Ivan Illich, Breaking the Silence

We are pleased to present an essay about Ivan Illich written by Fabio Milana, an Italian
researcher who has been looking closely at Illich's early years -- from his birth in 1926 to his
move to New York City in 1951. He originally wrote this essay to serve as the afterword to
the Italian publication of a transcript of The Corruption of Christianity, the CBC broadcast
prepared by David Cayley. The transcript was published in 2008. Mr. Milana kindly provided
us with an English translation of the essay, written with help from Milena Ibro and Jane
Upchurch. Mr. Milana's professional Web page may be viewed here; he is affiliated with the
Fondazione per le Science Religiose Giovanni XXIII, located in Bologna. We look forward to
seeing the results of his research, which he says will likely be completed this year. (May he
excuse us for making some small edits, mainly in the spelling of certain words, and for
leaving out the paper's footnotes. A complete copy of the paper is available for downloading
from his Web page.)

Ivan Illich, Breaking the Silence

by Fabio Milana
The Corruption of Christianity is the text of the homonymous programme that the Canadian
national radio broadcasted, maybe not by chance, in the first few days of the year 2000. Later
on, CBC itself put the recordings of the five parts on sale (remarkably, you can find them on
the website of a philanthropic organisation) as well as the cerlox-bound transcript, which
circulated in Europe as a German translation with parallel text; this Italian one is the first
edition of the text as a volume.
It can't be strictly called conversations, it is more of an assembly of excerpts from the
conversations between Ivan Illich and David Cayley (1997 and 1999), connected and
organized by the interventions of Cayley himself, in order to create a summary of the huge
material he recorded during those sessions. A redactio longior of this same material was
authorized by Illich as a consequence of the great interest the radio Corruption aroused, as
Cayley relates while publishing it, with the title inspired by Celans The Rivers North of the
Future (Anansi 2005; the German translation, C.H. Beck 2006, and the French one, Actes Sud
2007, are now available). Not even this latter version is drawn up in conversation form, but
as themed accounts, given by Illich himself to an interlocutor who withdraws into the
paratext: a gesture of implied adhesion, midway between the philosophical interview pattern,
the same Cayley used in the large and well-deserving Ivan Illich in Conversation (1992), and
the partnership he achieved in this kind of a two voices self-portrait which is the
Corruption. This confirms the common wavelength gradually reached by the catholic
Canadian journalist with a thinker who was programmatically hostile to the mass media.
In any case, a comparison between the two drafts speaks in favour of a kind of effectiveness
of our text, which is not just due to the significance of Illichs own voice passages selected
here, or to the editors qualified interventions, or even to the dramatic intensity of the script,
resulting from its necessary concision and from the game of roles itself. Naturally, Cayley
reminds the reader, who has less familiarity with Illichs intellectual and human story, of its
essential parts, which we could recognize in different phases. The first one is the militant
one, embracing almost three decades from his arrival in New York in 1951 and including his
fifteen-year activity in the Centro Intercultural de Formacin, later de Documentacin
(1961-1976), that he founded in the Mexican city of Cuernavaca to support the campaign

against the export of development to third world countries; during this period, a crisis
occurred in his relationship with the Catholic Church, which led to his giving up the
sacerdotal functions with their related privileges (1968-1969). The following phase consisted
of mainly anthropological-historical studies, taking on a position of critical distance, rooted
in his beloved 12th century, in order to reconstruct the origin of modern certainties, the
unconscious axioms of a world submitted to an intense and prolonged technological
development; this latter period began in 1978 as a consequence of something similar to an
existential breakdown, according to some witnesses very near to him, and ended fifteen
years later with texts of a summarizing nature like the essay collection In the mirror of the
past (1992), the retrospective Conversation mentioned above, and the last one in his own
hand, the comment on Ugo di San Vittore In the vineyard of the text (1993): inside this work,
that has an almost elegiac intonation, for the first and last time Illich recognizes himself too,
personally and not in a polemic way, as participating in a typically modern adventure, the
bookish text, which is closed between the two watersheds that forever divide it from the
lectio divina of monastic tradition and the era of digital screens. About a possible third phase
of Illichs research, our Corruption documents the most important paths in its three central
chapters: the survey on the origin of some modern categories of the political from the
Christian thought and praxis in the late Middle Ages; the study of the experience of the sight
inside a project on a history of the body, aimed at the affirmed contemporary disappearance
of the living and sentient flesh; the ethical problem in a world that has lost a substantial
notion of limit, and of the ontological order established by it. Here, though not chiefly here,
also lies the newness and the interest of our text.
The point is rather that Cayley manages to insert these recent enquiries effectively, as well as
some of their remote premises, in the prospective frame formed by the two side chapters,
inscribing thus the outermost moment of Illich's story inside a radical interrogation, of a
radically religious nature. Precisely the comparison with the 1992 Conversation highlights
the different pronunciation of previous themes, and generally an explicit torsion of Illichs
thought; and this allows Cayley to speak about a testament of Ivan Illich, the same way he
did in The Rivers North of the Future: a qualification that can also be applied to this
Corruption of Christianity, on the basis of its title itself. In fact, in the foreground of both the
texts there is a reading of Modernity that intersects, but at the same time rejects, the most
consolidated interpreting paradigms of this world's age: going from the one that understands
it as a secularized evolution of Christian categories to the opposite one that reveals the denial
and the upsetting of that inheritance, to the last one that excludes or even minimizes ab
origine the relationship between the two constellations. Illich explains Modernity as an
essential betrayal of the gospel message, which evolved later on by following independent
lines of force, being unaware of a drama not his own: and therefore liable to be analysed and
discussed sua iuxta et propria principia, as the author demonstrated during two decades; but
a betrayal which the Church itself made possible and substantially prefigured, by attempting
to be faithful to that announcement, to make it real, to ensure it firm roots in social
organisation as well as in individual consciences. It is in line with this reading, and with the
ambivalence it throws on the process we're considering, that we have chosen here the Italian
word pervertimento to render the concept; more than that, the paradoxical nature that the
whole process takes on, is derived from such an ambivalence. A reading that actually places
Western history inside the coordinates of Church history, and thereby right in the middle of
holy history, can't but see an inexplicable dynamism in that corruption: the mystery of an
anti-christian parabola of the historical Christianity and of the world that comes from it: the
corruptio optimi pessima that corruption which is Christianity, the way Illich expressed
himself too, according to some witnesses. But on the other hand, the deep incarnationism of
his perspective, firstly spiritual more than theological, redeems and rather over-invests
human history as the unique scene of the holy drama. Although Illich has always emphasized,

