Ivan Illich, Breaking the Silence

7/24/2019 Ivan Illich, Breaking the Silence

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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 hismove to New York City in 1951. He originally wrote this essay to serve as the afterword tothe 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 JaneUpchurch. Mr. Milana's professional Web page may be viewed here; he is affiliated with theFondazione per le Science Religiose Giovanni XXIII, located in Bologna. We look forward toseeing 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 forleaving out the paper's footnotes. A complete copy of the paper is available for downloadingfrom his Web page.)

Ivan Illich, Breaking the Silenceby Fabio Milana

The Corruption of Christianityis the text of the homonymous programme that the Canadiannational radio broadcasted, maybe not by chance, in the first few days of the year 2000. Lateron, 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, whichcirculated 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 andorganized by the interventions of Cayley himself, in order to create a summary of the hugematerial he recorded during those sessions. A redactio longiorof this same material was

authorized by Illich as a consequence of the great interest the radio Corruptionaroused, asCayley 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, butas 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-deservingIvan Illich in Conversation(1992), andthe partnership he achieved in this kind of a two voices self-portrait which is theCorruption. This confirms the common wavelength gradually reached by the catholicCanadian 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 effectivenessof our text, which is not just due to the significance of Illichs own voice passages selectedhere, 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, Cayleyreminds the reader, who has less familiarity with Illichs intellectual and human story, of itsessential parts, which we could recognize in different phases. The first one is the militantone, 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


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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 thesacerdotal functions with their related privileges (1968-1969). The following phase consistedof 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 technologicaldevelopment; this latter period began in 1978 as a consequence of something similar to anexistential 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 thepast (1992), the retrospective Conversationmentioned above, and the last one in his ownhand, the comment on Ugo di San VittoreIn 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, thebookish text, which is closed between the two watersheds that forever divide it from the

lectio divinaof monastic tradition and the era of digital screens. About a possible third phaseof Illichs research, our Corruptiondocuments the most important paths in its three centralchapters: the survey on the origin of some modern categories of the political from theChristian 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 disappearanceof the living and sentient flesh; the ethical problem in a world that has lost a substantialnotion 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 aradically religious nature. Precisely the comparison with the 1992 Conversationhighlightsthe 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 hedid in The Rivers North of the Future: a qualification that can also be applied to thisCorruption 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 mostconsolidated interpreting paradigms of this world's age: going from the one that understandsit 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 aboriginethe relationship between the two constellations. Illich explains Modernity as anessential betrayal of the gospel message, which evolved later on by following independentlines of force, being unaware of a drama not his own: and therefore liable to be analysed and

discussedsua iuxta et propria principia, as the author demonstrated during two decades; but

a betrayal which the Church itself made possible and substantially prefigured, by attemptingto 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 theambivalence it throws on the process we're considering, that we have chosen here the Italianwordpervertimentoto 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 placesWestern history inside the coordinates of Church history, and thereby right in the middle ofholy history, can't but see an inexplicable dynamism in that corruption: the mystery of ananti-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 expressedhimself 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-investshuman history as the unique scene of the holy drama. Although Illich has always emphasized,


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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'toperate 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 reallyconcerns the corruptioIllich has diagnosed) is not the subject matter of any esotericspeculation, 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 takenthe degeneration of the Gospel to its last consequences. The ultimate originality of theIllichian interpretation, which doesn't lie in his individual topics nor, in toto, in their system,

first of all rests on the direct, personal,passionatatestimony he has left us: the theologicalquestion on why this corruption happened, the historical one on how, the ethical one on whatto doin 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, withmy 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 atestament. 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 theyoften shared; but above all for the forty-year-long midwiferywith his friend's thought), hastestified to Illichs terrible pain because of

the inability to say what he wanted to say: about the corruptiooptimi, the mysterium iniquitatis, the relationship betweenthese two realities, their respective relationships to the world

and to the Church, and the interrelationships of all thesecomplex cultural/historical/ecclesiastical, divine affairs. In ourlong conversations on these themes, the struggle and frustrationwere evident.

