ll stay with you.” And this position of not helping, but standing by, because you respect freedom, is difficult for people in our nice society to accept. I have recently had evidence of this difficulty in believing that somebody like myself would suspend judgment at the suicide of a friend. But to put the mark of betrayal on it seems to me outside of my competence.

Catholic teaching on suicide is clear and adamant: “We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us,” says the Catechism. “It is not ours to dispose of.” But this life, Illich insisted, is now in the hands of doctors who have the right and the duty to save it and social workers with the right and duty to pick the lock in order to administer antibiotics. The Church must awaken to this new reality. In the 1960s, he had withdrawn from his official role at the Second Vatican Council when he felt his Church had equivocated rather than saying an absolute no to nuclear weapons. Now he was saying something very similar. The millions consigned to the twilight of the “Newland” could not be written off as victims of the Will of God, when they were clearly the casualties of a human design. “The war on death” had created a fundamentally new situation that the Church must face. In this situation he felt that friendship provided whatever light and guidance were available. He did not suggest that the old teaching about suicide be replaced or denied. He asked, what is fidelity to a friend in these new circumstances? Hesitantly, discreetly, obediently, he tried to ask the question, might we now have to feel our way beyond received categories in order to preserve each one’s freedom to find “the hour” of their death”? Catholics call on Our Lady Mary to “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” Perhaps the prayer should be amended, Illich suggested, to ask, “that we may not miss the hour of our death.”

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The other issue by which Illich feared discussion might be “paralyzed” was euthanasia, though he generally avoided this dulcet name and instead spoke bluntly of medicide or “professional assistance in suicide.” At the time he wrote, euthanasia was not legal anywhere. Now a number of countries, most recently Canada, as well as some American states have adopted legal regimes for what is now usually called “assisted death” or “assisted dying.” In Canada, many already consider ­death-​­by-​­doctor a right and are asking that this right be extended far beyond the current restrictive requirement that death be imminent and unavoidable. Illich was utterly opposed. He viewed “the demand that doctors now become executioners” as “a remarkable certificate of national abulia”—this last word, also spelled aboulia, is used mainly in neurology or psychiatric medicine for lack of will or diminished motivation. Illich believed strongly in what he called “hygienic autonomy,” the right of everyone to define health in their own way. Indeed, he published a manifesto under this name. Among his “demands” in this manifesto are “the liberty to refuse any and all medical treatment at any time / the liberty to take any drug or treatment of my own choosing / the liberty to be treated by the person of my choice . . . / the liberty to die without diagnosis.” With this view, he saw no reason why doctors should have a monopoly on d ­ eath-​­bringing drugs or the obligation to kill their patients on demand and many reasons why they shouldn’t. Notable among these reasons is medicine’s ancient association, however compromised, with healing; the rigidity inevitably involved in any explicit legal regime; and the final seal such a role would put on the status of doctors as “­life-​­managers.” Illich’s concern was with freedom. He thought the institutionalization and normalization of death moved in the opposite direction, taking the matter out of people’s hands and putting it into the hands of a whole new cadre of professionals. The idea that one cannot die without a doctor was, in his opinion, a sign of radical dependency and ­helplessness—“a recognition of [an] incompetence . . . almost beyond imagination.” It is now often said that the establishment of legal and medical norms for assistance in dying represents an overcoming of the death denial that marked an earlier phase of our civilization. In this view, people have now recovered what Illich claimed had been taken away from ­them—​­the active ability to die. Illich’s dissent turns on the issue of professionalization. Perhaps one can understand what he means by turning to the website of the Canadian Integrative Network for Death Education and Alternatives (CINDEA), which represents the new profession of “death midwife.” There it is said that the death midwife is “a facilitator, who offers a continuum of direct and integrated guidance and support to the Death Journeyer

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and their family through a personalized and participatory p ­ an-​­death process.” Here we meet death as a stage of life and a stereotypical process, best negotiated with professional guidance and support. It is not unimaginable that access to such services will soon be a right or even a requirement before receiving the doctor’s fatal cocktail. Illich was not talking about a process that can be “personalized.” He was pleading for friendship as a spirit in which the “measured discernment of unique situations” might be possible. Having advocated the declericalization of the Church in order that priesthood might become a vocation rather than a career choice, he certainly did not want to see a new secular clerisy take over the administration of ­death—​­at a price. Illich’s letter on “Posthumous Longevity” makes no recommendation beyond prayer, discerning attention, and friendship. Trying to avoid a rule, he could hardly propose a rule, and without a rule, a plan, or a policy, he knew, he lacked the price of admission to current debates. He did not want to tell “physicians, social workers or policy makers” what to do or to suggest what the status of the undead “ought to be in the law.” He recognized that “the viewpoint” he was proposing had “become taboo.” All he asked was that this “new evil” be recognized and remembered in the prayers of the nuns of Regina Laudis. This, I think, was sincere, and not a rhetorical trick meant to suggest a policy while appearing not to suggest one. The hegemony of policy will not be undone by policy. He was inviting people to see, with clear and unsentimental eyes, what was all around them and to suggest that friends can, nonetheless, still help one another to die. Life as Idol Illich diagnosed the modern condition as one of ­a-​­mortality, a term he first used in Medical Nemesis and strongly emphasized in his last writings. It is a condition, first of all, in which our community with the past is broken because there are “no dead around . . . no ghosts, no souls in Purgatory asking for prayers, no one waiting for ­re-​­incarnation, no ancestors in Abraham’s lap.” Beyond that, Illich’s invented word tries to name a state in which the boundaries of mortality have grown muddy and indistinct. The outer limits of this revised human condition are marked by those who hope to gain immortality as cyborgs or who have had themselves cryogenically preserved in anticipation of later medical resurrection. But all are affected by the fact that life without meaningful death loses its proper shape. This brings me back to the point at which I b ­ egan—​­the critique that so notably failed to gain Illich the public ear thirty years ago. Illich’s denunciation of life as an idol and “institutional

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fetish” is continuous with his theology of d ­ eath—​­life-​­as-​­idol and a­ -​­mortality are opposite sides of the same coin. Only when death is deprived of its meaning and reduced to the status of what Paul Fletcher calls “a terrible nuisance” can life take on the significance that Illich ascribed to it in his disregarded lectures on the subject. Life, Illich told the Lutheran convention in Chicago in 1989, had become “a spectral entity”—a ghostly thing. Once an indefinable attribute of living beings and their property only in that very limited sense, it had now acquired the status of real property capable of being owned, administered, and controlled. “Life,” he continued, is now something “for which the physician assumes responsibility, which technologies prolong; [which] has standing in court, [and which] can be wrongfully given.” It is “a process about whose destruction without due procedure or beyond the needs of national defense or industrial growth, ­so-​­called p ­ ro-​­life organizations are incensed.” This way of speaking of life, Illich claimed, was an instance of what A. N. Whitehead called “misplaced concreteness”—a quality abstracted from living beings was being reified and treated as something actual, substantial, and comprehensible. Life had taken on what Illich called a “substantive meaning”—a term that he used in several senses. A substantive, grammatically speaking, is a noun, and in that sense, Illich saw the new discourses of life as further steps along the road of what he had earlier called “nominalization.” Nominalization, for him, meant turning verbs into nouns, actions into states, experiences into possessions. In this sense, life represents the transformation of something that one does in living into something that one has. But Illich also used the word substantive to suggest that life had, in fact, taken on the character of a substance or entity. This was a “shadowy” substance and yet, even so, life had become “­stuffy—​­a thing which has stuff.” He had many examples of t­his—​­from the “lives” in which news media calculate the damage done by war or natural disaster to the habit of speaking in categories like “manpower” and “human resources.” What these many usages have in common is the imagination of life as a “compact reality” capable of management. This way of thinking and speaking, he thought, went far beyond that quintessentially modern attitude that C. B. Macpherson called “possessive individualism” by which I become, in effect, my own proprietor. The individual in Macpherson’s phrase remains a person, the category in which Illich thought that “the humanism of Western individualism is anchored.” But the dignity of a person depends on a defining and inviolable boundary, and in contemporary ways of speaking about life, Illich felt that this boundary was being erased. A person is singular; a life is an instance of something unimaginably general. Life can be evaluated and improved,

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possessed and conserved. It can become a quantity. If a hurricane or earthquake strikes, the news media will not be satisfied until a precise “death toll” has been established. Lives saved are equally palpable and bankable. If the City of Toronto wants to close a swimming pool, an Olympic champion swimmer will soon make it known, through social media, that swimming pools “save lives.” Lives, whether saved, lost, or at risk, can be weighed, counted, and costed. Life is not just a quality I manifest in living and will lose at death. It is something that I have and that by skillful management I can enhance. The sense of life’s substantive character reflects the many indexes of it that we now ­possess—​­from the electron microscopy that turns an otherwise imperceptible handful of cells in the womb into an emblem of life to the flat line on the electrocardiograph that signifies its cessation. I can still remember how startled I was to recognize the affinity between the display monitor mounted above a friend’s bed in the intensive care ward of a Toronto hospital and the display screen of the digital editing program with which I was just then beginning to learn to edit sound at the CBC. Both manifested a previously hidden interior: the movements of the heart and the wave structure of the sound made visible and thus, apparently, comprehensible. Scores of other probes, scans, and diagnostic images could serve just as well as examples, from the ultrasound image of the unborn child to the MRI to the airport gizmo that can see through your underwear. They all say something that goes beyond what they actually do, and what they say is that there is a universal grammar of existence. This is explicit in the naming of DNA as “the language of life.” When everything seems to be woven from the same binary code, it is an easy step to supposing it to be made of a common stuff. So many techniques now allow us to see life; so many discourses hammer home its supreme value. How could we not be its stewards, its curators, its manager? Life had acquired, Illich said, “a factitious nature.” By factitious, he meant that it had acquired the character of something artificial, of something made by human hands. And this character, he said, appeared “with special poignancy in ecological discussion.” He was referring to ecology, not as the delimited science of how organisms and habitats interact but as a way of speaking about how everything holds ­together—“a philosophical way of correlating all knowable phenomena,” he says. For example, around the time that Illich spoke, William Irwin Thompson published a collection of essays called Gaia: A Way of Knowing. The title refers to British scientist James Lovelock’s theory that the earth as a whole is s­ elf-​­regulating and thus can be considered as an ­organism—​­a theory he named after the ancient Greek earth goddess. For Thompson Gaia stood for a new philosophy, a new “way

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of knowing.” What this type of cybernetic theory signified to Illich was the collapse of a crucial distinction between reality and our models of reality. A metaphor is recognizable as s­ uch—​­we know that marriage is not a harbor nor faith a bridge even as we say that they a­ re—​­but we don’t recognize concepts like ecosystem or immune system or Gaia, when applied outside their proper domains, as metaphors. People had begun to think, Illich claimed, “in terms of a cybernetic system which, in real time, is both model and reality: a process which observes and defines, regulates and sustains itself. Within this style of thinking, life comes to be equated with the system.” He is saying, in other words, that contemporary people are living in a theory, a construct, an artifice that they have ceased to recognize as such. But why should this insight, once stripped of its impressive terminology, elicit more than a weary, so what? Doesn’t everyone live in a social construction of some sort? Isn’t it “turtles all the way down” wherever you go? Is contemporary reality somehow more theoretical than any other that has ever been? I think Illich’s answer is a decisive yes. The models tattooed with the emblem of “life itself ” are, in his view, fundamentally different; they are held and believed in a different way than stories about the Garden of Eden or how Raven found the first people in a giant clamshell or even how gravity governs the universe and keeps things in their place. The difference lies in the presumption that life can be known. Origen, in the second century, scoffed at those “simple enough to believe that God, like some farmer, planted trees in the Garden of Eden.” I imagine that the peoples of the Pacific Northwest had their ways of distinguishing everyday ravens from the Raven that coaxed their ancestors from the clamshell. Even Newton’s theory still supposed mysterious forces that he could describe mathematically but not e­ xplain—​­model and reality remained distinct. No one thought the world identical with either its mythic or its scientific depictions. But in our time, Illich claimed, “a conceptual collapse ha[s] occurred,” and it has effaced “the borderline between cosmic process and substance.” The distinction here between process and substance I take to be the same as that between model and reality in my earlier quotation. Storied imaginings and scientific reductions had given way to a worldview in which representation and reality had merged. How could this collapse have occurred? A first answer is that it is an effect of new technologies. The computer, one sometimes hears, is only a tool. I can remember Northrop Frye saying so and then concluding that the image of the world as computer was of a piece with earlier analogies like the book of life or the wheel of ­fate—​­all were mere “superstition,” the reflection of “a most pernicious tendency in

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the human mind to project onto machinery the qualities of external autonomy.” I admired his bravado, but I am more inclined to agree with Illich that the computer as the realization of Alan Turing’s dream of a “Universal Machine” is not itself a machine at all but the sign of a new ­age—​­an “age of systems,” as Illich says, that is now quickly supplanting the age of tools or instrumentality. The computer suggests itself as our likeness, and ourselves as its likeness, in ways quite unlike any ideas people may have gotten from the wheel or the book. This may still be “superstition,” as Frye asserts, but it is a superstition of unprecedented plausibility. Even before computers were in widespread use, Marshall McLuhan had expressed the same idea with respect to the net of electronic communications that now enfolds the earth: “Whereas all previous technology (save speech, itself ),” he wrote in 1964, “had, in effect, extended some part of our bodies, electricity may be said to have outered [i.e., externalized] the central nervous system itself, including the brain.” Our techniques have achieved such power and reach, and the simulations they make possible are of such detailed fidelity, that it is now possible to believe that life itself is within our grasp and our care. Life in the Sciences One of the difficulties Illich faced in trying to get a hearing on the subject of life was that he spoke at exactly the moment when life was ascending to the status of the certainty of certainties, “the value of all value,” as Paul Fletcher would later say. This change was observable in the sciences during the 1980s. The “mechanical philosophy” of the seventeenth century, in which our modern sciences have their roots, took no account of life. It was premised on a nature from which all animate or “occult” principles had been excluded, a nature reducible to matter in motion. Purposes, which had been central to the old Aristotelian science, were expelled from nature, and the world was reconceived as a play of mechanical forces and ironclad laws. Life, obviously purposeful, became an anomaly. Sometimes it was explained away; sometimes a special place was reserved for it. “Vitalism,” the belief in some animating principle not reducible to mechanism, became a persistent heresy, which erupted from time to time, but physical science generally stuck to its mechanistic axioms and treated the question “What is life?” as beyond its scope. As late as 1983, the British biologists Peter and Jean Medawar wrote that “[f ]rom a strictly scientific point of view, the concept of life makes no sense.” An instance of this orthodoxy was the treatment of British biologist Rupert Sheldrake. In 1981, Sheldrake published a book called A New Science of Life in

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which he argued his hypothesis that ­morphogenesis—​­the ­coming-​­to-​­be of natural ­forms—​­is not merely the mechanical dictation of the underlying genetic information. His alternative theory of “morphogenetic fields” is beyond my scope here. I only want to draw attention to the outrage with which the appearance of his book was met. The editor of Nature, Sir John Maddox, declared A New Science of Life “the best candidate for burning there has been in many years.” Sheldrake’s attempt to smuggle occult principles back into science deserved condemnation, Maddox said, as “heresy.” I mention this incident only to illustrate how violently “life” was excluded from scientific inquiry and how recently this still occurred. But even as Rupert Sheldrake’s book was being consigned to the fire of scientific inquisition, the orthodoxy against which he had offended was shifting. Eight years after l’affaire Sheldrake, in 1991, Canadian biophysicist Robert Rosen published Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life. It summed up what its author described as “thirty years work on the problem, ‘What is life?’”—the very question that the Medawars had pronounced, by scientific consensus, nonsensical. Rosen’s argument is involved and often mathematical, but he holds, in brief, that “the machine metaphor” that has dominated biology must be replaced. Addressing the question “What is life?” will generate, he says, a “relational biology” that is unafraid of the previously neglected topics of complexity and internal organization. Rosen’s work was a harbinger of the emergence of what is sometimes called “systems biology”—that is, a biology that studies whole systems rather than reducing them to simpler component parts. Complexity, emergence, and ­self-​­organization became the new scientific frontiers. “Our vision of nature,” wrote Nobel laureate physical chemist Ilya Prigogine and philosopher ­Isabelle Stengers, “is undergoing a radical change towards the multiple, the temporal and the complex.” Many took this scientific revolution as a healing of the great Cartesian cut that had riven spirit from matter, soul from body, and mind from nature. William Irwin Thompson saw it as the basis for a new “politics of life.” Robert Rosen saw himself as part of the inauguration of a new “natural philosophy,” able to overcome the disintegrated worldview characteristic of modern science. I myself was an enthusiastic chronicler of this “new science” and featured many of the people I have been quoting in broadcasts during the 1980s. This was one of the reasons I was so startled and so quizzical when I learned of Illich’s “to hell with life.” Where others saw a healing, Illich saw only the culmination of the process of “naturalization” that he had associated with science all along. Now it had “life itself ” in its grasp. Whereas earlier scientific models had been patently reductive, now r­eality itself seemed

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within reach. Humanity was being absorbed within “a process which observes and defines, regulates and sustains itself.” It was an outcome that biologist Loren ­Eisley had foreseen in the remarkable prophecy with which he concluded a series of lectures at the University of Cincinnati in 1959. By viewing ourselves externally as items of n ­ ature—​­the standpoint Illich called “naturalization”—humankind had turned itself, Eisley said, into a “last unbearable idol.” The Pink Disk and the Blue Disk The idolization of life was reflected, Illich thought, in a new iconography of which he found instances all around him. Particularly influential was a visit to the home of some graduate students while he was teaching at Penn State. “On the icebox door two pictures were pasted. One was the blue planet and one was the fertilized egg. Two circles of roughly the same ­size—​­one bluish, the other one pink. One of the students said to me, ‘These are our doorways to the understanding of life.’ The term doorway struck me profoundly.” Illich came to the conclusion that the two disks, the blue and the pink, were instances of what the phenomenologist of religion, Mircea Eliade, with others, calls a sacrum. Paraphrasing Eliade, Illich defines the term as follows: “Sacrum describes a particular place in the topology of any culture. It refers to an object, a locality, or a sign which, within that culture, is believed to be . . . a doorway. I had always thought of it as a threshold, a threshold at which the ultimate appears, that which, within that society, is considered to be true otherness, that which, within a given society, is considered transcendent. For Eliade, a society becomes a conscious unity not just in relation to neighboring s­ ocieties—​­we are not ­you—​­but also by defining itself in relation to what’s beyond.” Illich was a keen student of iconography. I have already related his careful analysis of the war over the status of images that erupted in e­ ighth-​­century ­Christendom and was provisionally settled, at the Second Council of Niceae, by the declaration that an icon is not due that “veritable worship which . . . belongs to the divine being alone” but is rather “a threshold” at which the divine glory becomes apparent. This is the context in which Illich was struck so profoundly by the term doorway. But as thresholds the pink disk and the blue disk differed absolutely from the images of Jesus and Mary, the saints and the holy angels with which the Council of Niceae had been concerned. These two circles were, as Illich says, “emblems for scientific facts.” They are visions obtained not by faith but by technology, and technology, in his view, of an unprecedented violence: the one

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r­equiring a rocket able to overpower the earth’s gravity, the other the overcoming of an ancient reticence by the introduction of a camera into the womb. What they picture, moreover, is not otherness but the destruction of the very possibility of otherness. “When we look at the earth from the outside and when we look at the unseen in pregnancy as something already visible here,” Illich says, we “abolish . . . the division between here and there.” The pink disk and the blue disk belong to an endless and homogeneous here and now, in which even the hallowed “doorways” lead into more of the same. Illich therefore concluded that he was witnessing what he called “a new stage of religiosity.” Religiosity was something that Illich distinguished from religion. Religion, he wrote in Gender, is the sort of thing that can be made “the subject of scientific research”—it’s a discrete object with clear institutional boundaries and a precise doctrinal definition. Religiosity is more ­diffuse—​­it’s a sensibility rather than a doctrine, and it expresses itself in the songs, stories, gestures, and ways of speaking by which people manifest their deepest feelings about the world around them. He calls the new religiosity centering on life a “stage” because he views it as a perverse continuation of historical Christianity. Rather than seeing it as a new ­beginning—​­a restored i­ nnocence—​­or as a revived paganism, he saw the cult of life as something that could have appeared only in the space first opened by Christian belief in God’s Incarnation. Speaking to the Lutherans in Chicago in 1989, he said,  . . . the origin of the idea of a person defining himself as life lies in a conversation between Jesus and Martha, the sister of the public woman, Mary Magdalene, whom Jesus had gone to visit because their brother Lazarus had died. And in that conversation, Jesus said to Martha: “I am life.” And, from that moment on, in Western languages, life in the ­singular—​­a ­life—​­life tout court which we can have or not have, refers to a relationship with Jesus. For much more than a millennium, it was quite clear that people can be among the living and be dead, and other people can be dead and have life. This is not simply a religious statement; this was a Christian message which became an everyday ordinary assumption. If, therefore, today, we use the term life for a zygote, a fertilized egg which is to be implanted in the uterus, we abuse the word for the incarnate God.

I’ll return in a moment to Illich’s claim that contemporary usage “abuses the word for the incarnate God,” but first I want to try to clarify the two very different senses of the word life that are in play here. Ray Downing, an American medical doctor who currently works in Africa, has defined this difference in a book called Death and Life in America: Biblical Healing and Biomedicine. Death and life, he

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says, have “­bio-​­definitions” and “spiritual definitions.” Life, in a biblical sense, is “a contingent power, dependent on God,” while “­bio-​­life” is understood as “an autonomous power,” a good in itself. In the Hebrew Bible, life is an implication of God’s breath: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” In the Christian scriptures, life is the gift of the Christ. He is “the way, the truth and the life.” “In him [is] life” and he has come, he says, that those who receive him “might have life and . . . might have it more abundantly.” This life is, by no means, synonymous with ­bio-​­life. Indeed, it may sometimes be its opposite, as when Jesus says, “He that finds his life shall lose it: and he that loses his life for my sake shall find it.” With the gradual marginalization of Christianity, there has been, in Ray Downing’s words, “a reduction of life to ­bio-​­life.” But even as this has happened, life has retained the aura with which its biblical usage once endowed it. This creates a paradox. We treat life, on the one hand, as a natural phenomenon while, on the other hand, sanctifying it. This is an instance of what Illich calls corruptio optimi pessima (the corruption of the best is the worst). He used this old adage to convey his sense that modernity is the Gospel turned upside down or inside out. When Jesus says that he has come that people might “have life and have it more abundantly,” he is speaking of something that can exist in the world only as a glimmer of awareness and only as an expression of freedom, never of compulsion. It can be, so to say, incarnated but not institutionalized. To accept and express this divine life is, in Illich’s terms, the best. The life that is endlessly affirmed in the contemporary world is the mirroring worst, which appears when the best is abused. Life, in the contemporary sense, is under intensive a­ dministration—​­proclaimed by advertisers, protected by bureaucrats, and prolonged by regular attendance at the gym. And yet it is never simply ­bio-​­life because the word is still suffused with the numinous quality with which the Christian tradition has invested it. To take just one famous advertising pitch out of thousands that say the same, the claim that “Coke Adds Life” would make no sense whatsoever outside a context in which “life more abundant” had been promised. This is the worst because it is a terminus at which the Gospel is overcome and forgotten at the same time as it is surreptitiously retained as an exploitable resource. It is this hidden retention of the ­Christian heritage that made life an idol in Illich’s view. The genealogy linking ­life-​­more-​­abundant with ­life-​­as-​­resource is significant in two ways. It indicates, first of all, that we couldn’t have got to where we are except by the way we’ve ­come—​­obvious enough, seemingly, and yet often overlooked by those who ignore the past and think only of “going forward,” as the

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c­ urrent cliché has it. If our mistake lies in the past and consists of a misappropriation of our religious heritage, then the future can only lie in a critical reappropriation of this past, not in a bold determination to blunder on regardless. Moreover, if life owes its aura to its being a displacement or perversion of Revelation, then it is also, in Illich’s terms, a blasphemy. The word will sound somewhat antique to most contemporary Western ­ears—​­it’s been a long time since Aquinas argued that blasphemy was a crime “more grave than murder”—and yet it was the word that Illich chose, in his late writings, to dramatize his horror at the worship of life. Blasphemy, he says, consists either in “attribut[ing] to God something which does not pertain to the divine goodness” or in “denying something which does so pertain.” Both aspects of blasphemy are evident, in Illich’s view, in the worldview of which solicitude for “life” is now the emblem: first, the conceptualization of the world as impersonal system mischaracterizes its ­creator—​­it “attributes to God something which does not pertain to the divine goodness”—and, second, the human attempt to assume “responsibility” for this system arrogates to people what is proper to ­God—​­it “denies” the character that ought to belong to God as l­ ife-​­giver. This might seem to be a theological argument, but Illich, surprisingly, asserts that, in making it, he “want[s] to be understood as a historian, and not as a theologian.” “I can only claim validity for an argument from history,” he says, “not from Revelation.” This follows from the view I set out earlier: that the contemporary ethos could only have taken shape in a society steeped for many centuries in ­Christian images, ideas, and i­nstitutions—​­a society in which the world’s dependence on God was felt to be an element of everyday experience and not just a theological doctrine. To speak of blasphemy “as a historian” is to recognize that, when contemporary persons claim “responsibility for life” or express a determination “save the planet,” they are claiming a sovereignty that was first pictured as belonging to God and that would otherwise have been unimaginable. They are thus ­blaspheming—​­denying God’s sovereignty and attributing it to ­themselves—​ ­whatever they might believe. This is Illich’s argument from history. Revelation is only intelligible to faith, and faith was not his to grant or impose, so he abstained from any argument that presupposed it. However, it is a matter of historical fact that many centuries of belief in this revelation shaped every aspect of the Latin Christendom that would give birth to the modern West. And this leads him to the view that when we speak reverently of life, the concept cannot be well understood except as a perversion of the tradition in which the divine life has become flesh. Without Christianity, there would never have been a “cultural space . . . in which . . . a life can appear as an object of management and perhaps as an object

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that can even be produced.” And this influence is all the stronger for going generally unrecognized, since we can’t even criticize what remains unconscious. Life and the Church When Illich accepted Will Campbell’s invitation to address an assembly of religious leaders in 1985, he tried to convince them that life presented a direct challenge to the Church. His argument, in the first place, was that the contemporary discourses of life constitute “a perversion of the Christian message.” But he also argued that the Church was itself the source of the danger in which it was standing. How can one demand, he asked his auditors, that the Church now “sail against the very current into which she steered the West”? He found a particularly pernicious contemporary example of this steering in a statement made in 1988 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, later Pope B ­ enedict XXIII: “Cardinal Ratzinger says first of all that it is a scientific fact that, from the moment of conception, a new life comes into existence. Second, he says that human reason, unaided by faith or revelation, can recognize in this life . . . the existence of a human person. And third, he says that for a Christian this human person is the most helpless and therefore the most deserving brother of Christ, or in Christ.” Illich found this statement outrageous. He took the view, first of all, that “a scientific fact” is a contingent creation. Its factuality is not s­ elf-​­evident but depends on the techniques and definitions by which it is, as Bruno Latour says, “made public.” Our world is full of provisional “scientific facts” that regularly change their status, often without our knowledge, as theories and observational techniques change. Illich thought it improper to found theological reflection on something so frail and potentially changeable. What exists at the moment of conception is no more than a microscopic item of genetic information. To impute personality to this imperceptible dot, as the future Pope did, was to make an illicit crossing of the boundary between scientific and social knowledge. The person who exists at the moment of conception is, Illich says, “a person without legs, without arms, without eyes, a person without a face whom I can’t face, a person whom nobody in ordinary life can see, a person who can appear only in certain types of electron photograph as something totally unlike anything I know as a person.” Ratzinger’s statement, for Illich, showed a very fundamental disorientation of the Church, not only because of its politically motivated bow to scientific facts but also because it implicitly approved a type of surveillance that he felt was an impudent violation of the dignity and the integrity of women. What “shameless violence [was] done to

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women,” he asks at one point, “. . . . in order to photograph the zygote” in the first place? That an infinitesimal being secluded in the womb should become a citizen of the state, a ward of the Church, and a brother in Christ made public what was inherently private and turned the interior of a woman’s body into a “showcase.” Against Bioethics Illich gave great importance to the field of bioethics in stabilizing and legitimizing the discourses of life. The term bioethics dates back to the 1920s, but the word only began to designate a possible profession during the 1960s. The Hastings Center, the first American institute of bioethics, was founded in 1969, in the period between the first heart transplant and the birth of the first ­test-​­tube baby. Thousands of other similar centers, institutes, departments, and committees followed. Addressing a group of bioethicists in 1989, Illich said, “The evolution of the field of bioethics has an exceptional significance for understanding our whole society at the present moment. I dare compare your profession’s significance to that of atomic science at the time Oak Ridge was built.” (Oak Ridge is a laboratory in Tennessee, established by the U.S. government in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project and instrumental in the creation of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) The comparison to Oak Ridge was certainly intended to shock but also to indicate a real conviction that bioethics has an exemplary role in modern medicine, and one that points to the crucial role of “ethics” more generally in a world in which virtually every organization now has its “ethics code.” What bioethics does, according to Illich, is “to creat[e] the semblance of ethical choice in an intrinsically unethical context.” This statement comes from “a call to ­de-​­bunk ­bio-​­ethics” that Illich issued with his friend, ­self-​­professed “medical heretic” Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, in 1987. Ethics, for Illich, retained the sense of ethos, the moral atmosphere proper to a place or a people. Although there may be a handful of proscriptions common to all human communities, ethics, generally, must occupy some g­ round—​­what is ethical is ethical for someone who is standing somewhere in relation to some other. Life is a term so general and so impersonal in character that it destroys any such context. When the object of medical care is taken to be “a human life,” ethics has no purchase and can serve only a cosmetic function. Life cannot be a subject of ethics. This was something Illich realized at a very early stage of the emergence of this “burgeoning field,” as the Canadian Bioethics Society calls it. He expressed his reservations in a talk he gave at the Hastings Center in 1975. Illich was acquainted with its founder Daniel Callahan, whom he had known as the editor

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of ­Commonweal, a Catholic journal for which Illich sometimes wrote. He began his lecture by relating a dream he had had after accepting the invitation: “I dreamt of squatting at night time in the barracks next to Moses Rabinowitz, a Jew, like myself, in Auschwitz. Being doctors, our elimination had been postponed, to use our competence for selection on the ramp. And, in my dream, Rabinowitz said to me: ‘Herr Kollege, can you figure out what ethical principles apply to what we do?’” “After this,” Illich says drily, “the meeting became most uncomfortable.” Later a whole issue of the Hasting Center’s Bulletin was devoted to refuting Illich’s suggestion that bioethics are “concentration camp ethics.” Perhaps this was an early sign, seven years before the furor around Gender finally sank his reputation as a “progressive” thinker, that Illich was quickly going out of tune with the spirit of the age. Nevertheless, his conviction that bioethics were indeed “concentration camp ethics” only ­deepened—​­to the point that he confessed to another group of bioethicists in 1989 that he was “embarrassed by [the] depth” of this conviction. Life, he was sure, could never provide a ground for ­ethics—​­what is proper to life cannot be ascertained apart from some particular way of life and some definite conception of the human person. In the absence of any such conception, bioethics can do no more than formulate procedural rules for the smooth functioning of systems. This is not at all to say that bioethics committees are not faced daily by agonizing decisions. Illich was explicit that he was “not discussing the moral quandary in which ­bio-​­ethicists find themselves” or any other “issue of method or substance.” Rather, he wanted to challenge “the very existence of ­bio-​­ethics” and to examine what the existence of this field says and does, beyond providing jobs for unemployed philosophers and disillusioned clerics. His claim was that it served a legitimizing function. If practices that had long since broken the bounds within which it makes sense to talk about ethics were submitted to “ethical” scrutiny, then they could be given a semblance of propriety. You don’t ask whether organ transplantation or the making of children outside the womb or the creation of transgenic species is a good idea in the first place. Nor do you try to discover the basis on which such judgments could be made. Instead, you talk about when and how and how much. In this way, it is made to appear that the technological juggernaut is being governed by ethical criteria. But it is not, according to Illich, b ­ ecause—​­I r­ eiterate—​­the conditions that give “ethics” meaning have been surpassed and rejected, and ethics has been retained only as a licensing and legitimating agency. This is a difficult question to discuss or think about. One still has to live in the world that has left meaningful ethics behind, and one still has to try to do what is right. If I had been consulted before the first heart transplant in 1967, I would

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already have counselled against the crossing of this frontier between persons. And yet I have a dear friend whose company I enjoy thanks to a liver transplant that revived him when he was nearly dead. Illich too had beloved friends who, as he said, had had their hearts “cut out and rewired,” and he loved them no less for that. The question for him was whether this reality ought to be given the appearance of being ethical. His unyielding answer was no. To him, the bioethics boom only established “The Growing Need for Irrelevant Professions,” as he titled his talk to an audience of chairmen of bioethics committees at the University of Illinois in 1989. By this he meant that bioethics exerts no fundamental brake on technological ­overreach—​­its ­irrelevance—​­but is crucial to its ­legitimization—​­the “growing need” it serves. His favorite illustration came from his friend Bill Arney. In his book Experts in the Age of Systems, Arney writes about the unimaginable complexity of the new generation of Boeing airplanes introduced in the 1980s, the 757 and the 767. In this connection, he relates a joke that he heard from pilots of these new planes. In future, the joke goes, planes will be flown by one pilot and one dog. “The pilot will be there to feed the dog, and the dog will be there to bite the pilot if he even thinks about touching the controls.” Illich loved this image and invariably compared the role of the bioethicist to that of the dog. Neither the pilot nor the dog can influence the direction of the system, but the dog contributes, Illich says, “a passionate, ‘natural’ bark.” Responsibility for Life What makes life such a “powerful idol” for Illich is the way in which it merges what is made and what is given and obscures the difference between them. The means by which life is made known are the work of human h ­ ands—​­it is brought before us by telescopes and microscopes, cameras and scanners, laboratories and field stations, scientific discourses and political interests. And yet, at the same time, the word conveys both overwhelming naturalness and transcendental significance. It is this ­combination—​­the artificial, suited out as God and nature at ­once—​­that lends such compelling plausibility to claims that life is ours to manage and ours to save. Implied is not just a competence or a right but a duty. Not only can we manage “life on earth,” we ought to do so. Illich renounced such “responsibility” as a comforting but mystifying illusion. He called it “a rain dance,” his preferred term for a ritual by which people hide the obvious from t­ hemselves—​­the obvious, in this case, being that giving oneself to a project of global management or global responsibility involves a grandiosity amounting to paranoia. “As long as you think about

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the world as a whole,” he said, “the time for human beings is over.” It is a question, for him, of the stance, or ­non-​­stance, that one ­takes—​­from where does one see the world as a whole? If the earth is an idea, whose idea is it? This is the same question that Martin Heidegger raises in his essay “The Age of the World Picture [Weltbild].” “A world picture,” he writes, “when understood correctly, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture.” Illich was clear that “the world as a whole” neither could nor should be taken as something that people can represent to themselves and thus bring under their imaginative control. The key distinction underlying Illich’s rejection of responsibility is between responsibility and renunciation. He did not reject that part of responsibility that involves care for what is given to us. What he rejected was the fantastic pretense that we can even know the world as a whole, let alone presume to manage it. In the same vein, he rejected “responsibility for health” because he believed that the word health, despite its vestigial etymological associations with hale, whole, and even holy, now pointed to the state of a system and not to a personally experienced human condition. His alternative was r­ enunciation—​­the attempt to discover, with others, what we can do without. He spoke of “courageous, disciplined, s­ elf-​­critical renunciation accomplished in community,” and he took every opportunity to add that, to him, this meant “living it up” within limits rather than putting on a hair shirt. The Deep Ecology slogan, “Simple in means, rich in ends,” comes close, I think, to what he meant by renunciation. The crucial point is that his denunciation of “responsibility” did not refer to action that is frugal, prudent, or mindful or to a disposition to make do with what is at hand. It referred to ways of thinking and speaking in which one implicitly takes the point of view of a systems a­ dministrator—​­an “­eco-​ ­crat,” he sometimes ­said—​­or identifies with a system construct, like health, insofar as it is conceived as a management of risks. The world is ours not to save but to inhabit in a spirit of praise, humility, and mutual enjoyment. Illich saw a humanity that was responsible for life as having reached the end of the human condition. In the book of Genesis, “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” from which Adam and Eve are forbidden to eat is also called “the tree of life.” It is in order to bar Adam and Eve’s way back to this “tree of life” that the cherubim and the “flaming sword which turned every way” are posted as guards at the gates of Eden. But now we have a new version of Genesis, Illich says, that “tells how Adam and Eve were entrusted with life and the further improvement of its quality. This new Adam is potter and nurse of the Golem.” Illich’s dread in the face of this new p ­ ost-​­human condition was reflected in the prophetic intensity of some of his late lectures. I can remember being present at

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one such ­talk—​­at Worpswede in Germany in December 1990—and bridling a little when he told his audience that “what determines our epoch is a bottomless evil which Hitler and Stalin did not reach.” Could the ­well-​­heeled audience to whom he spoke, at a time, for them, of peace and plenty, really be facing a “horror,” a word he also used, worse than Auschwitz or the Gulag? In what sense did evil in Stalin and Hitler’s time still have a bottom that has now fallen out? Illich dared this fearsome and even possibly offensive rhetoric, I think now, because he thought the world itself was disappearing. He was explicit about it in a letter he wrote to his old friend Helmut Becker around the same time. “Only smoke remains,” he said in that letter, “from the ­world-​­dwindling we have experienced . . . Exciting, ­soul-​ ­capturing abstractions have extended themselves over the perception of world and self like plastic pillowcases.” This replacement of reality by an abstract creates a “bottomless evil” because it destroys all orientation, all sense of proportion. These depend, in his view, on the existence of a given world whose givenness constitutes its a­ uthority—​­our senses, our certain mortality, our location in some definite place and tradition establish the limits within which even the greatest evil still has a bottom. In the “manufactured reality ever further removed from creation” in which Illich felt himself to be living in his later years, these limits seemed to have vanished, leaving only, as he said, “smoke.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, repurposing a term from Hegel, speaks of Christ as the “concrete universal,” the all in the one, everything available and expanding from within a unique and definite being. Illich thought that his civilization, by pursuing a parody of this conception, had at last reached its opposite. Call it the abstract universal or perhaps, as with Whitehead’s “misplaced concreteness,” the abstract ­concrete—​­the particular overshadowed by the general, the individual subsumed in its class, reality absorbed by its representation. The horror of this for Illich, and the reason he dares to call it an “evil which Hitler and Stalin did not reach,” is that the abstract is actually experienced as if it were the concrete. The visitor who refuses a cup of cider because she has already met her sugar requirement for the day, the expectant mother whose pregnancy hinges on a balance of risks, the devotee of Gaia who venerates a s­ elf-​­regulating ­system—​ ­these are people, in Illich’s view, who have “swallowed” a system and experience in themselves the properties of the model they have ingested. “People annihilate their own sensual nature by projecting themselves into abstracta, into abstract notions. And this renunciation of intimate uniqueness through the introjection and ­self-​­ascription of statistical entities is being cultivated with extraordinary intensity by the way we live.”

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One consequence of the loss of the human condition in the merging of model and reality is something that Illich calls “epistemic sentimentality.” Life is the quintessential example. On the one hand, being is conceived as a system that can be comprehensively analyzed and rationally managed. On the other, Illich says, this “same abstract mechanism is romantically identified with life and spoken about in hushed tones as something mysterious, polymorphic, weak, demanding tender protection.” The political left defends the blue disk, the right defends the pink; both use affecting emblems to invest scientific and technological objects with emotional significance. The framed sonogram of the fetus on the mantelpiece, the blue planet on the fridge magnet allow our feelings to attach to what is beyond the range of our senses. These are the elementary forms of epistemic sentimentality. They allow us to love and venerate what we also manage and dominate. Epistemic sentimentality also allows us to live with contradictions that are hard to face. Like an addict, consumer society needs what is killing it. To take just one instance: an endlessly growing economy is changing the atmosphere, poisoning soils, and polluting the seas, but such an economy is also believed to be the only path to economic justice and social peace. Sentimental fetishes make the contradiction bearable. This is true in everyday talk where a kind of compulsory cheerfulness reigns and epidemic hyperbole inflates even the most ordinary happenings to the level of the ­epic—​­the fabulous vacation, the great weekend, the mesmerizing spectacle, the blockbuster release. But it is true at a deeper level as well. American writer Wendell Berry once memorably described contemporary society as having forgotten how to subtract. In Berry’s example, we happily count increased longevity when summing up the Gross National Happiness, but we fail to subtract the misery of those who live too long. Sentimentality about life hides the discrepancy and prevents it from coming to our attention in any practical way. This sentimentality becomes all the more crucial, as it become plain that the great “systems” of our world have become, in a sinister way, more and more lifelike. Images of the q ­ uasi-​­biological character of our institutions and our civilization abound. J. T. Fraser speaks of the crossing of “the ­ant-​­hill threshold”; Kevin Kelly of “the rise of ­neo-​­biological civilization”; Donna Haraway declares that in “our time . . . we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism . . . in short . . . cyborgs [cybernetic organisms].” The world is imagined as a “global brain,” “a hive mind,” and so on, while the internet is pictured as some great, pulsing metazoan. I needn’t go on. All these images suggest a world over which we have as much control as we do over the weather or the movement of the tectonic plates. Our institutions obey logics that have little to do either with their

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announced purposes or with what people say they want from them. They have, so to speak, a life of their own. Epistemic sentimentality keeps our attention focused on their happier aspects: the reformed drug dealer who becomes a Harvard professor, or the mother kept alive for a week with no lungs before her transplant. Wishful thinking displaces painful insight. As in the ­Rider-​­Waite tarot card of the blithe Fool about to step, all unawares, off a cliff, epistemic sentimentality strews flowers along the path and keeps our heads high in the air. Antecedents and Affinities Illich’s denunciations of life as idol found neither response nor sequel in the C ­ hristian settings in which he delivered them. I imagine that the people he addressed were too much engaged in defending life to stand back and question the very concept. Outside these circles, he received no hearing ­either—​­perhaps because his critique was largely cast in theological terms like idolatry, blasphemy, and the corruption of the Gospel promise of life more abundant. One might say that he was too radical for the Christians and too Christian for the radicals. And yet Illich’s ideas, as I understand them, do harmonize with those of many other contemporary thinkers. I got my first hint of this when I came across C. S. Lewis’s entry on “life” in his Studies in Words, published in 1967. Lewis notes in this essay that the word life has begun to wear what he calls “a semantic halo”—an effect, he says, which is apt to end in the word’s becoming “nothing but halo.” He also comments on the words “rising temperature.” (Both effects, the temperature and the halo, are striking anticipations of Illich’s and Uwe Pörksen’s account of plastic words as ­hot-​­air balloons bursting with impressive connotations but lacking any precise denotation.) Lewis draws attention to the same paradox that would later impress Illich. On the one hand, life is an abstraction of stupefying ­generality—​­something that is everything. On the other, the word constantly tends to become an archetype and an emblem. Familiar narrative elements are smuggled in. “As soon as terrestrial organisms are seen in their genetic unity,” Lewis writes, “[and] made into a kind of family tree, the same feeling which went out to the ‘blood’ of a family can . . . be transferred to Life.” The same thing happens in “the popular picture of evolution.” The archetypal pattern of the Ugly Duckling or of Cinderella is engaged: “mere abstraction” becomes “a moving tale.” We are “invite[d] . . . first to reify, then to personify, [and] finally to deify Life.” Lewis concludes with an ironic apology for daring to touch a word that is “perhaps too hot to touch,” a word, he says finally, that sums up “the mystique of our . . . age.”

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Another author who perceives this mystique, though his evaluation of it is quite opposite to that of Lewis and Illich, is philosopher of religion Don Cupitt. In 1999, he published The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech, a book in which he practices what he calls “ordinary language philosophy.” Claiming that “ordinary language is the best radical theologian,” he presents a potpourri of everyday expressions that convincingly demonstrate that “a new religion of life” has installed itself in the common speech without the theologians or the lexicographers ever really noticing. The expressions Cupitt has gathered are f­amiliar—​­all would pass easily and unremarked in conversation. Taken together, they show that life is not only Paul Fletcher’s “value of all value” but also an active agency in our world. Life leads us, teaches us, and treats us well or badly. It embodies sanctity and inspires r­everence—​­that we “love life” goes almost without saying, whereas, Cupitt observes, a declaration of love for God might be followed by an “embarrassed silence.” “Life,” he writes, “signif[ies] a thing or power or agency that carries us along as a ­fast-​­flowing river carries a boat, this way and that; a moving Power that is both immanent within us and (poetically) over against us and surrounding us; that is thought of as not only filling us and inspiring us, but also as having q ­ uasi-​­personal attributes [like] having things in store for us.” Cupitt’s view, in brief, is that during the long decline of “traditional religious allegiances,” “religious feelings, language, and styles of thought” were “exported” to secular realms. The language that settled on life was that formerly applied to God, both as ­providence—​­what life “has in store”—and as personal g­ uide—​­life as pathway, teacher, and judge. This is a development of which Cupitt thoroughly approves. He views the “religion of life” as the overcoming of the state of religious alienation in which humankind has existed for many millennia. In this sense, he is Illich’s exact ­opposite—​­what Illich calls idolatry, he calls l­ iberation—​­but he does endorse Illich’s view that a new religion has established itself. Cupitt’s book shows that the transfer of the attributes of God to life has been gradually accelerating since the first stirrings of modernity’s Romantic countercurrent in the eighteenth century. Its current prevalence in “everyday speech” expresses a long gestation. This raises the question of whether life was really the “new kind of entity” about which Illich spoke to the Lutherans. Illich argues that there has been “a conceptual collapse between cosmic process and substance”—by which I understand him to say that nature’s independent existence, its substance, is now seen to derive from its process. Put another way, divinity is now seen to be entirely immanent in nature, which is conceived as having no external or transcendent source. But this move from transcendence to immanence is a­ rguably already a

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part of German romantic Naturphilosophie in the early nineteenth century. Schelling, for instance, writes that “Nature should be visible mind [Geist], mind invisible nature.” I would say that the “collapse” of which Illich speaks has already occurred in what Schelling says. If nature is “visible mind” or spirit, isn’t it already “a process which observes and defines, regulates and sustains itself,” a character Illich attributes only to contemporary “ecological discussion”? I haven’t space to pursue this question further here. I only want to point out that there is a lot Illich hasn’t said or taken into account. The word life plays a crucial role in the philosophies of thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson, and it has a comparable salience in the literary line running through D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and F. R. Leavis. A few examples: L ­ awrence speaks throughout his work of “faith in life”; F. R. Leavis accuses T. S. Eliot of “sin against life”; Nietzsche attacks Christianity for “defend[ing] those who have been . . . condemned by life.” The list could be expanded. In all cases, life is already a god in the sense that it invites faith, demands obedience, and executes judgments. Illich is clearly pointing to something new insofar as life has become “an essential referent in current ecological, medical, legal, political and ethical discourse.” But his argument would have had more historical depth if it had related current usage to the tendency that has been taking shape in philosophy and literature for a long time. This remains to be done. The second omission in Illich’s brief writings on life is any mention of the prominence of this theme in contemporary political philosophy. For me, the most notable authors in this respect are Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose announced purpose has been to extend the work of these two predecessors. All are concerned with what Agamben speaks of as the collapse of the distinction between “biological life” and “political existence.” Here I’ll restrict myself to a brief account of Arendt’s overlap with Illich. Arendt viewed modernity as a move from politics as the pursuit of “the good life” to politics as a pursuit of life as an end in itself. In ancient Greece, as she understood it, the household had been the place where everything involved in the maintenance of life was carried on, while the public space was the theatre of action. When modern political thought invented “society,” it cast it in the image of a large household. Oikonomia, which had referred to household management in ancient Greece, became economy, the central preoccupation of the modern state. “The social,” Arendt writes, “is neither public nor private in the older sense that divided the polis from the household.” Instead we see “the body of peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nationwide administration of ­book-​­keeping.” “Through

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society,” Arendt says, “it is the life process itself that has been channeled into the public realm.” She sees modern society, in other words, as a giant ­metabolism—​­a “life process” writ large. The force of life, Arendt says, is fertility. Marx’s “labour theory of value” serves her as an example. Labour produces life every more abundantly, until eventually its process becomes more important than its products. This is now obvious to ­all—​­we are concerned that economies should grow quite regardless of what they produce. Society is “dazzled by the abundance of its growing fertility and caught in the smooth functioning of a ­never-​­ending process” and, in this way, becomes unable to “recognize . . . its own futility. Nothing any longer outshines its endless labor. A crucial reason, for Arendt, lies in the idea on which modern science is ­founded—​­that knowing is making. The truth is to be established not by contemplation but by e­ xperiment—​­a staging of nature by which the truth is made. For the natural philosophers of the seventeenth century, God was the supreme intellectual who makes what he thinks, and they, in humble imitation, also strove “to make the real in the light of the rational.” They would remake the world in the image of their mathematical and geometrical conceptions of it. The consequence, according to Arendt, is that Being, which discloses itself by appearing, is replaced by Process, which is “inferred from the presence of certain phenomena.” The process “disappears in the product,” but one knows, by assumption, that “a production process necessarily precedes the existence of every object.” What has occurred in the move from Being to Process, from knowledge as contemplation (theoria) to knowledge as construction, is “a reversal of means and ends.” The significance of this reversal remained latent so long as God remained enthroned as the Great Artificer, but, in our time, she says, it has been fully revealed. Process now overshadows product, and life becomes an end in ­itself—​­our objective is to survive as long as we can on Planet Earth as a species and to live as long as we can as individuals. Liberal politics, Arendt writes, “must be concerned almost exclusively with the maintenance of life and the safeguarding of its interests.” These interests bring “all action under the sway of necessity.” Real action, as Arendt conceives it, is storied or symbolic action taking place in the “space of appearance”—the public r­ealm—​­where the stakes are not the play of necessity but the good and the glorious. In modern societies, this “political realm” is “overshadowed” by “the gigantic and still increasing sphere of social and economic life” that is considered “the proper realm to take care of life’s necessities.” Illich’s affinity with Arendt is clear. And, like Illich, who says that idolization of life is “the very current into which [the Church] steered the West,” Arendt too makes Christianity responsible for a world “caught in the smooth functioning of

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a ­­never-​­ending process.” In early Christian thought, she says, the world has only a limited and transitory lease. “The form of this world is passing away,” the apostle Paul says. And, even while the world lasts, the bond that holds Christians together is love, not a common world. But neither love nor charity, in her view, can found a public realm. “The unpolitical, ­non-​­public character of the Christian community,” Arendt says, is evident in its aspiration to “form a corpus, a body, whose members were to be related to each other like brothers of the same family.” When this view is secularized, it produces a view in which fellow feeling is of crucial importance. This undercuts the public realm as a theatre of symbolic and noninstrumental action. “The intimacy of a fully developed private life will greatly enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and private feelings,” she writes, but “this intensification will always come to pass at the expense of the reality of the world.” ­Christianity prepares the condition that she calls “­world-​­less”—the condition in which the purpose of life is the maintenance of life. Her account, I think, supplements Illich’s, who also argues, as we have seen, that the world has dwindled to mere “smoke.” She doesn’t make the same claims that he began to articulate a decade after her death in 1975: that life has become both a ­sacrum—​­a sacred ­object—​­and a ­substantive—​­a palpable possession—and that systems discourse has merged model and reality. But she does show that life as an end in itself has been latent in modernity from its inception, and that argues, I think, that what Illich is talking about is as much a culmination and a completion as it is a novelty. Illich and Arendt agreed on Christianity’s formative role in the shaping of modern society, though Arendt never really pulled her thoughts on this theme together in one focused presentation. In the last years of his life, Illich did. His apprehensions about life as a contemporary idol were part of this project, but there were many other “key verities defining secular society” in which he also detected a “Christian ancestry.” That “modernity can be studied as an extension of Church history” is a thought that had occurred to Illich as early as 1957, when his studies of the Puerto Rican school system forced him to the conclusion that this ostensibly educational context was, in fact, “ridiculously similar to a religious one.” But only in the later 1990s was he willing to sit down with me and share the full extent of his thinking on modernity as a corrupted Christianity. To these reflections I now turn.

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Corruptio Optimi Pessima

12

Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd, When all church bells were silent our cap and bells were heard. —G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

In my introduction, I described the mixture of amazement and curiosity I felt when Illich first told me that he thought the fate of Western civilization could be summed up in the old Latin tag corruptio optimi pessima (the corruption of the best is the worst). Later, as we got to know each other better, I began to urge that he say more on this subject. My insistent interest finally bore fruit in the later 1990s. Over the course of several weeks, speaking spontaneously but drawing on a lifetime’s meditation on this theme, he shared with me the discourses that I first broadcast and then published after his death as The Rivers North of the Future. In these talks, he presented his view as “a research hypothesis,” a term that suggests that he saw himself as providing an outline or sketch of a ground that he hoped others would continue to explore. This hypothesis, and what I have been able to see by its light, will be my subject in this chapter and the next. Illich began our conversation in 1997 by speaking of the Incarnation, the Christian belief that God is revealed in human and bodily form in Jesus Christ: “I believe that the Incarnation makes possible a surprising and entirely new flowering of love and knowledge. For Christians the Biblical God can now be loved in the flesh. Saint John says that he has sat at table with him, that he has put his head on his shoulder, heard him, touched him, smelled him. And he has said that whoever loves another loves him in the person of that other. A new dimension of love has opened . . . ” Right away, several things are notable. First, and above all, there is the fervent simplicity of this credo. It speaks not of the founding of a new religion but only of

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the disclosure of a new possibility. Second, it links love and knowledge, which are seen as flowering together. He sees love as a mode of knowledge but also insists that knowledge can be an expression of love. Recall his earlier statement that “a critical attitude” can be a way of expressing and cultivating “love for the church.” And, finally, he describes what appears in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as a divine revelation. What the Incarnation “makes possible” would not be possible without it. The “new flowering of love,” that is visible in the Christ, does not belong to the human repertoire as such. It can be received only as an unforeseeable and undeserved ­gift—​­a surprise. This new possibility was from the outset highly volatile. First, it “threaten[ed] the traditional basis for ethics,” which was ­belonging—​­to a family, a place, a people. “We had formerly come before I,” Illich says. The community to which each one belonged had created an inescapable horizon and boundary, defining those one could love and be loved by. With the opening of the “new dimension of love,” this horizon shifts. “Now I can choose whom I will love, and where I will love,” he says. Community boundaries become permeable and therefore vulnerable. A second expression of this volatility is the possibility of institutionalization: There is a temptation to try to manage and, eventually, to legislate this new love, to create an institution that will guarantee it, insure it, and protect it by criminalizing its ­opposite. So along with this new ability to give freely of oneself has appeared the p ­ ossibility of e­ xercising an entirely new kind of power, the power of those who ­organize ­Christianity and use this vocation to claim their superiority as social ­institutions. This power is claimed first by the Church and later by the many secular institutions stamped from its mould. Wherever I look for the roots of modernity, I find them in the attempts of the churches to institutionalize, legitimize, and manage ­Christian vocation.

Illich sums up these dangers in his formula corruptio optimi pessima. This old adage, in one form or another, can be traced to many sources, including ­Aristotle, Aquinas, and Shakespeare, who says in Sonnet 94 that “. . . sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds / Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” It’s a saying that implies a proportion between the best and the ­worst—​­the radiance of the world’s “mysterious vocation to glory” continues to be expressed in the “demonic night” produced by its ­ perversion—​­ and therefore a continuing relationship between them. Without the offer of the best, there would have been no worst.

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The Good Samaritan Illich illustrates the novelty and volatility of the New Testament through the parable of the Good Samaritan. In chapter 10, I discussed this story from the perspective of embodiment. Here I will consider it in relation to Illich’s claim that modernity turns the Gospel upside down. Jesus tells the story after he has been asked how to “inherit eternal life” and has replied that one must love God and one’s neighbor “as oneself.” But “who is my neighbor?” his interlocutor wants to know. Jesus answers with his tale of a man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho who is beset by robbers, beaten, and left “half dead” by the side of the road. Two men happen along but “pass by on the other side.” One is a priest and the other a Levite, a group that assisted the priests at the great Temple, which, at that time, dominated the landscape of Jerusalem from the Temple Mount. Then a Samaritan comes along. The Samaritans belonged to the estranged northern kingdom of Israel and did not worship at the Temple. Tension between the Samaritans and the Judeans in the Second Temple period gives the name a significance somewhere between foreigner and e­ nemy—​­in contemporary terms, he was, as Illich liked to say, a Palestinian. The Samaritan has “compassion” on the wounded one. He stops, binds his wounds, takes him to an inn where he can convalesce, and promises the innkeeper that he will return to pay the bill. Jesus concludes by asking, which of the three ­passers-​­by was the neighbor? Illich claimed that this parable had been persistently misunderstood as a story about how one ought to act. He had surveyed sermons from the third through the nineteenth centuries, he said, and found a broad consensus that what was being proposed was a “rule of conduct.” But this interpretation was, in fact, “the opposite of what Jesus wanted to point out.” He had not been asked how to act toward a neighbor but rather who is my neighbor? And he had replied, s­ candalously, that it could be anyone at all. The choice of the Samaritan as the hero of the tale said, in effect, it is impossible to categorize who your neighbor might be. The one who stopped was the very one who had no obligation whatsoever to help the man in the ditch. His intervention, according to Illich, was “utterly destructive of ethical decency” because it broke the very boundary that, up till then, had defined ethics. “In antiquity,” Illich goes on, “hospitable behavior, or full commitment in my action to the other, implies a boundary drawn around those to whom I can behave in this way.” The Samaritan crosses this boundary but not, as the homilies Illich surveyed suggested, because he is fulfilling a duty or applying a rule. He answers a personal call. He is moved in his guts, the original Greek says. (The word ­used—​­splágchnon—​­is usually translated in this story as compassion, but the

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King James Version renders it in other places as bowels.). A call is a unique occurrence, something obtaining here, now, between these two. Seen externally, it is “arbitrary,” Illich says, because it is known only to the one who hears it. The sense of being called is experienced intermittently and not as an unvarying obligation. “A new kind of ‘ought’ has been established,” Illich says, “which is not related to a norm. It has a telos. It aims at somebody, some body; but not according to a rule.” In Illich’s view, the parable of the Samaritan underwent a fatal change of meaning when it came to be understood as a teaching about the duty of care rather than about freedom. In his reading of the story, nothing predetermines the Samaritan’s choice: The Master told them [that] who your neighbour is is not determined by your birth, by your condition, by the language which you speak, but by you. You can recognize the other man who is out of bounds culturally, who is foreign linguistically, who, you can say by Providence, or pure chance, is the one who lies somewhere along your road in the grass, and create the supreme form of relatedness which is not given by creation but created by you. Any attempt to explain this “ought” as corresponding to a norm takes out the mysterious greatness from this free act.

The distinction between what is demanded by a norm or rule, on the one hand, and what is recognized through a call, on the other, is a foundation of Illich’s thought. It explains, for example, why he was so confident that the d ­ e-​ ­institutionalization he promoted would open horizons rather than close them. The usual view is that the modern institutions he analyzed are indispensable and without ­alternative—​­if we didn’t have them, we would have no way of obtaining the goods they provide. Illich held that alternatives would appear if they were allowed to but that they could not be guaranteed in advance without a devastating loss of freedom. He was willing to depend on how people were inspired, and inspiration is, by its nature, transitory and intermittent. The Samaritan, who loves outside the categories that prescribe his allegiance and obligation, stands for this freedom to invent, to respond, to take unpredictable directions. Ethos and Agape It becomes crucial, therefore, to understand the terms on which the Samaritan turns to his wounded enemy in the ditch. What prevents the freedom he exercises from becoming a universal duty and therefore a license for the unlimited institutionalization of charity? One answer comes from German phenomenologist Klaus Held,

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professor emeritus at the University of Wuppertal. In a lecture titled “Ethos and the Christian Experience of God,” which he gave at the National University of ­Ireland in Galway, he offered an interpretation of the parable of the Samaritan that I think complements and extends Illich’s understanding. Drawing on the thought of the founder of phenomenology, German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Held begins by examining what it means to have a world. There is ultimately only one world, he says, and all particular worlds refer to it, but we can never form “a bird’s eye view” of this world of worlds. “We can only experience the one world from the perspective of our homeworld.” (Husserl’s German word is Lebenswelt [life world], but Held translates it as homeworld.) The homeworld is the horizon within which meaning is possible. It is the source of our s­ helter—​­the horizon that holds us in and makes us ­known—​­but also the source of our ­suffering—​­our horizon is a limit that we have not freely chosen, a situation, as Heidegger says, into which we have been “thrown.” A homeworld has an ­ethos—​­an ancient Greek word meaning what is customary or habitual. The validity of an ethos is “anchored,” Held says, “in habitual behavior,” and this includes our inhabitation of a place as well as our accustomed ways of living in i­ t—​­of walking and talking, eating and drinking, playing and thinking. When the priest and the Levite, in Jesus’ story, pass by the one who lies, apparently dead, in the ditch, they follow the ethos of their homeworld, which demands nothing of them in such a case. The Samaritan has no more obligation than the other t­ wo—​­less, indeed, since the wounded one belongs to a hated foreign people whom his ethos requires him to shun. But he recognizes in the man’s plight what Held calls a “malfunction” of homeworldly ethics. The man in the ditch lies beyond the horizon of any ­homeworld—​­no one is responsible for him. This is the kind of case in which Jesus specializes. The man in the ditch belongs to a throng of outsiders, deprived of any homeworld, to whom Jesus directs his ministry. This group includes those temporarily outside the c­ ommunity—“the unclean woman” who has suffered prolonged bleeding, which has made her ritually impure and therefore t­aboo—​­and those permanently outside ­it—​­Held mentions “tax collectors, people possessed by demons, women of doubtful reputation.” Each has “fallen out of the normal referential ties” and experienced “the loss of homeworldly shelter.” This does not mean that Jesus, or his proxy the Samaritan, encounters them as “worldless”—for then they would not be human. Rather they have become members of the one world where they can only be reached if “the tension between homeworld and alien world” can be overcome. They lie, so to speak, in no man’s land, in the zone between homeworlds, where normal references don’t apply.

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What this points out is how sheerly momentous it is for the Samaritan to embrace his enemy and how equally fraught. The tension between homeworld and alien world is “constitutive of our experience of the world.” The cost of permanently overcoming it would be complete loss of meaning. To help someone whose predicament has put them outside the homeworldly boundaries that define ethics requires that one create what Held calls “new references.” The sufferer has fallen outside the “referential contextuality” that gives meaning and consistency to a given ethos. But to create new references for him/her means nothing less than to “cause history itself . . . to begin anew.” Help rendered beyond the limits of ethos occurs at a zero point where nothing less than a new w ­ orld—​­a new ­history—​­must be generated. Jesus points, again and again, to the possibility of transcending the boundaries that protect and fortify the homeworld. He refuses ritual duties or says they don’t apply to him. There are many examples in the Gospels, but a particularly strong one is his telling the young man who wants to follow him but asks leave first to bury his father that he should come along directly and “let the dead bury their dead.” He and his followers violate the Sabbath rules, and when he is upbraided for doing what is “unlawful,” he asserts that “the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” He associates with those who have been banned, shunned, or ostracized and even asserts, at one point, that they are the sole object of his ministry. “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners,” he says, leaving the question hanging, in my mind at least, whether the righteous are already saved or will never be saved so long as they consider themselves righteous. He can thumb his nose at convention in this way because he knows of a ­God—​­his ­Father—​­who transcends all ­limits—​­all homeworlds, all ritual requirements, all merely human emplacements. Even when he was the God of I­ srael—​­the God of a people, a place, a ­homeworld—​­he already encountered his people in places outside all religious or domestic e­ nclosure—​­in deserts, on mountaintops. Some of the prophets already present him as God of all, “the desire of all nations,” and not just the best of many gods. As Christianity evolves, he will become the God who creates ex nihilo, “from nothing”—the world is His original and spontaneous creation and no elementary stuff of any ­kind—​­no hint of “worldliness”—exists before he creates. (In many creation stories, some preexisting matter is formed into a world. Even in G ­ enesis, where the earth “in the beginning” was “without form and void,” there seem already to be “waters” over whose face God’s Spirit moves.) Jesus, as presented in the Gospels, is not yet entirely a universalist. The portrait of him wavers between the Jewish prophet, sent “only to the lost sheep of

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Israel,” and the universal Messiah in whom, as the apostle Paul says in his letter to the Galatians, there is “neither Jew, nor Greek . . . neither slave nor free . . . neither male, nor female.” But Jesus certainly presents a God who can grant the Samaritan safe passage into the world between worlds, into the one world where his neighbor lies dying. He can go where he has “to create new references” and “cause . . . history . . . to begin anew.” And this is already, Held argues, a creation “from nothing.” All of the “Abrahamic” ­religions—​­Judaism, Christianity, and ­Islam—​­present a God over all, independent of all homeworlds. But Judaism and Islam continue to “bind . . . their worship of God to a canon of law.” Christianity alone, Held says, gives “free reign to the sovereignty of the desert god over any homeworldly ethos.” It does so by insisting that “love of one’s neighbor” justifies a “surpassing of all ­law-​­abiding behavior.” This exposes it, he goes on, to a unique temptation: The temptation consists of regarding love of one’s neighbour not only as a corrective with respect to the normality of the ethos in the limiting case of an inescapable predicament, but of identifying this normality with love of one’s neighbour, i.e., of elevating the extreme case to the status of a normal case. But there is no ethos of agápe [disinterested love], for agápe as such explodes all ethical horizons. Actively compassionate love cannot take the place of a historically developed ethos, since, insofar as it represents the return of the isolated “neighbour” to a homeworldly referential context, it is dependent upon just such an ethos, which is already given and thus distinct from it. Agápe can only ever intervene as a corrective, when a pregiven ethos breaks down in the limiting case of an inescapable predicament.

Let me rephrase this, to me, crucial point so it is clear. The beaten man is in a ­predicament—​­his homeworldly ethos has “malfunctioned,” and he lies beyond its reach in a condition in which the very rules of this ­world—​­the rules the priest and the Levite observe in ignoring h ­ im—​­deny him aid. The Samaritan addresses this ­anomaly—​­he dares to step onto the uncharted, i­n-​­between ground on which the man lies stranded. But the condition of his aid is the existence of a homeworld to which he can return the wounded one. His act, understood in this way, is the exception that proves the rule. But should this exceptional act ever be taken as a possible ­norm—​­Christianity’s unique “temptation”—then the homeworld itself, indeed all homeworlds, will be put into jeopardy because “there can be no ethos of love of one’s neighbour.” Held’s analysis clarifies and supports Illich’s, and the language Held uses ­vividly evokes the world in which we now ­live—​­a world in which “all ethical

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­ orizons” have, as he says, “exploded,” creating a permanent state of emergency, h in which “the extreme case” has become “the normal case,” and all homeworlds quail before the impossible assumption that agape can and should become an ethos. (The idea that there can be “no ethos of agape” is also mirrored in Hannah Arendt’s claim that “charity . . . is incapable of founding a public realm.”) Held shows that charity cannot sustain a homeworld except as a supplement. But what limits the Samaritan’s action? How can it remain an exception and not turn and consume the homeworld on which it depends? Here I return to Illich’s idea of the call. This idea is enriched, I think, by Held’s insight that the wounded man’s situation is a zero point from which the world must be begun anew. Only the God who creates “from nothing,” Held says, can uphold the one who ventures onto this ground. For Illich, the Samaritan’s fearlessness is inseparable from Jesus’ announcement that “the kingdom of God has come upon you.” This is the light by which the Samaritan can “see” and attend to his enemy as a neighbor, but at the same time, it is the reason why S­ amaritan-​­type action can never establish a rule or a norm. For the kingdom, as the pearl of great price, is elusive. At one moment, it “comes upon” people and is “among” or “within” them; at another, it is hidden or buried or restricted by various seemingly impossible c­ onditions—​­one must “become as a little child”; one must lose one’s life in order to gain it; one must even, in one extreme formulation, “hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters.” It is “not of this world” and, therefore, not subject to this world’s considerations. It is hard to ­enter—“Straight is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to life, and few there be that find it.” Its presence among us is discontinuous and out of our control, and this is in its nature inasmuch as it is explicitly based on renunciation of all that we can hope to c­ ontrol—​­power, wealth, status, and, perhaps, life itself. The Samaritan becomes a neighbor only by forgetting himself, and all that establishes this self in what Held calls its “referential context.” His power to go where no ties bind and no law o­ btains—​­to go, in Held’s terms, into the one ­world—​­depends on what is called, in theological language, grace. Grace, in its simplest terms, is ­gratuity—​­it names a gift that we can neither compel nor deserve nor return but only gratefully receive. Grace enables action outside the bonds of reciprocity that constitute ethos. The wounded man lies beyond the Samaritan’s cultural ambit, outside the g­ ive-​­and-​­take that s­ ustains people in his community. He can hear his call, his appeal, but he can cross over to him only by the grace of God. Let him think he has done so under his own power, and an “ethos of agape”—that impossibility of which Held s­ peaks—​­is on the horizon.

