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Ivan Illich (1926-2002), the Catholic priest and key critic of Catholicism and modern Christianity, describes the apocalyptic or world-changing ideas inaugurated by Christianity and demonstrates how it is that the corruption of the best (New Testament Christianity) is the worst (modern Western society). Illich, in the spirit of Kierkegaard, pictures Christianity as potentially unleashing a power for evil, first in its revolutionary remaking of the world for the good (in freedom from law and the opening to the Personal) and then in the transformation of this highest good into the worst (the lonely fear of hell and suffering under the law of conscience). “Apocalyptic,” which is not Illich’s word, captures the unmaking of the world in both its recreative and destructive phases, which also describes the deep insight of Illich’s work.

First, he describes (in a series of books) how schools inhibit learning, hospitals threaten health, and prisons aggravate crime; each professionalizes or institutionalizes caring for basic human needs, creating a symbolic buffer around direct and personal experience. Then, toward the end of his life, he conducts a series of interviews filling out his original claims in two key areas. Jesus’ introduction of love and focus on the personal, also poses the possibility of betrayal, which is the new understanding called sin. There arose however, through perversion of this freedom, by Church and society, a new interior legalism (the modern individual), a constitutive part of the modern Nation State. According to Illich, “the Church would transform itself into what a later church council called ‘a perfect society,’ an independent, legally constituted, bureaucratically organized state exercising a dominion of an entirely new kind over the lives of the faithful.” [1] In Paul Kennedy’s summation of Illich, the modern West is the result of the Roman Church’s institutionalization of the Christian gospel, not only in education, health services, and economics, but in relationships, or lack thereof, definitive of modern life. All can be traced to the Christian originals and their historical perversion.

In Illich’s description, the incarnation loads depth and weight onto the human condition, divinizing relationality and friendship, and displacing a cosmic or closed order. As in the Gospel of John, the cosmos of darkness is broken open by the light, revealing the Person beyond cosmic law. As Illich says, “I therefore believe that the Incarnation, the ensarkosis, the Greek word for the enfleshment of the biblical, the koranic, the Christian Allah represents a turning point in looking at what happens in the world. And this is an extraordinary surprise and remains a surprise.” Where in traditional society the self is constituted by the web of family and tribe, which provide exacting rules of how one is to be (even in modern Japan, in my experience, the constant refrain is “we Japanese” and all one must do is follow the formal structures – good mother, good wife, good student, etc.) the incarnation suspends the defining structure, replacing the formal with the personal. The “I” defined by the “we” simply makes the individual a particular instance of the corporate, with the law and custom buffering direct relationship, but Christ removes this buffer.

Jesus ushers in the possibility of freedom from law, custom, tribe, ethnos, and custom, replacing this binding impersonal world with love, in which ultimate meaning is embodied, fleshly, and relational. According to Illich, “If I rightly understand the point of the Gospel, it’s crucifixion. That is, Jesus, as our saviour, and also as our model, is condemned by his own people, led out of the city, and executed as somebody who has blasphemed the community’s god.” The god of the law, is displaced by God in the flesh, making ethnic identity and law relative and response to Christ absolute, with the spirit of the personal displacing the letter of the law.

Love, after Christ, is not dictated by the strictures of the society, or by the family into which one is born. “It makes it possible for me to choose anywhere whom I will love and thereby destroys or deeply threatens . . . the basis for which ethics has always been ethnos, the historically given ‘we’ which precedes any pronunciation of the word ‘I.’” With the new horizon of love however, there arises the danger of institutionalizing it: “the attempt to manage, to insure, to guarantee this love by institutionalization, by submitting it to legislation and making it law, by protecting it through the criminalization of its opposite.” Love made a duty converts it into another ethical norm or rule, rather than an unconditioned response to the personal.

The failure of love is not simply the breaking of a rule, but the betrayal of relationship, which is the new possibility of sin. “Since that moment, since this possibility of a mode of existence was created, its breakage, its denial, infidelity, turning away, coldness has acquired a meaning it could not formerly have had. Sin, as a divinely revealed possibility for Man, did not exist before this moment. Where there was no freely, arbitrarily established relationship which is a gift from the other, which is founded on a glimmer of mutuality, the possibility of its denial, of its destruction could not be thought.”