An open letter written to David Ramage tells us that a volume on this topic was planned andpartially 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 oftheir practical reasons. In any case, Illich seems to go beyond the block of an ensemble ofresistances only after Cayley's intelligent provocation takes the persuasions out of his

mouth, that uncertainties and sickness would predictably have stopped him from puttingdown 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 centrallocusin 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, aswell as promoter of the above-mentioned meeting being the mayor of Oakland, remembershow on that occasion Illich wanted to meet the archbishop of the city, in order

to discuss matters of Catholic theology that greatly troubledhim. Before he died, Illich wanted to engage ecclesiasticalrepresentatives in a conversation about corruption in the early

Church and the evolution as he saw it of Christian charityfrom a personal act to planned institutional services [...] Hetried one subject, then another, but the bishop and his clericalassistants seemed nonplussed, even uncomfortable. Soon the

conversation was over and our guests excused themselves andleft.


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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 openingspeech of Msgr. Plotti, the archbishop of Pisa, for betraying an universalistic conception ofthe 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 longerpublish; in September, in Citt di Castello, speaking at a convention on the almost imminentpre-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 inKreftingstrasse, the Bremen house that welcomes him and his closest collaborators during histeaching 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 optimithat hehas finally decided to do the following week-end. For that occasion, Barbara Duden and SiljaSamerski, 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 LosAngeles 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 balancingact as a teacher. When speaking in Philadelphia or Bremen, Ifelt 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, Idid not relate the unprecedented characteristics of the modern

artifact to the new commandment recorded by St. John, but tothephiliatraditionally understood as the flowering ofpoliteia.

The friends in Bremen, as well as the reader of these pages, have the appropriate tools at theirdisposal to correctly evaluate the unique meaning Illich assigned to a renewed exercise of theclassicalphilia. It is also explicitly theorized in his 1998 Bremen speech, when he wasawarded 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 betweenphiliaandconspiratio(the liturgical practice of the primitive Christian Church, in his opinion starting aradically new kind ofpoliteia) 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 ofCatholic philosophy [] my other foot [...] heavy with mudclots 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-fiveyears 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 beenmore structured and binding: since March '68, in front of the Congregation for the Doctrineof 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, preachingat retreats etc., specifying to cardinal Seper the following June:

It's my intention to maintain this reserve as long as thereremains a doubt or reservation in the mind of the Superiors

about me even if it is totally groundless [] The munus

sacerdotaleis a free gift of God through the Church: althoughit remains indelible, in my opinion it should really only be


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exercised in the fullness of the communionand even of the trust

of the Church itself. The clerical state and its powers and dutiesof external representation of the ecclesiastic institutions are notas 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 orientationsand attitudes contingent and related to a certain historical

situation. Quod gratis ab Ecclesia accepi, semper gratisrenunciabo.

As we can ascribe these words to a deep and maturesensus Ecclesiae, likewise for thereserve 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 hadchosen 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 wholeintellectual production which comes after '68. This is a relatively uncommon task: duringIllichs 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 apophaticbehaviour, maybe for a greater involvement in other directions of research he had tirelesslyfed (in effect Challenges of Ivan Illichis the title of the volume, edited by Hoinacki and Carl

Mitcham), his theological challenge is perceived as being aligned or subordinated to otherones, 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 theposthumousPerte des sens, which notwithstanding encloses the decisive texts. Somesignificant testimonies, e.g. the ones we have mentioned before, filtered through the Bremencommemorations 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 Juneand through the commemorations of Claremont in 2004, preferably move backstage of theapophatic interpretation. Meanwhile others (Cayley firstly and most actively, in Italy

Giannozzo Pucci and Franco La Cecla) have intended to render the ultimate motive ofIllichan research explicit, identifying it in that core of wounded faith to be investigated alsoin the works which seem very far away from it at first glance: the pamphlets that went aroundthe world in the '70s and interfered with the international political agenda, giving a

contribution to the counter-cultures of alternative movements.Titles likeDe-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 goodreason 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 uniquelyCatholic ritual because I wanted to grasp the mystery of thecorruptio optimi. I went into the history of hospitality and careto oppose the Church-initiated sterilization of charity through

its institutionalization as service. I wrote on the degeneration ofwater into H2O as an instance of the disintegration of bodiesand the dissolution of sacramental matter. I got myself into

deep trouble with a pamphlet, Gender, on the social history of


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

by love for Our Lady who gave birth to that Brother throughwhom my fraternity with ... well, a guy like Mitcham issubsumed 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 andover, the corruptio optimi quae est pessima.