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Free and Fragile The Samaritan expresses the freedom to love that Illich thinks the Incarnation “makes possible.” He illustrated the idea for me with reference to the story in the Gospel of Matthew of “how Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” The devil came and took Jesus out into the desert. The Gospels call this devil the Satan, which means the tempter. And what the tempter invites him to do, ultimately, is to worship power, the powers, the powers of this world. Jesus replies to the tempter, “You shall worship only God, not power”; and, with these words, the New Testament creates the cosmic atmosphere in which the Samaritan can dare to step outside his culture, and the guardian spirits that watch his “we.” He can claim that even though, as a Samaritan, his “I” is the singular of a “we,” he can transcend this limitation and reach out to the Jew [in the ditch]. In a certain way, he is superior to the most powerful demons, watchdogs, dragons, horrors, and menaces which, in the world before Jesus, guarded the “we.”

The Samaritan, secure in the “cosmic atmosphere” the Incarnation generates, is free to defy the guardian spirits that are the condition of a contained community. His “inner . . . atmosphere . . . is not one of dread but of union with the Lord of the Universe.” This, for Illich, is the Christian stance, and his own, par excellence. Its keynote is relatedness. “We are creatures,” Illich says, “who find our perfection only by establishing a relationship.” But to do this I must put myself, as Illich says, “below the other,” since it is through the other that the call comes. A morality of relationship rather than rules, personal rather than categorical response, demands that one live in a spirit of forgiveness. This is because the new freedom to love whom one will and not whom one must also implies a new possibility of betrayal. An ethic of ­conversion—​­of turning toward God and toward the ­other—​­is always shadowed by the possibility of turning a­ way—​­of coldness, indifference, and infidelity. Just as a mood of fearlessness was part of the new Christian condition, so was a spirit of contrition. “Contrition,” Illich says, meant “not . . . a sense of culpability but rather a deep sorrow about my capacity to betray the relationship which I, as a Samaritan, have established, and at the same time, a deep confidence in the forgiveness and mercy of the other. . . . [It] is a sweet glorification of the new relationship for which the Samaritan stands, a relationship which is free, and therefore vulnerable and fragile, but always capable of healing.” “Free and therefore . . . fragile” could be said to sum up Illich’s view of freedom. Were it not fragile, it would not be freedom. Freedom stands on a razor’s edge,

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upheld there by a spirit of ­trust—​­that we will be able to bear what arrives without g­ uarantee—​­and of f­orgiveness—​­that we will ultimately put love higher than justice. Its subtlety and delicacy are its vulnerability. And, when it collapses, it collapses into something worse than the situation from which it initially declares its independence. Freedom institutionalized is something quite different from a resumption of the culturally shaped obligations that the Samaritan has transcended. The Gospel brought under the power of the world is not like anything that has existed before. Corruptio optimi pessima. As Illich tells the story, this institutionalization begins in a serious way in the period after the Emperor Constantine granted the Church official standing in 313 CE. Bishops acquired the status of magistrates in the imperial administration, and as the Roman Empire gradually failed, various other political functions also began to devolve on the Church. The Church became a welfare agency, solidifying its position by helping the state deal with “the massive immigration from rural and foreign areas” that was beginning to make city life dangerous in the later Roman Empire. In the early years of Christianity, it was customary in a Christian household to have an extra mattress, a bit of candle, and some dry bread in case the Lord Jesus should knock at the door in the form of a stranger without a ­roof—​­a form of behavior that was utterly foreign to the cultures of the Roman Empire. You took in your own but not someone lost on the street. Then the Emperor Constantine recognized the Church, and Christian bishops . . . gained the power to establish social corporations. And the first corporations they started were Samaritan corporations which designated certain categories of people as preferred neighbours. For example, the bishops created special houses financed by the community, that were charged with taking care of people without a home. Such care was no longer the free choice of the householder, it was the task of an institution.

The appearance of these xenodocheia, literally “houses for foreigners,” signified the beginning of a change in the nature of the Church that would unfold over many centuries. In trying to understand it, it is best not to get stuck on this or that ­practice—​­like the limited utility of having shelter available for the torrent of displaced people in the late Roman E ­ mpire—​­but rather to focus on what is ultimately at stake for Illich. “A gratuitous and truly free choice ha[s] become an ideology and an idealism,” he says, and “faith has been made subject to the power of this world.” I said earlier that the Samaritan’s relationship to the wounded man is made possible by the grace that guides and upholds him in his venture into the

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­ orld-​­of-​­worlds. But faith is also implied. Illich says: “The vocation, the ability, the w empowerment, the invitation to choose freely outside and beyond the horizon of my ethnos what gifts I will give and to whom I will give them is understandable only to one who is willing to be surprised, one who lives within that unimaginable and unpredictable horizon which I call faith.” Faith, by this account, is a willingness to endure, and even welcome, surprise in order to allow what comes to my attention to speak in its own voice rather than in the terms I prescribe. “Faith,” Illich says, “inevitably implies a certain foolishness in worldly terms.” This link between faith and foolishness is crucial to Illich’s understanding of the New Testament, and, in later years, he readily spoke of both himself and his Lord in these terms, calling Jesus, at one point, “a major disturber and fool” and talking of himself as one who employed his “fool’s freedom” to teach as he liked outside all academic categories. He described the idea “that God could be a man” as ­foolishness—​­a “logical contradiction” explainable “only by love.” He says that Jesus died as a f­ool—“this fool who was crucified”—hung in ignominy outside the city walls and “ridiculed by everyone entitled to represent Israel”—his unanimous rejection by his people symbolically completed by Peter’s denial outside the house of the high priest on the night of Jesus’ arrest. It is foolishness certainly to try to live in an “unimaginable and unpredictable horizon”—Illich’s characterization of ­faith—​­when our whole civilization is virtually defined by its effort to increase predictability. “Pleasant surprises” may be welcome, but real surprises occur only in the space that Klaus Held d ­ escribes—​­the world outside all enclosure and all “reference” where God calls Abraham to leave his name and his country behind on the basis of nothing more than a promise. This foolishness is inherent in the gospel, when seen from a “worldly” point of view, and this becomes significant when “faith is made subject to the power of this world.” Foolishness acts outside ­self-​­interest, obeys a promise without guarantee, risks everything on the word of another. But the Western Church, in its effort to “institutionalize this freedom, has tended to transform supreme folly first into desirable duty, and then into legislated duty.” This has required what Illich calls “a brutal form of earnestness”—a taming of all that is wild, extravagant, and subversive in the record of Jesus’ life and its encasement in a clerical bureaucracy. The Mystery of Evil The institutionalization of the G ­ ospel—“supreme folly” transformed into “desirable duty”—expresses what Illich calls “the mystery of evil.” The phrase is drawn from the apostle Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians. (Paul’s authorship is

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now disputed by some scholars, but what I am about to say does not turn on who wrote the letter.) The passage in which this phrase appears has been so consequential, and it receives such a novel interpretation by Illich, that I will begin by quoting it, more or less in full: And now, brothers, about the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and his gathering of us to himself: I beg you, do not lose your heads or alarm yourselves, whether at some oracular utterance, or pronouncement, or some letter purporting to come from us, alleging that the Day of the Lord is already here. Let no one deceive you in any way whatever. That day cannot come before the rebellion [apostasia] against God, when the Man of Sin [or lawlessness] will be revealed, the Son of Perdition. He is the Enemy. He rises in his pride against every god, so called, and every object of men’s worship, and takes his seat in the temple of God, claiming to be God himself. You cannot but remember that I told you this when I was still with you; you must now be aware of the restraining hand [katechon] which insures that he will be revealed only at the proper time. For already the secret power [mysterion] of wickedness is at work, secret only for the present until the Restrainer [katechon] disappears from the scene. And then he will be revealed, that wicked man [ho anomos] whom the Lord Jesus will destroy with the breath of his mouth and annihilate by the manifestation of his coming [parousia].

This passage is almost the sole New Testament source for the tradition of a­ nti-​ ­ hrist, even though that name is never explicitly mentioned. Jesus warns of “false C Christs” in his apocalyptic discourses, and the first letter of John warns several times of “antichrists,” but Second Thessalonians gives the only substantial description of the figure whom legend would elaborate as the ­anti-​­Christ. (This is not true insofar as the figure of ­anti-​­Christ overlaps with Satan, who has a prominent role in the New Testament, but I am speaking here of ­anti-​­Christ as a distinct character.) Illich’s particular concern was with the associated “mystery of evil,” which is translated here as “the mystery of wickedness.” The word being rendered as wickedness is anomos, literally “lawlessness.” In the Latin Bible, or Vulgate, which became standard for Christian Europe before the Reformation, Jerome translated this phrase as “mysterium iniquitatis,” and Illich often quoted the Latin as well as speaking of “the mystery of evil.” Illich felt that, in expounding the idea of corruptio optimi pessima, he could not avoid the figure of ­anti-​­Christ. He used this name to evoke that “entirely new kind of power” that he believed was Christianity’s unique and besetting temptation. This was both a bold and a courageous decision. To many people today, the figure

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of ­anti-​­Christ is either pure k­ itsch—​­a few years ago I came across a book titled How to Tell If Your Boyfriend Is the ­Anti-​­Christ—​­or an emblem of the more lurid forms of fundamentalism. But the term has a history. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, reformers associated ­anti-​­Christ with the Papacy. Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, and William Wycliffe, among many others, all called the pope by this name. In English Protestant John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), popularly known as The Book of Martyrs, “the proud and disordered reign of a­ nti-​­Christ . . . in the church” is said to have begun with the expansion of papal power that began at the end of the first millennium. To this day certain Protestant churches in the United States keep up the perfervid rhetoric associated with this tradition. As recently as 2000, for example, the U.S. Congress felt it necessary to censure Bob Jones ­University for this view of the papacy. Despite this persistence as a sign of ­anti-​­Catholic bigotry on the fringes of American Protestantism, it is generally the case that the ­anti-​­Christ has faded from awareness in modern times. In his history of the a­ nti-​­Christ legend, historian and theologian Bernard McGinn says that “the last Enemy rapidly became the hobby of cranks after 1660.” McGinn does acknowledge a couple of exceptions: Vladimir Solovyev, the late n ­ ineteenth–​­century Russian theologian, poet, and pamphleteer; and psychologist C. G. Jung. But these were “the last major Western thinkers,” McGinn wrote in 1994, “who were convinced that real consideration of the problem of evil necessarily involves A ­ nti-​­Christ.” I want to argue that this judgment was premature in view of the novel and necessary meaning that Illich has given the term. (René Girard was another “major thinker of our time” who revived and repurposed this problematic name.) Illich was quite aware of the turbid waters into which he was wading. “I know,” he said, “I risk being mistaken for a fundamentalist preacher in employing [this] monstrously churchy term.” He argued as follows: In the new Christian communities that began to grow after the death and resurrection of Jesus, one of the vocations, according to the New Testament, was that of prophet. Some scholars believe that the job of these prophets was to preserve and proclaim the words of Jesus during the long period when the gospel was transmitted orally. (The four canonical gospels drew on earlier written sources but were themselves written between forty and seventy years after Jesus’ death.) Illich argues that the prophets of the early church had a different function. “Once God’s word had become flesh,” he says, “there was no longer any need for the word of God to come through the mouth of a prophet.” So, what did they do that still deserved the old and elevated name of prophecy? According to Illich, “they had to announce a mystery, which

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was that the final evil that would bring the world to an end was already present. This evil was called ­Anti-​­Christ, and the Church was identified as the milieu in which it would nest.” His evidence is the Second Letter to the Thessalonians and the reference there to the power that is secretly at work, “the mystery of evil.” That the Church is its “nesting place” is an inference from the fact that the “Man of Sin . . . takes his seat in the Temple of God.” On this basis, Illich claims that the early Church was aware of its own shadow, aware that it harbored an unprecedented ­evil—​­one “that would have found no nesting place in the Old Testament”— aware that it was, so to speak, playing with fire. But this awareness didn’t last. “What is impressive about the transition from the early Church to the established Western Church,” Illich says, ‘is how thoroughly this mystery disappeared from the Church’s teaching and the concern of most its members. It r­ e-​­appeared from time to time in the prayers, writings and sermons of mystics and reformers; but the Roman Church did not centre faith on its existence, and neither did most of the Reformed Churches.” Whether Illich is right about the early Church’s ­self-​­awareness I leave to more competent authority. The textual evidence seems slender to me. But I don’t think this really touches his main point, which concerns the danger itself: that the greatest good will become the greatest evil. Whether it ever did or not, the Church, in Illich’s view, ought to have “centered” its faith “on the mysterious evil that entered the world with the Incarnation.” In adopting the word mystery, I believe Illich mainly intended to refer to what exceeds understanding rather than to the operation of an occult power. (The letter to the Thessalonians does speak, it’s true, of a “secret power,” but this might refer only to something unrecognized rather than to the operations of a hidden hand.) Illich certainly believed that the mystery of evil could be “investigated historically” and understood by anyone with “a certain power of observation.” One needs no faith to agree with him that “our world is out of whack with any prior historical epoch” or to find it “confusing and incomprehensible.” But he did also think that faith can discern more of this mystery than historical ­understanding—​­with what else is he reproaching the “established Western Church,” after all, if not with failing to discern the explosive character of the revelation with which it had been entrusted? Why is the Incarnation so explosive? In a book called The Breaking of the Image, British sociologist David Martin, an ordained Anglican priest as well as a scholar, suggests an analogy with the splitting of the ­atom—“the breaking of the tiniest unit” that “release[s] . . . a l­ocked-​­up power capable of filling the whole cosmos.”

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God contains unimaginable power, even if this is only, as the unbeliever supposes, an alienation of humanity’s power. On the Cross, God is broken and distributed, as bread is broken and distributed in remembrance during the communion meal. Two spheres are crossed and mingled. The power that has been contained in religion, as the realm of the sacred or set apart, is set free. Just as the boundaries of ethnos, with their guardian dragons, are breached by the fearless Samaritan, so the boundaries of religion are pierced by the announcement of the kingdom of heaven as present and available, here and now, however hard to attain. The world pivots on this infinitesimal point, this disregarded happening in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire. This is true for the faith that perceives its resurrected Lord gathering a reborn humanity to himself, but it is just as true for the nonbeliever watching the current emergence of what Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari calls Homo ­Deus—​­a humanity now remaking creation after its own image, as God once made us. Is it imaginable that Man could have become God, as Harari’s title says, without God first condescending to become Man? Sin Changes Its Meaning When Christ enters history, ­anti-​­Christ must necessarily enter with him. This was a point that C. G. Jung stressed. Once Christ is fixed in the psyche, Jung writes, “the coming of the ­anti-​­Christ is not just a prophetic ­prediction—​­it is an inexorable psychological law.” Once the church turns the gospel into an “idealism,” as Illich says, a compensation is bound to occur. The term ­anti-​­Christ gathers all the ways in which what is given can be abused; what is revealed can be betrayed; what casts light can, and must, generate shadow. But Illich also believed that one can say the same thing without reference to the highly mythological figure of the ­anti-​­Christ. There is no need, Illich says, “to engage in arcane speculations about what person or what power Paul meant to refer to in his letter to the Thessalonians.” What is meant by ­anti-​­Christ, he goes on, can also be expressed by the idea of sin, an idea that he thinks completely changes its meaning with the Incarnation. I believe that sin is something which did not exist as a human option, as an individual option, as a d ­ ay-​­to-​­day option before Christ gave us the freedom of seeing in each other persons redeemed to be like him. By opening this new possibility of love, this new way of facing each other, this radical foolishness, as I called it earlier, a new form of betrayal also became possible. Your dignity now depends on me and remains potential so long as I do not bring it into act in our encounter. This denial of your dignity is

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what sin is. The idea that by not responding to you, when you call upon my fidelity, I thereby personally offend God is fundamental to understanding what Christianity is about. And the mystery that I’m interested in contemplating is a consequence of the perversion of faith throughout history . . . 

This is a crucial but vulnerable statement, taken from The Rivers North of the Future. It’s one that I think Illich might have wanted to spell out more thoroughly, had we had a chance to go over the text before he died. Sin, in much of the New Testament, is a cosmic power, allied with death, and interwoven with “flesh.” We are all “under the power of sin,” Paul says. When Illich says that “sin did not exist as a human option” before our redemption in Christ, I don’t think he means to deny Paul’s view that unredeemed humanity is “under the power of sin.” Rather, I think he is saying that once we are redeemed, once sin is forgiven, once the Incarnation has occurred, then sin changes its nature. This makes “option” a key word in interpreting the preceding ­statement—​­sin, it might be said, is transformed from a besetting condition to a choice. “Sin,” Illich says, “is something that is revealed only in the light of its possible forgiveness.” Forgiveness of sin is “the cosmic atmosphere” in which the Samaritan can confidently defy the guardian spirits that once hemmed him in. Only in this new horizon is his act possible at all. Awareness of sin, looked at in this way, is an exaltation. “To believe in sin,” Illich says, “is to celebrate as a gift beyond full understanding, the fact that one is being forgiven.” Made visible “in the light of its possible forgiveness,” sin is transformed, as I said earlier, from an imperceptible condition to a choice, at least for those who hear the good news. A passage from the Gospel of John makes this clear: “If I had not done among them the works no one else did,” Jesus says, “they would not be guilty of sin. As it is, they have seen, and yet they have hated both me and my Father.” Illich knew the difficulty he faced in speaking about sin. “The very idea,” he says, “has become both threatening and obscure to contemporary minds.” He thought that there were two main reasons for this. The first is that sin was “criminalized” during the Middle Ages and became very hard to understand outside the legal/penal framework in which the church came to exercise its “care of souls.” The second is the prevalent conception of morality as a matter of “values.” Values are ­voluntary—​­I can change “my values.” They are r­ elative—​­one rises as another falls. They are m ­ easurable—​­I can say how much I value something. They are h ­ istorical—​ ­they change over time. And they constitute a ­scale—“Values can be positive,” Illich says, “but also negative, so the moment I speak, in philosophy, about values, I

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assume the existence of a zero point, from which values rise or decline in two directions.” All this flexibility and mutability militate against any conception of a good, which is good in itself, always and everywhere, without reference to changing human preferences. Values appear only when a conception of the good is lost. The good is what befits us as human beings. It implies a given nature and some transcendent order that assigns us our place and our limits. In the absence of such an order, we pick and choose among values. The recasting of morality as a calculus of values, along with the misunderstanding of sin as a penal and essentially repressive concept, makes it very easy to mistake what Illich is trying to say. That was why he risked the already problematic term ­anti-​­Christ for the “new evil” to which he wanted to draw attention. “I would have preferred to simply speak about sin,” he said, “but I was afraid that by using that term I would only heighten the guarantee that I would be misunderstood.” The difficulty is that sin and evil are related ­concepts—​­the concept of sin, Illich says, “allows a heightened understanding of evil.” But evil disappears along with good when values are instituted as the language of morality, since, according to Illich, evil can no more be historicized and relativized than good can. Indeed, the terms good and evil define each other and must inevitably rise and fall together. One can continue to speak about ­evil—​­and people often do use the word to dramatize and intensify some ­denunciation—​­but it was Illich’s view that the term loses both its coherence and its intelligibility without the idea of a good against which it revolts or from which it deviates. “Evil,” as he puts it, “is not a negative value.” What this means, for Illich, is that “modern horrors” cannot be seen for what they a­ re—​­a form of sinfulness. By horrors he doesn’t necessarily mean recognizable monstrosities but just the things he inveighed against all his life: compulsory schools that corrupt learning and tie social advancement to progress in a rigged game, health institutions that turn life into a scarce resource, transportation systems that immobilize the majority so a few can be “almost o­ mni-​­present.” All these things are ultimately a “direct contradiction of the new freedom proposed in the gospel”—they draw on the ­boundary-​­breaking freedom that the Incarnation makes visible and possible but only to turn it into its opposite. Traditional society lived under sin but within limits. Jesus taught and demonstrated a freedom that potentially threatened those limits. So long as this freedom was understood as a ­gift—​­a fleeting expression of a kingdom “not of this world”—it might have been complementary to traditional society, a loosening and leavening of its ethos rather than its destruction, but as soon as what had been freely given was put under administration, a door was opened to a fundamentally new world, a world that

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might be made good by the right institutions. The full character of this betrayal only becomes evident, in Illich’s view, when it is named as sin. Sin is not just the commission of a wrong or the infraction of a ­law—​­it is the fundamental betrayal by which faith is made subject to power. When sin is recognized as forgivable and a spirit of contrition and mutual forbearance is cultivated, it becomes a joyful knowledge, a knowledge that allows us to walk in the light by showing us how we have darkened our world. But sin is hidden, first by the Church when it fails to “center faith” on the temptation of a­ nti-​­Christ and second by the modern world when it fails even to recognize its origins in the faith that it has turned inside out and prates instead about its values. This hiding, and the betrayal it dissembles, take place in several stages, and I turn now to Illich’s account of them. The Assimilation of the Gospel “Christianity,” Illich says, “brings something new into existence,” and this novelty was so radical that it took considerable time to grasp and assimilate. Seven ecumenical councils were convened between 325 and 727 before all the elements of Christian belief were even defined, and all of these councils were held under the threat of schism and sometimes of violent conflict, as we saw in the case of the teaching on images that was finally thrashed out at the last such council at Nicaea in 787. This “digestion and penetration of Gospel truths,” in Illich’s view, produced many glorious results as well as the perverse effects that are emphasized in his corruptio optimi pessima. He speaks, for example, of the unique flowering of these truths in the “­cathedral-​­like pages” of Thomas Aquinas and of the way in which Hugh of St. Victor’s account of the virtues enriches classical tradition with a spirit of ­Christian mutuality. Christian notions, he says, seeped into Western society and became something more than concepts. They became “feelings about the self, the other and the world.” In earlier chapters, I have discussed Illich’s distinction between religiosity as a sensibility and religion as a set of formal beliefs. In these terms, the “newness” of the Gospel saturated Europe as a religiosity and not just as a religion. But Illich doesn’t say a lot about the means by which this “digestion and penetration” took place, and so, before turning to his account of Christianity as the seedbed of modern certainties, I’d like to briefly introduce a book that shows in more detail how this saturation of the Western sensibility occurred. The book is The Breaking of the Image by the British priest/sociologist David Martin, whom I mentioned earlier in connection with his analogy between the Incarnation and the splitting of the atom. Martin’s book made me understand how

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the historical process that Illich calls “digestion” might have taken place. Clearly it didn’t happen by a straightforward process of indoctrination. Martin relates the story of Clovis, the king of the Franks (466–511), who is said to have exclaimed, when he was first told the story of the Crucifixion, “Would that I had been there with my Franks!” It’s a legend that captures the heroic and antithetical spirit in which the tribes of Europe must at first have recast the Gospel. Still the “newness,” as Illich calls it, gradually exerted its power. Martin imagines this happening in two p ­ hases—​­a phase of slow, patient buildup and a phase of occasional explosive release. Like water wearing away rock, the good news was narrated and sung, incorporated in liturgies that were remembered before they were ever understood, retold in romances and legends of the saints. Martin compares these varied repetitions to “a set of spells” by which people “are bound in a certain direction . . . held ­spell-​­bound by an image, transfixed by a verbal incantation.” Under this impress, “there is a long period of imprinting in which the visionary acid cuts deeper and deeper into the psyche.” In this sense, Martin says, the Church acts as both a repository and a dam. It holds, preserves, and transmits the revolutionary Word, and at the same time, it holds it back insofar as it is incompatible with what Martin calls “the prerequisites of social life . . . continuity, contiguity and hierarchy.” The New Testament ends with a vision of “a new heaven and a new earth,” whereas social life is about continuance. Continuance rests on communion with the past and those who have gone before, but Jesus urges the ­would-​­be disciple who wants to bury his father before “taking up his cross” to “let the dead bury their dead.” One result of this conflict is a domestication of Christianity’s wild eschatological promise. Baptism, for example, the sign of rebirth in the spirit, voluntarily chosen, is soon administered to infants as a rite of initiation into the c­ ommunity—​­the equivalent of circumcision, which the early Church had found unnecessary for gentile Christians. But behind the dam the Church erects to hold back the waters of the spirit, potential builds. And from time to time, it is released. As Martin writes, “Consummation has to wait on a slow assemblage of potencies. It depends on the vast secret arsenal of concepts, a structure of expectation, anticipations, hopes, disappointments. A slipway has to be laid down before what has been patiently constructed starts to move.” Martin takes an example from the Putney debates of 1647. These debates concerned the new constitution England was to have after Cromwell’s New Model Army had prevailed in the First English Civil War. One of the speakers was Col. Thomas Rainsborough, who represented the Levellers. He declared his conviction that “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he.” The

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echo of the New Testament is unmistakable: “The last shall be first,” and “he that is least among you all is the one who is great,” are just two of many possible examples. The slipway is laid down, and at the right moment, the fitting words and thoughts come to hand. This is the double movement that Martin imagines in Christian society. There is a pattern of repetition by which a semiconscious repertoire is slowly built up, and then there is the moment of what Martin calls “consummation” at which some part of this repertoire suddenly and dramatically comes into p ­ lay—​ ­domestication alternates with disturbance, withholding with release. This is just a taste of Martin’s poetical scholarship, which combines a clairvoyant reading of Christian iconography with hardheaded sociological analysis. It showed me how “Christian notions,” as Illich calls them, sank deeper than thought within Latin Christendom. And it was within this process of assimilation, according to Illich, that modernity’s “preconditions” took shape. One of the examples he develops at length in The Rivers North of the Future is the Christian idea of “contingency.” Today the word evokes chance or uncertainty. What it originally meant in the Latin West was the utter dependence of the world on the creative activity of God, who brings the world into existence from ­nothing—​­ex ­nihilo—​­and sustains it in existence at every moment. Citing German philosopher Hans Blumenberg, Illich calls this “a uniquely Christian notion.” Klaus Held’s reading of the parable of the Samaritan evokes this uniqueness. Only a God who creates from nothing and belongs to no preexisting nature or culture can guide the Samaritan into the world between worlds where he rescues the wounded Jew. The idea wasn’t explicit in Jesus’ teaching. The formal doctrine of creation ex nihilo was first articulated by Augustine, hundreds of years after Jesus told the story. But Illich views A ­ ugustine’s teaching as a step, however bold, in the assimilation of the Gospel. Gradually, Illich says, “the newness” permeates culture and gives birth to a set of feelings as well as thoughts about how things stand in the world. Contingency, by the time the idea has grown to maturity in Thomas Aquinas’s “­cathedral-​­like pages,” is something sensed, something experienced, and not just a theological precept. This experience of a world lying in God’s hand is one of Illich’s “preconditions” of modernity. It is also a prime instance of Christianity’s vulnerability to ­corruption—​­an idea whose delicate poise is inevitably shadowed by the risk that it will collapse into its opposite. Before showing how this happened, I should say, first, that it was a doctrine that Illich himself affirmed. “As interesting as the reflections of modern cosmology might be,” he surprised me by saying during our interview in 1988, “I understand myself much better when I accept another model, out of which my culture came, the model of contingency in which God holds creation

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in his hand, as you can see on any Romanesque or Gothic apse.” The civilization that was conditioned by this idea of the world’s utter dependence on God, he thought, saw things in their proper light. But this “model,” which was equally a tone, a feeling, a stance, was vulnerable even as it was enlightening and to precisely the same degree. In the doctrine of contingency, the very life of the world was gathered into a single dependent and easily disturbed relation. Antiquity had seen nature as aboriginal and inexhaustible, teeming with gods who expressed the world’s vitality but did not bestow it. The idea of contingency drew all vitality into God. So long as the channel between nature and God remained open and intact, this did not deprive nature of its living and expressive character, as can be seen in Aquinas’s writings where nature is conceived as God’s creative thought. Writing of the diversity of creation, Aquinas says, “. . . because His goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, He produced many and diverse creatures, so that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided; and hence the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness more perfectly and represents it better, than any given single creature.” Nature depends on God, and we can recognize Him in the world He has made, even if only dimly and incompletely. As Joseph Pieper puts it, “things can be known because they are created, but things are also unfathomable because they are created and their light overpowers our intellect.” In the generations after Aquinas (1225–1274), this bond between God and created nature began to fray. Franciscan theologians like Duns Scotus (1266–1308) and William of Ockham (1285–1347) began to see Aquinas’s Aristotelian vision of a nature in which each thing has its proper good as a restriction of God’s will. They criticized this conception on the grounds that Aquinas’s world, once created, “would be,” as Charles Taylor puts it, “independent of God’s will” since he could not “further redefine what the good is for that thing.” For Duns Scotus, in Illich’s words, “the will of God . . . is its own cause.” Unlike Aquinas, who sees the “divine goodness” represented in nature, Duns and his successors suppose that God’s will is inscrutable and absolutely free. Nature might have been otherwise. According to Illich, “the emphasis on the supremacy and inscrutability of God’s will in Franciscan philosophy is finally pushed to the point where this will becomes arbitrary. Contingency . . . takes on the meaning which it still has today in English and French: mere chance, or instance. All one can say about what happens is that it happens because it happens.” The delicate thread linking God and nature had been stretched to the breaking point.

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There is now a substantial literature supporting Illich’s view that the issue between Aquinas and the great Franciscan theologians was momentous. ­Catherine Pickstock, in her After Writing, criticizes Duns for inaugurating what he called the “formal distinction.” Aquinas had said that the relation between God and creation is one of analogy. Creatures are not of the same kind as their creator, but they reflect or represent the divine being and, in this sense, participate in it. Duns says that being is “univocal”—of one kind or, literally, one voice. But this requires him to then distinguish between Being and ­beings—​­the formal ­distinction—​­and Being so far exceeds beings that “a priority of essence over existence” is created that then implies “a logical order preceding reality.” Instead of “arriving from God,” the actual now has what Pickstock calls “a hidden mathesis,” a term she uses to refer to the project of “mapping all knowledge onto a manipulable grid,” or what she calls the “spatializing” of knowledge. Illich expresses the same thought when he says that, by the time of René Descartes, “things no longer are what they are because they correspond to God’s will but because God has laid into what we now call nature the laws by which we evolve.” Thomas Pfau, in his Minding the Modern, tells a similar story. Thinkers like ­William of Ockham, Pfau says, assert “the utter incommensurability of God and creation.” Again, the emphasis on God’s untrammeled freedom and inscrutable will is the source of the difficulty. Because things aren’t what they are necessarily but might be otherwise, the possible and the real part company. Pickstock speaks of the “virtuality” that shadows reality as a result of Duns Scotus’ having “privilege[ed] . . . the rational over the actual.” A consequence, for Pfau, is that “meaning is no longer deemed intrinsic to experience.” The senses, he says, are “eventually . . . stripped of any evidentiary role.” Concepts that once enabled “participation in phenomena” now serve to coordinate the relation between “discrete empirical objects ‘out there’ and a hermetically enclosed observing consciousness, or cogito.” Accounts like those of Pfau and Pickstock closely parallel Illich. What Illich adds is his insight that this is just one instance of the possible fall from best to worst that shadows the New Testament from the start. Again and again, the pattern repeats: something supremely true opens the door to some previously unimaginable evil. Contingency fits this pattern. The idea is an inference from the character of the biblical God: the One who is met in the desert outside all “homeworlds”; the One who, through the Samaritan, rescues the man who is lying in no man’s land; the One with whom “all things are possible.” So long as the idea keeps its footing, as Illich (and Pickstock and Pfau) believe it does in Aquinas, it sheds a glorious light on the fragile beauty of each moment. But let it be radicalized and “pushed to the point

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where [God’s] will becomes arbitrary,” as it eventually is in Franciscan theology, and suddenly the world ends up “in the hands of man,” something that could never have happened “without nature having been put in God’s hands in the first place.” Contingency and Technology The doctrine of contingency, in Illich’s view, also played a crucial role in the origins of the technological society. It was Illich’s view, as we have seen, that tool is not, as is often supposed, a primordial human category. According to him, a general idea of tools, or technology, only appeared in the twelfth century. It took shape as an implication of God’s governance of the universe. If the world is sustained at every instant by God’s “constant creative activity,” is not some intermediary agency implied? How did the angels, for example, rule the different planetary spheres, as they were supposed to have done? Angels, as one knows, are pure spirits. They have no materia; they’re not juicy beings. They are beings of pure fire, an extraordinary fire which is taken from God. So these angels had to be given media, intermediaries, means by which they could influence the area of material reality which they were to govern. . . . And in order to allow the immaterial angel to make contact with reality through the spheres, the spheres had to be conceived as a special type of causa efficiens, which was totally obedient to the intentional user, who is the angel.

Causa efficiens is one of the four subdivisions that Aristotle makes in the idea of causation. Each thing has a material c­ ause—​­the stuff of which it’s m ­ ade; a​­ formal ­cause—​­the pattern to which it ­conforms; an ​­ efficient ­cause—​­the direct agency by which it ­happens; ​­and a final ­cause—​­its end or purpose. In the twelfth century, according to Illich, causa efficiens “got, so to speak, a stepchild. The category of causa efficiens developed a new ­sub-​­category called the causa instrumentalis, which was a cause without intention.” Illich admitted that “for the moment, I’m pretty much alone among historians of science in pointing to a world conceived in the spirit of contingency as the origin of the modern conception of tools.” Yet this was how he supposed it happened. In order to explain the relation between the ­micro-​­and the macrocosmos in a universe under minute and continuous divine administration, it became necessary to suppose first that angels used tools and then to generalize the idea. “A cause without intention,” and therefore obedient to the user’s intention, is the crucial idea.

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The idea and the experience of contingency belong to what Illich calls modernity’s “preconditions.” For there to be a society able to conceive abstractly of “the means of production,” tools first had to be conceptualized apart from their accustomed and enculturated uses, and this came about, in Illich’s view, as a product of widespread reflection on how God governed a contingent creation. This new spirit of instrumentality, he thought, was also evident in the invention of the “seven sacraments.” In the first millennium of Christianity, almost every object and exercise of daily life had its special blessing. Omnia ­benedicere—​­to bless ­everything—​ ­was the church’s mission. But “in the thirteenth century,” Illich says, “theologians . . .  found the term instrumentum extremely useful for naming seven among these blessings as so special as to require the separate category of sacraments.” Anyone can pronounce a blessing; sacraments are something else. They require both a special instrument and a special operator. Defined in this way, the sacrament is a ­tool—​­an instrument that is operated by a priest and then “used by God himself as a device to accomplish, and to accomplish inevitably, a certain purpose. . . . Correct performance of the seven rites constrains God to use them as instrumental causes towards the desired end.” At times, God himself is made an “instrumentality,” as, for example, when he is “summoned as a witness” to the vows that were part of the new sacrament of marriage. “It became . . . obvious,” Illich says, “that wherever something is achieved, it is achieved by means of an instrument.” Church Reform This new spirit was reflected in the reform and reorganization of the Church that were taking place at this time. From the tenth century on, a movement of monastic reform spread from the Abbey of Cluny in France. This movement repudiated local and feudal influences in favor of what legal historian Harold Berman calls “a model of translocal, hierarchical, corporate government.” Its flavor can be sensed in a prayer of the monks of Cluny in which they ask to be set “aflame with the spirit of love and discipline.” Reformers wanted to perfect the Church by extricating it from the many ties that bound it to the society in which it was then thoroughly embedded. In 1075 Pope Gregory VII published his Dictatus Papae (the Dictates of the Pope), ­twenty-​­seven statements in which he declares the independence of the Church and the supremacy of the pope. He gives the pope the right to “depose Emperors” and the sole right to name bishops. Many other grandiloquent titles are also ­assigned—​­that “the pope alone is the one whose feet are to be kissed by all princes” and that “to him alone is it permitted to make new laws according to

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the needs of the times” are among these c­ laims. But the essential idea was that the Church was to be ­disentangled from all political and cultural constraint and made a law unto ­itself—​­a societas perfecta, a perfect society, as the Council of Trent (1545–1563) will later say. This touched off a prolonged political s­ truggle—​­sometimes called the “investiture controversy” because it turned on who had the power to name or invest bishops. It pitted the pope against the emperor and other lesser rulers who wanted to retain their control over bishops as princelings of their realms. The details are complex, but the result in a nutshell was that the pope was endowed with a “plenitude of power” (plenitudo potestatis) of which no earthly tyrant had ever before dreamed. When Innocent III (1160–1216) was elected pope in 1198, he declared in his inaugural sermon that as pope he was “less than God but more than man.” At the same time, a new bureaucratic and legal structure was e­ laborated—​­a structure that anticipated the modern state much more than it recalled any previously existing political society. The Church underwent what Harold Berman calls the “papal revolution”—the first revolution, in the modern sense, and the mold, according to Berman, for all subsequent attempts to remake society. The reorganization of the Church reshaped what Illich’s teacher Gerhart ­Ladner had called “the idea of reform.” In the Church of the first millennium, reform was seen, in Illich’s words, as “the attempt to bring about a renewal of the world by means of one’s own personal conversion”—a renewal, Illich stipulates, “which God will perform.” This s­ elf-​­renewal, he goes on, was “the major social task of a Christian community.” He puts it in this paradoxical way, calling a change in the individual a social task, because he wants to stress the novelty of a society in which the community was organized around an individual disposition yet one that was at the same time a social disposition, since salvation would come through the other. Only God could “perform” this renewal, only a dedicated community could make it possible. This continued to be Illich’s view. Conversion was his paradigm of social life and social ­change—​­whether he spoke of ­self-​­limitation, renunciation, or the capacity for surprise, he implied always a turning toward the other one (and the other One) from whom the possibility of my s­ elf-​­renewal comes. The reformed Church that came into being in the wake of the papal revolution began to believe that conversion could be administered. The renewal that formerly only God could perform became an institutional imperative. In Deschooling Society, Illich wrote that to believe “obligatory schooling” can produce equal educational opportunity for all is “to confuse salvation with the church.” Later in that same book, in a memorable sentence that I have quoted

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before, he defined “pedagogical hubris” as “our belief that man can do what God cannot, namely manipulate others for their own salvation.” This belief began in the reformed Church that took shape from the eleventh century onwards. One of its most consequential expressions was what Illich called “the criminalization of sin.” Sin had originally been understood by Christians, he said, as “a personal offence against God”—a falling short, by indifference or by infidelity, of the new freedom of which Christ is the exemplar. By the end of the twelfth century, it had become “a juridical category.” The sign of this transformed understanding was the new institution of private confession to a priest. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 required that “every Christian, be they man or woman, will go once a year to their pastor and confess their sins or otherwise face the penalty of going to hell in a state of grievous sin.” This requirement “codified a dramatic departure from the prevailing practice up to this time of public confession and public penance.” But, more than that, “it . . . establishes the pastor as somebody who, in secret, judges or takes a juridical position in front of each Christian male or female. This makes the forgiveness of sin, in an entirely new way, a juridical a­ ct—​­a juridical act organized on a model or hierarchy which reaches down from the steeple into the hearts of the people.” Two things have happened here, according to Illich. First, a new kind of conscience is c­ reated—​­an inner court in which “one accuses oneself.” What goes on there is not ­contrition—​­sorrow sweetened by the knowledge of forgiveness, as Illich described it ­earlier—​­but something conceived “along the lines of criminal justice.” Second, a line is crossed between law and personal r­ elationship—​­to God and to the other. “The law now governs what is good and bad, not what is legal and illegal. Church law became a norm, whose violation led to condemnation in hell.” The Church assumed a new kind of jurisdiction over souls and an authority that extended even into heaven. This authority had its charter in the Gospel of M ­ atthew, where Jesus offers Peter “the keys to the kingdom of heaven,” but it was not until the reform of the Church that the idea of papal jurisdiction in heaven really began to seem practicable. Urban II, declaring the first Crusade in 1095, promises “remission of sins” to all who die “in the battle against the pagans” and founds his right to do so on “the power of God with which I am invested.” Similarly, the new understanding of the sacrament of marriage that was also formalized by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 transformed a cultural practice that the Church had formerly blessed into what Illich calls “a legal reality with standing in heaven.” An entirely new conception of law is evident here. “In the period prior to the eleventh century,” says Harold Berman, “law did not exist as a distinct system of regulation or a distinct system of thought.” This does not mean that the things

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now thought to comprise law did not exist, but only that what we now call law remained embedded in a patchwork of custom, precept, and local rule that no one had yet conceived as a “body of law.” The first such body was the canon law. In his Decretum Gratiani (ca. 1150), the monk Gratian brought together the diverse and discordant canons, or rules, of the Church into a harmonious and consistent system. He and his successors, known as “decretists,” also put forward, for the first time, a theory of justice based on the assumption of moral equality. Gratian’s Decretum begins: “Natural law is what is contained in the Law and the Gospel by which each is to do to another what he wants done to himself and forbidden to do to another what he doesn’t want done to himself.” The apostle Paul had said that those who were “in Christ” lived “not under the law but under grace.” Now the ­Gospel was understood as a source of law. Under the banner of papal monarchy, the Church reconceived itself as a new kind of ­entity—​­law-​­governed, formally constituted, and sovereign. (The pope is “the judge of all . . . judged by none,” Innocent III declared in the sermon I cited earlier.) Papal sovereignty implied a radical new kind of equality, the equal subjection of all to the pope and, by implication, to no one else. “Law exists in the bosom of the Pope,” declared Boniface VIII in his bull Sacrosanctae Ecclesiae (1298). Secular rulers took notice. Papal power, according to Larry Siedentop, was something they “envied, resented and learned from.” What they learned above all was to think of law not as the manifestation of something that already exists in nature or culture but rather as the expression of a sovereign will, as in Gregory VII’s claimed right “to make new laws according to the needs of the times.” The sovereignty asserted by the papacy became, for secular rulers, a means of centralizing and consolidating power. Conspiratio and Conjuratio Illich dramatized the magnitude of the change that had occurred by opposing conspiratio, the kiss of peace exchanged by the first Christians at their communion meal, to conjuratio, the swearing together that became characteristic of the legal and ­proto-​­contractual societies of the high Middle Ages. Speaking in Bremen in 1998, after having been given the city’s Culture and Peace Prize, he described conspiratio in this way: In the Christian liturgy of the first century, the osculum [kiss] assumed a new function. It became one of two high points in the celebration of the Eucharist. Conspiratio, the mouth-to-mouth kiss, became the solemn liturgical gesture by which participants in

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the cult action shared their breath or spirit with one another. It came to signify their union in one Holy Spirit, the community that takes shape in God’s breath. The ecclesia [church, from the Greek for public gathering or assembly] came to be through a public ritual action, the liturgy, and the soul of this liturgy was the conspiratio. Explicitly, corporeally, the central Christian ritual was understood as a ­co-​­breathing, a ­con-​­spiracy, the bringing about of a common atmosphere, a divine milieu.

The second high point was the communion meal of bread and wine, which Illich describes as “the incorporation of the believer in the body of the Incarnate Word.” These two gestures, conspiratio and communio, were “theologically linked,” the one preparing the other. First came the kiss, “the strongest, clearest and most unambiguously somatic expression for the entirely n ­ on-​­hierarchical creation of a fraternal spirit,” and then the unifying meal, “through [which] the fellow conspirators were transformed into a ‘we.’” This conspiratio, Illich says, was so bold and so intimate that it created a certain scandal even in the early Church. For example, “the rigorist African Church Father Tertullian felt that a decent matron should not be subjected to possible embarrassment by this rite.” Over time, the practice faded. The osculum pacis (the kiss of peace) became simply the pax and, where it is still practiced, now usually takes the form of a polite handshake. In the Roman Church, after the thirteenth century, a device called an osculatorium appeared. This was an often ornate and bejeweled “kissing object” that was first kissed by the priest and then passed though the Church to be kissed by each member in ­turn—​­a pregnant instance for Illich of a tool intermediating and distancing what had once been a direct relation. Illich contrasts conspiratio with conjuratio, the oath of allegiance by which the founders of medieval towns cemented their bonds with one another and, at the same time, loosed the feudal bonds that had previously bound them to the local lord. The two practices, in his view, were linked. Conjuratio, he says, became possible only in the atmosphere, “the spiritual climate,” engendered by conspiratio. But in trying to turn an intimate and evanescent atmosphere into a “secure and lasting association,” these first burghers were also laying the foundations for a society in which, as Illich writes, “the contractual formality soon overshadowed the spiritual substance.” Conspiratio was the sign and seal of an utterly new form of s­ ociability—​­a voluntary, nonhierarchical community, sprung from no blood or soil but formed liturgically through a communion of ­spirits—​­but in the attempt to put this trusting style of sociability on a punctual, reliable, and effective footing, the original inspiration was gradually lost. Illich, as always, searches for thresholds, symbolic moments at which a balance is shifted, but he recognizes, of course,

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that this change doesn’t happen all at once. Long after the first European townsmen swore their allegiance, conspiratio continued to feed and inform conjuratio. At the same time, this spiritual atmosphere was changed by its translation into a binding oath. In the conspiratio, the community forms “in God’s breath,” just as the Samaritan can “create new references” for his wounded enemy only by God’s grace. In the conjuratio, the ­proto-​­citizens of medieval European cities give their word and invoke God only as a witness to their undertaking. By the time early modern political philosophers, like Hobbes and Locke, begin to develop the myth of the “social contract,” their “­just-​­so story” about how people in “the state of nature” form a state to secure their persons and their rights, the role of the conspiratio in forming the civil ethos of Europe will have no part in the story. And yet, if Illich is right, it will continue to exert its influence. Without the conspiratio, there would be no conjuratio, for it is the conspiratio “turned inside out,” as Illich says, and neither the ­church-​­like character of the modern state nor the vast hopes modern people invest in the law and its capacity to straighten “the crooked timber of humanity” are thinkable except against this background. From the eleventh century on oaths of many kinds are instituted, from the citizens of the new towns “swearing the commune” to the redefinition of marriage as “an oath sworn before God.” But Jesus had told his disciples not to swear oaths of any kind. The injunction is a crucial part of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus, following the formula “You have heard it said . . . but I say to you . . . ,” revises various traditional commandments. In the case of oaths, he tells the crowd assembled on the mountainside: “. . . it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ But I say to you, do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.” This instruction is of a piece with the entire sermon, in which Jesus spells out what is new in his New Testament. Again and again, formal compliance is denounced in favor of spiritual assent. The people are told to pray “in secret” rather than “practicing your piety before men.” Formal reciprocity is to be replaced by f­orbearance—​­not “an eye for an eye” but “if anyone would . . . take your coat, let him have your cloak as well.” Planning is to give way to ­trust—​­do not be “anxious about your life,” but “consider the lilies of the field.” To live by these new rules is to live, in effect, without rules. Early Christianity faced this paradox with the idea that Jesus had spoken of what Augustine (354–430) called a heavenly city, the civitas dei, that was distinct from the civitas terrena, the earthly

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city. Already in his Contra Celsum, written around 248, Origen had written that ­Christians “know of the existence in each city of another sort of country, created by the Word of God.” But neither ­Origen nor Augustine supposes that this “other sort of country” could ever be given solid earthly foundations. Augustine does identify the church with the city of God but only as in “a state of pilgrimage” in this world. In the reformed Church, this distinction between the two cities begins to grow murky and indistinct. The way that Illich puts it is that “the frontier between [the Church’s] rules and its doctrine had begun to crumble”—its teaching had become enforceable. The realm beyond law to which the Sermon on the Mount had pointed was codified as an entirely new kind of law; the clear injunction to swear no oaths gave way to an oath sworn “in sight of God.” Christ, Illich says, “came to free us from the law”—to open up a space in which fidelity is freely chosen rather than coerced and obedience is an overflowing rather than an enforceable obligation. This way of life could not, by its nature, be made ­mandatory—​­it could not be, so to speak, n ­ ormalized—​­because its very existence implied a dimension of existence beyond the reach of rules and beyond the fatal dialectic of sin and law that Paul explores in his letter to the Romans. But it was normalized. Christian freedom was recoined as a set of legally constituted rights. Love, via the marriage oath, was legalized. Infidelity became “a juridical category.” Sin was criminalized. The city of God had been brought under administration. One way of getting at what Illich thinks about these changes is to ­compare his views with those of Larry Siedentop in his recent book Inventing the I­ ndividual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Siedentop, as I said earlier, wants to free ­Western historiography from the mystifying ­ categories—​­ Middle Ages, R ­enaissance, ­Enlightenment—​­that marginalize the Christian Church and downplay its formative influence on Western civilization. His book is an attempt to end the “civil war” between religion and secularism by exposing secularism’s religious ­origins. ­“Christian moral beliefs,” he writes, “[are] the ultimate source of the social ­revolution that has made the West what it is.” His book shows convincingly that both science and liberal political thought had a long gestation within the Church before they emerged as secular ideals. He views the elaboration of law that took place in the medieval Church, for example, as providing modern civil society with its first charter and constitution. Illich draws on the same sources and tells more or less the same story of a gradual translation of the New Testament into a set of socially practicable ideas, but where Siedentop sees everything he prizes about Western civilization in first flower, Illich sees an incipient fall from the best to the worst. The first and most obvious difference is that Siedentop is not concerned

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with the Gospel as ­such—​­it is the liberal political order he thinks it produced that he highlights. Illich, on the other hand, views the Gospel as “the best”—the pearl beyond price. What matters to him is what happens to this revelation when the extravagant charity of the Samaritan is stepped down to a socially manageable current, when the body of Christ becomes a corporation in the modern sense, and when the free and fearless Samaritan is transformed into the solitary, ­rights-​­bearing individual. The second difference is that where Siedentop sees an ­unalloyed good, Illich sees profound ambiguity. This sense of ambiguity is important to emphasize because a careless reader might otherwise mistake Illich’s account of the reformed Church for an outright condemnation. Take the redefinition of marriage as a sacramental oath sworn before God with “standing in heaven.” Before this change marriage was the province of families and communities, embedded, for good or ill, in a web of relations in which individual preferences did not have the last word. Then Church lawyers reconceived marriage as a contract freely undertaken by one man and one woman. The consent of both became necessary, and even if this idea, in practice, faced resistances that would take centuries to break down (and only unevenly even then), the principle, in all its astonishing novelty, had still been established. Marriage, Illich says, was “torn out of the family and community nexus.” This had two huge consequences: it was “a major epoch . . . in the formation of the individual,” and it was “the foundation of the idea that social entities come into existence by mutual contract.” (Towns formed by their citizens “swearing the commune” and associations formed by “the will of their members” appear at the same time.) Illich’s pointed descriptions of such changes can make it seem that he simply opposes them, but this is too blunt a view, I think. The freedom to “choose whom I will love and where I will love” is precisely what constitutes “the best” in his formula corruptio optimi pessima, so it can hardly be that he deplores this freedom when it comes to the choice of a marriage partner. I would say rather that he wants to draw attention to the shadow cast by contractual marriage and comparable innovations. Love is made more free and contractualized in the same gesture. What Illich asked, first of his church and then of his society, was awareness of ambiguity. The Seeds of Modernity As Illich sees it, the seeds of modernity are planted, one by one, around the turn of the twelfth century in a soil that a millennium of Christian teaching has worked and prepared. From the culturally ingrained sense of a contingent creation, absolutely

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dependent on God, emerged the idea of tools as ­self-​­standing “means of production” and nature as available “matter” without inherent worth. From “the Christian practice of establishing a bodily community through an equal contribution of . . . the spirit within” came the sworn social contract that founded the medieval town and later became the charter of the democratic state. From the idea of Christ as embodied in “the least of these my brothers” came the network of institutions able to identify needs and designate certain categories of people as “preferred neighbours.” From the experience of a mutuality beyond law, rule, or norm came law of an entirely new ­kind—​­law that criminalized sin and legalized love. And from the free ­Samaritan, “superior to the most powerful demons,” came the anxious man of conscience, alone with a bottomless responsibility and prey to “the anguish of the scrupulous.” All of these figures are condensations of developments that unfold over centuries, and all show the same inner dynamic. An unexampled freedom breaks the protective cultural shell that had kept even the most expansive ancient civilizations within certain bounds, and a civilization is erected whose appetite for improvement and expansion can find no limit. Through the misappropriation and misunderstanding of the best, the worst is created. The Church, for Illich, is the modern state in embryo. The idea underpinning the modern ­state—​­of sovereignty as supreme, underived, and unanswerable ­power—​­can be traced, ultimately, to a conception of God as creator and “omnipotent law giver,” but it passes into the modern state by way of the pope. When Gregory VII proclaimed that he alone was “permitted to make new laws according to the needs of the times” and Boniface VIII followed by claiming that law originates “in the bosom of the Pope,” they made themselves the source of a new idea of sovereignty. This idea of law “as the expression of sovereign will rather than as the expression of something that already exists,” as Siedentop says, was one of the innovations that secular rulers “envied, resented and learned from.” It was the plenitudo potestatis of papal monarchy that inspired the n ­ ation-​­building kings and queens of early modern Europe to attempt the absolute rule that forms the bridge from the communalism of medieval society to the individualism of the democratic state. In the political society of the Church, according to S­ iedentop, a moral ­status—​­the equality of ­souls—​­was translated into a social status via “equal subjection” to the pope. The same thing happened in the state during the period of absolute monarchy in early modern Europe when Louis XIV could say, “L’État, c’est moi.” The Church, likewise, was the source of much of the structure of the modern state. Modern ministries originate in “the Roman congregations, each competent

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to administer the law in a certain area.” “The idea of different s­ ecretariats,” Illich says, “for matters of faith, or for discipline, or for financial affairs, laid the foundations for the juridically distinct competences within the nation state.” The citizen, in Illich’s view, also makes his first appearance as the new subject of canon law. Through the criminalization of sin and the transformation of the clergy into a juridical authority, an inner forum, or court, is imputed to the believer. This forum internum, according to Illich, corresponds to the modern sense of conscience, as the place where I accuse myself. In his book In the Vineyard of the Text, he had argued that it was the clarification of the written page that had suggested the idea of conscience as a type of inner writing. In The Rivers North of the Future, he expressed “hesitation” about his having made new techniques of writing the only decisive factor and attributed equal importance to the criminalization of sin and the way in which it generated an inner court. The acquisition of this inner court by the believer who confesses to a priest who is also his judge, he now said, was a crucial step in the creation of the psychology of the citizen. “. . . if we want to understand the idea of patria of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea of fatherland, the idea of mother tongue, to which I owe sacred loyalty, the idea of pro patria mori, that I can die for my fatherland, the idea of citizenship as something to which my conscience obligates me, then we have to understand the appearance of the internal forum in the Middle Ages.” Before the conscientious citizen of the state, there was the obedient soul under judgment in the legal society of the church. We live today in a society that is suffering what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls a “hypertrophy of law.” Law, or regulation, is the solution to every problem. Governments are defined by their “legislative program,” which consists of the new laws they intend to pass and the old laws they intend to revise. In a speech she made when she was the chief justice of Canada’s Supreme Court, Beverley McLachlin claimed that law and religion constitute parallel universes and that both of them can “lay some claim to the whole of human experience.” Law, by this account, is a comprehensive worldview and a creative agent in the construction of society. It is not seen as restricted by the moral dispositions of the people or as expressive of some more fundamental moral source. It is understood, rather, as a world in itself and as the primary way, perhaps the only way, of making people good. It was Illich’s view that this fantastic elaboration of law, and its displacement of culture and morals, cannot really be understood without going back to the twelfth century and the “criminalization of sin.”

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Implications of Corruptio Optimi Pessima Corruptio optimi pessima, depending on how it is understood, can be either a profound or a banal idea. As a proverb, it says, at one level, no more than what everybody knows: you can’t win. It conforms fairly closely, for example, with two of the three rhetorical figures that Albert O. Hirschman identifies as the staples of conservative discourse in his book The Rhetoric of Reaction. These are what he calls the “perversity hypothesis” and the “futility hypothesis.” The first says: the more good you try to do, the more evil will result; the more you flout incorrigible human nature, the more it takes its revenge; cut off one head, two grow back, and so forth. The second, closely allied, says, plus ça change, plus c’est le même chose. Bruno Latour supplies telling examples, from the history of ­anti-​­idolatary, in his An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: “The Golden Calf has no sooner been cast down,” he writes, “than the ­Tabernacle with its sculpted Cherubim is put up. Polyeucte has just destroyed Zeus’s temple and someone is already erecting an altar on the same spot with the relics of St. Polyeucte.” Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, as the song says. On this level, Illich is just one more conservative pointing to the perverse consequences of aiming too high or the futility of an ­anti-​­idolatry that becomes, itself, an idol. But he is also doing something much more pointed and precise. He is describing a set of specific transformations, by which “Gospel truths” turn into the ideologies and institutions that drive our world, and, in this way, accounting for both the shape and the peculiar dynamism of these ideologies and institutions. Two consequences follow: one is that we will be unable to relax the fatal hold of these institutions on our imaginations until we have first understood their character as continuations of church originals; the other is that we will never recover the New Testament, as it might have been, until we have come to grips with its distortions and displacements. Might things have been different? Illich’s idea of modernity as a perversio optimi certainly raises the question. Could the freedom “to choose whom I will love and where I will love” have opened up the world without at the same time destroying the traditional boundaries and restraints within which people had lived? It was Illich’s view that “all worlds before our own” were shaped by a sense of proportion. Heaven and earth, man and woman, here and there were all ­proportions—​­each conditioned, complemented, and defined by the other. There was no individual thing or person able to define i­tself—​­everything depended on its other and on “the net of correspondences” in which it was enmeshed. People and place were similarly r­ elated—​­the people’s way of life given by the landscape and natural endowments of that place. Cultures differed, each shaping its sense of the good, the beautiful, and the true differently but each sharing this “experience

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of fit” that provided its “ethical” standard, insofar as ethics, originally, was nothing other than this ability to discern what is proper to a given setting. This world has now gone, replaced by a reality ruled by contract, choice, and s­ elf-​­determination. The “common sense” by which people discerned what was fitting has washed away, and we live in “social constellations to which nothing corresponds.” It is, Illich says, “a ­womb-​­less world” in which every frontier leads not to a beyond but only to more of the same. From poetry to architecture, economics to medicine, what is celebrated is not what observes a due measure and proportion but the brilliantly and inventively arbitrary. Was this inevitable, given the Samaritan’s freedom to fearlessly cross boundaries or Paul’s assertion that in Christ there is neither “Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” or Jesus’ injunction to “make disciples of all nations”? I asked Illich once whether “the Good News [could] have been preached without the destruction of proportions.” “Yes,” he answered, and then continued,  . . . what is revealed to us in the parable of the Samaritan is a new kind of proportionality. When they ask Jesus, Who is my neighbor? he answers, He to whom you as a free human being establish your personal proportionality by turning to him in love, and inviting him to the mutuality of love which one usually calls friendship. The Samaritan story makes me understand that I am “I” in the deepest and fullest sense in which it is given to me to be “I” precisely because you, by allowing me to love you, give me the possibility to be ­co-​­relative to you. . . . I see, therefore, in love, hope and charity the crowning of the proportional nature of creation in the full, old sense of that term. Nothing is what it is except because convenit, it fits, it is in harmony with something else, and I am free to choose with whom, or, better, to accept from whom I want, to whom I let myself be given, the possibility of loving. The call of charity, agape, which the ­Samaritan hears, does not destroy proportionality but rather elevates it to a level which formerly was not perceived.

The Gospel, Illich says, could have been added to existing cultures as no more than a leaven or “crowning proportion.” Indeed, the New Testament encouraged such an approach. Jesus sent his disciples out to preach without so much as a change of clothes, and the images he used to describe their mission, and his, all suggest indirect action rather than main force. The kingdom they were to preach is compared to yeast, to salt, to light. Each increases, enhances, or illuminates what is already present. Even direct action was understood as exemplary rather than instrumental: “By their fruits, ye shall know them.” All criticism was to be founded, first of all, on s­ elf-​­criticism—“Why do

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you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” These ­principles—​­all of them, equally, ­anti-​­principles—​­in no way implied the Church that Illich would later pillory as “the world’s largest n ­ on-​­governmental ­bureaucracy.” But a Church that would have been only a supplement to existing ­cultures and not their replacement “was not,” as Illich says, “God’s will.” Instead the Church became itself a culture as well as an ideology and the seed of a worldwide society in which all proportions lie in ruins, replaced by L ­ ego-​ ­like “values” that can be reconfigured at will. Still there is no going back. Cultures that rose and fell, cycled and recycled, belonged to the world before the C ­ hristian invention of ­history—​­that “valorization of time” that Mircea Eliade claimed was “Christianity’s most striking innovation.” History can no longer be unwound. We are situated, as John Milbank says, “on the far side of the cross” that is “the event of the judgment of God” and the event from which, as Illich would also say, there is no ­return—“you can’t take the crucifixion away,” is Illich’s way of putting it. M ­ ilbank adds: “In the midst of history the judgment of God has already happened. And either the Church enacts the vision of paradisal community which this judgement opens out, or else it promotes a hellish society beyond any terrors known to antiquity: corruptio optimi pessima.” According to the principle of corruptio optimi pessima, Latin Christendom and its secular sequels function as a negative revelation. Instead of the “paradisal community” that chooses peace, insecurity, and the otherworldly precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, what unfolds is the “mysterium iniquitatis,” the mystery of evil. Nonetheless, this i­nside-​­out or u ­ pside-​­down revelation is still, according to Illich, “a mystery of faith, a mystery whose depth of evil could not have come to be without the greatness of the truth revealed to us.” This does not at all mean that revelation is available only in this inverted form, as if we could infer the light only by its absence. Illich always insisted not only that the Gospel could have been preached without the loss of proportions but also that it still could be, if only we could recover what John Milbank calls that “unknown future that mankind has missed and must seek to rejoin”—the future whose gateway lies in the past. But it does mean that the Incarnation is partly given to us as if it were a photographic negative in which the lightest areas appear darkest, the darkest lightest, and the image is produced by a reversal of these p ­ roportions—​­the light known by the dark, the height by the depth. Illich spoke of living “with a sense of profound ambiguity.” “I can’t do without tradition,” he said, “but I have to recognize that its institutionalization is the root of an evil deeper than any evil I could have known with my unaided eyes and mind.” He might, in this sense, be said to be a negative historian, as much

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as a n ­ egative or apophatic theologian. The apophatic theologian approaches God by the via ­negativa—​­unable to say what God is because the God who can be known is always an obscuring idol, he/she focuses on what God is not. Illich, in the same way, studies “the West as the perversion of Revelation,” and by “accepting” this perversion, he says, “I become increasingly tentative, but also more curious and totally engaged in searching for its origin, which is the voice of him who speaks.” The point is delicate and easily misunderstood, and as I said in my introduction, some of Illich’s closest friends thought he would be wise to keep quiet about it. But I think it can and must be grasped. It was “the will of God,” Illich says, that his Church would be a “sinful church”—it would be tempted to try to rule the world even though its Lord, “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted,” had declined Satan’s offer of dominion over “the kingdoms of this world and the glory of them”—dominion that was clearly Satan’s to offer. The consequence is that the Gospel has partly to be understood in and through its corruption, and that is what Illich tried to do in his “­life-​­long study” of modernity as an inverted form of faith. According to Illich’s hypothesis, this inverted faith has long been baked into the foundations of modern society, from where, all unconsciously, it imparts to our civilization its peculiar dynamism and intractability. It might be objected that this civilization now holds sway and exerts a powerful appeal in places with no root whatsoever in Latin Christendom and that this fact disproves Illich’s hypothesis. I don’t think it does. Western Europe achieved decisive, worldwide power. It created the current world order, it fixed the boundaries of the nations of the earth, and it produced the very idea of the law by which they are governed. There were those, like Gandhi, who tried, unsuccessfully, to encourage resistance not just to European rule but to European ­thought-​­forms, but I think it is generally true that European modernity triumphed everywhere. Whether people chose it or just succumbed to the mimetic fascination exerted by triumphant power, it still prevailed. Technology, rights, individualism, free markets, and the like became universal aspirations. But I don’t think that understanding the Roman Church as at once the doorway to modernity and its template means that others, untouched by this church, can’t desire the way of life it incubated. The citizens of formerly Christian countries also desire it without any longer counting themselves as Christians. The question is how it came to be, not whether it is attractive. Illich once told me a ­story—​­this was in 1997—that is worth repeating in this regard: Thirty years ago, when I lectured in Pakistan, I met a man to whom I feel great gratitude, a physician who is now dead named Hakim Mohammed Said, who was then the head

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of the Unani Association of Pakistan and the world. [Unani medicine is the continuation in Muslim civilization of the Hippocratic and Galenic doctrine of the balance of humors.] I had spoken against the shadow cast by the medical struggle against pain and death. Afterwards, he approached me and said, Mr. Illich, what you are really telling us is that if we allow our techniques to be pressed into the campaign to kill pain and fight death, we will become the most effective importers of the Western Christian ideology.

Mohammed Said could discern in modern medicine a “Christian ideology,” and so could Gandhi, despite his being more of a Christian than most Christians. I think one probably sees the same intuition, though in a vicious, twisted, and inarticulate form, in some of the contemporary currents of Islamic reaction. And, if modernity is a Christian ideology, however appealing, then understanding it as such is just as relevant in ­non-​­Christian milieus as it is among those with a Christian tradition. Faith, I said a moment ago, is what imparts to our civilization its uncanny dynamism and its intractability. The dynamism seems u ­ ndeniable—​­we are surrounded by things we would be better off without and would never have chosen if given a chance to deliberate in advance on their potential ­consequences—​­and yet we careen onward into the century of the cyborg. The intractability seems equally patent. The failure of Illich’s deschooling campaign provides a good example. Illich demonstrated, in Deschooling Society, that mass, compulsory schooling is counterproductive on its own terms. It is a manifestly futile means of imparting knowledge, teaching people many things that they neither need nor want to know and therefore quickly forget. It prostitutes the arts and sciences by using them as instrumental means to ulterior and unrelated ends. And it perpetuates or increases inequality while compounding privilege. And yet Illich’s critique, one of many, made at best a small dent in the progress of this costly and destructive juggernaut. Inertia, by which an object in motion tends to remain in motion, is certainly part of the explanation. So is the number of livelihoods tied up in sustaining and servicing the enterprise. And so, finally, is the way in which an almost universal rite of passage becomes hallowed in story, song, and cultural memory. But, even so, the fact that such a system was ever erected in the first place requires explanation. I find Illich’s idea that its roots are in the Church persuasive. The Church identified salvation with attendance at services, submission to prescribed rituals, and obedience to Church rules. This created the deep ruts in which schooling still runs and the ingrained habits of mind that make it so resistant to criticism. As his friend Mohammed Said gratified him by recognizing, Illich argued that modernity is a “Christian ideology.” This has two profound implications, both of

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which I’ll examine further in the next chapter. One is that history “on the far side of the cross” is inevitably ­apocalyptic—​­it tends to the ­ever-​­fuller revelation of the “mystery of evil” that the Incarnation, once mistaken, sets in motion. The other is that Christianity has not been eliminated from the postmodern milieu in the way that many people think it has. Muslims and Jews will generally identify themselves as such, whether or not they are observant. Christians usually do not; once they have given up the Church, they usually give up the name. In one way this becomes ­them—​­they treat Christianity as a purely religious identity and no longer claim it when they have ceased to believe in it. But, in another way, it is entirely mystifying. It leads first to the thought that lapsed Christians are without religion, when they are, in fact, part of a religious celebration so total, so overscaled, and so unprecedented that it goes unrecognized as such. It also leads to the thought of secularity as a condition from which religion has been erased, or, as Charles Taylor says, subtracted, when it is actually a subset of Latin Christianity, as Illich, Taylor, and many others have shown. The story that Christianity can simply be forsaken and forgotten has prevailed in the modern mainstream since the eighteenth century, when Christianity first became a convenient scapegoat for all the ills that enlightenment promised to banish. Our religion, Voltaire wrote to Frederick II of Prussia in 1767, “is assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world.” He goes on to encourage the king to “extirpate this infamous superstition.” Today, much enlightened opinion continues to see Christianity in the same ­light—​­first as preeminently blameworthy and second as capable of being “extirpated,” thus restoring the innocent hope proper to a modern liberal society, when uncorrupted by religious ­obscurantism and repression. Illich challenges this story and shifts discussion onto a new ground. According to him, the entire ground plan of modern society is best studied as “an extension of church history.” Voltaire and his successors only “criticize Christianity with Christianity,” in René Girard’s words. Illich asks for a more searching genealogy that unearths the roots of modern institutions and allows us, if only dimly, to discern John Milbank’s “unknown future” that still awaits us in the past.

