Reflections by Carl Mitcham, Peter Warshall, Jerry Brown, Vijaya Nagarajan, Lee Swenson, David Cayley, and Lee Hoinacki
Cultural critic Ivan Illich died in Bremen, Germany on December 2, 2002. He was 76. Since the 1970s, his arc of concerns had paralleled Whole Earth's: tools as shapers of their users, individuals in the thrall of institutions, appropriately sized technology, "development" as a trap. He appeared frequently in Whole Earth's pages.
His argument that institutions and technologies eventually consume their own purposes was highly influential on movements from homeschooling to church reform, small-scale technology, and medical self-care, but his analyses were always more radical. He recognized, for example, that homeschooling or self-care could themselves become simply different delivery systems for "education" or "health" when those are treated as commodities needed to fulfill self-generated needs.
Illich wrote less in his later years, partly because of a debilitating facial tumor for which—true to his beliefs—he never sought treatment, but also because his work became an ongoing conversation (a "conspiracy," in the sense of "breathing together") with friends around the world. His most lasting legacy may be his effect on the people he touched, and their effects on others. Seven of his friends graciously agreed to share memories with us. Their essays, condensed in the issue, appear here full and unedited. —Michael K. Stone
by Carl Mitcham
Ivan Illich's life provides for me a special window on the twentieth century. Born in Vienna in 1926, World War II drove him to Italy. After the war he was ordained a Catholic priest. Then in 1951 he moved to the U.S., where he served as a pastor to Puerto Rican immigrants and then as Vice-Rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico galvanized an emerging criticism of economic development, and led in the 1960s to his founding the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) in Cuernavaca, as an institutional base for the exploration of alternatives and radical reflection. By all accounts, CIDOC was a magic place. For visitors from all over Illich's charismatic spirit of engagement inspired many new beginnings. Accused by the Vatican of thereby becoming a scandal in the Church, Illich resigned his professional ministry, although he was never laicized or married.
It was from CIDOC that Illich published his most widely read books: Deschooling Society (1971), Tools for Conviviality (1973), and Medical Nemesis (1976). In each case Illich identified the phenomenon of "counterproductivity": that is, the pursuit of technical processes to the point where their original goals are undermined. Public schooling, first conceived to advance learning, had become an impediment to real education. Advanced technological tools (such as telephones, cars, and television) were at odds with autonomous human development and the culture of friendship, which they once were invented and still claim to promote. High-tech health care was making people sick.
The correct response, for Illich, was a more disciplined and limited use of science and the invention of alternative, low-scale, technologies. Indeed, fearing that CIDOC itself might become counterproductive, Illich closed the center in 1976 to become a scholar without portfolio. This pilgrimage opened into a project in historical archeology that took its first full-bodied shape in Gender (1982), an attempt to recover those social experiences of female/male complementary obscured by the modern economic regime of sex. ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988) carried historical archeology forward into the area of literacy, as did In the Vineyard of the Text (1993).
ABC and Vineyard that Illich and I met at Penn State University, where we both found ourselves teaching. For some time I had known Illich's work — as well as his inability to suffer gladly those whose ideas he considered foolish. I was thus surprised and intimidated when he telephoned and began abruptly with, "This is Ivan Illich. I have made great use of your work on the philosophy of technology and want to invite you to a living room conversation." The conversation was one in a series that eventually gave birth to Wolfgang Sach's Development Dictionary (1992).
As I discovered, Illich had taken CIDOC on the road. Wherever he could find a place to bring together a circle of friends, who could then convene in convivial but serious conversation — often around a table with pasta, a little wine, and a candle — he would settle for a few months and try to deepen his and others' reflections. These too were inspiring times. Quite frankly, I seldom lived up to the challenges he often placed on my plate.
I was equally frustrated by an inability to contribute to his work. I remember especially one talk he gave on "The Immorality of Bioethics" in which he attacked the professionalization of ethics talk. I struggled to help get the lecture written up, but never succeeded. He worked well with others, but somehow we were never quite able to collaborate in this ways. Yet his friendship remained an unexpected blessing, repeatedly inviting me to rethink even critical assumptions.