Maybe we should not overestimate this late self-exegesis, despite its coherence with whatcomes out from his speeches in Chicago, held for the first time after a long period in front ofa 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 likeHospitality and Pain (1987),Educational Enterprise in the Light of Gospel(1988), TheConstruction of a New Fetish: Human Life(1989): in these extraordinary texts, Illichs non-

written book is clearly outlined; but here he is at the peak of his ten-year long engagement asa 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. Whatrather 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 fightagainst compulsory schooling, against the medical establishment which has become a majorthreat to health, against all the disabling professions, that requisition the traditional forms

of human self-determination to advantage castes of experts, administrators, planners, it willundoubtedly be possible to record the agreement with the contemporary criticism of

bureaucracies totalitarianism (his much admired Orwell, the theoreticians of Socialisme ou

Barbariein the '50s, the Frankfurt sociologists of alienation, the political scientists of theJewish-German diaspora in America etc.). But it appears to be much more pertinent tounderline 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 todayovershadowed by the best-sellers of the '70s. Though in these texts, as a consequence and asa homage to the self-suspension from theEcclesia 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 thepriest as the Churchs basic representative in the world, or rather the same need of aprofessional 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 headChristian communities to be called up on an elective basis rather than on an administrative-territorial one; he had contested privileges (precisely the monopoly on priesthood) andfeatures (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 withthe millennium that had seen it blossom. It concerned the same moral minority granted bythe 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 tothe 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.

FromDeschooling Society:Since Bonhoeffer contemporary theologians have pointed tothe confusions now reigning between the Biblical message andinstitutionalized religion. They point to the experience that

Christian freedom and faith usually gain from secularization.


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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 contrastedfidesandreligio, has reduced the latter within purely anthropological limits, and expunged it from adisenchanted 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, appearsprefigured 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 notionof a convivial tool. As for the concept of counter-productivity, that is a mould for the idea ofcorruptio 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 theChurch: a huge system born with the aim to evangelize the world, did not evangelize it anymore, 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'spractical 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: theattention he reserves to the historical-social sphere has autonomous reasons and very firmroots 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 comeout from a millenarian immobilism, according to him a non-thematic awareness of thesignificance 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 thatopened will cause the end of privilege and license, that's his auspice at least, but the youngIllich doesnt seem interested in prefiguring its shapes and results in the abstract. This is, ifanything, the office of the secular religions with their unavoidable ideological

rationalizations and their just as unavoidable differences, conflicts, failures. Thats a pricewhich can be paid in exchange for the astonishing vision of a universal mobilization ofmankind, 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 kingdomwhich 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 owndestiny 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-orderedauthority, least of all the Church, take on the task to promote and orient the change. The

task of the Church is rather to discernthe consequences on the human hearth, intended as

that of an individual man; but to discern them in a communitarianway: it is exactly thecelebration 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 inthe beautiful sentence: two hear the same story, but one gets the point. (Please note: there isonly 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 newsecular institutions offend human freedom, and of which obscure mythical-sacred powers areacting in the religioof development, that induces Illich to openly laugh at them; thisconcerned, 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 hisfirst 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;


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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 anti-institutional attitude and the choice in favour ofpowerlessnessare 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, oncebeyond some critical thresholds, cannot but enter into collision with the goal it claims to bethe 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, poweris only demoniacal, even when it assures (or precisely because it assures: but it really cannotassure 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 mankindcontemporaneous with us. To be repeated: no spiritualist temptation, no in-politicalinclination 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 theRuler of this world with the means of this latter: it rather predisposes for a mysteriouslyfertile failure. As far as this evangelical radicalism is concerned, we should consider the mostrecent 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, Illichjudged it, the same way he spoke about their initiator Ren Voillaume as fundamental for histraining 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 exercisedlike workers of the lowest level; the choice not to serve the last ones but to join their ranks, orat 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 hisforma vivendi, such has been, more or less, his vision of the Church as much as, in anothersense, 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 kataphasisof the