However, when the church institutionalizes hospitality, it also begins to exercise a new order of power, making its fortune off the exercise of charity. “And if you study the way in which the Church created its economic base in late antiquity, you will see that, by assuming the task of creating welfare institutions on behalf of the state, the Church’s claim to money, and practically to unlimited amounts of money because the task was unlimited, could be legally and morally funded.” Regulated charity, inhibits the inherent freedom of the personal response to the neighbor. “Something which Jesus told us about as a model of my personal freedom of choice of who will be my other (as in the story of the Good Samaritan, at the center of Illich’s description) is transformed into the use of power and money in order to provide a service.” Freedom and faith pass from the personal to institutional power, and gradually the power of the Word (made flesh) is institutionalized, and it is in this passage that Illich locates the anti-Christ – the institutionalization of sin.

“The idea that by not responding to you, when you call upon my fidelity, I thereby personally offend God is fundamental to understanding what Christianity is about. And the mystery which I’m interested in contemplating, the consequences of the perversion of faith throughout history which haunts us at the end of the twentieth century, is exactly related to my understanding of sin.” Illich is simultaneously describing the possibility for sin, and then showing how this betrayal of the personal (definitive of sin) is intrinsic to institutionalized Christianity and the institutions of State. According to Cayley, “The new possibility of personally facing one another has produced as its perversion a vast architecture of impersonal institutions all claiming, in some sense, to care. The vast engines that drive our world engines of education and health, as much as those of economic and technological development — all derive finally from a cooptation of the gospel’s promise of freedom.”

The key point, according to Illich, in the rise of an institutional faith, displacing the personal, occurs in 1075, when Pope Gregory VII issued the document “The Dictates of the Pope,” assigning legal supremacy to the Pope over all Christians and the legal supremacy of the clergy, the Pope’s emissaries, over secular authorities. The Church transformed itself into what a later council would call “a perfect society,” “an independent, legally constituted, bureaucratically organized state exercising a dominion of an entirely new kind over the lives of the faithful.”

As farming innovations (e.g., horse harnesses) allowed for settled communities around a church (rather than around fields), steeples arose and the supervision of the church over life intensified, including regular private confession to a priest (as opposed to the public confession before the congregation). In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council proclaimed, “Every Christian will go, under penalty of going to hell otherwise, grievous sin, once a year to their own pastor and confess their sins.” The priest judges, in secret, offering forgiveness of sin, in an entirely new way, a juridical act. Both law and sin took on a new meaning, departing from Paul’s depiction of being “released from the law” as Christians live “not under law, but under grace.”

For Paul, sin was a denial of the freedom of grace, but with its transformation into a legal offense, according to Illich, a new age began: “The sense of sin of the first millennium becomes now a sense of sin as a transgression of a norm.” In the New Testament, according to Illich, sin is the denial of grace, not a legal offense, but always a personal offense against a person (an infidelity). Now the sinner stands accused before a priest who judges her transgression of Christian law. “Grace becomes juridical. Sin acquires a second side, that of the breaking of the law, which implies that in the second millennium the charity, the love of the New Testament, has become the law of the land.”

At the same time an “inner court” is taken up in human interiority. “Not only was a juridical state structure created and sin was criminalized, made into something which could be dealt with along the lines of criminal justice even if under self-accusation, but also the concept of the forum internum (internal) came up. Forum is the general word for the court in front of which you have standing.” The beginnings of modern conscience, necessary guilt and fear of punishment, displace the notion of sin as personal betrayal. Even Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” – followed by the reflection that “conscience makes cowards of us all,” reflects the new fear of hell.  As Caley puts it, “This new moral solitude into which modern persons are plunged is but one aspect of a larger change that Illich sees taking place as the church tries to install the Kingdom of God as a legal regime on earth.”

