"Get going, get going, and do not come back"

In a recent post here, 'The Brothers Karamazov' came up, and now, we've just stumbled onto yet another connection between Ivan Illich and that dark Russian novel. Time magazine has published online its 1969 story about Illich's having been confronted by Vatican officials and asked to defend himself against a series of charges. This was, of course, the confrontation that led to Illich's voluntarily withdrawing from the priesthood.

The story begins:

From the reception room of the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a waiting monsignor led the visitor to a turn-of-the-century elevator. They rode down several floors, walked through rooms lined with musty, leather-bound volumes, entered yet another gloomy room. Across a heavy wooden table, decorated only with an austere black crucifix, sat a man in a black, violet-trimmed cassock. The visitor presented himself. "I am Illich."

"I know."

"Monsignor, who are you?"

"I am your judge."

Thus began, last June, the Vatican examination of Monsignor Ivan Illich, 42, Vienna-born New York priest, linguist and controversial founder of one of Latin America's most promising experiments in social and cultural education, the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico. What began as a quiet investigation has blown into a full-scale and still unresolved controversy in the past few weeks.

The conclusion:

Some dismayed Catholics are hoping that the Vatican's order, not yet fully promulgated worldwide, might still be rescinded. That is doubtful, but there is at least a hint that the Illich affair was more than a little disturbing to Rome. Cardinal Seper's last words to him, Illich recalled with some amazement last week, were: "Get going, get going, and do not come back." They were, Illich noted, remarkably close to the last words spoken by the Grand Inquisitor to his prisoner, Jesus Christ, in the philosophical vignette from The Brothers Karamazov. In Dostoevsky's tale, Christ has returned to earth, and the Inquisitor decides to burn him because his ideas of freedom are too dangerous for the world. After receiving his sentence from the Inquisitor, Christ kisses him. The Grand Inquisitor, shaken, orders him out: "Go, and come no more—come not at all, never, never!"

Some Memories of Illich in New York City

We recently wrote here about Illich's time as a priest in northern Manhattan. While researching that item, we'd come across a bulletin board devoted to "Personal Memories of Growing Up in the Heights" - Washington Heights, that is, a neighborhood right near the George Washington Bridge. We posted a query on that board, asking if anyone remembered Father Illich. And today, we're pleased to share the first response, which is not only generous but quite interesting. Thank you, Mr. Stafford. (We've taken the liberty of tweaking the original text, here, solely to improve readability.)

Re(1): Rev. John Illich
Posted on April 2, 2011 at 10:22:49 AM by Frederick Stafford

I am pleased to share with you these few memories I have of Father Illych who made such a great impression on me when I attended New York City's Incarnation Grammar School during the mid-1950's.

He was a very young man when he came to Incarnation which he did, I believe, straight from the seminary. Incarnation Parish at that time was primarily Irish with few Hispanics, the Puerto Rican wave of immigration having only recently started (today, of course, even they have moved to Jersey and the parish is now almost entirely Dominican.) The priests themselves were all either from Ireland or of Irish descent except for Father Illych, whom we assumed to be Russian, and who stood out from his colleagues by reason of this difference.

He and another young priest, Father Conlin, were the favorite confessors of us boys as we knew them to be more lenient than their older colleagues, especially one older intemperate father often heard berating abashed sinners within his confessional. We knew we could count on these younger priests to dole out but the mildest of penances for our grievous sins. Father Conlin was popular too as he was not that much older than us and fond of sport, often joining us in games attired in his cassock; his was a sunny disposition whereas Father Illych always seemed to have a cloud of sorrow hanging over him, as though suffering for fallen humanity, much as Christ did.

His brow was always furrowed and his face etched with lines of worry. Once he was compelled by his superiors to administer a solemn oath to the congregation that we forebear attending the movie, Baby Doll, an order apparently much to his distaste but which he executed as if it were but one more burden that he must bear.

Another time he gave a sermon on the correct way to pray, cautioning us against the rote recitations and hastily rattled off prayers so typical of Catholics, at one point startling us all by raising his arms in aloft and crying out in as dramatic a demonstration from the pulpit as I have ever seen, "When you pray you must pray with all your heart! You must throw yourself down on your knees like this (he half-knelt so we could still see him in the raised pulpit) and cry out to God, 'Oh Lord, hear me! hear this prayer of a lowly sinner, I beg of You! Please God, please, please!' And there were tears in his eyes to match the emotion in his voice.

Years later when I read The Brothers Karamazov I imagined the saintly brother Alyosha as resembling Father Illych. I have read that novel numerous times over the years and it is always Father Illych's face that comes to mind when I get to Alyosha. I had assumed Father Illych was Russian and was surprised to learn that he was Austrian. Only once did I witness his short temper and that was exacerbated by my exceedingly lame pronunciation of Latin when he was training us boys to serve at the alter.

I was surprised to hear years later that he had left the priesthood, as I couldn't imagine him in any capacity other than as a man of God, and he never gave any indication of being the consummate scholar he indeed was. I never knew him that well and I doubt if he would ever have remembered me, but he made a great impression on me and many others to whom he represented something of an archetype.

Interestingly, Lee Hoinacki points to this same book, The Brothers Karamazov, in his essay, "Reading Ivan Illich," which serves as one of the introductions to The Challenges of Ivan Illich. "Illich was trained in ecclesiology and was especially intrigued by liturgy," he writes.

He understood, I would argue, that the most ominous expression of secularization in the West was not the death of nature (although this was related), nor a misnamed materialism, nor sexual “freedom,” but the decline of liturgy, the routinization and emptying out of religious ritual in the churches. As he suggests, this process began with clerical actions to establish various assured institutional responses to God’s calling, later legitimated by a juridical or legal order; men hesitated to rest all hope on gratuitous gifts of grace. Illich captures the dénouement of this lack of faith with the ancient Latin adage corruptio optimi quae est pessima (the corruption of the best turns out to be the worst). He has attempted to show that this apothegm accurately reveals the origins of “normative notions of a cruelty, of a horrifying darkness, which no other culture has ever known.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, portrays institutional mistrust as a demonic temptation in Ivan’s poem, “The Grand Inquisitor,” perhaps literature’s most terrifying image of the betrayal of the freedom graciously given to people by Jesus.