Testament at the height of the '90s is a question on which more than one hypothesis can bemade. 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 civilizationtargeted by him actually feeds on these contestations, in order to operate more and morerefined, 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 asimpracticable and to do this from a position not only of retreat from public life, but also ofabsence and independence from its entire symbolic universe. That also entailed, on a spirituallevel, 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, andwhich constitutes the incunabulum of his testament, belongs to the years '87-'89, togetherwith 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 beingposthumous, publicly certified by the evident neoplasia that disfigures one of the mostbeautiful 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 context-

related reasons for the evolution of Illichian thought. After all, we are speaking of a man whoin 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 ofa critical going-through the so-called affluent society; a man who at the height of '71 had


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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 followingyears, including the unexpected possibilities to deviate the already written course ofdevelopment; 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 perceivedthe 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. Andcertainly Illich didnt remain uninterested in the rescued public and political role of religionson 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 conceptof life, which he considered aberrant to the limits of apostasy. And we could go evenfurther, 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 tenyears later as an introiboto the funeral of Illich himself.

The 2000-year epoch of Christian Europe is gone. That worldhas 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, butthat is no excuse for us, who were alive during the regimes of

Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler and Franco, to forget the farewell tothe 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, thefirst one of an age triumphantly welcomed as the end of history.

What had been propaganda in the Nazi Period and could beundermined by hearsay, is now being sold as a Menu with the

computer program or with the insurance policy; as counselingfor education, bereavement or cancer treatment; as grouptherapy for those affected. We old ones belong to the

generation of pioneers of that non-sense. We are the last of thatgeneration who helped to transform the systems ofdevelopment, communication and services into a worldwideneed.

The transition is achieved and even the last fragment of the past disappears from the sight ofa 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 bygenerations and codified as an art of living. The Illichian apologia of the vernacular valuesevokes, 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 acosmopolitan 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


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blue Adriatic, to the limestone mountains in the Dalmatia of my early childhood): like, at the

age of twelve, some days before theAnschluss, the irrevocable decision not to give childrento the old tower on the Dalmatian Island; or his entering a seminary in 1945, a choice thatremained 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 firstsight decisive, definitive for the Puerto Rican immigrant community. The same drasticnature also belongs to some unheard affirmations he made, such as the illustration of the vow

of chastity as the choice to live nowthe absolute poverty every Christian hopes toexperience at the hour of death; and to his silences, the above-mentioned ones, and thosethat 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 alreadyunfolded in its power (Hoinacki alludes to that in a discreet way when he sets Illich, a Jew onhis 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 atransition when, behind and around such a life, the figure of this world passes away, and thenetwork of references learnt by heart, to which the air balance of the tightrope walker istrusted, 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. Iwould like to come to die in your parish church, thus Illich only answered don AchilleRossi, 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 innerthought 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 hadalready filled out the death certificate. Illichian research, as we have seen, is qualified as aresearch 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 muchthe ability to penetrate, i.e. to provide an organic, structural description of a certain mentalworld, 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 moveback from it. Especially under this historical and comparative profile, his contributionsgenerally 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 Ellulwhom they expressly refer to, appear after all as the development or deepening of someclassical acquisitions of early twentieth-century thought (a title among others, the 1938Heidegger essay onDie 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?) thetranscendentals 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, theirbecoming obsolete etc. If we namely ask what the assumption of this knowledge on theassumptions is, we will find for example that, in his case, it is not the pre-categorical

immediateness of theLebenswelt, or the learning of an ontological difference that alwaysexceeds a given coming-about of being. For Illich it consists in a knowledge that proceedsfrom a revelation. It is the news, received by faith, of an original fracture that makes all thefollowing 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 apossibility, 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 intelligenceof Christianity. For him, Creation and Redemption are contents of faith that only Revelation,


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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 Incarnationwill 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 irremediablesoma,their flesh divinized by Incarnation: consequently divine themselves, and so perpetuallycreatorsof 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 beingresurrected; and I am destined for resurrection, hopefully on the

right side, precisely because Im enfleshed through my acts ofcharity, and through my doxological celebration of theenfleshment.