even in his own activity, the distinction of tasks and roles, language and method, between
politician and clergyman, theologian and historian, reason and faith, these players don't
operate on separate levels or within different dimensions: they converge on the same object,
they definitively insist on the same ground; so that Erich Fromm wasn't so wrong in
illustrating the first of Illichs books, Celebration of Awareness (1970), under the banner of a
humanistic radicalism. For a parallel reason, the Pauline mystery of evil (if it really
concerns the corruptio Illich has diagnosed) is not the subject matter of any esoteric
speculation, nor of any specialized intellectual performance: its rather a problem we are
daily, existentially, historically faced with, as men and as believers, in the age that has taken
the degeneration of the Gospel to its last consequences. The ultimate originality of the
Illichian interpretation, which doesn't lie in his individual topics nor, in toto, in their system,
first of all rests on the direct, personal, passionata testimony he has left us: the theological
question on why this corruption happened, the historical one on how, the ethical one on what
to do in such a climate that, after all, gets its apocalyptic tone from this living strain itself.
Here you also find a feature of closeness, the most significant although not the only one, with
my Sergio Quinzio: a name whose memory will be difficult for the Italian reader to avoid.
Many circumstances suggest that it is mainly in this sense that we should speak of a
testament. Lee Hoinacki, a former Dominican friar whose life is indissolubly interlaced
with Illich's (among other reasons, for the common daily practice of the breviary, which they
often shared; but above all for the forty-year-long midwifery with his friend's thought), has
testified to Illichs terrible pain because of
the inability to say what he wanted to say: about the corruptio
optimi, the mysterium iniquitatis, the relationship between
these two realities, their respective relationships to the world
and to the Church, and the interrelationships of all these
complex cultural/historical/ecclesiastical, divine affairs. In our
long conversations on these themes, the struggle and frustration
were evident.
An open letter written to David Ramage tells us that a volume on this topic was planned and
partially ready almost by the end of the 80s; we can only guess the theological difficulties
that lie at the basis of the subsequent hesitations, while we have more consistent traces of
their practical reasons. In any case, Illich seems to go beyond the block of an ensemble of
resistances only after Cayley's intelligent provocation takes the persuasions out of his
mouth, that uncertainties and sickness would predictably have stopped him from putting
down in words. In June 2001 in front of Oakland Tables diversified audience, which met for
Hospitality and Pain, he proposes his interpretation of the Good Samaritan parable, a central
locus in his denunciation of a millenarian, tragic misunderstanding. Jerry Brown, a man of
Jesuit background and a friend of Illichs since the time of his governorship in California, as
well as promoter of the above-mentioned meeting being the mayor of Oakland, remembers
how on that occasion Illich wanted to meet the archbishop of the city, in order
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 [...] 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.

Something similar happened a month later in San Rossore, during a convention called in
view of the infamous Genoa G8 summit: this time in order to question a part of the opening
speech of Msgr. Plotti, the archbishop of Pisa, for betraying an universalistic conception of
the neighbour. A year later, in May, Illich returns to the same themes in Camaldoli in front of
the catholic anti-globalization associations; in July he forcedly interpolates the Samaritan in
the intentionally slanted answers to an interview that La Stampa later decided to no longer
publish; in September, in Citt di Castello, speaking at a convention on the almost imminent
pre-emptive war, he assigns the modern program of rooting out evil from the world to the
original corruption of the love commandment. When he is found dead in his office in
Kreftingstrasse, the Bremen house that welcomes him and his closest collaborators during his
teaching periods at the local University, on 2nd December of the same year (2002), Illich is
surrounded by the papers he is using to prepare the seminar on the corruptio optimi that he
has finally decided to do the following week-end. For that occasion, Barbara Duden and Silja
Samerski, both of them very near to him, refer that he had hoped with friends and students
to reflect on his ideas on the ecclesiastical origin of uniquely Western certainties.
Referring to such ideas in front of an audience of Catholic philosophers gathered in Los
Angeles in March '96, Illich had said:
in this company they are trivial. They were not trivial, you can
be sure, on those tightropes on which I had to do my balancing
act as a teacher. When speaking in Philadelphia or Bremen, I
felt I ought to shroud my ultimate motive in apophasy. I did not
want to be taken for a proselytizer, a fundamentalist or worse,
a Catholic theologian; I do not have that mission. Therefore, I
did not relate the unprecedented characteristics of the modern
artifact to the new commandment recorded by St. John, but to
the philia traditionally understood as the flowering of politeia.
The friends in Bremen, as well as the reader of these pages, have the appropriate tools at their
disposal to correctly evaluate the unique meaning Illich assigned to a renewed exercise of the
classical philia. It is also explicitly theorized in his 1998 Bremen speech, when he was
awarded the Prize for Culture and Peace by the Hanseatic town. But still at that time, or at
least in that particular circumstance, it can be said that the junction between philia and
conspiratio (the liturgical practice of the primitive Christian Church, in his opinion starting a
radically new kind of politeia) deprives this latter of its polemical and prophetic potential.
We can then trust the tightrope walker in front of the Catholic philosophers,
with one foot [] on my home ground in the tradition of
Catholic philosophy [] my other foot [...] heavy with mud
clots and scented by exotic herbs through which I have
tramped;
at the same time, we ought to allow for his perturbation due to that encounter: twenty-five
years ago, I promised Pope Paul VI to abstain from talking to groups of priests or nuns. This
is the first time since that I face a Catholic association. Actually Illichs promises had been
more structured and binding: since March '68, in front of the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith, he had one-sidedly suspended the public celebration of the Holy Mass, the
publishing of articles concerning theology, public conferences on the same subject, preaching
at retreats etc., specifying to cardinal Seper the following June:
It's my intention to maintain this reserve as long as there
remains a doubt or reservation in the mind of the Superiors
about me even if it is totally groundless [] The munus
sacerdotale 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 of the trust