Illich video on YouTube

A video about Illich's life and thought, narrated in Spanish, has appeared on YouTube. We wish we could understand the narrator better.

"The necessity of straining the ear"

“Just before Christmas, 1952, while sitting in his office on the campus of Rutgers University, in New Jersey, Leopold Kohr uncovered the secret of the universe.

“Just after the Royal Wedding, 1981, while sitting in the Great Hall of City University in London, hundreds of people from about thirty nations gathered to hear Kohr’s explanation.

“Reading the book might have been easier.”

So begins “The Only Problem in the Universe,“ an article that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for May, 1982. Freelance journalist Rory O’Connor goes on to describe what took place at ”an intellectual jamboree” called the First Assembly of the Fourth World. The “center of attraction” at that event, which included a “curious mixture of ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural minorities, ranging from Celts and Kurds to Syrians and Scots”: none other than Ivan Illich.

Kohr, of course, is the author of The Breakdown of Nations, in which he argues that many, and perhaps all, social problems are the result of overgrowth - of the body politic growing too large for its own good. Easily the most succinct summation of Kohr’s ideas is the widely-touted phrase, “small is beautiful,” which is attributed to British economist E.F. Schumacher.

In 1994, Illich spoke in honor of his friend Kohr - they met in Puerto Rico - at a meeting of the E.F. Schumacher Society. Illich used that talk, available here, to put forth an engaging description of his own ideas about proportionality, or “fit,“ a key concept in his thinking about the modern world and its differences from the past and one for which he credits Kohr’s ideas about social morphology as a direct inspiration.

Two key words reveal Kohr’s thought, Illich writes:

Verhältnismässigkeit and gewiss. The first means proportionality or, more precisely, the appropriateness of a relationship. The second is translated as "certain," as when one says, "in a certain way." For example, Kohr would say that bicycling is ideally appropriate for one living in a certain place, like Oberndorf. An examination of this statement immediately reveals that “certain,” as used here, is as distant from "certainty" as "appropriate" is from "efficient." "Certain" challenges one to think about the specific meaning that fits, while "appropriate" guides one to knowledge of the Good. Taking both "appropriate" and a "certain place" together allows Kohr to see the human social condition as that ever unique and boundary-making limit within which each community can engage in discussion about what ought to be allowed and what ought to be excluded. To consider what is appropriate or fitting in a certain place leads one directly into reflection on beauty and goodness. The truth of one's resultant judgment will be primarily moral, not economic.

Another passage in this paper is one of our favorite statements by Illich that seems to summarize a key aspect of his thinking:

Ethics, in a strong tradition from Aristotle to Mandeville, involved a public controversy about the good to be pursued within a human condition and perhaps grudgingly accepted. Economics, however, demands the evaluation of desirable goals under the assumption of scarcity. It deals in the optimization of values; this leads to the creation of modern economic society, which provides seemingly unlimited fuel for a technological civilization. Such a civilization attempts to transform the human condition rather than debate the nature of the human good.

O’Connor’s account of Illich’s appearance at the meeting in London is great fun to read. We’re glad we clipped it from the magazine back when we were subscribers and managed to preserve the pages intact because somehow, copyright issues still prevent this period of The Atlantic from being available online.

First, O’Connor explains the irony of a gathering that seemed to have grown too large for its own good. Many of the scheduled forums overflowed with people, and moves were taken to split these meetings into ever-smaller units. Often, panels included representatives from many different parts of the world, not all of whom could speak English. May O’Connor forgive us for quoting him at such length:

“Frustration was high, and everyone looked forward to the next morning’s open plenary session, when the unpredictable Illich was scheduled to chair a panel including Kohr, [poet Jeff] Nuttall, and Mildred Loomis, an American ‘decentralist’ theoretician, among others.”

After listening to the panelists, Illich seized control of the proceedings and commenced an infuriating but brilliant oration in which he tried to summarize everything that had been said. His first step was to reject the use of the microphone, castigating it and those who employ it as anti-democratic. If some people in the room could not hear him, Illich maintained, it was because the group was too large.

The assembly he was addressing, Illich claimed, was precisely the right size. “Fifty percent more, and only somebody with a carefully trained voice, specializing to be a politician, would reach then entire group - would dominate.” Of equal importance, however, was “the necessity of straining the ear. It is the best way I know … to really … find out what the person has to say - instead of just letting him irrigate me with words.”

Soon thereafter Illich became infuriated. The occasion was an offhand remark by Jeff Nuttall about “producing ideas.” Illich was incensed when he heard this, and promptly informed Nuttall: “As soon as I am out of the chair, I will take you apart …. Produce ideas … How far can we go?” Illich demanded caustically. “We are not machines!” Language, it turns out, is at the center of Illich’s current work. “If I have problems with a Fourth World, it is that for me a livable world is a world of vernaculars.”

There followed a spellbinding analysis of the purpose and meaning of the assembly, delivered extemporaneously by Illich. “I do not think that producing thoughts fits into any vernacular,” he began. “To apply the term ‘production’ - forgive me for this precision in speech - means to totally misunderstand what is going on. … The term ‘production’ means that you can distinguish between ‘production’ and consumption - and I have no intention of consuming your ideas.”

Illich meant that anyone who wanted to live in a Fourth World where production was necessary could count him out. He employed a technique he called a “subjective appropriation” of everything he had already heard at the assembly to expand this idea. He then summarized the distinctions contributed by five speakers who concerned themselves with what he called “environmental thinking.”

“The next distinction which I heard,” Illich continued, “was … between taught mother tongue and vernacular … a vernacular movement. People who speak one vernacular know that nobody else understands them ever as well as they themselves speak it, because a vernacular you pick up only by listening to people who really say something to each other.”

“Finally, we had someone speak about meaning, sense, as opposed to what is rational,” Illich concluded. “A vernacular environment is profoundly irrational. The term ‘rational,’ when used in the social sciences … means precisely the destruction of that irrationality on which understanding between vernacular people can happen … It’s in a different order.