The wound that the very idea of a creatio ex nihiloentails for the eternity of thephysis, or the

wound that Resurrection inflicts on the motionless necessity of the natural laws, are of noparticular 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 arealized supernatural condition, able to transvaluate in every sense the traditional forms ofliving, 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 tobe the crucifixion, intended not as the restorative sacrifice of a perturbed order, but on thecontrary: the elevationof Jesus, his exclusion from the earth and the community, from the

ethnosand from its ethos the break of every order (and the imitatioof this anarchic as wellas 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 oneeye 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 Worddoesn't retain the highly dialectical character of this latter. The original krisisit represents is

processed by Illich according to a perspective ofphilosophia perennis, the fixed and declaredterm 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 ofgratia naturam perficit, for instance, doesnt lose validity for him; which ispossible only on the basis of a dynamic cosmos-anthropology claiming an essentialevolutionary step right at the stage of Incarnation variously widespread in the generationwhich foregoes and prepares the Council. It will be noticed, for example, that in Illich there is

no sign of a pure nature: naturaalways showing itself assignataby interpretation, as asecond nature, the hexisof a determined historical-anthropological tradition; on which thenewness of the Gospel will in fact intervene catastrophically, but prefiguring, on the other

hand, an unprecedented glorification of the kosmosand creature as pronounced in that samevernacular. This is a problematic junction for Illichian thought, but able to compel it, at thesame 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 newrelationship between Logos and Sarx revealed by the incarnation of the Word, is called tocreate, through theological love, a new and continuously renewed proportionality: betweenJudean and Samaritan, characteristically, or in exercising aphilafreed from the limits of the

polis. It is to be acknowledged that, from a distance, these elaborations appear consistent withwhat he had already been theorizing in the 70s under the heading conviviality and, more ingeneral, 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


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proposal faced on one hand the rising tide of the theology of liberation, on the other hand the

fast rappel l'ordreof post-conciliar Catholicism, and before the tenuous spirit of prophecyof '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-genesisof ends at work. The above-mentioned supernatural anthropology is exposed to the replieswhich 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 non-contradictory development of post-conciliar theology: its secularizing outcome (theinsurance 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 Illichianreflection too: the radically humanist and the following blatantly anti-modern one; butwithout the corresponding drifts: ethical reduction on one side, secession of identity on the

other. It can be said that Illich was a prioriimmunized from them because his central issuewas not the Church-World relationship; this is why updates, conflicts and conciliations in thisfield couldnt be atop his agenda. His topic was rather the invisible in Mary's womb, and thewhole 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 Incarnationthat he goes back to, in order to understand and evaluate the dramatically regressiveanthropological 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, gratuitousconvenientiain 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 radicalbreakdown of everyproportio. So that contemporary reality seems summarizable in him bythe image of the blind techno-bureaucratic power directly commensurated with the quiveringflesh of theHaftling, 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 iswhat remains of the persons dignity and freedom when Logos and Sarx split up, and no morethan 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, inperfect agreement with the living beings manipulation techniques which it dreams ofthwarting). 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 oftechnique, 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 nowperfectly 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 homooeconomicus. 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 ofthe incarnation of Logos. So Grace reappears in its originally nihilistic side, which he hadtried in vain to compensate through the doctrine of a new and free proportionality to nature-

tradition. Once the previous and underlying natural bonumis made movable, and soendangered, the same supernatural optimumis prepared for a possible corruption, when thevery object on which it exercised its prerogatives, and which acted as a constraint, ananchoring 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 lengtheningof 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


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a different kind of necessity. Necessity is like saying religio: the subtle balance between

incarnationism and secularization, intrinsicism and dialectic theology, which characterizesIllichan thought, shatters in the impact with the Techno-Moloch grown in the womb of theChristian 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 beformulated, and the mysterium iniquitatisis found to be still intact in the provocative qualityof its primeval appearance.