In the last decade of his life he increasingly questioned the notions of environmental responsibility and the new ideology of life. Calls for environmental responsibility were, he argued, just another excuse for advancing a technological management of the world, and even pro-life movements gave too much ground to science, when they defined human life as originating with a conception that could not be directly experienced. What was at work in history was a counterproductivity writ large that he fingered with a Latin phrase, corruptio optimi que est pessima, the corruption of the best is the worst. Contemporary attempts to better the human condition ultimately undermined their own ends. In the face of such temptations, one must seek out new forms of asceticism, silence, and withdrawal. Illich's own final withdrawal occurred quietly at a home in Germany, not that far from the Vienna where he began. To his friends, is left an effort to understand where he has gone.
Carl Mitcham is professor of liberal arts and international studies at Colorado School of Mines. He directed the Science-Technology-Society Program at Penn State and was founding director of the Philosophy and Technology Studies Center, Polytechnic University, New York. He is coeditor of The Challenges of Ivan.
by Peter Warshall
This last time I saw Ivan was at the University of San Francisco. At the pre-lecture dinner, he as ever blossomed, talking of the replacement of Good by Values, the instrumentality of prayer, the false embodiment of intentions in food. What was lovely, if not spectacular, about Ivan was his memory of specific conversations that he had with you or someone that had nurtured the emergence of a crisp, clear and heartful idea. "Remember, the spaghetti dinner in Cuernavaca in 1984, when you asked about the cognitive judgment of gender..." To him, conviviality was the brains.
As he chatted to students and admirers, sadly I engraved his elegant profile — the long forehead and Spanish nose, the thin cheeks and strong chin — into my cortex. On one side, his face remained intense, handsome. The other had sprouted a cancer about the size and shape of a small head of cauliflower, as if a giant mushroom were pushing his skin out from his jaw, slowly breaking to the surface. Only the soup and sucking the chocolate cover off the strawberries seemed pleasurable. Solid food had become painful. I thought how many people must have appeared as he did, in the period of history he loved and knew so well, the medieval, a period when Good was not so problematic.
When others headed to the auditorium, he asked if I would bar entry to the dining room and, removing his opium pipe, sucked hard. I stood, back flat to the door, thinking about trying some too. But his was an act of ritual as much as an act of remedy, of plant powers from the medieval period; this was old medicine, the poppy's blood, not refined into morphine patches. This was a direct connect — pain, body, and nature — not techno-medicine maniacally determined to prolong life.
We walked down the steep hill to the auditorium, my hand lightly grabbing his elbow or arm as one should not walk opiated. I thought of Bach fugues that stars make in opium dreams as the vehicular headlights and car brakes canon-balled our eyes and ears, and listened to the renegade Priest Illich, now already out-there, half-crossed-over, reveling in divine luminescences and ether-wind tongues. I was, for some reason, smiling big, thoroughly charmed, hearing childhood echoes: "Grandfather, yes grandfather."
When on a roll, Ivan could never be comprehended easily. His genius, a genius of radical anthropology, required thoughts on thoughts. Hard to describe. By analogy, it went something like this. Think of the layering of mathematics. There are, to start with, simply numbers. Add an unknown (x, y) and you have algebra; apply algebra and you have geometry; add the notion of infinity and you generate a calculus of space; remove the boundaries of space and there lies Einstein and cosmology. Ivan gallivanted from numbers to cosmology; around and back, with a mounted knight's ease. He never remained at any one level (let's say, numbers, number theory, and probability). He, like no one I have ever read or met, saw that one-level of perceiving is a mind-trap set by culture, isolating the intellect from the ultimate cosmos/conviviality of love.
That night, he tried to guide the audience in a leap from Medieval Greek caritas (caring love) to social welfare programs (secular charity). He traced the secular illusion that a society could actually organize "caring" as "charity" — from Arab way-homes to Christian sick houses (we're at about 1100 AD) and onward to modern welfare state education and medicine. By then, with the interventions of hospital technology, the bureaucracy of nursing and specialists, caring became a simulacra, a mask of love.
At the close of his talk, literally on his knees, Ivan beseeched some closeted heart of humanity to find its way back to caritas. A former Jew, defrocked by the Vatican. Isn't his a familiar story? and his life the eternal crucial query?
Peter Warshall is Whole Earth's editor at large.
by Jerry Brown
When in 1976, I first met Ivan Illich at the Green Gulch Farm, he told me that his current focus was the study of economics. Then, I didn't understand that by the word economics, Illich meant a way of life where things are experienced only under assumptions of scarcity. Illich saw this as profoundly wrong.
