Here I am with my second book review in a week. My first was a review of Ivan Illich's "Tools for Conviviality". What started out as an inquiry into how Christians should interact with AI turned into a bit of an obsession. I purchased David Cayley's “Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey” and read the entire thing (560 pages) in a couple of days.

I believe Illich may be one of the most important thinkers of the modern age (and certainly one of the most underrated). I will define modern as Illich does: roughly the 800 years from the 12th century until now. That is not the consensus view of scholars of history, who typically date modernity from the Renaissance or Enlightenment, but after reading Illich you too may see Gregorian Reforms, Canon law and the invention of the interword spacing as having laid the groundwork for our modern world.

Illich is hard to pigeonhole, and this may be some of the reason for his relative obscurity. One attempt to describe him from the book is as an “orthodox revolutionary”. He was, perhaps, too orthodox for the revolutionaries and too revolutionary for the orthodox. He wrote across a range of eclectic subjects: church reform, healthcare, education, technology, energy, gender, the history of literature, and more. There are certain niche movements that are rediscovering Illich, it seems. The homeschoolers read Deschooling Society. The vaccine skeptics Medical Nemesis. The environmentalists may read "Energy and Equity”, and the AI decelerationists “Tools for Conviviality”. But none of these groups seem to be comparing notes. And yet, through these seemingly wide-reaching and unrelated topics there is a consistent thread of thought, which Cayley’s book does a great job of illuminating. And this is no mean feat. Not only because of the wide-ranging material, but also because Illich was not the most systematic of thinkers, and a lot of work is expected from the reader of his writings in terms of fitting the pieces of the puzzle together.

Structure of the Book

The book is structured pretty much chronologically taking the reader through Illich’s life. In that sense, it’s a biography, although Cayley is reluctant to call it such, for reasons you are best to read directly from the source. Cayley was an acolyte and friend of Illich, and recorded two major interview series with him for CBC Radio in Canada, as well as two books published on the back of those interviews. The interview series can be listened to on YouTube:

Ivan Illich | Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman: Conversations with David Cayley (1989)
https://youtu.be/VXghb5xOD8s

Ivan Illich | The Corruption of Christianity: Corruptio Optimi Pessima (2000)
https://youtu.be/KF8wZmmksjw

Cayley, therefore, has a thorough understanding of Illich and his work, as well as the evolution of his thought. He therefore structures the book more as a story arc tracing Illich’s thinking than a biography in the traditional sense. There are biographical facts concerning Illich aplenty, but the focus is definitely on his thoughts and how these developed over time.

Early Life and priesthood

The book begins with Illich’s early life. Already remarkable, he is the product of a marriage between Yugoslavian landed gentry and a daughter of a rich Austrian Jew who converted to Christianity. In somewhat mysterious circumstances, the parents separated when Illich was a boy, and he was raised at his grandfather's villa in Vienna. Eventually, the war, and the Nazis, became an issue, and after the grandfather’s death, the family was forced to sell the villa (for a below-market-value price) and flee to Italy, Florence, where the young Illich was to complete his education. Illich showed remarkable aptitude, especially with languages, and after electing to become a Roman Catholic priest, he was identified by the Vatican as a potential for high office. But Illich, in the first of a pattern of behavior we will see throughout his life, spurns the obvious path, and elects for the “road less travelled by”, by becoming a parish priest for Puerto Rican immigrants in New York. You’ll need to read the book for the details, but needless to say, Illich managed to be a gadfly to the Church, to the extent that they had him in front of the modern-day “inquisition”. As a result, he agreed to leave public ministry (although he remained a priest until his death), and began the second phase of his life, as a public intellectual. But here Cayley “pieces together the puzzle” and highlights how Illich wrote in “The Vanishing Clergyman” “Should I, a man totally at the service of the Church, stay in the structure in order to subvert it, or leave in order to live the model of the future?” He describes this as living “today the ordinary life of tomorrow’s priest” — a life of insecurity and risk, free from hierarchical control and salaried institutional roles, while remaining deeply faithful to the Church. We will see how a seemingly random “pivot” from priest to public intellectual/ author, writing about education and healthcare, was actually a rational progression, for a man who had deep reservations about institutions in the industrial age, and who believed that it may be more effective to operate as a churchman outside of the church, all the time remaining faithful to it.