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13

Apocalypse

I have always abstained from making apocalyptic statements or interpreting the apocalypse. —Ivan Illich, 1992 I do not believe, with some, that this is a ­post-​­Christian world. . . . I believe, though I’m hesitant about the term, that it’s an apocalyptic world. —Ivan Illich, 1997

Illich believed that Western history is best understood as the revelation of what he called “the mystery of evil” or “the historical progression in which God’s I­ ncarnation is turned . . . inside out.” This view makes him, unavoidably, an apocalyptic thinker. But the term is so deeply problematic that Illich refused it for as long as he possibly could. “I have always abstained from making apocalyptic statements or interpreting the apocalypse,” he told me in 1992. Five years later, when we recorded the interviews that make up the first section of The Rivers North of the Future, this abstention was no longer possible. I had used the term “­post-​­Christian” to describe the complete oblivion of Christianity in which many of the people I know and love now live. I meant nothing more, as I think Illich understood, but he took the opportunity to clarify his own view. “I do not believe, with some,” he said, “that this is a p ­ ost-​ ­Christian world. That would be consoling. I believe, though I’m hesitant about the term, that it’s an apocalyptic world.” He then continued: At the very beginning of our conversation, we spoke about the mysterium iniquitatis, the mystery of evil, the nesting of an otherwise unthinkable, unimaginable, and ­non-​ ­existent evil and its egg within the Christian community. We then used the word A ­ nti-​ ­Christ—​­the ­Anti-​­Christ, which looks, in so many things just like Christ, and which preaches universal responsibility, global perception, humble acceptance of teaching instead of finding out for oneself, and guidance through institutions. The A ­ nti-​­Christ, or let’s say, the mysterium iniquitatis, is the conglomerate of a series of perversions by

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which we try to give security, survival ability, and independence from individual persons to the possibilities that were opened through the Gospel by institutionalizing them. I claim that the mysterium iniquitatis has been hatching. I know too much of Church history to say that it’s now breaking its shell, but I dare to say that it’s now more clearly present than ever before. It is, therefore, completely wrong to ascribe to me the idea that this is a p ­ ost-​­Christian era. On the contrary, I believe this to be, paradoxically, the most obviously Christian epoch, which might be quite close to the end of the world.

Illich goes on to make two additional points. He says, first, that he is not trying to “revive” prophecy, the vocation by which he thinks the early Church tried to discern and guard against the Incarnation’s inevitable shadow and learned to reject “those who call themselves apostles but are . . . found . . . to be false.” “The time of prophecy lies behind us,” he says, and the vocation of prophecy must now be reinterpreted “as that of the friend.” It is only through friendship, which he defines as “the practice of . . . little acts of foolish renunciation,” that “hope for a new society can spread.” Second, he says that all who are willing to face “the horror of our time” as “something unexplainable” act “as “witnesses for a mystery.” “Only faith,” he says, “can fully discern the mystery,” but all who recognize in the contemporary reality something they can neither explain nor “explain away” have recognized the Incarnation’s shadow. “That this mystery is the mysterium iniquitatis,” he adds, “does not make it less fit to be the entrance door into the entire mystery of the Incarnation.” To understand why Illich thinks our time is apocalyptic, we must first understand what he means by this term. The word as it is commonly used today describes some sort of final destruction, accomplished either by human hands through war and industrial overreach or, for one segment of religious opinion, through divine retribution. This is not completely unbiblical. Each of the Synoptic Gospels (­Matthew, Mark, and Luke) contains an apocalyptic discourse in which Jesus makes vivid predictions about an end time in which the sun will darken, the stars will fall from the sky, the elect will be swept up into heaven, and the damned will be “thrown into the furnace of fire” where they will “weep and gnash their teeth.” The book of Revelation, with which the New Testament concludes, adds many more lurid touches. From Armageddon to the lake of burning sulfur, the Whore of Babylon to the Great Beast, its figures have informed the popular imagination of the end of the world throughout the Christian era. John’s Revelation also set a tone by its mood of ressentiment and Schadenfreude. It begins with threats, reproofs, and denunciations directed against “the seven churches that are in Asia,”

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and it goes on to show a relish in the torments of the damned that has marked the genre it inaugurated ever since. (Even the equable Thomas Aquinas believed that “the happiness of the saints” would be made “more delightful to them” if they could “see perfectly the sufferings of the damned.”) This settling of scores is not what Illich is talking about and why, presumably, he abstained for so long from “apocalyptic statements.” He defines apocalypse as “revealing or unveiling,” which is the literal meaning of the Greek word. For him, this involves no last battle or divine fire falling from heaven but rather a historical sequence in which the mysterium iniquitatis is progressively disclosed. Apocalypse as Unveiling The theme of unveiling or uncovering is prominent in the New Testament. In the Second Temple in Jerusalem at Jesus’ time, the Holy of Holies, the site of God’s most intense earthly presence, was secluded from view by a veil. All the ­Synoptic ­Gospels assert that while Jesus hung on the Cross, this veil was torn in two. At the same time, in the Egyptian city of Sais, there stood a statue of the goddess Isis with her face covered by a veil. According to Plutarch, it bore the inscription “I am all that has been and is and shall be, and no mortal has ever lifted my veil.” During the Enlightenment, this veil became a figure for the secrets that natural philosophy had begun to bring out of hiding. It too was ripped. In both cases, the veil was a sign of a hesitation or restraint that was no longer thought to be ­necessary—​­the truth had been shown and no longer required shelter behind a veil. This is also a crucial theme in Jesus’ teaching. At one point, he says that he will “utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world”; at another he tells the disciples that “nothing is covered that will not be revealed or hidden that will not be known.” Both these pregnant sayings, like the rending of the temple’s veil, point to a potency, tendency, or dynamic that has been set in motion by the Incarnation and will finally result in complete discovery of whatever has been hidden, mystified, or withheld. For Illich, as for all Christians, the Incarnation represents a decisive moment. Jesus comes, in the words of Luke’s Gospel, “to cast fire on the earth,” and however slow the burn, things will not go on as before. This dynamic of decision is implicit in the Bible from the beginning. Adam and Eve already face a choice as to whether they will eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” and, in that way, become, as the serpent claims they will, “like God.” Moses, declaring “the words of the covenant,” says to the people of Israel, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life.” The choice has always been there, but

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with the appearance of the Word of God “in the flesh,” a point of ultimate decision has been reached. Jesus is, so to speak, God’s last word. Illich once expressed this to me in the words of a young nun who had sought his counsel. Thinking of the many voices by which God’s word is spoken in the Bible and the absence of such speech in our time, she had asked him why God no longer talks to us. She then paused and answered her own question: “Perhaps,” she mused, “He has nothing more to say.” Illich told the story with evident enjoyment and the implication that this was a naive way of saying what he himself thought. Once the Incarnation has created the possibility of loving God “in one another” and finding him “in the least of these my brothers,” then history has become the theatre of salvation. Matters have been put into human hands. This call to attend, first of all, to one another can be understood as the overcoming of religion insofar as religion, to this point, has meant the unending effort to placate potentially threatening gods. “Faith in the Incarnate Word sacrificed on the cross is not a religion,” Illich says, “and cannot be analyzed with the concepts of religious science.” Religions possess a “sacrum,” a sacred center by which they are oriented, while Christian churches are “built over an altar, a table, which stands on top of an empty tomb.” When the women who were Jesus’ companions go the tomb where they think his corpse has been laid after his crucifixion, a messenger tells them that he is not there but has risen and “gone before you into Galilee.” The sacred space is empty. Gods that die and rise, and die and rise again, in a repeating pattern, are a mythological staple. But Christ dies “once for all,” Paul says, and, having died, “will never die again.” “Christians,” Illich adds, “remember a historical event and expect one by which history will be closed.” Christian faith is lived in history, in changing circumstances, and does not depend on some fixed mythological framework. It is enacted in how we face what arrives here and now. The Incarnation, Illich says, can be “prolonged” by our actions. His statement implies a present that is always open, and this is why Illich could sometimes be so fierce about invocations of a future that can be planned. “To hell with the future,” he once told an interviewer. “It’s a m ­ an-​­eating idol.” Faith lives in the unpredictable present, in which the future lies immanent and unformed, and, in this sense, it is the opposite of religion, insofar as religion names the attempt to generate security and solidity, continuity and reliability. This tension between an open present and a planned future constitutes the ambivalence of the ­Church—​­it will inevitably become a religion in order to preserve and pass on a “deposit of faith” that is emphatically not a religion. The Church contains the Gospel in both senses of that ­term—​­it preserves and protects it, but it also holds it in, containing

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its power and shielding society from its effect. It announces the kingdom and at the same time endlessly defers its arrival (since that would mean the end of the Church as institution). This is exactly the ambiguity that Illich thinks “disappeared from the Church’s teaching and concern” in “the transition from the early Church to the established Western Church.” Religion, as the simultaneous preservation and alienation of the Gospel’s power, creates a realm apart in which the action of the Incarnation loses its grip on reality and is turned in on itself. The Church becomes one of the “powers of this world,” and the mysterium iniquitatis, according to Illich, consists of “the decision to make faith into something that is subject to the power of this world.” Faith here is clearly distinguished from religion. But this distinction is not always easy to maintain, inasmuch as the two are usually found wrapped up together and sometimes even completely merged, as they are in expressions like “religious faith.” At this point, therefore, it becomes crucial to understand what Illich and his tradition mean by faith. Faith as a Mode of Knowledge The letter to the Hebrews defines faith, in the words of the King James translation, as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The Revised Version has “the assurance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things not seen.” Either way, one “meets the Lord in the air” because a faith that finds assurance in what has no a­ ssurance—​­hope—​­and evidence in what is not e­ vident—​­the ­unseen—​ ­has, by definition, no solid grounds. Rather it is what Illich variously calls “foolish trust” or “taking the predictability out of the face of the other” or “learn[ing] to receive . . . surprises.” Here it’s worth recalling a passage I quoted in my introduction: Faith is a mode of knowledge which does not base itself either on my worldly experience or on the resources of my intelligence. It founds certainty on the word of someone whom I trust and makes this knowledge which is based on trust more fundamental than anything I can know by reason. This, of course, is a possibility only when I believe that God’s word can reach me. It makes sense only if the One whom I trust is God. But it also rubs off on my relationship to other people. It makes me aim at facing people with a willingness to take them for what they reveal about ­themselves—​­to take them, therefore, at their ­word—​­and not for what I know about them.

Two things are salient in this account of faith. First it says that there is a form of knowledge, which is precisely not knowledge in the two most common senses of

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the term. It is not knowledge that comes from ­experience—​­the structure of expectations induced by what has happened to me so f­ ar—​­and it is not knowledge that comes from the “resources of my intelligence”—the convictions induced by thought. This is already breathtaking and, one might as well say, impossible. It certainly deserves the name Illich sometimes gives it, which is foolishness. Who confers trust that neither intelligence nor experience warrants? Second this statement gives a new significance to what happens to each one. Illich says that the Incarnation is “an outworking of pure, unconstrained freedom.” It occurs neither by chance nor of necessity but as what Illich calls gift or surprise. How little we think of this domain is illustrated, for Illich, by the fate of the word gratuity. It means today no more than a tip, a small addition to what is asked. Gratuitous, according to most dictionaries, means uncalled for, without cause or reason. Why be interested in what has no certified reason for existing? What can only exist as a surprise must, by definition, follow no law and conform to no reasonable expectation. Practical people want a predictable order. But “the realm of gratuity, or gift . . . comes into existence in response to a call, rather than a determinative cause.” And, in the Bible, Illich says, “this is the primary form of ‘causation’—from God’s summons to Abraham to Jesus’ running into Philip and saying, ‘Follow me.’ The Gospel exacts from its readers the recognition that what it presents is neither necessity nor chance but a superabundant gift given to those who will freely receive it.” Jacques Derrida has written of how gifts “annul” themselves. “The gift,” he says, “is the secret that can’t be told because, as soon as it is revealed as a gift, it enters an economy of reciprocity and receives its due.” A gift must therefore withdraw and hide in order not to be drawn into an economy. This paradox is well attested in the Gospels. It is why Jesus advises that the left hand should not know what the right hand is doing, why injunctions to preach and spread the word are countered by injunctions to “tell no one,” why the righteous who “practice piety . . . in order to be seen” often receive such short shrift, and why to gain your life you must first lose it. Goodness to remain goodness must be forgetful of itself as goodness. This is, of course, impossible in the natural course of things. How can my left hand ignore what my right hand is doing if it’s plainly evident? The answer must be equivocal. It is clearly impossible in worldly t­erms—​­the economy that the gift establishes as soon as it’s given is an element of social physics as unalterable as gravity. Who fails to keep account of what has been given and taken? Who can love a real enemy without potentially becoming the victim of their enmity? The commandments of the Sermon on the Mount are impossible to fulfill, its p ­ redictions—​­the meek shall inherit the ­earth—​­so far fanciful. But then there is the angel’s answer to Mary’s

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incredulity when Christ’s birth is announced: “With God all things are possible.” And there is faith that reaches into “the unseen” and puts its trust in the “still small voice” that speaks to the prophet Elijah in a cave on Mount Horeb. The commandments of Jesus are not ethical guidelines or rules of everyday conduct; they are the precepts of the kingdom of heaven, which are precisely not rules and can never become rules without all hell breaking loose. They can be practiced in the world only fitfully, only with humor and discretion, and only under the conditions that Jesus specifies. These conditions are stringent and sometimes shocking. Consider perhaps the most shocking of them all: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Often the conditions are contradictory: preach to all, but don’t “cast your pearls before swine”; give alms in secret, but don’t hide your light under a bushel; and so on. They are summed up in the parable that compares the kingdom of heaven to “treasure hidden in a field.” The man who finds it “sells all that he has and buys that field.” This cost of “all that he has” can only be borne by a very special kind of community, practicing a very special kind of ­awareness—​­ironic, playful, ­contrite—​­of the dangers of aiming so high. What Illich called “brutal earnestness” remained a besetting temptation. The Gospel points to possibilities that lie beyond the amplitude of thought or experience and outside the net of irresistible and indifferent necessity that, as A ­ ristotle says, “does not allow itself to be persuaded.” This was good news, heady news. It’s easy enough to see in retrospect that it should have been disseminated in a sober, tactful, cautious spirit that was mindful of the dangers accompanying this volatile revelation. But perhaps what C. G. Jung calls a psychic inflation was inevitable. “The people that walked in darkness ha[d] seen a great light.” The Sermon on the Mount speaks of a light that cannot be h ­ idden—“a city set on a hill.” “The light that enlightens every man was coming into the world,” says the prologue of John’s Gospel. God was disclosed “in the flesh.” Secrecy, mystery, and discretion were all threatened by this disclosure. Even when Jesus urges the disciples to keep something secret, or “tell no one,” it is often only for the time b ­ eing—“until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead” or “[w]hen the Son of man shall come in his glory.” How could the principle of ­anti-​ ­idolatry have endured when Jesus displayed the very “image of the invisible God”? How could a sense of measure and proportion have survived the command to “make disciples of all nations”? How could the reticent, ironizing, paradoxical side of Jesus’ teaching have persisted once he was revealed as the mighty Christ Pantocrator “ruler of all nature”? Perhaps the light was too bright for the ­Christians to have avoided a spirit of triumphalism and relentless positivity.

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Not Peace, but a Sword There were, nonetheless, warnings within the Gospels in the form of those “apocalyptic discourses” that I mentioned earlier. There Jesus predicts that his appearance will have dire consequences. He says that he has “not come to bring peace, but a sword.” He claims that families will be ­divided—“a man’s foes will be those of his own household”—and that “nation will rise against nation.” He forecasts “great earthquakes . . . famines . . . pestilences . . . and fearful sights and great signs . . . from heaven.” He foresees d ­ esecration—“the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be”—“such tribulation as there has not been from the beginning of the creation” and “men fainting with fear and foreboding of what is coming on the world.” Some of these prophecies transparently relate the destruction of the Second Temple, which was pillaged and razed by Roman legions in retribution for the Jewish rebellion of 66 ­CE—​­an event that had taken place after Jesus’ death but before the Gospels were written. Others seem to anticipate widespread cultural and ecological disruption. All foresee a definite end to “the age,” “the times,” even to the existing “heaven and earth.” As soon as the Church recognized itself as a permanent institution and not a sign that “the time is fulfilled,” these passages became something of an embarrassment. By the nineteenth century, as scholars like David Strauss and later Albert Schweitzer began the quest to rescue the “historical Jesus” from the apocalyptic Jesus, this embarrassment had grown acute. René Girard perceived in this discomfiture a deep historical irony. Just as the end of the world was being cooked up once again in the “dark satanic mills” of the industrial age and fire from heaven was about to fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Christians resolutely turned their back on the prediction in their own texts that such things would be a sequel to “the coming of the Son of Man.” Illich, for a long time, was more hesitant than Girard about “interpreting the apocalypse,” but in the end, he too had to recognize that his corruptio optimi pessima took an implicitly apocalyptic point of view. Girard’s writings focused centrally on the way in which the Cross demystifies and disables sacrifice as a mechanism for containing violence and in this way generates an apocalyptic choice between peace and uncontained violence. Illich saw Christianity’s effect as occurring in every dimension of human existence, as boundary and proportion, complementarity and limit were undermined. Through the Church, the Gospel’s jagged paradoxes and impossible commands were gradually operationalized and spelled out in systems of law and education, health and hospitality. This shadow incarnation is apocalyptic because it is cumulative and because it is revelatory, producing finally that “conglomerate

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of perversions” that is now “more clearly present than ever before.” It is this conglomeration that makes our age, for Illich, “the most obviously Christian epoch”— the culmination of a 2,000-year history. The mysterium iniquitatis, he says, has been “hatching.” Jesus says he has come to bring “not peace but a sword.” This sword can be taken not just as a symbol of violence but also as an image of discrimination or ­decision—​­the sword as that which separates and divides. Viewed in this way, the Incarnation appears as the ultimate gamble, a final role of the dice on which everything has been ­staked—​­God’s last word, as the young nun discerned. A decisive change has taken place in the religious imaginary. At first, it involved only a handful of people who experienced Jesus as alive, as resurrected, after his ­crucifixion. “The Resurrection appearances,” writes theologian Walter Wink, “did not . . . take place in the temple before thousands of worshippers, but in the privacy of homes or cemeteries. They did not occur before religious authorities, but to the disciples hiding from those authorities. The resurrection was not a ­world-​­wide historic event that could have been filmed, but a privileged revelation reserved for the few.” “[Jesus] had indelibly imprinted the divine,” Wink says, “[and] God had everlastingly entered the human.” Once this intermingling has taken place, a historical sequence is set in motion that implies, sooner or later, a decisive end. The appearance of the God/man is the beginning of this end, however prolonged the ending may prove to be. The historical arc between those first Resurrection appearances and the worldwide society to which Latin ­Christendom would eventually give birth is long, erratic, and sometimes catastrophic, but it begins with the announcement that the Word has become flesh and an irreversible direction established. History and Revelation We are talking of a historical sequence that is begun and, for a long time, shaped by a ­revelation—​­a disclosure, to repeat Illich’s formula, from a realm out of the reach of both experience and intelligence. This is a mystery and a paradox: history is being determined by a power whose effects are evident but whose source lies outside history and beyond the grasp of historical science. “How is the historian to face the fact,” Illich once asked, “that a new form of perception and behavior, which is unprecedented, surprising, unexpected, and unexplainable is simply . . . there?” “It is not legitimate for him . . . as a historian,” he continued, “to say, Well, God came and revealed it. That’s not within a historian’s frame of reference.” On the other hand,

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there are “undeniable historical consequences” that follow from the Incarnation. “[Christian] belief,” Illich says, “refers to what exceeds history, but it also enters history and changes it forever.” Illich was first introduced to this paradox of history changed by “what exceeds history” by his teacher Gerhart Ladner’s book The Idea of Reform, in which Ladner presents the Christian revelation as a ­historical ­novelty—​­a vision without precedent in any prior culture or civilization. “It was . . . with regard to this concept of Ladner’s that I began to reflect on the appearance in the first millennium of Christianity of normative ideas which are radically new, and belong to a new gestalt, different from anything known elsewhere or previously. And I began to wonder if their history could be studied, if it would be possible to follow their historical evolution.” In taking up this task and in facing up to the perplexities involved in studying the historical effects of what is “not within a historian’s frame of reference,” Illich followed in Ladner’s footsteps. In an appendix to The Idea of R ­ eform—​­he calls it an ­excursus—​­Ladner argues that the relation between history and revelation can only be comprehended by a philosophy of complementarity. (Ladner was at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study at the same time as Danish physicist Niels Bohr and was appreciative of Bohr’s attempts to develop such a philosophy.) “Man,” Ladner says, “. . . is a complementary being” whose consciousness is “open to eternity” even as he/she participates in the “determined events” that comprise history. Christians, accordingly, can be seen both as determined historical actors and as people responding freely to a revelation in which “the exact impression” of God has been made visible in Jesus. To ask whether historical action is free or determined, Ladner says, and to treat these alternatives as mutually exclusive, is like asking how we can be free and still believe in a God who foresees and foreknows our acts. If our acts have been foreseen, they must already exist in some determined form and therefore not be free. But if they have not been foreseen, then God is no more than a powerless bystander or an inept kibitzer at the game he/she/it has set in motion. The only theological answer to this is sheer bravado: God must be able to foresee our acts “as” free. Contradiction, or complementarity, remains the horizon of c­ onsciousness—​ ­only faith can supply the rest. “God came and revealed it” violates the canons of historical explanation, but the “unprecedented, surprising, unexpected and unexplainable” is there nonetheless, as part of history. The two can only be held together as complementary views. Illich told me that he “read and ­re-​­read” Ladner’s book, and although he never says so explicitly, I think he took over Ladner’s view. He held Christianity as faith and Christianity as a determined historical object together in his understanding, and at the same time, he held them apart, always aware of the

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difference. (It might be said that failure to hold these complementary perspectives apart and to distinguish them was the sin of the Church insofar as it “ma[d]e faith into something that is subject to the power of this world.”) “The truly apocalyptic view of the world,” Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “is that things don’t repeat themselves.” His insight adds another dimension to the view I’ve been developing of the Incarnation as the beginning of the end. Mircea ­Eliade says the same thing when he speaks of Christianity’s having “valorized time.” Mythological time is cyclical and repetitive; Christians, as Illich says, “remember a historical event and expect one by which history will be closed.” But the idea that things don’t repeat themselves establishes itself only slowly, if at all. ­Christianity, once it became an established institution, drew closer to the mythological worldviews that it initially repudiated. Apocalypse, especially insofar as it was connected to the mysterium iniquitatis, moved to the margins of Church teaching. Giorgio Agamben, in an “address to the church of our Lord,” given in Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral in the presence of its bishop, spoke of “the Church’s incessant deferral of the Last Judgment” and “the eclipse of the messianic experience.” Establishments plan for their continuance, not their disruption. Easter is assimilated to spring fertility rituals, Christmas to Saturnalia and other midwinter rites. Everything returns, recurs, and repeats. Some Christians reject C ­ hristianity’s historical dimension altogether. The most notable example, for me, is Simone Weil, who asserts, without qualification, that “chronology cannot play a decisive role in a relationship between God and man.” Christ must have “been present on this earth from the very beginning,” she says. The Incarnation for her is only the consummate instance of what must be always and everywhere true and not primarily, as Illich says, a “historical event,” tending sooner or later to completion in a second event by which “[history] will be closed.” In Weil’s Platonic Christianity, it is axiomatic that “the whole truth [must] be present at every time and every place, available for anyone who desires it.” Otherwise “it would not be possible to pardon God” for the unconsoled suffering of “so many innocent people” in the ages before Christ appeared. Weil, in other words, cannot accept Illich’s claim that history can be the scene of anything “radically new.” And she is just one instance of widespread resistance to a view in which God is implicated in an unfolding story in which He chooses to reveal what is true for all at a particular time and place, and through a particular person. Why should salvation be “from the Jews,” any more than from the Chinese, the Bantu, or the Algonquians? Even so, Illich viewed the Incarnation as a o­ nce-​­and-​­for-​­all disclosure, occurring at a definite time and place, from which it would then be shared from hand

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to hand with all the vicissitudes and misadventures that entailed. Just how deeply he held to this view, I learned one evening when he and I and Lee Hoinacki were sitting talking in the outdoor kitchen of his home in Mexico, and I remarked to him that I considered the passage in which Jesus is shown as intending to establish a church as an “interpolation” in the Gospel. (In Matthew 16:18, Jesus says, “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church.” This saying is the foundation of the “apostolic succession” that is thought to link today’s Church with Jesus by an unbroken tradition as well as being a ­pun—​­Peter’s name in Greek means “rock.”) Illich replied that he had been intensively exposed as a student to discussion of whether this passage is an interpolation. For him, he went on, it was part of his faith to take it as spoken. Jesus, in his divine mind, must have known all that would follow, even to us sitting around the table that night. The founding, with foreknowledge, of a Church that would incubate the mystery of evil was part of “the darkness of God,” he said. And yet, he added, how else would we know Him if he had not founded his Church on this unsteady rock? (Peter, remember, had been both Jesus’ t­ empter—“Get thee behind me, Satan”—and his d ­ enier—“The cock will not crow, till you have denied me three times.”). The story shows several aspects of Illich’s faith. The one I want to emphasize here is that he thought, against Weil, that chronology could perfectly well play a role in the relationship between God and humanity. His faith was, in that sense, rooted in a particular history. It’s also evident that he could see the humor in designating Peter as the rock against which “the gates of hell [would] not prevail.” (At another point, in the same conversation, he said that “the gospel parables cannot finally be understood except as jokes.”). Likewise, he acknowledged the darkness in God as something absolutely inscrutable. His faith, in this sense, was c­ hildlike—​­simple, obedient, and undivided. Another objection to the apocalyptic view of history, as tending to some final division of the sheep from the goats, lies in the fact that worlds are always ending while others are being born. W. H. Auden in his poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” imagines this indifference of one world to another: children skate on “a pond at the edge of the wood” unaware of “the miraculous birth” that their elders reverently await; “the torturer’s horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree” during “the dreadful martyrdom”; a farmer complacently plows his field while, behind him, Icarus plunges into the sea. What fills the sky for one is a matter of no concern to the other. A foreboding of ecological doom, which might seem particular to our time, has been recurrent since classical times. Plato lifted his eyes to the hills around Athens and saw “the soil washed away,” the once “abundant timber” cut, and “by comparison with the original territory,” nothing left but “the skeleton of a

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body wasted by disease.” Tertullian, a Christian bishop and Church father, writing in North Africa, six hundred years after Plato, saw a world so populous and so intensively developed that “its resources hardly suffice to support us.” A millennium later, during the middle years of the fourteenth century, it’s possible, by the highest estimates, that as much as half the population of Europe died of plague. The cultures of the North American prairies saw their entire subsistence destroyed virtually overnight when the great buffalo herds were massacred. Devastated at the same time by disease, they truly faced the end of the world. Today peoples and languages continue to languish and die, as their subsistence is destroyed and their way of life undermined. The world ends with us as we die, cultures and civilizations wax and wane, glaciers advance and retreat, and this is important to remember, as comfortably situated contemporaries cry doom and claim that a changing climate is the infallible sign that the decisive moment is at ­hand—​­that This Changes Everything, as the title of a recent book by Canadian writer/activist Naomi Klein claims. Illich had good reasons for refraining, through most of his life, from “interpreting the apocalypse.” Nor would he likely have shared Klein’s confidence in planetary scale climate models. But, even with all the caution historical perspective ought to impart to claims about the end of the world and due regard for the human propensity to funnel angst into decline and fall stories, there still seems to be something uncanny and unprecedented in the way our world presses, across the board, not just at ecological limits but also at the limits of human nature. Worlds have ended, but never the entire world, all at once, as ours would in a nuclear war. Cultures have faced catastrophe, but never has human nature itself been thrown into question as it now is by engineered environments and genetic and cybernetic supplements. Our world, Illich said, is “out of whack with any prior historical epoch.” It confronts us as something “confusing, unbelievable and incomprehensible,” something, he said, that “forces me to accept a set of axioms for which I find no parallels in past societies.” Mysterium Iniquitatis Illich then is an apocalyptic thinker, reluctant though he was to associate himself with this fraught discourse. He thinks that a misapprehension of the Incarnation acquires historical momentum, as it is institutionalized and enculturated, and he sees this tendency as achieving something like full extension or elaboration in our time. He also believes that this unfolding has both an overt and a more hidden

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aspect. What must be plain to all is the existence of a society, now a worldwide society, which is quite unlike any previous society or culture. This uniqueness can be recognized even by those who are enthusiastic about it and who share neither Illich’s ­horror—​­his sense of facing “a bottomless evil which Hitler and Stalin did not reach”—nor the genealogy by which he roots this uniqueness in the “newness” of the Gospel. Nothing more than “a certain power of observation” is needed to recognize modernity’s startling novelty on this level, Illich says. What is not available to all is the mystery that he claims only “faith can fully discern”—the mystery of why the greatest good should take the form of the greatest evil or, to put it another way, the mystery of why the Gospel would ultimately be “preached throughout the whole world” in such a negative and inverted form. What is it that Illich, by faith, discerns about the mysterium iniquitatis? Perhaps the best way to answer is by reviewing what the Incarnation meant to him and, by implication, therefore, how he thought this “new possibility” ought to have been received. He says, first, that with the appearance of the Word of God in human form “something happened cosmically”—an expression that suggests to me a change in the very nature of things. Second, he believed that, in the I­ ncarnation, God had shared his very Being with us, and, in this way, a divine vocation had been opened to humanity. “The other side of the mystery of ensarcosis, God becoming flesh,” he says, “is the mystery of apotheosis, man becoming divinized.” He attributes this view to “the Church Fathers” but clearly indicates his own assent to it. Third, he viewed the Incarnate God as an anarchist. He says this plainly in a sermon he preached in Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church on November 13, 1988. Jesus, he says, was “an anarchist savior. That’s what the Gospels tell us.” From the moment Jesus refuses the power Satan offers him, in the scene of the temptation in the wilderness, Jesus defines himself, Illich says, as “the Powerless One.” He is “a dropout from power and money” and “a conscientious objector to force”—his “social doctrine” no more than a series of parries, paradoxes, and ­one-​­liners. But, in any case, Illich says, we are not asked to put our trust in his doctrine but in his “person.” He continues, in a passage that I quoted in part earlier, that modern English has lost the word for this kind of trust, but the biblical word, which he continued to use, is obedience: Obedience in the Biblical sense is the epitome of audire, hearing. It means unobstructed listening, unconditional readiness to hear, untrammeled disposition to be surprised. . . . When I [obey], my heart, mind and body come to be below the other. When I listen unconditionally, respectfully, courageously, with the readiness to take in the other as a radical

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surprise . . . I bow, bend over towards the total otherness of someone. I renounce searching for bridges between the other and myself, recognizing that a gulf separates us. Yet, paradoxically, renouncing a bond, I initiate a free relatedness between us for which we have only that abused word “neighbour.” Leaning into this chasm makes me aware of the depth of my loneliness; but I am able to bear it in the light of the substantial likeness between the other and myself. The only thing which reaches me is the other in his word, which I accept on faith. By the strength of this word I can now trust myself to walk on the surface without being engulfed by institutional power. You certainly remember how Peter just walked out on the waves of the Lake of Gennesaret on the word of his Lord. But as soon as he doubted, he began to go under.

This is the stance that Illich thinks the Gospel calls for. It implies a life lived on the very spur of the moment, without preconception or program. It emphasizes “free relatedness” rather than the bonding or binding that often characterizes religion. The Church, in Illich’s view, must be free, and it can only be free insofar as its roots lie outside this world. Again and again he characterizes the Incarnation as gift or surprise or “the outworking of pure, unconstrained freedom”—all qualifications that belong to a realm outside and beyond the calculus of desert that must condition any viable social order. “This gift,” Illich says, “becomes fully visible only at the moment of its rejection, the moment which I take to be the point of the ­Gospel, the Crucifixion.” He goes on: “Jesus, as our Saviour but also as our model, is condemned by his own people, led out of the city, and executed as someone who has blasphemed the community’s God. . . . If, therefore, we take as our example this man who says, Let this chalice pass from me, because he so much fears it, it is an example simultaneously of loyalty to his people and of willingness to be excluded from them by what he stands for. This, in the supreme form, is the Christian attitude towards this worldly community, an attitude which Christians try to embody in everyday life.” To express loyalty by accepting exclusion, to submit to the community but always as a witness to what exceeds i­ t—​­this is the quintessential Christian stance, Illich says. The church established in the memory of the ­Cross—​­its savior hung, deliberately, off the ground and outside the gates and walls of the c­ ity—​­is no more than an intimation of the reality to which it points. Illich’s observation that “the gift becomes fully visible only at the moment of its rejection” can be taken as pertaining specifically to the C ­ rucifixion—​­the full character of God’s love cannot be revealed except by its consent to utter abjection, even to the point where God abandons God in the cry of desolation from the ­Cross—​­but it can also be

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i­ nterpreted more generally. The world cannot, for long, endure the t­ ruth—“human kind cannot bear very much reality,” as Eliot s­ ays—​­and the truth cannot, for long, endure in the world. It appears only in its vanishing, at the moment at which it is subject to no further appropriation and we can see it as what it is. This is clear in the story of the resurrected Jesus appearing to two of his disciples on the road to ­Emmaus—“their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight.” The owl of Minerva (or wisdom) takes flight, as Hegel says, only at dusk. Illich made the same point about prayer. Prayer, he said, is connected to death, as both its rehearsal and its premonition. In prayer we cultivate that disinterestedness that is available to us only as silence and, in the attempt, recognize our immense distance from God. “There is no greater distance,” Illich says. His emphasis on renunciation says much the same: we can overcome the world only by withdrawing from it. The Church Forgets Itself The Church, then, is properly an “­other-​­worldly” community that lives in the world. I have dwelt on this point in order to dramatize what happens when the Church forgets itself and succumbs to that spirit of “brutal earnestness” that allows Christians to begin to believe that the kingdom of heaven constitutes a viable political program. I described this institutionalization, as Illich understood it, in my last chapter. Here I would like to consider how this attempt at a compulsory Christian society has gradually faded from awareness and so become incorrigible, even as it has continued. The story of how modernity disguises its roots, and begins to hide from itself, begins when the Enlightenment turns on the Church and makes religion its scapegoat. This is a great simplification, I know. Just as Jonathan Israel has recently argued for a distinct “radical Enlightenment,” so there was a Christian Enlightenment and no doubt many other Enlightenments. Nevertheless, the difficulty of discussing or understanding religion in contemporary settings seems to argue for an effective taboo/demonization proceeding, in general terms, from the Enlightenment. The Church became, for many, a sign of violence and obscurantism. The chronic wars of the early modern period were retrospectively named the Wars of Religion, as if religion meant war and secular rule peace. A threatened and defensive Roman Catholic Church became the ally of reaction and a­ nti-​­modernism. (I mentioned earlier that Illich as a young priest still swore “the oath against modernism” instituted by Pius X in 1910.) Protestant Christianity and secular reform continued to interpenetrate right into the middle years of the twentieth century, but today it seems generally

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true to say that the formative influence of Christian institutions and thought styles on Western society has been largely forgotten, where it has not been actively disclaimed. Ours may be, as Illich says, “the most obviously Christian epoch,” but it is obvious only to those able to discern this denied and disowned lineage. In a world violently opposed to scapegoating, Christianity has become the last acceptable scapegoat, the one institution about which nothing good ought to be said. René Girard, who agrees with Illich that Christianity is the invisible foundation of the modern, calls this “fighting Christianity with Christianity.” Christianity, in Girard’s view, is the source of our sensitivity to victims and our capacity for s­ elf-​ ­criticism, both of which originate in the New Testament’s rejection of mandatory community solidarity. But the Enlightenment and its sequels say that Christianity is not Christian enough, just as the Reformation had said that Catholicism had not been Christian enough. Modern reformers complain, quite justly, about the violence of Christianity, Girard says, but they fail to notice that “they can complain [only] because they have Christianity to complain with.” In this way, there arises a race of ­super-​­Christians who have renounced Christianity but have no other basis for their fantastic hopes and their extreme sensitivity to injustice than the Gospel that they consider to be entirely superseded. This creates an extremely confusing situation, in which what Illich considers obvious, and is obvious from his point of view, is far from obvious to those who take their own good will for granted and believe themselves to be the authors of their own “values.” The Dominion of ­Anti-​­Christ An invincible belief in one’s own goodwill, along with a dogmatic indifference to the source of this s­ elf-​­confidence, is one of the signs of what Illich calls “an apocalyptic world.” This is a world in which the principle or tendency that Illich calls ­anti-​­Christ, by which the Christian revelation is turned inside out, has achieved a state of relatively full exposure. There are many other such signs, almost all of them a matter of commonplace and daily note. There is a feeling of saturation or surfeit, but with an undertow of ­loss—​­an “intimation of deprival,” as George Grant says. There is a feeling of limitlessness crossed with an acute experience of fiscal and ecological limit. The unlimited haunts our rootless minds, but every institution strains against the limitations of its budget, resources, and blunt bureaucratic methods, and every substantial economic project pushes against ecological limits so stringent that they must be figured to the very last part per million of carbon. Gigantic expenditures pile up, but there is a widespread sense of insufficiency, shortage, and cutback. The

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same paradox is expressed in the current battle against ­norms—​­of race, class, gender, sexual identity, or a­ ppearance—​­a battle that is inevitably conducted in highly normalizing environments, like schools, which have no natural basis and so can only exist on the basis of their rules. The result is what can only be called the norm of ­normlessness—​­a rule against rules that produces endless blind and fruitless conflict and perfectly summarizes our apocalyptic extremity. A chronic shortage of time makes it difficult to come into the present, though everything appears to be present and available on demand as never before. We have, in other words, reached a limit but without any sense that we have arrived or ever could arrive. This gives existence, a least in the precincts in which I live, an uncanny, paradoxical, and impalpable character, as if no one can quite grasp what’s going on. When the present is examined as “an historical entity,” as I quoted Illich before, “everything seems confusing . . . and incomprehensible . . . out of whack with any prior epoch.” This is what I think Illich means when he says that the preeminent feature of our time is that it’s “Christian”—it reveals C ­ hristianity, as an ideology, at the terminus of its d ­ evelopment—​­the moment at which baffling limits appear everywhere but the genetic structure of the Western project, what I earlier called “administered salvation” still maintains its grip on the social imaginary and those who don’t hope for a revival of this project lose themselves in angry and resentful reaction to it. Illich thought that the societies that grew out of Latin Christendom, first in Europe and then around the world, could be understood as a revelation of the “mystery of evil,” the mystery of what happens when God’s ultimate gift is coopted and put to work, made to generate rules, bear interest, and guide government. This revelation is progressive. To that extent our situation is privileged. Jesus tells his disciples that the “gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come.” This prediction is realized, in a perverse way, in the now tarnished contemporary dream of universal “development” and its successor, the unimpeded circulation of everything via “globalization.” And, in a sense, the end has come, if the end is taken to refer to a world that has “gone about as far as it can go” along its present path. To this extent Illich is an apocalyptic thinker. Illich as a ­Non-​­Apocalyptic Thinker But there is another sense in which Illich is a profoundly ­non-​­apocalyptic or ­counter-​ ­apocalyptic thinker, and he can only be properly understood if both aspects of his stance are taken into account. I pointed at the outset to the contrast between Illich’s

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claim that he “had always abstained from making apocalyptic statements” and his willingness at the end of his life to characterize our time, if only “hesitantly,” as “apocalyptic.” This apparent inconsistency can be accounted for by a firm distinction between the historical and the mythological apocalypse. The historical apocalypse is what I have been discussing. It is the progressive revelation or unveiling of what happens when the kingdom of God is, in effect, sold into captivity. This evil is mysterious in the sense that it is an effect of the Word’s becoming flesh, and thus of an event which we cannot begin to comprehend because, as Illich says, “it is a surprise, remains a surprise and can’t exist as anything else.” But, even so, it is manifest in history and open to study by believer and n ­ on-​­believer alike. The mythological apocalypse is what Illich all his life abstained from speaking about or interpreting. Among its preeminent features are, first, the projection of human evil onto God, so that it’s God who prepares the burning lakes and falling fire and not ourselves; second, an exclusive emphasis on the kingdom as something in the future, something that comes only after God’s cleansing fire has fallen; and, finally, a strong accent on retribution, and the separation of the virtuous elect from “the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars” who are to be “consigned,” according to the Book of Revelation, “to the fiery lake of burning sulfur.” The New Testament is pervaded by this mythological apocalypticism and Jesus’ often expressed preference for sinners and lost sheep counterbalanced by the prediction that those who fail to heed him will be thrown into “the outer darkness [where] men weep and gnash their teeth.” I mentioned earlier that it was largely embarrassment over this lurid apocalyptic element that drove scholars like David Strauss and Albert Schweitzer to begin the quest, which still continues, for the historical Jesus. But I would argue that this sensibility vies, in the New Testament, with a second sensibility, which holds that heaven is here and the kingdom is now, if only in an evanescent and momentary way. “The kingdom of God,” Jesus says, “is not coming with signs to be observed . . . for behold the kingdom is in the midst of you”—or “within you” in the King James Version. It comes as a ­surprise—​­as “a thief in the night” or a treasure unearthed by chance in a field. At the beginning of the Gospel of John, he says, “The time is coming, and now is.” He tells the Pharisees, “Before Abraham was, I am.” Often he looks to ­nature—​­to the world as it is here and ­now—​­for images of the kingdom. He asks his listeners to “consider the lilies of the field” as an instance of the divine splendor because “even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” He gives it as a sign of God’s impartiality that he “makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”

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This is the current in the Gospel that animated Illich and made him, in the sense in which I am now speaking, a profoundly n ­ on-​­apocalyptic thinker. He is explicit about it himself. “The Kingdom comes to fulfillment without utopian realization,” he says, “and it will come about without being apocalyptic.” Illich stood for “a new society right now,” consistently deprecating preoccupation with the future. He liked the word density to describe the thickening of the present moment that he believed had been made possible by the Incarnation. He speaks of the “phenomenological density which the body takes on” when “the one who knocks at the door [is] treated . . . not as if he were Christ but as Christ.” The word conveys an infinity that opens in and through the moment rather than coming only at the end of time. He thinks of the Church in similar terms as a community that makes the kingdom present by its celebration. “The only time the Lord is present to us,” he says, “is at the present moment which we celebrate together.” Most of what needs to be said about Illich as an a­ nti-​­apocalyptic thinker has already been presented in chapter 4 in connection with his views on the nature of the Church, so I won’t repeat it here. What remains is the question of how these two views, apocalyptic and c­ ounter-​­apocalyptic, relate to each other within Christian tradition and, by extension, the question of where Illich stands in this tradition. The New Testament, as I’ve said, is profoundly ambivalent. Many of the contradictions comprising this ambivalence have already been mentioned. I’ll focus here on one. Jesus is presented, on the one hand, as a teacher who puts forward a way of life that his listeners are free to accept or reject. Had they accepted, the story might have had a different ending. On other hand, Jesus is shown as a character in a story already written. He tells the disciples after his Resurrection: “Everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Before his death he had told them that it’s “necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory.” On the one side, you have the teacher who invites people into a new condition and speaks of a kingdom that is present and available here and now. On the other, an iron necessity is being fulfilled and an outcome already foreseen accomplished. The apostle Paul is firmly on this second side when he says in his letter to the Romans that Jesus was “set forth” or “put forward” by God as a propitiation or expiation for humanity’s sin. He is so exclusively concerned, in his letters, with the redemptive effect of Jesus’ death that he never even mentions his life or his teaching, though he was writing within twenty years of Jesus’ death and knew many people who had known him. This contradiction between Jesus as an exemplar, his life a contingent play of chance and necessity like other lives, and Jesus as sacrificial lamb, his life utterly

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predetermined by the divine plan of salvation, passes into Christian tradition. To take one instance of how this contradiction played out, Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) in his Cur Deus Homo? (Why the God Man?) put forward what came to be called the “satisfaction theory of the atonement.” He argued that humanity, through the disobedience of Adam and Eve, had contracted a debt of honor to God, and since God’s honor is infinite, so must be the debt. This is why God’s own son, himself infinite and ­co-​­eternal with God, is the only one who can, by his death, pay the price and satisfy the debt. Anselm’s account continues the tradition that begins with P ­ aul—​­Christ “set forth” as a “propitiation.” In other variants of this tradition, Jesus is a “ransom”—the price paid to redeem a slave or a substitute who “bears” our sins. The idea is engraved in my mind in the words of the Anglican service of Holy Communion, where it is said that Christ, by his death on the Cross, makes “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.” But there were objections to Anselm’s view even at the time he wrote. His younger contemporary, Peter Abelard (1079–1142), responded: “How cruel and wicked it seems that anyone should demand the blood of an innocent person as the price for anything, or that it should in any way please him that an innocent man should be ­slain—​­still less that God should consider the death of his Son so agreeable that by it he should be reconciled to the whole world.” Abelard’s alternative account stresses Christ’s example. We are not “purchased” by his suffering love or freed of a debt incurred by our first parents; rather, we are inspired by him. “Our redemption through Christ’s suffering,” Abelard writes, “is that deeper affection in us which not only frees us from slavery to sin, but also wins for us the true liberty of sons of God, so that we do all things out of love rather than fear.” Abelard sees Jesus as one who lights or shows the way. Jesus portrays himself in these terms when he says that he is “the way.” Greater love has no man than this,” Jesus also says, “that he lay down his life for his friends.” “No longer do I call you servants,” he continues, “for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from the Father I have made known to you.” At the beginning of his poem “Jerusalem,” William Blake hears the voice of this Jesus saying, “I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and a friend; / Within your bosom I reside, and you reside in me.” This view is ­anti-​­apocalyptic in locating the significance of the Incarnation within the human. No one is pulling the strings behind the scene. The position of Paul and Anselm is apocalyptic in imagining the Incarnation as a transaction within God at which humanity is essentially a ­bystander—​­Jesus as God pays the price demanded by God. The

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­ ifference is the same one I tried to mark earlier by distinguishing between a hisd torical and a mythological apocalypse. Illich belongs to the tradition of Blake and Abelard and gives voice to this lineage in our time. The accent is always on the human. In the passage on the ­Crucifixion that I cited earlier, he speaks of Jesus as “our Saviour but also our model.” Jesus gives an “example,” he goes on, of a “loyalty to his people” that shows itself by his “willingness to accept being excluded from them.” Illich, likewise, rejects, as does Abelard, the element of necessity in Anselm’s account. To say that God’s honor must be satisfied is to say that Jesus must be born and must die, but Illich will accept no touch of necessity in his account of the Incarnation. What can exist only as a surprise, as unwarranted and unexpected gift, cannot at the same time be said to be necessary in order to settle the cosmic score with an aggrieved God. Indeed, there is little, if anything, in Illich about the whole redemption/salvation/atonement side of Christianity, with its account of all that Jesus has done for us or in place of us; there is a great deal about the way he has shown and the possibilities he has opened and about how, in consequence, we might live in the world right now. Again, the ­non-​­apocalyptic side is to the fore. A Tragic View of Christianity Illich takes what might be hesitantly called a tragic view of Christianity. This is embodied, above all, in his saying that whoever contemplates the evil ­Christianity let loose must feel “the temptation . . . of cursing God’s Incarnation.” He made this statement in the first of the interviews that make up The Rivers North of the Future. At the time, he was laying out for me his idea that, with the Incarnation, an evil of an unprecedented kind also came into existence, an evil that he thought the first Christian communities had correctly identified as “­anti-​­Christ.” Then, unexpectedly, he interrupted himself: “What I have stammered here, talking freely and unprepared, I have avoided saying for thirty years. Let me now try and say it in a way that others can hear it: the more you allow yourself to conceive of the evil you see as an evil of a new kind, of a mysterious kind, the more intense becomes the ­temptation—​­I can’t avoid saying it, I cannot go on without saying ­it—​­of cursing God’s Incarnation.” These words were spoken in the context of what was, initially, a radio interview, and I can remember how anxiously I hesitated over them when preparing the broadcast in which they eventually found a place. I could hardly exclude a statement that Illich presents as having been withheld for thirty years and now

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v­ irtually forcing itself out of his mouth, and yet I worried that the rhetorical delicacy with which he, at the same time, allows and overcomes the avoided thought might well be lost on radio listeners as they exercised on their treadmills, executed left turns in traffic, or rinsed their dishes. In the end, I did what I could to explain, and explain again, what I thought was going on in this highly vulnerable statement, but his words remain surprising and challenging. Why, in the first place, say this? I had not asked, and had not thought of asking, and probably would not have presumed to ask even if I had. He uses the general “you,” as if anyone contemplating modern evil as evil of a new kind would face this ever more intense temptation, but who else but Illich so sharply distinguishes modern evil from the evils that have always beset suffering humanity? We have to assume then that it is Illich, above all, who faces this temptation, and who has silently faced it for thirty years, and who now wants others to know the full depth and obscurity of the mystery he has been contemplating: Why would God redeem humanity by a means so volatile and a path so arduous that it was almost bound to lapse into a corrupted and inverted parody of itself? Illich does not curse the Incarnation, but he did feel compelled to face this temptation and to dramatize its intensity. One could almost do it, he says. And this almost expresses an absolutely crucial distinction between the Gospel, as it might have been, and its actual historical fate. The weight of this actuality is so overwhelming that one might, at times, wonder if Illich is saying that the Gospel is true but can’t be proclaimed (because it is no sooner proclaimed than betrayed). I don’t think he is, but, like his temptation to curse, I think this possibility must be faced. Illich says, “Wherever I look for the roots of modernity, I find them in the attempts of the churches to institutionalize, legitimize, and manage Christian vocation.” This is a remarkably comprehensive statement. It says that modernity is ­totally—“wherever I look”—a product of the Church’s attempt to put the Gospel into harness. And it says that this is the result of “institutionalizing, legitimizing and managing”—three practices that seem absolutely fundamental and unavoidable (at least to the modern disposition). Can one then even imagine that it might have been different? A story that moves inexorably to a foreordained conclusion is certainly one of the things we mean by tragedy. And there is insight to be gained in contemplating the history of Christianity as a tragedy in this sense. Corruptio optimi pessima is a proverb for a reason. It expresses what has proved perennially true. But there is another sense of tragic, one that points not to an inevitable outcome but to a style of awareness. Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno speaks, in his great work of that name, of The Tragic Sense of Life, and Unamuno can be

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helpful in interpreting Illich, I think. Unamuno has a sense similar to Illich’s of Christianity as worldly folly, masquerading as socially approved “truth.” An established religion guarding its “truth,” Unamuno says in his The Agony of Christianity, always has about it “something collective, social and even public,” while faith, on the other hand, is “something incommunicable [that] lies in agony in each and every one of us.” The tragic sense of life, for Unamuno, is the sense of a world unalterably riven by paradox and contradiction, a world in which the dance of “life” and the fixed categories of “reason” will be forever engaged in “mortal combat.” Unamuno, with his “agony” and “mortal combat,” is so dark and dramatic that Illich can seem sanguine by comparison, but I think they largely agree. To celebrate awareness, as Illich always did, is to allow contradiction to come into ­consciousness—​­as humor, as forgiveness, and as awareness of l­ imits—​­in a way that potentially forestalls its appearance as Nemesis. But I do think that limit in Illich is always linked to Nemesis or to what Jung calls enantiodromia, his Greek word for the way in which any tendency, when pushed too far, can turn into its opposite. “Paradoxical ­counter-​­productivity” is precisely this revenge of the disregarded opposite. And Illich explored limits of many kinds. ABC and In the Vineyard of the Text explore the ways in which “media” inexorably condition our knowledge. His archaeology of modern “certainties” shows how difficult it is to relax the grip of “axioms” of which we are not even aware. Gender is fundamentally concerned with what he variously calls otherness, duality, and complementarity. The fundamental idea, whether in Unamuno or in Illich, is that everything in the world is constituted by an opposite that defines it, limits it, and allows it to be what it is. It might be said that the highest good for this view of things is balance or harmony, both of which are a kind of unity in difference. This sounds w ­ ell—​­who is against harmony or balance?—but it also has its tragic dimension because nothing can be pushed to a conclusion or completion. If mutually defining limits are not accepted, the opposites must, as Unamuno says, go to war. Equality and hierarchy will both have to have their due; as will orality and literacy, heaven and earth, freedom and constraint, and any other constitutive pair that comes to mind. The ability to understand, accept, and embrace contradiction, and thus forestall its appearance as Nemesis, is what I think Illich means by “celebration of awareness.” “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free,” Jesus says in John’s gospel. The kingdom of heaven, for Illich, is something of which we can be aware, not something we can possess or produce. Such awareness is tragic in two ­senses—​­it indicates a limit at which we can love but never secure what we love and a limit at which the attempt to secure it will inevitably turn against us and become

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412 / Ivan Illich

an actual tragedy. Limit here means the point of balance, the degree at which nemesis or counterproductivity sets in, the moment the best begins its decline into the worst. A philosophy able to recognize in principle that such a point/degree/ moment exists will look for it and perhaps be wise enough to stop there. Without such a philosophy, the perverse consequences of overreach will be very difficult to correctly identify. My grandmother knew there could be “too much of a good thing”—it was one of the commonest of her many ­proverbs—​­but today we seem to have opted for the ­unlimited—​­for our “dreams,” as one so often ­hears—​­and to such an extent that the answer to every predicament is more of the same, redesigned. The idea that a threshold may have been exceeded is conservatism, defeatism, or worse. Think of the expression “zero tolerance,” so often spoken without qualm to indicate that administered perfection is within reach. This is a second sense in which Illich’s view is tragic: it recognizes unsurpassable limits, fixed in the nature of things, beyond which tragedy waits to unfold. Tragedy can be thought of as a consequence of ignoring or defying the principle that I have tended to call complementarity but that Illich also sometimes names as ­proportionality—​­the principle by which worldly things are what they are because they are opposed and upheld by their contrary, which is also their complement. Illich began to develop a philosophy of complementarity in Gender, but he never, to my knowledge, connected this work to his idea that ­anti-​­Christ is the predictable consequence of the appearance of the Christ or that that the best, corrupted, is the worst. If he had, I think his corruptio optimi pessima could have been presented as a form of complementarity. The best and the worse are, in this sense, p ­ roportional—​­the hell that results from trying to produce heaven on earth is exactly scaled to the perverse ambition it embodies. In the Incarnation God gives himself to the world utterly. The Word becomes flesh, available to all as food, as friend, and as freedom from the defensive religious scrupulosity by which people had formerly tried to keep the terrifying sacred at bay. But, once people forget that this “new possibility” has the fleeting and unbiddable character of grace and begin instead to take it as an institutional desideratum, the evil they let loose is proportional to the good they were given. G. K. Chesterton thinks the same thought as Illich when he says that the modern world, insofar as it is “full of wild and wasted virtues,” is, in a perverse way, “far too good.” It evinces, Chesterton says, “the old Christian virtues gone mad”—the good pushed to the point at which it becomes its opposite. Illich’s tragic style of awareness is summed up, finally, in his attitude toward the Church. He viewed himself throughout his life as a loyal and obedient son of

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the Church, and at the same time, he saw the institutional Church as the source of an unprecedented evil. That it should be so was for him, finally, “God’s will.” “Just as He allowed the sin of Adam and Eve with all its consequences,” Illich said, “He accepted the founding of a church which is in this world, even though it is not of this world, and, therefore, will also be a sinful church.” Ultimately, his posture was one of submission. He found inspiration for this stance in the death of Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican monk and civic reformer, burned for heresy in Florence in 1498. Savonarola had, as Illich says, “chase[d] the Medicis out of Florence”— that, not heresy, was his real c­ rime—​­and, as a boy exiled to Florence in 1942, Illich had regarded the reforming monk with “that enthusiasm one can have at that age for rebels.” (One of the commonest portraits of S­ avonarola—​­it appears at the top of his Wikipedia ­page—​­shows a striking resemblance between the two men.) In 1998, Illich got a chance to pay tribute to his boyhood hero when he was asked to lecture at a conference commemorating the 500th anniversary of Savonarola’s execution. He spoke about his predecessor’s understanding of “the two faces of the Church.” Savonarola, Illich said, recognized the church “as the nesting place for evil,” and yet he faced his funeral pyre “with marks of obedience which [were] public, unquestionable and extraordinary.” Relating the events of Savonarola’s last day, Illich called him and the two monks who died with him, “in the fullest, most glorious way, clowns, fools, who knew what they were doing.” And then he added, “I wish I could die that way.” Corruptio Optimi Pessima as Critique The Christian revelation presented, to those who received it, the highest temptation: the truth, complete, final, and universal. This was the temptation that Illich saw repeated in modern institutions: to see themselves as good without limit or contradiction. But of what avail is it to know this: Does recognizing corruptio optimi pessima as the mechanism that has made our world have any practical consequences? I believe that it does. Illich’s “hypothesis” portrays our ostensibly irreligious society as being, in actuality, intensely religious, but in a way that is almost entirely invisible to most of those who practice this religion. This is an insight with the power to radically alter the very terms in which we commonly think about religion. According to Canadian historian of religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the word religion began to take on its contemporary color only in the sixteenth century. “Religion as a discrete category of human activity separable from culture, politics and other areas of life,” Cantwell Smith writes, “is an invention of the modern West.”

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414 / Ivan Illich

Before this modern crystallization, religion meant a disposition, a virtue, and a practice but not a discrete and bounded body of beliefs. Historian John Bossy says the same in his book Christianity in the West, 1400–1700. He argues that during the Middle Ages, religion was inextricable from culture. Only at the time of the Reformation did the idea of religion as a matter of rational belief and private choice begin to take shape. By 1700, he says, this process was relatively complete. By then, he writes, “the world was full of religions, objective social and moral entities characterized by system, principles and hard edges.” Historian and philosopher of science Bruno Latour fills out this picture with his idea that we have, until recently, lived under what he calls “the modern constitution.” This constitution consists of a set of purifying separations that divide nature from society, private from public, the religious from the secular, and so on. Social space is mapped and coordinated, and religion becomes a purely private persuasion with no claim on the secular or public realm. This account is no longer persuasive, as Charles Taylor has shown in his A Secular Age. He calls this story in which religion is forced out of the public sphere and confined to its private quarters a “subtraction narrative”—take away religion and, presto, there’s the secular. His view is that the secular is the child of Latin Christianity and quite unimaginable without this lineage. According to Taylor, Latour, and many other contemporary thinkers, religion has escaped the restrictive definitions characteristic of the modern outlook. Things never really were this way, Latour argues in his We Have Never Been Modern, but now the “modern constitution” is manifestly in shambles, its carefully demarcated categories all bleeding into one another. Society has become the prime determinant of nature, the private has been relentlessly publicized, and the imprint of religion on the secular has become unmistakable. The idea that religion would inevitably fade in the face of ­modernization—​­once a sociological ­axiom—​­has lost its purchase. Religion has “returned”—in both politics and philosophy. What Illich brings to this new situation is his analysis of modern institutional procedures as rituals or liturgies and his demonstration that modern certainties have an ineradicable Christian lineage without which they could never have come to be. This has consequences for both politics and religion. In the case of politics, it argues that our civilization is fed by unconscious sources that shape and rule our actions without our being aware of it. And it argues further that we will only begin to get a grip on the current order when we recognize and begin to explore this unconscious in which the motive power of our civilization lies buried and hidden. In the case of religion, the consequences are equally profound. The word religion is protean, I know, and can be made to cover everything from the priest at

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the altar to the ballplayer who won’t change his socks during a winning streak, but I am speaking here of two things: first, of the religious inheritance that Illich believes is encoded in our institutions and, second, of religion as a perpetually renewed and inextinguishable impulse in human beings. People everywhere, without exception, hold something ­sacred—​­they designate a hallowed ­not-​­to-​­be-​ ­touched center that imparts meaning to the profane field that surrounds it. Theologian Karl Barth, my teacher on this point, speaks of religion as a “yoke” that we put on whenever we try to decide for ourselves “who and what God is.” The temptation of “religion,” when seen in this way, is comparable to what Illich calls the temptation of a­ nti-​­Christ—​­to bring what must begin and end as surprise under administration. Contemporary society continues to bear this yoke, insofar as it is unconsciously motivated by a Christian ideology. What Illich points to, beyond the unmasking of this ideology, is the possibility of returning to the gospel that it corrupts and, therefore, hides. Toward a New Reformation According to Illich’s hypothesis, modernity constitutes a displaced church. This characterization extends to both state and society. The state’s care of its citizens mirrors the church’s care of souls, and the citizen’s bond to fatherland and mother tongue mirrors the faithful Christian’s relation to the church. The church, then, is not just this or that handsome old building with a “heritage designation”; it is the archetypal and overarching form of our sociability. This becomes important in a social formation so deeply divided that those who compose it no longer recognize any common ground. Illich describes the Church in its original form as the site of a celebration that created “a common atmosphere.” This celebration created a community of an unprecedented k­ ind—​­a community open to anyone willing to share in its spirit. But over time this community changed its character. The institution began to eclipse the people who made up the institution; the container began to overshadow the content. Today, the word community is most often applied not to a body created by a sharing of spirits, but to an association united by some common interest or shared ­allegiance—​­one is part of the legal community or the gay community or the local ratepayers’ association. Often such communities are at loggerheads with others of a different persuasion or belonging. There is little vestige of a common atmosphere. Illich’s evocation of a Church that was still improvised by its members becomes suggestive in this context. A ­dis-​­integrated society can only be reintegrated on a common ground. Neither the historical Church nor its doctrines can provide such

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a ground. Quite the contrary, for both the Church and its doctrines are deeply divisive. But Illich’s proposal is that we rewind the history in which these divisions are situated. In William Blake’s prophetic poem “Jerusalem,” there is an excursus headed “To the Christians.” It begins: “I give you the end of a golden string / Only wind it into a ball: / It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate / Built in Jerusalem’s wall.” Illich’s analysis of the Church and its historical fate is, to me, “the end of a golden string.” Once it is rewound into a ball, what will stand before us? The name church is not ­important—​­what is important is its original reference to a unity beyond interest, a communion founded on what is common. Perhaps such a communion must remain nameless or use only provisional and temporary names in a time when a word can pass from originality through cliché to obsolescence almost overnight. In any case, I think Illich, wherever he went, created churches in this free and irreligious sense. “Where two or three are gathered in my name,” Jesus had said, “there am I in the midst of them.” Theologian William Cavanaugh, in a radio program we did together a few years ago, gave me an image with which I will end this chapter. He was trying to explain to his students his idea of the church as a political community (but not a political community in the usual sense), and one of his students said, “That sounds like Ariadne auf Naxos.” The student was referring to an opera by Richard Strauss in which a rich man in Vienna plans a splendid party. First a solemn tragedy is to be performed and then a comedy, and to conclude, there is to be a magnificent display of fireworks. But the director of the tragedy is displeased that his serious work will be followed by clowning and buffoonery, and things get even worse when the rich man’s major-domo tells him that the fireworks must start at nine o’clock sharp, so the tragedy and the comedy will have to be played at the same time. This is what happens: the tragedy unfolds with the clowns in its midst. Cavanaugh thought this was a brilliant image for the church’s proper place and adopted it. The Church, he says, does not perform on “a separate stage”—there is no separate stage, just the one stage of history where we all perform at once. But the Church is like the clowns, or fools of God who let the light of a different story fall into the tragedy as it unfolds. They cannot take charge of the story without becoming part of the tragedy, but they can appear and manifest the comedy, and comedy, as I can remember Northrop Frye saying, is only tragedy with a different ending.

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14

Illich’s Way of Life

I want to plead for the philosophy of technology as an essential element for . . . Christian askesis . . . the acquisition of habits that foster contemplation. —Ivan Illich Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for ­half-​­an-​­hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” —Lewis Carroll, Through the ­Looking-​­Glass

Much of this book has been about Illich’s thought, as he expressed it in writing and in conversation. I have written as a friend, continuing a conversation, and trying always to keep the man himself in view, but I want to stress again, at the end, the inseparability of Illich’s life and work. He was someone for whom thinking and writing cleared a way to live but was not that way of life ­itself—​­that he thought to live rather than living to think might be a way of putting it. The distinction is inexact, of course, since no one lives without thinking or thinks without living, but its intention is to sort out those scholars who spend a lifetime patiently building and refining a body of thought from those for whom thinking is more of a preparation or a clearing away of obstacles. Admired examples of the first category, from my own experience, are Northrop Frye and René Girard, both of whom devoted themselves, in book after book, to carefully thinking through the visionary kernels of insight with which each began. Illich definitely belongs to the second category. In a presentation to an association of Catholic philosophers in Los Angeles in 1996, he says, “I engage philosophy as ancilla,” the Latin word for a serving maid. Such a servant is necessary, he continues, “to avoid blunders on the path to the good life” as well as “to avoid perverting the Gospel.” Elsewhere in this talk he characterizes a specific branch of ­philosophy—​­the philosophy of ­technology—​­as “an essential element for

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Christian askesis.” He then defines askesis as “the acquisition of the habits that foster contemplation” or “conversion to God’s human face.” “Understanding the characteristic features of new artifacts”—the task of the philosophy of ­technology—“has become a necessary preface,” he goes on, “to . . . dar[ing] chaste friendship, intransitive dying and a contemplative life in a technogenic world.” Illich uses the word philosophy here in an expansive rather than a narrowly academic sense, and he assigns it a formidable t­ ask—​­to understand how the technological environment shapes our t­ hinking—​­but he still qualifies it as no more than “a necessary preface.” What matters finally is not philosophy but “conversion to God’s human face,” not the critique that sweeps away “blunders” from the path but the “good life” itself. This was Illich’s view throughout his life as a writer and teacher. He took a similar view of the role of doctrine in Christianity. The dogmas of the Church are important, he said, but only insofar as they “exclude the intrusion of myth” from faith’s journey into “mystery.” Again, knowledge is assigned a crucial but still only negative or preventative role. What Illich calls “fulfillment of the kingdom in the heart” cannot be attained by “the intellectual conviction” that is produced by doctrine, however acutely doctrine may perform its prophylactic function. The kingdom, as “a social reality at a transcendental level,” is not “a community of concepts, images or symbols.” Rather, it is “a communitarian f­orm-​­of-​­life” informed by “faith and messianic hope.” Putting it less theologically, Illich said to me: “Many people have considered the course of a life as a kind of ‘walking on foot,’ or pilgrimage. . . . And my road has been one of friendship. A Christian monk of the Middle Ages said that living with others in community is the greatest penance one can undertake, but that is the way I have taken: to try to maintain fidelity and to bear one another’s impossible way of being.” “To try to maintain fidelity” was Illich’s ideal. In the preceding quotation, he emphasizes the difficulty of bearing with one another. But he put just as strong an accent on the happiness of living with those he loved. “Don’t be afraid of the sweetness,” he told me once, and, though he was speaking of the love of God, I knew he was referring also to the friendships in which one is “conver[ted] to God’s human face.” On the title page of my copy of his In the Vineyard of the Text, there is a Latin inscription in Illich’s hand from Hugh of St. Victor. Illich translates this passage in the book, and it represents him, as well as Hugh, so beautifully that I want to reproduce it here. Writing to his monastic brother Ranulph about charity (caritas), which could equally well be translated in contemporary English as love, Hugh says: Charity never ends. When I first heard this, I knew it was true. But now, Dearest Brother, I have the personal experience of fully knowing that charity never ends. For I was a

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foreigner [Hugh had come to St. Victor, just outside medieval Paris, from Flanders] and met you in a strange land. But the land was not really strange for I found friends there. I don’t know whether I first made friends or was made one. But I found charity there, and I loved it; and could not tire of it for it was sweet to me, and I filled my heart with it and was sad that my heart could hold so little.