of the Church itself. The clerical state and its powers and duties
of external representation of the ecclesiastic institutions are not
as indelible and they are strictly conditioned by the Churchs
recognition: I dont 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.
As we can ascribe these words to a deep and mature sensus Ecclesiae, likewise for the
reserve Illich maintained almost to the end of his life: his refusal to consider himself in
partibus infidelium, having the duty to discharge an apologetic mission, and at the same time
the experience of an exile condition, the feeling of being a stranger in the territories he had
chosen as his own paroika a condition and feeling he will discover as a presupposition for
neo-testamentary charity as well as for his own vocation to friendship itself. If that is true,
and if it casts a dramatic chiaroscuro on the testament later dictated to Cayley and
eventually shouted from the rooftops, this obliges us on the other hand to reverify the whole
intellectual production which comes after '68. This is a relatively uncommon task: during
Illichs life, for example in the Festschrift his friends put together for his 70th birthday and
published in 2002, maybe in observation of and perhaps for emphasis on his apophatic
behaviour, maybe for a greater involvement in other directions of research he had tirelessly
fed (in effect Challenges of Ivan Illich is the title of the volume, edited by Hoinacki and Carl
Mitcham), his theological challenge is perceived as being aligned or subordinated to other
ones, more often in the external margin than in the centre or at the origin of his thought.
Reintegrated in this position by Valentina Borremans and Jean Robert in the foreword of the
Fayard edition of the Oeuvres compltes, it returns to the background in occasion of the
posthumous Perte des sens, which notwithstanding encloses the decisive texts. Some
significant testimonies, e.g. the ones we have mentioned before, filtered through the Bremen
commemorations of February 2003, through the contributions that appeared in Whole
Earth in the spring of the same year, through the Lucca convention of the following June
and through the commemorations of Claremont in 2004, preferably move backstage of the
apophatic interpretation. Meanwhile others (Cayley firstly and most actively, in Italy
Giannozzo Pucci and Franco La Cecla) have intended to render the ultimate motive of
Illichan research explicit, identifying it in that core of wounded faith to be investigated also
in the works which seem very far away from it at first glance: the pamphlets that went around
the world in the '70s and interfered with the international political agenda, giving a
contribution to the counter-cultures of alternative movements.
Titles like De-schooling Society (1971), Tools for Conviviality (1973), Energy and Equity
(1974), Medical Nemesis (1976) and many others, have enjoyed a wide reception, free from
controversialistic implications, actually devoid of explicitly religious auras; and with good
reason we should add. Only retrospectively, and only addressing other Catholics, the
philosophers in Los Angeles, Illich could say:
I analyzed schooling as the secularization of a uniquely
Catholic ritual because I wanted to grasp the mystery of the
corruptio optimi. I went into the history of hospitality and care
to oppose the Church-initiated sterilization of charity through
its institutionalization as service. I wrote on the degeneration of
water into H2O as an instance of the disintegration of bodies
and the dissolution of sacramental matter. I got myself into
deep trouble with a pamphlet, Gender, on the social history of

duality and its corrosion by sexuality. I wrote that piece, driven

by love for Our Lady who gave birth to that Brother through
whom my fraternity with ... well, a guy like Mitcham is
subsumed in the mystery of the Trinity. In writing these books,
I found the same mysterious pattern repeated again and again:
A gift of grace was transformed into a modern horror: over and
over, the corruptio optimi quae est pessima.
Maybe we should not overestimate this late self-exegesis, despite its coherence with what
comes out from his speeches in Chicago, held for the first time after a long period in front of
a Christian audience (of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, with the permission of
the Catholic cardinal of the diocese), already by the end of the 80s, in addresses like
Hospitality and Pain (1987), Educational Enterprise in the Light of Gospel (1988), The
Construction of a New Fetish: Human Life (1989): in these extraordinary texts, Illichs nonwritten book is clearly outlined; but here he is at the peak of his ten-year long engagement as
a historian and genealogist of Modernity, and it seems imprudent to reduce the outcome of
this research to evidence already acquired in the previous phase of his vita activa. What
rather undeniably acts in this latter, although not on the surface of the texts, is the continuity
with an ecclesiological reflection already attested since the end of the '50s. In the fight
against compulsory schooling, against the medical establishment which has become a major
threat to health, against all the disabling professions, that requisition the traditional forms
of human self-determination to advantage castes of experts, administrators, planners, it will
undoubtedly be possible to record the agreement with the contemporary criticism of
bureaucracies totalitarianism (his much admired Orwell, the theoreticians of Socialisme ou
Barbarie in the '50s, the Frankfurt sociologists of alienation, the political scientists of the
Jewish-German diaspora in America etc.). But it appears to be much more pertinent to
underline the heritage of texts by Msgr. Illich ipsius, like The Vanishing Clergyman
(1959-1967), well-known in that period, also to the Holy Office, but later and until today
overshadowed by the best-sellers of the '70s. Though in these texts, as a consequence and as
a homage to the self-suspension from the Ecclesia docens, Illich appears to do nothing else
but move and extend, to directly adjoining territories (knowledge, health), a theology of
secularization in whose name he had already previously contested the current idea of the
priest as the Churchs basic representative in the world, or rather the same need of a
professional clergy; he had welcomed a humanity finally come of age, produced by the
affluent society, and he had invoked the ordination of adult, self-supporting men to head
Christian communities to be called up on an elective basis rather than on an administrativeterritorial one; he had contested privileges (precisely the monopoly on priesthood) and
features (such as separate training in seminaries, or a celibacy of more a legal than a
charismatic nature) of a holy order bound to disappear, in its hierarchic figure, together with
the millennium that had seen it blossom. It concerned the same moral minority granted by
the caste benefits and ordered to another moral minority, the one of a flock devoted to
ignorance and obedience which is now desecrated by Illich in the institutions assigned to
the secular salvation of individuals who have been preliminarily divested of their capacity to
be enough for themselves and to tolerate the non-saved substance of the human condition.
From Deschooling Society:
Since Bonhoeffer contemporary theologians have pointed to
the confusions now reigning between the Biblical message and
institutionalized religion. They point to the experience that
Christian freedom and faith usually gain from secularization.