For him, creation was a gift, accessible to every man and women--without any expert ministrations or institutionalized services. His critique of schooling, the pursuit of health, high technology and sexual equality all challenged core beliefs in progress and the capacity of progress to reduce suffering and improve the human condition.
When I try to understand Ivan Illich, I am forced back upon my experience in the Jesuit Novitiate in the 1950's. There, I was taught Ignatian indifference to secular values of long life, fame and riches. It is only through that mystical lens that I can grasp the powerful simplicity of the way Illich lived. He had no home of his own and relied on the hospitality of friends. He traveled from place to place with never more than two bags. He refused medical diagnosis, any form of insurance and gave away whatever savings remained at the end of each year.
On December 2, 2002, Ivan Illich died in Bremen, Germany at the home of his friend, Barbara Duden. Three months earlier, he and I and two friends shared the pleasure of walking together through the streets of Florence, Italy. We enjoyed a leisurely meal in a small, typically Tuscan restaurant. Laughter and Chianti flowed freely. As I got up to pay the bill, I noticed Ivan coming back from the cashier. He had already taken care of it.
Among the serious thinkers I have had the privilege to meet, Ivan Illich alone embodied in his personal life as well as in his work, a radical distancing from the imperatives of modern society. From Deschooling Society (1971) to In the Vineyard of the Text (1993), he bore witness to the destructive power of modern institutions that "create needs faster than they can create satisfaction, and in the process of trying to meet the needs they generate, they consume the earth."
Ivan Illich was the rarest of human beings: erudite, yet possessed of aliveness and sensitivity. He savored the ordinary pleasures of life even as he cheerfully embraced its inevitable suffering. Steeped in an authentic Catholic tradition, he observed with detachment and as a pilgrim the unforgiving allure of science and progress. With acute clarity and a sense of humor, he undermined, in all that he wrote, the uncontested certitudes of modern society.
In his last visit to Oakland, he invited the local archbishop to discuss matters of Catholic theology that greatly troubled him. Before he died, Illich wanted to engage ecclesiastical representatives in a conversation about corruption in the early church and the evolution-as he saw it--of Christian charity from a personal act to planned institutional services. This he called the corruption of the best becoming the worst- Corruptio optimi quae est pessima. His interlocutors arrived at my loft and were ushered into the library. Illich spoke at length, summoning up his vast store of Church history. He tried one subject, then another, but the bishop and his clerical assistants seemed nonplussed, even uncomfortable. Soon the conversation was over and our guests excused themselves and left. I am sure they were wondering what in the world Illich was getting at.
Two days after Illich died, the New York Timesprinted an obituary that was a polemic rather than a thoughtful remembrance. The writer described Illich as a preacher of "counterintuitive sociology" to "a disquieted baby-boom generation," using "Jesuitic argumentation" and "watered-down Marxism." He also quoted a deceased Timesliterary critic who said in 1989 that he would "especially" discard Illich's books from his personal library. Given Illich's frontal assault on the status quo, it is not surprising that the paper of record would so interpret his work.
In the Seventies, facing sharp criticism from the Vatican, Illich withdrew from the active priesthood and refrained from speaking ever again as a Catholic theologian. Instead, he focused on the nature of technology and modern institutions and their capacity for destroying common sense and the proper scale for human activity. Illich identified the "ethos of non-satiety" as "at the root of physical depredation, social polarization, and psychological passivity." Instead of welfare economics and environmental management, Illich emphasized friendship and self-limitation.
At first, Illich offered trenchant social criticism, particularly in Tools for Conviviality (1973) and Medical Nemesis (1976). In later years, he turned his attention inward and to what one of his friends called an ancient way of doing theology. In an essay entitled, The Cultivation of Conspiracy,Illich wrote: "Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship."
In the last twenty years of his life, Ivan Illich suffered increasingly from a persistent growth on the side of his face, which he never treated, nor had diagnosed. In explaining why he voluntarily suffered, he said simply: nudum Christum nudum sequere.I follow the naked Christ.