Illich as Public Intellectual

It is in this spirit he wrote Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, and Medical Nemesis, the books that made a name for him. His essential criticism was that the institutions do more harm than good. That they take away people’s capacity to help themselves “in the vernacular”, and make people dependent on institutions that often do the opposite of their stated purpose. School turns most into “dropouts” and “failures”. They monopolize learning and make any competency gained outside of the credentialed system devalued in the market. Healthcare takes away people’s innate capacity to help one another, and takes away the dignity from suffering and dying. I covered the institution critique in my (Tools review), and also mentioned the deeper theology underpinning the books, which went unnoticed by many at the time he wrote them. Cayley was the first to bring the underpinning to the surface, explicitly, in the “The Corruption of Christianity: Corruptio Optimi Pessima” series of interviews, which became the book “Rivers North of the Future”. Once you understand what Illich is saying in these interviews, a lot of his earlier work starts to make a lot more sense, and the thread of thought running through them all becomes clear. Essentially, Illich believed that the modern secular west and its institutions were a corruption of the Christian church, which itself had become a corrupted version of the gospel, its original sin being to have tried to institutionalize, guarantee, and administer grace as a service, a process that began with the xenodochium– or “houses for the foreigners/poor” –in the late Roman Empire, which Illich claims displaced the free, spontaneous, “vernacular”, and gratuitous acts of charity common in all Christian homes back then, as these homes would commonly have a candle lit at night, and an extra serving of bread for whoever should need it. Illich goes on to trace further evidence of corruption, as the Gregorian Reforms put the Pope above all others, and the Canon Law reforms mandated private confession, a process, Illich argues, which makes a type of modern person subject to rulers and law, as the lay person is encouraged to have an inner voice examining conscience, and the focus shifts from freely given grace to constant fear of sin and damnation. Other interesting evidence of institutional shift is put forward such as the gradual shift from the “Conspiratio” or “Holy Kiss” practiced by early Christians at church – a mouth-to-mouth kiss – to the “pax-board”, which was handed down to the congregation by the priest, and handed round to kiss, thus mediating what had formerly been a “free act of turning to the other”, an embodied act of gratuitous love.

It’s heavy stuff. Illich is a remarkably learned historian and, I believe, a savant of deep spiritual insight. It’s cliche and one tries to avoid saying it, but the word “prophet” does come to mind with Illich. (Although he would likely strongly object–saying that “the time of prophecy is behind us.”)

Most of this fascinating theological and historical insight is also available in “Rivers North of the Future”. Where Cayley adds to previous works here is his filling in the gap between Illich’s “cancellation” in the 80s, and his final testimony in “Rivers North”. For those unaware, Illich had been somewhat of a darling of the left in the 70s. In many ways, his works were far more radical and far more urgent than even Marxists. This is because, where Marxists saw history as an inevitable trajectory towards the workers gaining control of the means of production, Illich saw that the tools/means of production were themselves the problem. It didn’t matter who owned them; the tools when passing the two watersheds and reaching radical monopoly would make humanity slaves to the tools. The problem, to Illich, was that tools were working “for” us and not “with” us. The tools were making us dependent. And for Illich, this was nothing less than a corrupted gospel (men trying to guarantee grace/health/wealth for all), which was giving birth, or unveiling, in a literal apocalyptic sense, the antichrist. (which to Illich is the structural counterfeit of the Incarnation–institutionalized charity replacing gratuitous love–not a future individual villain.) As stated previously, a lot of Illich’s theological grounding would only become clear later, so for many at the time, his works appeared aligned with the “revolution”, and people didn’t ask too many questions. That is, until he wrote “Gender”.