The attack on worldwide religion of health and education, on their radical monopoly, is
deep-rooted in a recent theological tradition that has separated and contrasted fides and
religio, has reduced the latter within purely anthropological limits, and expunged it from a
disenchanted world where it can survive only as a regression or mystification; in this second
case, by assuming the form of idolatry, an abusive management of the transcendent having
the pretension to do what God cannot, namely, manipulate others for their own salvation.
On the contrary, the convivial society Illich outlines in his more political manifesto, appears
prefigured from his model of church as a network of small diakonai, emancipated from the
clergy-and-laity structure, self-sufficient on a sacramental level anticipating here the notion
of a convivial tool. As for the concept of counter-productivity, that is a mould for the idea of
corruptio optimi pessima, more than a foreboding can be picked up in Illichian polemic when
he highlighted the evangelical and social contradictions in the bureaucracy inside the
Church: a huge system born with the aim to evangelize the world, did not evangelize it any
more, and in the meantime overturned the evangelical message itself.
With all that, we do not want to imply that those who through time have taken Illich's
practical indications seriously (about education systems for instance, or sanitary praxis,
sustainable development and reduction in consumption, defense of cultural diversity and
peace, or peaces, construction) have understood little or badly. The technical-administrative
systems Illich questioned in these texts werent veiled allegories of the Catholic Church: the
attention he reserves to the historical-social sphere has autonomous reasons and very firm
roots in its religious thought, organically indebted, on this point, to Emmanuel Mouniers
tragic optimism. In the humanity that has come of age, as well as in the world that has come
out from a millenarian immobilism, according to him a non-thematic awareness of the
significance of the incarnation emerges: an ability to say one great Yes to the experience of
life, that is to man's race to maturity, to his inventing the future. The new era that
opened will cause the end of privilege and license, that's his auspice at least, but the young
Illich doesnt seem interested in prefiguring its shapes and results in the abstract. This is, if
anything, the office of the secular religions with their unavoidable ideological
rationalizations and their just as unavoidable differences, conflicts, failures. Thats a price
which can be paid in exchange for the astonishing vision of a universal mobilization of
mankind, the coming into sight of a sort of a transcendental unity, so to say, potentially
acting in the joint presence of everybody in the change, beyond the different experiments,
models, ideals; it is this, in radically humanist terms, that realization of the kingdom
which the development is aimed at, and which is the embodied Christ already present in the
Church. The Kingdom of Christ would be thus the free and shared taking charge of its own
destiny by a grown-up humanity, without the burden of a determined content to be
performed, or of a model of society to be privileged. This excludes that any over-ordered
authority, least of all the Church, take on the task to promote and orient the change. The
task of the Church is rather to discern the consequences on the human hearth, intended as
that of an individual man; but to discern them in a communitarian way: it is exactly the
celebration of awareness, it accompanies the human adventure, respecting its freedom and
contemplating its mystery. So that the Christian difference in the world can be summed up in
the beautiful sentence: two hear the same story, but one gets the point. (Please note: there is
only one story and only one point; but these two entities, being reciprocally like the whole
and the part, are never coextensive.) Maybe it is the ironic realization of how much the new
secular institutions offend human freedom, and of which obscure mythical-sacred powers are
acting in the religio of development, that induces Illich to openly laugh at them; this
concerned, by extension, a Church unable to share the by now solitary awareness of its son,
and so to address the same criticism to itself, but it doesnt mean that it definitely was his
first or final target. Analogies and chronologies are well known to Illich, but the decisive step
is wanting: the explicit recognition of a direct filiation between Church and Modernity,
institutionalization of the evangelical message and technical-bureaucratic alienation of life;