In what was his most provocative and perhaps final comment on the "pursuit of health," Illich wrote:
"Yes, we suffer pain, we become ill, we die. But we also hope, laugh, celebrate; we know the joy of caring for one another; often we are healed and we recover by many means. We do not have to pursue the flattening-out of human experience. I invite all to shift their gaze, their thoughts, from worrying about health care to cultivating the art of living. And, today with equal importance, the art of suffering, the art of dying."
Jerry Brown, governor of California from 1975 to 1983, is mayor of Oakland.
by Vijaya Nagarajan
In 1981, in the early summer before the monsoons, I met Ivan Illich in Tharamani, a village on the porous edges of the growing city of Madras (now Chennai) in the state of Tamil Nadu in southeastern India. It was the Illich of print I encountered under the large thatched roof of the library at the Murugappa Chettiar Research Centre, Photosynthesis and Energy Division (MCRC), an appropriate technology center.
Founded and directed in 1976 by C. V. Seshadiri, this place was an epicenter of activities of organic biodynamic gardening, solar energy, fish ponds, algae as nutritional supplements for poor schoolchildren, and countless other projects where young Indian men and women were giving their life energy to solve real problems in real places. As a research intern I was studying the effects of biogas plants on the accessibility of cow dung as domestic household fuel to those women who were still in the heart of the gift economy of the commons.
That summer, I often wore the traditional half-saris, most young Tamil women my age wore, signaling the state of post-menstruation and availability for possible marriage. However, at MCRC, I was surrounded by young hip people who were wearing blue jeans, smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky after work!
Having just turned twenty, I had come "home" to India to fulfill a childhood dream to return to India, work in its villages and serve its peoples. I had come from UC Berkeley where I was studying the political economy of natural resources. I had recently left the field of mechanical engineering because I had felt the gaze of engineering had left out the influence of culture, women, conflict resolution, and environment on technology.
Seshadiri's assistant director was assigned to help me set up my research project. During the very first week, when I had explained what I wished to do, he asked me with surprise and amazement, "You are from UC Berkeley, and you have not heard of Ivan Illich! Before you go and do any research in our village projects, you must understand the work of Ivan Illich!" Under his sharp scolding tutelage, I reluctantly studied Illich, beginning with Tools for Conviviality. I had come to India to be in and work in villages, not read books on the philosophy of technology. I planned to get through his writings as quickly as I could, so I could do the real work I had come to do.
I did not know that that book was one of the most difficult of his writings. I plunged in, bewildered, and excited. I had never read anyone like him before. He had a kind of engineering mind, but he applied it poetically to social problems. He analyzed transportation, communication, and modern technologies to illuminate the moment when they become counter-productive to the intentions of their inventors and the communities' needs.
He questioned my certainties: were cars the very "best" way to get around? what friendships did we lose when we no longer walked to do the toils of everyday life? who was doing the shadow work, the unpaid implicit economic work which supported our explicit paid economic work? In reading him, my own intuitions about the blind spots of my engineering training were illuminated as lightning flashes on the sea of my imagination.
I went back and forth between the work of reading Illich and the work of being and understanding village life in India. It was as if Illich's point of view came from the sophistication of an Indian villager in all its complexities and nuances, yet his thinking was rooted in modern, cosmopolitan life. I felt I had found an "intellectual" home, though I felt I only understood half of what he was trying to say.
Illich came lecture on Gender the year after I returned to Berkeley. I read the early draft of that manuscript, and it became the sharp anvil on which I struggled with my feminism, a fount of liberation for me. I argued with the expositions laid out in that work. Illich brought with him to Berkeley an extraordinary cluster of individuals from around the world. Some of them gave informal seminars on their work and its relationship with the theoretical foundations of Gender. As my work had focussed on women and energy issues, it made sense to attend the seminar on Gender and Tools run by Lee Swenson. He has become my compadre ever since; and an extraordinary husband and father of our twin girls, Jaya and Uma. So I must thank Ivan for gifting me my husband.
It is difficult to describe the energy and excitement of being a young Indian woman in Berkeley and encountering these unusually courageous individuals—men and women who were thinkers, but also doers, willing to go outside of institutional ways of thinking and being. They were committed to the "poor," but not in an "I am going to help you because I know what you need," but rather, in a dialogic, ongoing struggle to understand how we know what is needed, and how the imposition of felt needs creates its own despairs and sufferings.