The friendship of which Hugh speaks here is distinct from the “interpersonal relationships” of our time. One of the things that distinguish it is that Hugh considers friendship to be inseparable from the love of wisdom. For Hugh, Illich writes, friendship is both “a metaphor” for his “pilgrimage toward paradise” and the means to reach this “hoped for fulfillment.” Another text that Illich loved and often cited, De Spirituali Amicitia (Concerning spiritual friendship), connects friendship directly with the love of Christ and with his presence. In this treatise, which Illich says “shaped his understanding,” Aelred, the abbot of Rievaulx in northern England and a contemporary of Hugh’s, also addresses a fellow monk. “Here we are, you and I,” Aelred begins, “and, I hope, also a third who is Christ.” This “third” is an important figure in Illich’s thought. He/she is Christ but a Christ who may not resemble the watercolor Jesus of the illustrated New Testament. The third, for Illich, was whoever might show up. He liked to keep a candle burning at any significant gathering as a sign of this One, any one, who might come and as “a constant reminder that the community is never closed.” “Whoever loves another loves [Christ] in the person of that other,” Illich says. But Christ is not only the object of the love. He is also, so to speak, its m ­ edium—​­its way, as Jesus said of himself. He is the third who makes possible what is between the two and prevents it from becoming idolatrous, fixated, or merely s­ elf-​­interested. Aelred spoke further of the relationship between Christ and the friend in a letter to Bernard of Clairvaux, whose urging had prompted him to write on friendship in the first place: “Praying to Christ for your friend,” he wrote, “and longing to be heard by Christ for your friend’s sake, you reach out with devotion and desire to Christ. And suddenly and insensibly, as though touched by the gentleness of Christ close at hand, you begin to taste how sweet he is and to feel how lovely he is. Thus, from that holy love with which you embrace your friend, you rise to that love by which you embrace Christ.” Aelred, when he speaks of “rising” from the love of the friend to the love of Christ, is not, in any way, referring to an instrumental relationship. The friend is not a means or a s­ tepping-​­stone. The friend is Christ, according to the metaphorical principle that pervades the New Testament. “I am the vine and you are the branches.”

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“When two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” “Whatever you have done for the least of these my brothers, you have done for me.” These are not likenesses or comparisons; these are i­dentifications—​­two things that are one insofar as each reveals and declares the other. “God only Acts and Is, in existing beings or Men,” says William Blake. And this comes close to the essence of Illich’s Incarnational ­Christianity—​­we love one another in Christ, and we love one another as Christ. Things can only be what they are with reference to what makes them what they are. John Milbank, talking to me about the principle of analogy in medieval theology up to the time of Aquinas, said, “Nothing that’s created exists in itself. It only exists by sharing in the divine reality. So, in that sense, it’s always other to itself. It’s speaking of itself but also of God. By speaking of itself it speaks of something other to itself which is God.” Friendship in Christ follows the same pattern. It moves toward itself by moving away from itself and, in speaking of itself, always speaks of its beginning and end in something other than itself. “We are creatures that find our perfection only by establishing a relationship,” Illich says. The Right Person at the Right Moment Friendship governed what Illich wrote and taught, just as it continues to govern my commentary on what, out of friendship, he gave to me. “Most of my life,” he said, “is really the result of meeting the right person at the right moment and being befriended by him.” He said this with reference to the role his friendship with ­Everett Reimer played in his decision to undertake the phenomenology of compulsory schooling that eventually became Deschooling ­Society—​­Reimer was the chairman of Puerto Rico’s Human Resources Planning Commission when Illich met him in 1956—but it applies to many of his other undertakings as well. Sometimes there was a single i­ nterlocutor—​­ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind was the result of such a conversation with the book’s coauthor, Barry Sanders; sometimes there were many, as one can see from the acknowledgments page in Tools for ­Conviviality; and sometimes what he felt to be an urgent occasion summoned him. But even, in these cases, where a public issue was being engaged, one can often discover that Illich’s work began with some personal encounter or responded to some personal request. And, in the same way that much of Illich’s work grew out of his being befriended “by the right person at the right moment,” so it was with the work of the many people he befriended. I have mentioned already the way in which Uwe Pörksen’s invaluable book, Plastic Words, germinated in conversations with Illich when they were both at the Berlin Wissenschaftskolleg in 1981. Another example is Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie’s equally invaluable Crime Control as

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Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style, which he dedicated to Illich. Christie and Illich were longtime ­friends—​­Christie is one of the crowd of people credited with helping to shape Tools for ­Conviviality—​­and Christie made the dedication because “[Illich’s] thoughts are behind so much of what is formulated here.” Illich’s collaboration with Barbara Duden, which I discussed in chapter 10, is another example. In Illich’s view, friendship expresses “the new dimension of love” that “opens” with the Incarnation and allows me “to choose whom I will love and where I will love.” In the ancient city, friendship was possible only between those who belonged, by birth, to the same civic community and so shared the same ethos. Plato and A ­ ristotle write wonderfully about friendship, but in their world, the number, class, and character of those eligible to become friends were strictly determined and strictly limited. “Then,” says Illich, “comes that major disturber and fool, that historical Jesus of the Gospels, with his story about the Samaritan . . . who is the only one acts as a friend towards a ­beaten-​­up Jew. . . . [He] discloses a new unrestricted ability to choose whom I want for a friend, and the same possibility of letting myself be chosen by whomever wants me.” Friendship was no longer something that could appear only in a given community; it became itself a generator of community and “led in the history of the West to the creation within the Church of new voluntary, ­self-​­chosen forms of life within which friendship could be practiced.” Monasticism was one of these new “forms of life,” and many of the writings on friendship that Illich c­ herished—​­Aelred and Hugh are both e­ xamples—​­grew out of the monastic tradition. But Illich also admired modern forms of Christian community like the C ­ atholic Worker houses inspired by Dorothy Day or the Piccola Famiglia dell’­Annunziata, the little family of the Annunciation, established by his friend Giuseppe Dossetti in Italy. Illich had turned away from the monastic life of the Little Brothers of Jesus after testing his vocation in Tamanrasset in 1959 and concluding that he should accept the more public life to which his intellectual gifts seemed to destine him, but he still aspired to life in community. His way of combining these vocations was to take it as his “task to explore the ways in which the life of the intellect, the disciplined and methodical joint pursuit of clear v­ ision—​­one could say philosophy in the sense of loving t­ ruth—​ ­can be so lived that it becomes the occasion for the kindling and growth of philia.” (Illich, as readers will have noticed, often used Greek and Latin words as a way of avoiding the pitfalls of modern usage, but philia here can be taken as synonymous with friendship as I am using the term.) Illich hoped to kindle friendship in the course of intellectual work and, at the same time, to show that friendship can provide an indispensable context for such work. The two, in his view, go together. “Common investigation” can lead to “truly, deeply committed human ties,” and convivial ­settings—“around a dining table

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or over a glass of wine and not in the lecture hall”—can foster and contextualize “common investigation.” No depreciation of scholarship, or the rigors proper to it, was ­intended—​­Illich always insisted on “research that is public, disciplined, documented and critical.” He wanted, rather, to reunite head and heart and end a divorce that he felt had begun at the time when the first universities were created and scholarship was defined as the precedence of scientia (knowledge) over wisdom. To overcome this split, Illich thought, would require a revival of askesis (asceticism). He used the term only reluctantly because he feared it would suggest ­self-​­mortification and because he believed, as I quoted him earlier, that “the asceticism which can be practiced at the end of the 20th century [will be] something profoundly different from any previously known.” On the other hand, he needed to speak in some way of the renunciations that he felt would be necessary if critique and contemplation were ever to be rejoined. What must be renounced can be seen at work in the contemporary university. Its methods have made it, Illich says, “almost an enemy to the collegial procedure, which I’ve tried to cultivate.” This deformation of the university has been progressive since the twelfth century, in Illich’s view, but like so many other latent or l­ ong-​ ­term trends, it has accelerated in our time with the emergence of the “multiversity.” Among “a number of extremely sticky and persistent . . . academic etiquettes,” Illich particularly criticized “the organization of knowledge into specialized and exclusive disciplines,” but one can add credentialism, professionalization, the instrumentalization of the university curriculum as a ladder to social advancement, and the pursuit of relevance, with its implication of a p ­ re-​­scripted harmony of interests between the university and its world. From the very beginning of his career as an “educator”—an epithet he was often given in his h ­ eyday—​­Illich tried to establish more balanced forms of study. At his institute in Puerto Rico and in the early days of the Center for Intercultural Formation (CIF) in Mexico, explicitly Christian practices of prayer and eucharist were the complement to intellectual work. After CIDOC grew and became more cosmopolitan and Christian celebration could no longer be the sole source of unity, he continued, in more improvised ways, to create friendly settings for critical work and to emphasize the elements of food, wine, and fellowship in bringing about the atmosphere he sought. Wherever Illich was, friends gathered. He created scenes, usually vivid scenes. “When I was younger,” he told me in 1997, “and was offered access to the lecture hall, the public forum, I grabbed it, but always with the idea of bringing together those who took me seriously in more convivial circumstances.” After his lectures in Bremen, during the last ten years of his life, anyone who wished could carry on

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discussion of the evening’s theme over an infinitely expandable “spaghetti” dinner at Barbara Duden’s house. During the years he taught at Penn State U ­ niversity, between 1985 and 1995, there were numerous “living room consultations” that gathered groups of twenty or thirty people for three to five days of serious talk, ­well-​­watered with “ordinary but decent wine” and interspersed with good meals and long walks. (“A good tax lawyer,” Illich recalled, “found a way of making it credible to the IRS that a certain number of cases of [such] wine are my major teaching tool.”) Looking over the meetings that were held in 1988 and 1989, I find subjects ranging from the critique of economics to “The Heart’s Senses in Medieval ­Religiosity.” I attended a number of these gatherings, and while they were never entirely free of residual academic ­vanities—​­why would they be?—they were always conducted in an atmosphere that limited such posturing and often produced continuing connections between the participants. Friendships formed within the wide ambit of Illich’s kindling influence have lasted to this day. (Northrop Frye used to say that he tried to teach from “within the personality” of the authors, like Blake or Milton, that he expounded, and in this sense, those of us who were part of Illich’s circle operated and operate still within Illich’s personality.) This influence also extended into my broadcasting work in a decisive way. Once Illich adopted me, other doors opened. Encounters that began as interviews often continued as friendships. A visit I made to Oslo, under Illich’s auspices, to see Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie in 1992 is a good example. It produced, first of all, a popular and timely t­hree-​­hour radio series called “Crime Control as Industry,” after Christie’s book of that name which was published in the same year as my broadcasts. It began an enduring friendship that took me to Oslo several more times in the years before Christie’s death in 2015 and brought him now and then to my home in Toronto. And it drew me, unexpectedly, into the politics of crime control. In 1995, I got a call from Nils, urging me to come to Oslo again for an international conference he was organizing in the hope of dramatizing the political emergency he perceived in the rapidly rising rates of imprisonment in a number of Western countries, above all the U.S. and the former Soviet republics. This was not convenient, but after years of having almost every door I knocked on open to me, someone was knocking on my door, and I felt I had to say yes. “Who says A must say B,” as Illich said. He also went to Oslo at Christie’s bidding. I then found myself swept up in a t­en-​­hour radio series called “Prison and Its Alternatives” and, eventually, a book called The Expanding ­Prison—​­how else as a writer and broadcaster could I answer Christie’s appeal for help? I was at best a reluctant criminologist, but these were the kinds of adventures into which friendship with Illich could lead.

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Soberly Milking the Sacred Cow Once CIDOC closed its doors in 1976, Illich’s practice of what he called “common investigation” or “pursuit of clear vision” was often conducted on the margins of some university, which paid at least some of the bills. He described his relationship with the universities from which he made his living as “soberly milking that sacred cow”—a good joke but also an accurate description. He was sober and deliberate without ever taking the pretensions of the contemporary university too seriously. What he earned, he shared, and I think a remarkable study could be made of how throughout his life he redistributed money and opportunity. The virtue of enoughness that he preached he also exemplified. He lived in bountiful times, which surely helped, but it was generally true that money was found as the occasion demanded rather than pursued or made an end in itself. Illich regarded friendship as the Christian virtue par excellence, because it responds to the presence of God “in the flesh.” A story he told me in 1997 will illustrate: I was recently in Bologna as a guest of Paolo Prodi [an old friend] . . . [also present] was Romano Prodi, Paolo’s brother, who is currently the Prime Minister of Italy. He was very happy to have me there and took me aside to talk. At one point in our conversation, he asked whether something I had said was not a continuation of prophecy for our time. And I answered him, Romano, the time of prophecy lies behind us. The only chance now lies in our taking this vocation [i.e., prophecy] as that of the friend. This is the way in which hope for a new society can spread. And the practice of it is not really through words but through little acts of foolish renunciation.

This story, once again, connects friendship with renunciation (askesis) or what must be given up if we are to be fully present to one another, but it also makes an interesting link between friendship and prophecy, claiming that these are each expressions, at different historical moments, of the same “vocation.” Prophecy, for Illich, precedes Christ (although he does argue that this vocation was retained in the early Church as a defense against ­anti-​­Christ). It is prophecy, he says, that brings “God’s people” into existence: What makes the ancient Jews unique is that they became a social “we,” an “I” in the plural, around the message that whatever happens in history or can be seen in nature is a foreshadowing, in the sense, that pregnancy foreshadows birth. (I mean pregnancy here in the old sense in which a woman was said to be “expecting” or “in good hope,”

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not the current sense in which the womb has become the mapped and monitored public place in which an embryonic citizen resides.) The prophets of Israel made the astonishing claim that they could step outside the family and tribal context in which tomorrow turns in a circle with yesterday, and instead speak about a tomorrow which will be totally surprising, messianic. It is around the announced Messiah that the historically unique phenomenon of God’s people comes into existence, and the Old Testament is pregnant in this sense with the Messiah. “The whole creation,” the apostle Paul says, “has been, until this time, groaning in labor pains.”

With the appearance of the Christ, “the prophets were fulfilled.” “From that moment on,” Illich says, “any prophetic act or word is not only a hope but faith in the carnal presence of God.” One does not prophesy what is already present. This was true from the first moment of Jesus’ ministry, but in Illich’s view, it is true in our time a fortiori. “Faith in the Incarnation can flower in our time,” he says, “precisely because faith in God is obscured, and we are led to discover God in one another.” This is why Illich told Romano Prodi that “our only chance now” is to channel whatever yearns for prophecy into the practice of friendship and to e­ liminate—“by little acts of foolish renunciation”—whatever stands in its way. Insofar as faith is recognition of “the carnal presence of God,” friendship is the true practice of faith. In friendship are combined the new freedom and the new obligation that Illich believes were disclosed in the Incarnation: our liberty to choose whom we will love and our obligation to maintain fidelity once we have chosen. He hoped not only “to foster the growth of . . . open group[s] of people who are moved by fidelity to each other as persons” but also to dare these friends “to maintain fidelity even if the other one becomes a heavy burden.” This new freedom takes us outside all ­prescription—​­who the friend will be cannot be foreseen according to category, class, or culture. It opens us to relationships that “may appear arbitrary from everyone else’s point of view,” relationships so “deeply personal” that they remain, in his word, “shaded” from the view of all others. “You cannot write the biography of a friendship,” he told me, meaning, I think, you can gain no definitive external view of a friendship, because “friendships run on separate ways that cross and run parallel and cross again,” and no one but the friends themselves can know the why of these converging and diverging paths. On the other hand, when one claims such freedom, betrayal and infidelity take on a new character as sin. “To live outside the law, you must be honest,” as Bob Dylan once sang. Freedom cannot claim a guarantee and still be freedom. It rests only on fidelity, on whether we keep or break faith. Our fidelity will fail, again and again, and sin names not

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just this fault but also the knowledge of forgiveness and renewal. This too is part of friendship. Conditions for Friendship Friendship moves from hand to hand, from person to person. In this sense it bespeaks limitation as well as possibility. A new friend can always appear, but there can only be so many friends before fidelity becomes a pretense. This was one reason, it seems to me, why Illich, finally, outran his celebrity and never really fought back against his excommunication from the ranks of “progressive” thinkers following the bitter feminist reaction against Gender. He could never completely escape the weight of “greatness,” but he was able, in the last period of his life, to sink back into scenes where he could “live with those I love” and respond to the world around him moment by moment. In the years of his fame, he passed as a “social theorist,” and his books were often filed on the sociology shelves of bookstores, but he might just as well be called an ­anti-​­social ­theorist—​­someone who seeks to limit all the ways in which “society” supervenes over individual persons and undermines their “personal relatedness.” This is explicit in the introduction to Tools for Conviviality, where he makes ­self-​­limitation the condition of friendship. “Austerity” . . . has . . . been degraded and has acquired a bitter taste, while for Aristotle or Aquinas it marked the foundation of friendship. In the Summa Theologica, II, II, in the 186th question, article 5, Thomas deals with disciplined and creative playfulness. In his third response he defines “austerity” as a virtue which does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those which are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness. For Thomas, “austerity” is a complementary part of a more embracing virtue which he calls friendship or joyfulness. It is the fruit of an apprehension that things or tools could destroy rather than enhance eutrapelia (or graceful playfulness) in personal relations.

If what finally matters happens ­face-​­to-​­face and “personal relatedness” is the primary site of ­self-​­discovery and ­self-​­creation, a brake is implied on all planning and administration. One is no longer trying to map out the future but only to ­identify and eliminate the barriers and blockages to those relationships from which the future might come if allowed. Planning and provision are prudent to a point but cannot be allowed to foreclose surprise. This view is messianic in the sense that it allows for an unforeseen tomorrow that doesn’t “turn in a circle with yesterday,” but it is not the messianism of the big cinematic Rapture where heaven

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opens and the Lord appears on a white horse, ready “to smite the nations” with the “sharp sword” that “issues from his mouth.” Walter Benjamin’s more modest saying that “every second of time is the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” comes much closer. And to this Illich adds that the Messiah enters not as a blinding light but as a friend. We discover him/her, as Illich says, “in one another.” Friendship was the foundation of politics for Illich. In ancient communities, like the Greek c­ ity-​­states, it had been, he thought, the other way round. There politics had been the ground of friendship and friendship the crowning glory of political life. But “friendship arising from a place and the practices appropriate to it” is not an option for most modern people, Illich said. For us friendship must come first as a ground in which a politics and an ethics might grow. This was his theme in a radio interview he did with his old friend Jerry Brown in 1996. “I do believe,” he told Brown, “that if . . . something like a political life . . . remain[s] for us, in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship.” “Community life if it exists at all today,” he went on, “. . . is in some way the consequence of friendship cultivated by each one who initiates it.” This is not how democracy is usually understood, as he admitted to Brown, saying that “it goes beyond anything which people usually talk about,” but he still insisted that “each one . . . is responsible for the friendships he can develop” and that “society will be [only] as good as the political result of these friendships will be.” His remarks to Romano Prodi strike the same note: only from friendship can “hope for a new society spread.” The commitment to what moves hand to hand, face to face, and person to person is constant. A good society is one in which we are turned toward one another and not toward idols that deflect our attention. But we turn toward one another, he insists, as Christ and in Christ, not as ends in ourselves. This would just be to idolize the friend. Illich’s practice as a teacher, as well as the content of his teaching, refers entirely to “the third who is Christ.” His critical work was intended to demolish whatever hides, deflects, or substitutes itself for this presence. His positive work, as a sower of friendships, was focused on “pursu[ing] truth within the horizon of a ‘we’ that is truly a plural ‘I,’ a ‘we’ that is arbitrary, that is unique, that slowly emerges [and] that cannot be put into any class.” Friendship and Writing The importance of friendship, and the communities that it generates, is also a key to understanding Illich’s practice as a writer. He introduced the first collection of his writings to be ­published—​­The Church, Change and Development (1970)—with

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an open letter to Jim Morton, then the director of the Urban Training Center, which issued the book. The Urban Training Center was an institution with which Illich had been closely ­connected—​­he speaks in his letter of “us at the UTC”—and Morton, later the dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, was a friend. Illich tells Morton, in this letter, that each of the papers in the book was “meant for an audience . . . people into whose faces I could look.” He goes on to express the hope that readers will understand that they are now holding a book of ­essays—​­he says “gropings”—that have been abstracted from these unique contexts and made deceptively permanent. This was a lifelong preoccupation. The recorded voice and even the amplified voice were often depreciated in a similar way. In our radio interviews in 1988, he speaks of what we are doing as “a public intercourse exhibition” and says that he is willing to display himself to strangers in front of the “keyhole” represented by my microphone only out of love for me. Later he speaks of the radio documentaries I will eventually compose as “this mosaic we’re making out of stones broken from readings and writings which were set in a different context.” At the end of the 1997 interviews that make up the main text of The Rivers North of the Future, he is still marveling, ruefully, that “totally unknown people, perhaps after my death, will listen to these voices” and think to know us by our “digitalized utterance[s]” without ever seeing “our faces or the changes in your smile or frown.” ­Friendship—​­a face into which he could l­ook—​­was always the ideal, even if circumstances and conflicting objectives often demanded compromise. Illich, at least in aspiration, was an oralist who deprecated an “acoustic climate” in which “the spoken word” and its “­place-​­engendering power” are drowned out by the recorded, amplified, and broadcast voice. In a paper composed in 1990 called “The Environmental Threat to the Survival of the Voice,” he says: For a quarter of a century, I have tried to avoid using a microphone, even when addressing a large audience. I use it only when I’m on a panel, or when the architecture of the auditorium is so modern that it silences the naked voice. I refuse to be made into a loudspeaker. I refuse to address people who are beyond the reach of my voice. I refuse to address people who are put at an acoustic disadvantage during the question period because of my access to a microphone. I refuse, because I treasure the balance between auditory and visual presence, and reject the phony intimacy which arises from the distant speaker’s overpowering “whisper.”

There is certainly an element of bravado ­here—​­a hostile reader might even say ­hypocrisy—​­from a man whose reputation was built on the worldwide d ­ issemination

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of his voice and image through modern media. Illich could not have possibly intervened in “public discussion” in the way he did. nor entertained the hope he expressed in his writings of the 1970s that a “political majority” could be assembled for his proposals to deschool, decelerate, and demedicalize. had he not been able to throw his voice far beyond its “naked” capability. Still I take him seriously. I have seen too many people fall under the mystifying spell of “the distant speaker’s overpowering whisper” not to. As with so many of Illich’s provocations, I think he has to be seen as offering a way of thinking that can potentially begin to rectify the current disproportion between ethereal voices and actual ones rather than a rule of conduct or a pat solution to a “problem.” However circumstances shaped his practice, he wanted to express his preference for the dialogic and interpersonal over the amplified and decontextualized word. Here, Illich was pulled in two directions. In one of his first published essays, he had reproached his fellow Catholics with “lack of missionary spirit.” Faith not shared is not faith, he said. This pushed him, as he said, to “grab” the podium when it was offered, to speak far beyond “the reach of his [unaided] voice,” and to write for mass audiences. On the other hand, many things he said over the years suggest that he essentially agreed with Plato’s view of writing as the antithesis of dialogue, a petrified speech able only to say the same thing over and over again. “Once a thing is put in writing,” says King Thamus to the god who has invented writing in Plato’s Phaedrus, “the composition . . . drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people and not address the wrong.” Illich may also have seen the quite contrary truth in Jesus’ parable of the sower where the Word is disseminated far and wide despite only occasionally falling into “good soil,” but he more commonly portrayed himself as an oralist, hostile to all forms of amplification and reproduction. In Berkeley in 1982, when his permission was sought to have his response to his critics ­recorded—​­admittedly a fraught ­occasion—​­he declared that “to be taped is to be raped.” (The remark became part of his legend, but it was a stricture happily never applied to me.) On another occasion he said to my wife Jutta, playfully but not pointlessly, “Think of all the harm I did with my books.” One response to this predicament was to write, as he did, in a formal, compact style that resisted easy misappropriation. His books were generally short, spare, and rhetorically refined. Another was to take the view that texts are only valuable and useful as seeds or starting points. In his letter to Jim Morton, when he speaks of each essay as a deliverance to “people into whose faces I could look,” he goes on to say that each one “attempted to question the value of a context within which we think, rather than . . . to state and solve a puzzle.” To successfully

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question a context of thought, he goes on, does not mean that we have either solved a problem or generated a definitive “new paradigm.” Rather, we have “open[ed] a horizon on which new paradigms for thought can appear.” In a passage I quoted earlier, he then compares this opening of new horizons to leav[ing] home on a pilgrimage,” and not “the pilgrimage of the West which leads over a travelled road to a famed sanctuary” but rather “the pilgrimage of the Christian East which does not know where the road might lead and the journey end.” The clear implication is that no “paradigm of thought” is ever definitive or final. “I Am No Theologian” Historian Todd Hartch, in The Prophet of Cuernavaca, his book about Illich, has argued that “most” of what Illich wrote after withdrawing from Church service in 1969 had “a hidden purpose.” Illich, he claims, “camouflaged his theology” and used “social and political critique as a sort of code.” He argues further that this obscure motive resulted in a “lack of lucidity.” “Many of his friends and supporters,” Hartch writes, “longed for the day when he would produce a clear, direct, and simple speech or text, but he never did.” I have already said that I find this account partial, obtuse, and strangely unsympathetic, especially when compared with the generally sympathetic character of the rest of Hartch’s text. Here I only want to add that I think the figure of friendship that I have been developing, along with Illich’s qualified distrust of writing, provides a better basis for understanding Illich’s work than accusing him of an inept and clouded esotericism that confused even his friends. (Illich did a couple of times intimate that when he wrote about schools he was really writing about the Church, but I regard these remarks as extravagances that are contradicted, above all, by the text of Deschooling Society.) Illich’s first studies of the Puerto Rican school system in the 1950s led him to the conclusion that he was facing “structured injustice.” Poor Puerto Ricans, he came to understand, were being sold the lie that learning is a product of teaching. By a cruel double stroke, they were being deprived of their native capacity to learn and, at the same time, being made to believe that their disadvantages were their own fault. Illich certainly believed that this system descended quite directly from the Church, but charity alone would have determined him to oppose it, with or without this lineage. School limits what people can do for themselves and one another by routing all inquiry and all opportunity through the institution. In denouncing such a system, Illich can be seen to be acting both as a friend and as one who clears a space for friendship. The school as a “radical monopoly” absorbs attention and imagination as well as physical and financial resources.

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It prevents people depending on one another by making them depend on the institution. It hides abundance by fostering scarcity. No hidden motive need be invoked to account for Illich’s ­opposition—​­friendship suffices. In saying what I have just said, I am not trying to refute the idea that Illich was “doing theology in a new way,” as his friend Lee Hoinacki claimed. Theology interprets the word (logos) of God (theós), and I have no doubt that this was what Illich was doing. But, insofar as he was doing it in a genuinely new way, as H ­ oinacki said, it may not have much resembled the theology that Hartch thinks is “hidden” in Illich’s books. Illich himself assented to Hoinacki’s characterization but, at other times, hotly denied that he was a theologian, telling me at one point. “I am no theologian [and] nobody can tell me that I am.” The apparent contradiction is resolved by disentangling the very different senses of the word theologian that are at play here. Yes, Illich was “doing theology” insofar as he was trying to expose the Christian ideology at work in modern institutions and to subject these institutions to a theologically informed analysis that recognized their liturgical, ­myth-​­making character. But, at the same time, he was “no theologian” because he disclaimed the authoritative position implied by the name in the Catholic tradition. He refused, he said, to “start from revelation which you must accept before you can follow me” but instead chose “to write as a historian curious about the undeniable historical consequences of Christian belief.” “What I want to cultivate, in myself, and with friends,” he said, “is . . . powerlessness”—a quality he sharply distinguished from “impotence,” the first being a refusal, the second merely a lack. He rejected the title of theologian insofar as it indicated a position of power. In the same way, he refused to prescribe for society generally, restricting himself, as he said to proscription rather than prescription. Illich had no positive program. There was no master plan for the reconstruction of education, just a call for its disestablishment. For the rest he trusted in what he called “the extraordinary creativity of people” and stuck to describing all that stands in the way of people being able to exercise their talents. Whether he is called a negative theologian or a negative sociologist makes little difference in the end. He was acting as a friend, one who can’t necessarily tell you what to do but may sometimes be able to tell you what not to do. This negative form of social analysis is no small or inessential task, even if does show a certain reticence or humility. Illich made this clear when he told the American Catholic Philosophical Association that even though philosophy is only “ancillary” to “conversion to God’s human face,” this ancillary function is absolutely crucial and indispensable. We live in a world, he said, where “things are what ‘matter’” because “things are forever at the center of ­belief-​­shaping rituals.”

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“[The] world is now a ­man-​­made thing,” and the manufactured elements of which it is made are now “charged by design with intentional symbolic loads.” It follows that the very possibility of conversion, and “the acquisition of habits that foster contemplation,” depends on our ability to see through the symbolic “halo” that makes technological objects “subtly irresistible, so that we become addicted to them.” Whether he was dealing with cars or computers, texts or toilets, philosophy of technology was always Illich’s field, and he practiced it, he said, as “an essential element for askesis, and specifically for Christina askesis.” This, I think, says plainly what was Christian about his teaching and writing without supposing any more obscure motive. His way of sharing his faith was rooted in his g­ ifts—​­his analytical penetration along with his sparkling and original way with ­words—​­and he used these gifts in iconoclastic (­image-​­breaking) critiques intended to dispel institutional and technological mystiques. The idea, ultimately, was always to allow “individuals [to] accept . . . the invitation to see in everybody whom they choose the face of Christ.” As I pointed out earlier, many of Illich’s early essays and lectures were addressed to Christian audiences with whom he could at least assume certain starting points. After he formally suspended his priesthood in 1969, he often spoke to people who did not share his faith. Late in his life he was surprised to discover that almost no one in his class in Bremen could even recognize the phrase “on earth as it is in heaven” from the Lord’s ­Prayer—​­the prayer with which Jesus answered his disciples’ request that he “teach [them] to pray.” This was so striking that he actually took a survey and discovered that only seventeen of the two hundred people present were familiar with the prayer. But even from the beginning of his experiment in priesthood outside the Church, he set himself the task of making arguments intelligible to those who did not share his faith. This is why I have insisted that he had no hidden purpose. “Doing theology in a new way” consisted precisely in this task: to reveal “the undeniable historical consequences of Christian belief,” not to write in secret ciphers. He may sometimes have “shroud[ed] his ultimate motive,” as he told the Catholic philosophers, but, in my view, this expressed only discretion, not deception. Illich himself sometimes wondered whether he had gone too far is his attempt never to appear as “a proselytizer, a f­ undamentalist—​­or worse, a Catholic theologian.” Once when he was staying with his friends Sajay Samuel and Samar Farage in State College, Pennsylvania, he received a visit from Islamic scholar William Chittick, also a friend. During an evening’s conversation, Chittick asked Illich why he thought he had not been listened to. The question passed, but during the

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night, Illich later told Samuel, he woke up laughing. If he had not been listened to anyway, then what had been the point of his conscientious effort to construct his arguments without reference to his faith? This was certainly a profound l­ aughter—​ ­the divine humor is deep, as Illich ­knew—​­but I think nonetheless that his sudden apprehension in the night grasped only one side of a complicated question. Faith, first of all, is known more by its fruits than its professions, and, in this sense faith was implicit in everything Illich did. Faith, moreover, is not in our ­power—​­it is “in its root,” Illich says, “a gift.” And because faith, as a gift, is “either there or not there,” independently of our wills, it “cannot be the basis for an ethical imperative.” Illich could neither have conferred faith on his readers and listeners nor have made himself better understood by appealing to what they either didn’t have or didn’t recognize that they had. (There are, as Simone Weil says, “implicit forms of the love of God,” and atheism may sometimes be a “purification” that brings the atheist nearer God than the ­self-​­satisfied “believer.”) Recognizing all the ironies, paradoxes, and misadventures to which Illich’s laughter in the night paid tribute, I would still rather ascribe his relative reticence about his faith after 1969 to ­tact—​­a word that I hope conveys a certain feel for situations as well as respectful holding ­back—​­and also to a salutary discipline that he imposed on himself. By salutary I mean that in order to make himself understood beyond the shrinking boundaries of professed Christianity, Illich had to study and to emphasize the manifest historical consequences of Christian faith and to demonstrate that “the ­Incarnation . . . represents a turning point in the history of the world for believer and ­non-​­believer alike.” This also touches the point made above about philosophy of technology as a necessary askesis or “antecedent” to the flowering of faith. Again Illich’s work appears as a preparation for faith or the creation of a clearing for faith and therefore as a practical exercise of faith rather than a veiling of it. In “The Vanishing Clergyman,” an essay he first drafted in 1959, Illich had asked: “May we pray for an increase of priests who choose ‘radical’ secularization? [and] who leave the Church in order to pioneer the Church of the future?” (I know Illich later cursed the future as “a m ­ an-​­eating idol,” but I believe he was then talking about the shadow of utopia on the present and not the unknown and untested ­possibility—​­the future “north of the future”—that he wanted to evoke in “The Vanishing Clergyman.”) What can “radical secularization” mean if not a naked, undefended plunge into the saeculum, the present age, taking “nothing for [the] journey,” as Jesus told his disciples when he sent them out to preach? What can “the Church of the future” be but a Church quite unlike the one we know? Perhaps in time understanding of religion will shift away from the prevalent picture

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of exclusive clubs that provide “identity” to those who hold a membership card. Perhaps the whole modern dichotomy between religion as a sphere of irrational and unaccountable “belief ” and a public sphere where evidence and rational argument supposedly hold sway will be replaced by a more nuanced and less polemical picture. Then I think it will be easier to understand a man who deployed the philosophy of technology as a form of “Christian askesis”—who practiced theology in the territory usually claimed by sociology, who spoke of blasphemy and hoped to be understood “as an historian and not a theologian,” and who sought “the human face of God” outside all religious enclosure. He took the way in which he told Romano Prodi that he saw our “only chance”—the way of friendship. Many people entered into communion with Ivan Illich without being able to make the same doctrinal affirmations that he did. Does celebration have to be called Christian in order to be Christian? Or does if flourish better in our time under the deprivation of ­namelessness—​­a “no one’s rose,” in the image of Illich’s beloved Paul Celan? Illich’s Reception I have tried to show that Illich is best understood not as a covert theologian but as a friend and as an evangelist of a new ­kind—​­an evangelist for that “church of the future” of which he spoke. This ­stance—​­tactful, tentative, and utterly attuned to its unprecedented ­circumstances—​­was frequently misunderstood during his lifetime. The hundreds of obituaries that appeared in newspapers from around the world after he died suggested that he had brushed against the social imaginary of his time as something like a fabulous rumor. The New York Times saw him as a ­has-​­been, headlining their “tribute”: “Priest Turned Philosopher Whose Views Drew Baby Boomers in the 70’s.” The Times of London mourned a holy man who had “lived most of his later life . . . in a mud hut . . . just outside Mexico City.” The Times also claimed that he had acquired a fluent knowledge of Greek in a single day from a hotel ­gardener—​­a supernatural feat that accorded well with its picture of Illich as a saint. In other places he was a “renowned sociologist,” a “culture critic,” a “provocative religious radical,” and even a “pioneer of liberation theology,” though Illich, in fact, had dissented from liberation theology. One can trace the same pattern of incomprehension and mistaken assumption through the reception history of Deschooling Society, Illich’s most widely discussed book. Those who recognized the “mystic,” like Neil Postman, missed the practical dimension in Illich’s critique; those who appreciated this practical dimension missed the anthropological depth in Illich’s view of schooling as a mythopoetic ritual; and almost nobody took seriously

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the idea that he was making a constitutional p ­ roposal—​­to disestablish school systems rather than abolish them. I can think of no reviewer who appreciated the full scope of the work. Illich clearly puzzled many of his contemporaries. One obvious reason was his many contradictions. He was, at once, a mandarin and an anarchist, superbly proud and utterly humble, a critical intellectual and a prayerful pilgrim, a man of tradition and “a pioneer of the church of the future.” I can vividly remember my own surprise when I first found out that Illich wasn’t quite the man I had initially taken him for. It was the fall of 1970, and he had agreed to address a t­ each-​ ­in on “international development” that some friends and I had organized. Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister and someone whom Illich knew personally, had then just declared martial law in response to the kidnapping by the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) of the British trade consul and the minister of labour for the province of Q ­ uebec—​­a reaction that almost everyone I knew deplored and had demonstrated against. I had gone to the airport to meet I­ llich—​­in a b ­ eaten-​­up car that suited my style at the time but certainly wouldn’t be allowed on the road ­today—​­and, on the drive back, I expressed my opposition to Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measure Act, confident that the man I thought of as a “radical,” like me, would agree. Instead he astonished me with a wholehearted defense of Trudeau’s draconian policy, saying that Trudeau had been wise to apply sudden and excessive force rather than temporizing with the FLQ’s ­terrorism—​­a view that seems a lot more plausible to me today than it did in 1970. Seeing my discomfiture, he went on to say that he was much more conservative than might appear from the vogue he was then enjoying in “progressive” circles. (It would be a stretch to say Illich ever got much of a hearing with the New Left, insofar as it advocated political revolution and therefore thought of Illich’s “institutional revolution” as “reformism” or, worse, an apology for cutbacks in government services, but he was certainly, for a time, the darling of the devotees of cultural revolution.) This was when he joked with me that he appeared radical only because his orthodoxy was so total, so antique, and so unfamiliar as to seem ­avant-​­garde­—a harbinger of the movement that John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, and their friends, a generation later, would call “radical orthodoxy.” Illich also emphasized this throwback quality when he was interviewed by his friend political theorist Douglas Lummis during the 1980s. Answering a question about how his political thought should be characterized, Illich told Lummis that, among the available labels, he would accept the name anarchist as an approximate fit but that his preference would be the designation his friend Paul Goodman gave himself in his

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last book, The New ­Reformation, which Goodman subtitled Notes of a ­Neolithic ­Conservative. This name does well at capturing Illich’s view of the past as an anchor and a standard, an exemplar and a “remedy”—a term he used with Lummis to indicate the use of the past as a counterweight to “the categories of the social sciences and politics which in the last two centuries have become increasingly utopian” and now have “their frameworks resting partly in the future.” However, it may hide somewhat the “radical,” modernist, ­self-​­invented side of ­Illich—​­the part of him that could say, for example, when calling for a “new asceticism,” that he had in mind something “profoundly different from any[thing] previously known” or the invocation in Tools for Conviviality of a completely reimagined and retooled modernity. On Contradiction I want to conclude this chapter by arguing that Illich’s apparent contradictions evince an exemplary style of thought rather than a careless disregard for consistency. In philosophy, since the time of Aristotle, contradiction has been taken as a sure sign of untruth. According to the principle or even law of ­non-​­contradiction, contradictory statements cannot both be t­ rue—​­A cannot, at once, be A and ­not-​­A. A countercurrent of mystics and rebel philosophers has disputed this principle, but it remains conventional as well as philosophical wisdom that one ought not to believe what the White Queen in Through the Looking-Glass calls impossible things. Faith, however, does not obey philosophy’s rules. This begins with the Incarnation on which Illich’s life and teaching centered. “That God could be man can be explained only by love,” Illich says. “Logically, it’s a contradiction.” Many other contradictions follow. The Gospels, as I’ve already shown, are full of opposing and seemingly incompatible characterizations and injunctions: tell no one/tell everyone; do your alms in secret/don’t hide your light under a bushel; Jesus is a judge/Jesus is not a judge; the passion of the Christ is ­pre-​­scripted and inevitable/Jesus’ teaching might have carried the day. These are not trivial or superficial discordances; they are major violations of the law of ­non-​ ­contradiction. But instead of insisting on this mysterious and puzzling character and treating the sentences of Jesus as koans designed to confound the mind intent on perfecting its knowledge, the Church increasingly sought reconciliation with philosophy, as defined by the principle of ­non-​­contradiction. Étienne Gilson sums up “the spirit of medieval philosophy” as the transformation of “the truth that is believed . . . into the truth that is known [as] a body of rational truths.” But rationality is defined by its internal consistency, while the Gospel, as we have seen, is a tangle of contradictions.

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It might be objected, at this point, that in trying to characterize Illich as one who embraces contradiction, I am overlooking his description of himself as “a pupil of Aquinas,” that great harmonizer of philosophy and faith. As a pupil of Aquinas, Illich says that he seeks “understanding through faith” and “faith through understanding”—the very formula for the reconciliation of faith and r­ eason—​­and even goes so far as to say that “the foundations of my entire perceptual mode” were laid in his study of Aquinas with Jacques Maritain. This is true, as far as it goes, but Illich also speaks of Aquinas as “a magnificent shell” and tells the story of how he shocked René Voillaume, one of the founders of the Little Brothers of Jesus, by telling him that he read Aquinas not for the truth but as “a linguistic exercise, a beautiful walk . . . through mental cloisters.” On another occasion he told me that “Thomism is like a delicate phase, something glorious but apt to be broken when it is moved out of its time.” So I don’t think Illich should be understood as a Thomist but rather as someone who gratefully and wholeheartedly acknowledged his formation within the Catholic tradition. In his remarks on Aquinas as the foundation of his mode of thought, he goes on to say that this “architecture” had made him “intellectually free” to move between the medieval and the modern and even into other ­civilizations—​­he mentions “the world of Islam”—“without getting dispersed.” Freedom seems to me the keynote here. Illich utterly belonged to his tradition, but in belonging to it so completely, he was also free to go beyond it. Contradiction is one of the names for the equivocal character of the Christian revelation. Throughout a lifetime of study, Illich saw “the same mysterious pattern repeated.” “Again and again,” he says, “a gift of grace was transformed into a modern horror.” The best became the worst, and this ambivalent character was innate and inevitable. It was not just a knot to be untied or a problem to be solved but a tension to be endured. That is why the highest goods for Illich are always on the order of humor, balance, and awareness and why he compares faith to “getting” a joke. Contradiction, on this reckoning, is not a fault in ­thought—​­a sign of untruth. It is rather, as Simone Weil says, “the criterion of the real.” The Cross, with its opposed arms, is an image of contradiction. Illich is contradictory because only a “Zaunreiter” (a fence rider), as he called himself in his address to the Catholic philosophers, can remain upright in a world as forgetful of where it has come from and where it is going as our “late modernity.” He stands, he says, “with one foot . . . in the tradition of Catholic philosophy” and the other “dangling on the outside . . . heavy with mud clots and scented by exotic herbs through which I have tramped.” He imagines himself as “walking the watershed,” observing the “profoundly different . . . and contradictory worlds” lying on either

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side. In Gender, which contains Illich’s most sustained reflection on ways of knowing, he denounced what he called “central perspective,” the term by which he indicated the unified and “objective” view that is characteristic of modern science. This standpoint, as a number of historians of science have concluded, is borrowed from God. Science begins, according to Isabelle Stengers and Ilya Prigogine, as “the prophetic announcement of the world seen from a divine . . . point of view.” “The world,” as Illich says, “is taken out of God’s hands [and] placed into the hands of people.” The divine point of view that Stengers and Prigogine say modern science has appropriated depends on a certain view of G ­ od—​­as the great intellectual who, in effect, thinks up ­creation—​­and a certain view of the ­world—​­as a unified, consistent, and transparent entity. A philosophy of contradiction brings both assumptions into question. If God appears, from our point of view, as a coincidentia oppositorum, as Nicholas of Cusa supposes, then no unified or synoptic view is available to us. (“I begin, Lord, to behold thee,” says Cusanus, “in the door of the coincidence of opposites which the angel guardeth that is set over the entrance into Paradise.”) Similarly, if contradiction is a condition of the world’s existence and each thing is defined and sustained by its opposite, then no comprehensive view of things is possible. Illich never went quite so far as I am venturing here, but his remarks on “central perspective” in Gender certainly deprecate what he sees as modern science’s pretension to perceive the ­whole—​­to grasp things at once and in their entirety. And when he says, likewise, that doctrine is useful only insofar as it excludes myth from “faith’s journey into mystery,” I think he can be read as one who understood the crucial part played by “unknowing” in that journey. “As long as you think about the world as a whole,” he says, “the time for human beings is over.” We cannot see everything all at once, and the blasphemous illusion that we can is as fatal to our policy, in the largest sense of the word, as it is to our humility. (I use blasphemous here in Illich’s “historical” sense of ascribing to ourselves what had once pertained to God.) Contradiction then is intrinsic to Illich’s thinking and to his stance. (I hope it is clear by now that I am using the word contradiction here in a broad sense that includes not just literal ­contra-​­diction but also overlaps with what Illich calls complementarity and sometimes proportionality as well as other forms of opposition.) It was neither flamboyance nor disdain for petty consistency that made him at once an ­ultra-​­modernist and a deep traditionalist, a mandarin and an anarchist, but rather the view that thought can only stand upright and walk on two legs. Modernity’s utopian simplification of existence can only be undone, he thought, by a thoroughgoing critique of that unity of knowledge that science

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claims to embody, by both its method and its point of view. From the shadow of the I­ ncarnation to “the multiple balance” that characterizes conviviality to the certainty of nemesis when tools and institutions pass the point at which paradoxical counterproductivity sets in, Illich thinks in opposed pairs that condition each other and depend on each other. “I am ‘I’ in the deepest and fullest sense in which it is given to me to be ‘I,’” Illich says, “precisely because you, by allowing me to love you, give me the possibility to be correlative (­co-​­relative) to you, to be . . . proportional to you.” The very gift of myself comes from another, and for this to occur, as I have said before, there must first be an other. This necessity implies a stringent limitation of our knowledge. It requires me to more or less abandon the scientific and sociological abstractions by which I think to grasp, locate, and sum up the other and to recognize a particularity that these abstractions not only fail to touch but actively conceal. “Only the singular,” says Cusanus, “has actual existence.” There is a connection, it seems to me, between the idea of contradiction as a bar to comprehensive and synoptic knowledge and Illich’s idea that free relatedness completes and crowns the sense of proportionality or complementarity characteristic of all premodern societies, where “nothing can exist without being . . . ­proportional to something else.” In each case, the one not only depends on the other but depends on the other’s existence not being absorbed in some overmastering unity or eclipsed by it. Knowledge is not renounced, but a single, commanding perspective, with its capacity to rise above the other, clearly is. Living in the light is connected, intimately and intrinsically, with living in the dark. We can understand only if we first sacrifice the G ­ od-​­like ambition to overstand and recognize that the there are realities for which only “analogy, metaphor and poetry can reach.” Illich, seen from the standpoint I’ve taken in this chapter, was trying to specify the conditions for friendship and, above all, to say what must be renounced for it to thrive. Those who didn’t believe him when he said he was trying to revive an ­art—​­of living, of dying, of suffering, of f­riendship—​­and instead analyzed his work as a series of unsatisfactory “solutions” to various contemporary “problems” were often confused and dismayed once the masking effect of his exotic style and appearance wore off. I’ve described these misunderstandings throughout this book. The feminists of Berkeley thought they were being bullied by a European maître à penser when he lectured on gender there in 1982. Francine du Plessix Gray, in her 1970 profile of Illich for The New Yorker, thought she detected in Illich’s opposition to development “the aristocrat’s sentimental ­attachment—​ ­recalling Tolstoy’­s—​­for cultures of poverty untainted by bourgeois aspiration.”

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Liberation theologians were put off by his insistence that the Church must remain outside politics, even while “taking the moral stance which corresponds to the vocation implied in the Gospel.” Political radicals who were drawn to CIDOC disliked Illich’s emphasis on what he called “le bon ton . . . our basically correct behavior.” Canadian scholar/activist Ursula Franklin, though an admirer, thought that he “pontificated on things in which he had no participation.” “I could identify with Illich,” she said to me once, “but I have no idea whether Illich could identify with me.” Neil ­Postman thought him “a mystic . . . a utopian . . . and an authoritarian,” claiming that deschooling was a utopia, presented as if it were a practical policy proposal, while remaining, as something that had never existed and could never exist, “invulnerable to criticism.” Todd Hartch, as we have seen, thinks he was writing a veiled theology that even his closest associates didn’t really understand. Illich’s writings can, I’m sure, be disorienting for those who are looking for plain words about how this or that problem is to be fixed. His ­effects—​­by turns poetical, aphoristic, scholastic, and ­satirical—​­are various and original, and the genre in which, at a given moment, he is writing can be hard to determine for those who like their sociology and theology in distinct and clearly marked packages. Someone so utterly contemporary is not expected to consort so familiarly with Aelred of Rievaulx or Hugh of St. Victor or to mix his scholasticism with so mordant a sarcasm. Perhaps the old English word wit, insofar as it combines sense of humor with intellectual penetration, best sums up his style for me. What I admire in Illich’s sentences is their balance, their pithiness, and their extraordinary precision. In his last years, he dared to show himself to the public, through me and other friends, in unrehearsed conversation, but up to that time his utterances were very carefully crafted and often said exactly what they were meant to s­ ay—​­not more, not less. Added to this was a power of comprehension that I can only call clairvoyance, since it was a kind of a­ ll-​­at-​­once apprehension of the character of his times. My wife, Jutta, on first reading Gender, put down the book and asked me, in a tone of astonishment, “How does he know these things?” It’s a good question. She answered herself: “He’s like a bird cocking his head this way and that to take everything in.” His colleague and friend Sajay Samuel said of Gender that, from its pages, he could “see his grandmother’s house” in south India. The story of the boy under the table, listening, comes to mind again. He kept the same alert, tentative, curious disposition all his life and so sensed what was going on in his times in a way that went beyond the usual pathways of sociological analysis or “cultural criticism.” There are three points that I would like to reiterate in concluding this sketch of Illich’s way of life of life as a thinker, writer, and weaver of communities. The

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first is the iconoclastic and ancillary character of his work. It is always about what must be renounced, broken, or set aside before one can enter into those “communitarian forms of life” in which he felt that “the human face of God” was revealed. In this sense, his work is a preparation, not a completion, a way rather than a destination. One enters as he says on a “pilgrimage” that leads “not to a famed sanctuary” but by a way in which one “does not know where the road might lead or the journey end.” The second is that his work should be understood not as a “hidden” or “camouflaged” theology but as theology practiced in a new way for a new era in which the consequences of the institutionalization of the Christian Gospel are fully manifest and religion as a life apart, a separate sphere, no longer tenable. Finally I think he should be taken at his word and read as a ­friend—​­the only vocation that is open to us, as he remarked to Romano Prodi, in a world in which the truth has already been revealed and already corrupted and now lies buried beneath the weight of these deformations.

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Epilogue The Art of Suffering In Limits to Medicine, Illich argued that one of the casualties of modern medicine’s promise of comprehensive care has been what he called “the art of suffering.” Implanting the expectation that all suffering can and, eventually, will be relieved, he said, undermines those personal and cultural capabilities that made suffering bearable and meaningful in the past. Suffering itself does not end. On the contrary, he stressed the many new and unaccustomed forms of suffering that inevitably result from the errors, oversights, and dashed hopes generated by biomedicine. Rather, it loses its dignity. As something that, ideally, ought not to have occurred, it becomes an anomaly, a mere glitch in a system not yet perfect but decisively aimed at perfection. This results, he wrote, in “a progressive flattening out of personal virtuous performance.” The word suffering itself becomes “almost useless” because any positive use of it to “designate a realistic human response” suggests only “superstition . . . ­masochism or . . . condescension.” Illich’s book often puzzled its ­readers—​­there were many, as he predicted, who could not fathom his lament for “the art of suffering.” And if one starts from the assumption that the only available positions are for or against, then someone who issues such a lament and depreciates indiscriminate “­pain-​­killing” must, necessarily, be for suffering. But Illich didn’t see it that way. He believed rather that suffering is part of the human condition. Existence itself is suffered inasmuch as it is something that we are given and not something we make. The art of suffering, in this sense, takes in more than the capacity to tolerate pain, disease, or disability. It is a way of taking t­hings—​­an art of enjoyment as much as an art of ­endurance—​­a respect for the “givenness” of existence. This emphatically does not mean never trying to mitigate and relieve pain. What is at issue is the imminent threat that this quality of givenness will be snuffed out altogether and that we

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will then find ourselves in a second, entirely artificial creation. This is why Illich feared the promise, however specious, of a treatment for every ill. If the world is ours to make as we see fit and every problem sooner or later has a solution, then whatever merely arrives, without authorization, must be suspect. Illich wanted to preserve the possibility of being surprised, and he wanted to allow what occurs to show, in time, a meaning that might not be immediately evident. This requires that a balance be maintained between nature and artifice, freedom and control, what arrives unbidden and what comes with the proper credentials. If suffering is automatically to be alleviated, disease to be “battled,” then one loses the ability to test what arrives for its personal meaning. During his final years Illich gave exactly the sort of “virtuous performance” that he had said, in Limits to Medicine, was being progressively “flatten[ed] out by biomedicine.” He demonstrated the art of suffering he had praised, and it seems fitting to end by telling the story. Around 1980, a small lump that some feared might be cancer appeared on his cheek. He decided, eventually, to leave it untreated. This was not, I want to stress, a decision taken on a priori grounds. Though a critic of too much medicine, Illich was in no way a fundamentalist. During the time I was in touch with him, he underwent dental surgery and treatment for a hernia that made it difficult for him to sit or walk. Rather, it was a considered decision for which he gave three main grounds. One was the advice he received from a Pakistani friend, Hakim Mohammed Said (1920–1998), who was a prominent practitioner and modernizer of the Unani medical tradition. Said, as I mentioned earlier, had approached Illich after a lecture Illich had given in Pakistan in the 1970s and told him, to Illich’s great delight, that he had understood his lecture to have shown modern medicine to be “a Western Christian ideology.” They became friends, and Illich consulted him about this lump. Said’s advice was that this new feature of his face belonged to his person and that having it removed would throw him out of balance. A second ground for leaving this lump alone was the vivid memory of a conversation, years earlier, with his uncle, his mother’s brother, who was an astrologer and a follower of Rudolf Steiner. His uncle, basing himself on an astrological reading, predicted that later in life Illich would experience trouble, possibly connected with his jaw, and also advised that he should take no action against it. Finally, and I think most important, Illich had his own intuition that, whatever lay in store, it was a cross he should not try to avoid bearing. Once he quoted to me the passage in the letter to the Colossians in which the apostle Paul says, “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” Paul’s

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claim, Illich commented, as well as being “gloriously consoling,” is also “a way in which I may look at the course of my own life.” Illich’s illness was never definitively diagnosed, and different stories circulate about attempts at diagnosis. Lee Hoinacki, in an essay called “An Art of Suffering,” which he wrote in Illich’s memory, relates the following incident: In the early 1980s, when the bump was visible on the side of [Illich’s] face, a doctor friend, Quentin Young, wanted to do something about it. But he knew Illich was not really interested in investigating and treating the condition. So he devised a ruse. He arranged to have Illich invited to a social gathering in Chicago at which an oncologist, prepared for the trick, was present. When a group of previously informed people surrounded Illich, the oncologist took out his syringe and quickly withdrew fluid from the swelling for a biopsy. Not wishing to cause a scene, Illich did not resist or create a commotion. . . . Later, Dr. Young told Illich the biopsy revealed the presence of a tumor that medical opinion considered dangerous. It was not unequivocally malignant, but the doctors strongly advised surgery to remove it.

This story of the medical ambush is not accepted by all of Illich’s friends. ­However, he did tell me a rather similar story about a later incident. It occurred when he was traveling by plane from State College, Pennsylvania, to Toronto and was seated, quite by chance, next to an oncologist. This gentleman, without Illich’s permission, began to palpate the tumor. What he discovered, I never heard. Illich, in telling the story, was interested only in the man’s impudence. Both incidents illustrate how scandalous an undiagnosed disease can be in today’s medicalized milieu. This was something that Illich often spoke about in his final years. One of his last public lectures was titled “And Lead Us Not into Diagnosis but Deliver Us from the Pursuit of Health”—a name that plays on the petition to “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil” in the Lord’s Prayer. He also wrote a manifesto called “Hygienic Autonomy” that asserted a right “to die without diagnosis.” His view, in brief, was that diagnosis involves the application of a stereotype that suppresses variation, eliminates personal meaning, and may change the very being of the subject of the diagnosis insofar as that person identifies with the medical category. This, again, is a question of the intensity with which diagnosis is pursued and believed. It does not condemn the desire to know what’s wrong or the desire to set it right but refers to a condition in which diagnosis has run wild and begun to destroy the very ground on which persons, not defined by their labels, can stand.

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Illich lived for more than twenty years with this disfiguration of his face. The swelling eventually grew to the size of a small grapefruit and seemed, from its appearance, to be composed of a group of smaller tumors. As it grew, it impinged on his jaw and became steadily more painful. He controlled the pain, as best as he could, with yoga, acupuncture, and his remarkable ­self-​­discipline. He also smoked raw opium. He had been prescribed opium in liquid form but found that he got more relief from smoking. This he did in a traditional style, placing a lump of the opium on silvered paper, heating it over a candle, and then inhaling the smoke through a straw with which he followed the track of the molten lump as it slid along the paper. ­Friends—​­I was ­one—​­occasionally liked to join him in this ritual, and he sometimes joked that his analgesic was becoming our vice. He carried the opium with him when he traveled, and when it was once discovered at customs in London, he was able to convince the agent to treat it as medicine rather than as a proscribed drug. Smoking opium, he said, didn’t remove the pain, but it allowed him to push it to one side, giving him a certain “distance” from it. One can never know how much another suffers, but my impression was that during the last fourteen years of his l­ ife—​­the years in which I knew him w ­ ell—​­he was never without discomfort and sometimes in quite intense pain. The question, of course, is why, given that an initially fairly uncomplicated surgery might have relieved the condition. It might be thought that Illich made a prudent calculation, given that he lived, and lived gloriously, with the condition for more than twenty years. Cancers do metastasize, and the disturbance of surgery might have led to metastasis. This might even have been the eventuality his uncle foresaw. But Illich didn’t calculate risks. He wanted to know the meaning of what had happened to him, and he concluded that this was a fate he ought to embrace. Mohammed Said’s suggestion that it was a matter of balance is evocative and goes with Illich’s own sense that this was his share in “the afflictions of Christ.” The cross is a balance, says Simone ­Weil—“a going down as a condition of rising up.” What was being balanced? No one can really say, but I have two impressions that I would like, tentatively, to share. The first is that during the years I knew him well, Illich seemed to increase in humility and in a tender joy in those around him that I can only call sweetness. I don’t mean that those qualities were not there before but only that they seemed to increase and abound. For this reason, I sometimes thought of his illness as a purifying fire. A man as gifted as Illich, and one who had passed as brightly across the sky as he did in his golden youth, could hardly not have been proud. Sometimes I would see traces of that pride in his conversation or his dealings with others. But, as the years of his illness went on, even these vestiges

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seemed to burn away until all that was left was love. Perhaps he needed that fire to complete his “walk beneath the nose of God” and make himself ready to die. The second impression is that his sufferings opened the hearts of others. This was certainly true of me. It was not that he ever dramatized what he was going through. On the contrary, this sometimes quite theatrical man was m ­ atter-​­of-​­fact about his discomfort and never for a moment made me feel that I ought to be wringing my hands or showing sympathy, even when I rather unsentimentally pushed the edge of what he had left to give, as I sometimes did during our final interviews. (“The way I feel at this moment,” he said, at one point, when I asked him to expand a theme he had introduced, “I will be happy just to get through today’s conversation.”) No, he opened my heart by touching it and expanding my sense of what is possible. The issue of suffering is a vexed one in Christianity. ­Christ-​­in-​­agony has been a constant theme in story, song, and picture, and sometimes the Church has used this suffering as a way to manipulate its members. I am not talking about this style of suffering for, as in Jesus died for your sins, and I don’t think Illich is either when he speaks of sharing in Christ’s afflictions. Earlier I contrasted the theory of “substitutionary atonement,” in which Jesus takes our place and pays the price an insulted God demands for our m ­ isdeeds—​­suffers for ­us—​­with Peter Abelard’s very different account in which Jesus opens a way or shows an ­example—​­an example, Abelard says, that inspires “that deeper affection in us which not only frees us from slavery to sin, but also wins for us the true liberty of sons of God.” Illich, in this sense, gave an example and showed a way. It was a great part of his teaching that people ought to inspire one another rather than referring always to accredited authorities, approved formulas, and diagnostic stereotypes, and I think that many who knew him were touched and inspired by the “virtuous performance” he gave in his last years. Illich’s unusual way of taking his disease shows the possibility of finding personal meaning in what comes to us and perhaps of regaining a relationship with death as something other than that determined skeletal enemy with whom the doctor wrestles so heroically in the modern imagery of death that Illich studied in Limits to Medicine. Illich’s example denormalizes. He proposes no rule about how one should deal with cancer of the parotid gland, if that, as some thought, was what he his condition was. Rather, he tried to understand what this meant for him and what he could and should do with it. Go to a hospital today with a diagnosable condition, and you will be assigned to a population for whom the risks and recommended treatments have been ascertained. The meaning of the event

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will perhaps be of concern to the social workers but not to the doctors. Diseases exist to be cured or eliminated. What they mean, what responses they evoke in the community of the sufferer, where the balance lies between remediation and acceptance, are not questions that are usually asked. Illich insisted that these were matters for every person. He fought against “the ­self-​­aggrandizing technological myth” that has medicalized the human condition. He fought against the loss of death as a personal act. And, most crucially of all, he demonstrated another way. Illich died on December 2, 2002, in Bremen, Germany. That morning he had called Silja Samerski, a younger friend and colleague who lived in an adjacent street, and asked her to come over so that they could work on a project they had in hand. When she arrived, she found him lying dead on a couch in the living room. My sense was that he had drained his cup to the last drop. His friend Muska ­Nagel—​­Mother Jerome by her monastic n ­ ame—​­prepared a card in memoriam. One side gave the place and dates of his birth and death. On the other, printed on an image of flames, were the words, in Latin and English, from the Gospel of Luke: “I am come to cast fire upon the earth, and would that it were already kindled!”

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Conclusion: An Intellectual Journey This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and it is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of trees on the water. —Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow We have got on the slippery ice where there is no friction and so, in a certain sense, the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“Always assume that there is one silent student in your class who is by far superior to you in head and heart.” That was Leo Strauss’s answer when asked for “a general rule regarding teaching.” It was a precept I followed as a broadcaster, and, often, it proved true, though sometimes its truth was only revealed years after the fact. No matter how many listeners distressed me after a program was aired by showing that they had overlooked, misunderstood, or forgotten what I hoped to convey, one or two would, sooner or later, come to light for whom the program had in some way meant more than I could have imagined and more, in some sense, than it had meant to me. It might be said that I worked for these unknown listeners, but it would be truer to say that I worked for myself while remembering and hoping for them. Illich signified such hope by lighting a candle. “On the table,” he said, “there is always a candle” as a sign of the one who is yet to come. I do not know, and may never know, the reader of this book for whom that candle stands (even if I can infer, by this point, a certain patience), but I speak to her or to him now. I said at the beginning that I felt compelled to write this b ­ ook—​­to respond to all that Illich gave me and to continue what he left unfinished in The Rivers North of the Future, the book I dared to call his “testament.” I find, at the end of the adventure, that Illich’s work has come into clearer focus for me under two main headings: the first is the idea of complementarity, the second is the power of example.

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Let me take them in turn. In writing this book, I have discovered Illich as a philosopher of complementarity. By this I mean awareness of the duality or doubleness that constitutes b ­ eing-​­in-​­the-​­world. Each word we speak invokes and depends on its contrary; each move we make depends on the opposition of our limbs. The world, as we know it, begins when Adam and Eve taste the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and ­evil—​­they come to know these two realities as inextricable and interpenetrating, a knowledge God had thought proper only to himself and to whomever else he is addressing when he acknowledges, after the fatal fruit has been eaten, that “the man has become like one of us.” From this understanding of things, I draw three implications: the first is that only complementary perspectives can disclose the whole of reality: no one sees it all. Even God appears, from the human standpoint, as what Nicholas of Cusa calls “a coincidence of opposites.” The second is that each existence throws a shadow that must be acknowledged if it is not to exert unconscious power over that existence. “Everyone carries a shadow,” C. G. Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” Wendell Berry says the same, in a different register, when he points out, in his essay “The Way of Ignorance,” that it is inherent in our “creaturely” condition that “the extent of our knowledge will always be, at the same time, the measure of the extent of our ignorance.” Whatever sheds light, by the same token, generates shadow. The third is that any principle pushed to its extreme may turn into its opposite. B ­ alance—​­opposites held together in t­ ension—​ ­is, therefore, the best to which we can aspire. In Illich this philosophy begins with a clear understanding that “the kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven” that Jesus preached was to be found in the world but that it was not “of the world.” From the earliest days of his priesthood, Illich made a strict separation of earthly from heavenly realities. He distinguished the Church as She from the Church as It, the Church as a “worldly sign of an ­other-​ ­worldly reality” from the Church as a corruptible worldly power. When he became vice chancellor of the Catholic University in Puerto Rico and was obliged to exercise an authority he regarded as p ­ olitical—​­I related the story e­ arlier—​­he even went so far as to stop celebrating Mass, except in a remote fishing community with no connection to the world of the university. “I didn’t want to get mixed up,” he said, “in a conflict between the priestly office of making the o­ ther-​­worldly unity . . . of the liturgy real and my stance as a politician.” It was not that he refused to act “as a politician”—his political aims, as we have seen, were r­ adical—​­it was that he saw the Church as what stands before, beyond, and after politics as its necessary complement, inspiration, and atmosphere.