Illich’s “cancellation”

Illich had identified some fascinating threads to pull on in terms of axiomatic assumptions we take for granted in the modern, industrial world, which, in fact, have no precedent in preindustrial history, or which straight up don’t make sense. He wrote “Shadow Work” highlighting the inconvenient truth that much of the “work” that makes the economy go round is, in fact, unpaid “shadow work”, and most of this (at least at the time Illich wrote) was done by women. When you sit down and do the math, you see pretty much every activity in your day is dedicated, in some way, to keeping the economy moving. To serving the economy. Whether it is washing shirts for work, seeing that the kids do their homework, commuting, consuming, much of what we do can be argued to be unpaid, “shadow work”. This also led Illich to the fascinating insight that the modern industrial world was pitting men against women. The paid workers were seen to be against their bosses (capital vs labor), whereas, in fact, Illich saw labor disputes as a ritual, in the religious sense, whereby both parties were performing it so they could both ignore what they were really doing that was inconvenient to acknowledge. Illich saw this as paid labor and capital in an unholy alliance, exploiting shadow work. He also had the insight that to form the perfect homo economicus, it was needed to eliminate “sex” such that both men and women could become gray blobs who were fitted into the economy interchangeably as required. Illich researched pre-industrial societies and found that, wherever one looked, societies had always worked in a complementary, gendered way. In some societies, the men would milk the cows and the women would tend to the crops, for example. Or in others, the women would milk the cows while the men tended to the crops. There was not necessarily anything inherent in a task or domain that gendered it one way or the other. (We also see this in languages with gendered nouns, where one language might have a noun as a male gender and another may have the same noun as female). But the work and the domains were always separated. Men and women had always complemented one another, never competed for the same roles. This was another example of a vernacular being crushed by industrial organization, in Illich’s opinion.

Needless to say, the book was not received well. Most misunderstood Illich to be calling for some return to some male-dominated patriarchal, primitive society. They said he was glorifying a dismal past. Most damned him without even reading the book. He may even be one of the first examples of “cancellation” by the progressive left. An interesting fact, according to Cayley, is that Illich was one of the first to use “gender” in the sense it was used in the book, and related to the sense it is used today in academic settings. (although this is disputed). His publisher advised him against using the word, claiming people only understood it as a grammatical concept. How innocent those times must have been(!). But according to Cayley, the academic world, to this day, refuses to give credit to Illich for using the term, such is the extent he has been airbrushed from history. His cancellation/ excommunication was swift, complete, and enduring.

Illich the historian

What I found most interesting was to learn that Illich again pivoted, again in what seemed quite a random and unrelated direction, but again, Cayley threads the needle and explains how Illich’s thoughts remained consistent throughout. Prior to Gender, Illich had been interested in a theory of “scarcity” which Illich saw as a poisonous lie of the industrial age. Following the negative reaction to Gender, he pivoted away from scarcity, and started looking into seemingly obscure historical subjects, such as the history of vision, the alphabet, or books themselves.