I am an Indian and an American. From the first moment I met Illich, he seemed to intuit and accept my biculturedness. Whether I wore a sari, blue jeans, a sundress, or a salvaar kameez, it was as if his eyes looked inside and outside. His face, though tough on most people, was remarkably tenderhearted and generous when he looked at me. I felt loved by him. He was the rarest of teachers. He stretched you beyond your limits of understanding, nearly every time. He basked in the use of nearly twelve languages and they were sprinkled generously throughout his conversations, lectures, as if you, too, had a similar capacity.
He gave me many gifts for which there is no way to reciprocate. My mother, who had been raised in a village until she was a teenager, and had been taken out of school at a young age, was burdened by the judgements made of her by those of us who were schooled. It was an astounding experience, through Illich, to re-know my mother. It is a sad testimony of our modern educational system, but until then, I had never thought of her as rich of experience, wisdom, stories, culture, of magical intelligence.
Throughout the 1980's and the 1990's, my work with Lee on The Recovery of the Commons Project and the Institute for the Study of Natural and Cultural Resources involved hosting Ivan at numerous public and smaller community conversations in Berkeley. He stayed over many times in our home. During one period, I was working at the Red Star Yeast factory in West Oakland. He would come with Lee to drop me off at the factory at four in the morning for the early morning shift or late after midnight for the night shift. He wanted to see the assembly lines; he wanted to know how it felt to be in a physically challenging environment for eight hours a day. Whatever I was doing, he was curious about it and he wanted to learn from it.
In the fall of 1984, while we were visiting Ivan in Claremont, he looked at me and said, "I want to ask you about something after dinner." That evening, a unique conversation began. He excitedly showed me one of his footnotes on an index card, and said, "Do you know anything about the kolam?" I looked at him with surprise, "Oh, yes, I grew up with this ritual practice, it is just something my mother did every day, and there is really not much to say about it. But I could draw you some rice flour designs tomorrow at the front threshold before sunrise and you could ask me any questions you wish." The next morning, after I had drawn these designs, we sat on the raised plinths of the front threshold of the house, warming up in the rich darkness of that sapphire dawn sky. He barraged me with questions, none of which I could answer. With these initially unanswerable questions, he started me on my own pilgrimage. This trail led me to lecture on the kolam at the Smithsonian's Festival of and onto graduate school in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley emphasizing Tamil Culture, Folklore and Anthropology and Art History.
In December 1992, soon after I passed my oral doctoral examinations, I had a few days before I went off to India for my fieldwork for fourteen months. I told my husband over breakfast one morning, "I wish I could talk to Ivan about my work before setting off to India." The next day we got a phone call from him in Bremen, Germany, saying he was thinking of me all day the day before and wanted to come and see me for a few days. He came to Berkeley and we talked about the kolam and the study of Indian women for three days. I felt renewed and energized about my search for understanding what the kolam was.
When I returned from my long sojourn in India, I felt the strong need to speak to him again. My husband and I went down and stayed near his house in Cuernavaca. We saw him every day for ten days. He said, "I will give you two hours a day to discuss your work. Come with your questions." He pushed me about what I had learned and what I knew and what I did not and could not know. Over this period, he tried to convince me that my most productive work would be as an scholar in religious studies. I was taken aback and not swayed at all. It would be over three years before a series of chance encounters led me to my present work as a full-time professor in that field.
To me, Ivan Illich was a teacher, a friend. When I looked into his eyes, I felt a most amazing feeling in myself and the world; it was a world full of wonder, intelligence, and surprise, despair and sorrow, enchantment and disenchantment, simplicity and density, clarity and doubt. And it did not feel ambivalent. I felt that it was how the world in fact was and he reflected that in all its complexities. I miss him.
Vijaya Nagarajan is assistant professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco, and codirector of the Institute for Natural and Cultural Resources. Her book on the kolam, tentatively titled Drawing Desire, is being published by Oxford University Press. She is a member of Whole Earth's editorial advisory board.
by Lee Swenson
"I believe that if something like a political life is to remain for us in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship. Therefore my task is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships." —Ivan Illich
It was this very lived idea and practice of friendship that was one of the greatest gifts; among so many, that Ivan brought to his astonishingly diverse wold wide web of friends. Just as I sought out Ivan in Mexico while I was the Director of the Institute of the Study of Nonviolence in the late 1960's, so Ivan would knock on the door, anywhere in the world, of a writer that he was curious about. "Ah, El Nonviolento," he would joke with me as he whisked me into his library, his soft white serape flying out behind him, his huarachies car-tire soles squeaking as he flew across the red tiles.