“I’ve said all this because I have serious problems when the term ‘environmental thinking,’ or ‘ecological thinking,’ is used. Environment usually is conceived as a new kind of professional’s perception of space, which shall be better than that which we have …”

“This way I summed up what went on in my own mind while I listened in a very subjective way to the other speakers this morning,” Illich added. “Because I am working at this moment on an attempt to describe three major, so-called environmental concerns …

“The first one is concerned with the biological environment. … Environmental managers [are] concerned to maintain biological destruction below that level beyond which the industrial system would break down. … A second concern for which you gave for me a very beautiful summary … [is] that growth in product does not only deplete biological and physical resources, both in production and circulation of those resources, but that any kind of growth takes, beyond a certain level, out of the environment precisely those utilization-values which would make it possible for people to get along without further products.”

The third concern, and one that is crucial to Illich’s current intellectual endeavors, is sexism. “I believe that sexism … is a necessary consequence of the splitting of production from consumption,” Illich remarked. “The moment you say ‘producing thought,’ I think already of an erect penis. And the destruction of the conditions for gendered existence is one more … major, converging concern of the environment.”

At that, the assembly seemed to take a collective deep breath and broke for lunch.

An hour later, it was back to the Great Hall for more debate about the propriety of using a microphone. Illich came under increasing attack. The ruckus began when the towering Nigerian Jimoh Omo Fadaka started to use the microphone to ask a question of Illich.

“Stop!” Illich shouted at him. “I cannot believe that you, a member of the Third World, are trying to use this technology. It is not necessary.”

After a time, however, it became apparent that those in the back of the Great Hall could not possibly understand Fadaka’s thickly African-inflected speech without mechanical assistance, and cries of “We can’t hear you!” wafted toward the front until Fadaka finally decided to ignore Illich’s advice.

“We are not interested in such false disputes,” he began. “We are interested in finding solutions to our problems, and we want you to tell us exactly the mechanics of getting there from here. We may or may not decide to agree with you, but we can at least discuss the mechanics … You seem too interested in theory … Can you please give us an idea as to how to get there?”

“Forgive me for being so precise as to harp on this, too,” Illich answered carefully. “I do not have the slightest idea as to what any one of you should do. I do not know what I should do. I know what I have to abstain from - and I have to abstain from speaking to people who can see me through a microphone. You might tell me this is too simple-minded, right? It’s a tiny little thing … for those of you who feel it, it says two dozen other things. And for those who believe that speaking is a production of messages to communicate, it makes no sense!”

Fadaka began to reply, but was again interrupted. “We can’t hear you!” came the chant from the back of the Great Hall. Grasping the microphone, the African told Illich he could not accept what Illich had to say, because ‘if there are difficult solutions to different problems, then there is no point in coming here to discuss them to each other! We might as well go back to where we came from.”

Illich agreed, at least partially. “There might be less sense in coming together than the ‘meeting industry’ assumes. I myself am very, very happy to be here, and I find that the style … this atmosphere of people talking to each other, freely and without feelings of inferiority, is very beautiful … but when [Anglican priest and prominent Fourth World activist] John Papworth first invited me: ‘No, not a Fourth World jamboree! I won’t come!’ … The airplanes are run for the meeting industry.”

Suddenly a well-dressed Englishman in the back of the hall stood up and asked a question. “Your objection to the use of a microphone … I find very difficult to reconcile with the fact that you are wearing the product of high technology - to wit, a pair of spectacles. … How can you [defend this]?”

“Sir, this question was first placed by Goethe, [who] refused in his presence people who wore spectacles,” Illich responded, “because he felt they should see him as clearly or as fuzzily as their nature allowed. I find this very beautiful …”

“I’m afraid I cannot accept that, whatever Goethe says,” his questioner shot back. “You haven’t answered the question I asked.”

“Forgive, I will try to answer in a less Jewish, less metaphorical way," said Illich, as eyebrows shot up around the room. ”I draw the line in my saying of no to television. … I am not a puritan. I believe in dirty, small, forever-courageous attempts of unplugging myself. I purposely, at a meeting which is concerned with scale, try to eliminate the tool which makes the human voice limitless in its reach, because I do believe that now - we have both very good voices - we are aware of three things when we talk without a loudspeaker. We are both aware how distant we are from each other, we are both aware of the limitations a group can have, and, even more importantly, we are both aware of the relative advantage which our personality gives us over [others].”

The debate over the uses of the microphone marked the high point of the assembly, in a sense. Paradoxically, the large-group gatherings seemed to be working better than the small-group forums, some of which were becoming increasingly torn by strife and others of which were falling apart from lack of either interest or focus. Illich went off to spend the rest of his time at a forum on education, which devolved, by reason of his overwhelming personality, into a lecture about his ideas on the necessity of deschooling society, punctuated by occasional questions from the moderator, Henryk Skolimowski - a lecture that was alternately thought-provoking and incomprehensible. (When one poor soul in the education forum interrupted Illich to inform him that she hadn’t understood a word that he said, he snapped back, “I am not trying to communicate with you!” and continued his previous thought.)

The article goes on to describe how, from there on out, the Fourth World assembly devolved into “something that resembled a Marx Brothers movie more than a solemn conclave on pressing world issues.” Disgruntled attendees stormed out, attempts to call votes came to nothing, some people just sat in a circle, holding hands and chanting ”om.”

“Nothing was decided, nothing was declared, and nothing, in fact, was done,” O’Connor writes.

As we understand it, the Fourth World movement went on to spawn a good deal of thinking and activism, even as the term itself, Fourth World, lost much precision as it got adopted by a widening range of groups and activists. John Papworth’s magazine, Resurgence, continues to publish, for instance. And all the while, a key figure in the U.S.'s nascent fourth World movement has been Kirkpatrick Sale, a writer and a devotee of Kohr who has published a good deal about human-scale technology and communities and who has played a leading role in arousing Vermonters to secede their state from the Union. Mr. Sale's forward to a 1978 reprint of The Breakdown of Nations is well worth a look.