The stuff he writes about the eye, vision, and its changing conception through history deserves a review just on its own. But this is already getting long, so I will ask the reader to buy the book for themselves if they are interested to know about that. I want to focus on Illich’s interest in the alphabet and the evolution of books, because here I think we best see the thread of thinking from his concern with tools and their effect on the human condition. There is a famous saying “the medium is the message”, which I had never really understood until reading Illich. In his “In the Vineyard of the Text” he gives commentary on Hugh of St. Victor's "Didascalicon," exploring the evolution of reading and the impact of technology on text comprehension. The work highlights a significant shift in reading practices during the twelfth century, comparable to the later invention of the printing press. In fact, Cayley implies, the printing press could not have really even been conceived of without the cultural shift of Hugh’s time, when interword spacing and indexing transformed the text from a script for vocalization into an optical tool for private study. It’s hard for us to imagine now, but the act of reading was radically different prior to these innovations. Reading was considered somewhat of a physical exercise. The text was joined up without spaces, so the common habit was to read out loud, and in public or within groups. Once the book became indexed and words separated, it created the possibility of private reading, which had not really been conceivable before. This had many revolutionary implications. The first, perhaps, and related to Illich’s other threads of thought, was that it led to the atomization, and, to some degree, disembodiment of the individual. Now people could have a private study in their heads. There began to be an increasing awareness of the mind/body distinction. People saw words representing things and wondered about whether the sign was the thing itself. People started to question the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Was the bread Jesus, or was it an abstraction pointing to Jesus, like the word? The book’s organization with an index also made it more of a reference tool. The title of the book “In the Vineyard of the Text” is a play on the word for “pagina” or page in Latin, which also described the way grapes were lined up in a Vineyard, but also, because the pre-innovation text was considered like taking a stroll through a Vineyard, whereas after, the text became a means of study and reference. There was something lost, Illich argued, as people took the book and accelerated learning knowledge, but did not cultivate wisdom and understanding in the way that had been done previously through group reading. This would set the stage for the university, the printing press, the Reformation, and, of course, the scientific revolution. Once again, Illich digs through history and comes back to tell us the decisive moment was much earlier than we all thought it was.

And something of the way Illich read history is worth noting here. Illich’s interest in history was mainly to go back to a time and perspective where the axiomatic assumptions of our present age were not yet in place. A bit like a fish doesn’t know it is in water, we also are often unaware of quite how much we take for granted as “obvious” when, in fact, history shows it is anything but. Illich’s approach to history is like an explorer going back to the past in order to find and bring back lost treasure, but also, to peer back from the misty before times at our present age, and shine a light on something strange, something off, something we have forgotten and if we remembered might save us. The number of times while reading I would encounter some wild-looking claim, think, no, that can’t possibly be true, look it up, and then be shocked to find it was, indeed, true, was worth the price of admission alone. Worthy of note is that Illich had great reservations about the impact computers would have on humanity. He saw us shifting from the age of tools to the age of systems. And the system is an entirely different beast to a tool. A tool, you can put down. A tool is separate from you. But with a system, you are part of it. Considering the profound and consequential impact of something as simple as adding spaces between words with an alphabetical index had on human civilization, what on earth is the computer going to do to us? One can only imagine Illich’s horror had he lived to see ChatGPT’s emergence.

Conclusion

The book concludes with Illich’s theology, and how he lived his life. This was my main takeaway from the book, and it is simple: friendship, hospitality, and “foolish acts of small renunciation”. I came away, I think, understanding and sharing Illich’s despair about the modern age. I also think he is right about the apocalyptic unveiling of the antichrist (again, as a structural counterfeit of the Incarnation–institutionalised charity replacing gratuitous love–not a future individual villain), via the institutions of the secular west, and, it is highly likely, that the age of systems will be devastating to humanity. But, like Illich, I am a believing Christian, so I am reassured that Christ will conquer in the end. Until He does (maranatha! Another word I learned from the book), what is there to do, but to live for “philia” (friendship), and keep a candle lit for Him who might show up at any time?

Illich died in Germany in 2002, with an untreated tumor on the side of his face, which he had suffered for 20 years. The reason for his refusing treatment would be worth a separate review. Needless to say, it further shows the depth, mystery, integrity and thoughtfulness of the man. 

I could go on and on. I probably only understood 40% of the book, remembered 50% of that, and can only recount around 10% of that here. I highly recommend this book to anyone, for an introduction and comprehensive overview of Illich’s thoughts. I also recommend a good AI subscription to help with understanding it and researching the background details. You might want to get it on Kindle so that you can copy and paste more easily, as “non-convivial” as that might be, and as much as Illich would likely have despaired to see you do it.