Looking me deep in the eyes, his grand nose just inches away, his first question was a crisp, penetrating "Who are your authors?" My breath stopped a moment, thinking, "Who are my authors?"
From that day on my world was flooded with brilliant and subtle ideas as well as a vast bouquet of Ivan's friends of whom he would rattle off names, phone numbers (often wrong; he was strongly dyslexic). "This I who you must meet. Now!" And thirty years later, this circle of friends is still one of the deepest pleasures and catalytic parts of my intellectual and activist life.
Beginning in the late 1960's and on through the 1980's, Ivan would say to me, "I'll give you a week a year, for whatever you want to do with me. Any money you can gather from that, is for you and your work." So it would be a dense, tangled week. Lectures and talks at universities where there was a pot of money, the rest on a shoestring to cover the food and wine, many community gatherings- from early morning breakfasts, to late Italian style dinners with friends. Disciplined, focused, free. Ivan was a totally physical being. I think he came for these weeks to smell, to feel directly the visceral response of these ideas and questions – to see the deep pleasure of understanding. One hell of a week, and off Ivan would go till we met in Mexico, or Italy, or the East Coast.
An example of how Illich would continually create a table to gather around was in the Fall of 1982, when Ivan came to the University of California Berkeley as the Regents lecturer on his provocative work on Gender. It was held on Thursdays from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. so that more than half of the 700 people in the seminar came were working people and intellectual activists. Rather, they came from all over the Bay Area. Ivan took his Regents Lecture fee and rented a large house above the campus in the Berkeley Hills and invited a dozen friends/collaborators to live together for those four months. Friends came from Germany, Italy, Holland, Mexico, with two Americans. Ivan would replenish the bowl of food money on the kitchen counter so morning, noon, and late at night, there was an abundant table. It was mostly a German-Italian palate: breads, cheeses, pasta, adequate bottles of wine. Good breads and cheeses had just begun arriving in Berkeley. No one ate out and everyone helped serve everybody else and everyone helped clean up, including Ivan. There was always a plate, a bowl, a seat for you and visiting friends, who flowed in from the world. If one needed some extra help, Ivan might squeeze in a paying talk somewhere and pass along the money.
For me, the greatest gift of all was falling in love with an ebullient South Indian Tamil woman, Vijaya Nagarajan,. And a tender, gentle courtship it was. Many thresholds to learn of, to pause at and to slowly cross. Two strong, enduring marriages came out of that gang of twelve.
Ivan was thrifty, generous, catalytic, and usually socially wise on how to keep clusters of widely divergent souls thinking and working together. Through endless drafts and hard late night editing, Ivan would craft his groundbreaking books, along with so many classic essays. We are grateful to have had so many years together.
Lee Swenson is past director of the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence and the Farrallones Institute, and is codirector of the Institute for Natural and Cultural Resources.
by David Cayley
Corruptio optimi pessima. The corruption of the best is the worst. In this old adage, which goes back to the Middle Ages, Ivan Illich summed up his thought about the relations between Western civilization and the Christian gospel. Illich was a Christian, who understood Christianity as what he called "radical foolishness," but he felt that Christianity had been perverted through its institutionalization. When Jesus told the story of the Samaritan, the outsider, who stopped for a half-dead Jew in the ditch, he was indicating, according to Illich, a glorious new possibility and not an ethical norm. But the Christian church when it made common cause with the Roman Empire began to misunderstand the difference between conversion and compulsory care. The possibility inherent in the Incarnation of knowing God in one another became the possibility of a new, more intimate form of power exercised by those who believed they could guarantee, insure and institutionalize this possibility.