In the early 1980s, we had the fortune of hearing Mr. Sale introduce Leopold Kohr in the auditorium of P.S. 41, a primary school on West 11th St. in Greenwich Village. This, Mr. Sale told the small audience, was Kohr’s “first and only New York appearance.“ Just in from Dover in the U.K., where he’d opened a meeting of the Greens, Kohr told us that he’d been “stone deaf” for 40 years, but he went on for a good hour or so to speak in a lively way - through microphone and loudspeaker - about the “terrible seductiveness of bigness.”

“Smallness,” he said, “is a law of nature. Man is the measure of all things.”

And then, with Mr. Sale serving as his amplifier, Kohr took questions from the floor.

Illich as a young priest in Manhattan

Ivan Illich left Europe for America in 1951, aiming to pursue post-graduate studies at Princeton University. The plan was to work with a rich collection of materials pertaining to the practice of alchemy in the Middle Ages. One of Illich's earliest and most important teachers, the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, held a post at the Institute for Advanced Studies, just down the road from the university.

Almost immediately upon his arrival in New York City, however, Illich quite literally took a radical turn. Instead of settling in Princeton, 50 miles to the south in central New Jersey, he took the 'A' train to northern Manhattan. And there, for the next 5 years, he would serve as a parish priest, paying most of his attention to the neighborhood's burgeoning population of Puerto Ricans. And it was this ministry, writes Christopher Shannon in a 2004 essay, "The Death and Rebirth of Ivan Illich," appearing in a Web publication called Books & Culture, "that provided the intellectual foundation for all his subsequent writings."

While visiting family friends in New York, he would later tell interviewers, Illich had heard from an African-American maid about mounting tension between the city's blacks and the many newly-arrived Puerto Ricans. Curious, Illich visited a then-thriving Puerto Rican street market in East Harlem and very quickly, these Caribbean immigrants struck him as more fascinating than medieval alchemists. The market was La Marqueta, originally a gathering of Italian-owned pushcarts that eventually consisted of nearly 500 vendors crammed into five buildings situated beneath the elevated railroad tracks running up Park Ave. between East 111th and 116th streets.

[Photos, from top): Bettman/Corbis (1968); http://www.literanista.net; NY State Archives]

Puerto Ricans had moved to the city in large numbers during WW2, many of them to work in jobs previously held by men and women fighting overseas. After the war, many of these new workers stayed on, but in New York City, they didn't fit the typical immigrant mold, as would soon be portrayed so memorably in the Broadway musical West Side Story. From the song "America":

Boys: I think I go back to San Juan

Girls: I know a boat you can get on

Boys: Everyone there will give big cheer

Girls: Everyone there will have moved here

Because New York was only a few hours' flight from the Caribbean, Puerto Ricans didn't necessarily consider the mainland their permanent home, as had most of their European predecessors, whose journey involved many days on a ship. What's more, their ways of living were new to New York. In, Puerto Rico, daily life was spent mainly outside, in a sunny clime and mostly around, not within, small, relatively flimsy homes. (Why build permanently in the face of frequent hurricanes?) But now, their eating, socializing, and playing games, and their children playing so openly out in front of apartment buildings was not always appreciated by their New York neighbors.

Using his connections with the New York diocese under Cardinal Spellman, Illich managed to get himself posted to a church where he might serve these newcomers as well as learn more about their culture. He was named an assistant priest at Incarnation Parish, located on St. Nicholas Ave. at 175th St., practically in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge. Here is the church as seen in 1957:

Incarnation had long served a flock of fairly conservative Irish. Washington Heights, as the neighborhood was called, also had become home to a fair number of Germans, many of them Jews who'd fled to America before the world war. (Among them, as we recall, was the family of Henry Kissinger.) Eventually, Illich's mother would move to this neighborhood, too, and spend her last years there. (Interestingly, in light of Illich's enduring interest in the Middle Ages, The Cloisters, a marvelous museum devoted to that era, is in this neighborhood, a few blocks to the north of the bridge on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River.) Like many NYC neighborhoods, Washington Heights saw many of its residents eventually leave, but they took with them many memories, as seen here. (The neighborhood is largely Latino, now, but last we visited, a few Irish bars were still operating and in the park that surrounds The Cloisters, German was still to be heard occasionally.)

Illich's time at Incarnation is recounted with much color by Francine du Plessix Gray in her 1970 book, Divine Disobedience. She recalls how the pastor of Incarnation, a Monsignor Casey, thinking that the name Ivan sounded "Communist," insisted that his new curate call himself John Illich.

John Illich's energy and devotion at Incarnation became legendary, Gray reports. One of his colleagues there told her that "living in the same parish with John Illich was 'like riding a Piper cub with an atom bomb under the seat.' Illich climbed stairs three at a time and never walked through the rectory, but swept through it like a tornado. He rose earlier, questioned more, worked harder for the Puerto Ricans than any man in the diocese. ... The Puerto Ricans idolized him ... he was Mr. Puerto Rico, their Babe Ruth."

In 2003, we came across a memoir of growing up Catholic in Washington Heights in the 1950s, by a Richard O'Prey. (This memoir no longer exists as we found it, but it has been archived in the Wayback Machine, an archive of old websites. Mr. O'Prey also seems to have published it in book form.) He recalled Illich as an erudite priest - though it appears he may have misremembered Illich's story about fleeing pursuers of some sort; if Illich was forced to escape anyone, it was likely the Nazis:

Father Ivan Illich, a fugitive from the Iron Curtain, was the final
member of the staff at Incarnation. Father Illich spoke heavily accented
English, but he was reputed to be an intellectual. In later years, he
would prove that assertion by writing several books on education and
Church reform. In the early 1950s he contented himself in saying Mass
with a piety and deliberation that went far beyond his peers. No one
could accuse him of garbling his Latin or hurrying the rubrics of the
Mass. His account of eluding border guards and escaping the Iron
Curtain, was fascinating. It also humanized the conflict that we heard
about in Europe. For his bravery and audacity, he won our respect and
admiration.