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This understanding of complementarity informs Illich’s work from beginning to end. It has often been remarked that within the fully elaborated work of a thinker there lies a simpler ­structure—​­a seed, a signature, a myth. “Every thinker thinks only one thought,” says Martin Heidegger. Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, observes that behind each philosopher’s “formal system” lies “something simpler,” which he calls their “crude system.” Illich’s “one thought” is complementarity, though it is expressed under many different names. Balance, proportion, boundary, limit, nemesis, threshold, and watershed are all terms that denote aspects of this “one thought.” Wherever Illich turns his attention, he finds opposing domains whose balance is threatened by the predominance of one or the other. In his philosophy of mission, he was always keenly aware of the integrity of the world the missionary enters and of the tact, humor, silence, and humility that are necessary on the missionary’s side if this integrity is to be preserved. (And the missionary, it should be remembered, is, for him, the type of any and every Christian for whom “missionary spirit” ought to be a consequence of the gift they have received.) His critique of development applied the same strictures to the secular messianism of development. He emphasized, always, the potential injury to the complementarity between tradition and development, when development is treated as an unalloyed good. “The siren of one ambulance,” he wrote in Limits to Medicine, “can destroy Samaritan attitudes in a whole . . . town.” Deschooling Society concerned the loss of curiosity, initiative, and autonomy that that can occur when education becomes pervasive, compulsory, and mechanical. Energy and Equity and Tools for Conviviality both sought to discover the proper balance between mobility and stability, individual freedom and social equality, tools that liberate and tools that confine and oppress. This poise between opposites was an ideal, he realized, that would vary in practice from case to case, since “the human equilibrium is open” and can shift. But it can shift, he insisted, only within “finite parameters”—there must always be a balance between opposing domains. Hypertrophy in one domain will always lead to a loss in the corresponding and complementary sphere. The point is made unmistakably in the “two watersheds” section of Tools for Conviviality and then developed further in Limits to Medicine. Up to a point, modern medical techniques will enhance health. Beyond this point, medicine will become injurious and begin to eat away at the cultural matrix in which birth and death, illness and suffering, were once embedded. In his works of the early 1980s, Shadow Work and Gender, Illich took a further step with his explorations of the domain that he referred to as the ­vernacular, a term that he tried to expand far beyond the reference it then had, which was

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mainly to styles of architecture or untrained, everyday forms of speech. He wanted a name, he said, by which unpaid acts that “improve livelihood” could be sheltered from the shadow of the state and the market. Adoption of such a term, Illich argued, would do three things. It would be, first of all, a way of describing cultures before they became subject to intensive technical, pedagogical, and therapeutic development. Second, the idea of a distinct vernacular domain would protect an emerging “archipelago of conviviality” against colonization and commercial enclosure. Finally, he saw the term as a theoretical tool with which to remap social and political space. Illich had little success in putting his remodeled word into play or even in establishing the need for such a term. Nearly forty years later, not much has changed in a political conversation in which our options are still thought to consist in an alternation between the right’s attempt to expand the rule of the market and the left’s attempt to expand the rule of the state. The realm of spontaneity and gift, friendship and mutual aid, the unplanned and the ungoverned remains mostly unmarked, invisible and inarticulate. Illich’s arguments never received any significant public airing, and Gender, which might have served as a wildly promising seedbed of ideas on how the vernacular is constituted, was instead vilified and more or less stricken from the intellectual record. At present, no commonly used word indicates a limit to development, to professional intervention, to commercialization. The “shaping of language,” to take just one of Illich’s examples, is almost entirely in professional hands, and words like community that ought to refer to a complementary hemisphere in which culture grows wild and state and market are held at bay have been so thoroughly colonized that they have largely lost this d ­ enotation—​­communities are, by and large, communities of interest, not cultures grown on a common ground. A ­one-​­dimensional mode of l­ ife—​­or radical monopoly, in Illich’s ­terms—​­has so utterly overcome its proper complement that many doubt that the vernacular domain that Illich wanted to recreate ever existed or ever could exist. A lot of the controversy about his book Gender turned on this very point. In that book he argued that gender, the division of society into two heterogeneous but complementary fields, is the quintessential characteristic of vernacular cultures. However much the customs, prerogatives, and obligations of men and women might vary from place to place and time to time, this much was universal: in all ­pre-​­industrial, ­pre-​­capitalist societies, two “gendered subsets” faced each other, defined each other, constituted each other. For Illich, the discovery of this historical reality was an a­ stonishment—​­an invaluable window on economic

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­ istory, a way of “rais[ing] the epistemological issue of modern European modes h of ­perception,” and a potential inspiration for those “struggl[ing] to preserve the biosphere . . . [and] recover . . . the commons.” His critics took him for a reactionary and a romantic who prettified and glorified an oppressive past. These critics so completely confounded gender with patriarchy, despite Illich’s cogent case that these were quite distinct from one another, that they found only threat and bad faith in Illich’s attempt to highlight both the universality of complementary modes of social organization and the striking absence of complementarity in “modern European modes of perception.” In the final stage of his thinking and writing, Illich completed what he began in Gender by tracing the modern destruction of complementarity and proportion back to its source in the Church’s interpretation of the Incarnation as a warrant for the creation of the world’s first total institution. The Gospel, as he read it, announced freedom, but of a kind that could never be normalized or guaranteed. The Samaritan claimed the freedom to “step outside his culture,” but he didn’t announce a policy of zero tolerance toward assaults on the road to Jericho. There was, at first, an implicit recognition that Samaritanism can never become a norm without destroying the very ground on which it stands. But, eventually, the Church succumbed to the imagination of an unlimited, unshadowed ­good—​­a world in which sin is a crime, love the law, and the Church a perfect society. Once, the world consisted of many heterogeneous yet overlapping domains. To give just one example, William Blackstone (1723–1780) in his Commentaries on the Laws of England lists ten different bodies of law that exerted distinct but simultaneous jurisdictions in the England of his day. One could find sanctuary, and exemption from the criminal law, in a church because there divine law prevailed. Today it is more and more the case that everything is everywhere, and boundaries are seen as obstacles rather than as shelters. Minutely nuanced “identities” are cultivated, but only within the context of one world, one law, one science, and one continuously graded sex. The contemporary college and university system, with its course for every taste, its frictionless integration with the economy, and its disregard for its own tradition, seems to me a fair example of this kind of indistinct, unbounded space. Illich pursued distinctions and limits and tried to preserve or restore spaces in which independent action was possible and people could still be surprised. He deplored monoculture and ­monotony—​­radical monopoly and “monocular perception.” Each domain of experience acquired its character and consistency in relation to some opposing domain. Medicine can ameliorate the human condition only so long as it doesn’t abolish it. Science is

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helpful only insofar as it recognizes itself as a highly artificial mode of perception and doesn’t try to eliminate the complementary domain of common sense and practical judgment. Formal education retains its distinction only in a world in which knowledge acquired for its own sake is its complement and equal. I want to emphasize that what I am here calling complementarity is not dualism in any of the usual senses of this word. In early Christianity, for example, the term dualism was used by apologists for what would become orthodoxy against Gnostic Christians, who, it was said, condemned material embodiment and failed to recognize creation, even in its fallen state, as good. Illich is emphatically not a dualist in this sense. He believed that creation is good and embodiment a blessing, and he condemned nothing more than that modern Gnosticism, which holds that “technical actions” undertaken by professional “initiates” who monopolize the “special formula” can rescue us from our material condition. Complementarity is something else altogether. It holds that, in the world as it is, there are inherent limits, that each thing is structured and conditioned by its opposite, and that opposites, when overextended, lapse into one another. This view has a genealogy that I will not develop h ­ ere—​­notable exponents, as I noted in chapter 8, are Nicholas of Cusa, William Blake, G. W. F. Hegel, Simone Weil, C. G. Jung, and some of the thinkers of Jewish ­Kabbalism—​­but I would argue that it has always been a countercurrent to the mainstream of Western thought. It is well represented in story and ­proverb—​­Illich’s corruptio optimi pessima is a proverb, and there are many others: you can’t win, there can be too much of a good thing, and the like. But proverb and cliché often embody precisely those truths that are acknowledged and disregarded at the same stroke. Complementarity enters only by the back door, while the imminence of ­heaven-​­on-​­earth is still preached in the front room. Masking this dissonance is the work of our “certainties.” According to Illich we are in the grip of ideas that lie so deep in our history, our language, and our institutions that their consequences confront us as an implacable f­ ate—​­ideas so obvious that that they never show up as ideas at all, as in Wittgenstein’s saying that “progress is the form of our civilization rather than one of its features.” This grip can only be loosened, in Illich’s view, by patiently unraveling these certainties and tracing them back to their beginnings. This is the path Illich invites his readers to take. It is the way of the crab, receding from the present but with eyes fixed on its fading silhouette until its beginnings are, always provisionally, discovered. Paul Celan, in the poem from which I took the title for my second book of interviews with Illich, says that he “casts his nets” into “the rivers north of the future.” He seeks a reality and a refreshment that he supposes lie beyond the future that can be reached from

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the present. The road that runs from the present into the future will never reach these rivers because it is only a continuation of the same. So where do these mysterious rivers rise, and how does one reach them? Illich’s hypothesis, I would say, is that these rivers flow from a past in which untried futures still lie unrealized. What can’t be reached from a future continuous with our present arises from those past moments that have not yet given birth to a present but that might if we attended to them. Illich finds many such moments in his beloved twelfth century, when a newly “visible” text founded the university, when sin was “criminalized,” when tools leapt free of the hands of their users and became the nascent technology in whose “shell,” Illich says, we are now “prisoners.” Each of these moments might have been different and will show on examination how they might have been different. This way through the past to the future leads back, finally, to the Incarnation, an event eventually taken by the Church as without shadow and requiring only faithful adherence to the divine plan of salvation, already made visible in the sacrificial death of God’s Son. Some of those who first formulated Christianity spoke, in a pregnant phrase, of the economy of ­salvation—​­adapting the Greek word for household management (oikonomia) as a description of God’s provident governance of the world. For Illich the Incarnation signifies, above all, freedom. For the early Church, whose members believed they had, as one wrote, “gazed into the depths of Divine knowledge,” it came to signify adherence to a plan, submission to a hierarchy. Freedom remained a note in the melody and a potentially explosive latency that would from time to time erupt. But, by and large, the Church adopted political models, like divine monarchy, that spoke not of freedom, or, as Illich says, “an anarchist Christ,” but of administration and of an institution that performed in the place of the laity. Many Christian revivals have tried to recapture the enthusiasm of the early church or of “primitive Christianity.” It seems to me that Illich is asking for something ­else—​­he is asking for a rethinking of the original mistake, which was to assume that heaven had come to earth and abolished earthly necessity. This is a timely suggestion. A great deal of apocalyptic anxiety is currently focused on the figure of predicted climate change, but it seems to me that the revelation of our time is taking place across the board, with every institution stretched past its proper limits and every person living beyond their capacity. What better time to ask how the unlimited got loose in our world and how things might be put back within distinct bounds? Many contemporary people, in their incessant “going forward,” have forgotten the p ­ ast—​­not the past as hobby or heritage, not the historian’s professional

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domain, but the past as a living reality and a story that potentially harbors other outcomes than the one in which we are living. James Carse says that the past reveals “new beginnings” as a consequence of “surprise.” Surprise occurs when something appears from outside the frame in which we have posed a person, an object, or an event. It reveals a present different than we had thought it and, therefore, a past that is different in the same measure. What we had thought was going one way is shown, when we allow it to surprise us, to be going in a quite different direction. The past, as what can be provisionally ascertained about what has actually happened, doesn’t change, but what it means, and what it reveals about what is possible, does. When surprise is welcomed, and even, as with Illich, sought, the past is necessarily revealed in a new ­light—​­it opens to us in a new way. Illich’s pursuit of the historical origins of what today we call technology is an example. His search led him to the early twelfth century and the writings of Hugh of St. Victor—​­a man who, he felt, had “walked the watershed,” during the revolutionary changes of that time. Illich found in Hugh the first “systematic reflection on what constitutes a tool.” Hugh stood in the first dawn of the age now ­ending—​­the age of tools, with its “extraordinary intensity of purposefulness” and its conviction “that wherever something is achieved, it is achieved by means of an instrument.” In the face of this new age, he proposed a philosophy that Illich called “critical technology.” One of the tenets of this philosophy was that “the mechanical arts,” in Hugh’s term, must remain part of philosophy rather than becoming, as they did, an independent factor in the unfolding of Western society. This idea died, stillborn, with Hugh in 1141, but in an essay written at the end of the 1970s called “Research by People,” Illich revived it and tried to bring it to bear on his attempt to identify “tools for conviviality.” This illustrates how a “new beginning” can appear in the past once surprise has unsettled the air of inevitability, which is produced by taking the present for granted. Illich spoke of Hugh of St. Victor, quite unaffectedly, as a friend and interlocutor. The relationship between them offers an instance of the living past and of the restored community between past and present in which Illich believed. In Illich’s friendship with Hugh of St. Victor one can see the pattern of his relationship to history more generally. He was, he said, “a migrant between two space/times,” shuttling between the “certainties” of the past and of the present. When he found the wellsprings he was looking ­for—​­the moments at which those assumptions that would become today’s certainties began to emerge and h ­ arden—​ ­he contemplated the potentialities of such moments. In Hugh’s case, he perceived, in the bud, an entirely different account of the proper use of tools than the one

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that achieved predominance in the West. His approach to early C ­ hristianity was the same. In finding the moment at which the Church began to forget that it was ­“pregnant with an evil that would have found no nesting place in the Old ­Testament,” he, at the same time, discovered “the road not taken”—the Church as it might have been, and might still be, the “new church” that he had predicted and promoted in the 1960s. In this way, he ­announced—​­along with many ­others—​ ­a Christianity able to slough off the institutional carapace built up over two ­millennia and to begin to understand itself as the practice of the Gospel rather than as its ritual containment. He encouraged people to embrace what the apostle Paul calls “the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free”—the liberty to break out of the institutional containments that the Church bequeathed to modernity and distinguish learning from schooling, health from biomedicine, morality from law. He drew attention to present abundance rather than insurmountable scarcity, to what is here, now, rather than the pot of gold at the end of an endless curriculum. In the Age of the ­Church—​­the age now reaching its apocalyptic ­extremity—​­we have experienced what Australian scholar Nicholas Heron calls “a paradoxical form of salvation without end, of salvation without d ­ eliverance—​­something like an endless oikonomia [economy].” “What is truly saved,” Heron adds, “is only the hierarchy itself,” and by hierarchy he means, first of all, the providential divine administration, the economy of salvation, but equally its transposition as Church hierarchy and then as secular bureaucracy. (Here Heron echoes Giorgio ­Agamben’s claim that the Church sustains itself by incessantly deferring what it seems to promise.) This dream is dying, however slowly and painfully. “The giant,” as Illich wrote sixty years ago, is “totter[ing] before it collapses.” Illich holds out the ­possibility that the dream might be succeeded by the reality. I have been developing the idea that Illich’s “one thought” is complementarity, but I want to pause here to emphasize that this is not meant in any way to suggest a spirit that is equivocal, mediocre, or noncommittal. Journalists in my youth evinced this lukewarm spirit when they boasted that if left and right were both against them, they must be on the right track. This was not at all Illich’s way. In his statement on “walking the watershed” that I have used as one of my proof texts, he begins by saying how “terribly sad” it makes him to meet young people trained to seek only the “average,” which he defines as an indifferent “tolerance of all ideas.” “Such spiritual indecision,” he goes on, “is the very contrary of walking the middle way.” Illich was never unwilling to take a stand or render a judgment. On the contrary, it seems to me that the severity and confidence of his judgments often obscured his underlying commitment to a complementary view of reality.

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For example, Illich throughout most of the first half of his career made it clear, at least to his attentive readers, that he stood for a moderation rather than a rejection of modernity, for a disestablishment of compulsory education, not the outlawing of schools; for a circumscription of medical techniques, not the elimination of modern medicine. This was not always so clear later on when a world that appeared to him to have lost its mooring and drifted off into a sea of “­soul-​­capturing abstractions” often evoked what must have appeared to many as total denunciation. I stress, therefore, that Illich’s underlying worldly ideal was always balance and a careful drawing of distinctions, even when he was moved to speak of the “bottomless evil” that “renders us speechless.” The distinction between “spiritual indecision,” which averages opposing claims, and what Illich calls “the middle way” seems to me crucially important. Western society is haunted by a dream of unshadowed perfection. It begins with the idea that, by the Incarnation, divinity has entered ­humanity—​­that, in Blake’s paraphrase of Athanasius, “God becomes as we are that we may be as he is.” The reformed Church of the second Christian millennium imagined itself, and after the Council of Trent (1545–1563) called itself, a “perfect society.” Historian of the law Harold Berman, in his magisterial Law and Revolution, makes a convincing case that the papal revolution that unfolded after the beginning of the second Christian millennium was the template for all subsequent attempts “to begin the world over again,” as Tom Paine said on the brink of the American ­Revolution. Today we are inundated by the rhetoric of change, advance, i­ nnovation—​­of things constantly made better and then, going forward, better still. Balance, in such a milieu, is apt to suggest only stasis and mediocrity. But it is harder to hold opposites in tension, giving each its due, than it is to pursue the limitless into the clouds of abstraction. Illich’s middle way is life on the e­ dge—​­the razor’s edge of discernment and distinction, the sword that Jesus says he has brought. He points to “the narrow gate . . . that leads to life” and suggest that this narrow way is the only way out of the current state of division in which virtues that are integral to one another stand opposite and c­ ontend—​­generosity opposing thrift, spontaneity disagreeing with planning, justice pitted against prosperity. These, and other pairs, are often treated as mutually exclusive “­trade-​­offs”—a little more of one, a little less of the other until the correct recipe is found. The right favors more competition, the left more regulation, and so on. A philosophy of complementarity is about something more than this process of fluid adjustment which is already the stuff of everyday politics. Illich stands for what might be described as the independence of domains. When he writes of what he calls vernacular gender, he

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speaks of men and women in such a regime as constituting two different kinds, as different, he says, as a square and a circle. When he discusses “the delusion about science” by which he claims contemporary society is “stunned,” he imagines a realm of common sense and practical judgment that possesses its own standing, its own dignity, its own proper boundaries, and not one merely deficient in “scientific literacy,” as a thousand campaigns to improve popular understanding of science have asserted. When he proposes vernacular as a term with which to insulate new forms of subsistence against the intrusion of state and market, he hopes to erect a boundary and a bulwark, not just designate a region within an integrated system. In all these cases, a distinct and bounded domain relates to other equally distinct ­domains—​­man to woman, science to common sense, vernacular society to commercial society. And these relations, if they are to flourish, must be based on respect for the boundary that gives each its character. Illich distinguished what he called two types of duality. In the first type, which prevailed in the West up to the seventeenth century, “duality shaped the depths of consciousness.” Opposed terms like man and woman gave what Illich calls “ultimate consistency” to each one’s sense of their own existence. The second type of duality, which has shaped modern understanding, is produced by a polarization within “an a priori abstract notion which then finds accidental distinctions.” One begins from “the human being, the self, the individual” and conceives difference as something generated or constructed within this unified field. Duals of the first type are complementary but incommensurable; duals of the second type are variations of the same. “My kingdom is not of this world” is an instance of the fi ­ rst—​­it supposes a reality that stands over and against “this world,” even as it is within it. The current discourse on “gender fluidity” is an example of the ­second—​­divergences from the norm are elaborated, even to the point of destroying any norm, but the whole operation takes place along the unbroken continuum of “human sexuality.” Illich tried, first of all, to draw a clear distinction between these two types of duality and then to bring the original and now obscured or abandoned type back into view. He raised the question whether there might be something necessary in the idea of absolute difference, bridgeable only by the shuttle of imagination, if human beings are to hold the unlimited at bay and save the distinct and bounded realities in which they formerly lived. This is the first thing that I want to highlight in conclusion: the way in which complementarity, and related concepts like proportion, balance,and limit, form the unifying foundation of Illich’s work. The second thing is the power of example in I­ llich—​­the power of his own example, first of all, but also the importance

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of ­example as a figure in his thought. Example derives from the Latin exemplum, which means literally “that which is taken out.” It is often used for what is ­representative—​­an instance of something more ­general—​­but the one who is “made an example” is also singled out from the class to which they belong. So, the word can indicate what is lifted up as well as what remains anchored in its more general class, what provides a new model or pattern as well as what only testifies to one that is already established. Remember Illich’s words about the crucifixion in which he speaks of Jesus as both “model” and “example” who shows “loyalty to his people” by his “willingness to accept being excluded from them.” The example here models the exception, and what is “taken out” points to a new way. This fits Illich, who saw himself, preeminently, as a man “taken out.” He was taken out, first, from the maelstrom of central Europe, when his roots were cut during the Second World War and he became one who “never had a place which I called my home.” But he was also taken out from his time as one who tried “very consciously to be a remainder of the past, one who still survives from another time.” It was in the same light, seemingly, that he saw his priesthood as something to be exercised only insofar as he was removed or “taken out” of any political entanglement, as when he refused to celebrate mass in settings where he was known as an official of the Catholic University in Puerto Rico. Illich, to me, is an example of a renewed Christianity. (Let me set aside the imponderable question of whether a new thing should keep its old name or be given a new one. I will just use the old word and hope to be understood.) This begins with his way of reading the Gospel, attentive to “the voice of an anarchist Christ” and his way of understanding the Church as an institution that, from its very early days, made itself “visible” in the world “according to the mode of a state or political entity.” Illich’s proposal was a sweeping “declericalization” and an ecumenical effort to “seek the visibility of the Church in the conscious evangelical interpretation of prayer,” understood as “the search for the presence of God.” He understood the Gospel primarily as an invitation to live in freedom rather than to invent law, bureaucracy, and pastoral edification on a previously unimagined scale. And he understood this invitation as s­ elf-​­limiting, inasmuch as it proposed neither a norm nor a duty nor an institutional imperative but a call to a new and very demanding type of relationship. Illich, as I’ve stressed, was a proscriptive rather than a prescriptive ­thinker—​ ­he pointed out what he thought was wrong and what ought to be avoided while generally abstaining from addressing the future. “You must understand,” he wrote, “that the only time the Lord is present to us is the present moment which

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we celebrate together.” In this light, it is slightly ridiculous, I know, to speak of a renewed Christianity. A now that is f­ orever—​­a presence present always only in the ­present—​­belongs to all time. It points to what has always been and always will be. “Before Abraham was, I am.” Still Illich does offer indications for a new practice. He portrays the Gospel as an invitation to a way of life rather as the promise of a “redemption” that lifts us out of the common lot and into some privileged status. The accent always falls on what has been opened and made possible, not on deliverance or the satisfaction of a debt. Illich never sets aside Christian d ­ ogma—​­his protestations of orthodoxy in the 1960s were s­ incere—​­but he deemphasizes it. Dogma, he says, has the purely negative function of protecting faith from “the intrusion of myth.” This is not unimportant in a world where new mythologies are continually elaborated, new rituals eagerly invented, and every pop star acclaimed an “icon,” but it is still secondary. Faith does not consist in “conceptual teaching.” It is experienced and then transmitted from one to the other by those who have had this experience. Finally, it is “fulfilled . . . in the heart.” Christianity, in this sense, delivers people from “the sacred” and its dreadful machinery of separation which places the world out of our reach. It invites people to live the life of God here, now, among themselves. Illich announced the end of what I have called the Age of the Church as early as 1959 when he first drafted his essay “The Vanishing Clergyman.” He recognized that the walls of the airtight compartment to which Bruno Latour’s “modern constitution” had assigned religion were collapsing and that a radical “secularization” was overtaking the Church. He anticipated the birth of a “­post-​­religious” church prepared to return to the mountainsides, marketplaces, and dining rooms in which the Gospel was first ­proclaimed—​­its truth shared simply as truth and not as some ­set-​­apart religious truth. In this context, Illich tried to live his f­aith—“to nakedly follow the naked Christ,” as he said. That this was scarcely visible to many who encountered him, and even some who knew him, testifies to the nakedness of which he speaks. There was little adornment or show in his faith. Its principles were “little acts of foolish renunciation” by which he helped himself and others see what they could do without and an unfailing hospitality that made him consider “an ordinary but decent wine . . . his major teaching tool” and “a dining table” a proper place for the “search for truth.” He attempted throughout his life to bring people together in durable friendships. He insisted that faith not only “manifests” in celebration but is also “acquired in . . . celebrating.” And he emphasized the cultivation of awareness as the matrix both of charity and of political decision. None of these have much to do with religious observance in the conventional sense, but

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then Illich wasn’t really a religious man in this sense. Although beloved as a priest in his youth for “the devotion with which he said his Mass,” he was remarkably free of the type of “religious” spirit that expresses itself in ritualism, ostentatious piety, and moralism. He did not confuse salvation with the Church nor mistake the map for the territory. He believed that the kingdom of God is “a social reality at a transcendental level”—it lies always beyond our reach and yet is also here now among us to be touched, felt, and enjoyed as part of the available “density of the real.” Illich considered our time to be “the most obviously Christian epoch.” He argued that his contemporaries were practicing a degenerated form of C ­ hristianity as a consequence of their participation in institutions descended from the church and still bearing the church’s genetic imprint. When he called, in “The Vanishing Clergyman,” for a new church and for “extraordinary priests willing to live today the ordinary life of tomorrow’s priest,” he implied the clearing away of this old Christianity as much as the new practice that I see him as embodying. This old Christianity is the prime determinant of how we think and how we live and why we can’t get off the escalator on which we are currently being carried away. Illich’s description of the practices of modern institutions like education, law, and medicine as perverse liturgies invites us to think history b ­ ackward—​­to unwind the thoughts that now think us until we find their ­origins—​­and then to begin subtracting by deschooling, demedicalizing, and creating vernacular practices of law and order, rather than continually adding new layers of bureaucracy, technology, and professionalized “vision.” From the beginning he suggested that “a critical attitude” was one of the ways by which “love for the church” could be expressed. It was always by faith that he proposed to dismantle what had been built in the name of faith. It was faith that animated his sense that what we need is abundant and at h ­ and—​­insufficient only to those who have swallowed the s­ elf-​­fulfilling prophecy of endemic scarcity. And it was by his willingness to abandon the institutional guide rails that he thought had turned the Church into the world’s largest multinational corporation that he began to uncover another Christianity, old as much as new, but one that had become, at best, a countermelody in the Church’s song. He hoped for a Christianity willing to recognize that its Gospel is worldly ­folly—​­its promise something that can be “fulfilled,” in Illich’s words, but never “accomplished.” He speaks of a Christianity that one “gets” as one gets a ­joke—​­a Christianity laced with insoluble ­contradictions—​­a Christianity that resolves only in silence and mystery. “For years,” Illich once said, “I have applied to myself a test every time I read a Gospel: if I can smile, I probably have understood it.”

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A final way in which I see Illich as an example is in his stance as a man of the ­past—“one through whom roots . . . go far back,” one who could genuinely call a medieval monk his friend. Illich’s Norwegian friend Nils Christie once told me that he felt that he understood Illich best when he thought of him as “a visitor from the 12th century.” This might seem somewhat patronizing, and perhaps even derogatory, as accusations of “living in the past” usually are, but Christie and Illich were very dear friends, and Christie knew that Illich was, in many ways, quite superbly modern, so I suppose that he meant something more complimentary. He meant, perhaps, that Illich brought the past alive in the present. This was an invaluable gift to his friends and students. “Tradition,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.” Illich, who can often be profitably read alongside ­Chesterton, made me understand this idea of a community that includes the dead and the living as well as the extent of the injuries this community has suffered since the Reformation began to deliberately break the bonds between those who have gone before and those who “happen to be walking around.” The reality of the past suffers among us in two ways. It suffers first from a view of history in which the past offers only a crude first draft of the present that it was destined to become all along. This view naturalizes and domesticates the ­present—​­an effect quite opposite to the estrangement and unsettling Illich tried to produce by viewing the present from the perspective of the past rather the past from the perspective of the present. The past’s second disability is that there is simply no time for i­ t—​­the present expands so inexorably via new communications media and figments of the past are so easily summoned up from the web’s vast archive that the past loses its reality as that “foreign country” with which we try, nonetheless, to maintain continuity and communion. Illich’s view of the past as a living reality which harbors both refreshment and renewal dovetails with what I have called his philosophy of complementarity. He does not prefer the past or long to return to the past, as his detractors often said. Rather he views the past as the present’s necessary ­complement—​­its other from whom it learns who and what it is. This is something the present can learn in no other way. Without community between past and present, we must inevitably treat life as a wasting asset, a scarce resource of which we should get all we can before we are deprived of it. Tradition forms the complement, balance, and limit to Illich’s emphasis on the n ­ ew—​­on a “new church,” “a contemporary art of living,”

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or “a new complementarity between critical and ascetical learning.” The principle Illich followed was always that freedom to innovate and rootedness in tradition are different sides of the same coin. Without the rootedness, innovation is promiscuous and unguided, as we see in the riot of “disruptive” innovation taking place all around us. Without the innovation, the opposite occurs, and rootedness in tradition lapses into arid habit. This was what Illich stressed in his pursuit of a new reformation of the Church. Those who expressed their “unconscious fear of a new church” by propping up “a clerical and irrelevant church,” far from defending tradition, were displaying a want of confidence in its power to orient change. He emphasized the same complementarity between the given and the freely invented in discussing his own mode of thought. It was, he said, “the Thomistic foundation of my entire perceptual mode,” laid in his studies of Thomas Aquinas with Jacques Maritain, that had made him “intellectually free” to explore new worlds without “getting dispersed.” Grounding without freedom is bondage, ungrounded freedom only permissiveness. This dialectic, as I’ve pointed out, has many names. It can be called balance or tension, synergy or contradiction, proportionality or paradox. I have settled provisionally on complementarity, but I think all these terms point toward a wholeness that can only be sustained when the opposites that compose the whole are each given their d ­ ue—​­by music and laughter as much as by more tragic styles of awareness. The alternative to recognizing this “coincidence of opposites” is what Illich calls “a monocular perception of reality”—a perception that registers only that single, inexorable track along which we are endlessly progressing without ever really knowing what is propelling us along this way. Today there are many who doubt that progress is altogether good and who say, therefore, that the age of progress is over, but the valence we assign to progress is not the p ­ oint—​­the point is that we can’t stop the train, whatever we think of it. Illich points to the source of this ­pell-​­mell advance. This doesn’t, by itself, slow the train down, but it does indicate where we ought to look to find out how the direction in which we are blindly bound was set. Illich understands the restless and irrepressible dynamism of modernity as a transposition of the Church’s effort to realize the kingdom in an administrative state. He has tracked this movement right into the grain of contemporary life, showing, for example, how pastoral power is at work in the school or how the criminalization of sin is expressed in our overgrown penal and legal apparatus or how our faith in technology grew out of a belief in the peculiar efficacy of sacraments. This tells us where the movement began, even if most of its momentum is now inertial. Institutionalization of the freedom proclaimed and

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demonstrated in the Incarnation created, according to Illich “an entirely new kind of power,” and it this same power that courses through state and corporate bureaucracies today. Behind this power, says Illich, lies a forgetting. The church, giddy with the news of its deliverance from sin and death, forgot that it still lived in the net of necessity in which good and evil are codependent and a great good, pursued unconsciously, must necessarily generate a proportional evil. We now live in a petrification of the ideology to which this obliviousness gave rise, but one that is rarely recognized as such. This has two consequences. First, this ideology, by going unrecognized, escapes ­critique—​­many notice the automatism of our society, with its compulsive embrace of the new and its myth of perfection through technology, but then offer facile “solutions” that leave unexamined the deeply rooted fatality that prevents us from turning or looking back. The second is that the Gospel, as a way of life rather than as an institutional imperative, is obscured because it is thought of either as something already unsuccessfully tried or as something in the process of being accomplished as society is perfected. Illich gives an example of how this hidden way of life can be uncovered and lived in our time. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, argued that modernity is in the grip of what she called a “­no-​­man rule.” The “­no-​­man” who rules is the supposed interest of society, expressed through a bureaucracy in which power is so endlessly mediated that, finally, no locus of power can be discovered at all. Arendt, like Illich, traced this form of rule back to the Church and its access to a plan of salvation in which earthly politics could never play more than a subservient and instrumental role. Michel Foucault likewise saw the origins of modern “governmentality” in the pastoral function of the Church. More recently, Giorgio Agamben has taken this line of analysis much deeper into patristic theology in his book The Kingdom and the Glory. There he demonstrates that what these old theologians called “the economic Trinity,” or the set of relays by which the divine providence is exercised, are a “paradigm of modern government.” Illich belongs to this school of thought, but he is after something more than a genealogy of modern “governmentality,” however valuable that may be. He also has an alternative account of Christianity, an account in which the Gospel is not coined as the “entirely new kind of power” that these thinkers have traced but remains a way of life inherently resistant to perverse forms of institutionalization. (Illich, as I’ve stressed, never imagined a world without institutions. He prayed only for ­self-​­aware and s­ elf-​­limiting institutions.). He trusts that faith provides him with “a mode of knowledge” that exceeds “the resources of [his] intelligence” and, in this way, he discerns more than historical and philological analysis can discover about those things, like the corruptio optimi,

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which he considered to be mysteries, a word that recurred frequently in our final conversations. An example of what I’m talking about would be his vulnerable and easily misunderstood statement that he “aims[s] at facing people with a willingness to take them . . . at their word” rather than basing his understanding on what he knows about them. On its face, this aim would seem to contradict the overwhelming consensus of contemporary thought in the wake of Marx, Nietzsche, and ­Freud—​­Paul Ricoeur’s three “masters of suspicion”—that s­ elf-​­consciousness is always to some degree false consciousness, a veil for interests one would prefer to keep out of sight. How is one to take people “at their word” when they are plainly deluded? Is he naive? Is he practicing a kind of disciplined folly for Christ’s sake? This latter might sometimes be true, but I think mainly that he is pointing beyond the limits of knowledge. To take the other at their word is not only to refrain from j­udgment—“judge not that you be not judged”—but also to recognize that what happens to me, or fails to happen, is an impenetrable ­mystery—​­a set of chances that may mysteriously fit me even as they remain chances. (Chance and providence being, as Simone Weil says, complementary rather than mutually exclusive terms.) To take the other “at their word” points to a meaning in each existence that exceeds both the other’s intention and my expectation, conditioned by what I think I already know about them. Mystery is fundamental, not as an ­anti-​­intellectual idea, excusing an unwillingness to call a spade a spade, but as an indication of the limits of knowledge and the disposition, always, to be surprised. Illich’s writings of the 1970s, as I’ve shown, are delicately poised between hope and foreboding. He spoke of a “mood . . . propitious for a major change of direction in search of a hopeful future.” But, at the same time, he warned of an inhuman future, with all “bridges to a normative past broken” and even spoke to me of the “depression” he suffered while writing Tools for Conviviality and contemplating this future. What Illich believed possible in the early 1970­s—​­disestablishment of compulsory education, limits to speed, “agreement on the roof of technological characteristics under which a society wants to live and be happy,” “an unprecedented housecleaning in the health professions,” and so o­ n—​­no longer appears even thinkable. The “society” that might have come to these agreements no longer exists. It is still compulsively spoken ­of—​­no pompous sentence is complete without the phrase “in our society”—but this is mostly whistling in the dark by people who know in their hearts that society, imagined as a political community capable of decision, has now shattered. If we take the word society as a continuation of ­church—​­the body politic as the secular equivalent of the body of C ­ hrist—​­then it might be said that we have lost the church but kept its liturgies, which perhaps

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explains a social atmosphere combining apparent irreligion with an intense, q ­ uasi-​ ­religious scrupulosity about things like correct speech, safety, risk, and health. Of what use or interest, then, are Illich’s proposals? Well, he himself, speaking in 1988, saw “extraordinary opportunities” arising from the implosion of society and the collapse of faith in universal development. Disillusionment, he said, was allowing people to exercise their “extraordinary creativity”—“using their brains and trusting their senses”—without obeisance to the overscaled and dysfunctional institutions that were promised but often failed to arrive in the age of development. Illich’s emphasis on surprise, on friendship, and on reversion to tradition continues to inspire many people who are trying “to recover and enlarge the commons” and build convivial ways of life amid the debris of development. Even in unpromising political circumstances, Illich offers a way of thinking and a style of awareness that can sustain those who continue to try to establish what bulwarks they can against the unlimited. And, should conditions ever again become propitious, I believe that in Tools for Conviviality he has set out the terms for what he called “recovery” as clearly as it is possible to do. Illich, I’ve said, was a contradictory ­figure—​­a sophisticated and quintessentially modern man who wanted to be “a remainder of the past,” a highly educated apostle of deschooling, a ­jet-​­setter who advocated limits to speed, an aristocrat who tried to revive the vernacular, and a subtle intellectual who preached simple faith. But just to enumerate these contradictions, as if they somehow invalidated what he said and did, is facile. Illich, to me, not only embodied ­contradiction—​ ­he demonstrated that contradiction, as complementarity, is the key to what he called conviviality and ecologists have sometimes called r­ e-​­inhabitation or homecoming. This, I believe, is Illich’s “one thought”—from “the multiple balance” on which conviviality depends to the “two types of duality” that distinguish tradition from modernity to the mysterious proportion that links the freedom revealed in Christ to the “demonic night” that has been its paradoxical consequence when “turned . . . inside out.” There is no better illustration than the two accounts of apocalypse that I showed to be intermingled in his thought. Illich is both an apocalyptic thinker who believes that our world unveils “the mystery of evil” incubated by a forgetful Church and, at the same time, an ­anti-​­apocalyptic thinker who believes that “the only time the Lord is present to us is at the present moment which we celebrate together.” (“As soon as [you] have thought something,” Simone Weil advises, “try to see in what way the contrary is true.”) I have given this style of awareness in which opposites interpenetrate many names in this b ­ ook—​­from tragic to ­celebratory—​­but, whatever it is called, I believe that understanding of

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contradiction, expressed as limit, as the condition for imagination, and as an experience of God is the key to a human way of life. I am sure that I have partly found in Illich what I was myself looking for, but I’m equally sure that what I found was what was there waiting to be discovered. Illich remains, for me, that candle in the dark of which he speaks in the injunction that I have used as one of the epigraphs for this book. I thank him and you, my reader, for whom that candle also stands.

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Notes

Abbreviations I have used abbreviations for the titles of my main sources. Many of Illich’s books exist in multiple editions, some with different pagination than others, so readers should note the specific edition I am citing when looking up references. The editions and the abbreviations I have used are as follows. ABC  Illich, Ivan, and Barry Sanders. ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. First edition, North Point Press, 1988. BEE  Illich, Ivan. Beyond Economics and Ecology: The Radical Thought of Ivan Illich. Edited by Sajay Samuel. London: Marion Boyars, 2013.

G  Illich, Ivan. Gender. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. H2O  Illich, Ivan. H2O and the Waters of ­ orgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of F “Stuff.” Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1985. IGC  Illich, Ivan, and Etienne Verne. Imprisoned in the Global Classroom. London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1976. IIC  Cayley, David. Ivan Illich in Conversation. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1992. IMP  Illich, Ivan. In the Mirror of the Past. London: Marion Boyars, 1992.

CA  Illich, Ivan. Celebration of Awareness. ­Garden City: Anchor Books, 1971. First edition, ­Doubleday, 1970.

IVT  Illich, Ivan. In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

CCD  Illich, Ivan. The Church, Change and ­Development. Chicago: Urban Training Center Press, 1970.

LM  Illich, Ivan. Limits to Medicine: ­Medical ­Nemesis; The Expropriation of Health. ­Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. (This book went through three editions as Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, beginning in 1975. The longer Limits to Medicine, first published by ­Penguin in 1976, was Illich’s final version. It used the original title as its subtitle.)

CII  Hoinacki, Lee, and Carl Mitcham, eds. The Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. DS  Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin Education, 1973. First edition published by Harper and Row in the United States and Calder and Boyars in England, 1971. EE  Illich, Ivan. Energy and Equity. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

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PC  Illich, Ivan. The Powerless Church and Other Selected Writings, 1955–1985. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. (This new collection was published after I had largely completed my book. I have left my references to the original sources of the articles collected

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470  /  Notes to Pages 1–4 in The Powerless Church but added page references for this new, more easily accessible book in parentheses.) RNF  Illich, Ivan. The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as Told to David ­Cayley. Edited by David Cayley. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2005. RUU  Illich, Ivan. The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies. London: ­Marion Boyars, 1978. SW  Illich, Ivan. Shadow Work. London: Marion Boyars, 1980.

TC  Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. THN  Illich, Ivan. Towards a History of Needs. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1978. (This book ­contained some previously published pieces, like Energy and Equity [1974] and one essay, “The Right to Useful Unemployment,” that was ­published separately by Marion Boyars in the same year, but also included three essays not ­published elsewhere: “Tantalizing Needs,” “Outwitting Developed Nations,” and “In Lieu of Education.”)

Epigraphs Carry a candle in the dark: IIC, 147.

On the table . . . there is always a candle: RNF, 150.

Introduction p. 1  his campaigning years: IIC, 119. p. 1  a new Church: CA, 50—the phrase occurs in other places as well. p. 1  on a par with General Motors . . . totter before it collapses: CA, 59. p. 2  his gospel of degrowth: This word was not yet in use in the 1970s—it appeared in English later as a translation of Serge Latouche’s décroissance— but the economic shrinkage the word describes was certainly a crucial part of Illich’s thinking in Tools for Conviviality and other works of the time. p. 2  totally enclosed in an artificial creation: TC, 54. p. 2  a talk he gave that year in Chicago: He was addressing a group called the Conference on Inter-American Students Project (CIASP), an ­organization of young American (and Canadian) Roman Catholics. His talk was published in CCD as “Yankee, Go Home: The American Do-Gooder in Latin America,” but it still circulates on the internet under the title “To Hell with Good

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Intentions,” as, for example, here: http://www. swaraj.org/illich_hell.htm. (This version claims the talk was given in Cuernavaca, but I believe Chicago is correct. It is also called by this name in PC, 120–27.) p. 2  demonstration models for high service consumption: This phrase comes from IIC, 94, but aptly summarizes what Illich said to the CIASP volunteers in 1968. p. 3  A conference on Orality and Literacy at the University of Toronto in June 1987: My three-hour radio series on the conference is here: http://www .davidcayley.com/podcasts?category=Literacy. A transcript is here: http://www.davidcayley.com/ transcripts/. p. 4  soberly milking that sacred cow: RNF, 147. p. 4  a “keyhole” before which we were exhibiting ourselves to strangers: IIC, 162. p. 4  hope of . . . being surprised: Ivan Illich, “Commencement [Address] at the University of

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Notes to Pages 5–12  /  471 Puerto Rico,” New York Review of Books, October 9, 1969, 15. p. 5  pamphleteer: IIC, 108. p. 5  inner biography: Hoinacki quoted the phrase from Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 2, where Unamuno says that it is the “inner biography” of a philosopher that can sometimes mean the most to his or her readers. Hoinacki’s introduction to my conversations with Illich was never published. p. 5  what he would later call Illich’s “trajectory”: Hoinacki’s “The Trajectory of Ivan Illich” appears in the Bulletin of Science, ­Technology, Society 23, no. 5 (2003): 382–89, ­available here: http:// journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177 /0270467603259776?journalCode=bsta. p. 5  I had asked him about a remark Lee Hoinacki had made to me the day before: IIC, 242–43. p. 5  Europe is the Church, and the Church is Europe: Illich attributes this saying to Christopher Dawson. I have never been able to find it in Dawson’s work. José Antonio Ullate, the Spanish translator and publisher of The Rivers North of the Future, directed me to Hilaire Belloc’s Europe and the Faith, where Belloc says, “Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe.” Illich often transposed quotations, and I now believe this one must have been transposed from Belloc to Dawson.

p. 9  Horribly will I haunt the man: Edward Clodd, Memories (London: Chapman and Hall, 1916), 140. p. 9  His biography . . . “hidden”: The remarks quoted here are from my notes on a private conversation in 1990. p. 9  shot at and beaten up with chains: IIC, 120. p. 10  When I submit my heart: This lecture, “The Educational Enterprise in the Light of the Gospel,” has yet to be published in English, but like most of Illich’s uncollected work, you can find it online, in this case here: http://www.davidtinapple .com/illich/1988_Educational.html. (The online version is unpaginated, so I can give no page reference.) p. 10  You cannot write the biography of a friendship: RNF, 152. p. 11  Faith is a mode of knowledge: RNF, 57. p. 11  the taming of chance: Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). p. 11  hound nature in her wanderings . . . bind her to our service: Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 4, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Heath (London: Longmans, 1858), 296. p. 12  When Jesus bumps into the brothers Peter and Andrew: Matthew 5:18–19.

p. 5  I want to explore with you a phenomenon: Ivan Illich, “Hospitality and Pain,” a sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church in the Chicago Loop, November 23, 1987; this talk is unpublished in English but available here: https://www.pudel.samerski.de/

p. 12  that One whom Illich would name only reluctantly: See, for example, RNF, 106.

p. 9  stammer . . . what I have avoided saying for thirty years: RNF, 61.

p. 12  parable of the Samaritan: Luke 10:29–37.

p. 9  his hypothesis: RNF, 191. p. 9  possible research themes: RNF, 206. p. 9  I leave it in your hands: RNF, 171.

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p. 12  A man’s life of any worth: John Keats, Selected Letters of John Keats (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 261.

p. 12  what happens between the [beaten-up] man and the Samaritan (and following quotes): RNF, 183–84. p. 12  parable of the wheat and the tares: Matthew 13:24–30.

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472  /  Notes to Pages 13–19 p. 13  William Blake left his autograph: William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), 698. p. 13  whenever any Individual rejects error: Ibid., 562.

p. 16  a power among powers: CCD, 92. p. 17  the roof of technological characteristics: Ivan Illich, “How Shall We Pass On Christianity?,” The Critic 30, no. 3 (1972): 19 (PC, 165). p. 17  mechanical messiah: DS, 54.

p. 13  a mysterious historicity: RNF, 184.

p. 17  artificial creation: TC, 54.

p. 13  the ruins of time build mansions: Letter to William Hayley, May 6, 1800, in Blake, op. cit., 705.

p. 17  gruesome apocalypse: TC, 108.

p. 13  beyond the horizon of our attention: IIC, 124.

p. 17  “rapid deschooling” already underway: Ivan Illich, “Deschooling the Teaching Orders,” America, January 9, 1971, 13 (PC, 144).

p. 14  as much oxygen as a herd of twenty elephants (and following quotes): IIC, 163–64. p. 14  a lovelier life: RNF, 101. p. 14  I know only one way of transforming: IIC, 282–83. Nudum Christum sequere (To nakedly follow the naked Christ) is a quotation from St. Jerome, whose roots, like Illich’s, were in Dalmatia. For an interesting excursion on Illich’s links with Jerome, see his old friend Domenico Farias’s article “In the Shadow of Jerome” in CII. p. 14  almost omnipresent in the world: IIC, 110. p. 14  sobria inebrietas: Illich thought this expression had a medieval origin. The only ascription I have been able to find is to the modern Catholic scholar Stratford Caldecott.

p. 17  paradoxical counterproductivity: LM, 15.

p. 17  “unprecedented housecleaning” in “the health professions”: LM, 11. p. 17  tramping on roads scented by exotic herbs: Ivan Illich, “Philosophy . . . Artifacts . . . Frie ndship,” a lecture to the American Catholic Philosophical Association in Los Angeles in 1996, available here: https://www.pudel.samerski.de/. p. 17  his pamphleteering: IIC, 108. p. 17  the myth of education: IIC, 73. p. 17  learning under the assumption of scarcity: IIC, 71. p. 18  a line which ran through every precapitalist society: IIC, 175.

p. 14  joyful austerity: TC, xiii.

p. 18  struggle to preserve the biosphere: G, 18.

p. 14  the signs of the times: Matthew 16:2ff. “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather; for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.”

p. 18  “Gendered Good Old Days”: This was the headline of a review by Canadian journalist Sheila Munro. I failed to note its source.

p. 16  a sign lifted up among the nations: CCD, 89.

p. 19  Joan W. Scott’s 1986 article “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”: The article was originally published in the American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986) and republished in The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s Critical

p. 16  a divine bud that will flower in eternity: CCD, 87.

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p. 18  All the salient features of modern propaganda: Robin Lakoff, Feminist Issues: A Journal of Feminist Social and Political Theory 3, no. 1 (1983): 15.

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Notes to Pages 19–23  /  473 Feminism, ed. Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). p. 19  a change in the mental space . . . not expected to observe: IIC, 169–71. p. 19  extraordinary intensity of purposefulness: RNF, 226. p. 19  swallowed by the system: RNF, 163. p. 19  The computer cannot be conceptualized as a tool: RNF, 157–58. p. 20  Soul-capturing abstractions have extended themselves: Illich wrote this in an unpublished letter to his friend Hellmut Becker in 1992. A translation of this letter by Barbara Duden and Muska Nagel, under the title, “The Loss of World and Flesh,” was read out at Illich’s funeral by Wolfgang Sachs, and I am quoting from that text. p. 20  history as his way of understanding the present: SW, 26. p. 20  modernity as an extension of church history: RNF, 169. p. 20  ridiculously similar to a religious one: IIC, 65.

p. 21  propitious for a major change of direction: DS, 112. p. 21  that “change of mind” of which the New ­Testament speaks: The Greek word is metanoia. It’s the word the apostle Paul uses when he says, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2). p. 21  predictions of an increasingly uninhabitable natural and social environment: TC, 82–83. p. 22  a proscriptive rather than a prescriptive thinker: McKnight quotes Illich to this effect in my radio series “Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman: Conversations with Ivan Illich,” 31; the transcript is here: http://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts. p. 22  the surprising inventiveness of people: IIC, 111. p. 22  the idols of the mind: Francis Bacon argues in his Novum Organum that the mind is deflected from accurate thought by four attractive and disorienting idols, which he calls the idols of the tribe, the cave, the marketplace, and the theater. (By theater he refers to ideas “which have immigrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophies” and are “but so many stage plays.”) (New York: P. F. Collier, 1902), 20ff.

p. 20  a continuation of the “church services” of the late Middle Ages: DS, 48.

p. 22  new complementarity . . . critical habits of thought: I’m quoting from an unpublished outline Illich prepared in 1989 and submitted to David Ramage, then the president of the McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, for a lecture series on “Askesis.” The lectures were never given.

p. 20  the perversion of Revelation: IIC, 243.

p. 22  the practice of love: RNF, 101.

p. 20  walk beneath the nose of God: IIC, 242.

p. 22  the most important religiously celebrated ideology today: RNF, 210.

p. 20  a World church: DS, 48. p. 20  a ritualization of progress: DS, 40–56.

p. 20  nakedly follow the naked Christ: IIC, 283. p. 21  Illich arrives at the hour of his legibility: Ivan Illich, Genere: Per uno critica storica dell’uguaglianza (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2013), 7. (I am quoting from a rough translation of Agamben’s introduction that was made by a friend.)

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p. 22  manipulate others for their own salvation: DS, 55. p. 22  a practical arrangement for imparting education: IIC, 66. p. 23  “ceremonial or ritual” quality which . . .  constitutes its “hidden curriculum”: DS, 39.

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474  /  Notes to Pages 23–30 p. 23  what his friend Paul Goodman called “a new reformation”: Goodman’s last book, published in 1970, two years before his death, was called New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative.

Books, 1991). I remember reading a digest of the argument by the author in Harper’s, but I do not intend to evoke Gergen here, beyond crediting him for the apt word.

p. 23  institutional revolution: Illich subtitled his first book Celebration of Awareness, “a call for institutional revolution.”

p. 24  The mind and the heart are colonized: Ivan Illich, “An Expansion of the Concept of Alienation,” Journal of Social Philosophy 4, no. 1 (1973): 1.

p. 23  modernity can be studied as an extension of church history: RNF, 169.

p. 24  once thinking becomes a monocular perception: IIC, 241.

p. 23  religion a yoke: Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 258.

p. 24  A political majority might be assembled: All of Illich’s writings of the early 1970s called for a political decision in favor of limitation. See, for example, TC, 116–17.

p. 23  man a factory of idols: Calvin, Institutes (1.11.18), quoted in Karl Barth, On Religion, trans. Garrett Green (London: T.T. Clark, 2006), 58. p. 23  the net of religion: Blake, op. cit., 82.

p. 25  plasticity: Catherine Malabou has written extensively about plasticity as a new world image. See, for example, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

p. 24  Saturation seems a good word for this: The term was first suggested by Kenneth Gergen in his book The Saturated Self (New York: Basic

p. 25  Ray Monk’s biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein: Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990).

Prologue p. 27  The oldest surviving family document: From “Family Chronicle,” a handwritten booklet by Ellen Illich, translated and put into typescript by Daisy Illich, the first wife of Ivan’s younger brother Sascha, who gave me a copy. Sascha died in 2009. p. 27  It was Sascha Illich’s understanding: Here and in what follows I am relying on an unpublished interview I did with Sascha Illich. p. 28  Art Nouveau villa in Pötzleindorf: This house itself has a history that is related here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Regenstreif. The villa was designed by a celebrated architect, Friedrich Ohmann, in a romantic style that also incorporated certain baroque elements. It sat amid two hectares of formal gardens, containing sculpture and fountains. The house was large, and beautifully appointed and equipped, with its own swimming pool, small movie theatre, and bowling alley.

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p. 28  That island from which I come: IIC, 101. p. 28  The man who speaks to you: IMP, 52. p. 28  Since I left the old house: IIC, 80. p. 29  His schooling, he recalled: IIC, 59. p. 29  paraded in front of his class: Lee Hoinacki, Dying Is Not Death (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, Wipf and Stock, 2006), 104. p. 29  I knew that . . . Hitler would be occupying: IIC, 76. p. 30  bribes to the Gestapo: A recollection shared in private conversation. p. 30  diplomatic protection: IIC, 80. p. 30  shipped to them via Trieste: Interview with Sascha Illich.

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Notes to Pages 30–36  /  475 p. 30  to learn sufficient Norwegian: Nils Christie told me this story while I was visiting him in Oslo in 2014, the year before he died. p. 31  capsule biography: IIC, 81. p. 31  as he told his friend Douglas Lummis: This interview, which I have in an undated typescript, has not to my knowledge been published. Lummis is the author of Radical Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). For several years in the late 1980s, he joined with Illich and others in the conversations that produced The Development Dictionary (London: Zed, 1992). p. 32  I got stuck in Salzburg: IIC, 8; Martina Kaller, an Austrian scholar who has ­published a biography of Illich in German, has ­investigated this period in Illich’s life. She writes: “According to his registration records, Illich studied for two semesters at the Pontifica Università Gregoriana— Salzburger Fakultät (Faculty).” The professors he mentions in IIC were “Benedictines allied to the Kolleg St. Benedikt—a study college . . . at the Salzburg Benedictine Abbey.” Martina Kaller, “The American Way of Life as Seen through the Lenses of Ivan Illich (1926–2002),” in Quiet Invaders Revisited: Biographies of Twentieth Century Immigrants to the United States, ed. Günter Bischof (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2017), 277–86. p. 32  not a Toynbean: IIC, 143. p. 32  Fabio Milana found it “hard to interpret”: Private communication. p. 32  “It looks,” wrote Toynbee: Arnold J. Toynbee, “Christianity and Civilization,” in Civilization on

Trial (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 6. p. 32  When historians look back: Quoted in Jack McGuire, Essential Buddhism: A Complete Guide to Beliefs and Practices (New York: Pocket Books [Simon and Schuster], 2001), 206–7. p. 33  at the Gregorian University in Rome: IIC, 81. p. 33  the womb out of which: RNF, 142. p. 33  the first attempt to study a social phenomenon: IIC, 65. p. 33  his imaginative Thomism: IIC, 61. p. 33  The Gothic approach, both narrow and precise: IIC, 150. p. 33  Thomism is like a delicate vase: RNF, 182. p. 33  he tested his vocation: Illich’s friend Lee Hoinacki was the source of this story. p. 33  why he decided to become a priest: IIC, 85. p. 34  otherworldly unity . . . of the liturgy: IIC, 99. p. 34  when Pius XII intervened in the Italian election: From my notes on a private conversation. p. 34  wanted to get away from Rome: IIC, 84. p. 34  boarded a former troop ship: http://­ backpalm.blogspot.ca/2012/07/illich-journey-to -america-1951.html.

Chapter 1 p. 35  The peregrinus, or pilgrim, set out on his journey: Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters (New York: Dell, 1961), 94; the passage I have quoted concerns medieval Irish monks.

p. 36  Now the Lord said to Abram: Genesis 12:1.

p. 35  In imitation of Christ: CCD, 98.

p. 36  Jesus’ curt instruction: Mark 1:16–17.

p. 35  a boy . . . exiled in Vienna: See “The Cultivation of Conspiracy,” in CII, 234.

p. 36  When the disciples are sent out to preach: Matthew 10:9–10.

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p. 36  Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt: Exodus 16:1–36; Numbers 11:1–9.

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476  /  Notes to Pages 36–43 p. 36  Eternal life is promised: Matthew 19:29. p. 36  Foxes have holes: Luke 9:58–62. p. 36  no abiding city: Letter to the Hebrews 13:14.

p. 41  their experience at Pentecost: Acts of the Apostles, chap. 2. p. 41  sent only to the lost sheep: Matthew 15:24. p. 41  not to abolish the law: Matthew 5:17.

p. 36  we leave home on a pilgrimage: CCD, 13.

p. 42  Peter . . . sees a vision: Acts, chap. 10.

p. 37  I wanted to get away from Rome: IIC, 84.

p. 42  slough off its cultural containment: Lamin Saneh’s Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (rev. ed., New York: Orbis, 2009) tells the story of Christianity’s successive translations and the give-and-take between mission and culture that was involved.

p. 37  Ivan Illich . . . what kind of a name is that?: Francine du Plessix Gray, “The Rules of the Game” [a profile of Illich], The New Yorker, April 25, 1970, 42. p. 37  Not foreigners, yet foreign: CA, 17–29. p. 38  In order to practice what he preached: Ana Maria Diaz-Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Ave: The Impact of the Puerto Rican Migration on the Archdiocese of New York (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 133. p. 38  There are no ushers in Jose’s father’s house: Ivan Illich, “The American Parish,” Integrity 9, no. 9 (1955): 5–16 (PC, 3); Integrity was a Catholic journal published in New York between 1946 and 1956 and “dedicated,” as it said on its cover, “to the task of discovering the new synthesis of RELIGION and LIFE for our times.” p. 39  Criticism brings about change: Ibid., 10 (PC, 6). p. 40  like riding in a Piper Cub: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 43. p. 40  He became an outstanding figure: Cayley, “Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman: Conversations with Ivan Illich,” 3. p. 40  key man . . . in the American church: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 46. p. 41  I believe that properly conducted language learning: CA, 29–30. p. 41  preach to “all nations”: Matthew 28:19. p. 41  If Catholics ever lose their concern: Illich, “The American Parish,” 14 (PC, 11).

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p. 42  he remembers himself as a young chorister: Illich, “How Shall We Pass On Christianity?,” 15 (PC, 156). p. 43  He characterized its peril in dramatic images: “The Vanishing Clergyman” in CCD, 61, and CA, 59. p. 43  “a sinking ship”: CCD, 30. p. 43  contact with Latin America might have “a revolutionary impact”: Todd Hartch, The Prophet of Cuernavaca: Ivan Illich and the Crisis of the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 63. p. 43  bringing the Church into view as I sign of Christ: This quotation and those in the following two sentences are taken from “The Crisis of the Church and the Task of the Religious.” This was a lecture by Illich to a Jesuit organization called Pro Vita Mundi at its first international ­congress in Essen, Germany, held September 3–5, 1963. The conference was called “Die Not Der Kirche Und Die Aufgabe Der Ordensleute” (The ­Predicament of the Church and the Task of the Religious Orders). The German text of Illich’s talk was recently recovered from the conference proceedings by Italian scholar Fabio Milana, who is working on a book on Illich’s formative years that will soon appear in Italy. My wife, Jutta Mason, translated the text he provided from German to English. The paper is unpublished, but I have posted her translation on my website: http://www. davidcayley.com/blog?category=Crisis%2FTask. (It appears there as continuous text, so I cannot give page references.)

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Notes to Pages 43–52  /  477 p. 43  The Church is . . . portrayed as a sign: CCD, 89, 105. p. 43  Never does the missionary: Illich, “The Crisis of the Church and the Task of the Religious.” p. 44  In South America . . . it didn’t work: Ibid.

p. 45  five basic components: CCD, 92–93. p. 45  a grasp of “fundamental mythology”: CCD, 100–101. p. 45  the grammar of silence: CCD, 123.

p. 44  The new church will be built up: Ibid.

p. 46  the majority who attended: Hartch, op. cit., 17.

p. 44  faith becomes transparent in a new language: Ibid.

p. 46  I felt very much attached to Puerto Rico: IIC, 88.

p. 44  the way of ignorance:. “In order to arrive at what you do not know / You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. / In order to possess what you do not possess / You must go by the way of dispossession.” T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1943), 15.

p. 46  The two Irish Catholic bishops: IIC, 88.

p. 44  In Christ, God emptied himself: Philippians 2:7. p. 44  To communicate himself perfectly to man: CCD, 113. p. 44  strain to recognize her past: CCD, 87. p. 44  In his long essay, “Mission and Midwifery”: CCD, 99–100.

p. 47  As a historian I saw: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 46. p. 47  The images he uses: Illich, “The American Parish,” 14 (PC, 12); CA, 90; du Plessix Gray, 80. p. 47  This is a book about Heaven: Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2000), 351. p. 48  I knew that I couldn’t possibly engage: IIC, 98–99. p. 48  The last straw came: Hartch, op. cit., 22–23.

Chapter 2 p. 49  Perhaps no comparable acreage in Christendom: Daniel Berrigan, “Cuernavaca Revisited,” Jubilee 15, no. 9 (1968): 35. p. 49  the people in Latin America saw it: Cayley, “Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman,” 5. p. 50  He arrived there, by his own account: I quote here and in what follows from Illich’s introduction to the English edition of Carlo Carretto’s Letters from the Desert (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972), viii. p. 50  A retreat of forty days: Hartch, op. cit., 27. Hartch quotes Illich as saying that this was “the most wonderful time of his life.” He once told me

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that he sustained such a lengthy retreat—“twice as long as Carretto had undertaken,” he said— “out of vanity.” (Hartch is quoting a letter he wrote at the time to Joe Fitzpatrick. His remark to me was made nearly forty years later—by an old man looking back in bemusement at his younger self.) p. 50  what he says of Carretto: Carretto, op cit., ix. p. 51  In “giving alms”: CA, 50–51. p. 51  Historian Todd Hartch, who has studied this period: Hartch, op. cit., 29. p. 52  The library of this institution: BEE, 114.

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478  /  Notes to Pages 52–61 p. 52  Valentina Borremans . . . travelled throughout Latin American: For more on Borremans’s collection, see http://backpalm.blogspot.ca/2011/10/valentina-borremans.html. (This blog created by the late John Verity—he signed his posts by his middle name Winslow—is full of interesting Illich lore.) p. 52  Illich concluded, in Todd Hartch’s summary: Hartch, op. cit., 29.

p. 56  Throughout the 1960s our experience and reputation: CA, 40. p. 56  some complained of harsh treatment: Hartch, op. cit., 35ff. p. 57  I love the way he tortures his missionaries: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 76–78. p. 57  a lot of intellectual violence: Ibid., 79.

p. 53  based on what he had learned in Puerto Rico: Ibid., 20.

p. 57  In 1963 he expressed his hope: Hartch, op. cit., 63.

p. 53  Development had been in the air: See Gustavo Esteva, “Development,” in The Development Dictionary, 6.

p. 57  This center later played . . . a strange ­important role: IIC, 205.

p. 54  I had begun as a believer: RNF, 145. p. 54  I put into parentheses their claim to educate: IIC, 62.

p. 57  He made me read: IIC, 205. p. 57  Câmara, in his courage: See IIC, 147–49. p. 59  There was, for example, a certain Helen: IIC, 97.

p. 54  a war on subsistence: This phrase appears several times in the essays of the late 1970s that comprise Shadow Work (1981) and not, to my knowledge, before, but it summarizes a view that had been maturing for many years.

p. 59  prejudicial to the Church: See “Dear Father Kavane” in CCD, 33–41.

p. 54  It is blasphemous: CA, 52.

p. 59  return[ed] to what the Conquest stamped her: CA, 46.

p. 54  a place already so touristy: IIC, 204. p. 55  a center for de-Yankeefication: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 49. p. 55  Illich sometimes presented the story this way: See IIC, 87–98; and RNF, 194ff. p. 55  Paul Tanner . . . viewed Illich: The story is told in detail in Hartch, op. cit., 12–47. p. 56  ambiguity, flattery and misdirection: Hartch, op. cit., 33–34. p. 56  When I first heard of John Considine: See IIC, 93; and RNF, 194. p. 56  relationship of mutual respect: Hartch, op. cit., 72. p. 56  anti-missionary plot: Ibid., 35.

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p. 59  compulsion to do good an innate American trait: CA, 7.

p. 60  A large proportion of Latin American Church personnel: CA, 50. p. 60  It is easy to come by big sums: CA, 46. p. 60  Instead of learning how to get along: Ibid. p. 60  The Church has become an agent: Ibid., 47. p. 61  The smothering of the Brazilian radio schools: Ibid.; Thomas C. Bruneau, The Political Transformation of the Brazilian Catholic Church (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 80ff. p. 61  Exporting Church employees to Latin American: CA, 50. p. 61  transform the old hacienda of God: CA, 49. p. 61  the risk of applying the knife: CA, 51.

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Notes to Pages 62–68  /  479

Chapter 3 p. 62  It is my thesis: “The Powerless Church,” CA, 87 (PC, 134).

p. 66  personal realization of an intimate vocation: CA, 75 (PC, 113).

p. 62  the questionnaire Illich was given in Rome: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 40.

p. 66  An adult layman ordained to the ministry: CA, 70–71 (PC, 109).

p. 62  Some silly Roman business: IIC, 99.

p. 67  But where the danger is: The line, which has been translated in various ways, occurs at the beginning of Hölderlin’s poem Patmos.

p. 62  Church as She . . . Church as It: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 80–81. p. 63  The Oath Against Modernism: https://www. papalencyclicals.net/pius10/p10moath.htm. p. 63  A critical attitude: Illich, “The American Parish,” 10 (PC, 6). p. 63  Tyconius in his Liber Regularam: Giorgio Agamben discusses the little-known Tyconius and reproduces the relevant sections of his Book of Rules in The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 5ff., 46–59. p. 64  nothing theologically new: CA, 57. p. 65  the unknown future that mankind has missed: John Milbank, “The Last of the Last: Theology, Authority and Democracy,” Telos 123 (2002): 15. p. 65  divine mandate: CA, 60 (PC, 100). p. 65  the rock on which it was founded: In the Gospel of Matthew (16:18), Jesus says, “You are Peter, and on this rock will I build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” (Peter’s name in Greek is Pétros, “rock,” which makes Jesus’ commission at least a pun if not an overt instance, as Illich suspected, of divine humor.) p. 65  suspect that [the Church] has lost its relevance: CA, 59 (PC, 100). p. 65  folkloric phantoms: CA, 64 (PC, 104); and du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 85. p. 65  Ecclesiastic employees live: CA, 62 (PC, 102). p. 65  Clerics are smothered: CA, 66 (PC, 105).

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p. 67  The March on the Pentagon: A massive m ­ obilization against the American war in Vietnam, held in October 1967, when 100,000 protestors surrounded the Pentagon. p. 67  We call you to join: CA, 5–6 (PC, 133). p. 67  a man-eating idol: Interview with Douglas Lummis, op. cit. p. 68  We stand at the end: CCD, 21–22. p. 68  We have ceased to live in a rigid framework: CCD, 17. p. 68  process of the world’s progressive socialization: CA, 60 (PC, 101). p. 68  the new era of constant development: CA, 88 (PC, 135). p. 68  a world come of age: The phrase recurs in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997; first English edition 1953); see, for example, the letter to Eberhard Bethge of June 8, 1944, 324–29. p. 68  a conference he gave to a group of radical psychiatrists: See “Concerning Aesthetic and Religious Experience,” in PC. In what follows, I have not noted passages that follow directly on from those I have noted. Any discrepancies with PC in the passages I cite are a result of my having occasionally preferred an earlier translation that I have of this conference. p. 68  We have discovered and lifted the veil: PC, 69.