The Church in Illich's view was the template for the vast institutional architecture of modernity by which we are now gripped. In his books of the 70s he spoke to a social moment at which it seemed possible to believe that this grip could be released. He called for the disestablishment of schools and the demedicalization of health. Institutions like medicine and education, he argued, had reached a scale at which they defeated their own purposes and were now functioning as a counter-productive nemesis. His arguments gave heart to dropouts but had little enduring influence within these institutions. In Canada today, the proportion of public budgets devoted to "health care" has passed a third and is inching, health economists say, towards a half, and yet all agree that medical "needs" remain scandalously unmet and underserved. This situation would seem to virtually define what Illich called "medical nemesis," and yet Illich is never invoked in discussions of health. Or, if he is, as in a recent issue of the British Medical Journal, he is made an apostle of self-care as a solution to crippling costs, when he in fact he called for a much more radical demedicalization of living and dying.
After his period of "pamphleteering," as he called it, in the 70s, Illich in later books tried to search more deeply into the historical sources of our present day dilemmas. Some of these books like the wonderful In the Vineyard of the Text were hardly reviewed; and, when he died, the New York Times obituary made it sound as if he had already been dead for twenty years. ("Priest Turned Philosopher Appealed to Baby Boomers in 70s," NYTDec. 4, '02) But, for those who knew him, there was no one more alive. I would not have known how to wish for so surprising a friend. Muska Nagel, a nun at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, and an old friend of Ivan's, made a memorial card with a quotation from the Gospel of Luke (12:49): "I am come to cast fire unto the earth, and what will I but that it be enkindled." I can think of no more fitting obituary for a man who set fire to so many hearts.
David Cayley is the author of Ivan Illich in Conversation and producer of two five-hour radio series about Ivan Illich. He is working on a book based on transcriptions of conversations with Illich about his idea that modernity can only be understood as a perversion of Christianity.
by Lee Hoinacki
On Monday, December 2, 2002, Barbara Duden called me from Bremen, Germany. Here in Philadelphia where I now live it was about half-past twelve noon, and we were eating lunch. She said that Ivan Illich had died that morning.
Since I had seen Ivan in September, and since we had such a good talk at that time, I was reluctant to attend the planned funeral. Barbara would be surrounded by good friends.
That afternoon and evening I started calling and sending emails to people on this side of the Atlantic. One answer, for example, from Gustavo Esteva, contained a column for the Mexico City newspaper, Reforma on Ivan's death; he had already written this!
The next morning, I continued contacting people. In the afternoon a Bremen friend, Antje Menk called, saying that the young people there (Silja Samerski and Matthias Rieger, I guess) were insisting that I come, and she was sending a ticket. I was unable, then, to finish going through my list of people to notify.
I called Peter Bohn, another Illich friend in Philadelphia, since we had agreed to meet downtown the next day after a demonstration against the war in front of the Federal Building; I told him I was going to Germany and would not be there to meet him.
He said he, too, would check on a ticket. Later, he called back to say he had a ticket for me that evening to Frankfurt. Then Samar Farage called from Germany to say that they couldn't buy a ticket for me from that side of the Atlantic. I explained that Peter had just bought me an electronic ticket. I had a few minutes to pack and get to the airport.
Arriving in Frankfurt, I took a train to Bremen. In the train station, I was joyfully surprised to find Michael Aiwanger, a young friend, there to meet me. He took a chance that I would come in on that train! We walked to Barbara's home, getting there shortly after 3 p.m.
Michael had seen Ivan early Monday morning, and they talked about a seminar Ivan was to direct on the weekend. Ivan said he was tired and lay down on a futon in the living room. Michael left and, some minutes later Silja, who lives down the street, came in (she has a key to the house), and found him dead. Barbara, who was in Hanover at her teaching job, had spoken to Ivan on the phone about noon.
When I arrived at the house, each person, Barbara especially, warmly embraced me; I felt embarrassed by such a genuine outpouring of affection. I entered the front room and found the body of Ivan resting on the futon where he had died. A burning candle and cut flowers stood nearby ... a symbol of life ... an image of death.
Using the Breviary that contained the Latin Vulgate, the one Ivan and I said each day whenever we were together, I recited some of the Officium defunctorum,the office of the dead.
Wednesday evening was a time to greet old friends who had come for the wake and funeral. So many good people, all of whom had been introduced to me by Ivan since the time I first visited him in Germany in 1978 ... some now close friends.
Early Thursday morning we lifted the body into a plain wooden coffin, and the lid was screwed down with finger-nuts.