How indeed is the counter-productivity of a gift of grace to be conceived? How is a history ofsalvation to be told, when at the end of modernity it results in the specularly oppositeoutcome the anti-christian one with respect to the evangelical promises? At this point, and

in a certain sense onlyat this point of Illichs historical and theoretical journey, theintermediate term emerges: the Church. It is the Church that Illich indicts for treason: partlythe 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 nestfrom which the Antichrist took his conquering flight. He accuses the Church in its moreancient 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 modernindustrial 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 weshould intend the cartoon, re-evoked by Illich himself many times, with which he took leavefrom the Council: a limp penis in the condom, a nuclear missile in an upright position,

accompanied by the motto: Thisis against nature). It is the peculiarly Illichan thesis on aderivation 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, exceptfor his areas of weakness, of bonhoefferian minority, left to the Churches ambiguous

management. Nevertheless, having repeated this once again, we are certainly not at thesolution of the mysterium, as it is evident for Illich too, but only in the presence of a differentand more internalfaciesof it. In effect, the betrayal of the Church

is not un-Christian. As I understand the Gospels, with manyothers, it is part of the knosis, the humiliation, thecondescension of God in becoming man and founding or

generating the mystical body that the Church understands itselfto 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 knosisallowedvarious 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 choiceexclusively in favour of the more recently revealed one, foreign and persecuted goodness, inopposition 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 torecover within a providential design. At this price,

Gods goodness and power shines more glorious than ever, inthe fact that he can tolerate [...] the this-worldliness of his

church, which has become the seed from which modern serviceorganizations have grown:


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where it should be noticed that also power shines more gloriously than ever, insofar as it is

converted intopowerlessness. Related to the divinitys life, it is a dynamism analogous to thatwhich lives, but in reversed roles, in the body of the Church. It was a feature of the knosisindeed, 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 wouldbe able to live the life of faith and charity, and, on the other

hand, a source of the perversion of this life throughinstitutionalization, which makes charity wordly, and true faithobligatory.

Illich is not saying here that this double eventuality is a structural ambivalence of the Churchas 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 mostunprocessable contradiction, in a tragic (i.e. necessary and insoluble) co-belonging. He

doesn't say this, because he ispartof that contradiction, inseparable from it, and thepowerlesspart 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 admireJesus 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 derivingfrom it, if it didnt settle down in the sweet paradoxes of typically non-believingecclesiologies, is only tolerable in the shortened perspective of an impending end:

I live in the kairosin 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. Imtherefore expecting the resurrection of the Church from the

humiliation, for which the Church itself must be blamed, ofhaving gestated and brought forth the world of modernity.

Since this latter has reached its full maturity, the unveiling of its anti-Christian nature can'tdelay any longer; and it is an apocalypse, like every other thing in Illich, which is totallyincarnated:

When I say I believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the

life overlasting, the resurrection of the dead for me stands forthe resurrection of the Church.

Could the Church, however, also in its resurrected body, not bear the stigmas of its originalconstitution? In these terms, the mysterium iniquitatissuggests the recollection of a famousshort 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 above-mentioned letter of 18th June 1968 with which he refused to undergo the trial brought againsthim 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 personallydeliver it to him. A little later the Cardinal sent him away telling him Go, go, and never


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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 inDostoievskis story of The Grand Inquisitor. (Seper was a Serbo-Croat himself, and thosewords 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, offidesagainst 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 apophaticway, in the greatest discretion and delicacy; from its position the Church, which neverthelesshas 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 useof 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 indealing with this topic in the presence of an audience like the one we had before us [extra-ecclesial, ed. note] but I felt I had to take a step forward. This one!: Jesus was asked : Who ismy neighbour? and he answered telling the tale of the Samaritan [] the Church, my

Mother Church, pioneered poor houses for poor people, hospitals, schools for theinstitutionalization of charity! At this point Archbishop Plotti stood up, came towards me atthe 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 shoutedfrom the rooftops will certainly be forced. Certainly only inside that mute, inextricable hugcan we fully understand his martyria, his testimony within the Church against the Church.

Documents

Ivan Illich, Breaking the Silence