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480  /  Notes to Pages 68–78 p. 68  We have learned to deal with every myth: Ibid., 71. p. 69  The struggle against the illusions of the ­sensibility: Ibid., 76. p. 69  What is bothering me incessantly: Letter to Eberhard Bethge from Tegel prison, April 30, 1944, in Bonhoeffer, op. cit., 279–80. p. 70  We no longer need God: PC, 71. p. 70  Mystical experience is but a particular experience of reality: Ibid., 76. p. 71  The mystical experience is the fruit of love: Ibid., 86. p. 71  The individual can attain faith: Ibid., 87. p. 71  put away childish things: 1 Corinthians 13:11: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” p. 72  The development of humanity tends: CA, 87 (PC, 134). p. 72  the growing mutual relatedness: CCD, 19. (A version of this essay also appears in CA as “The Powerless Church” and as the title essay in PC.) p. 72  social innovation . . . an increasingly complex process: CCD, 21 (PC, 138). p. 72  Only the Church can reveal: CCD, 17 (PC, 134). p. 72  teach us in liturgical celebration: CCD, 19 (PC, 136).

p. 73  the sense of the Church: CCD, 79. p. 73  never before interpreted: CCD, 80. p. 73  Christian celebration renews the whole Church: CCD, 81. p. 73  A global divine liturgy: CCD, 85. p. 73  A new church: CA, 50 (PC, 96). p. 74  for no purpose at all: CA, 94 (PC, 139). p. 74  renewing of the mind . . . metanoia: Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able discern what is the good, pleasing and perfect will of God.” p. 74  I remember that atmosphere in the mid1960s: IIC, 212–13. p. 75  May we pray for an increase: CA, 70 (PC, 108–109). p. 76  The intellectual situation of the Church: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions: On the Church in the Modern Age (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 41–42. p. 76  Illich on “the new missionary challenge” of the church: Illich, “The America Parish,” 15 (PC, 12). p. 76  Superannuated . . . superseded . . . and burdened: Balthasar, Razing the Bastions, 44. p. 76  The future depends on whether: Ibid., 4. p. 77  A garden enclosed: Song of Solomon 4:12.

p. 72  a seed, a yeast, a divine bud: CCD, 87, 89, 105.

p. 77  The Church as a closed garden: Balthasar, Razing the Bastions, 100.

p. 72  What the Church contributes through evangelization: CCD, 19 (PC, 136).

p. 77  Profound mysteries, things that . . . only her saints knew: Ibid., 55.

p. 73  Faith is . . . intelligence . . . enlightened by love: Simone Weil, Notebooks (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1956), 242.

p. 78  The Church suffers what it must judge: Ibid., 88.

p. 73  The substance of things hoped for, the e­ vidence of things unseen: Hebrews 11:1.

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p. 78  Illich influenced by von Balthasar: There is a suggestive passage in Illich’s article “How Can We Pass On Christianity?” in which he recalls

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Notes to Pages 79–83  /  481 having arranged to have another essay of von Balthasar’s on the Church translated into English and it having “cost me a lot when I got into trouble.” The essay is called Casta Meretrix, “The Chaste Prostitute.” It’s a long, learned, and, I thought, rather convoluted essay in which von Balthasar shows how reformed or reforming prostitutes, like Rahab in the Old Testament and Mary Magdalene in the New Testament, are signs and prefigurations of the Church. Illich admired the essay because he wanted Catholics to admit to the “fallen” character of the Church. For his brief remarks on the subject, see Illich, “How Shall We Pass On Christianity?,” 17–18. Casta Meretrix can be found here: http://www.newtorah.org/Casta Meretrix.html. p. 79  the stand demanded by the times: IIC, 101. p. 79  During the Second Vatican Council I worked: IIC, 100–101. p. 80  the moral stance which corresponds: IIC, 103. p. 80  not a question of democracy: IIC, 102. p. 80  What can you say about one atomic bomb: IIC, 128; see also “I Too Have Decided to Keep Silent,” in IMP, 32–33; and Ivan Illich, “The Silent People,” The Progressive, June 1983, 50. p. 80  Intolerable realities . . . burn out hearts . . . acceptance of self-destruction: IIC, 126–30. p. 80  a sign of contradiction: Hartch, op. cit., 4. p. 81  the aristocrat’s sentimental attraction: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 80. p. 81  Canadian scholar/activist Ursula Franklin: Franklin was a friend, and these remarks were made in private conversation. Her affinity with Illich is evident in her book The Real World of Technology (Toronto: CBC Enterprises, 1990; Toronto: House of Anansi, 1992; Toronto: House of Anansi, 1999). p. 81  Illich’s subversion . . . of American missionary initiative: CA, 40.

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p. 81  He befriended . . . Camilio Torres: “Kann Gewalt Christlich Sein?: Speigel Gespräch mit dem katholischen Südamerika-Experten Ivan Illich über Kirche und Revolution,” Der Spiegel, September 1970. p. 81  a strange, devious, slippery personage: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 62. p. 81  More than once he was physically attacked: Illich tended to downplay and certainly never dramatized the physical danger he faced during this period, but there is a brief account of his being “shot at and beaten up with chains” in IIC, 120–22. p. 82  basically subversive purpose: CA, 40. p. 82  John Considine was complaining: Hartch, op. cit., 50. p. 82  Cardinal Cushing . . . was appalled: Ibid., 79; IIC, 97–98. p. 82  missionaries . . . constituted . . .  .7 percent of church personnel: CA, 40. p. 82  sober meaningful generosity: CA, 45 (PC, 91). p. 82  on the side of W.R. Grace and Co: CA, 47 (PC, 93). p. 82  top level discussion of his trustworthiness: Hartch, op. cit., 72. p. 82  Illich’s relations with René Voillaume: See IIC, 150–52; and Robert Joseph Fox, “Commentary by Ivan Illich,” in Fox-Sight: Telling the Vision of Robert J. Fox (Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 1989), 155 (also in PC, 168–74); Illich’s speculation that Voillaume played a role or, at the least, failed to support Illich after his summons to Rome in 1968 was shared with me privately. p. 82  a request by Illich for an audience with the pope: Hartch, op. cit., 74. p. 83  Illich summoned to Rome: In what follows, I rely on the account Illich gave to ­Francine du Plessix Gray, as cited previously, and on what Illich and Lee Hoinacki told me; the letters I cite and the

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482  /  Notes to Pages 84–88 memorandum to Betsie Hollants are drawn from materials Illich released to the public at that time in the form of a CIDOC “Dossier”—headed D37. p. 84  an ambitious publishing program: In CII, Carl Mitcham, one of the editors, has included a short bibliographic essay on CIDOC’s publications as an appendix to his introduction. p. 84  letter to Sergio Méndez Arceo: Edward B. Fiske, “Vatican Curb Aimed at Cultural Center of Reform Advocate,” New York Times, January 23, 1969, 1–2.

the “margins of the situation.” I leave it to future historians, should there be any, to sort the matter out. For me Illich was, effectively, the director of CIDOC. (The quote from Hartch is on p. 95 of his book; the letters to Spellman and Maguire are included in CIDOC Dossier 37.) p. 86  made a scandal out of [him]: IIC, 99. p. 86  These proceedings . . . have cast: CIDOC Dossier 37.

p. 85  memo to Betsie Hollants: CIDOC Dossier 37.

p. 87  a man totally at the service of the Church: CA, 67 (PC, 106); this essay was first published in The Critic, a publication of the Thomas More Society of Chicago, in 1967.

p. 86  difficult to evaluate Illich’s oft-expressed desire: Hartch, op. cit., 94.

p. 87  for a radical socialism: “Kann Gewalt Christlich Sein?”

p. 86  the presiding spirit of CIDOC: I say presiding spirit because I think this designation is undeniable. As to his formal position, the documents I have are ambiguous. In October 1967 he “reminded” Cardinal Spellman by letter that “in 1966 I bound myself contractually for a five to ten year period to the presidence of CIDOC.” The following year he wrote to Archbishop John Maguire, the interim head of the New York Archdiocese following Spellman’s death, that “a year ago I bound myself contractually for a second minimum period of five years to several academic institutions in Mexico, among which is CIDOC.” However, Hartch reports that when Rome required, as a condition of rescinding its ban, that Illich step down as president of CIDOC, the “actual director” of CIDOC, Carmen Pérez, characterized the request as “absurd” and “reminded the press that Illich was only ‘on the margins of the situation’ because he was not the director of CIDOC but merely ‘like any other university professor’ who used CIDOC’s facilities.” Moreover, Illich told me that he did not exercise formal power at CIDOC but only “unquestioned” authority. (“I never held any office, I never exercised any power, I never signed anything during [those] fifteen years in Mexico. I always acted through unquestioned influence, but not through the exercise of managerial power.” IIC, 203.) Clearly, he cannot have been, at the same time, the legal and contractual president, an eminence grise exercising a purely implicit authority, and a quasi-professor on

p. 87  theologically a profound conservative: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 68.

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p. 87  What makes this place run: Ibid. p. 87  setting fire to draft files or joining a guerrilla band: Tom and Marjory Melville were Maryknoll missionaries expelled from Guatemala after they were accused of being connected to a guerrilla group in 1967. They later joined with Daniel and Philip Berrigan and several others in burning draft files in Catonsville, Maryland. According to du Plessix Gray (op. cit., 79), Illich “disdainfully” dismissed the Melvilles as “dilettantes” and “ingénues” and added, “One does not take shortcuts.” p. 87  Robert Inchausti has called this stance “subversive orthodoxy.”: Robert Inchausti, Subversive Orthodoxy (Ada: Brazos Press, 2005); Inchausti profiles twenty thinkers, including Illich, in whom he finds Christianity’s revolutionary potentials expressed within more or less orthodox frameworks. p. 88  first paycheck made out to the Rev. Monsignor Ivan Illich: Hoinacki, “The Trajectory of Ivan Illich.” p. 88  abstain from talking to groups of priests or nuns: He spoke of this promise in a presentation to the American Catholic Philosophical Association

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Notes to Pages 89–98  /  483 at its annual meeting in Los Angeles on March 23, 1996. This paper remains unpublished in English but can be found here: https://www.pudel .samerski.de/.

“Lima Discourse,” Learning for Living [now renamed The British Journal of Religious Education] 13, no. 3 (1974): 85–89 (PC, 146–55).

p. 89  it is my intention to maintain this reserve: This letter has not to my knowledge been published in English. Fabio Milana quotes it in his afterword to the Italian translation of the transcript of my CBC Radio series “The Corruption of Christianity: Ivan Illich on Gospel, Church and Society.” (Ivan Illich, Pevertimento Del Christianismo: Conversazione Con David Cayley Su Vangelo, Chiesa, Modernità [Firenze: Verbarium Quodlibet, 2008].) Milana made the English translation, and I have reproduced it as he gave it to me.

p. 90  Illich, “How Shall We Pass On Christianity?” (PC, 156–67); my exposition of this article follows its sequence step-by-step, so I will not add further notes as I quote it.

p. 89  The authority of a “Catholic theologian”: RNF, 121.

p. 90  in the spirit of the Maran Atha: Sometimes written as one word, sometimes as two, as Illich does, this is one of only a handful of expressions in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, to be found in the New Testament. It appears in 1 Corinthians 16:22. It can be read as an announcement, the Lord is coming/has come, or as an invocation, Come, Lord.

p. 89  “Deschooling the Teaching Orders”: America, January 9, 1971.

p. 90  never and always: The expression is T. S. Eliot’s in “Little Gidding,” the last of the Four Quartets, 32.

p. 89  in Lima to address a conference of the World Council of Christian Education: Ivan D. Illich,

p. 92  testifying to his love of the Church outside its context: IIC, 104.

Chapter 4 p. 94  The New World Church is the knowledge industry: DS, 52. p. 94  John Ohliger bibliography: It was published by ERIC Clearinghouse on Teacher Education and remains available at http://files.eric.ed.gov/ fulltext/ED090145.pdf. p. 94  an institution that might meet “the needs of others”: IIC, 59, 60. p. 95  structured injustice: IIC, 60. p. 95  a system for producing dropouts: IIC, 62–63. p. 95  never made an object of study: RNF, 139. p. 95  the best that has been thought and said: This famous phrase comes from Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869).

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p. 96  puts into parentheses their claim to educate: This quotation and all subsequent ­quotations in this paragraph are taken from IIC, 62, 63. p. 96  showcase for development: IIC, 62. p. 98  There is neither Jew, nor Gentile: The Epistle of Paul to the Galatians 3:28. p. 98  We know of the existence in each city: Celsus is known to posterity only through Origen’s response to his criticism in the latter’s Contra Celsum. See Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 76. p. 98  Ecclesiology as the predecessor of sociology: IIC, 65. p. 98  Within ecclesiology there is branch called liturgy: IIC, 65–66.

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484  /  Notes to Pages 98–106 p. 98  Leitourgia: New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/09306a.htm.

p. 101  a secularization of Catholic ritual: RNF, 144.

p. 98  Aidan Kavanagh: Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology (New York: Pueblo Publishing Company, 1984).

p. 101  the modern mania for education: RNF, 145.

p. 98  Liturgy was primary theology: Ibid., 74. p. 99  the church builds itself from liturgical acts: Ibid., 62. p. 99  Christians do not worship because they believe: Ibid., 91. p. 99  The assembly is changed by its liturgy: Ibid., 76. p. 99  power and momentum of its inward flow: Ibid., 93. p. 99  enacted style of common life: Ibid., 106. p. 99  to receive a message: Ibid., 116. p. 99  a context that seemed ridiculously similar to a religious one: IIC, 65. p. 99  Quite definitely I was not studying: IIC, 66. p. 100  Gluckman was my hero: IIC, 66. p. 100  rituals have an ability to generate: RNF, 140. p. 100  The way that Gluckman puts it: Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1965), 241, 258. p. 100  No ritualization of social relations in highly differentiated societies: Ibid., 261.

p. 101  an intensity of ritual behavior: RNF, 144.

p. 102  I never wanted to do away with schools: IIC, 66, 68. p. 102  three simple constitutional proposals: Ivan Illich, “The Need for Cultural Revolution,” in Tradition and Revolution, ed. Lionel Rubinoff (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1971), 59. p. 103  common to powerful churches throughout history: DS, 43. p. 103  Bruno Latour and the “modern constitution”: Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). p. 103  the secular itself is a myth: A series of seven radio broadcasts I presented on this theme in 2012 can be found here: http://www.davidcayley. com/podcasts?category=Myth+of+the+Secular. p. 104  ritualization of progress: A chapter heading in DS, 40–56. p. 104  school is a ritual of initiation: DS, 49. p. 104  common sense drips to the rock bottom: Illich, “The Need for Cultural Revolution,” 55. p. 104  deschooling must be at the root: DS, 52. p. 105  World Church . . . cargo cult . . . total claim: DS, 48, 50. p. 105  The teacher as custodian acts: DS, 37. p. 105  The child must confront a man: DS, 38.

p. 100  mystical means outside of sensory observation: Ibid., 251.

p. 105  The claim that a liberal society can be founded: DS, 37.

p. 100  Ritual is a procedure whose imagined purpose: RNF, 140.

p. 106  invite compulsively repetitive use: DS, 61.

p. 101  a rain dance which is world-wide: RNF, 140.

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p. 106  a perfect system of regressive taxation: DS, 65.

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Notes to Pages 106–114  /  485 p. 106  Now that I’m back in the United States . . . a dazed population: IIC, 68, 70.

p. 110  a mystic . . . a utopian . . . and an authoritarian: Ibid., 143.

p. 107  Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling: DS, 77.

p. 110  In proposing a deschooled society: Ibid., 141.

p. 108  Sidney Hook’s review: “Learning and the Role of Schools,” Current, April 1972. p. 108  Bruce Kidd’s review: “The Private Celebration of Ivan Illich,” Canadian Forum, September 1971. Kidd is reviewing Illich’s Celebration of Awareness but with particular attention to the articles on education in that book that prefigure Deschooling Society. p. 109  Herb Gintis review: Herbert Gintis, “Towards a Political Economy of Education: A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society,” Harvard Educational Review 42, no. 1 (1972): 83. p. 109  Marx and Engels on utopian socialism: “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” The Marx Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978), 498. p. 109  Each of us is personally responsible: DS, 52. p. 109  the individual outside of society: Gintis, op. cit., 83.

p. 110  Illich a “totalist”: Ibid., 142. p. 111  Consider . . . his attitude toward the poor: Ibid., 144. p. 111  firmly fixed on the goal: Ibid., 144. p. 111  insofar as he means to be taken literally: Ibid., 144–45. p. 111  Illich our Tolstoy not our Lenin . . . deschooling a metaphor: Ibid., 146. p. 111  I am certain that in 1971: Ivan Illich, “Deschooling the Teaching Orders,” America, ­January 9, 1971, 13. p. 112  for the first time in history: Illich, “How Will We Pass On Christianity?,” 19 (PC, 165). p. 113  an engineered Messiah: DS, 50. I have condensed his phrase, which reads, in full, “Man has become the engineer of his own messiah.” p. 113  The mood of 1971: DS, 112.

p. 109  integral link in the larger institutional allocation: Ibid., 80.

p. 113  Liberate ourselves . . . from our pedagogical hubris: DS, 55.

p. 109  The school system fulfills a functional role: Ibid., 88.

p. 113  in fear and trembling: Philippians 2:12.

p. 109  Daniel Bell: Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 421ff. p. 110  socialist in economics, liberal in politics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Bell. p. 110  Neil Postman: Neil Postman, After Deschooling, What?, ed. Alan Gerntner, Colin Greer, and Frank Riessman (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).

p. 113  trusting faith in the goodness of nature: DS, 106. p. 114  The school system . . . performs the threefold function: DS, 43. p. 114  Elsewhere the school is “sacred territory”: DS, 38, 48, 50. p. 114  The disestablishment of schools will inevitably happen: DS, 104.

p. 110  To you Ivan Illich may be: Ibid., 137.

p. 114  No social order ever perishes: Marx Engels Reader, op. cit., 5.

p. 110  conservative and obtuse: Ibid., 140.

p. 114  The time is fulfilled: Mark 1:15.

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486  /  Notes to Pages 114–122 p. 114  The coming of the mechanical messiah: DS, 54. p. 115  A cause without a party: DS, 73. p. 115  only a generation that grows up without obligatory schools: DS, 44. p. 116  “a sacred precinct”: DS, 37.

p. 117  Can two societies with . . . different ritual structures: “Man Alive,” CBC Television, May 25, 1969. p. 118  In Germany I met with him: IIC, 70. p. 118  I wrote an article in which I basically said: IIC, 73; the article was “The Alternative to Schooling,” Saturday Review, 54, June 1971.

p. 116  Durkheim recognized that this ability to divide social reality: DS, 31.

p. 118  How can we better understand: IIC, 71.

p. 116  at the threshold of maturity: CA, 5 (PC, 133).

p. 118  rabble-rousing: IIC, 71.

Chapter 5 p. 119  by abandoning the institutional frameworks: Hartch, op. cit., 47.

p. 121  when the word revolution was in the air: RNF, 53.

p. 119  take no thought for the morrow: Matthew 6:34.

p. 121  all those well-meaning people: IIC, 212.

p. 120  a revolutionary inversion: TC, 119.

p. 121  Every Christian a missionary: Illich, “The Crisis of the Church and the Task of the Religious,” op. cit.

p. 120  An audience at York University: Illich, “The Need for Cultural Revolution.”

p. 122  beneath the nose of God: IIC, 242.

p. 120  does not know where the road might lead: CCD, 13.

p. 122  following the naked Christ: IIC, 283.

p. 120  timeo Dominum transeuntem: RNF, 97.

p. 122  the Church of the future: CA, 70.

p. 120  one of the great and overwhelming fortunes: IIC, 210.

p. 122  “hidden purpose” . . . “social and political critique as . . . code”: Hartch, op. cit., 146.

p. 121  As Ladner expounds it, reformatio came to refer: RNF, 52–53.

p. 122  start from revelation which you must accept: IIC, 241.

p. 121  turned away from their culture and assumptions: IIC, 211.

p. 122  perversion of Revelation: The term is used throughout RNF.

p. 121  born anew “in the spirit”: In the Gospels, the idea of rebirth “in the spirit” gets its fullest discussion in chap. 3 of John; Illich discusses contrition as the “ground-tone” of the new Christian community in RNF, 53.

p. 122  secular institutions stamped from [the Church’s] mould: RNF, 47–48.

p. 121  different from anything known elsewhere: IIC, 212.

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p. 122  doing theology a new way of: Hoinacki made this claim in an interview with me for my first radio series about Illich, “Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman,” 32. He expanded it in his essay “The Trajectory of Ivan Illich.”

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Notes to Pages 122–130  /  487 p. 122  conversion to God’s human face: Illich, “Phil osophy . . . Artifacts . . . Friendship.” p. 123  to find the roof of technological characteristics: PC, 165.

p. 127  radical monopoly: TC, 57. p. 127  A generation ago in Mexico: TC, 56–57. p. 128  Man’s poetic ability withers: TC, 61.

p. 123  to ordain what is good enough for all: TC, 115.

p. 128  The power to endow the word with personal meaning: TC, 63.

p. 123  faith is either there or not there: LM, 269.

p. 128  The human equilibrium is open: TC, 49. All subsequent quotes in this paragraph are on this page.

p. 123  making a new society right now: IIC, 213; the full quotation is in chap. 4, 14. p. 123  that light over a long marsh: See Rex ­Murphy’s review of The Rebel Sell: Why the ­ Culture Can’t Be Jammed by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in the Literary Review of Canada, March 2005. p. 124  The Crisis of Democracy: http://trilateral. org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf, 123, 179. p. 124  the reconstruction of imperial ideology: This is the subtitle of the second volume of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, The Political Economy of Human Rights (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1979). p. 125  epilogue to the industrial age: TC, ix. p. 125  I include among tools: TC, 22. p. 126  a Heideggerian pursuit of its essence: Heidegger begins his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” by claiming that the only way to establish a “free relationship” to technology is by “open[ing] our human existence to [its] essence.” See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper Torchbooks), 1977). p. 126  Deschooling is at the root: DS, 52. p. 126  the destructive dominance of industry over society: LM, 215. This was the final definitive version of what was first published as Medical Nemesis. This last edition incorporated the earlier title as its subtitle, and I sometimes refer to it in my text by this first and better-known name.

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p. 128  The multiple balance: This is the title of TC’s third chapter, 49–90. p. 129  Leopold Kohr . . . whom Illich first met in Puerto Rico: They remained friends thereafter. Illich wrote the introduction to Kohr’s book The Inner City (Talybont: Y Lolfa, 1989) and gave the laudatio at a celebration of Kohr’s eightieth birthday. He speaks of their friendship in IIC, 82–84. p. 129  one cause behind all forms of social misery: Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), ix. p. 129  social morphology: G, 82. p. 129  D’arcy Thompson and J. B. S. Haldane: See D’arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971; first edition, 1917); and J. B. S. Haldane, “On Being the Right Size,” in James R. Newman, The World of Mathematics, vol. 2. (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1956; originally published in 1928). p. 129  Interview with Douglas Lummis: Interview with Douglas Lummis, op. cit. p. 129  Engineered obsolescence: TC, 83. p. 129  political discussion is stunned: TC, 92. p. 129  moral and political imagination paralyzed: TC, 93. p. 129  a total crisis approaches: TC, 117. p. 129  Contemporary man attempts: DS, 108. p. 130  Man will find himself totally enclosed: TC, 54.

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488  /  Notes to Pages 130–137 p. 130  The only way of regeneration: Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 7.

p. 133  Motorways expand, driving wedges: EE, 15.

p. 130  scrap everything to save man: Ibid., 62.

p. 133  a socio-cultural energy coma: EE, 9.

p. 130  “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man”: Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 265–80.

p. 133  almost omnipresent in the world: IIC, 110.

p. 130  Herbert Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). p. 130  Port Huron Statement: Greif, op. cit., 265. p. 131  C. S. Lewis: C S. Lewis, Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947). p. 131  the ultimate goal of the human sciences: Greif, op. cit., 303. p. 131  moralizing pool of humanistic sermons: Ibid., 286. p. 131  an invention of recent date . . . drawn in sand: Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 387. p. 131  to speak so easily of man: IIC, 125. p. 131  As in Adam all die, so . . . in Christ shall all be made alive: 1 Corinthians 15:22. p. 132  seek majority agreement on the roof: Illich, “How Shall We Pass On Christianity?,” 19. (PC, 165). p. 132  The Virtue of Enoughness: See Sach’s article under this name in NPQ Quarterly, Spring 1989, 16–19; an interview with Illich titled “The Shadow Our Future Throws” appears in the same issue, 20–24. p. 132  Wherever the maximum velocity: TC, 85–86. p. 133  energy and equity can grow: EE, 5. p. 133  the powerfully rushed: EE, 18.

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p. 133  an order of magnitude that is theoretically identifiable: EE, 46.

p. 134  political inversion: TC, 108–23. p. 134  the structure of tools: TC, 115. p. 134  simple in means, rich in ends: The phrase is associated with Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, but it admirably sums up what Illich is after in Tools for Conviviality as well. Illich’s claim that the beatitudes can now be proved occurs in “How Shall We Pass On Christianity?,” 19 (PC, 165). p. 134  My subject is tools, not intentions: TC, 14. p. 135  Tools have biases: See, for example, Harold Innis, The Bias of Communications (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951). p. 135  The issue at hand is not the juridical ownership: TC, 27. p. 135  “Three Dimensions of Public Choice”: SW, 9–26; another version appears in IMP, 83–104 as “Three Dimensions of Public Option.” p. 135  The first, or “x” axis: SW, 11. p. 136  the idolatry of science: TC, 92. p. 136  stunned by a delusion about science: All quotations in this paragraph in TC, 92–95. p. 137  Initially, the use of the term “science by ­people”: SW, 78. p. 137  Illich’s colleague Valentina Borremans: Valentina Borremans, Guide to Convivial Tools (New Providence: R.R. Bowker and Co., 1979). p. 137  citizen science is not what Illich meant by research by people: For a critique of contemporary citizen science, see Philip Mirowski, “Against Citizen Science,” Aeon, November 11, 2017.

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Notes to Pages 138–143  /  489 p. 138  Industrialized man calls his own: TC, 97. p. 138  the word in its weakness: TC, 119. p. 138  the recovery of legal procedure: TC, 99–107; subsequent quotes from these pages.

neighbor and trusted friend in Cuernavaca in the 1960s and wrote the introduction to Illich’s first book, Celebration of Awareness. They remained close until Fromm’s death in the early 1980s.

p. 139  Mankind may wither and disappear: TC, 83.

p. 141  Theodor Shanin: A Lithuanian-born sociologist who was professor for many years at the University of Manchester and later founded the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. He and Illich enjoyed a long and affectionate friendship.

p. 139  technocratic and managerial fascism: TC, 12, 109.

p. 141  two-thirds of mankind still can avoid passing through the industrial age: TC, ix.

p. 139  In 1971 when I began to write: IIC, 281–82.

p. 142  “An Expansion of the Concept of Alienation”: Illich, “An Expansion of the Concept of Alienation,” op. cit.

p. 139  deschooling a movement which we cannot stop: DS, 104.

p. 139  the formal structure of politics and law: TC, 115. p. 140  Real revolutionaries: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 66. p. 140  condemn unconditionally all premeditated killing: “Ivan Illich Writes Pope Paul,” Commonweal, September 4, 1970, 428–29 (PC, 128–30). p. 140  At times idols must be shattered: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 66. p. 140  True profound heresies: Hartch, op. cit., 107. p. 140  Law Against Law: I have this paper in a faded photocopy given to me by Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie, who was in that seminar as well. I don’t find it among the many articles that the author lists on his website. All quotations that follow are from this draft. p. 141  Tools for a convivial and yet efficient society: TC, 35. p. 141  They incorporate science in instruments: TC, 72. p. 141  trusting faith in the goodness of nature: DS, 106. p. 141  Erich Fromm: Erich Fromm was a German Jewish scholar who blended Marxist humanism with psychoanalysis in popular books like Escape from Freedom and The Art of Loving. He was Illich’s

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p. 142  therapeutic treatment colonizes the mind and heart: Ibid., 1. p. 143  The university turned out in strength: Theodor Shanin, “Ivan Illich: A Man for All Seasons,” written in appreciation of his old friend the year after Illich died. It has not, to my knowledge, been published. p. 143  Gustavo Esteva: Esteva was a friend and colleague of Illich’s. He lives in Oaxaca, Mexico. When I first met him, he described himself to me as a “de-professionalized intellectual and nomadic story-teller.” In what follows I quote from a paper called “Commonism: Enclosing the Enclosers,” which he gave in Oakland, California, at a conference on Illich in 2013. An introduction to Esteva’s thinking can be found in a radio program I made with him, which is here: http://www.davidcayley. com/podcasts?category=Not+an+Ecosystem. p. 143  a book that Shanin himself brought out in 1983: Theodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “the Peripheries of Capitalism” (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). p. 143  the country that is more developed industrially: Karl Marx, preface to first edition of Capital (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1990). p. 143  natural laws working themselves out with iron necessity: Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 105.

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490  /  Notes to Pages 143–150 p. 143  Mir: “In Russian history, a self-governing community of peasant households that elected its own officials and controlled local forests, fisheries, hunting grounds, and vacant lands. To make taxes imposed on its members more equitable, the mir assumed communal control of the community’s arable land and periodically redistributed it among the households, according to their sizes (from 1720)”. (Encyclopedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/topic/ mir-Russian-community.) p. 144  W.W. Rostow . . . stage theory: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman_Rostow. p. 144  development of . . . “productive forces”: In the preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx writes, “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed, and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself” (https://www .marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859 /critique-pol-economy/preface-abs.htm). p. 144  “the long march through the institutions”: This was the famous formula of Rudi Dutschke, a leader of the German student movement in the 1960s. I take it here as emblematic of a view of liberation as endlessly renewed struggle and dutiful completion of necessary stages. p. 144  playful austerity: TC, xiii. p. 145  transition to socialism: TC, 12. p. 145  Traditional English commons: Lewis Hyde, Common as Air (New York: Farrar, Strauss and ­Giroux, 2010), 27–28. p. 145  An oak tree might be in the commons: IMP, 49. p. 146  Those who struggle to preserve: G, 18; the phrase the archipelago of conviviality appears in various places in Gorz’s work—one that I recall is André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1979). p. 146  still believed in some big symbolic event: IIC, 117.

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p. 146  People can use the so-called benefits: IIC, 115–16. p. 146  informal economy: https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Informal_economy. p. 148  Harry Truman’s bold new program”: Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (London: Zed Books, 1992), 6. p. 148  time to write its obituary: Ibid., 1. p. 148  the commons as an activity: Esteva cites Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: The Struggle to Reclaim Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 279. p. 148  David Bollier and Silke Helfrich: David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (Amherst: Levellers Press, 2012); Patterns of Commoning (Amherst: Off the Common Books, 2015); and Free, Fair, and Alive (Vancouver: New Society, 2019). The “potato park” is described in Patterns of Commoning, 103ff. p. 149  Esteva has also been chronicler: Esteva’s works in English include Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism (London: Zed, 1998) and Gustavo Esteva, Salvatore Babones, and Philipp Babcicky, The Future of Development: A Radical Manifesto (Bristol: Policy Press, 2013). p. 149  modern society of responsibly limited tools: TC, xiii. p. 149  alternatives to economics: See IMP, 34–46. p. 149  I feel almost unbearable anguish: TC, 119. p. 150  A more sinister form of deschooling: In 1976, Illich and a French colleague, Etienne Verne, reflected on this incipient fate in a book less well known than most of Illich’s works called Imprisoned in the Global Classroom (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1976).

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Notes to Pages 151–158  /  491

Chapter 6 p. 151  Disabling Professions: Ivan Illich, Irving K. Zola, John McKnight, Jonathan Caplan, and Harley Shaiken, Disabling Professions (London: ­Marion Boyars, 1977).

p. 153  pastor, prophet and priest: See chap. 5, 15–16; and DS, 38.

p. 151  The professionalizing of knowledge: Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Mentor Books, New American Library, 1956), 196.

p. 154  political delegation: LM, 14.

p. 151  liberal versus dominant professions: This idea gets its fullest development in Disabling Professions and The Right to Useful Unemployment. p. 152  When Charles James Fox told the House of Commons: Fox’s speech is quoted in Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 65–66. p. 152  The collapse of powers: The phrase comes from Illich’s friend and colleague Sajay Samuel. It doesn’t occur, so far as I know, in Illich’s writings, but Samuel coined the expression to ­summarize Illich’s critique of the soft totalitarianism of ­professional power. Samuel develops the idea in a lecture given at the University of Paris in 2010 called “‘The Age of Disabling Professions: A ­Postscript.” It has appeared in French, coauthored with Jean Robert, as “Le rôle des professions,” Esprit, no. 367 (8/9) (2010): 185–92. He also discusses it in an essay called “Consoling Thoughts About Tyranny at the End of the Age of Experts” which is here: https://www.pudel.samerski.de/. p. 152  mutual check upon one another: The quotation is from Blackstone’s Commentaries, but the phrase is standard and recurs in many places. Other quotations are available here: http://cakeofcustom. blogspot.ca/. p. 153  It provides him with a license: LM, 107. p. 153  he who successfully claims power: LM, 107. p. 153  “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”: Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Cambridge: MIT Press), 5.

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p. 154  poetic self-affirmation: TC, 99.

p. 155  health spending in Ontario: See “Budget Will See Tough Decisions in Health Care,” The Toronto Star, April 22, 2015. p. 155  stunned by a delusion about science: TC, 92. p. 155  dominant professions threatened a deeper alienation: Illich, “An Expansion of the Concept of Alienation,” op. cit., 1. p. 155  Pathogenic medicine is the result: LM, 215. p. 156  Whenever an institution paradoxically takes away: LM, 216. p. 156  Illich’s roots were in natural law: Interview with Douglas Lummis, op. cit. p. 156  Illich applied various names to this new condition: DS, 108; TC, 54; LM, 262; IIC, 270. p. 156  The social commitment to provide all citizens: LM, 14. p. 157  An article in The Walrus: Rachel Giese, “The Errors of Their Ways,” The Walrus, April 2012; Ralph Nader, “Suing for Justice,” Harper’s Magazine, April 2016, 61; Nader cites a story in the Washington Post but gives no date. The likely source of Nader’s claim is a recent article in the Journal of Patient Safety 9, no. 3 (2013): 122–28, which sets 400,000 as the upper limit of what is possible. p. 157  The medical establishment has become a major threat to health: LM, 11. p. 157  Social iatrogenesis obtains: LM, 49. p. 158  It sets in when the medical enterprise saps the will: LM, 133. p. 158  superstition, sado-masochism, and the rich man’s condescension: LM, 133.

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492  /  Notes to Pages 158–165 p. 158  conquer nature . . . relieve man’s estate: The quotes from Francis Bacon are from memory. “The relief of man’s estate” is spoken of in The Advancement of Learning, I think. The conquest of nature is referred to in various places in his works. p. 158  Medical civilization is planned and organized: LM, 138. p. 158  Uncomprehending mainstream intellectuals: Christopher Shannon, “The Politics of Suffering: Ivan Illich’s Critique of Modern Medicine,” in Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past, ed. Wilfred McClay (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2007), 320.

p. 162  illness was still personal suffering: LM, 165. p. 162  the idea of using biomedical interventions: LM, 164. p. 163  the task of eliminating sickness: LM, 164. p. 163  The sudden emergence of the doctor as ­saviour: LM, 165. p. 163  an event that corresponds to the achievement of Copernicus: LM, 165–66. p. 163  socially created: LM, 172.

p. 159  initiates who monopolize special formula: LM, 117; Illich is quoting in this passage from Eric Voegelin’s Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1968).

p. 163  bifurcation of nature: Whitehead develops the idea in “Theories of the Bifurcation of Nature,” the second chapter of The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 26–48.

p. 159  In every society, medicine . . . defines what is normal: LM, 53–54.

p. 163  Misplaced concreteness: Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 52.

p. 160  Medical categories . . . rest on scientific foundations: LM, 55.

p. 164  entire perceptual mode: IIC, 150.

p. 160  as a member of the medical profession: LM, 253; subsequent quotes in this paragraph are on this page or the next. p. 160  [Medical staff ] are using intervention: “Being Born,” Ideas, CBC Radio, September 29, 1983, 22 in the transcript here: http://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts/. p. 161  equating statistical man with biologically unique men: LM, 104. p. 162  And Lead Us Not into Diagnosis: This lecture has not yet been published in English; the title refers to the petition “lead us not into temptation” in the Lord’s prayer (Matthew 6:9–13). A German version is here: https://www.pudel .samerski.de/. p. 162  Diagnosis always intensifies stress: LM, 104. p. 162  The French Revolution gives birth to two great myths: LM, 161.

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p. 164  made public: Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). p. 164  no world without a being in the world: Andreas Vrahimis, “‘Was There a Sun Before Men Existed?’: A. J. Ayer and French Philosophy in the Fifties,” Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 1, no. 9 (2013). p. 165  His theory seems to be . . . paradigms . . .  épistémès: Thomas Kuhn, The ­Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Foucault presents the idea of the épistémè in The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1971) and revises it somewhat in Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 197. p. 165  Galileo’s mechanics v. Aristotle’s: This was a casus belli between philosophers Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty, with Taylor claiming that science does, with qualifications, improve our understanding and Rorty denying that we have access to a reality independent of our theories about which we could improve our knowledge.

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Notes to Pages 165–171  /  493 Taylor revisits their friendly controversy in his Retrieving Realism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), coauthored with Hubert Dreyfus, 132–44. p. 165  “Epoch specific”: IMP, 214. p. 165  “totally epoch-specific”: IIC, 136. p. 165  the odor of sanctity: IIC, 138. p. 165  the woman of the eighteenth century: Illich collaborated closely with German historian Barbara Duden on what they called “body history.” Duden’s first book, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), analyzed the records of eighteenth-century German physician Johannes Storch, who compiled eight volumes on Diseases of Women (Weiberkrankheiten). p. 165  all-powerful social imaginary: I use the word imaginary in the sense that began to come into English with Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) and took a leap forward with Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries (2004). Taylor uses the word for the envisioned or imagined whole within which our sense of what exists and what is possible is given narrative shape, color, and texture. I prefer the word to Kuhn’s paradigm or Joseph Schumpeter’s pre-analytic vision or various other alternatives because of its direct indication of the role of imagination. p. 165  a critical, scientifically sound demedicalization: LM, 172. p. 166  In the detection of sickness: LM, 100; in the years since Illich wrote, precautionary, legal, and insurance-related concerns have intensified the tendency he describes. p. 166  pursuit of health as a “pathogen”: Ivan Illich, “Body History,” The Lancet, December 6, 1986, 1325.

p. 166  An advanced industrial society is sick-­ making: LM, 174. p. 167  stress: The story of this word’s ­interesting career has been told by Illich’s friend Robert Kugelman in his Stress: The Nature and History of Engineered Grief (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 1992). p. 167  Jean Pierre Dupuy: “Medicine and Power: A Tribute to Ivan Illich,” a paper read to the Royal Society of Medicine in London, January 20, 2003. It can be found here: https://www.karger.com/ Article/Pdf/78148. All subsequent quotes from Dupuy are from this paper. p. 168  neither a luddite, nor a romantic: IIC, 188. p. 169  The destructive power of medical over-­ expansion: LM, 223. p. 169  almost all demonstrably effective . . . health devices: LM, 67. p. 169  Chile . . . reducing the national pharmacopeia: LM, 77. p. 169  deadening dream of infinite power: LM, 106. p. 170  Myth fulfilled the function: LM, 264. p. 170  Nemesis has become structural and endemic: LM, 265. p. 170  Recourse to faith provides an escape: LM, 270. p. 170  The alternative to a new ecological religion: LM, 270. p. 170  the point of optimal synergy: LM, 270. p. 170  compulsory survival in a planned and engineered hell: LM, 272.

Chapter 7 p. 171  Practical men who believe themselves exempt: John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of

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Employment, Interest and Money (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 383–84.

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494  /  Notes to Pages 171–177 p. 171  It is only possible to reach a right understanding: C. G. Jung, The Psychology of the Transference (1946) in Collected Works, vol. 16 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 165–66. p. 171  taken up by campaigns: IIC, 118–19. p. 171  when I was offered access to the lecture hall: RNF, 148. p. 171  Todd Hartch reports: Hartch, op. cit., 110. p. 171  I came to feel like a juke box: IIC, 119. p. 171  he published six books: The Church, Change and Development, Celebration of Awareness, Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Energy and Equity, and Medical Nemesis. p. 172  The 1970 catalogue: Hartch, op. cit., 114. p. 172  He remembered it as an oasis: Cayley, “Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman,” 8. Swenson’s example of CIDOC as a seedbed was Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, which began when Illich passed Hyde a copy of Marcel Mauss’s Essay on the Gift at CIDOC. Don Juan, to whom Swenson refers, was a creation of Carlos Castaneda, an American anthropologist who had a runaway best seller in 1968 with The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Many people took the book and its sequels as reports of actual encounters with a Yaqui shaman, but these works are now generally seen as fiction. p. 172  There was a little red-haired . . . kid: IIC, 201. p. 172  Gene Burkart: “From the Economy to Friendship: My Years of Studying Ivan Illich” is the last essay in Eugene J. Burkart, Bearing Witness: Selected Writings of Eugene J. Burkart (Waltham: Back Pages Books, 2014). This book was assembled by Burkart’s friend Aaron Falbel from Burkart’s newspaper columns and occasional writings after Gene’s death in 2012. p. 172  Closing of CIDOC: All quotes in this account from IIC, 202–4. p. 173  10th anniversary of CIDOC’s founding: Illich had begun his work in Cuernavaca in 1960–61, but the first associations that were ­created were the Center for Intercultural

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Formation (CIF) and a civil association called the ­Centro de Investigaciones Culturales. The name Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) was not registered and adopted until 1964 (Hartch, op. cit., 74). In calling 1976 the tenth anniversary, Illich is probably thinking of the move from the Hotel Chulavista, where CIF began in 1961, to Rancho Tetela, which became CIDOC’s new home in 1966. p. 174  propitious for a major change of direction: DS, 112. p. 175  rabble-rousing could not reach: IIC, 71. p. 175  figure . . . ground: This was an idea McLuhan borrowed from gestalt psychology to distinguish what is noticed—the figure—from the context that gives it meaning but is generally unnoticed—the ground. See particularly Marshall McLuhan, The Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), a collaboration with his son Eric that was published after his death. p. 175  the history of Western ideas in an Oriental language: IIC, 120. p. 175  meetings with Krishnamurti: C. V. Williams, Jiddu Krishnamurti: World Philosopher (1895–1986): His Life and Thoughts (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2004), 552; see also J. Pupul Jayakar, Krishnamurti: A Biography (Delhi: Penguin, 1986), 306ff. p. 176  that Archimedean point outside the present: IIC, 134. p. 176  kept all my notes in Latin: IIC, 123. p. 176  I enjoy that particular generation: IIC, 123. p. 176  I tried to get people to understand: IIC, 132. p. 177  extend their incredulity: IIC, 145. p. 177  good historical method: IIC, 132. p. 177  I study history: IIC, 238. p. 177  hunted for no lessons: IMP, 39. p. 177  did not advocate a return to the past: IMP, 22.

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Notes to Pages 177–184  /  495 p. 177  Ludolf Kuchenbuch . . . compared him to an eagle: Kuchenbuch made this remark during a discussion on the continuing pertinence of Illich’s thought that was held at the home of Uwe and Gunhild Pörksen in the fall of 2010. p. 177  I wrote it to offer a guide: IVT, 5. p. 178  “historiography through the eyes of a crab”: IMP, 194. p. 178  the present not the past . . . is a foreign country: L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between begins: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” The saying has long since outgrown its source and become, by now, almost a proverb. p. 178  the study of history as a privileged road: SW, 26. p. 178  Economics is the science: Lionel Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 16. p. 178  “a major study on the history of scarcity”: SW, 1. p. 179  strip the world bare: Mahatma Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 38 (Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1953), 243. p. 179  jobs-for-all . . . an unattainable fantasy: I remember being impressed by this statement at the time. I have been unable to trace it, so my memory, and the obvious truthfulness of the statement, is my only authority. p. 179  the colonization of the informal sector: SW, 2.

p. 180  soft energy path: Amory B. Lovins, Soft Energy Paths: Towards a Durable Peace (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). p. 180  Expertocracy and commodity dependence: SW, 20. p. 180  An irresistibly spreading shadow economy: SW, 2. p. 180  alternative economics or alternatives to economics: IMP, 34–47. p. 181  the perception of the outsider: SW, 18–20; subsequent quotes, until noted, are from the same passage. p. 181  ecologically unfeasible . . . anthropologically vicious: SW, 20. p. 181  I do not oppose growth-oriented societies: SW, 11–12. p. 182  the economic ideology: See Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago: University of ­Chicago Press, 1977). p. 182  influence of Louis Dumont and Karl Polanyi: In addition to the preceding title, see Dumont’s Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); the books of Karl Polanyi’s that most influenced Illich were The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1944) and Trade and Markets in the Early Empires (New York: The Free Press, 1957), a collection Polanyi edited with Conrad Arensberg and Harry Pearson. Illich situates his work in relation to Polanyi’s in IIC, 192–96; Dumont is discussed on 191–92. p. 182  Commodity fetishism: Capital, 165.

p. 179  In the U.S.A. at least four million people: SW, 16–17.

p. 182  Vernaculum as homebred, homespun: All quotes, until otherwise noted, from SW, 57–58.

p. 180  The beauty of a unique, socially articulated image: SW, 12.

p. 183  shadowy underside . . . complementary hemisphere comes into existence: SW, 1.

p. 180  the counterculture: Theodore Roszak, The Making of the Counterculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).

p. 183  activities connected with shopping: SW, 100.

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p. 184  euphemism scatters . . . taboos act against analysis: SW, 100.

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496  /  Notes to Pages 184–194 p. 184  required to make commodities useful: IIC, 156. p. 184  services as commodities: Illich, “An Expansion of the Concept of Alienation.”

rapidly industrializing United States, thus proving, in Illich’s tart paraphrase, that industrial society “cherishes” what it actually “destroys” (SW, 99). p. 188  women and the “labours of love”: SW, 107.

p. 185  unpaid activities which improve livelihood: SW, 24.

p. 188  working man in a conspiracy with his employer: SW, 108.

p. 185  commodity-independent lifestyles: SW, 24.

p. 188  ritual . . . a procedure whose imagined purpose: RNF, 140.

p. 185  hausfraulichung: I’m quoting Illich’s paraphrase of von Werlhof and Duden in IIC, 173–74. In SW, he cites Claudia von Werlhof, Frauenarbeit: Der blinde Fleck in der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (Women’s Work: The Blindspot in the Critique of Political Economy) (Bielefeld, 1978); and Gisella Bock and Barbara Duden, Labor of Love—Love as Labor: On the Genesis of Housework in Capitalism, in From Feminism to Liberation, ed. Edith Hoshino Altbach (Cambridge MA: Schenkman, 1980). p. 185  bifurcation of work . . . apartheid: SW, 99. p. 186  alchemy in the work of Albert the Great: IIC, 84. p. 186  deeply rooted in alchemy: TC, 10. p. 187  labour . . . the real measure of exchangeable value: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1 (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1910), chap. 5. p. 187  Work is presented as the stone of wisdom: SW, 105. p. 187  The plebeians rioted: SW, 106–107. p. 187  An unprecedented economic division of the sexes: SW, 107. p. 187  In 1810 . . . in New England: SW, 112; see also Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). Illich commends this book and draws on its research in his essay “Shadow Work.” Douglas’s argument, in brief, is that during the course of the nineteenth century American women were “disestablished” and sentimentalized, becoming an idealized repository for all that was in fact being lost in the

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p. 188  a world to win . . . nothing to lose but their chains: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992; originally published in 1848), chap. 4. p. 189  restoration of the commons: All quotes on SW, 4. p. 190  women positioned to undertake a radical questioning of the categories of economics: IIC, 182. p. 191  2 percent to 3 percent growth doubles the size of an economy in 24 to 35 years: The calculation comes from Darrin Qualman’s Civilization Critical: Food Nature and the Future (Black Point: Fernwood, 2019), 175. p. 191  the need for a Coke: “Outwitting Developed Nations,” in THN, 60. p. 191  Charles Leadbeater: Charles Leadbeater, “The DIY State,” Prospect Magazine, no. 130, January 2007. p. 192  the last frontier of arrogance: IIC, 157. p. 193  sketch of the informal economy: Colin C. Williams, Confronting the Shadow Economy: Evaluating Tax Compliance and Behaviour Policies (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014), 1, 35. p. 193  What is propagated as self-help: SW, 2. p. 194  private vices . . . publick benefits: This is the subtitle of The Fable of the Bees, a satire published by physician Bernard Mandeville in 1714. p. 194  proscriptive rather than . . . prescriptive: Illich’s friend John McKnight quotes this remark in “Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman,” 31.

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Notes to Pages 194–202  /  497 p. 194  a dear friend of mine: IIC, 106. p. 194  careful, systematic reflection on what constitutes a tool: IIC, 219. p. 195  Hugh feels that the worst thing that has ­happened: IIC, 220–21. p. 195  The science of tools has no proper name: SW, 91. p. 195  critical technology: SW, 92. p. 196  tasted and found pleasing: SW, 87. p. 196  last as well as the first: IIC, 219. p. 196  In [Hugh’s] lifetime the number of waterwheels doubled: SW, 91. p. 196  Restitution and reinvestiture: SW, 93; subsequent quotes, until noted, SW, 93–94.

p. 197  color, sweetener, and the taste of stagnant ideals: SW, 2. p. 197  sentimental attraction to cultures of poverty: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 80. p. 197  good old days: See Munro, op. cit. p. 197  dotty ideas: Leadbeater, op. cit. p. 197  mechanical donkey: He invited ­German industry to invent such a device, which he ­imagined as a simple, indestructible truck with a top speed of 30 miles per hour. See “Kann Gewalt Christlich Sein?” (Can Violence Be Christian?). p. 198  new commons: Esteva et al., The Future of Development: A Radical Manifesto, 138.

Chapter 8 p. 200  I begin, Lord, to behold thee: Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1928), 46. p. 200  At the time [Gender] was written: IIC, 182. p. 200  One more step toward a history of scarcity: G, xi. p. 200  gender as a way of knowing: Illich says of Gender in IIC (172): “I had to raise the epistemological issue of modern European modes of perception.” p. 201  Particularly significant was Barbara Duden’s claim: IIC, 174. p. 201  no matter into which culture I moved: IIC, 175. p. 201  a better heuristic investigating tool: Fabio Milana in his afterword to the new Italian edition of Gender (Genere: Per una critica strrica dell’uguaglianza) quotes this remark from an editorial in the magazine Coevolution Quarterly

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where some parts of Gender were first published but gives no date. p. 201  condition without precedent: G, 4. p. 202  Gender probably “irrecuperable”: G, 4. p. 202  A total segregation of the sexes: Munro, op. cit. p. 202  not easy to spell out what I have to say: G, 5. p. 202  Uwe Pörksen’s memoir: Uwe Pörksen, Camelot in Grunewald: Szenen aus dem ­intellektuellen Leben der achtziger Jahre [Grunewald is the district of Berlin where the institute is located.] (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2014). Translations from this book are by Jutta Mason. p. 202  Illich’s first lecture on gender at the Wissenschaftskolleg: Ibid., 136–44. p. 202  Equal Rights amendment: The Equal Rights Amendment, barring any distinction of sex in federal or state law, had been passed by Congress

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498  /  Notes to Pages 203–210 with over 90 percent support and then ratified by 35 state legislatures. It needed to be passed by only three more states to become law, but a populist movement led by Phyllis Schlafly hardened reaction against the amendment in the remaining legislatures. The Equal Rights Amendment expired on June 30, 1982, when the requisite number of state legislatures failed to adopt it within the prescribed time limit. p. 203  witch-hunting trial: IIC, 186. p. 203  response to Illich’s ideas: special issue of Feminist Issues: A Journal of Feminist Social and Political Theory 3, no. 1 (1983). p. 203  Gloria Bowles . . . opens: Ibid., 3–6. p. 203  medieval university atmosphere: Mandalit del Barco and C. Amanda Rittenhouse, “Famed Philosopher Brings Eclectic Views to Berkeley,” The Daily Californian, September 30, 1982, 14. p. 203  Robin Lakoff: Illich as Text, 15–18. p. 203  Arlie Hochschild’s critique: Ibid., 6–11. p. 203  research that is disciplined . . . but emphatically non-scientific: G, 62. p. 204  Lillian B. Rubin: On Gurus and Easy Solutions, 11–14. p. 204  Barbara Christian: Ibid., 23–28. p. 204  Clair Brown: Ibid., 19–22. p. 204  Nancy Scheper-Hughes: Ibid., 28–37. p. 205  colleagues and friends attempt to dissuade him: G, 9. p. 205  women academics grab at the semblance of legitimacy: G, 35. p. 205  madly off in all directions: The phrase occurs in a story called “Gertrude the Governess” in Stephen Leacock’s Nonsense Novels (Montreal: Publisher’s Press, 1911). p. 205  quotation from Paul Goodman: IIC, 202.

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p. 206  the exalted feminist professors: IIC, 182. p. 207  Illich never again published with a major trade publisher: ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind was reprinted by Vintage Books, a Random House imprint, but the first edition was made by North Point Press, a small San Francisco press. p. 207  He recalled advising his publisher Pantheon: IIC, 181. p. 207  Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis: The article was republished and its influence celebrated in the American Historical Review for December 2008. It also became the subject of a book—The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminism, ed. Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). p. 207  gender as the “performative” aspect of sexual identity: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). p. 208  degrowth: See, for example, Serge Latouche, Farewell to Growth (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009). p. 208  three stages of “the movement”: SW, 3. p. 209  utilization value of the environment: SW, 3. p. 209  a common interest . . . in “economic expansion and the suppression of subsistence”: SW, 108. This point is discussed at greater length in the previous chapter. p. 209  he did speak of its loss elegiacally: See, for example, “The Sad Loss of Gender,” NPQ [New Perspectives Quarterly], Winter 1990. p. 209  gender and sex as ideal types: G, 14. p. 210  revised German edition: Ivan Illich, Genus, 2nd ed. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995). p. 210  new Italian edition: Illich, Genere: Per una critica strrica dell’uguaglianza.

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Notes to Pages 210–215  /  499 p. 210  Duality: G, 20–21; Illich’s usage isn’t entirely consistent, but he generally distinguishes between duality in which two domains, standing on different footings, oppose each other, and polarity in which a common field is polarized but still unified. p. 210  Fundamental and in no two place the same: G, 68. p. 211  socio-biological mythology: G, 77. p. 211  difference in pitch between men’s and ­women’s voices: IIC, 184. p. 211  gender is culturally determined: G, 180. p. 211  Lillian B. Rubin: On Gurus and Easy Solutions, 11–14. p. 211  two gendered subsets: G, 68. p. 211  gender substantive: G, 80. p. 211  a corset into which a genderless libido is forced: G, 81. p. 211  born and bred into gender: G, 81. p. 211  tear the shirts off each other’s backs: IIC, 188. p. 212  a perpetual and restless desire of power after power: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Macmillan [Collier Books Edition], 1962), 80. p. 212  the appearance of common sense: G, 8. p. 212  Of everything that economics measures, women get less: G, 4. p. 212  pursuit of a non-sexist economy absurd: G, 4. p. 213  no good will . . . no struggle . . . no legislation: G, 16. p. 213  ideal types: G, 14. p. 213  the same but with different plumbing: IIC, 199.

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p. 213  paradoxically genderless: G, 14. p. 213  appearance of homo oeconomicus: G, 9–12. p. 213  madness of general concepts: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 2, Unfashionable Observations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 289. p. 213  morphological closure of community life: G, 81. p. 214  Just as education has produced: IIC, 177. p. 214  the wage gap: See Kay S. Hymowitz, “Why the Gender Gap Won’t Go Away. Ever,” City Journal 21, no. 3 (2011). In Canada, Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente has taken the same view. See “Gender Wage Gap: Why It May Never Close,” May 30, 2015; and “Forget the Gender Pay Gap. The Class Gap Is Much Bigger,” March 8, 2016. Both writers cite the work of Professor ­Claudia Goldin of Harvard. She provides a digest of her views in an interview with National ­Public Radio’s All Things Considered here: http:// www.npr.org/2016/04/12/473992254/onequal-pay-day-why-the-gender-gap-still-exists. p. 214  Statistics Canada report: René Morissette, Garnett Picot, and Yuqian Lu, “The Evolution of Canadian Wages over the Last Three Decades,” March 2013, a research paper done for the Social Analysis Division of Statistics Canada. It can be found here: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/ pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2013347-eng.pdf. p. 215  the Oxfam Canada and Centre for Policy Alternatives report: The Globe and Mail, Kate Mcinturff, Brittany Lambert, Making Women Count: the Unequal Economics of Women’s Work, March 7, 2016; and http://www.cbc.ca/news/ business/wage-gap-oxfam-1.3478938. p. 215  Canadian Association of University Teachers statistics: https://www.caut.ca /docs/equity-review/narrowing-the-gender -gap-mdash-women-academics-in-canadian -universities-%28mar-2008%29.pdf?sfvrsn=12. p. 215  American Medical Association reports: http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/ama-wire/post /medical-specialties-vary-gender.

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500  /  Notes to Pages 215–222 p. 215  the feminization of poverty: Diana Pearce, “The Feminization of Poverty: Women, Work, and Welfare,” Urban and Social Change Review 11, no. 1–2 (1978): 28–36.

p. 218  the word energy as a collage: G, 131; in defining scientific terms as a form of collage, Illich says, his account shows “an analogy to Roland Barthes’s analysis of myth.”

p. 215  moral sexism and epistemological sexism: G, 71–72.

p. 219  Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor: Dreyfus Taylor, Retrieving Realism.

p. 216  sad loss of gender: G, 179.

p. 219  the soil of the sensible and opened world: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 160–61.

p. 216  he had to go one step deeper: IIC, 172. p. 216  shape of sickles in Styria: G, 91. p. 216  symbolic duality: G, 76. p. 216  complementarity in physics: G, 69. p. 216  complementarity fails to penetrate the social sciences: G, 75. p. 216  Gender bespeaks complementarity: G, 4. p. 217  Central perspective: G, 61. p. 217  Thomas Nagel: Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). p. 217  stereoscopic science: G, 61; the expression is quoted from June Nash’s introduction to June Nash and Helen I. Safa, eds., Sex and Class in Latin America: Women’s Perspective on Politics, Economics, and the Family in the Third World (South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey, 1980). p. 217  Research that is disciplined [and] critical: G, 62; he makes the same stipulation in his essay “Research by People” in SW. p. 218  Science naturalizes: G, 131. p. 218  fallacy of misplaced concreteness: Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 52. p. 218  “The Social Construction of Energy”: BEE, 107–23. p. 218  Marx soon supposes: BEE, 111. p. 218  Heisenberg Gifford lectures: BEE, 113.

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p. 220  he sees himself as a prophet: Pörksen, Camelot in Grunewald, 136. p. 220  Illich rejected the name: RNF, 170. p. 220  idolatry of scientific method versus carefully incorporating it: On “idolatry,” see TC, 100; on the ways in which “modern science and technology can [now] be used to endow human activity with unprecedented effectiveness,” see TC, 12. p. 220  the racist and the professional: G, 79. p. 220  critique of conscientization: G, 158. p. 220  old men ought to be explorers: Eliot, Four Quartets, 17. p. 221  rootedness of gender in mystical experiences: G, 146. p. 221  when I speak in metaphors: G, 73. p. 222  I am the vine: John 15:5. p. 222  books open to one another: John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1999), Meditation XVII. p. 222  members of one another: “So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another” (Romans 12:5 KJV). p. 222  A man’s reach should exceed his grasp: Browning’s lines occur in his poem Andrea del Sarto; McLuhan’s quip I heard at second hand from Northrop Frye.

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Notes to Pages 222–232  /  501 p. 222  Gender is a metaphor: All following quotes on this subject from G, 73–74. p. 223  Obscured . . . coded . . . camouflaged . . . hidden: Hartch, 146, 147, 150, 151. p. 223  In a review of Hartch’s book: http://www. davidcayley.com/blog/2015/4/20/a-review-oftodd-hartch’s-the-prophet-of-cuernavaca-ivan-illich-and-the-crisis-of-the-modern-west and http:// www.davidcayley.com/blog/2015/12/3/further-reflections-on-todd-hartch’s-the-prophet-of-cuernavaca. p. 224  Perichoresis in Greek uses the prefix peri: Richard Kearney, “The God Who May Be,” Ideas Transcript, February 27, 2006, 21; the transcript is here: http://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts/. p. 224  Dante’s fourfold method: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Allegory_in_the_Middle_Ages. p. 224  Jacob’s ladder: Genesis 28:10–19. p. 225  two persons who are more profoundly other: G, 80.

p. 228  Lévi-Strauss . . . the real primitive: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1952). p. 229  Erazim Kohak: “The Age of Ecology,” Ideas, CBC Radio, June 28, 1990, 28. The transcript is available here: http://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts/. See also Kohak’s The Embers and the Stars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). p. 229  not well understood in Berkeley: IIC, 185. p. 229  progress the very form of our civilization: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 7. p. 229  container and content: Idries Shah, The Book of the Book (London: The Octagon Press, 1969). p. 229  religion as chrysalis: Arnold Toynbee, An Historian’s Approach to Religion (London: Oxford University Press, 1956). p. 229  Illich not a Toynbean: IIC, 143. p. 229  the other as burden: SW, 18.

p. 225  Biblical religion a tissue of metaphors: The idea is developed extensively in Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982) and many other works of Frye’s.

p. 230  The furry guardians of local gender: G, 159–61.

p. 225  all we get: David Cayley, Northrop Frye in Conversation (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1992), 193.

p. 231  Elijah v. the prophets of Baal: 1 Kings 18.

p. 225  through a glass darkly: 1 Corinthians 13:12. p. 227  I have this lovely teacher: RNF, 198. p. 227  I became increasingly convinced: IIC, 184–85. p. 228  Lévi-Strauss . . . universal structure: Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973. Greif is talking, in the passage I quote, about how Roland Jakobson’s linguistics offered “the template of universal reducible structure” that Lévi-Strauss was looking for.

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p. 231  God of gods and Lord of lords: Deuteronomy 10:17.

p. 231  what many traditions call the high or ultimate god: Vincent Donovan, in his Christianity Rediscovered: An Epistle from the Masai (Notre Dame: Fides/Claretian Press, 1978), says many African religions acknowledge both local divinities and an ultimate god. p. 231  When I say my prayers in Mexico: IIC, 254. p. 231  change in marriage: G, 101. p. 232  I would write a novel about Abelard: RNF, 88. p. 232  The welding of two individuals into a taxable unit: G, 101.

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502  /  Notes to Pages 232–240 p. 232  Broken gender: G, 102–3.

p. 237  ever new kinds of defeat: G, 178.

p. 232  representations of the Virgin Mary: G, 158.

p. 237  genderless modern humans behave almost as apes: G, 76.

p. 233  The Gothic housecleaning: G, 158. p. 233  The dragons and kobolds, the basilisks and wild men: G, 163. p. 234  The buffered self: Taylor deploys the term in various places, beginning with Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) and continuing with The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1991) and A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). He distinguishes the buffered self from the more porous self of pre-modern times. p. 234  single vision: Blake, op. cit., 722. p. 234  a frontier with no beyond: RNF, 137. p. 235  the least of these my brothers: Matthew 25:40. p. 235  Whoever loves another: RNF, 57. p. 235  the angel with the flaming sword: Genesis 3:2. p. 235  Jean-Marie Domenach interviews Illich on French television: This interview with subtitles can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/66948476. p. 236  Rabbi Dov Baier . . . things revealed in their opposites: Rachel Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent to God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 64.

p. 237  nasty, brutish and short: Thomas Hobbes’s figure for life in the state of nature (Leviathan, 100). p. 238  Take away the otherness of the other: RNF, 199. p. 238  neither Jew nor Greek: Galatians 3:28. p. 238  messianic dispensation: The word dispensation contains an interesting ambiguity inasmuch as it can mean both an exception or exemption and an order of things. Illich’s whole history of Christianity could be described as a shift from the first to the second meaning. p. 238  continue to lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him: 1 Corinthians 7:17. p. 238  disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church: 1 Corinthians 14:35. p. 238  all shall be changed: 1 Corinthians 15:51–54. p. 238  Alfred Loisy’s bon mot: Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) was a French Roman Catholic priest, professor, and theologian. I know this quotation as a free-floating bit of lore. Loisy’s Wikipedia entry cites his 1902 book L’Évangile et l’Église (The Gospel and the Church) (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976) as its source.

p. 236  I like to walk the watershed: IIC, 241.

p. 238  Digestion . . . religiosity materializes un-thought notions: RNF, 82.

p. 236  Address to Catholic Philosophical Association: Illich, “Philosophy . . . Artifacts . . . Frie ndship,” op. cit.

p. 238  the social imaginary: Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 23.

p. 236  In German I have a simple way of expressing it: RNF, 198.

p. 240  found it impossible to accept . . . category of the human being: IIC, 178–79.

p. 237  Norma Swenson’s question: IIC, 183.

p. 240  in an examination of what Illich has said and meant: IIC, 119.

p. 237  abstract, genderless norm: G, 4. p. 237  the struggle to create economic equality: G, 66.

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p. 240  wandering Jew and Christian pilgrim: RNF, 147.

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Notes to Pages 240–247  /  503 p. 240  hope for surprises: Illich, “Commencement [Address],” 15.

p. 241  the aura of myth . . . borrowed from the goddess: G, 158.

p. 240  who still survives from another time: IIC, 101.

p. 241  Illich as Mariolator: Illich applied this name to himself in conversation with me. The remark was obviously intended in a jocular and ironic spirit but still seems germane.

p. 240  Oath Against Modernism: Introduced in chap. 3. p. 240  new alliance struggling to preserve the biosphere: G, 18. p. 240  sad loss of gender: G, 179. p. 241  Incarnation of symbolic duality: G, 76. p. 241  inherently different behavioral style: G, 77. p. 241  gender is substantive: G, 80. p. 241  born and bred into gender: G, 81. p. 241  the Greeks had become moral and misogynistic patriarchs: DS, 107. p. 241  From immemorial time, the Earth Goddess had been worshipped: DS, 107–8.

p. 241  our lady Mary, this strange girl: RNF, 180. p. 241  driven by love for our Lady: Illich, ­“Philosophy . . . Artifacts . . . Friendship,” 4. p. 241  afterthoughts on a conversation with Erich Fromm on Bachofen’s Mutterrecht: DS, 7. p. 243  anatomy is but the raw material: G, 14. p. 243  gender might be irrecuperable: G, 4. p. 243  The greatest difficulties I encountered: IIC, 185–86. p. 243  a contemporary art of living can be recovered: G, 4, 179.

Chapter 9 p. 244  Christians have always believed: RNF, 107. p. 244  Twelve Years After Medical Nemesis: A Plea for Body History: IMP, 211ff. p. 244  our bodies . . . the result of medical concepts: Ibid., 213. p. 244  a natural fact that stands outside the historian’s domain: Ibid., 215.

p. 245  an ontology of systems: This phrase crops up repeatedly in Illich’s later writings. See, for example, “The Age of Systems” in RNF, 157–68; also Ivan Illich, “Death Undefeated: From Medicine to Medicalization to Systematisation,” British Medical Journal 311 (1995): 1652–53; and “Pathogenesis, Immunity and the Quality of Public Heath” here: http://brandon.multics.org/ library/Ivan%20Illich/against_coping.html.

p. 245  epoch-specific body: Ibid., 215.

p. 245  Illich himself had surgery: Hoinacki, Dying Is Not Death, 207.

p. 245  pathogenic pursuit of health: Ibid., 212.

p. 246  age of systems: RNF, 157–69.

p. 245  even still in Gender: Gender concludes with the hopeful prediction that “a contemporary art of living can be recovered” (179).

p. 247  Turing’s universal machine: Illich discusses this issue of novelty made to appear familiar in IIC, 171; and RNF, 157–58.

p. 245  the intensity with which individuals cope: LM, 14.

p. 247  I believe that during the mid-1980s: IIC, 169–70.