maybe because he hadnt lost hope yet that secularization processes in progress would
produce the antibodies for both of these pathologies. However, the assumption of an antiinstitutional attitude and the choice in favour of powerlessness are explicit in both cases,
which has not always been captured by the activistic audience of the Illichan word. In fact
institution is refused by Illich as aimed at nothing but power; and power is by its very nature
counter-productive, as aimed at itself, at its own maintenance and growth, which, once
beyond some critical thresholds, cannot but enter into collision with the goal it claims to be
the means to. That which in political language seems to correct the personalist revolution in
an anarchical sense, in the language of faith will be simply pronounced: in this world, power
is only demoniacal, even when it assures (or precisely because it assures: but it really cannot
assure at all) education, health, freedom of movement etc. Fortunately, the powerless are
always with us they are, as the old comforted Illich will say, the great majority of mankind
contemporaneous with us. To be repeated: no spiritualist temptation, no in-political
inclination in the trivial meaning of the term, in this attitude: militating the incarnation of the
Word does not permit that; only, it doesnt allow the fight and and the victory against the
Ruler of this world with the means of this latter: it rather predisposes for a mysteriously
fertile failure. As far as this evangelical radicalism is concerned, we should consider the most
recent link inside the chain which transmits it to us: the family of the Little Brothers of Jesus:
the most important order of the Roman Catholic Church in the aftermath of the war, Illich
judged it, the same way he spoke about their initiator Ren Voillaume as fundamental for his
training in the 50s. The propensity towards hidden life, not religiously qualified, is in Illich
a Foucauldian one; as well as the explicit appreciation of a form of contemplation exercised
like workers of the lowest level; the choice not to serve the last ones but to join their ranks, or
at least to join their same point of view: in brief, the sharing of the human condition by
renouncing each form of distinction, direction, correction. If this has not been visibly his
forma vivendi, such has been, more or less, his vision of the Church as much as, in another
sense, of the political action and maybe the spirit of his long stay in partibus.
How this militant conception evolved, and most of all, why it reached the kataphasis of the
Testament at the height of the '90s is a question on which more than one hypothesis can be
made. First of all, biographical reasons can be invoked, also belonging to his intellectual
biography: the existential breakdown at the end of the '70s, which we dont know much
about, is most likely related to the acquired awareness that the technical-scientific civilization
targeted by him actually feeds on these contestations, in order to operate more and more
refined, tentacular subsumptions of the individual freedom; whence the necessity to radically
and totally distance oneself, so as to challenge the very grounds of a world by then judged as
impracticable and to do this from a position not only of retreat from public life, but also of
absence and independence from its entire symbolic universe. That also entailed, on a spiritual
level, a commitment to new forms of ascesis, in place of or in addition to the classical ones;
on that front Illich is called in fact to give the most exacting testimony: the fatal illness which
affects his jowl, and which he refuses to cure in order not to hand over his own body
meaning his own embodied humanity to the technical management of the institution in
charge. Maybe it is not insignificant that the outline of the book he only announced, and
which constitutes the incunabulum of his testament, belongs to the years '87-'89, together
with the Chicago speeches: that is, when the life expectancy given to him by the specialist
expires, and before entering if it is legitimate to conjecture a virtual condition of being
posthumous, publicly certified by the evident neoplasia that disfigures one of the most
beautiful faces of the planet, it has been said, and that also torments him with pain,
sharpening his gaze at the same time. Moreover, we are required to put forward contextrelated reasons for the evolution of Illichian thought. After all, we are speaking of a man who
in 1961 had made sure he was ready for his battle station against the White House - Vatican
developmentalist and anti-Castrian crusade in Latin America, thus inaugurating the decade of
a critical going-through the so-called affluent society; a man who at the height of '71 had

already struck, in the school system, the trend of capitalism to reconvert itself in the direction
of the services sector; a man who could foresee in 1973 the energy crisis of the following
years, including the unexpected possibilities to deviate the already written course of
development; lastly a man who captured, towards the end of the same decade, the paradigm
leap, even in a social sense, which was implicit in the Systems theory as well as in the
computer revolution. It is hardly surprising for such a curriculum if he promptly perceived
the closing of a possible dialectics inside the Western world on the turn around of the 80s;
and ten years later, if he attempted to supply a relevant elaboration of the first steps of the
global era, which generated a lot of apocalyptic literature close to the first Gulf War. And
certainly Illich didnt remain uninterested in the rescued public and political role of religions
on the international scene, and in particular, in the West, in the renewed activism of the
Catholic Church on the uncommon ground of encounter and crash established by the concept
of life, which he considered aberrant to the limits of apostasy. And we could go even
further, in badly lit territories, placed on the crossroads between history and psychology.
A fissure to reach these recesses is opened by the letter to Hellmuth Becker, which served ten
years later as an introibo to the funeral of Illich himself.
The 2000-year epoch of Christian Europe is gone. That world
has passed, into which our generation was born. Not only to the
young but also for us, the old, it has become incomprehensible,
impalpable. The old have always remembered better times, but
that is no excuse for us, who were alive during the regimes of
Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler and Franco, to forget the farewell to
the world we lived through [...] We, the seventy years old, can
be unique witnesses, not only for names but also for
perceptions that no one knows any more.
Alongside the novelty of the register he uses, partially due to the literary genre, we should
underline the date: 1992, one year after the end of USSR and of the short 20th century, the
first one of an age triumphantly welcomed as the end of history.
What had been propaganda in the Nazi Period and could be
undermined by hearsay, is now being sold as a Menu with the
computer program or with the insurance policy; as counseling
for education, bereavement or cancer treatment; as group
therapy for those affected. We old ones belong to the
generation of pioneers of that non-sense. We are the last of that
generation who helped to transform the systems of
development, communication and services into a worldwide
need.
The transition is achieved and even the last fragment of the past disappears from the sight of
a man that had been establishing such a deep but at the same time such a problematic
relationship with the dimension of place, root, with the experience accumulated by
generations and codified as an art of living. The Illichian apologia of the vernacular values
evokes, in contrast, his origin from the broken Hapsburg crucible (crawling with
undefinable nationalities, a paper of Opus Dei branded him with infamy); the choice of a
cosmopolitan belonging such as the Roman Church, through whose reticulum the young
priest moved horizontally, going to live in three continents; the self-exile from this Church,
the search for an impossible Chinese or Indian naturalization, the precarious shelter on the
margins of the international scientific community. But it evokes in contrast also some of his
gestures of abrupt and definitive break, almost a repetition of an original shock (as a boy, [I]
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): like, at the
age of twelve, some days before the Anschluss, the irrevocable decision not to give children
to the old tower on the Dalmatian Island; or his entering a seminary in 1945, a choice that
remained unprocessed, at least out loud, so as to radiate a proto-existentialist aura like the
one emanating from the same choice, in the same years, made by the young Lorenzo Milani;
or again, in 1951, on arriving in New York, the exploration of the barrio and the love at first
sight decisive, definitive for the Puerto Rican immigrant community. The same drastic
nature also belongs to some unheard affirmations he made, such as the illustration of the vow
of chastity as the choice to live now the absolute poverty every Christian hopes to
experience at the hour of death; and to his silences, the above-mentioned ones, and those
that have been only alluded to, never interrupted, maybe the really determinant ones: whose
names are Hiroshima or Auschwitz, as primary scenes of a universe of technique already
unfolded in its power (Hoinacki alludes to that in a discreet way when he sets Illich, a Jew on
his mother's side, between Paul Celan and Primo Levi). Now we should ask what happens in
a life up to that point suspended over risk and uprooting or lets say more precisely: over a
transition when, behind and around such a life, the figure of this world passes away, and the
network of references learnt by heart, to which the air balance of the tightrope walker is
trusted, gets lost. Shouldn't we at least wait for him to dramatically get in contact with the
earth again, for an ultimate face-to-face encounter? Perhaps on a sheltered patch of earth. I
would like to come to die in your parish church, thus Illich only answered don Achille
Rossi, who put forward some future involvements in Citt di Castello to him, a few weeks
before his death.
In a philosophical existence no detail is unworthy of attention; but finally, it is the inner
thought movement that we should ask for discriminating corroboration. As a historian and
philosopher Illich is, in the '80s, most promptly a protagonist of the debate on Modernity,
which rose up at sunset, when a famous report by Lyotard to the government of Quebec had
already filled out the death certificate. Illichian research, as we have seen, is qualified as a
research on transcendentals, the non-reflected assumptions of thought and even perception in
the Modern era; what characterizes it, for example if compared to Foucaults, is not so much
the ability to penetrate, i.e. to provide an organic, structural description of a certain mental
world, than the ability to distance oneself, i.e. to catch and bring out differences, the fracture
or the chain of fractures, epistemic as well as sensory, that lead to the present or move
back from it. Especially under this historical and comparative profile, his contributions
generally seem to be not only relevant but frankly surprising; while under a philosophical
profile we should recognize that they, as well as those of the gloomy Calvinist Jacques Ellul
whom they expressly refer to, appear after all as the development or deepening of some
classical acquisitions of early twentieth-century thought (a title among others, the 1938
Heidegger essay on Die Zeit des Weltbildes). Their trait of originality abstracting from the
practical implications of which his research is more generous lies rather in the level of
metadiscours, meaning the level it is possible for Illich to trace, evading (but how?) the
transcendentals of his own age, and where it becomes possible for him to situate and evaluate
the discontinuities: the rising of new assumptions, their passage to the status of axioms, their
becoming obsolete etc. If we namely ask what the assumption of this knowledge on the
assumptions is, we will find for example that, in his case, it is not the pre-categorical
immediateness of the Lebenswelt, or the learning of an ontological difference that always
exceeds a given coming-about of being. For Illich it consists in a knowledge that proceeds
from a revelation. It is the news, received by faith, of an original fracture that makes all the
following ones possible, assigns them a sense, allows them to be judged: the Incarnation of
the Word. A before and an after, a movement principle as such, the opening of a novelty a
possibility, a freedom in the immobile corpus of the peoples wisdom, is produced only by
this event, which not for nothing constitutes the beginning and end of Illichian intelligence
of Christianity. For him, Creation and Redemption are contents of faith that only Revelation,