Here is what appears to be the New York Times' first mention of Illich, in March, 1953:

Serving society couples, we imagine, was only a sideline. Illich's main accomplishments were in and on behalf of the Puerto Rican community, which still, if unknowingly, celebrates his remarkable efforts almost 60 years later. Illich was instrumental in bringing that struggling community into the fold of the wealthy, Irish-dominated New York diocese. Caribbean and Latin American Catholics celebrated their religion quite differently from Europeans, singing different songs, interpreting the images and lives of certain saints quite differently, and even understanding the hours of the day in a different way. (Illich understood that it was too much to expect islanders to arrive for Mass "on time" with the same precision that most New Yorkers took for granted.) Unlike many of his fellow churchmen, Illich actually bothered to learn the Spanish language - very well and incredibly quickly, Gray reports. The diocese sent him to a Berlitz course downtown, but Illich breezed through those lessons and found the best language training to be simply mixing with his parishioners out in the streets. (It helped, we imagine, that he already knew Italian.) Equally important, he made a point of getting to know the culture of Puerto Rico, from his parishioners and by spending summer vacations on the island, owning a shack there and traveling its rural byways on horseback and by foot.

It was during one of these visits that he learned of a man who would be tremendously influential. This was sociologist Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, S.J., whom we've written about here recently. As Mr. Shannon tells it in his "Death and Rebirth" article, which reviews a collection of essays published in 2002, The Challenges of Ivan Illich, Fitzpatrick helped greatly to further Illich's education. With a degree from Harvard, Shannon writes,

Fitzpatrick was among the first generation of Catholic priests who saw immersion in secular learning as essential to the task of making the Church relevant to the modern world. [...] Though educated to the highest European standards in history and philosophy, Illich actually knew little of modern social theory; Fitzgerald modestly takes credit for introducing Illich to the works of Durkheim, Weber, and the other great writers of modern sociology. [...] On one of his visits [to P.R.], Illich learned of Fitzgerald as the only other New York-based clergyman to go to Puerto Rico to study the cultural background of the immigrants. Back in New York, Illich and Fitzgerald struck up a friendship and began to collaborate on a variety of innovative pastoral projects.

Shannon sees the Illich-Fitzpatrick partnership working in ways that differed significantly from other Church-led social-reform efforts of the time:

Against the assimilationist ethos of the early civil rights movement and anticipating the Second Vatican Council's endorsement of "inculturation," Illich argued that the Church could best serve the newly arrived Puerto Ricans by helping them to sustain their traditional liturgical and devotional practices in their new environment. Unlike the progressive, "social justice" Catholicism of the late 1960s, Illich saw culture, rather than economic inequality, as the starting point in the pastoral care of the poor. [In Challenges, Illich collaborator Lee] Hoinacki notes Illich's academic training in the history of liturgy, and argues that Illich "understood … that the most ominous expression of secularization in the West was … the decline of liturgy, the routinization and emptying out of religious ritual in the churches." The liturgical lens through which Illich read modernity may account for the difficulty so many secular intellectuals have had in understanding, much less accepting, his social critique.

[...]

At the heart of Illich's pastoral vision lay the conviction that ministering to the poor requires not so much service as presence. Illich sought not to help the poor, but to be poor. Being poor meant many things, from the biblical ideal of the poor in spirit to a more anthropologically informed notion of cultural poverty, or the abdication of one's cultural assumptions in order to immerse oneself in the life of the poor. Fitzgerald and Illich sought to embody this ministry of presence in their first collaborative outreach project, El Cuartito de Maria, or The Little House of Mary. Illich arranged for Incarnation to rent an apartment in one of the tenements heavily populated with Puerto Rican (potential) parishioners. Women from the parish volunteered to watch and play with children so that mothers could work or run errands, but the purpose of the project was neighborly rather than vocational. Illich insisted that establishing personal relationships with the immigrants was a more important ministry than any program of material or spiritual uplift.

"By the standards of 1950s social work," Shannon explains, "El Cuartito de Maria did not do much to improve the lives of the poor, but then that was never Illich's intention. Much to the confusion of his church colleagues, and later his secular interlocutors, Illich rejected not only the idea of improvement, but the very language of doing and making, both of which he saw undermining authentic human relationships in the modern world."

From what we've read, especially in The Rivers North of the Future, where Illich elaborates on the parable of the Good Samaritan, this observation rings quite true. Authenticity in relationships - true friendship, as he might have put it - is precisely what Illich idealized in opposition to the "liberal fantasy" of treating and understanding people as mere instances of a class that experts view as needy of professional therapies and services. The idea of Illich rejecting "the very language of doing and making" is not one we've heard before, but it does seem to resonate with Illich's idea of foregoing power in favor of informed, contemplative, fully aware impotence.

We recently came across Fitzpatrick's side of the story, as related in his own book The stranger is our own: reflections on the journey of Puerto Rican migrants. A good chunk of this book is available via Google Books, and on page 16, we read of the two men's first encounter:

In the spring of 1953, I was sitting in my office in Keating Hall when Father William Lynch, S.J., then editor of Thought, the Fordham University Quarterly, came into my office. He said: "There is a young priest in my office and he would like to meet you. His name is John Illich." ... And so I met the man who was to have a profound influence on me and on the Church during my generation. I walked into Father Lynch's office and I was immediately struck by the appearance of the man: tall, exuding energy and tension, and intense in conversation. "I followed you all over Puerto Rico," he said, "and I read the report you left with Bishop Davis. You are the one person I wanted to meet when I came back." [...] He then described for me his whirlwind month in Puerto Rico. It was far different from mine during which I was accompanied from door-to-door of prominent people, introductions arranged ahead of time. Illich walked over miles of rural roads, took to horseback, visited towns in remote mountains and crowded urban barrios. In his conversation with me, he began to comment on the customs and culture of the people. For a person who was neither an anthropologist nor sociologist, his perception of the culture and lifestyle of the Puerto Ricans was remarkable. I said to myself, "This is a man I want to keep in touch with." We talked for almost two hours, during which I learned many things I had not known about aspects of Puerto Rican life. After he left, Father Lynch asked me, "What is your impression?" I don't know what it was that prompted me to say it; I know nothing at the moment of Illich's background. I replied, "Bill, he reminds me of some of my brilliant Jewish intellectual friends. I wonder if there is something Jewish about him!" Years later, I was to meet his mother and learn that she came from Sephardic Jewish ancestry. She had become a Catholic to marry Illich's father and she remained a devout Catholic until her death.