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504  /  Notes to Pages 247–251 p. 247  natural, obvious, inevitable and timeless: RNF, 76. p. 247  Hugh of St. Victor and the Artes Mechicanicae: Hugh was not completely original— Johannes Scotus Eriugena (ca. 815–ca. 877) had already enumerated the mechanical arts and distinguished them from the liberal arts during the “Carolingian Renaissance” almost three centuries earlier—but Illich sees the early twelfth century as the time when the sense of instrumentality that would create the modern age began to gain an irresistible cogency and momentum. p. 248  When the radicals of the 1960s denounced the system: New Left leader Mario Savio, speaking on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California at Berkeley in December 1964, urged his fellow protestors to “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus” in order to prevent “the machine . . . from working.” His speech is here: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches /mariosaviosproulhallsitin.htm. p. 249  We look at the present through a rear-view mirror: Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (Toronto: Penguin, 2003/1967), 74–75. p. 249  gobble up so-called data and organize them: IIC, 62. p. 249  computer-assisted learning webs: DS, 75ff. p. 249  Heinz von Förster . . . Humberto Maturana . . . Francisco Varela: German scholar Bernhard Pörksen has provided a good introduction to the thought of Heinz von Förster in a book of interviews called Understanding Systems (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers and Heidelberg: Carl-Auer-Systeme Verlag, 2002). From Being to Doing (Heidelberg: Carl-Auer Verlag, 2004), in which Pörksen presents his conversations with Humberto Maturana, is equally good. My introduction to Varela was through an essay called “Laying Down a Path in Walking” in William Irwin Thompson, ed., Gaia: A Way of Knowing (Hudson: Lindisfarne Press, 1987). p. 249  Gordon Pask and Herbert Brün: Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of

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Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) was my introduction to the work of Gordon Pask and his colleagues. More on Herbert Brün and the CIDOC seminar on ­relational networks can be found here: http:// backpalm.blogspot.ca/2011/01/breakdown -of-schools-and-cybernetics.html. p. 249  Speaking to an audience of nurses in Hershey, Pennsylvania: Keynote address at the second annual conference of the Qualitative Health Research Association of Penn State University at Hershey, Pennsylvania, June 11, 1994. It was ­published as “Pathogenesis, Immunity and Public Health,” Qualitative Health Research, Feb 95, Vol. 5, Issue 1 and can be found here: https:// chamberscreek.net/library/illich/against _coping.html. p. 249  the intensity of autonomous coping ability: “ . . . health levels will be at the optimum when the environment brings out autonomous, personal, responsible coping ability,” Illich writes in Limits to Medicine, 14. This does not include the exact phrase he quotes to his audience in ­Hershey—I can’t find that sentence—but it says the same thing. p. 250  When Norbert Wiener named the new science of systems: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: Wiley, 1948). p. 250  what Gregory Bateson called “the pattern that connects”: Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1979), 8ff. p. 250  There is no outside text: Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1974; first French edition, 1967), 30ff.; this saying has often been imprecisely quoted as claiming that there is “nothing outside the text.” p. 251  postmodernism is incredibly disembodying: RNF, 224. p. 251  I would like to get . . . people to think: IIC, 224. p. 251  Technology is a mode of revealing: “The Question Concerning Technology,” in

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Notes to Pages 251–257  /  505 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1977), 295. p. 251  how information lost its body: N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2. p. 252  We are not stuff that abides: Ibid., 98. p. 252  media ecology: The term was coined by Neil Postman as an umbrella for the study of how communications media shape the environments in which they operate. p. 252  the central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter: Ibid., 18.

p. 254  Duden had “happened upon” a historical treasure trove: Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin, v. The book was first published in Germany in 1987 as Geschichte unter der Haut, literally “History Under the Skin. p. 255  use [her] own body as a bridge into that past: Ibid., vii. p. 255  stories from Dr. Storch’s patients: Ibid., 108–9. p. 255  like a stream of dense lava: Ibid., 37. p. 255  the essence of the body was the unlimited number of stories it could tell: Ibid., 68.

p. 252  We are our epistemology: Ibid., 113.

p. 256  When I look at how doctors behave: RNF, 125–26.

p. 253  The most important thing about each person is the data: Ibid., 244.

p. 256  It was as if the physician were participating in a Greek tragedy: RNF, 203.

p. 253  The principal assumption made in Artificial Life: Ibid., 231.

p. 256  I can train myself to see: IIC, 143.

p. 253  The first scientists imitated their conception of God: Cayley, Ideas on the Nature of Science, 211. Samuel, a friend of Illich’s and mine, is a professor in the Smeal College of Business at the Pennsylvania State University and a careful student of the history of science. p. 254  a collapse of the borderline between . . .  process and substance: IMP, 230. p. 254  the smooth integration of my immune ­system into a socioeconomic world system: Ivan Illich, “Health as One’s Own Responsibility: No Thank You!,” a lecture given in the German cities of Hanover and Worpswede in December 1990. It’s still unpublished in English but can be found here: https://www.pudel.samerski .de/, 5. p. 254  I can stand for every sentence in this book: Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 2–3. (The book was first published in German in 1991 as Die Frauenlieb als öffentlicher Ort, literally “woman’s body as public space.”)

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p. 256  In 1100 the crucified Christ: IIC, 136–37. p. 257  massive, widespread reflection in the twelfth century: IIC, 139. p. 257  I cannot understand the desire to dissect the body: IIC, 144. p. 257  Illich focused . . . on the history of the senses: RNF, 104. p. 257  two long essays on the history of the gaze: “Guarding the Eye in the Age of the Show,” Science, Technology, and Society (S.T.S.), Pennsylvania State University, Working Paper No. 4, August 1994; and “The Scopic Past and the Ethics of the Gaze,” written with Barbara Duden, Mother Jerome, O.S.B. and Lee Hoinacki, Science, Technology, and Society Studies, Pennsylvania State University, Working Paper No. 6, November 1995. Penn State has since shut down its S.T.S. program, and neither of these papers has appeared in book form in English, but they can be found here: https://www.pudel.samerski.de/and https://www. pudel.samerski.de/. Illich also summarized this work for me in RNF, 104–20.

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506  /  Notes to Pages 258–264 p. 258  the image [was] not considered a major problem: RNF, 113. p. 258  Thou shalt not make . . . any graven image: Exodus 20:4—the third of the Ten Commandments. p. 258  the image of the invisible God: Colossians 1:15. p. 258  the parallel between Christian imagery and pagan statuary: RNF, 112. p. 258  It was . . . a time . . . when expanding Islam had become a major threat: RNF, 113–14. p. 259  It is a threshold at which the artist prayerfully leaves: RNF, 114–15. p. 259  a particularly beautiful and precious icon [ found] in a poor woman’s hut: RNF, 115. p. 259  the picture became a teaching device: RNF, 116. p. 260  thoroughly in line with the Christian spirit: RNF, 117. p. 260  do not be afraid: Luke 1:30. p. 260  Faith in the mystery of the resurrection: RNF, 130. p. 260  So long as the gaze was considered to be a willed action: RNF, 108–109. p. 261  not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person: Matthew 15:11. p. 261  The asceticism that can be practiced at the end of the twentieth century: The proposal, dated September 9, 1989, which I have in typescript, is unpublished. In it, he suggests a “five-year course” that would restore “ascetical theory and discipline” to a “legitimate place” in the “contemporary methodology of higher learning.” p. 261  constructs of an epistemologically explosive nature and subsequent quotes: IIC, 126–28. p. 262  Illich at the Second Vatican Council: See chap. 4, 18–19.

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p. 262  the same position in the German peace movement: IIC, 128; “I Too Have Decided to Keep Silent,” in IMP, 32–33; Ivan Illich, “The Silent People,” The Progressive, June 1983, 50. p. 262  The icon, I would argue, cultivates my ability to see: RNF, 119. p. 263  He became as we are that we might become as he is: RNF, 99. p. 263  the human form divine: Blake, op. cit., 13. p. 263  the parable of the Samaritan: Luke 10:25– 37; Illich develops his interpretation in various places in RNF, beginning at 50. p. 263  moved in his splágchnon, in his guts: RNF, 222. The word recurs in the New Testament. The King James Version translates it as “bowels” as when Paul writes to the Philippians, “I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:10). p. 263  Abraham sees three strangers in front of his tent: Genesis 18. p. 263  Mary confronts a weird messenger: Luke 1:26ff. p. 264  . . . is a surprise, remains a surprise and could not exist as anything else: RNF, 48. p. 264  the engendering spirit/did not enter without her consent: Denise Levertov, Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 2002), 162. p. 264  Philosopher Richard Kearney: Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 23–26; Kearney also develops the point in interviews with me that can be found at http://www. davidcayley.com. p. 264  the buffered self: Taylor deploys the term in various places, beginning with Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) and continuing with The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1991) and A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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Notes to Pages 264–271  /  507 p. 264  Some thirty inches from my nose: W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 688. p. 265  Our bodiliness has a metaphysical quality: RNF, 110. p. 265  drowned in carnality: RNF, 207. p. 265  ensarcosis . . . apotheosis: RNF, 99. p. 265  I’d rather not speak about things which I understand so little: RNF, 214. p. 265  Paul preaching to the citizens of Athens: The Acts of the Apostles 17:16–34. p. 265  How intuitively right these Athenians were: RNF, 213. p. 266  a void space . . . into which you could put any construct: RNF, 130. p. 266  exploded to include the enfleshed God: RNF, 214. p. 266  God didn’t become man, he became flesh: RNF, 207; re: “bombing the neighbor for his own good”: at the time this interview was recorded NATO’s air forces were bombing Serbia and Serbian positions in Kosovo, in response to Serbian atrocities against Kosovar Albanians. p. 267  Rudolf Bultmann: Primitive Christianity in its Contemporary Setting (London: Collins, 1956). p. 267  God’s call to Abraham: Genesis 12:1. p. 267  Jesus’ call to Peter and Andrew: Matthew 5:19. p. 267  a possibility of thinking and experiencing . . . always somewhat in the shadow: RNF, 207–208. p. 267  Our hope of salvation lies in our being surprised: CA, 127. p. 268  Ian Hacking, “The Looping Effect of Human Kinds,” in Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, ed. Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

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p. 268  Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance: Hacking, The Taming of Chance. p. 269  Franz Kafka, “The Coming of the Messiah,” Part Two of Parables and Paradoxes (New York: Schocken Books, 1961). p. 269  like a thief in the night: 1 Thessalonians 5:2. p. 269  nothing in the scope of our present knowledge: Illich, Genere: Per una critica storica dell’uguaglianza, 8. p. 269  Giorgio Agamben: Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) and The Church and the Kingdom (London: Seagull Books, 2012). p. 269  Every day, every instant is the small gate: Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Part XVIIIB, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). p. 269  The time of the Messiah cannot designate: The Church and the Kingdom, 4–5. p. 269  the time time takes to come to an end: Agamben, The Time That Remains, 65–67. p. 270  impotent spectators who look at the time that flies: Ibid., 68. p. 270  the past rediscovers actuality: Ibid., 75. p. 270  hypertrophy of law: Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, 35–36. All subsequent quotes in this paragraph are from this passage unless otherwise noted. p. 270  what the New Testament calls restrainers: 2 Thessalonians, 2:6 speaks of a force that is “restraining” the rebellion of the “man of lawlessness” that will precipitate “the day of the Lord.” p. 270  tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow: William Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 5, scene 5. p. 271  the complete juridification . . . of human ­relations: Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, 40.

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508  /  Notes to Pages 271–278 p. 271  Whenever any Individual Rejects Error: Blake, op. cit., 562. p. 271  this queer thing, the instant: Parmenides, 256c in Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon, 1961), 948. p. 271  Time is the mercy of eternity: Blake, op. cit., 121. p. 272  epistemic breaks: The term is associated with Michel Foucault, but the idea of “epistemological rupture” was used earlier by Gaston Bachelard and also plays an important part in the thought of Louis Althusser. The issue of communication across “epistemic breaks” is more or less the same problem that arises with Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shifts.” p. 272  All flesh is grass: Isaiah 40:6. p. 272  the flesh lusteth against the spirit: Galatians 5:17. p. 272  two become one flesh: Mark 10:8. p. 272  the body of this death: Romans 7:24. p. 272  the body of Christ: 1 Corinthians 12:27. p. 273  If I had to choose a sentence: RNF, 97. p. 273  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of ­wisdom: Psalms 111:10; Proverbs 9:10; RNF, 95–103. p. 274  Prospective diagnoses: One of my teachers on this subject was Alan Cassels, a Canadian researcher who years ago presented a radio series called “You Are Pre-diseased” on Ideas. This series can be found on his website under “audio” at http://www.alancassels.com. p. 274  Silja Samerski: For an introduction to Samerski’s work, see Silja Samerski, The Decision

Trap, Genetic Education and Its Social Consequences (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2015); or “Losing Sight of People” in Cayley, Ideas on the Nature of Science. Several of her papers in English are also available at https://www.pudel.samerski.de/. p. 275  If anybody should ask me: RNF, 210. p. 275  A body generated by interiorizing an ideological construct: RNF, 211. p. 276  fulfilled her sugar requirements for the day: IIC, 166. p. 276  a choice of vitamins and other inputs: RNF, 210. p. 276  life as a cyborg: Illich was introduced to the term by Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); see IIC, 124. p. 276  I have therefore come to the conclusion: RNF, 210. p. 276  influenced by Gaston Bachelard: H2O, 3; and Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. The Dallas Institute for the Humanities, which was Illich’s host, had recently published a new translation of Bachelard’s book (Pegasus Foundation, 1983). p. 276  I asked him whether baptism can no longer take place: IIC, 248. p. 276  unless they are born of water and the Spirit: John 3:5. p. 276  I brought the matter up again: IIC, 298. p. 277  transmogrified [stuff ] with which archetypal waters cannot be mixed: H2O, 7. p. 277  Man will find himself totally enclosed: TC, 54.

Chapter 10 p. 278  A bulldozer lurks in every computer: IVT, 118.

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p. 278  A picture held us captive: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953/2001), 115.

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Notes to Pages 278–285  /  509 p. 278  Without precision of definition: Wendell Berry, Standing by Words (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1983), 55. p. 278  rediscovery of language: TC, 95–99. p. 278  most fundamental of commons . . . good old words: RUU, 57. p. 278  convivial function of language . . . poetic self-affirmation: TC, 99. p. 278  logocentrism, the death of the author: The term logocentrism was coined by German philosopher Ludwig Klages in the 1920s for the belief that language has an irreducible object and is not merely an arbitrary code; “the death of the author” was the title of a 1967 essay by French critic Roland Barthes in which he argued that the implications of texts far exceed the intentions of their authors; Julia Kristeva introduced the term intertextuality to suggest the way in which texts are haunted by other texts; the instability of meanings within texts was a central premise of Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction.” p. 279  Somebody who does not say what he means: IMP, 127.

p. 280  The Academy of Projectors in Lagado: Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, part 3, chap. 5. p. 280  great big blockyisms: “The Psychosemanticist Will See You Now, Mr. Thurber,” Science 123, no. 3200 (April 27, 1956); this essay is also reprinted in the Thurber collection Alarms and Diversions, where I first encountered it. p. 281  the commodity fetish: Marx, Capital, 165. p. 281  idols magical and empty . . . myths of everyday life: Pörksen, op. cit., 23; Roland Barthes defines myth as “naturalized” knowledge, an account that resembles Illich’s view of science as a form of “naturalization.” p. 281  A prestigious fetish: Ivan Illich, “Brave New Biocracy: Health Care from Womb to Tomb,” NPQ: New Perspectives Quarterly 11, no. 1 (1994). p. 281  Money is spent to decide: IMP, 119. p. 282  dead impersonal rhetoric: IMP, 127. p. 282  colorless mumbling: SW, 66.

p. 279  grabs people with ghostly arms: Friedrich Nietzsche, Complete Works, ed. Oscar Levy, vol. 4 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 5.

p. 283  pointed pen: Illich speaks of the “very pointed pencil” with which he wrote his articles of the 1970s in IIC, 119.

p. 279  some words become so flexible: DS, 32.

p. 283  The American, French, or German colloquials: IMP, 127.

p. 279  energy, sexuality, transportation, education: ABC, 106. p. 279  gone through a scientific laundry: IIC, 253–54; subsequent quotes from the same passage. p. 279  Plastikwörter was published in Germany by Klett-Cotta in 1988. An English translation, on which Jutta Mason, Uwe Pörksen, and I collaborated, was published by the Penn State Press in 1995 as Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language. p. 280  make old words look out of date: Ibid., 22ff.; subsequent quotes from the same passage.

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p. 283  resuscitate some of its old breath: IMP, 124. p. 283  I was brought up mentally: IIC, 90. p. 283  My friend the goldsmith in Timbuktu: SW, 67. p. 284  Now, your majesty, let me come: SW, 49. p. 284  the royal respect for the autonomy of her subject’s tongues: SW, 50. p. 285  Nebrija drafts the declaration of war against subsistence: SW, 51.

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510  /  Notes to Pages 285–294 p. 285  to engineer, to synthesize chemically a ­language: SW, 35.

p. 291  reading the last page first: Cayley, Ideas on the Nature of Science, 35.

p. 285  a resource to be mined: SW, 43.

p. 291  to try to explain a machine gun to Hugh of St. Victor: IIC, 133.

p. 285  suppress untutored speech: SW, 35. p. 285  Nebrija clearly showed the way: SW, 42–43. p. 286  It’s a period of self-consciousness about language: This quotation is drawn from a CBC radio series I did called “The Origins of the Modern Public.” You can find it here: http://www .davidcayley.com/podcasts?category=Origins +of+Modern+Public. Roland Greene’s comments begin part 3 of this series. It was through him that I gained the perspective on Nebrija and his larger context that I am presenting here.

p. 292  passing over a watershed: chap. 10, 4. p. 292  language mathematized: “The Mathematization of the Vernacular” is the last chapter of Plastic Words, op. cit. p. 292  the valley of the dry bones: Book of Ezekiel, chap. 37. p. 293  a separation between the knower and the known: Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).

p. 286  the tower of Babel: Genesis 11:1ff.

p. 293  media ecology: See: http://www. media-ecology.org/media_ecology/.

p. 286  Pentecost: Acts of the Apostles 2:1ff.

p. 293  the word is a creature of the alphabet: ABC, 3.

p. 287  The Church conceives, bears, and gives birth: SW, 45.

p. 293  No bridge built out of the certainties inherent in the literate mind: IMP, 167.

p. 288  when the titled gentlemen with their swords were replaced: RNF, 190.

p. 293  Restrictions on writing in India: See “Literacy: The Medium and the Message,” Ideas transcript, http://www.davidcayley.com /transcripts, 6–7.

p. 290  the free and anarchic development of printing technology: SW, 42–43. p. 290  standardiz[e] a living language for the benefit of its printed form: SW, 39. p. 290  the enormous wealth and beauty of the bibliophilia: Ivan Illich, “On the Parallel Evolution of the Idea of ‘Text’ and that of ‘University,’” https:// www.pudel.samerski.de/. (The title is different in this version, but the text is the same as the one I have quoted.) p. 290  Surprise causes finite play to end: James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (New York: Random House [Balantine Paperback Edition], 1986), 22–23. p. 291  History heightens my sensitivity: IMP, 35.

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p. 293  Plato’s warning: Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 520. p. 294  Ambrose’s silent reading: Saint Augustine, Saint Augustine’s Confessions (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1991), 92. p. 294  reading as exercise: IVT, 57. Illich gives no citation, but I believe this tidbit traces to the research of French Jesuit Marcel Jousse on “the oral style.” p. 294  quotations on styles of monkish reading: IVT, 54ff. p. 294  the book becomes the decisive metaphor: IMP, 159ff. p. 294  changes in book layout producing “the visible text”: IMP, 169ff.; IVT, 97ff.

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Notes to Pages 295–300  /  511 p. 295  word separation: “Literacy: The Medium and the Message,” part 2, op. cit., 10. p. 295  the book an ark and place of pilgrimage: IVT, 25, 35. p. 295  symbols of certain virtues: “Literacy: The Medium and the Message,” part 2, op. cit., 11. p. 295  the page had lost the quality of soil: IVT, 119. p. 296  tasks acquire symbolic significance: IVT, 73–74; following quotes on same pages. p. 297  The study of effects has lately driven me: Letter to Muriel Bradbrook, November 5, 1971, quoted in Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (Toronto: Stoddart, 1999), xxii. p. 297  that which I have to live with: IIC, 238.

p. 298  this or that manuscript: IMP, 171. p. 298  many other things done by the book: IMP, 172. p. 298  The idea of a self: ABC, 72. p. 298  code of canon law: It was in the middle of the twelfth century that the monk Gratian first assembled the canons of the church in a legal textbook known both as the Decretum Gratiani and as the Concordia Discordantia Canonum. This served as the basis for a proliferation of canon law in the following centuries. Berman’s Law and Revolution and Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual, both cited previously, provide good introductions. p. 298  Illich disavows a “learned contribution”: IVT, 5. p. 299  paralyzed research on the earlier cognitive transformation: Illich, “On the Parallel Evolution . . .,” 8.

p. 297  a growing scholarly consensus: Giles Constable, The Reformation of the 12th Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Harold Berman uses the term papal revolution in his magisterial Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Charles Taylor develops his idea of a “reform master narrative” throughout A Secular Age. See also Siedentop, Inventing the Individual.

p. 299  not a single book or article: Brian Stock’s The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), which does appear in Illich’s bibliography in In the Vineyard of the Text, is a distinguished exception to Illich’s sweeping claim.

p. 297  machine parks: SW, 91.

p. 299  default mode: Taylor used this expression in interviews I did with him for Ideas. The series is here: http://www.davidcayley.com/ podcasts?category=Charles+Taylor.

p. 297  the moral self: IVT, 72. p. 297  on the criminalization of sin and the legalization of the Church: RNF, 80ff. p. 297  institutionalize, legitimize and manage Christian vocation: RNF, 48. p. 297  bookish reading: IVT, 1; George Steiner, “The End of Bookishness,” Times Literary Supplement, July 16, 1988.

p. 299  minimize the moral and intellectual ­distance: Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 350.

p. 300  In my beginning is my end: Four Quartets, 11. p. 300  hinge period: IIC, 134–35. p. 300  what Hugh actually did: IIC, 228. p. 300  his reading still belongs to the old world: IIC, 232.

p. 298  the mirror of [a] mind: Illich, “On the Parallel Evolution,” 7.

p. 300  Hugh recognizes the possibility of silent reading: IIC, 232.

p. 298  optical rather than acoustic: Ibid., 10.

p. 300  I myself never looked down: IVT, 29.

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512  /  Notes to Pages 300–310 p. 300  no longer monks, but people who lived in community in town: IIC, 220.

p. 305  Historian Brian Stock: See Stock, The Implications of Literacy, 273ff.

p. 301  the wisdom hidden in the mechanical arts: SW, 94.

p. 305  the Symbol of all symbols: Schmemann, op. cit., 148.

p. 301  an ontologically remedial technique: IVT, 11.

p. 305  the reality of the symbol and the symbolism of reality: Ibid., 128.

p. 301  to walk the watershed: IIC, 241; this passage is discussed in chap. 9, 53–54. p. 301  Of all things to be sought: IVT, 7. p. 301  At the beginning of the century: Illich, “On the Parallel Evolution,” 7. p. 302  new settings for “critical thinking, arguing and learning”: Ibid., 8; following quotes on same page. p. 302  acquisition of knowledge pried apart from sensual self-discipline: Ibid., 9. p. 302  ascetical mystical versus intellectual critical: Ibid., 11.

p. 305  Technogenesis of the modern page and following quotes: Illich, “On the Parallel Evolution . . .,” 6–7. p. 306  Illich as exile: IIC, 76; prologue and chap. 1. p. 306  the island of literacy: Illich used this phrase in conversation with me. p. 306  the mirror of the past: The title Illich gave to a collection of his essays published in 1992. p. 306  the end of instrumentality and the revival of gratuity: RNF, 226. p. 307  like a smog to engulf us: ABC, xi.

p. 302  lecture series on askesis: See chap. 9, 17ff.

p. 307  a vantage point in the past: IVT, 5.

p. 303  a somatic transformation in our societies: Ibid., 9.

p. 307  I still remember a shock I had: IMP, 176–77.

p. 304  the womb out of which and within which the Church comes to be: RNF, 1. p. 304  the dynamic condition of theological reflection: Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, 7. p. 304  Liturgy is “the work of the people”: Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 25. p. 304  Illich on the Berengarius controversy: RNF, 108. p. 304  Berengar’s confession: Paul Bradshaw and Maxwell Johnson, The Eucharistic Liturgies: Their Evolution and Interpretation (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2012), 224. p. 305  Hugh brings centuries of Christian metaphor to their full maturity: IVT, 123.

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p. 308  on his bibliophilia: Illich, “On the Parallel Evolution . . .,” 6–7. p. 308  sanctified the text: IMP, 190. p. 308  Within the last two decades: IMP, 190. p. 308  genetic substance could best be understood: IMP, 200. p. 308  A phonetic system must be analyzed: Adam Kuper, review of Emmanuelle Loyer, Lévi-Strauss, TLS, October 14, 2016, 4. p. 309  language reduced to a code: ABC, 107. p. 309  the power implicit in the State: ABC, 111. p. 310  O’Brian’s world is senseless: ABC, 113. p. 310  All social relations can be reduced: ABC, 114.

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Notes to Pages 310–315  /  513 p. 310  Orwell a prophet in the Hebrew sense: ABC, 118.

p. 312  storage room of the Greek reader: ABC, 26.

p. 310  hovered in the air: ABC, 112.

p. 312  I have observed how six people: IMP, 192.

p. 310  tearing human minds to pieces: ABC, 114.

p. 313  his very self threatened: IMP, 176.

p. 310  My sentences can potentially break the frame: RNF, 161.

p. 313  a conceptual and perceptual topology: IIC, 124.

p. 312  Tools are intrinsic to social life: G, 90.

p. 313  a trip through computerland: IMP, 207.

p. 312  general theory of tools: Illich gives this description of Tools for Conviviality in IIC, 108. p. 312  inability to understand what has happened: IIC, 171. p. 312  winged word: ABC, 19.

p. 313  the cybernetic dream: American writer Morris Berman had used this phrase in an article in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology for which Illich gives no citation (IMP, 204). p. 313  I am concerned about how to keep awake: IMP, 202.

Chapter 11 p. 314  In the midst of life we are in death: The sentence appears in the Order for the Burial of the Dead in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (Anglican Church of Canada, 1962, 601). It is thought to trace back to a French Gregorian chant created around 750 CE. p. 314  Death gives meaning to life: Peter Canon, “Rehearsal for Death,” Integrity 10, no. 6 (1956): 5; PC, 20. p. 314  Lecture in Macon, Georgia: The account that follows is drawn, sometimes word for word, from an unpublished memorandum written by Illich in 1995, recalling these events. p. 314  Will Campbell: Will Campbell (1924–2013) was a Baptist minister, born in a Mississippi parish where the Bibles were embossed with the Ku Klux Klan symbol, who went on to become an associate of Martin Luther King. p. 314  the most powerful idol: IMP, 220. p. 314  he addressed a convocation of American Lutherans: IMP, 218–31.

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p. 314  in neither place did I get the impression: IIC, 279. p. 315  Life as Idol: Broadcast here: http://www. davidcayley.com/podcasts?category=Ivan+Illich. Transcript here: http://www.davidcayley .com/transcripts/. p. 315  first exploring Illich’s views on death: I am grateful to Susan Babbitt for the idea of writing first about Illich’s theology of death and only then exploring his critique of “life as idol.” She made the suggestion after reading an earlier version of this chapter in which I began with life. She has written about Illich in her Humanism and Embodiment (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). p. 315  It is death which gives meaning to life: Canon, “Rehearsal for Death,” 5 (PC, 20). p. 315  a longer and more detailed essay: Rev. Ivan D. Illich, “The End of Human Life: An Interpretation of Death as the Supreme Form of Prayer,” Horizontes 1, no. 2 (1958): 54–68 (PC, 26–42).

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514  /  Notes to Pages 315–324 p. 315  In every society, the dominant image of death determines: LM, 179. p. 316  the condition Illich called a-mortality: See, for example, Illich, “Death Undefeated,” op. cit. p. 316  death is a birthday: All subsequent quotes, unless noted, are from the 1956 and 1958 articles cited previously. p. 317  the sense that I really deserve a kick: RNF, 96. p. 317  Socrates at his trial: Phaedo, 64a in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 46. p. 318  My words fly up/My thoughts remain below: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 3.

p. 320  Hobbes quote: Fletcher cites: Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, 2nd ed., edited by F. Tönnies (London: Frank Cass & Co, 1969), 71. p. 320  graceless nature . . . civic state of grace . . . secular transfiguration: Ibid., 146. p. 320  man to man is . . . a wolf: Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949), 1. p. 320  experience of God impossible in the present: Ibid., 147. p. 321  death excised from life: Ibid., 153. p. 321  life our only true possession: Ibid., 153.

p. 318  There is no greater distance: CA, 33.

p. 321  the dominant image of death: LM, 179.

p. 319  Whoever would save his life: Matthew 16:25.

p. 322  the open grave looms much larger: LM, 187.

p. 319  Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth: John 12:24. p. 319  Paul Fletcher: “Prolegomena to a Theology of Death,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 50, no. 2 (2008): 139–57. p. 319  The Church must renounce: Ibid., 156.

p. 322  attitudes to the dissection of corpses: LM, 193. p. 322  we see physicians wrangling with the skeleton: LM, 204. p. 322  the epoch of natural death brought to an end: LM, 210.

p. 319  John Behr: See John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (Crestwood: SVS Press, 2006). A lecture on the same subject is here: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7nEgSkFWzk.

p. 322  By the time he reconsidered Medical Nemesis: IMP, 211–17.

p. 319  Life as the supreme good: Fletcher, op. cit., 140.

p. 323  article in the British Medical Journal: Illich, “Death Undefeated,” 30.

p. 319  theology eviscerated and displaced: Ibid., 154.

p. 323  open letter to a community of cloistered Benedictine nuns: “Posthumous Longevity: An Open Letter to a Cloistered Community of Benedictine Nuns, Epiphany, 1989.” This is one of a group of late essays that has yet to appear in English. All my quotations from it can be found in the version here: https://www.pudel.samerski .de.

p. 320  the dead marginalized: Ibid., 150. p. 320  the ossuary at St. Paul’s emptied: The story is told by John Stow (1525–1605) in his Survey of London. I heard it from Steven Mullaney, who relates it at 30:17 of the first program of my radio series “The Origins of the Modern Public,” op. cit. p. 320  Hobbes argues: Ibid., 144–45.

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p. 323  Dying is an intransitive word: RNF, 165.

p. 323  I failed to speak to her: Ibid., 4. p. 324  suspension and aimlessness: Ibid., 5.

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Notes to Pages 324–331  /  515 p. 324  A-topia: U-topia is a “no place”; a-topia suggests a step further—perhaps an un-place.

p. 328  Misplaced concreteness: Whitehead, Science In the Modern World, 52.

p. 324  Limbo: An indefinite state assigned, in Catholic doctrine, to unbaptized infants, virtuous pagans and so on. Dante, in The Divine Comedy, places it at the edge of his Inferno.

p. 328  A substantive meaning: IIC, 255.

p. 325  I will in no way help in a suicide: RNF, 167.

p. 328  shadowy substance . . . stuffy: IIC, 275.

p. 325  We are stewards, not owners: http://www .newadvent.org/cathen/14326b.htm.

p. 328  what he had earlier called nominalization: See, for example, TC, 95–99.

p. 328  compact reality: IMP, 222.

p. 325  Illich withdraws from the Vatican Council: See chap. 4, 23–25.

p. 328  possessive individualism: C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

p. 325  Not miss the hour of our death: “Posthumous Longevity,” 6.

p. 328  the humanism of Western individualism is anchored: IMP, 220.

p. 326  he published a manifesto under this name: “Hygenic Autonomy: A Manifesto,” forms an epilogue to Illich, “Brave New Biocracy, op. cit.

p. 329  special poignancy in ecological discussion: IMP, 229–30; subsequent quotes, until otherwise noted, are from this passage.

p. 326  an incompetence almost beyond imagination: RNF, 166.

p. 329  Gaia: A Way of Knowing: Thompson, Gaia: A Way of Knowing.

p. 326  a continuum of direct and integrated ­guidance: http://www.cindea.ca/midwifery.html.

p. 330  turtles all the way down: In case the story is unfamiliar, in the version I first heard—there are many—an anthropologist is quizzing a member of a culture he/she is investigating about cosmology and is told that the world rests on the back of an elephant. And what does the elephant rest on? asks the anthropologist. A turtle, he is told. And what supports the turtle? Ah, says the informant, after that, it’s turtles all the way down.

p. 327  modern condition . . . a-mortality: He uses this expression in a draft text I have for a lecture series entitled “A-Mortality,” to be given in Barcelona in 1990. I believe he gave the lectures, but I do not know the date, or where in Barcelona, or even whether he used the text I have. p. 327  an institutional fetish: Illich’s lecture to the Lutheran convocation in Chicago in 1989 was called “The Institutional Construction of a New Fetish: Human Life” (IMP, 218–31). p. 328  spectral entity: IMP, 220. p. 328  wrongfully given: The reference here is to lawsuits claiming “wrongful life” in which the plaintiff asserts that he or she ought to have been aborted and is consequently owed damages to mitigate the expense of some disability that should have been foreseeable. p. 328  A process about whose destruction: IMP, 226.

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p. 330  Origen scoffed: Quoted in Connor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 381. p. 330  mere superstition . . . pernicious tendency: Cayley, Northrop Frye in Conversation, 161. p. 331  Universal Machine not a machine: IIC, 171. p. 331  Whereas all previous technology: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. (Cambridge: Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994; first edition, 1964), 247.

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516  /  Notes to Pages 331–336 p. 331  From a strictly scientific point of view: Peter and Jean Medawar, Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 66–67. p. 332  John Maddox denounces A New Science of Life: John Maddox, “A Book for Burning?,” Nature 293 (1981): 245–46; Sheldrake discusses the affair in Cayley, Ideas on the Nature of Science, 164ff.

p. 333  an unprecedented violence: IIC, 265. p. 334  a new stage of religiosity: IIC, 276. p. 334  Religiosity distinguished from religion: G, 161–62. p. 334  the origin of the idea of a person defining himself as life: IIC, 255–56.

p. 332  Sheldrake condemned as a heretic: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcWOz1xjtsY.

p. 334  Jesus said to Martha: “I am life.”: John 11:25–26.

p. 332  thirty years work on the problem, What is life?: Robert Rosen, Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin and Fabrication of Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), xiii.

p. 334  Ray Downing: Ray Downing, Death and Life in America: Biblical Healing and Biomedicine (Scottsdale: Herald Press, 2008).

p. 332  Our changing vision of nature: Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New Science Library, Boulder: Shambala, 1984), xxvii.

p. 335  And the Lord God formed man: Genesis 2:7.

p. 332  a new politics of life: See Thompson’s essay “Gaia and the Politics of Life: A Program for the 90’s?” in Gaia: A Way of Knowing. p. 332  Robert Rosen saw himself: David Cayley, “Religion and the New Science,” Ideas, CBC Radio, November 11, 1985, transcript, 25; the transcript is here: http://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts/. p. 332  I myself was an enthusiastic chronicler: See, for example, Cayley, “Religion and the New Science.” p. 332  naturalization: G, 131. p. 333  Man at last is face to face: Loren Eisley, The Firmament of Time (New York: Athenaeum, 1960), 180. p. 333  On the icebox door two pictures: IIC, 263–64. p. 333  Sacrum describes a particular place: IIC, 264. p. 333  war over the proper status of images: See chap. 10, 14–16, for a more detailed discussion of this issue. The quotation from the Council’s proceedings can be found at: https://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Second_Council_of_Nicaea.

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p. 335  An autonomous power: Ibid., 63.

p. 335  the way, the truth and the life: John 14:6. p. 335  in him is life: John 1:4. p. 335  have life and have it more abundantly: John 10:10. p. 335  He that finds his life shall lose it: Matthew 10:39. p. 335  reduction of life to bio-life: Downing, op. cit., 49. p. 336  more grave than murder: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2:2, q. 13. p. 336  Blasphemy consists in attributing to God: Ivan Illich, Blasphemy: A Radical Critique of Technological Culture, Science, Technology and Society Working Papers, No. 2, 1994, 36. On its copyright page, this paper is said to have been “prepared during 1993 by Ivan Illich, with assistance from Lee Hoinacki, as part of a discussion with [California politician] Jerry Brown about health care.” It was distributed, for a time, by the Science, Technology and Society Program at the Pennsylvania State University with which Illich was then affiliated, and by Jerry Brown’s organization “We the People.” It is no long available, so far as I know. The quotations that follow in this paragraph are from this paper.

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Notes to Pages 336–341  /  517 p. 336  the cultural space in which a life can appear: IIC, 269. p. 337  a perversion of the Christian message: IMP, 219. p. 337  current into which the Church steered the West: IMP, 225. p. 337  statement by Cardinal Ratzinger: The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s “Complete List of Documents” shows a statement released in February 1988 called “Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation—Donum Vitae.” The list is here: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia /congregations/cfaith/doc_doc_index.htm. p. 337  Cardinal Ratzinger says first of all: IIC, 258–59. p. 337  a scientific fact is a contingent creation: Illich refers to Ludwig’s Fleck’s The Genesis of a Scientific Fact (1935), a book that Thomas Kuhn acknowledged as a crucial precursor of his idea, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), that knowledge is ordered and made intelligible by “paradigms” which are prior to the ­observations on which they confer the status of fact. p. 337  science “made public”: See Latour and Weibel, Making Things Public, op. cit. p. 337  a person without legs: IIC, 260. p. 337  Shameless violence done to women: IIC, 265. p. 338  turns a woman’s body into a showcase: The expression is used in Duden, Disembodying Women, 34–42. Illich, so far as I know, never felt the need to take a “position” on abortion. When Will Campbell told Illich that “life” was tearing apart the Christian church, he was talking about the destructive consequences of people digging themselves into fortified positions. What Illich wanted to defend was the privacy of the womb and the prerogative of women with respect to pregnancy. He was certainly not “pro-abortion,” as some have said, but I think it’s fair to say, though I know of no explicit statement on the subject, that he did not think abortion was within the competence of the state.

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p. 338  the evolution of the field of bioethics: Ivan Illich, “The Growing Need for Irrelevant Professions,” Opening address to a meeting with Chairmen of Bioethics Committees, University of Illinois, Medical Humanities, November 14, 1989—unpublished. p. 338  the semblance of ethical choice: IMP, 233. p. 338  his friend “medical heretic” Robert Mendelsohn: Mendelsohn was the author of Confessions of a Medical Heretic (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1979). p. 338  bioethics a burgeoning field: https://www .bioethics.ca/bioethics-centres. p. 339  I dreamt of squatting: Illich told this story when he delivered the annual Dean’s Lecture at the Pennsylvania State University on September 8, 1997. It is not published or available online. p. 339  not discussing the moral quandary: Illich, “The Growing Need for Irrelevant Professions.” p. 340  the pilot will be there to feed the dog: William Ray Arney, Experts in the Age of Systems (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 45. p. 340  a passionate natural bark: Illich, “The Growing Need for Irrelevant Professions.” p. 340  As long as you think about the world as a whole: IIC, 281. p. 341  A world picture when understood correctly: Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 129. p. 341  he rejected “responsibility for health”: See Illich, “Health as One’s Own Responsibility: No Thank You!” op. cit. p. 341  courageous, disciplined, self-critical renunciation: Ibid., 4. p. 341  simple in means: This phrase is often attributed to Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1912–2009), but I don’t know its origin.

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518  /  Notes to Pages 341–346 p. 341  the tree of life and the sword which turned every way: Genesis 2:17, 3:24. p. 341  new version of Genesis: IMP, 230. p. 342  what determines our epoch: Illich, “Health as One’s Own Responsibility: No Thank You!” op. cit. p. 342  letter to Hellmut Becker “The Loss of World and Flesh,” op. cit. p. 342  Christ as concrete universal: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-drama (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988). p. 342  People annihilate their own sensual nature: RNF, 221–22. p. 343  This same abstract mechanism is romantically identified with life: IMP, 230. p. 343  forgotten how to subtract: Cayley, Ideas on the Nature of Science, 163. p. 343  crossing the ant-hill threshold: J. T. Fraser, Time: The Familiar Stranger (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 342ff. p. 343  rise of neo-biological civilization: Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of NeoBiological Civilization (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1994). p. 343  in our time we are all chimeras: Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women, op. cit. Parts of this book, notably the essay “The Bio-politics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse,” left a strong impression on Illich. p. 343  The global brain: “The global brain” is the title of more than one book, but I believe Peter Russell originated the image. The internet as a metazoan comes, I think, from Kevin Kelly, but I am unable to track the reference. p. 344  mother kept alive with no lungs: http:// www.cbc.ca/news/health/burlington-womanspent-6-days-without-lungs-thanks-to-new-life -saving-procedure-1.3951129; Globe and Mail, January 26, 2017.

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p. 344  semantic halo . . . nothing but halo: C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 282–83. p. 344  mere abstraction becomes a moving tale: Ibid., 303. p. 344  the mystique of our age: Ibid., 304. p. 345  Don Cupitt: The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech (London: SCM Press, 1999). p. 345  Ordinary language philosophy . . . best radical theologian: Ibid., unpaginated foreword. p. 345  embarrassed silence: Ibid., 13. p. 345  Life signifies a thing or power: Ibid., 14. p. 345  Religious feelings exported to secular realms: Ibid., 9. p. 345  life a new kind of entity: IMP, 218. p. 346  Nature should be visible mind: Schelling is quoted in Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 137. p. 346  a process which observes and defines: IMP, 229. p. 346  Leavis accuses Eliot: F. R. Leavis, The Living Principle: English as a Discipline of Thought (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975), 263. p. 346  Nietzsche . . . condemned by life: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 573. p. 346  This remains to be done: Some preliminary notes on Illich and Romanticism are here: http://www.davidcayley.com/blog/category/ Illich%2FRomanticism. p. 346  Agamben builds on Arendt and Foucault: Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3.

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Notes to Pages 346–354  /  519 p. 346  The social . . . neither public nor private: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 28.

Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 155; following quotes in the same passage.

p. 347  life process channeled into the public realm: Ibid., 45.

p. 348  The form of this world is passing away: 1 Corinthians 7:31.

p. 347  the force of life is fertility: Ibid., 108.

p. 348  The unpolitical, non-public character: Arendt, The Human Condition, 53.

p. 347  dazzled by the abundance of its growing fertility: Ibid. 135.

p. 348  this intensification will always come to pass: Ibid., 50.

p. 347  to make the real in the light of the ­rational: The phrase is borrowed from my friend Sajay Samuel. See Cayley, Ideas on the Nature of Science, 210.

p. 348  key verities defining secular society: IMP, 226.

p. 347  The significance of this reversal remained latent: Ibid., 296–97. p. 347  Liberal politics concerned almost exclusively with the maintenance of life: Hannah Arendt,

p. 348  modernity as an extension of Church history: RNF, 169. p. 348  ridiculously similar to a religious one: IIC, 65.

Chapter 12 p. 349  research hypothesis: RNF, 58. p. 349  I believe that the Incarnation makes ­possible: RNF, 47. p. 349  expressing love for the church by a critical attitude: Illich, “The American Parish,” 10 (PC, 6). p. 350  There is a temptation to try to manage: RNF, 47–48. p. 351  the good Samaritan: Luke 10:25–37; my quotations are from the Revised Standard Version. p. 351  the opposite of what Jesus wanted to point out: Here and in what follows I am paraphrasing and quoting from RNF, 50ff. p. 352  in the bowels of Jesus Christ: Philippians 1:8.

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p. 352  It is arbitrary, Illich says: RNF, 177. p. 352  a new kind of ‘ought’ has been established: RNF, 177. p. 352  The Master told them: RNF, 207. p. 353  “Ethos and the Christian Experience of God”: Klaus Held gave this lecture on October 18, 2000. My thanks to Donagh Healy, who was then writing an MA thesis on Illich at the N.U.I., for sending me the text. The English text has not been published. The German text appeared in Intersubjectivité et théologie philosophique, Biblioteca dell’Archivio di Filosofia, CEDAM, Padova 2001, 247–61. This theme is also treated at length in Klaus Held’s Der biblische Glaube: Phänomenologie seiner Herkunft und Zukunft (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2018). p. 353  The unclean woman: Mark 5:25–34. p. 354  let the dead bury their dead: Luke 9:60.

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520  /  Notes to Pages 354–361

p. 354  I came not to call the righteous: Luke 5:32.

p. 359  Peter’s denial: Matthew 26:33–35 and 69–75, for example—more or less the same account appears in all four gospels.

p. 354  the desire of all nations: Haggai 2:7.

p. 359  God calls Abraham: Genesis 12:1ff.

p. 354  only to the lost sheep of Israel: Matthew 15:24.

p. 359  transform supreme folly first into desirable duty: RNF, 58.

p. 355  neither Jew nor Greek: Galatians 3:28.

p. 360  And now, brothers, about the coming of the Lord: This translation of Second Thessalonians 2:1–8 is by American theologian/historian Bernard McGinn from his book Anti-Christ: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 42–43.

p. 354  the sabbath made for man: Mark 2:23–28.

p. 356  charity . . . is not capable of founding a public realm: Arendt, The Human Condition, 53. p. 356  the kingdom of God has come upon you: Luke 11:20. p. 356  become as a little child: Matthew 18:3. p. 356  lose one’s life in order to gain it: Matthew 10:39. p. 356  hate father and mother: Luke 14:26. p. 356  not of this world: John 18:36. p. 356  Straight is the gate: Matthew 7:14 (KJV). p. 357  The devil came and took Jesus: RNF, 98–99. p. 357  below the other: Illich, “The Educational Enterprise in the Light of the Gospel,” op. cit. p. 357  Contrition not a sense of culpability: RNF, 53–54.

p. 361  the proud and disordered reign of antiChrist: Quoted in Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 262. p. 361  Bob Jones University censured: Dennis Pettibone, “Martin Luther’s Views on the AntiChrist,” Journal of the Adventist Theological Society 18, no. 1 (2007): 81. He cites U.S. Congress, 106th Congress, 2d Session, S. Con. Res. 85, February 29, 2000. p. 361  the last enemy becomes the hobby of cranks: McGinn, op. cit., 230. p. 361  Jung and Soloviev the last major thinkers concerned with anti-Christ: Ibid., 265.

p. 359  faith implies a certain foolishness: RNF, 57.

p. 361  René Girard is another: An essay of mine comparing Illich’s and Girard’s conceptions of anti-Christ is here: http://www.davidcayley.com/ blog/category/Christ+and+Anti-Christ. This essay also appears in The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion, ed. James Alison and Wolfgang Palaver (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

p. 359  Jesus as major disturber and fool: RNF, 147.

p. 361  I know I risk being mistaken: RNF, 62.

p. 359  Illich’s fool’s freedom: RNF, 104.

p. 361  Gospel transmitted orally: See, for example, Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

p. 358  In the early years of Christianity: RNF, 54. p. 359  the vocation, the ability, the empowerment: RNF, 56.

p. 359  that God could be a man . . . logical contradiction: RNF, 57. p. 359  this fool who was crucified . . . ridiculed by everyone: RNF, 69, 58.

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p. 361  once God’s word had become flesh: RNF, 59; subsequent quotes until otherwise noted from the same passage.

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Notes to Pages 362–369  /  521 p. 362  The breaking of the tiniest unit: David Martin, The Breaking of the Image: A Sociology of Christian Theory and Practice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 77.

p. 366  feelings about the self: RNF, 68. p. 367  a set of spells: Martin, op. cit., 82. p. 367  a long period of imprinting: Ibid., 125.

p. 363  Yuval Noah Harari: See Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Toronto: Signal Books, 2016).

p. 367  the prerequisites of social life: Ibid., 167.

p. 363  The coming of the anti-Christ not just a prophetic prediction: C. G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Collected Works, vol. 9 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 43.

p. 367  take up your cross: Luke 9:2.

p. 363  Church turns the gospel into an idealism: RNF, 55. p. 363  no need to engage in arcane speculations: RNF, 62. p. 363  I believe that sin is something: RNF, 62. p. 364  under the power of sin: Romans 3:9. p. 364  Awareness of sin is an exaltation: Theologian James Alison makes the same point as Illich in his The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter Eyes (New York: Crossroad, 1998). p. 364  to believe in sin is to celebrate: RNF, 54–55. p. 364  if I had not done among them: John 15:24. p. 364  the idea of sin has become threatening and obscure: RNF, 53. p. 364  values can be positive but also negative: RNF, 63. p. 365  I would have preferred to speak about sin: RNF, 62. p. 365  almost omni-present: IIC, 110. p. 366  Christianity brings something new into ­existence: RNF, 64. p. 366  digestion and penetration of Gospel truths . . . Aquinas’s cathedral-like pages: RNF, 69. p. 366  Hugh of St. Victor’s account of the virtues: RNF, 52.

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p. 367  a new heaven and a new earth: Revelation 21:1.

p. 367  let the dead bury their dead: Matthew 8:22. p. 367  the equivalent of circumcision: Paul writes to the church at Corinth that “neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but keeping the commandments of God” (1 Corinthians 7:19). p. 367  the poorest he that is in England: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putney_Debates. p. 368  the last shall be first: Matthew 20:16. p. 368  he that is least among you: Luke 9:48. p. 368  modernity’s preconditions: RNF, 68. p. 368  Hans Blumenberg . . . uniquely Christian notion: In RNF, 64ff., Illich calls Blumenberg “one of the master thinkers of our time” and uses Blumenberg’s article on contingency in the German dictionary of religion, Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Religion in History and the Present), as his guide in discussing this idea. p. 368  As interesting as the reflections of modern cosmology might be: IIC, 114. p. 369  because his goodness could not be adequately represented: Quoted in William C. French, “Creation and Salvation According to Martin Luther: Creation as the Good and Integral Background,” in E. M. Conradie, ed., Creation and Salvation: A Mosaic of Selected Classic Christian Theologies (Berlin: Lit, 2012), 157–58; French cites Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, q. 47, art. 1.

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522  /  Notes to Pages 369–375 p. 369  things can be known because they are created: Joseph Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas (New York: Pantheon, 1957), 61.

p. 372  aflame with the spirit of love and discipline: See “the Cluniac prayer” in https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Cluny_Abbey.

p. 369  would be independent of God’s will: Taylor, A Secular Age, 97.

p. 372  Dictatus Papae: Berman, Law and Revolution, 96.

p. 369  the will of God is its own cause: RNF, 66–67; subsequent quotes, until noted, are from this passage.

p. 373  Innocent III’s inaugural sermon: http:// legalhistorysources.com/ChurchHistory220 /Lecture%20Four/LectureFive.htm.

p. 370  Catherine Pickstock on Duns Scotus: Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 121–35.

p. 373  Illich’s teacher Gerhart Ladner: Gerhart Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Ages of the Fathers; (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). Illich’s relation to Ladner is discussed in chap. 6, 2–3.

p. 370  definition of mathesis: Ibid., xiii. p. 370  things no longer are what they are because they correspond to God’s will: RNF, 68. p. 370  privileged the rational over the actual: Pickstock, op. cit., 127. p. 370  discrete empirical objects “out there”: Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2013), 26–27. p. 371  the world in the hands of man: RNF, 70. p. 371  tool not a primordial human category: See chap. 10, 4. p. 371  angels . . . are pure spirits: RNF, 74–75; subsequent quotes are on these pages. p. 372  theologians found the term instrumentum extremely useful: RNF, 78–79; the seven sacraments are baptism, confirmation or chrismation, eucharist, penance, anointing of the sick, holy orders, and matrimony. p. 372  God himself an instrumentality: RNF, 86. p. 372  obvious . . . that wherever something is achieved: RNF, 226. p. 372  a model of translocal, hierarchical, corporate government: Berman, Law and Revolution, 90.

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p. 373  which God will perform: IIC, 211. p. 373  to confuse salvation with the Church: DS, 18. p. 374  our belief that man can do what God cannot: DS, 55. p. 374  Every Christian be they man or woman: RNF, 89; subsequent quotes from the passage that follows. p. 374  A judicial category: RNF, 87. p. 375  prior to the eleventh. Century . . . law did not exist: Berman, Law and Revolution, 85. p. 375  Natural law is what is contained: Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 216. p. 375  envied, resented and learned from: Ibid., 229. p. 375  not under the law but under grace: Romans 6:14. p. 375  Law exists in the bosom of the pope: John Neville Figgis, Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius: 1414–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956; first edition, 1907), 15. p. 375  In the Christian liturgy of the first century: Ivan Illich, “The Cultivation of Conspiracy,” in CII, 240.

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Notes to Pages 376–383  /  523 p. 376  A device called an osculatorium appeared: Ibid., 240.

p. 379  associations created by “the will of their members”: Ibid., 234.

p. 376  contractual formality soon overshadowed: Ibid., 241.

p. 380  preferred neighbours: RNF, 54.

p. 377  the crooked timber of humanity: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” is the Sixth Proposition of Immanuel Kant’s essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” (1784). p. 377  citizens “swearing the commune”: Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 268. p. 377  an oath sworn before God: RNF, 84. p. 377  it was said to the men of old: Matthew 5:33–37. p. 377  pray in secret: Matthew 6:6. p. 377  an eye for an eye: Matthew 5:38–40. p. 377  do not be anxious about your life: Matthew 6:25–28. p. 378  the existence in each city of another sort of country: Quoted in Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 76–77. p. 378  church as the city of God in “a state of pilgrimage”: Augustine, City of God, book 19 (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 693–96. p. 378  in the sight of God: These words begin the marriage ceremony: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God . . . ” See Anglican Book of Common Prayer, 564. p. 378  Christ came to free us from the law: RNF, 82. p. 378  dialectic of sin and law in Paul: Letter to the Romans, chap. 7. p. 378  love was legalized: RNF, 87. p. 379  Christian moral beliefs are the ultimate source: Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 353. p. 379  foundation of the idea that social entities come into existence: RNF, 88.

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p. 380  anguish of the scrupulous: RNF, 193. p. 380  omnipotent law-giver: Schmitt, Political Theology, 36: “The omnipotent God became the omnipotent law-giver.” p. 380  the bridge from the communalism of medieval society to the individualism of the democratic state: I was influenced on this point by Michael McKeon’s Secret History of Domesticity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2005), which argues that absolutist monarchy in the early modern period generated equality in the same way that Siedentop says that papal monarchy did—by equal subjection of all. p. 380  moral status to social status: Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 23. p. 381  if we want to understand the idea of patria: RNF, 93. p. 381  hypertrophy of law: Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, 40. p. 381  law can lay some claim to the whole of human experience: McLachlin made this remark at a conference on Pluralism, Religion and Public Policy, held at McGill University in October 2002, at which I was present. p. 382  Albert O. Hirschman: Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1991). p. 382  the Golden Calf has no sooner been cast down: Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 167. p. 382  meet the new boss: The Who, “Won’t Get Fooled Again” from Who’s Next. p. 382  all worlds before our own: All quotations and paraphrases in this paragraph from RNF, 132 and 136–37. p. 383  neither Jew nor Greek: Galatians 3:28.

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524  /  Notes to Pages 383–390 p. 383  make disciples of all nations: Matthew 27:19. p. 383  what is revealed to us in the parable: RNF, 197. p. 383  without so much as a change of clothes: Matthew 10:9. p. 383  yeast, salt and light: Matthew 13:33; Matthew 5:13–16. p. 383  By their fruits: Matthew 7:20. p. 384  Why do you see the speck: Matthew 7:3. p. 384  world’s largest non-governmental bureaucracy: CA, 59 (PC, 100). p. 384  it was not God’s will: RNF, 196. p. 384  Christianity’s most striking innovation: ­Mircea Eliade, Myths, Rites and Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader, ed. Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 243. p. 384  On the far side of the cross: John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 442. p. 384  you can’t take the crucifixion away: IIC, 243. p. 384  in the midst of history, the judgment of God: Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 433.

p. 384  a mystery whose depth of evil could not have come to be: Illich, “Hospitality and Pain,” 1. p. 384  unknown future that mankind has missed: Milbank, “The Last of the Last., op. cit. p. 385  a sense of profound ambiguity: IIC, 243. p. 385  the West as the perversion of Revelation: IIC, 243. p. 385  led up by the Spirit into the wilderness: ­Matthew 4:1–11. p. 385  life-long study of modernity as an inverted form of faith: Illich, “Hospitality and Pain,” 1. p. 385  Thirty years ago, when I lectured in Pakistan: RNF, 128. p. 387  Our religion is assuredly the most ridiculous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Voltaire#Christianity. p. 387  Modernity as an extension of church history: RNF, 169. p. 387  criticize Christianity with Christianity: David Cayley, “The Scapegoat: René Girard’s Anthropology of Violence and Religion,” CBC Radio, March 5–9, 2001, transcript, 44ff. The transcript is here: http://www.davidcayley.com/ transcripts/.

Chapter 13 p. 388  I have always abstained: IIC, 266. p. 388  I do not believe, with some: RNF, 169. p. 388  the historical progression in which God’s Incarnation is turned inside out: Illich, “Hospitality and Pain,” 1. p. 388  At the very beginning of our conversation: RNF, 170–71; following quotes in same passage.

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p. 389  Those who call themselves apostles: Revelation 2:2. p. 389  the apocalyptic discourses: Matthew 24/25, Mark 13, and Luke 21; quotation from Matthew 13:49–50. p. 390  Aquinas . . . the happiness of the saints . . . the suffering of the damned: Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, q. 94, art. 1.

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Notes to Pages 390–394  /  525 p. 390  defines apocalypse as revealing or unveiling: RNF, 179.

p. 392  meet the Lord in the air: 1 Thessalonians 4:17.

p. 390  the veil of the temple rent in twain: Matthew 27:51, Mark 15:38, Luke 23:45.

p. 392  foolish trust: IIC, 251.

p. 390  the veil of Isis: https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Veil_of_Isis. p. 390  hidden since the foundation of the world: Matthew 13:35. p. 390  nothing covered that will not be revealed: Matthew 10:26. p. 390  cast fire upon the earth: Luke 12:49 KJV. p. 390  tree of the knowledge of good and evil . . . like God: Genesis 2:17, 3:5. p. 390  I have set before you life and death: Deuteronomy 29:1, 30:19. p. 391  Faith in the Incarnate Word: IIC, 268. p. 391  gone before into Galilee: Mark 28:7. p. 391  once for all . . . will never die again: Romans 6:9–10.

p. 392  taking the predictability out of the face of the other: RNF, 57. p. 392  learning to receive surprises: Illich, “Commencement [Address],” 15. p. 392  Faith is a mode of knowledge: RNF, 57. p. 393  outworking of pure, unconstrained freedom: RNF, 49. p. 393  Realm of gratuity comes into existence: RNF, 49. p. 393  The gift is the secret that can’t be told: Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 30. p. 393  left hand and the right hand: Matthew 6:3. p. 393  tell no one: Matthew 17:9. p. 393  practice piety in order to be seen: Matthew 6:1.

p. 391  the Incarnation prolonged: RNF, 207.

p. 393  lose your life in order to gain it: Matthew 10:39.

p. 391  To hell with the future: Interview with Douglas Lummis, op. cit.

p. 394  with God all things are possible: Luke 1:34–37.

p. 391  deposit of faith: an old Church expression for revelation and the duty to “guard what has been entrusted to you” (1 Timothy 6:20).

p. 394  still small voice: Kings 19:12.

p. 392  disappeared from the Church’s teaching and concern: RNF, 60.

p. 394  preach to all: Mark 16:15.

p. 392  powers of this world: RNF, 99; Ephesians 6:12.

p. 394  hate father and mother: Luke 14:26.

p. 394  pearls before swine: Matthew 7:6. p. 394  alms in secret: Matthew 6:4.

p. 392  make faith subject to power: RNF, 57.

p. 394  don’t hide your light: Matthew 5:14–16.

p. 392  substance of things hoped for: Hebrews 11:1.

p. 394  treasure hidden in a field: Matthew 13:45.

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526  /  Notes to Pages 394–398 p. 394  necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded: Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1015a, 32.

Michigan State University Press, 2009) and Cayley, “The Scapegoat,” 42.

p. 394  the people that walked in darkness: Isaiah 9:2.

p. 396  the Resurrection appearances did not take place in the temple: See Walter Wink, “What Happened to Jesus?” Tikkun 23, no. 2 (2008): 46–47.

p. 394  light of the world . . . city on a hill cannot be hidden: Matthew 5:14. p. 394  light that enlightens every man: John 1:9. p. 394  until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead: Mark 9:9. p. 394  when the Son of Man shall come in his glory: Matthew 25:31. p. 394  image of the invisible God: Colossians 1:15. p. 394  ruler of all nature: From the hymn “Fairest Lord Jesus,” which dates back to the Middle Ages. p. 395  Not peace but a sword . . . foes of his own household: Matthew 10:34–39. p. 395  nation against nation . . . earthquakes, ­pestilence: Ibid. p. 395  desolating sacrilege: Matthew 24:15. p. 395  such tribulation: Mark 13:19. p. 395  fainting with fear and foreboding: Luke 22:26. p. 395  the close of the age: Matthew 24:3. p. 395  the signs of the times: Matthew 16:3. p. 395  heaven and earth shall pass away: Luke 21:33. p. 395  the time is fulfilled: Mark 1:15. p. 395  the coming of the Son of Man: Matthew 34:27. p. 395  René Girard perceived in this discomfiture: See Girard’s Battling to the End (East Lansing:

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p. 396  How is the historian to face the fact: IIC, 211–12. p. 397  undeniable historical consequence . . . what exceeds history but changes it: RNF, 48. p. 397  It was with regard to this concept of Ladner’s: IIC, 212. p. 397  Man is a complementary being: The Idea of Reform, op. cit., 440. p. 397  Jesus “the exact impression of [God’s] ­person”: This is Willis Barnstone’s translation of Hebrews 1:3 in his Revised New Testament (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 1072. p. 397  Illich reads and rereads Ladner: IIC, 212. p. 398  make faith subject to the power of this world: RNF, 57. p. 398  the truly apocalyptic view of the world: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), 56. p. 398  valorization of time: Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 1959), 111. p. 398  remember a historical event: IIC, 268. p. 398  address to the Church of our Lord: Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, 1. p. 398  incessant deferral of the Last Judgment: Ibid., 40. p. 398  Chronology cannot play: Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 17.

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Notes to Pages 398–406  /  527 p. 398  the whole truth must be present: Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 302–303. p. 399  Get thee behind me, Satan: Mark 8:33. p. 399  Before the cock crows: John 13:38. p. 399  La Musée des Beaux Arts: Auden, Collected Poems, 179. p. 399  Plato lifted his eyes: Plato, “Critias,” The Collected Dialogues, 1216. p. 400  its resources hardly suffice to support us: Tertullian wrote this around 200 CE. See Andrew S. Kulikovsky, Creation, Fall, Restoration: A Biblical Theology of Creation (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications Ltd., 2009), 246ff. p. 400  The cultures of the North American prairies: Impressed at a young age by Mi’kmaq singer Willie Dunn’s “The Ballad of Crowfoot” and the short film collage he and his associates made to illustrate it, Crowfoot has ever after been my image and reminder of a person facing the end of a world and a way of life. He was a chief of the Sisika people and a leader of the Blackfoot Confederacy who lived from around 1830 to 1890. Willie Dunn’s film and song are here: https:// www.nfb.ca/film/ballad_of_crowfoot/. p. 400  out of whack: RNF, 60. p. 401  a bottomless evil: Illich, “Health as One’s Own Responsibility: No Thank You!,” 3. p. 401  a certain power of observation: RNF, 60. p. 401  only faith can fully discern: RNF, 170. p. 401  preached throughout the whole world: ­Matthew 24:14. p. 401  something happened cosmically: RNF, 176. p. 401  the other side of the mystery of ensarcosis: RNF, 99. p. 401  sermon in Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church: Illich, “The Educational Enterprise in the

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Light of the Gospel,” op. cit. Subsequent quotes, until noted, are from this lecture. p. 401  Jesus as our Saviour but also as our model: RNF, 49–50. p. 403  human kind cannot bear very much reality: Four Quartets, 4. p. 403  they recognized him and he vanished: Luke 24:31. p. 403  the owl of Minerva takes flight: These words conclude the preface to G.W.F. Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right. The text is here: https://www .marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr /preface.htm. p. 403  There is no greater distance: CA, 33. p. 403  the wars of religion: William Cavanaugh argues persuasively that this is an ideologically motivated misnomer in his The Myth of Religious Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). p. 404  René Girard on fighting Christianity with Christianity: Cayley, “The Scapegoat,” 44ff. p. 404  intimations of deprival: “A Platitude” from Technology and Empire, reprinted in George Grant, The George Grant Reader, ed. William Christian and Sheila Grant (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 451. p. 405  Everything seems confusing and incomprehensible: RNF, 60. p. 405  The gospel of the kingdom will be preached: Matthew 24:14. p. 406  This is a surprise, remains a surprise, and could not exist as anything else: RNF, 48. p. 406  the cowardly, the unbelieving: Revelation 21:8. p. 406  the outer darkness where men weep: Matthew 8:12 and elsewhere—the prediction recurs.

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528  /  Notes to Pages 406–414 p. 406  The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed: Luke 17:20. p. 406  A thief in the night: 1 Thessalonians 5:2. p. 406  treasure unearthed in a field: Matthew 13:44. p. 406  the time is coming and now is: John 5:25. p. 406  before Abraham was I am: John 8:58. p. 406  even Solomon in all his glory: Matthew 6:29. p. 406  makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good: Matthew 5:45. p. 407  The kingdom comes to fulfillment: PC, 84. p. 407  a new society right now: IIC, 213. p. 407  phenomenological density of the body: RNF, 110.

p. 408  our redemption through Christ’s ­suffering: Ibid., 110. (Gorringe again cites A Scholastic Miscellany, 283–84.) p. 408  greater love has no man than this: John 15:13–15. p. 408  I am not a God afar off: Blake, op. cit., 146. p. 409  our Saviour but also our model: RNF, 50. p. 409  What I have stammered here: RNF, 61. p. 410  Whenever I look for the roots of modernity: RNF, 48. p. 411  something collective, social and even public: Miguel de Unamuno, The Agony of Christianity (New York: Frederic Ungar Publishing, 1960; first Spanish edition, 1931), 6. p. 411  life and reason in mortal combat: Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Peoples (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1926; first Spanish edition, 1912), 90. p. 411  You will know the truth: John 8:32.

p. 407  the only time the Lord is present: Illich, “How Shall We Pass On Christianity?,” 16 (PC, 159).

p. 412  wild and wasted virtues: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974/1908), 22.

p. 407  everything written about me in the law of Moses: Luke 24:44–46.

p. 413  God’s will . . . a sinful church: RNF, 196–97.

p. 407  Jesus “set forth” as a propitiation: Romans 3:21–26. p. 407  necessary that Christ should suffer: Luke 24:26. p. 408  a full perfect and sufficient sacrifice: Anglican Book of Common Prayer, 82. p. 408  How cruel and wicked it seems: I am quoting from Timothy Gorringe’s God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 109, a book that shaped my view of this question. Gorringe cites E. R. Fairweather, ed., A Scholastic Miscellany (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1956), 276ff.

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p. 413  Savonarola chases the Medicis out of Florence: RNF, 86. p. 413  enthusiasm one can have at that age for ­rebels: RNF, 153. p. 413  two faces of the church: RNF, 154. p. 413  in the fullest most glorious way clowns: RNF, 156. p. 413  Religion as a discrete category: Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 19. p. 414  the world was full of religions: John Bossy, Christianity in the West: 1400–1700 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 9, 170.

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Notes to Pages 414–420  /  529 p. 414  the modern constitution: Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, op. cit.

p. 415  a common atmosphere, a divine milieu: CII, 240.

p. 415  Toward a New Reformation: The image is borrowed from the title of Paul Goodman’s final book, New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative, published in 1970 and reissued by PM Press in 2010. Goodman and Illich were friends, and their ideas overlap—Illich once said, for example, that if he had to pick a political label for himself, Goodman’s “Neolithic conservative” would be his choice. I use Goodman’s image here to suggest the possibility of a practical response to the “World Church” in which Illich claims that we live.

p. 416  I give you the end of a golden string: Blake, op. cit., 231. p. 416  where two or three are gathered: Matthew 18:20. p. 416  Ariadne Auf Naxos as an image for the church: Cavanaugh tells this story in my Ideas series, “After Atheism: New Perspectives on God and Religion,” part 3. It can be found here: http:// www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/after-atheism-new-perspectives-on-god-and-religion-part-3-1.2914006.