as Gods word becoming historical flesh, takes away from the mythological dimension with
which they occur in other religious traditions. Creation for example through the Incarnation
will perdure. It has a beginning. It is not eternal like God, but it has no end: it has no end
because it is perpetuated under new skies and new earth by Incarnation; and because this
latter too continues endlessly: in charity, namely, righteously intended as an unheard relation
between a me and you that are absolutely singular, coinciding with their irremediable soma,
their flesh divinized by Incarnation: consequently divine themselves, and so perpetually
creators of novelty. On the other hand, the glory of the human that Incarnation institutes
brings Resurrection with it in an implicit way:
only Gods flesh is capable of resurrecting, of being
resurrected; and I am destined for resurrection, hopefully on the
right side, precisely because Im enfleshed through my acts of
charity, and through my doxological celebration of the
enfleshment.
The wound that the very idea of a creatio ex nihilo entails for the eternity of the physis, or the
wound that Resurrection inflicts on the motionless necessity of the natural laws, are of no
particular relevance for Illich: they lack the inaugurating power of the Gospel, the very leap
of the paradigm, the passing (not simply ethical, but mystical if anything messianic) to a
realized supernatural condition, able to transvaluate in every sense the traditional forms of
living, single or associated, by introducing a freedom foreign and unknown to every other
historical-symbolic constellation. It is not by chance if the core of the Gospel seems to him to
be the crucifixion, intended not as the restorative sacrifice of a perturbed order, but on the
contrary: the elevation of Jesus, his exclusion from the earth and the community, from the
ethnos and from its ethos the break of every order (and the imitatio of this anarchic as well
as tightrope-walker Christ is probably the secret cipher of his spiritual biography).
Desecration and liberation: this is precisely Illich's Gospel, and here lie the roots of the
extraordinary seriousness of existence the way he perceives it at the light of Incarnation one
eye on the Guardini of his graduation thesis, the other on the Bonhoeffer of his own maturity.
But the metadiscours which just unravels from the assumption of incarnation of the Word
doesn't retain the highly dialectical character of this latter. The original krisis it represents is
processed by Illich according to a perspective of philosophia perennis, the fixed and declared
term of so much of his roaming as we have already seen. Beyond every messianic fracture,
in line with the teaching of his master Maritain and of his ever favourite Thomas, the ancient
formula of gratia naturam perficit, for instance, doesnt lose validity for him; which is
possible only on the basis of a dynamic cosmos-anthropology claiming an essential
evolutionary step right at the stage of Incarnation variously widespread in the generation
which foregoes and prepares the Council. It will be noticed, for example, that in Illich there is
no sign of a pure nature: natura always showing itself as signata by interpretation, as a
second nature, the hexis of a determined historical-anthropological tradition; on which the
newness of the Gospel will in fact intervene catastrophically, but prefiguring, on the other
hand, an unprecedented glorification of the kosmos and creature as pronounced in that same
vernacular. This is a problematic junction for Illichian thought, but able to compel it, at the
same time, to its most original intuitions: for example see the pages on contingency, or the
analysis of how the immeasurableness of Christian freedom, analogous with the totally new
relationship between Logos and Sarx revealed by the incarnation of the Word, is called to
create, through theological love, a new and continuously renewed proportionality: between
Judean and Samaritan, characteristically, or in exercising a phila freed from the limits of the
polis. It is to be acknowledged that, from a distance, these elaborations appear consistent with
what he had already been theorizing in the 70s under the heading conviviality and, more in
general, with the idea of a sustainable development, thanks to which free human kind could
drive the ancient orders without dissipating their human scales: when, for a moment, his