In 1215 — the same gathering that pronounced the duty of annual private confession — also redefined marriage as a contract between two individuals witnessed by God. In Illich’s description, “The constitution of the union or relationship of love in its supreme form, namely commitment of a man and a woman to each other for ever on the model of the Gospel became defined as a juridical act through which an entity comes into existence which is called marriage, and for this juridical act, God becomes, so to speak, the necessary instrumentality, asking him to be present and a witness to what you say to each other, therefore using God as a juridical device.” Where Jesus had set aside swearing oaths, oaths before God in marriage and family made this contractual arrangement core to society (the beginnings of social contract). And this idea of taking oaths with God as a witness reached a new high point when the Church defined the formation of the basic cell of society, the family, as a contract entered freely and knowingly by a man and a woman, constituting a legal reality with standing in heaven.

New Testament communities were not formed on the basis of contractual obligations, but were a community gathered by Christ: “in the Eucharistic assembly, a ‘we,’ a new ‘we,’ the plural of the ‘I’ was established which was not of this world, of politics in the Greek sense.” It was a community of the Spirit, sealed by the kiss of a shared breath or spirit. “The Christians adopted this symbolism to signify that each one of those present around the dining table contributed of his own, spirit of, if you want, the Holy Spirit, which was common to all, to create a spiritual community, a community of one spirit, before they sat down and shared the same meal, the Eucharist.” No longer would hierarchy, ethnic or sexual identity be determinate. “It gave to those who participated at the ceremony the idea that community can come into existence outside of or other than the community into which I was born and in which I fulfill my legal obligations, in which all those who are present equally share in the act of its establishment.”

Gradually citizenship in this alternative community became regulated. “And by the tenth century, the mode of performing this ceremony changed. The priest, instead of sharing the peace with everybody, kissed the altar as though he were taking something from the altar which stands for Christ, and then handing it down to the others.” The kiss moved into the background as did its spiritual (conspiratsio) significance, so that “during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries an instrument was developed called an osculatorium, a kissing object . . . which the priest kisses after he has kissed the altar and hands down to the community.” The symbolic is replaced by the embodied (and interpersonal) in a very literal fashion. “The breathing together of the spirit in the conspiratsio becomes the swearing together of citizens in the social contract that will eventually define the modern state.”

As Cayley puts it, “When the Roman Church adopted the rule of law, Ivan Illich claims, it laid down many of the tracks within which modern society would run. Conscience, as the inner imprint of the fear of judgement, and contract, as an oath sworn with God as a witness, are both ideas that will become crucial for the modern nation-state.” With Protestantism threatening, the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent, presented itself “as a law-based church whose laws were obligatory for the citizens in conscience.” The pronouncements of Trent, Illich thinks, finalized the perversion of the original beloved community: “Through this criminalization of love perverted . . . the basis was created for the new way of feeling citizenship as a command of my conscience, for the possibility of the state to claim raison d’etat, as guideline for its legislation which is obligatory in conscience, parallel to the Church’s ability to confuse church law and doctrine, or to diminish, abolish, make permeable the frontier between what is true and what is commanded.”

The modern individual interiorizes subjection to the law and as his own judge “is alone in a new and unprecedented way. As the subject of an internalized Christian law, he no longer enjoys that free, trusting, unmediated relationship with God and other people” which marked the New Testament community. “The criminalization of sin generating the idea of conscience also obscures the fact that the answer to sin is contrition and mercy, and that therefore, for him who believes in sin, there is also a possibility of celebrating as a gift beyond full understanding the fact that he’s being forgiven.” The possibility of contrition, forgiveness, and sweet acceptance are obscured by the legal conception of sin and self.

[1] Though Illich wrote extensively, the ideas expressed here come toward the end of his life and were only captured in an interview recorded by David Cayley, and presented as a series of podcasts https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Ivan+Illich, for which Cayley has provided transcripts https://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts. Paul Kennedy moderates the overall podcast, with David Cayley, commenting in both the direct conversation and explanatory asides. Thank you to Brad Klingele for pointing this series out to me.