The large church of St. Johann was nearly filled the next morning for the Mass. Various friends of Ivan participated in the ceremonies, well arranged by Wolfgang Sachs. The pastor, Propst Ansgar Lüttel, who had been to see Ivan some days earlier, spoke the homily/eulogy, acknowledging his awareness of who the man, Ivan Illich, was.
Many of those at the Mass gathered in the chapel of the distant cemetery, Oberneuländer, for a short service, then proceeded to the gravesite for the burial. I was especially impressed by the ceremony in which each person present went up to the open grave and threw a handful of dirt on the lowered coffin; some also threw flowers.
All were then directed to a hotel for coffee and a bowl of soup. For some, it was the last event of the celebration, since they had to return to their jobs and homes.
My final feeling was one of joy. Various factors together, not in any order, contributed to this feeling. From reports of those persons who were present, the meeting between Ivan and Propst Lüttel, some days before Ivan's death, was most cordial and filled with understanding. In the light of this report, I must regard the visit, especially the time the two of them were together alone, as a grace-filled moment for Ivan.
At the church, just before the Mass, a young man came up to greet and embrace me. Almost ten years earlier there had been a serious break between him and Ivan ... from close intimacy to anger, distance, pain on both sides. He and Ivan never again spoke to one another.
Before and after the break, I visited him, stayed with his parents, and tried to be a friend; we had been quite close. Because of his lack of enthusiasm for my visits, several years ago I had stopped traveling to the town where he lived.
He traveled five hours to get to the funeral, and had to return home almost immediately after the ceremonies for his teaching duties the next day. He came back to Bremen to see me on Saturday and Sunday; we had long talks. I think that much of the woundedness that divided him and Ivan is now healed.
Another person, a young woman, was also bitterly estranged from Ivan. She had moved from a close friendship to a kind of smoldering anger. She and I had also been good friends, but I had not seen her for two or three years. While in Bremen, I sent her a greeting card, and received an immediate friendly reply by email (sent to the Illich email address). She was happy to hear from me, and invited me to come visit her and her family.
These three events were beyond what I could have hoped for ... they do not respond to my sense of causality ... they are, strictly speaking, gratuitous gifts, manifestations of a merciful Providence.
Well, maybe. They may also represent a kind of higher superstition, that is, my superstition. True, they are signs, but signs of what? I take them to be signs of grace. But the very fact that I interpret them in this way may indicate a superstitious need in me ... I need signs of grace (there's a hard saying in the New Testament in which the Lord rebukes those who seek signs; see, e.g. Mk. 8.12).
I regard these events as a blessing on Ivan's life, as indicating a good far beyond what even the most perceptive eulogists will be able to cite. They indicate the important aspect of Ivan's stance: How he stands before God ... (again, maybe!).
Ivan suffered from physical pain, which, as far as I could tell, was constant and almost unremitting ..., and this for some years. I think he also suffered certain effects from the opium that he took to help bear the pain, but as I don't know anything about the physical pain, I know even less about the effects of opium. He was also greatly and increasingly distressed in his attempts to be a friend to different people.
I think, however, beyond all the above, he experienced another terrible pain: the inability to say what he wanted to say: about the corruptio optimi, the misterium 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 ... and awful to witness. He who had said so much so well in his life was now unable to speak. And he was acutely aware of his inability to articulate what he vaguely felt to be the truth.
Given the other pains and sufferings, maybe especially the long-range effects of the opium, it was impossible for him ever to overcome this final confusion. Therefore, I felt it was good that he died sooner rather than later. In a sense, it was already years too late.
David Cayley is now working on some tapes he recorded in which Ivan attempts to make a last statement. I've read most of the transcripts and there are nearly insuperable problems ... of clarity and theological precision. But maybe Cayley can pull off what he did with the life and thought of Simone Weil! From her eminently difficult writings, he put together a magnificent intellectual/witness portrait.
So, my overall feeling is one of immense gratitude. Ivan Illich suffered various quite different kinds of pain in the days, weeks, months, and final years preceding his death. All that is now swallowed up in the fulfillment of his faith.
Lee Hoinacki
Philadelphia
January 2002
Social philosopher Lee Hoinacki, a former Dominican priest, university professor, and subsistence farmer, is author of Stumbling Toward Justiceand is coeditor of The Challenges of Ivan Illich.