Fitzpatrick also recalls the creation of what he calls El Cuartito de la Santisima Virgen, or "The Little Room of the Most Holy Virgin": Illich "encouraged a group of the young women to fix up the apartment with pictures and items reminiscent of Puerto Rico, and just be there to allow the children and mothers to come by, to mind the children when mothers went shopping; in brief, to create a familiar, neighborhood place where the people could gather with no formality, but which was carefully organized by the young women. ... It was a remarkable example of receiving the Puerto Ricans as our own, in a situation where they were very much at home among their own. After Illich left Incarnation parish and went to Puerto Rica (November 1956), the interest faded and eventually El Cuartito disappeared."

Fitzpatrick recalls working with Illich on a "slide show" to help migrant workers in New Jersey "in their social and religious life. Illich conceived of an arrangement of slides depicting experiences of the farm workers, and a cassette which would provide an explanation for the workers of the experiences depicted in the slides. We worked very hard on this. I wrote the text for the cassette. ... At the last moment, it never came off. ... It was a brilliant Illich idea which, for some reason, was aborted." (We imagine that Fitzpatrick probably meant simply a tape recorder, not a cassette, for the latter had yet to be invented.)

Illich's real triumph regarding the city's Puerto Ricans - and the New York diocese itself - was the San Juan Fiesta. As Fitzpatrick describes it, this was a celebration in honor of the patron saint of Puerto Rico. It had begun in 1953 and continued for two years in St. Patrick's Cathedral, down on Fifth Ave. "Illich said this was ridiculous and that a fiesta like this should be held outside with processions and civic celebrations." And so, in 1956, the event was moved to the Fordham campus, up in The Bronx, complete with a large procession and Mass celebrated by Cardinal Spellman - a key backer of Illich then and when he had moved on to Mexico - and even a sermon given by Spellman in Spanish. Thanks partly to Illich's touring Puerto Rican neighborhoods with a sound truck, some 30,000 people showed up for this event - a good ten times more than had been predicted by one church official.

This event made Illich nothing less than a hero within the diocese, for he had managed to bring off a rapprochement between the Puerto Rican flock and the Irish-led diocese in way that surprised both sides. In fact, this yearly event continued to be held year after year, every June 24, more or less, and it continues today, more or less. It's now known as the Puerto Rican Day Parade and it's held in June on Fifth Ave. by Central Park.

Illich's triumph led to his being named as vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. And his taking that post, Fitzpatrick recalls, seemed to be appropriate, given South America's increasing importance to the U.S. and the Church and the potential for Puerto Rico to serve as a bridge between the two continents. Here is how the New York Times covered the news:

As anyone who has read much about Illich knows, his time in Puerto Rico was fertile yet stormy. Spellman visited the island and thanks to Illich, was received with thousands cheering his motorcade's entry into San Juan. It was in Puerto Rico, too, that Illich and Fitzpatrick co-wrote (with a William Ferree) a book called Spiritual care of Puerto Rican Migrants, which is available for viewing on Google Books (Google sells this book in electronic form, too, for $10.) It also was in P.R. that Illich had his first close look at - and serious doubts about - compulsory schooling, a line of thinking that eventually led to Deschooling Society. (Someone named Anandita Bajpai did their master's thesis in 2008, at the University of Vienna, about The Catholic Church as an Education Provider in Puerto Rico 1948-1960; it's available online in PDF format. The thesis advisor: Prof. Dr. Martina Kaller-Dietrich, the author, in 2008, of a biography of Illich.)

And it was in Puerto Rico, too, that Illich ran afoul of Church authorities when he publicly argued against their plans to start a political party opposed to birth control. Illich believed the Church had no business getting involved in politics, especially at a time when there was so much controversy over a Catholic (John F. Kennedy) running for president of the U.S. The resulting controversy led Illich to leave not only his university post but the island of Puerto Rico itself. Working with Fitzpatrick, he selected Cuernavaca, Mexico, as home for the Center for InterCultural Documentation, or CIDOC, which would remain there until its voluntary closing in 1976.

Interestingly, while Incarnation's own website cites the church's role in the history of Puerto Ricans in New York, it makes no mention at all of either John or Ivan Illich.

Illich in Bali - on art, gender, and education

"In 1978, I spent a week in a village on the island of Bali. I dropped into a small place, off the beaten track, and arrived there at just the right moment, on the one August moon of the century when the earth is purged of every last dead body. In all the cemeteries men rooted through the soil digging up their ancestors. Some pulled out white bones, while others unearthed still-mouldering corpses. The women stood there to take charge of this prize. They washed the ancestors in firewater, wrapped them into packages of cotton cloth and bound them together with paper streamers. Altogether it was a festive affair.

"I had found a room in the village headman’s second household. We became acquainted and I learned that he truly reigned over the community. During the Indonesian bloodbath of 1967, he had had 217 people shot, ‘enemies’ he called them. Now, twelve years later, he did his duty and financed their appropriate cremation. Proudly he pointed to the bales of cotton and the sacks of sugar that he was donating for the occasion. In Bali it takes many yards of cloth and many pounds of rice cake for a dignified end.

"From the balcony of his secondary wife’s house, I watched the road on which the dead were making their last trip; from the cemetery they were carried to their home for a visit, and after a short stay the heavy catafalque was brought to the river, down where the pyre was ready. During the few days I watched, about three dozen processions danced by. They all moved to the traditional sound of the gamelan. However, the processions were of two very different kinds: only a few were led by living gongs; the rest danced to synthetic music. Two profoundly different things were going on down there, on the road winding through the rice paddies, two things as different as those which the shoptalk of educators confuses under the term, ‘process’. And I find myself unable to use the single term, ‘product’, to designate their respective outcomes. My first task, therefore, is to make the distinction between intransitive life and a transitive process, between the art of living (which always includes the art of suffering and of dying) and art which I can recognize as a product. I know that the distinction is difficult to make in modern languages. Nevertheless, it is an obvious and ominous distinction."