proposal faced on one hand the rising tide of the theology of liberation, on the other hand the
fast rappel l'ordre of post-conciliar Catholicism, and before the tenuous spirit of prophecy
of '68 could be reabsorbed into more lasting but more short-ranging ideological frameworks.
In fact, on the contrary, those speculations seem to be reparative and belated, suggested more
from the urgency of understanding how and why the evangelical message failed in Western
History, when by that time the triumph of technique had shown an enigmatic hetero-genesis
of ends at work. The above-mentioned supernatural anthropology is exposed to the replies
which could arise from the historical dimension, precisely because it takes this latter
seriously and embodies it in itself. And we could consider, in this sense, the twofold and noncontradictory development of post-conciliar theology: its secularizing outcome (the
insurance company, as Illich calls it) or rather, if we read the signs of the times more
pessimistically, the fundamentalist backlash. These are apparently the two stages of Illichian
reflection too: the radically humanist and the following blatantly anti-modern one; but
without the corresponding drifts: ethical reduction on one side, secession of identity on the
other. It can be said that Illich was a priori immunized from them because his central issue
was not the Church-World relationship; this is why updates, conflicts and conciliations in this
field couldnt be atop his agenda. His topic was rather the invisible in Mary's womb, and the
whole horizon of human history in all its dimensions, in their reciprocal relationship. So it is
human history, in all its dimensions, that he questions; and it is the mystery of Incarnation
that he goes back to, in order to understand and evaluate the dramatically regressive
anthropological mutation which present times sign.
What emerges from this inquiry, according to the diagnosis gradually formed during the 80s,
is substantially a reversed course of the historia salutis. It is not the free, gratuitous
convenientia in the relationship with the transcendent as well as among human beings, on the
model of incarnation of the Word, that Illich recognizes but, on the contrary, the radical
breakdown of every proportio. So that contemporary reality seems summarizable in him by
the image of the blind techno-bureaucratic power directly commensurated with the quivering
flesh of the Haftling, this latter deprived of everything and ready to receive, with the serial
number, the seal of an accomplished subsumption into the system. If this is a man: if this is
what remains of the persons dignity and freedom when Logos and Sarx split up, and no more
than the bare life is left, at the mercy of the alienating power of the modern artifact (which
included here its conceptual versions: e.g., the abstract life of recent Catholic preaching, in
perfect agreement with the living beings manipulation techniques which it dreams of
thwarting). Almost developing a theorem in full, already sketched out in the Benjaminian
Trauerspiel, Illich comes to point out how the transmogrification produced by the regime of
technique, as a radical disincarnation, is nothing but the furthest outcome of a spiritualization
process, whose widespread materialism would only be the visible waste, the by now
perfectly dia-bolic correlate: the current biologism, for example, or the crazed dynamics of
desire, and more in general that mechanism of technical production of needs for their
technical satisfaction in a scarcity regime, which is our present-day glorification of homo
oeconomicus. But Illich's nagging worry in the 90s is mainly the evidence, in his eyes, that
this spiritualization, though void and fetishistic, would be unthinkable without the premise of
the incarnation of Logos. So Grace reappears in its originally nihilistic side, which he had
tried in vain to compensate through the doctrine of a new and free proportionality to naturetradition. Once the previous and underlying natural bonum is made movable, and so
endangered, the same supernatural optimum is prepared for a possible corruption, when the
very object on which it exercised its prerogatives, and which acted as a constraint, an
anchoring to the earth, deteriorates or gets disfeatured. In this case supernatural freedom
doesnt simply get lost, it actually persists, but insofar as perverted: no longer a lengthening
of Incarnation, in the discrete and contingent shapes of charity, intended via a pure analogia
fidei but incorporated, or rather disembodied, in depersonalizing institutes and apparatuses,
which should make it independent from the risk of contingency, but which thereby turn it into

a different kind of necessity. Necessity is like saying religio: the subtle balance between
incarnationism and secularization, intrinsicism and dialectic theology, which characterizes
Illichan thought, shatters in the impact with the Techno-Moloch grown in the womb of the
Christian world up to imperial sizes. Hence a tactical retreat, in Illich's late anti-modern
preaching, almost with the intent to restore the mechanisms and the structure of classical
soteriology, in whose language, notwithstanding, the problem he poses can't actually be
formulated, and the mysterium iniquitatis is found to be still intact in the provocative quality
of its primeval appearance.
How indeed is the counter-productivity of a gift of grace to be conceived? How is a history of
salvation to be told, when at the end of modernity it results in the specularly opposite
outcome the anti-christian one with respect to the evangelical promises? At this point, and
in a certain sense only at this point of Illichs historical and theoretical journey, the
intermediate term emerges: the Church. It is the Church that Illich indicts for treason: partly
the Constantinian Church, then mostly the Gregorian one, finally the Tridentine one and last
but not least the contemporary one, pre- as well as post-conciliar recognizing in it the nest
from which the Antichrist took his conquering flight. He accuses the Church in its more
ancient stages, for having given birth, although at different levels of intensity, to the aberrant
project of edifying a Christendom (but this term is lacking in Illichs vocabulary; he
symptomatically epitomizes its meaning in the sole word Christianity); in more recent ones,
for not having acknowledged and condemned the sub-products of that project in modern
industrial civilization, continuing to exert moral pressure on individual conduct, but averting
the gaze from impersonal structures of sin generated in the transition (and in this sense we
should intend the cartoon, re-evoked by Illich himself many times, with which he took leave
from the Council: a limp penis in the condom, a nuclear missile in an upright position,
accompanied by the motto: This is against nature). It is the peculiarly Illichan thesis on a
derivation of the Modern from Christendom, as a pious counterfeit of Christianity operated
by the Church: a misunderstood kingdom of God on the earth, later inherited by man, except
for his areas of weakness, of bonhoefferian minority, left to the Churches ambiguous
management. Nevertheless, having repeated this once again, we are certainly not at the
solution of the mysterium, as it is evident for Illich too, but only in the presence of a different
and more internal facies of it. In effect, the betrayal of the Church
is not un-Christian. As I understand the Gospels, with many
others, it is part of the knosis, the humiliation, the
condescension of God in becoming man and founding or
generating the mystical body that the Church understands itself
to be.
Indeed there is only one way to elaborate the mystery of corruptio optimi: to transfer its
paradoxicality directly into God, something that the theologeme of the knosis allowed
various voices of 20th century religious thought to do in front of the mysterium iniquitatis.
With a typical move of a widespread theological semi-marcionism, if not two divinities, at
least two attributes of the same divinity are distinguished and contrasted, with a choice
exclusively in favour of the more recently revealed one, foreign and persecuted goodness, in
opposition to justice and might, freely abandoned by a God who, in so doing, withdraws first
of all from himself, thus leaving the field to a negativity that a theodicy no longer dares to
recover within a providential design. At this price,
Gods goodness and power shines more glorious than ever, in
the fact that he can tolerate [...] the this-worldliness of his
church, which has become the seed from which modern service
organizations have grown:

where it should be noticed that also power shines more gloriously than ever, insofar as it is
converted into powerlessness. Related to the divinitys life, it is a dynamism analogous to that
which lives, but in reversed roles, in the body of the Church. It was a feature of the knosis
indeed, to tolerate that
this mystical body would itself be something ambiguous. It
would be, on the one hand, a source of continued Christian life,
through which the individuals acting alone and together would
be able to live the life of faith and charity, and, on the other
hand, a source of the perversion of this life through
institutionalization, which makes charity wordly, and true faith
obligatory.
Illich is not saying here that this double eventuality is a structural ambivalence of the Church
as such; namely that not either possibility, but both of them have always and necessarily
occurred and continue to occur, never peacefully but each and every time in the most
unprocessable contradiction, in a tragic (i.e. necessary and insoluble) co-belonging. He
doesn't say this, because he is part of that contradiction, inseparable from it, and the
powerless part of it: sad son who
wants to be faithful and who sees in the stains of his mother,
the Church, only a reason to believe more strongly, to admire
Jesus who, in his prescience, must have known what Church
will be and who, despite this, gave it to me as the only mother.
As Illich had shifted the contradiction to God, so he has taken it upon himself, almost to
alleviate the mother from that burden for a stretch of the road. But the pressure now deriving
from it, if it didnt settle down in the sweet paradoxes of typically non-believing
ecclesiologies, is only tolerable in the shortened perspective of an impending end:
I live in the kairos in which the mystical body of Christ,
through its own fault, is constantly being crucified, as his
physical body was crucified and rose again on Easter day. Im
therefore expecting the resurrection of the Church from the
humiliation, for which the Church itself must be blamed, of
having gestated and brought forth the world of modernity.
Since this latter has reached its full maturity, the unveiling of its anti-Christian nature can't
delay any longer; and it is an apocalypse, like every other thing in Illich, which is totally
incarnated:
When I say I believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the
life overlasting, the resurrection of the dead for me stands for
the resurrection of the Church.
Could the Church, however, also in its resurrected body, not bear the stigmas of its original
constitution? In these terms, the mysterium iniquitatis suggests the recollection of a famous
short story by Dostoevsky, which can be encountered in Illich's story too, and once directly
from his lips, according to some testimonies. It is the central episode of his life, the abovementioned letter of 18th June 1968 with which he refused to undergo the trial brought against
him by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, because of the way it had been
prepared, and offered to renounce his priesthood in return. The next morning he went to the
Palace of Sant'Uffizio to Cardinal Seper, the Prefect of the Congregation, to personally
deliver it to him. A little later the Cardinal sent him away telling him Go, go, and never

come back. It wasnt until I was going down the stairs from his office Illich recounts
that it struck me that he was quoting from the Inquisitors last words to the prisoner in
Dostoievskis story of The Grand Inquisitor. (Seper was a Serbo-Croat himself, and those
words were possibly spoken in a Slavic language.) Everything happened as if, from that
moment, Illich acted in order to provide the silent prisoner's answer to the inquisitor, the
longest and most meticulous apologia of (personal) freedom against (public) happiness, of
fides against religio, of the existential risk against the assisted securities, of the personal,
unpredictable act of love against organized ethical agencies, of the free, anarchic renunciation
against the obligation to feel and satisfy needs. It was a reply which went on in an apophatic
way, in the greatest discretion and delicacy; from its position the Church, which nevertheless
has spoken a lot in the meantime, remained perfectly silent. Then, after thirty-three years, a
complete reversal of roles.
It was my turn, with the utmost respect I told His Excellency that I was shocked by his use
of the Christian mystery, of a purely personal and freely chosen friendship, with the aim of
funding any globophile or globophobe agencies. I confided to the moderator my anguish in
dealing with this topic in the presence of an audience like the one we had before us [extraecclesial, ed. note] but I felt I had to take a step forward. This one!: Jesus was asked : Who is
my neighbour? and he answered telling the tale of the Samaritan [] the Church, my
Mother Church, pioneered poor houses for poor people, hospitals, schools for the
institutionalization of charity! At this point Archbishop Plotti stood up, came towards me at
the opposite end of the table, looked at me and hugged me.
To lead back to this episode Illich's renunciation of silence as well as his gospel shouted
from the rooftops will certainly be forced. Certainly only inside that mute, inextricable hug
can we fully understand his martyria, his testimony within the Church against the Church.