Chapter 14 p. 417  I want to plead: Illich, “Philosophy . . .  Artifacts . . . Friendship,” 1. p. 417  Alice laughed: Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1897), 101–2. p. 417  Northrop Frye and René Girard: Frye describes his initial vision—the moment “when suddenly the universe just broke open”—in my Northrop Frye in Conversation. René Girard describes his conversion, and the moments at which his mimetic theory coalesced, in an interview with James Williams in René Girard, The Girard Reader, ed. James Williams (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 262, 283–88. p. 417  I engage philosophy as ancilla: Illich, ­“Philosophy . . . Artifacts . . . Friendship,” 4. p. 417  an essential element for askesis: Ibid., 1. p. 418  dogmas of the Church important only ­insofar as they “exclude the intrusion of myth”: PC, 87.

p. 419  Here we are, you and I: This is Illich’s translation. See also Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, Cistercian Fathers Series, no. 5 (Collegeville: Cistercian Publications, Liturgical Press, 2010), 55. p. 419  the community is never closed: RNF, 151. p. 419  Whoever loves another: RNF, 47. p. 419  its way, as Jesus said of himself: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). p. 419  Praying to Christ for your friend: Bert Ghezzi, The Voices of the Saints: A Year of Readings (New York: Image Books/ Doubleday), 2–3. p. 419  I am the vine: John 15:5. p. 420  Where two or three: Matthew 18:20. p. 420  Whatever you have done for the least of these: Matthew 25:40.

p. 418  Many people have considered: RNF, 152.

p. 420  God only Acts and Is: Blake, op. cit., 40.

p. 418  Charity never ends: IVT, 26–27.

p. 420  Nothing that’s created exists in itself: David Cayley, “The Myth of the Secular,” part 6, here: http://www.davidcayley.com/ podcasts?category=Myth+of+the+Secular.

p. 419  De Spirituali Amicitia shaped his understanding: RNF, 150.

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530  /  Notes to Pages 420–427 p. 420  We are creatures that find our perfection: RNF, 52. p. 420  Most of my life is really the result: IIC, 61. p. 420  Nils Christie: Nils Christie, Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags Western Style? ­(London: Routledge, 1993). p. 421  his thoughts are behind so much: Ibid., 14. p. 421  the new dimension of love: RNF, 47. p. 421  then comes that major disturber: RNF, 147. p. 421  led in the history of the West to new forms of community: RNF, 147. p. 421  his friend Giuseppe Dossetti: RNF, 148. p. 421  after testing his vocation in Tamanrasset: See chap. 2, 49–50. p. 421  intellectual life as philia: RNF, 148; following quotes in same passage. p. 422  research that is public, disciplined, documented and critical: G, 177. p. 422  a divorce that began when the first universities were created: See chap. 10, 301–4. p. 422  almost an enemy to the kind of collegial procedure: RNF, 146. p. 422  a number of extremely sticky and persistent academic etiquettes: RNF, 148. p. 422  When I was younger: RNF, 148. p. 423  Northrop Frye used to say: Cayley, Northrop Frye in Conversation, 148. p. 423  Encounters that began as interviews: Among the Ideas series resulting from connections created through Illich are “Crime Control as Industry,” “Community and Its Counterfeits” (John McKnight), “Plastic Words” (Uwe Pörksen), “Leopold Kohr,” “The Earth Is Not an Ecosystem,” “The Informal Economy,” and “Beyond Institutions.” All are here: http://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/.

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p. 423  Who says A must say B: IIC, 245. p. 424  I was recently in Bologna: IIC, 170. p. 424  What makes the ancient Jews unique: IIC, 49; quote from Paul, Romans 8:22. p. 425  From that moment on: RNF, 176; following quotes on the same page. p. 425  Faith in the Incarnation can flower: RNF, 176. p. 425  to foster the growth of an open group: RNF, 148. p. 425  arbitrary from everybody else’s point of view: RNF, 52. p. 425  You cannot write the biography of a friendship: RNF, 152. p. 425  To live outside the law: Bob Dylan, “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” Blonde on Blonde. p. 426  live with those I love: RNF, 229. p. 426  “Austerity” . . . has . . . been degraded: TC, xiii. p. 427  from his mouth issues a sharp sword: Revelation 19:11–16. p. 427  every second is the strait gate: Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” XVIIIB, in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1969), 264. p. 427  friendship arising from a place: RNF, 147. p. 427  his old friend Jerry Brown: Brown then hosted a radio show called We the People on KPFA in Berkeley. See: http://www.wtp.org/archive /transcripts/ivan_illich_jerry.html. p. 427  Pursuing truth within the horizon of a “we”: RNF, 148. p. 427  He introduced the first collection of his writings: CCD

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Notes to Pages 428–434  /  531 p. 428  public intercourse exhibition: IIC, 161. p. 428  this mosaic we’re making: IIC, 235. p. 428  unknown people will listen to these voices: RNF, 171. p. 428  acoustic climate . . . place engendering power: “The Environmental Threat to the Survival of the Voice,” unpublished paper, written in 1990; the following quote is from the same text. p. 429  lack of missionary spirit: Illich, “The American Parish,” 14 (PC, 11). p. 429  Once a thing is put in writing: Phaedrus, 275e in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, 521. p. 429  parable of the sower: Luke 8:4ff. p. 430  the view of historian Todd Hartch: Hartch presents this view in his The Prophet of Cuernavaca: Ivan Illich and the Crisis of the West. It is criticized in Chap. 2. p. 430  Most of what Illich wrote . . . had “a hidden purpose”: Hartch, op. cit., 145ff. p. 430  Illich intimates that when writing about school he was really writing about the Church: Hartch cites a speech to the Thomas More Society in Chicago in 1970 (op. cit., 147); see also IIC, 242. p. 430  structured injustice: IIC, 60. p. 430  radical monopoly: Illich develops this idea in TC, 54ff. p. 431  Lee Hoinacki’s claim that Illich is “doing theology in a new way”: Cayley, “Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman,” 32. p. 431  Illich assented to Hoinacki’s characterization: IIC, 241ff. p. 431  I am no theologian: RNF, 121. p. 431  What I want to cultivate . . . is powerlessness: RNF, 182.

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p. 431  proscription not prescription: Cayley, “Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman” 31. p. 431  the extraordinary creativity of people: IIC, 116. p. 431  the invitation to see the face of Christ: RNF, 56. p. 432  almost no one could recognize the Lord’s prayer: RNF, 131. p. 432  teach us to pray: Luke 11:1. p. 432  did not want to be taken for a proselytizer: Illich, “Philosophy . . . Artifacts . . . Friendship,” 4. p. 432  Once when he was staying with his friends: The story is from Sajay Samuel. p. 433  Faith known by its fruits: Matthew 7:16. p. 433  Faith as a gift: RNF, 183. p. 433  Faith is either there or not there: LM, 269. p. 433  implicit forms of the love of God: See Simone Weil, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George Panichas (Wakefield: Moyer Bell, 1977), 469–91. p. 433  Simone Weil . . . atheism as a purification: Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge), 103–4. p. 433  the Incarnation represents a turning point: RNF, 48. p. 433  may we pray for an increase of priests: CA, 70. p. 433  take nothing for your journey: Luke 9:3. p. 434  who spoke of blasphemy and hoped to be understood “as an historian and not a theologian”: See discussion in chap. 11, 336. p. 434  a no one’s rose: Paul Celan, “Psalm,” The Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 1989), 179.

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532  /  Notes to Pages 434–440 p. 434  Illich’s obituaries: See New York Times, December 4, 2002; The Times (of London), December 5, 2002; and El Mostrador (Chile), December 3, 2002.

p. 438  Science is the prophetic announcement: Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (Boulder: New Science Library, 1984), 76.

p. 435  interviewed by his friend Douglas Lummis: Interview with Douglas Lummis, op. cit.

p. 438  I begin, Lord, to behold thee: Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God, 46.

p. 436  That God could be man can be explained: RNF, 57.

p. 438  As long as you think about the world as a whole: IIC, 281.

p. 436  Tell no one/tell everyone: Matthew 17:9; 28:19.

p. 438  blasphemous in Illich’s “historical” sense: Illich, Blasphemy, 36; chap. 12, 25–27.

p. 436  alms in secret/light under a bushel: Matthew 6:4; 5:15.

p. 439  the multiple balance: TC, 49–91.

p. 436  a judge/not a judge: Compare John 12:47— “I do not judge anyone”—with “the curses against the Pharisees” in Matthew 23. p. 436  Étienne Gilson . . . the truth that is believed becomes the truth that is known: The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1940, 34–35. p. 437  a pupil of Aquinas: RNF, 177–78. p. 437  the Thomistic foundations of my entire perceptual mode: IIC, 150. p. 437  Illich shocks René Voillaume: IIC, 151–52; Illich’s problematic relationship with Voillaume is discussed in chap. 2, 50. p. 437  Thomism like a delicate vase: RNF, 182. p. 437  the same mysterious pattern repeated: Illich, “Philosophy . . . Artifacts . . . Friendship,” 4. p. 437  compares faith to getting a joke: CA, 90.

p. 439  I am ‘I’ in the deepest and fullest sense: RNF, 197. p. 439  Only the singular has actual existence: Nicholas of Cusa, Of Learned Ignorance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), 88. p. 439  completes and crowns the sense of proportionality: RNF, 197. p. 439  analogy, metaphor and poetry can reach: G, 62. p. 439  the aristocrat’s sentimental attraction, recalling Tolstoy’s: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 80. p. 440  the moral stance which corresponds to the vocation implied in the Gospel: IIC, 103. p. 440  le bon ton . . . our basically correct behavior: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 68. p. 440  pontificated on things in which he had no participation: From my notes on a private conversation with Ursula Franklin, who was a friend, about Illich.

p. 437  contradiction the criterion of the real: Weil, Gravity and Grace, 89.

p. 440  mystic . . . utopian . . . authoritarian: Postman, After Deschooling, What?, 137, 141, 143.

p. 437  Zaunreiter, a hedge straddler: Illich, ­“Philosophy . . . Artifacts . . . Friendship,” 1.

p. 440  through me and other friends: In addition to my two books of the oral Illich, there are his conversations with Majid Rahnema in The ­Post-Development Reader (London: Zed, 1997),

p. 437  walking the watershed: IIC, 240–41.

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Notes to Pages 441–449  /  533 with Jerry Brown in his Dialogues (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 1998), with Aaron Falbel in the journal Growing Without Schooling (#86, https://issuu.com/patfarenga/docs/gws-86) and

the invaluable, unpublished interview with Douglas Lummis that I have cited several times. p. 441  One enters on a pilgrimage: CCD, 13.

Epilogue p. 443  a progressive flattening out of personal virtuous performance: LM, 138.

p. 445  And Lead Us Not into Diagnosis: “And Lead Us Not into Diagnosis,” op. cit.

p. 443  designate a realistic human response: LM, 133.

p. 445  Hygienic Autonomy: A Manifesto: This manifesto is an appendix to Illich, “Brave New Biocracy.”

p. 443  depreciate “pain-killing” at all costs: A whole chapter of LM (140–60) is devoted to “The Killing of Pain.”

p. 446  smoking opium didn’t remove the pain: Hoinacki, Dying Is Not Death, 107.

p. 444  artificial creation: TC, 54.

p. 446  Simone Weil . . . the cross as balance: Weil, Gravity and Grace, 84.

p. 444  Unani medical tradition: This tradition, which preserves the four humors of Galenic medicine, has Hellenistic roots. It passed through Arab and Persian hands to Mughal India and continues to be practiced in Pakistan today. p. 444  modern medicine a Western Christian ­ideology: RNF, 128. p. 444  I rejoice in my sufferings: Colossians 1:24. p. 445  In the early 1980s when the bump was visible: Hoinacki, Dying Is Not Death, 105. p. 445  not accepted by all of Illich’s friends: ­Barbara Duden, for instance, has told me that she thinks this never happened. I didn’t hear the story until after Illich’s death, so I never asked.

p. 447  The way I feel at this moment: RNF, 190–91. p. 447  the two version of atonement: See chap. 15, 25–26. p. 448  self-aggrandizing technological myth: Illich, “Brave New Biocracy,” 11. p. 448  I am come to cast fire upon the earth: Luke 12:49; Mother Jerome’s card actually gives an older translation—“What will I but that it be enkindled?”—but I have substituted what appears in the Revised Standard Version in the interest of clarity. Willis Barnstone’s recent ­translation gives: “How I wish it were already ablaze!”

Conclusion p. 449  This is a book about Heaven: Berry, Jayber Crow, 351. p. 449  We have got on the slippery ice: Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 107.

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p. 449  assume there is one silent student: Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968/1995), 9. p. 449  on the table there is always a candle: RNF, 150.

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534  /  Notes to Pages 450–456 p. 450  the man has become like one of us: Genesis 3:22. p. 450  Everything carries a shadow: C. G. Jung, “Psychology and Religion” in Psychology and Religion: West and East, Collected Works, vol. 11 (Princeton: Princeton University Press [Bollingen Series]), 131. p. 450  The extent of our knowledge . . . the extent of our ignorance: Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays (Berkeley: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005), ix. p. 450  in the world, not of the world: Luke 17:21; John 18:36. p. 450  Church as She . . . Church as It: du Plessix Gray, op. cit., 80. p. 450  The worldly sign of an other-worldly reality: CCD, 105. p. 450  I didn’t want to get mixed up in a conflict: IIC, 99. p. 451  Every thinker thinks only one thought: Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 50. p. 451  behind each philosopher’s formal system: Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1945), 203.

p. 453  Types of law recognized in Blackstone’s Commentaries: I discuss the point in my book The Expanding Prison (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1998), 318ff. p. 453  monocular perception: IIC, 241. p. 454  modern Gnosticism: LM, 117; my quotations are from Illich’s précis of points made by Eric Voegelin in his Science, Politics and Gnosticism , op. cit.. p. 454  Progress the form of our civilization: Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 300. p. 455  Prisoners in the shell of technology: TC, 54. p. 455  Plan/economy of salvation: See Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) and Nicholas Heron, Liturgical Power: Between Economic and Political Theology (New York: Fordham, 2018) for further elaboration of the idea that the roots of modern economy and government lie in the economic theology of the early church. p. 455  gazed into the depths of divine knowledge: From a letter sent by Clement of Rome to the church at Corinth around the end of the first century, one of the earliest Christian documents not included in the New Testament and possibly earlier than some that are. See Heron, op. cit., 68.

p. 451  “missionary spirit” . . . the gift they have received: Illich, “The American Parish,” 14 (PC, 11).

p. 456  Surprise reveals new beginnings in the past: Carse, op. cit., 22.

p. 451  The siren of one ambulance: LM, 16.

p. 456  Hugh of St. Victor . . . first systematic reflection on what constitutes a tool: IIC, 219.

p. 451  The human equilibrium in open: TC, 50. p. 451  the domain that he referred to as the vernacular: SW, 57–58. p. 452  improve livelihood: SW, 24. p. 452  any set that is made up of two gendered subsets: G, 68. p. 453  Samaritan’s freedom to step outside his ­culture: RNF, 99.

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p. 456  extraordinary intensity of purposefulness . . . wherever something is achieved: RNF, 226. p. 456  Hugh as friend and interlocutor: IIC, 219ff.; the idea of Hugh as interlocutor I read out of a passage in which Illich speaks of a fantasy dialogue in which he “describes a modern transportation system to a very brilliant and adaptable and sensitive monk of 1135” (IIC, 121). p. 456  wherever something is achieved: RNF, 226.

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Notes to Pages 456–462  /  535 p. 456  a migrant between two space/times: IIC, 121. p. 457  pregnant with an evil . . . the nest of an evil: RNF, 59. p. 457  the road not taken: Robert Frost, Selected Poems (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston), 71. p. 457  the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free: Galatians, 5:1. p. 457  a paradoxical form of salvation without end: Heron, op. cit., 86. p. 457  Agamben’s claim that the Church defers what it promises: Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, 34–35. p. 457  The giant begins to totter: CA, 59. p. 457  young people trained to seek only the “average”: IIC, 240–41. p. 458  a sea of “soul capturing abstractions”: “The Loss of World and Sense,” op. cit. p. 458  bottomless evil renders us speechless: Illich, “Health as One’s Own Responsibility: No Thank You!” p. 458  God becomes as we are: “There Is No Natural Religion,” in Blake, op. cit., 3. p. 458  the church a perfect society: RNF, 92. p. 458  to begin the world over again: Thomas Paine, Common Sense (New York: Peter Eckler, 1922), 57–58.

p. 460  example derives from the Latin exemplum: https://www.etymonline.com/word/example. p. 460  Remember Illich’s words about the ­crucifixion: RNF, 50. p. 460  never had a place I called my home: IIC, 80. p. 460  very consciously a remainder of the past: IIC, 101. p. 460  the voice of an anarchist Christ: Illich, “The Educational Enterprise in the Light of the Gospel,” op. cit. p. 460  sweeping declericalization: “The Vanishing Clergyman,” CA, 57–83. p. 460  evangelical interpretation of prayer: Illich, “How Shall We Pass On Christianity?,” 18 (PC, 163). p. 460  the only time the Lord is present to us: Ibid., 16 (PC, 159). p. 461  Before Abraham was I am: John 8:58. p. 461  dogma protects faith from the intrusion of myth: PC, 76. p. 461  fulfilled in the heart: Ibid., 75. p. 461  the sacred and its dreadful machinery of separation: On this point I am indebted to Giorgio Agamben’s book Profanations (Cambridge: MIT, 2005). p. 461  little acts of foolish renunciation: RNF, 170.

p. 458  the sword Jesus says he has brought: Matthew 10:34.

p. 462  the devotion with which he said his Mass: This was the recollection of his close friend and colleague Joe Fitzpatrick (Cayley, “Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman,” 3).

p. 458  the narrow gate that leads to life: Matthew 7:12–14.

p. 462  confuse salvation with the church: DS, 18.

p. 459  as different as a square and a circle: G, 81.

p. 462  social reality at a transcendental level: PC, 76.

p. 459  stunned by a delusion about science: TC, 92. p. 459  two types of duality: IIC, 184–85.

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p. 462  the density of the real: Illich quotes the expression from Nicholas of Cusa in PC, 75.

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536  /  Notes to Pages 462–466 p. 462  the most obviously Christian epoch: RNF, 170.

p. 464  unconscious fear of a new church: CA, 50.

p. 462  extraordinary priests willing to live today: CA, 70.

p. 464  Thomistic foundations of my entire perceptual mode: IIC, 150.

p. 462  a critical attitude . . . love for the church: Illich, “The American Parish,” 11 (PC, 6).

p. 464  monocular perception of reality: IIC, 241.

p. 462  the church as multinational corporation: CA, 59. p. 462  fulfilled but not accomplished: PC, 74; Illich says “not yet accomplished,” but I don’t think his “yet” refers to a human possibility. This “text” is made of speaking notes and is not entirely consistent. Two pages earlier the opposite formula— accomplished but not fulfilled—is used, but I believe the same paradoxical already-but-not-yet is intended. p. 462  For years I have applied to myself a test: Ibid., 2. p. 463  one through whom roots go far back: IIC, 101. p. 463  a visitor from the 12th century: Christie made this remark in conversation while I was ­visiting him in Oslo in 2012. p. 463  Tradition means giving votes . . . to our ancestors: From “The Ethics of Elfland,” a chapter of Orthodoxy (1908) reproduced in G. K. Chesterton, The Essential G. K. Chesterton (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1987), 256. p. 463  breaking the bonds between the living and the dead: See chap. 11, 319ff., and Illich’s chapter “Death Against Death” in LM.

p. 465  An entirely new kind of power: RNF, 47. p. 465  “no-man rule”: Arendt, The Human Condition, 40. p. 465  Michel Foucault on pastoral power: Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 1997) and Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). p. 465  Divine oikonomia a paradigm of government: Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, 142. p. 466  Paul Ricoeur on “the masters of suspicion”: Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). p. 466  Judge not that you be not judged: Matthew 7:1. p. 466  Simone Weil on chance and providence: Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Putnam, 1951), 68. p. 466  mood propitious for a major change of ­direction: DS, 112. p. 466  bridges broken to a normative past: TC, 83.

p. 463  a “foreign country”: Hartley, The Go-Between.

p. 466  the depression he suffered while writing Tools for Conviviality: IIC, 282.

p. 463  new church: CA, 50. p. 463  a contemporary art of living: G, 179.

p. 466  the roof of technological characteristics: Illich, “How Shall We Pass On Christianity?,” 19 (PC, 165).

p. 464  a new complementarity between critical and ascetic learning: Illich, “Askesis,” 1–2.

p. 466  unprecedented house-cleaning in the health professions: LM, 11.

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Notes to Pages 467–467  /  537 p. 467  allowing people to exercise their “extraordinary creativity”: IIC, 115ff. p. 467  mysterious proportion linking revelation to “demonic night”: Illich, “Hospitality and Pain,” 1.

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p. 467  the only time the Lord is present to us: Illich, “How Shall We Pass On Christianity?,” 16 (PC, 159). p. 467  as soon as [you] have thought something: Weil, Gravity and Grace, 93.

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Index ABC (Illich, I., and Sanders), 3, 279, 292, 309, 420 Abelard, Peter, 232, 408–9 abortion, 517n. See also death; life Acts and Monuments (Foxe), 361 Aelred of Riveaulx, 419 After Deschooling, What?, 110–11 After Writing (Pickstock), 370 Agamben, Giorgio, 18–19, 21, 210, 269–71, 346, 381, 398, 465, 479n age of instrumentality, 247–48 age of systems, 19–20, 246–49, 307, 504n The Age of the Crisis of Man (Greif ), 130 “The Age of the World Picture” (Heidegger), 341 The Agony of Christianity (Unamuno), 411 Albert the Great, 295 alchemy, economic, 186–89 Algeria, 49–50 alienation, 24, 155, 186 allegories, 12, 13 Alliance for Progress, 16, 53–54, 95 alphabet, 293, 296–97 alternate uses, scarcity and, 178 Althusser, Louis, 508n ambiguity, corruptio optimi pessima and, 379 American Church Alliance for Progress and, 16 complacency of, 82 Puerto Ricans in, 38, 40 American Historical Review, 207 “The American Parish” (Illich, I.), 38, 39, 41–43 amoeba words, 279–80 a-mortality, 327–28 Anatheism (Kearney), 264 Anderson, Benedict, 493n “And Lead Us Not into Diagnosis but Deliver Us from the Pursuit of Health” (Illich, I.), 445 Anselm of Canterbury, 408 anti-Christ apocalypse and dominion of, 404–5 corruptio optimi pessima and, 359–63

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anti-Semitism, in childhood, 29–30 apocalypse, 12 anti-Christ and, 404–5 climate change and, 400, 455 counter-apocalyptic thought and, 405–9 embarrassment over, 395, 406 Gospel warnings of, 395 Incarnation and, 390–91, 396–400 interviews on, 388–89, 409–10 mysterium iniquitatis and, 388–90, 400–403 in New Testament, 389–92, 407–9 resurrection and, 396 revelation, history and, 396–400 as unveiling, 390–92 apophatic theology, 121–23 Aquinas, Thomas, 33, 164, 366, 369–70, 437 Arendt, Hannah, 130, 346–48, 465 Aristotle, 248, 371, 421 Arney, Bill, 340 artificial life, 253 “An Art of Suffering” (Hoinacki), 445 asceticism, 260–62, 302–3 assisted death, 325–26 Auden, W. H., 264–65, 399 Auer, Albert, 32 Augustine, 36, 64, 294 autonomous action, in Tools for Conviviality, 126–27 awareness, 235, 411–13 Ayer, A. J., 164 Babbitt, Susan, 514n Babel, language and, 286–87 Bachelard, Gaston, 165, 276, 508n Bacon, Francis, 11, 22, 196–97, 473n Baer, Dov, 236 Baier, Klaus, 8 balance, suffering and, 446–47 “The Ballad of Crowfoot” (Dunn), 527n barbarians, 181 Barth, Karl, 23, 415

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540 / Index Barthes, Roland, 281, 509n Bateson, Gregory, 228, 250, 252 Bateson, Mary Catherine, 252–54 Becker, Helmut, 342, 473n Behr, John, 319 “Being Born” radio series, 160–61 Bell, Daniel, 109–10, 125 Belloc, Hilaire, 471n Benedict XXIII, 337 Benjamin, Walter, 21, 269–70, 427 Berengar of Tours, 304 Berman, Harold, 372–75, 458 Berrigan, Daniel, 49, 57, 87, 482n Berrigan, Philip, 482n Berry, Wendell, 47, 278, 311, 343, 449, 450 bioethics, 338–40 biography, aversion to, 9–13 Blackstone, William, 453 Blake, William, 13, 23–24, 234, 271, 408–9, 416 blasphemy, life and, 336–37 Blumenberg, Hans, 368, 522n body. See also disembodiment crucified Christ and, 256–57 embodiment and, 262–67 as flesh, 262–67 flesh compared to, 271–72 Gospel, gaze and, 257–60 as historical construct, 244–45, 254–57, 272 morality, gaze and, 260–62 surprises and, 267–71 as system, 247 Bohr, Niels, 397 Bollier, David, 148–49 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 68–71, 75, 479n Boniface VIII, 375, 380 books, visible text and, 294–98, 301 Boorstin, Daniel, 259–60 Borremans, Valentina, 7, 52, 137 Bossy, John, 414 Bowles, Gloria, 203, 205, 207–8 Brazil, 57–58, 81 The Breakdown of Nations (Kohr), 129 The Breaking of the Image (Martin), 362–63, 366–67 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), 84 Brown, Clair, 204 Brown, Jerry, 8, 427, 517n Browning, Robert, 222 Brün, Herbert, 504n Bultmann, Rudolf, 267 Burkart, Gene, 173, 494n

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Callahan, Daniel, 338–39 Call for Forty Thousand (Considine), 53 Câmara, Hélder, 57–58, 81 Camelot in Grunewald (Pörksen), 202 Campbell, Will, 314, 337, 513n, 517n Canadian Integrative Network for Death ­Education and Alternatives (CINDEA), 326–27 Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), 2, 96 Canon, Peter (Illich, I.’s, pseudonym), 315 canon law, 375, 381, 511n Cantwell Smith, Wilfred, 413 capitalism, socialism without, 143–44 career phases, 16–21 Carretto, Carlo, 50–51 Carroll, Lewis, 417 Carse, James, 290–91, 456 Cassels, Alan, 508n Catholic Church, 1–2. See also Christianity community and, 415–16 criticism and, 39–40 culture and, 41–43 development and, 72–73, 77–78, 229 faith and, 73 forgetfulness of, 465 gender and, 229–31 influences from, 25 life and, 337–38 marriage and freedom in, 379 marriage and gender in, 231–33 modernity and, 379–81, 386–87, 403–4 optimism in 1960s for, 73–75 in politics, 34, 47–48 position in, 82–83 Puerto Ricans and, 16, 39 reform of, 372–75 renewal and, 75–76 resignation from, 86–89 “rules of the game” and, 87–90 schooling and, 89–90, 116–17, 229 as “She” and “It,” 62–64 social criticism and, 92–93 on suicide, 324 Catholic University, Puerto Rico, 40–41, 48, 94 Cavanaugh, William, 416 Celebration of Awareness (Illich, I.), 1, 37, 41, 67–68, 120, 121 celibacy, clergy and, 66, 72 Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC), 1–2, 7, 17 closure of, 173–76 disappointment with, 172–73

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Index / 541 economic issues of, 174 establishment and growth of, 84, 494n Holy Office banning, 84–86 ideas generated at, 171–72 presiding spirit of, 482n record-keeping at, 9 Center for Intercultural Formation (CIF), 16, 55–58 certainties complementarity and, 454–55 concept of, 175 history studies for distance from, 176–78 modernity and, 13–14 scarcity and, 178–80 war on subsistence and, 180–84 chastity, 10, 91 Chesterton, G. K., 349, 412, 463 childhood anti-Semitism in, 29–30 charisma in, 31 exile in, 35–36 father’s absence in, 27–28 in Florence, 31–32 intelligence in, 30 in Rome, 33–34, 37 in Vienna, 29–31, 35 Chittick, William, 432 Chomsky, Noam, 124 Christian, Barbara, 204 Christianity. See also Catholic Church; corruptio optimi pessima contingency and, 368–69 corruptio optimi pessima and, 7–8, 20, 368 death in history of, 319–23 doctrine in, 418 equality in, 238 exile and, 36 friendship and, 424–25 imagery in, 258–60 Judaism roots of, 41–42 message of, 92 passing on, 42–43, 90–93 religionless, 69–70 renewed, 460–61 rituals of modernity and, 23–24 suffering and, 447 tragic view of, 409–13 Trinity in, 223–24 violence of, 404 West and, 5–6 Christianity in the West (Bossy), 414 “Christian vocation,” 21–22 Christie, Nils, 30, 420–21, 423, 463, 489n

IvanIllich_4pp_BM_449-552.indd 541

The Church, Change and Development (Illich, I.), 1, 36, 43, 121, 427–28 Church of the Incarnation, 16, 38 CIDOC. See Center for Intercultural Documentation CIF (Center for Intercultural Formation), 16, 55–58 CINDEA (Canadian Integrative Network for Death Education and Alternatives), 326–27 circumcision, 367, 521n citizen science, 137 citizenship, 381 civil society, 152 clergy, 65–67, 72. See also priesthood climate change, apocalypse and, 400, 455 clinical iatrogenesis, 157 code, language as, 308–10 colonialism, Latin American missions and, 59–60 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (Bell), 109–10, 125 Commentaries on the Laws of England ­(Blackstone), 453 commodities, 280–81 Common as Air (Hyde), 145 commonism, 145–49 Commons Strategies Group, 148–49 community, 415–16, 421–23. See also friendship complementarity certainties and, 454–55 dualism compared to, 454, 459 in Gender, 234–37, 452–53 Good Samaritan parable and, 453 philosophy of, 450–51 “spiritual indecision” compared to “middle way” and, 457–58 wholeness in, 464 computers, 249, 253, 312 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. See Holy Office, summoned to conjuratio, 375–79 Connally, Joseph, 40 Considine, John, 53, 55–56, 82 conspiratio, 375–79 contingency, 368–69, 371–72 contradictions, 436–41, 467–68 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx), 490n conviviality, 2, 14. See also Tools for Conviviality conditions for, 136–39 duality and, 467 Cooke, Terence, 86, 88–89 “The Corruption of Christianity” radio series, 7–8

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542 / Index corruptio optimi pessima (corruption of the best is the worst), 20 ambiguity and, 379 anti-Christ and, 359–63 Christianity and, 7–8, 20, 368 conspiratio and conjuratio and, 375–79 contingency and, 368–69, 371–72 Good Samaritan parable and, 351–59 Gospel assimilation and, 366–71 implications of, 382–87 Incarnation and, 349–50 interviews on, 6–8 life and, 335 modernity and, 5–6 origins of, 350 religion and, 413–15 sin and, 363–66 counter-apocalyptic thought, 405–9 counterproductivity, paradoxical, 155–56 Cox, Harvey, 75 Cranmer, Thomas, 319–20 Crick, Francis, 308 Crime Control as Industry (Christie), 420–21, 423 “Crisis in Development” teach-in, 1 The Crisis of Democracy (Huntingdon), 124 crisis of man, Tools for Conviviality and, 131–32 critical technology, 194–97, 456 criticism, Catholic Church and, 39–40 Crowfoot, 527n Crucifixion, 256–57, 402–3 Cuernavaca, Mexico, 54–57, 84 cultural iatrogenesis, 158 Cupitt, Don, 345–46 Cushing, Cardinal, 55, 82 CUSO (Canadian University Service Overseas), 2, 96 cybernetics, 249–54 Cybernetics (Wiener), 252 d’Argenteuil, Héloise, 232 Daston, Lorraine, 291 Davis, James, 46, 47 Dawkins, Richard, 309 Dawson, Christopher, 471n death, 9. See also life as activity, 316 assisted, 325–26 in Christianity, history of, 319–23 dignity in, 158–59 doctor intervention and, 322–23 eternity and, 320–21 fear of, 317

IvanIllich_4pp_BM_449-552.indd 542

Illich, I.’s, theology of, 315–19 of Illich, I., 448 meaning and, 13 “posthumous longevity” and, 323–27 prayer and, 318, 403 rehearsal for, 317–18 renunciation and, 318–19 suicide and, 324 Western conceptions of, 315–16 Death and Life in America (Downing), 334–35 Decretum Gratiani (Gratian), 375 de Foucauld, Charles, 49–50 “degrowth,” 2, 470n Democracy in America (de Tocqueville), 238 demystification, 68–71, 77–78 depth, flesh and, 267 Derrida, Jacques, 228–29, 250, 393 Descartes, René, 265 deschooling, 17. See also schooling Deschooling Society (Illich, I.), 15, 20, 46, 93, 151, 229, 420, 451 constitutional proposals in, 101–5 on disabling professionalism, 156 institutional spectrum in, 106–8 learning webs in, 249–50 on pedagogical hubris, 373–74 practicality of, 112–13 predictions of, in retrospect, 114–17 public interest in, 94 reception of, 108–11, 434–35 responding to critics of, 111–14 second thoughts on, 117–18 “Deschooling the Teaching Orders” (Illich, I.), 89 de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, 140–42, 489n De Spirituali Amicitia (Aelred), 419 development, 451 age of, 147–48 Alliance for Progress and, 16, 53–54, 95 Catholic Church and, 72–73, 77–78, 229 commonism following, 148–49 Latin American missions and, 53–55 Operation Bootstrap and, 54, 94–95 restoration of the commons and, 189–91, 208–9 scarcity and, 179 schooling for, 95–97 war on subsistence and, 181–82 The Development Dictionary (Sachs), 4, 147–48 diagnosis, 161–62, 166–68, 245–46, 445 Diaz-Stevens, Ana Maria, 37–38 Dictatus Papae (Gregory VII), 372 difference, post-structuralism and, 228–29

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Index / 543 “Disabling Professions” (Illich, I,), 174 discrimination, sexism and, 213–14 diseases, 163–65, 168 disembodiment, 245 cybernetics and, 249–54 postmodernism and, 251 risk and, 246, 274–77 social media and, 254 symbolic fallout of tools and, 251–54 Disembodying Women (Duden), 254–55, 517n dissymmetry, gender and, 227 De Diversis Artibus (Presbyter), 247–48 doctor intervention, death and, 322–23 Domenach, Jean-Marie, 235, 242 Donne, John, 222 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 84 Douglas, Ann, 496n Downing, Ray, 334–35 Dreyfus, Hubert, 219 dualism, complementarity compared to, 454, 459 duality conviviality and, 467 in Gender, 227–29 polarity compared to, 499n types of, 459, 467 Du Bellay, Joachim, 285–86 Duden, Barbara, 6, 70, 185, 201, 209, 254–56, 421, 493n, 517n Dumont, Louis, 182, 495n Dunn, Willie, 527n du Plessix Gray, Francine, 40, 47, 55, 62, 81, 87, 140, 172, 439, 481n Dupuy, Jean Pierre, 167–68 Dutschke, Rudi, 490n Duve, Freimut, 261 ecclesiology studies, 97–98 economic alchemy, 186–89 economic ideology, 182 economics, gender and, 18–19, 212–15 education. See schooling Ehrlich, Anne, 125 Ehrlich, Paul, 125 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 298–99 Eisley, Loren, 333 Eliade, Mircea, 333, 384, 398 Eliot, T. S., 44, 220, 346, 477n “The Eloquence of Silence” (Illich, I.), 41 embodiment, 262–67. See also body; disembodiment “The End of Human Life” (Illich, I.), 315 Energy and Equity (Illich, I.), 133, 156, 451

IvanIllich_4pp_BM_449-552.indd 543

“The Environmental Threat to the Survival of the Voice” (Illich, I.), 428–29 epistemic sentimentality, life and, 343–44 epistemological sexism, 215–16, 238 equality, 206, 210, 212, 237–40 Equal Rights Amendment, 202–3, 497n Eriugena, Johannes Scotus, 504n Esteva, Gustavo, 143–50, 199, 489n, 490n eternity, death and, 320–21 ethos, Good Samaritan parable and, 352–56 euthanasia, 325–26 example, 22, 459–63 Excelsior, 86 “An Expansion of the Concept of Alienation” (Illich, I.), 142 Experts in the Age of Systems (Arney), 340 faith Catholic Church and, 73 dynamism of, 386 foolishness and, 359 as gift, 433 as knowledge form, 392–94 religionless, 71–72, 391–92 understanding, 10–11 Farage, Samar, 432 feminism, 18–19. See also gender equality and, 206, 210, 237–40 Equal Rights Amendment and, 202–3 “man” terminology and, 131 optimism for, 200–201 wage gap and, 214–15 Feminist Issues, 203, 211 fidelity, friendship and, 425–26 Fiesta of San Juan, 40 Finite and Infinite Games (Carse), 290 Fiore, Quentin, 249 Fitzpatrick, Joseph, 40, 49, 80, 82, 119 Fleck, Ludwig, 164, 517n flesh body as, 262–67 body compared to, 271–72 depth and, 267 Resurrection and, 263, 265–66 salvation and, 273 surprises and, 267–71 Fletcher, Paul, 319–21, 328, 331 Florence, childhood in, 31–32 FLQ (Front de Libération du Québec), 435 folk Christianity, 32, 52 foolishness, faith and, 359 forgiveness, of sin, 364

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544 / Index Foucault, Michel, 131, 165, 465, 508n Fox, Charles James, 152, 154 Fox, Robert, 67 Foxe, John, 361 Franklin, Ursula, 81, 440, 481n Fraser, J. T., 343 freedom Good Samaritan parable and, 357–59, 383 Incarnation and, 455 marriage and, 379 Free Speech movement, 248–49 Freire, Paolo, 81, 220 friendship Christianity and, 424–25 collaborations and, 420–21 community and, 421–23 conditions for, 426–27 fidelity and, 425–26 gender and, 243 history studies and, 463 love and, 421 new theological approach and, 430–34 “posthumous longevity,” death and, 323–27 prophecy and, 389 renunciation and, 424–25 spiritual, 419–20 writing and, 427–30 Fromm, Erich, 242, 489n Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), 435 Frye, Northrop, 225, 330–31, 416, 423, 529n “The Futility of Schooling in Latin America” (Illich, I.), 97 future, difficulty in planning for, 90–91 Gaia (Thompson, W. I.), 329–30 Gandhi, 87–88, 148, 179 gaze, 257–62 gender. See also feminism Catholic Church and, 229–31 dissymmetry and, 227 economics and, 187–88, 212–15 friendship and, 243 as heuristic investigating tool, 201, 216 “man” terminology and, 130–32 marriage and, in Catholic Church, 231–33 as metaphor, 221–24 otherness and, 225–27 patriarchy compared to, 211–12 poverty and, 215 relatio subsistens and, 223–24 religiosity and, 233–34 sex compared to, 207, 210–13, 221

IvanIllich_4pp_BM_449-552.indd 544

shadow work and, 190 subsistence and, 226–27 vernacular culture and, 211, 458–59 wage gap and, 214–15 as way of knowing, 215–17 Gender (Illich, I.), 18–20 argument of, 210–13, 240–41 Catholic Church and, 229–31 complementarity in, 234–37, 452–53 duality in, 227–29 equality in, 206, 210, 237–40 levels in, 201–2 marriage in, 231–33 messianic time in, 269–71 metaphor in, 221–24 misunderstandings of, 209–10, 240–41 organization of, 205 otherness in, 225–27 philosophy of, 216–17 reception to, 179, 197, 200, 202–6, 243 religiosity in, 233–34, 334 reputation damage from, 206–10 science critique in, 217–21, 438 shadow work in, 190 gender, economics and, 18–19 “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical ­Analysis” (Scott), 19, 207 Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Fleck), 164, 517n Gilson, Étienne, 436 Gintis, Herb, 109, 112 Girard, René, 387, 395, 404, 521n Gluckman, Max, 100–101 The Go-Between (Hartley), 495n Goodman, Paul, 172, 205–6, 282, 435–36, 529n Good Samaritan parable complementarity and, 453 corruptio optimi pessima and, 351–59 embodiment and, 263–67 ethos and, 352–56 freedom and, 357–59, 383 misunderstanding of, 351–52 Gorz, André, 146 Gospel. See also corruptio optimi pessima apocalypse warnings in, 395 assimilation of, 366–71 contradictions in, 436–37 gaze and, 257–60 Goya, Francisco, 170 Gramática de la Lengua Castellana (Nebrija), 285 Grant, George, 404 Gratian, 375

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Index / 545 Greene, Roland, 286–87, 510n Gregory VII, 372, 375, 380 Greif, Mark, 130–31, 501n Growing Up Absurd (Goodman), 282 Growing Without Schooling (Holt), 137 A Guide to Convivial Tools (Borremans), 137 guru status, in India, 175–76 The Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan), 299 H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness (Illich, I.), 276 Hacking, Ian, 268 Haldane, J. B. S., 129 Harari, Yuval Noah, 363 Haraway, Donna, 343 Hartch, Todd, 48, 51–53, 55–56, 80–81, 86, 122, 171–73, 223, 430, 477n, 482n Hartley, L. P., 495n Hastings Center, 338–39 Hatzikiriakou, Kostas, 158, 227 Havelock, Eric, 293 Hayles, Katherine, 251–54 health, medicine as threat to, 245 Heidegger, Martin, 251, 341, 353, 451, 487n Held, Klaus, 352–56, 359, 368 Helfrich, Silke, 148–49 Herberg, Will, 45 Herman, Edward, 124 Heron, Nicholas, 457 Hesiod, 241–42 hidden curriculum, of schooling, 107 Hirschman, Albert O., 382 historical Jesus, 395, 406 History of Western Philosophy (Russell), 451 history studies certainties distanced through, 176–78 friendship and, 463 language and, 288–92 revelation and, 396–400 surprises and, 290–92, 456 Hobbes, Thomas, 212, 320 Hochschild, Arlie, 203–4 Hoinacki, Lee, 5, 7, 8, 29, 122, 399, 431, 445, 471n, 486n Hölderlin, Friedrich, 67 Hollants, Betsie, 85–86 Holt, John, 137 Holy Office, summoned to, 16, 62, 83–86 Honest to God (Robinson), 75 Hook, Sidney, 108, 112 “How Shall We Pass On Christianity?” (Illich, I.), 42–43, 90–93 How We Became Posthuman (Hayles), 251–52

IvanIllich_4pp_BM_449-552.indd 545

Hugh of St. Victor, 177, 194–97, 291, 297–307, 311, 418–19, 456–57 The Human Condition (Arendt), 465 human nature, Tools for Conviviality and, 129–31 Hume, David, 268 Huntingdon, Samuel, 124 Husserl, Edmund, 353 Hutchins, Robert, 110 Hyde, Lewis, 145 “Hygienic Autonomy” (Illich, I.), 445 iatrogenesis, 157–59, 244, 262–63 icons, 310–13, 333–37 The Idea of Reform (Ladner), 120, 397 Ideas radio series, 3–5, 7–8 Illich, Ellen “Maexie” (née Ellen Regenstreif; mother), 27–30, 474n Illich, Ivan. See specific topics Illich, Mischa (brother), 27 Illich, Piero (father), 27 Illich, Sascha (brother), 27–28, 30, 33, 474n The Image (Boorstin), 259–60 imagery, 258–62 imitation, example compared to, 22 immanent infinity, 253 In Bluebeard’s Castle (Steiner, G.), 124 Incarnation, 436 apocalypse and, 390–91, 396–400 corruptio optimi pessima and, 349–50 freedom and, 455 sin and, 363–64 Inchausti, Robert, 87 India, guru status in, 175–76 industrialization, 204 infidels, 181 infrastructure, Latin American missions and, 60–61 The Inner City (Kohr), 487n Innocent III, 373 innovation, rootedness in tradition and, 464 An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Latour), 382 Institute of Intercultural Communication, 16, 41, 45–46 institutional spectrum, schooling on, 106–8 Integrity, 315 intertextuality, 309, 509n In the Mirror of the Past (Illich, I.), 292 In the Vineyard of the Text (Illich, I.), 15, 19, 177, 194, 292, 300, 307 Inventing the Individual (Siedentop), 378 inversion, in Tools for Conviviality, 134, 150 “investiture controversy,” 373 Isabella, Queen, 284–85

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546 / Index Israel, Jonathan, 403 Ivan Illich in Conversation (Hoinacki), 5 Jakobson, Roland, 308, 501n Jayakar, Pupul, 175–76 Jayber Crow (Berry), 47 Jefferson, Thomas, 102 “Jerusalem” (Blake), 416 Jesuit Gregorian University, Rome, 33 Jewish mysticism, 235–36 John of Damascus, 259 John XXIII, 53, 56 Judaism, 27, 29–30, 41–42, 258 judgment, deferral of, 21 Julião, Francisco, 81 Jung, C. G., 78, 114, 171, 361, 394, 450 Kabbalah, 235–36 Kafka, Franz, 269 kairos, in New Testament, 67, 114 Kaller, Martina, 475n Kavanagh, Aidan, 98–99, 304 Kearney, Richard, 223–24, 264 Keats, John, 12 Kelly, Kevin, 343 Kennedy, John F., 53, 95 Kepler, Johannes, 257 Keynes, John Maynard, 171 Kidd, Bruce, 108–9, 112, 485n The Kingdom and the Glory (Agamben), 465 Kitzinger, Sheila, 160–61 Klages, Ludwig, 509n Klein, Naomi, 400 knowledge, faith as form of, 392–94 Kohak, Erazim, 229 Kohr, Leopold, 128–29, 487n Kriss-Rettenbeck, Lenz, 32, 52 Kristeva, Julia, 509n Kuchenbuch, Ludolf, 177–78, 494n Kuhn, Thomas, 508n, 517n Kuper, Adam, 308 labor, 187–89, 347 Ladner, Gerhart, 120–21, 373, 397 Lakoff, Robin, 203 Langton, Christopher, 253 language. See also literacy amoeba words and, 279–80 Babel and, 286–87 as capitalized resource, 281–83 as code, 308–10 corruption of, 138

IvanIllich_4pp_BM_449-552.indd 546

disappearance of, 309, 312–13 historical approach to, 288–92 icons compared to sentences in, 310–13 national, 285–86 nominalizations and, 280, 328 personal meaning and, 278–79 plastic words and, 279–81 self-consciousness about, 286–88, 510n taught mother-tongue and, 283–88 Larrain, Manuel, 53 Late Marx and the Russian Road (Shanin), 143 Latin American missions CIF and, 55–58 colonialism and, 59–60 development and, 53–55 distractions from, 61 hope for, 43 infrastructure problems of, 60–61 interest in, 32 opposition to, 1, 16, 51–52, 59–61 PAVLA and, 53, 59, 60 politics and, 81 structural problems of, 60 superstitions and, 52 translation and, 44, 476n Latouche, Serge, 470n Latour, Bruno, 103, 164, 337, 382, 414 law canon, 375, 381, 511n Church reform and, 374–75 formal, 142 modernity and, 381 papal sovereignty and, 375, 380 recovery of, 138–39 Sermon on the Mount and, 378 “Law Against Law” (de Sousa Santos), 140–42, 489n Law and Revolution (Berman), 458 Lawrence, D. H., 346 lay literacy, 294–96, 311 Leacock, Stephen, 205 Leadbeater, Charles, 191–92, 197 learning webs, in Deschooling Society, 249–50 Leavis, F. R., 346 Letters and Papers from Prison (Bonhoeffer), 75 Levertov, Denise, 264 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 131, 228, 308–9 Lewis, C. S., 344 liberalism, 102–3 liberation theology, 57, 439–40 Liber Regularam (Tyconius), 63–64 life. See also death “bio” and “spiritual” definitions of, 335

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Index / 547 bioethics and, 338–40 blasphemy and, 336–37 Catholic Church and, 337–38 corruptio optimi pessima and, 335 epistemic sentimentality and, 343–44 icons and, 333–37 as idol, 327–31 lectures on, 314–15 renunciation and, 341 responsibility for, 340–44 scholarly writings on, 344–48 in sciences, 331–33 substantive meaning of, 328–29 Life Itself (Rosen), 332 Lifton, Robert Jay, 261–62 Limits to Medicine (Illich, I.), 17, 123, 451 art of suffering in, 443–44 on death in Christianity, history of, 321–22 diagnosis in, 162 on disabling professionalism, 156 modern medicine critique in, 168–70 on professionalism and power, 153–55 scientism in, 159–62 Linebaugh, Peter, 148 literacy Hugh of St. Victor and, 300–303, 305 implications of, 305–7 lay, 294–96, 311 monkish reading and, 294–95, 297–98, 300 printing press and, 298–99 scholarly reading and, 302 types of, 309 visible text and, 294–98, 301, 308 watersheds in history of, 292–94 Little Brothers of Jesus, 50, 82 liturgy, schooling as, 97–101, 115–16, 304 Locke, John, 187 logocentrism, 278, 509n Loisy, Alfred, 502n Lovins, Amory, 197 Luijf, Reginald, 276–77 Lummis, Douglas, 31, 129, 435–36, 475n Macpherson, C. B., 328 Maddox, John, 332 Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age (Toffler), 252 Maguire, John, 482n Malabou, Catherine, 25 “man,” terminology of, 130–32 Man Alive, 117–18 Mandeville, Bernard, 194 Marcuse, Herbert, 130

IvanIllich_4pp_BM_449-552.indd 547

Maritain, Jacques, 33, 130 marriage, 231–33, 379 Martin, David, 362–63, 366–68 Marty, Martin, 45 Marx, Karl, 114, 140–45, 149, 182, 187–89, 248, 280–81, 347, 490n materiality, cybernetics and, 252–53 McGinn, Bernard, 361 McKeon, Michael, 523n McKnight, John, 22 McLachlin, Beverley, 381 McLuhan, Marshall, 222, 249, 252, 297, 299, 331, 494n McManus, James, 46, 47, 49 Medawar, Jean, 331 Medawar, Peter, 331 media complex, 153–55 Medical Nemesis (Illich, I.), 3, 15, 93, 126, 244–50, 322–23, 487n medicine art of suffering and, 443–45 death, doctor intervention and, 322–23 diagnosis and, 161–62, 166–68, 245–46, 445 as health threat, 245 iatrogenesis and, 157–59, 244, 262–63 modern, critique of, 168–70 political power of, 162–65 scientism and, 159–62 The Medium Is the Massage (McLuhan), 249 Melville, Marjory, 482n Melville, Tom, 482n Mendelsohn, Robert, 338 Méndez Arceo, Sergio, 54–55, 57, 66–67, 84, 86 Meredith, George, 9 Merleau Ponty, Maurice, 164, 219 Merton, Thomas, 35 messianic time, 269–71 metaphor, gender as, 221–24 Mexico, 55–57, 84, 146–49. See also Center for Intercultural Documentation “middle way,” “spiritual indecision” compared to, 457–58 Milana, Fabio, 31, 32, 76, 476n, 497n Milbank, John, 64–65, 384, 387 Minding the Modern (Pfau), 370 Minsky, Marvin, 253 “Mission and Midwifery” (Illich, I.), 44–45 missions, 41–46, 57–59, 451. See also Latin ­American missions modernity Catholic Church and, 379–81, 386–87, 403–4 certainties and, 13–14

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548 / Index modernity (Continued) corruptio optimi pessima and, 5–6 demystification of, 68–71 law and, 381 medicine and, critique of, 168–70 preconditions of, 368, 372 religion and, 414–15 rituals of, 22–24, 103, 175 scarcity and, 18 surprise and, 11, 268 trends of, 68 war on subsistence and, 180–84 Mohammed Said, Hakim, 385–86, 444, 446 Monk, Ray, 25 monkish reading, 294–95, 297–98, 300 monsignor title, 41, 50 Montesquieu, 152 morality, 159–60, 260–62 moral sexism, 215 morphogenesis, 332 Morris, Gerry, 55 Morton, Jim, 428, 429 Moscoso, Teodoro, 54, 94–95 mother-tongue, taught, 283–88 Muechlin, Michel, 32 Mumford, Lewis, 130 Murphy, Rex, 123–24 “La Musée des Beaux Arts” (Auden), 399 “My Ivan Illich Problem” (Postman), 110–11 mysterium iniquitatis (mystery of evil), 359–63, 388–90, 400–403. See also anti-Christ; apocalypse The Mystery of Christ (Behr), 319 mystery of evil (mysterium iniquitatis), 359–63, 388–90, 400–403. See also anti-Christ; apocalypse mysticism, Jewish, 235–36 Nader, Ralph, 157, 491n Naess, Arne, 488n Nagel, Muska, 6–7, 448 Nagel, Thomas, 217 National Catholic Register, 86 national languages, 285–86 natives, 181 Nazism, 29, 35 Nebrija, Elio Antonio de, 284–86, 288–92 The New Reformation (Goodman), 436 The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech (Cupitt), 345–46 A New Science of Life (Sheldrake), 331–32 “newspeak,” 309–10

IvanIllich_4pp_BM_449-552.indd 548

New Testament apocalypse in, 389–92, 407–9 exile in, 36 faith and foolishness in, 359 Good Samaritan parable in, 263–67, 351–59, 383 kairos in, 67, 114 mandate of, 41–42 obedience and, 11–12 translations of, 42 New York, Puerto Ricans in, 37–41 New Yorker, 40, 47, 62, 81, 87 Nicholas of Cusa, 200, 213, 438, 439, 454, 450, 462, 497n, 532n, 535n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 78, 279, 346, 466, 499n, 509n, 1984 (Orwell), 309–10 nominalizations, 280, 328 Novum Organum (Bacon), 473n oath against modernism, 63 obedience, 11–12, 91, 401–2 obituaries, 434 objective diseases, 163, 168 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 250 Ohliger, John, 94 Ohmann, Friedrich, 474n Old Testament, 42 On Liturgical Theology (Kavanagh), 98–99 Operation Bootstrap, 54, 94–95 opium, 6, 446 Orwell, George, 309–10 otherness, gender and, 225–27 Our Bodies, Ourselves, 237 Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue ­(Diaz-Stevens), 38 pagans, 181 Paine, Tom, 458 pamphleteering, 17, 156 papal sovereignty, 375, 380 Papal Volunteers for Latin America (PAVLA), 53, 59, 60 Parables and Paradoxes (Kafka), 269 paradoxical counterproductivity, 155–56 Parmenides (Plato), 271 “Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman” radio series, 4–5 Pask, Gordon, 504n patriarchy, gender compared to, 211–12 Paul VI, 34, 82 PAVLA (Papal Volunteers for Latin America), 53, 59, 60 Pearce, Diana, 215 pedagogical hubris, 373–74

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Index / 549 Penn State University, 3–4, 106 Pérez, Carmen, 482n perspective, in science, 217–18 Pfau, Thomas, 370 philosophy of technology, 417–18 phoneme, 308 Pickstock, Catherine, 64, 370 Pieper, Joseph, 369 Pius IX, 63 Pius X, 63 Pius XII, 34, 47, 53 plastic words, 279–81 Plato, 271, 293, 399–400, 421, 429 “A Plea for Research on Lay Literacy” (Illich, I.), 294–95 Polanyi, Karl, 209, 495n polarity, duality compared to, 499n political map, in Tools for Conviviality, 134–36 Political Theology (Schmitt), 153 politics Catholic Church in, 34, 47–48 Latin American missions and, 81 media complex and, 154–55 medicine’s power in, 162–65 radicalism and, 78–81, 87 in Tools for Conviviality, 139 Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society ­(Gluckman), 100–101 The Population Bomb (Ehrlich, A., and Ehrlich, P.), 125 Pörksen, Uwe, 202, 205, 219–20, 279–81, 497n “posthumous longevity,” death and, 323–27 Postman, Neil, 110–12, 313, 434 postmodernism, disembodiment and, 251 post-structuralism, 228–29 poverty, 91, 215 power equality and, 212 of example, 459–60 medicine’s political, 162–65 professionalism and, 151–55, 491n separation of, 152 sovereignty and, 153 prayer, 91–92, 318, 403 pregnancy, risk awareness and, 274–75 Presbyter, Theophilus, 247–48 priesthood. See also clergy celibacy and, 66, 72 motivations for, 33–34 suspending exercise of, 86–89 teacher complications with, 48, 108 Prigogine, Ilya, 332, 438

IvanIllich_4pp_BM_449-552.indd 549

Primitive Christianity in Its Contemporary Setting (Bultmann), 267 printing press, 298–99 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change ­(Eisenstein), 298–99 prisons, shadow work and, 184 Prodi, Romano, 425, 427, 434, 441 professionalism alienation and, 155 diagnosis and, 166–68 disabling, 156 iatrogenesis and, 157–59, 244, 262–63 media complex and, 153–55 medicine’s political power and, 162–65 modern medicine and, critique of, 168–70 paradoxical counterproductivity and, 155–56 power and, 151–55, 491n scientism and, 159–62 “Prolegomena to a Theology of Death” (Fletcher), 319–21 prophecy, friendship and, 389 The Prophet of Cuernavaca (Hartch), 51–53, 173, 223, 430 pseudonyms, 315 Puerto Ricans, in New York, 37–41 Puerto Rico. See also Institute of Intercultural Communication; Latin American missions banishment from, 46–48 Catholic University in, 40–41, 48, 94 missions in, 41, 43–46 Operation Bootstrap in, 54, 94–95 schooling in, 95–96, 430 Rabinowitz, Moses, 339 Race and History (Lévi-Strauss), 228 Radical Democracy (Lummis), 475n radicalism, 78–81, 87 radical monopolies, in Tools for Conviviality, 127–29 Radical Orthodoxy, 64–65 radical secularism, 433–34 Rainsborough, Thomas, 367–68 Ramage, David, 261, 302, 307 Razing the Bastions (von Balthasar), 76 record-keeping, at CIDOC, 10 reflexivity, cybernetics and, 252–54 Regenstreif, Ellen. See Illich, Ellen Regenstreif, Fritz (grandfather), 27, 30 “Rehearsal for Death” (Illich, I.), 315 Reimer, Everett, 95–97, 420 relatio subsistens, gender and, 223–24 religion Christianity without, 69–70

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550 / Index religion (Continued) corruptio optimi pessima as critique of, 413–15 faith without, 71–72, 391–92 modernity and, 414–15 religiosity compared to, 334 secularization as, 103 religiosity, 233–34, 334 remedy, critical technology and, 195–96 renewal, 43, 57, 75–76, 90 renewed Christianity, 460–61 renunciation, 318–19, 341, 424–25 “Research by People” (Illich, I.), 194–97 research for people, 136–37 responsibility, for life, 340–44 ressourcement, 64, 75–78 Reston, James, 282 restoration of the commons, 189–91, 208–9 Resurrection, 263, 265–66 resurrection, apocalypse and, 396 Retrieving Realism (Taylor and Dreyfus), 219 revelation, 396–400, 437 Revisiting Realism (Taylor), 492n revolution. See also Tools for Conviviality apophatic theology and, 121–23 commitment to, 119 commonism and, 145–49 new concept of, 120–21, 139–42, 150 in 1960s, 123–24 universal class and, 141–42 The Rhetoric of Reaction (Hirschman), 382 “The Right to Useful Unemployment” (Illich, I,), 174 The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its ­Professional Enemies (Illich, I.), 198 “The Rise of Epimethean Man” (Illich, I.), 242–43 rituals, 22–24, 100–101, 103, 175 The Rivers North of the Future (Cayley), 9, 20, 349, 363–64, 368, 388–89, 409–10 Robbins, Lionel, 178 Robinson, John, 75 Rome, childhood in, 33–34, 37 rootedness in tradition, innovation and, 64–65, 464 Rorty, Richard, 492n Rosen, Robert, 332 Rostow, W. W., 144 Roszak, Theodore, 180 Rubin, Lillian, 204, 211 “rules of the game,” Catholic Church and, 87–90 Russell, Bertrand, 451 Rykwert, Joseph, 244 Sachs, Wolfgang, 3–4, 118, 132, 147–48 sacrament, as tool, 372

IvanIllich_4pp_BM_449-552.indd 550

Sacrosanctae Ecclesiae (Boniface VIII), 375 salvation, flesh and, 273 Samaritan parable. See Good Samaritan parable Samerski, Silja, 274, 448 Samuel, Sajay, 253, 432–33, 491n Sanders, Barry, 3, 279, 292–94, 309, 420 Saneh, Lamin, 476n satyagraha, 88 Savio, Mario, 248–49, 504n Savonarola, Girolamo, 413 scarcity alienation and, 186 alternate uses and, 178 certainties and, 178–80 development and, 179 modernity and, 18 self-perpetuating, 190–91 sexism and, 243 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 204 Schlafly, Phyllis, 498n Schmemann, Alexander, 305 Schmitt, Carl, 153 scholarly reading, 302 Scholem, Gershom, 235–36 schooling. See also Deschooling Society Catholic Church and, 89–90, 116–17, 229 for development, 95–97 ecclesiology studies and, 97–98 expenses of, 97 futility of, 386 hidden curriculum of, 107 on institutional spectrum, 106–8 as liturgy, 97–101, 115–16, 304 myth of, 17–18, 103–4, 114, 118 predictions on, 114–17 priesthood and teacher complications with, 48, 108 in Puerto Rico, 95–96, 430 as ritual, 100–101 rituals of modernity in, 22–23, 103, 175 scholarly reading and, 302 social functions of, 109 success rate in, 96–97 supply and demand of, 175 teacher roles in, 105 Schrödinger, Erwin, 308 Schumacher, E. F., 129 Schweitzer, Albert, 395, 406 science. See also medicine Gender’s critique of, 217–21, 438 life in, 331–33 sex and, 220–21

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Index / 551 Science, Technology, and Society (S.T.S.), 506n Science and the Modern World (Whitehead), 151 scientism, 159–62 Scott, Joan W., 19, 207 Scotus, Duns, 369–70 “The Seamy Side of Charity” (Illich, I.), 51, 82 Second Vatican Council, 63, 79 Secret History of Domesticity (McKeon), 523n A Secular Age (Taylor), 103, 414 The Secular City (Cox), 75 secularization demystification and, 77–78 radical, 433–34 as religion, 103 self-help, subsistence compared to, 191–94 The Selfish Gene (Dawkins), 309 Selye, Hans, 167 sentences, icons compared to, in language, 310–13 sentimentality, epistemic, 343–44 separation of powers, 152 Seper, Cardinal, 83–84, 88–89 Sermon on the Mount, 377–78 Serna, Ana, 324 sex, 20, 210–13, 220–21. See also gender sexism, 213–16, 238, 243 shadow work, 183–85, 190, 198–99 Shadow Work (Illich, I.), 137, 178–80, 183–84, 229, 496n critical technology in, 194–97 economic alchemy in, 188–89 restoration of the commons in, 189–90, 208–9 taught mother-tongue and, 283–84 Tools for Conviviality continued in, 197–99 Shah, Idries, 229 Shanin, Theodor, 142–44, 489n Shannon, Christopher, 158 Shannon, Claude, 252 Sheldrake, Rupert, 331–32 Siedentop, Larry, 375, 378 “Silence Is a Commons” (Illich, I.), 145 sin, 363–66, 374, 381 Small Is Beautiful (Schumacher), 129 Smith, Adam, 187, 238 “The Social Construction of Energy” (Illich, I.), 218 social criticism, Catholic Church and, 92–93 social iatrogenesis, 157 social imaginary, 238, 493n socialism, without capitalism, 143–44 socially created diseases, 164–65 social media, disembodiment and, 254 Solovyev, Vladimir, 361 sovereignty, power and, 153

IvanIllich_4pp_BM_449-552.indd 551

Spellman, Francis Joseph Cardinal, 40, 50, 83, 482n Spenser, Edmund, 286 der Spiegel, 87 The Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu), 152 “spiritual indecision,” “middle way” compared to, 457–58 Stancioff, Feodora, 55 Standing by Words (Berry), 311 Steiner, George, 124, 297 Steiner, Rudolf, 444 Stengers, Isabelle, 332, 438 Stock, Brian, 305 Storch, Johannes, 254–56 Stow, John, 320 Strauss, David, 395, 406 Strauss, Leo, 449 stress, diagnosis of, 167 S.T.S. (Science, Technology, and Society), 506n Studies in Words (Lewis), 344 subsistence economic alchemy and, 187 gender and, 226–27 self-help compared to, 191–94 shadow work compared to, 184–85, 198–99 war on, 180–84, 192, 285, 478n subversive orthodoxy, 87 Suenens, Cardinal, 92 suffering, 158–59, 443–47 suicide, 324 superstitions, Latin American missions and, 52 surprises body and, 267–71 history and, 290–92, 456 messianic time and, 269–71 modernity and, 11, 268 sustainability, Tools for Conviviality and, 132–33 Swenson, Lee, 172 Swenson, Norma, 237 systems biology, 332 systems thinking, 250–51, 504n Tamanrasset, Algeria, 49–50 Tanner, Paul, 55–56 Taubes, Jacob, 202 taught mother-tongue, 283–88 Taylor, Charles, 103, 219, 234, 238, 264–65, 297, 299, 414, 492n, 493n teachers, 48, 105, 108 technology. See also tools contingency and, 371–72 critical, 194–97, 456 historical origins of, 456

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552 / Index technology. See also tools (Continued) philosophy of, 417–18 uncritical enthusiasm for, 196 writings on, 19–20 text, visible, 294–98, 301, 308 Theobald, Robert, 67 theology apophatic, 121–23 liberation, 57, 439–40 new approach to, 430–34, 441 A Theology of History (von Balthasar), 76 “The Question Concerning Technology” (Heidegger), 487n This Changes Everything (Klein), 400 Thompson, D’arcy Wentworth, 129 Thompson, William Irwin, 329–30 “Three Dimensions of Public Choice” (Illich, I.), 135 Thurber, James, 280 Tillich, Paul, 67 time, messianic, 269–71 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 238 Toffler, Alvin, 252 tools. See also technology age of instrumentality and, 247–48 computers as, 249, 312 sacrament as, 372 symbolic fallout of, 251–54 symbolic significance of tasks and, 296–98, 308 Tools for Conviviality (Illich, I.), 14, 15, 93, 120, 178–80, 420, 451 age of systems and, 246–47 autonomous action in, 126–27 conditions in, 136–39 crisis of man and, 131–32 ending of, 149–50 friendship conditions in, 426 human nature and, 129–31 introduction to, 125 inversion in, 134, 150 political map in, 134–36 politics in, 139 radical monopolies in, 127–29 scientism in, 159 self-perpetuating scarcity in, 190–91 Shadow Work continuing from, 197–99 sustainability and, 132–33 terminology in, 125–26, 312 two watersheds theory in, 126–27 Torah, 42 Torres, Camillo, 81 Toward a New Reformation (Goodman), 529n Toynbee, Arnold J., 32

IvanIllich_4pp_BM_449-552.indd 552

tradition, 64–65, 90, 464 The Tragic Sense of Life (Unamuno), 410–11, 471n “tramping,” 17 Translating the Message (Saneh), 476n translations, 42, 44, 476n Trinity, in Christianity, 223–24 Trudeau, Pierre, 435 Truman, Harry, 53, 148 tumors, 6, 444–46 Turing, Alan, 247, 310, 331 Tyconius, 63–64 Unamuno, Miguel de, 410–11, 471n underdeveloped, 181 universal class, revolution and, 141–42 unveiling, apocalypse as, 390–92 Upcott, William, 13 Urban II, 374 Urban Training Center, 428 values, sin and, 364–65 “The Vanishing Clergyman” (Illich, I.), 64–67, 75, 81, 87, 93, 433–34, 461–62 vernacular culture, 211, 452, 458–59 vernacular domain, 182–84, 452 “Vernacular Values” (Illich, I.), 284 Verne, Etienne, 490n Vienna, childhood in, 29–31, 35 visible text, 294–98, 301, 308 Vision of the Last Judgment (Blake), 271 Voillaume, René, 50, 82, 437 von Balthasar, Hans Urs, 75–79, 342, 480n von Förster, Heinz, 504n von Werlhof, Claudia, 185 wage gap, feminism and, 214–15 Ward, Graham, 64 Watson, James, 308 Weber, Max, 105 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour), 414 Weil, Simone, 73, 398, 433, 437, 466, 467 West, Christianity and, 5–6 Whitehead, Alfred North, 151, 163, 218, 328 Wiener, Norbert, 250, 252 wild man, 181 William of Ockham, 369 Williams, Colin, 193 Wink, Walter, 396 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 25, 222, 278, 398, 449, 454 The Woman Beneath the Skin (Duden), 493n Zapatista movement, 149

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