So begins a remarkably journalistic and stylish essay by Ivan Illich, delivered to a gathering of art teachers in 1981, in Rotterdam. We're excited to have just discovered the existence of this paper, which as far as we can tell has evaded Illich's bibliographers. Its title: "Arts Education: Process and Product." Originally published in the Journal of Art & Design Education, it's available from something called Wiley Online Library. (That Illich's work appears in a journal about art education fits a pattern, of sorts. During the early 1980s, we'd often browse New York City's better, more eclectic magazine shops, confident we'd find some new essay of his. He appeared in a short-lived journal called Democracy, for instance, and in The Progressive, and perhaps in others.)

Illich continues: "Down there, coming out of a bamboo grove, half a dozen funerals danced as tradition had always demanded. They came with a big drum, suspended on sticks between the two bearers; they came carrying five gongs, each of a different size, and swinging bells. I could not distinguish the orchestra’s sound from the steps of the dancers, nor from the swinging of the dead body in its catafalque. It was all one event which I watched, making one effect with the art work of the paddies and the gods of Bali, dressed up for the occasion in grey and white chequered aprons. What happened there was one intransitive event. Only the bifocal lenses of a systems analyst could project into this occurrence a distinction of process and product. And the ordinary agglutinative speech of Indonesia is even less fitted than our inflected languages to make such a distinction."

Process and product, it turns out, are the themes of this art teachers conference, which has invited Illich as its keynote speaker. He goes on to explain that as he sees it, the traditional "art of living" involves neither process nor product. And he contrasts that with the modern way of education. "Education is an ERSATZ as much as prostitution or the police," Illich writes. "The less of these a society has, a society needs, the better off it is."

He recalls a week's vacation in Bali - with a friend named Franca - and his search for the "double ikat," a special kind of tie-dyed cloth that had become quite rare by that time and that he sees as "a supreme expression of vernacular art." He goes on to tell his audience about his memories of the art teachers he met years before in Puerto Rico, where he'd helped to run the educational system. "One thing I learned is to have an immense respect for the art teachers," especially those teaching in poorer schools. "Who were they, these strange people? More often than not, they were women. They taught elementary classes, and their pupils looked forward to the art class. These women gave the impression of cultivating their pupils’ art of living rather than teaching them. And in every instance I can remember, the colleagues of such an art teacher looked at her askance, and considered her a nut to be tolerated, if not a criminal whose influence on the children ought to be counterbalanced."

Illich moves to explain that the "art of living never has been a human art. It is not an art which modern man can practice. It has never been a genderless art. The art of living has always been ‘gendered’. ... The art of living and the art of being part of a gender coincide. As the vernacular ikat is woven of warp and weft, so each vernacular language is woven of two kinds of speech: the speech of men and that of women. Only the foreigner hears a common ‘language’. The speech of men is learned by boys, that of women by girls; they are very often quite different from each other."

And this helps to explain why it is that so many art teachers observe, with great sadness, their young students losing their interest in painting, and drawing, and sculpting just as they approach puberty - "a break, a drying up, a loss of confidence, a shrivelling." These children, Illich argues, are dealing with the fact that the initiation ritual that once affirmed the gender line separating men and women has been turned inside out. "What is now called puberty is the inverse of what was formerly an initiation ritual. With puberty, male and female children are both supposed to become equally human. Both are supposed to be equally productive workers, to compete for the same genderless jobs, producing the same genderless commodities to meet the same genderless needs. Puberty means the mere sexual maturity of economic neuters. And all too often the art teacher supports this process." [emphasis in original]

"Education," Illich writes, "could be defined as the process by which young people are trained into genderless competence for genderless work, as the process by which men and women are forced to look at their own reality through the genderless telescopes of their tutors, or considered as the process through which men and women are ‘humanised’, turned into humans, made into people, true men. Therefore, education can be seen as the process whose product is ‘modern man’, even though half the species is and remains, at least vestigially, of the female sex."

Illich on "alienation" - 1973

We've just found another paper by Ivan Illich that, as far as we can tell, is not listed in any of the more-or-less official bibliographies of his work. From 1973, it's entitled "An expansion on the concept of alienation." The paper appeared in The Journal of Social Philosophy for January of that year (Vol. 4, Issue 1), which Wiley made available online in 2008.

We've not yet seen the paper in its entirety, but it starts off, at least, as a somewhat dismayed reaction by Illich to the reception of his book Deschooling Society. "As the hidden curriculum moves out of the darkness and into the twilight of our awareness, phrases such as the "deschooling of society" and the "disestablishment of schools" become instant slogans," he writes. "I do not think these phrases were used before last year. This year they have become, in some circles, the badge and criterion of the new orthodoxy. Recently I talked by amplified telephone to students in a seminar on deschooling at the Ohio State Ujniversity College of Education. ... "

More from the first page: "The [Marxist] concept of alienation cannot help us understand the present crisis unless it is applied not only to the purposeful and productive use of endeavor, but also to the use made of men as the recipients of professional treatments. ... Schools have alienated man from his learning. He does not enjoy going to school; if he is poor he does not get the reputed benefits; if he does all that is asked of him, he finds his security constantly threatened by more recent graduates; if he is sensitive, he feels deep conflicts between what is and what is supposed to be. He does not trust his own judgement and even if he resents the judgement of the educator, he is condemned to accept it and to believe himself that he cannot change reality. ... Today, it is relatively easy to get wide agreement on the fact that gratuitous, compulsory schooling is contrary to the political self-interest of an enlightened majority. ... Proponents of recorded, filmed and computerized instruction used to court the schoolmen as business prospects; now they are itching to do the job on their own. ...

Here is the facsimile of the opening page that Wiley makes available online:

Speaking of "empty liturgy"

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times writes today about a new app for the iPhone that's designed to help Catholics prepare for the confession box. The software walks a person through a questionnaire based on "the Ten Commandments, your examination of conscience and any 'custom sins' you might have." Thus, women get asked about abortion, men about masturbation. Once his or her sins have been enumerated, the parishioner can consult these findings during confession and make their time with a priest more efficient.

Writes Dowd: "At least we know now that Nietzsche was wrong. God isn’t dead. His server may be down though."

Illich in Italy

One of the more intriguing organizations we've come across in our travels around the Web is La Scuola Popolare di Musica Ivan Illich, located in Bologna, Italy. Many musical performances filmed there, many of them featuring fairly free improvisations, can be found on YouTube. On the school's MySpace page, we find this description:

"Since 1992, the Ivan Illich Community School of Music (SPMII) in Bologna has proposed music courses for everybody: children, the youth and the elderly, those who wish to play and to sing together with others, those who have never touched a musical instrument, those who want to become professional musicians, those who want to improvise, those who want to make and listen to music untied by genres and those who want to have a good time learning. In addition to the individual instrument courses, the SPMII offers laboratories of ensemble music, practical workshops, classes for children as well as a choir and an orchestra. It has always paid particular attention to the music of oral tradition and to the music of improvisation and research. Weekly, the school presents lecture-concerts, open meetings of improvisation, films, debates and parties. SPMII and the park of Via Giuriolo 7 are places of musical and social interaction, a self-managed and libertarian space where people meet in a friendly environment. We are waiting for you…"

The school's main website is written in Italian, which we don't read, but look as we might, we can't find any text there that might be an explanation of how this school got its name. We can imagine, though, that Illich's notion of deschooling might have inspired musicians to found an alternative musical school, one aiming to teach anyone who wants to learn how to play music, and not necessarily using the traditional conservatory method or canon. As we've mentioned here, Illich's thoughts on education inspired composer Christopher Small to write a book in the 1970s called Music, Society, Education that in turn inspired people such as Peter Gabriel and David Byrne in their mining and developing the world music scene.

We can only guess at what Illich accomplished in Italy, France, and Germany - not to mention Spain and Mexico - whose languages he spoke fluently and where he was deeply respected. As might be expected, there is an Italian website devoted to him. There, we find a paper by Matthias Rieger, a Bremen friend and musician, entitled "Ascoltare la musica con le orecchie di Ivan Illich." Our computer Englishes this phrase as "To listen to music with the orecchie [ears] of Ivan Illich." (Somehow, we don't think Illich would have liked to see papers like this read in computer-translated form, so we'll refrain and give it our best guess.) The paper seems to have been presented by Mr. Rieger at the inauguration of something called the Centro di Documentazione Interculturale della Scuola per la Pace [Intercultural Documentation Center of the School for Peace?]. What appears to be a set of papers relating to Illich and presented at this forum in 2003 are available on the Web (PDF), in Italian. (A few days later: We've just noticed that some of these papers are available in English at the Pudel site, out of Bremen. There's even a poster for the conference in Bologna.)

Illich himself seems to have delivered at least one lecture in Italy that, as far as we can tell, has yet to appear in English. Barbara Duden refers to such a paper on page 16 of "Ivan Illich, Beyond Medical Nemesis (1976)," her 2003 overview and appreciation of Illich's work during the last two decades of his life. Evidently, Illich delivered a lecture at a Bologna symposium called “Sickness and Health as Social Metaphors." Ms. Duden writes that the paper was published in Le Monde Diplomatique for April 1999 and that an English translation was set "to appear in a collection of essays." Elsewhere, in a comprehensive bibliography of Illich's work, we've seen this citation:

Illich, Ivan (1998I): And do not lead us into diagnosis, but deliver us of the pursuit of health. Bologna, October 24th 1998, English Version of the Opening Lecture of the symposium on "Salute e Malattia". (The 'I' included with the date indicates that the item is written in Italian.)

And another bibliography states this:

Illich, Ivan (1998): "And do not lead us into diagnosis, but deliver us of the pursuit of health."

Bologna, October 24th 1998, English Version of the Opening Lecture of the symposium on 'Salute e Malattia'.

En Francais: "Ne nous laissez pas succomber au diagnostic, mais délivrez-nous des maux de la santé."

'Lezione magistrale' dÍvan Illich au Syposium de Bologne: 'Maladie et santé comme métaphore sociale', 25 au 28 octobre 1998.

In Italiano: "Non indurci in diagnosi, ma liberarci dai mali della salute."

Lezione di Ivan Illich nel Simposio di Bologna il 25. Ottobre 1998.

The Guardian's obit for Illich ends with this paragraph:

He was able to finish a history of pain which will be published in French next year, as will his complete works. His last wish, which was to die surrounded by close collaborators amid the beginnings of a new learning centre he had planned in Bologna, was not realised. (emphasis added)

We've read (in The Challenges of Ivan Illich) that Illich considered the Italian edition of Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis , as published in the 1990s, to be the definitive version of that text.

Meanwhile, we've always wondered what Illich's tastes in music were, if any.

Recalling Illich

A Canadian website called Philia, A Dialogue of Caring Citizenship, makes available an essay recalling a warm and surprising encounter with Ivan Illich. The author is Sam Sullivan, the mayor of Vancouver until 2008, who visited Illich at the home of Jerry Brown, then mayor of Oakland, Calif. He writes good:

Toward the end of the three days I asked some of [Illich's] devotees if I could ask him for a photo together. Most thought this was a bad idea. One said, “You have seduced the seducer. He loves you and I wouldn’t push that relationship any further.” Another said that perhaps his feelings about technology might be the reason he has rarely been photographed. I was disappointed and it probably showed. As we were saying goodbye, Ivan insisted I tell him what was on my mind. After a moment’s hesitation I blurted out, “Ivan, I really wanted to ask you if it would be too much ... or maybe I shouldn’t ask ... or – really, Ivan, what I really want is, could we have a picture together?”

His eyes brightened and he said, “Of course!” But he wanted a good backdrop. ...

Illich used the old Greek Philia to describe the kind of neighborly friendship and truth-seeking that he advocated as the best antidote to the modern world's disabling professions and disembodying systems. We take it to mean conviviality, as Illich famously used that word, and then some.

"We believe there are countless opportunities to enable people who have been isolated and marginalized to flourish in dignity and take their place as full citizens," the Philia site states. "In fact, we are confident that welcoming their diverse contributions is the principal catalyst for nurturing vibrant communities for all of us.

"We are inspired by a range of thinkers and activists who are examining how changes in society reflect on culture and history. We're collecting stories of a new way of living to provide glimpses of a better future. And we're developing consensus among influential leaders in society about how we can shape more vibrant, hospitable and resilient communities."

Sullivan maintains his own site here.