The Prophet of Cuernavaca: Ivan Illich and the Crisis of the West, Todd Hartch, Oxford University Press, 2015 (ISBN 978‐0‐19‐020456‐3), xiv + 256 pp., hb $29.95

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Todd Hartch concludes his peculiar history of the maverick critical theorist and Catholic priest Ivan Illich by claiming that ‘the hinge of Illich's life and impetus for many of his most important ideas was his attack on the Catholic missionary initiative in Latin America’ (p. 158). The period ‘from 1959 until 1968’, he avers, ‘represents the best window into the meaning of Illich's life. … What makes these years stand out is that during the entire period, Illich devoted himself to opposing the plans and desires of the American bishops, the Latin American bishops, and three popes’. In this period of ‘prolonged disobedience’, he goes on, Illich was ‘flirting with [a] Promethean arrogance that he condemned in others’; he did so, ‘if one takes Catholic doctrine seriously…perhaps even at the risk of his soul’ (pp. 159–60). For those already familiar with the work and ideas of Ivan Illich, these conclusions may seem odd. First, it was in the 1970s and not the 1960s that Illich gained public fame and notoriety, and this is usually taken as his defining period; second, his relative fame is not for works on Christian mission or of theology, but of semi-popular critical theory, on the dominant institutions and norms of ‘commodity-intensive’ societies: in education, healthcare, and the sphere of production, among others. Hartch's interpretation nonetheless has a certain logic to commend it. It was Illich's decision to cease priestly ministry in the late 1960s – an outcome of the controversies arising from his longstanding opposition to the North American missionary initiative in Latin America, and (crucially, because not enough is made of this by Hartch) also to the wider North American development program in that region – that prompted him to direct his attention to mainstream social critique, what Hartch describes as ‘secular’ as opposed to ‘religious’ concerns (pp. 11; 109). Yet more pressingly, Illich's works even of the 1970s and beyond represent, on Hartch's view, a kind of ‘encoded theology’ (p. 146), but only ‘encoded’ because of Illich's subsequent decision to refrain from speaking directly to theological matters, again a result of his conflicts with the Church and laying-down of priestly ministry. Hartch is therefore right to claim that the 1960s were a pivotal period for Illich. He is also correct that there is a ‘hidden’ theological dimension to Illich's subsequent writings that has not properly been taken into account by scholars (more on that in the succeeding paragraphs). Even so, Hartch's book, a ‘work of history’ (p. 130) focussing on the period of Illich's life from 1961 to 1976, repeatedly concerns itself with less interesting questions than it might, given this potentially fruitful interpretive framework. Chapters 1 to 4 tell the story of Illich's involvement in the training of North American Catholic missionaries arriving in Latin America in the early 1960s while director of the Centre for Intercultural Formation (CIF), an ecclesially financed training center based in Cuernevaca, Mexico. Hartch's basic argument is that Illich set himself from the off to subvert the missionary aims of his superiors, which he believed were based on naive assumptions about the material and spiritual conditions of Latin Americans, and an unexamined sense of superiority on the part of the North American Church. This account, in important respects true (Illich once described CIF as a ‘center for de-Yankeefication’), is nonetheless told in an unhelpfully sensationalist manner. Illich, we read, was involved in ‘an anti-missionary plot’ (p. 37) and a ‘crusade’ (p. 74); deliberately sought ‘to scare off potential missionaries’ (p. 39), and was ‘dangerous’ (p. 19), ‘wily’ (p. 55), a man of ‘deep cunning’, and a ‘master strategist’ (p. 106), ‘determined to defy…the plans of the Vatican, regardless of the cost’ (p. 29). Smothered by this style of narration is the fundamental ambiguity of Illich's actual position, towards which Hartch himself occasionally gestures when he notes that Illich's actions were explicitly motivated by his love for the Church (p. 45ff). In fact, for the younger Illich, a critical attitude towards certain ecclesial programs was reconciled with a basic loyalty to the Church on the basis of a distinction, never actually mentioned in Hartch's book, between the ‘Church-as-She…the mystery, the kingdom among us’ – and the ‘Church-as-It’, the temporal institution, possessive of worldly power (cited in Francine du Plessix Gray, Divine Disobedience [New York: Alfred Knopf 1970], p. 289). Illich, it appears, perceived his role as that of ‘the scrupulous criticism of the Church-as-It for the sake of the Church-as-She’ (ibid., p. 290). One could question this posited dualism on several grounds, not least its apparent convenience, but that Hartch leaves it undiscussed even while bluntly critiquing the theological and spiritual integrity of Illich's actions is a significant shortcoming. Chapter 5 provides a moment of transition in the book – and of relief. After a balanced exposition of Illich's controversial essay ‘The Seamy Side of Charity’, Hartch describes with some sensitivity the strange events surrounding Illich's summoning to the Vatican in 1968 to be questioned by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Here, our author is more composed, combining fair critique of Illich with an equally fair indictment of his obvious mistreatment at the hands of the Church authorities. The change in tone is both stark and refreshing. Chapters 6 and 7 chart the ultimate demise of the missionary initiative in Latin America from 1969–1972 and Illich's own move away from explicitly theological interests while leading CIF's partner institution, Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC). Chapter 8 follows this with some welcome textual engagement, offering an interesting exposition of two of Illich's major 1970s publications, Deschooling Society and Medical Nemesis. In particular, Hartch provides a stellar analysis of CIDOC as a material outworking of the ‘convivial’ principles of Illich's social thought (pp. 134–137), which represents a genuine addition to existing scholarship. The final chapter seeks to understand the meaning of Illich's official silence on theological matters from the 1970s until later life, and here Hartch extends Lee Hoinacki's earlier interpretation of Illich's social theory as, in fact, a form of apophatic theology. Unfortunately, this deepens problems already apparent in Hoinacki's own (brief) exposition of this issue, to do with a misrepresentation of the apophatic mode as a means simply of concealing a secret message by a process of encoding or encryption (Hartch refers dramatically to ‘The Illich Code’ in this regard [p. 146ff]). On one hand, such a reading ignores what is arguably the metaphysical ‘point’ of apophaticism: its emphasis on the ontological difference between God and the created order, the idea that the divine surpasses all finite things (God is not like any finite thing, even while God may to some extent be spoken about indirectly through all of them, because all finite things share in God as their cause, as per the Divine Names of Pseudo-Dionysius for instance). This reading also, and in a related way, elides the intrinsic significance of Illich's own mode of theological indirectness, better interpreted as revealing both his affirmation of faith in divine grace and charity as abroad within the world and wont to appear by way of the surprising and unexpected (thus repeating non-identically the prototypical Christian ‘surprise’ of the Incarnation), and also his renunciation and critique of what he saw as the Church's over-identification of itself with formal, juridical modes of power, precisely at the expense of this free movement of grace and charity (see for this, in particular, Rivers North of the Future [Toronto: Anansi Press 2005]). Here, form and content must be read together, as recognized in a short but beautiful essay on Illich by Domenico Farias (‘In The Shadow of Jerome’, in Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham (eds.), The Challenges of Ivan Illich [Albany: SUNY Press 2002], pp. 59–70). The approach of Hoinacki and now Hartch falls short, by contrast, because in seeking merely to ‘decode’ Illich from a ‘secular’ into a ‘theological’ idiom, it cannot account for the correspondence between his critique of power in modernity, including in the modern Church, and the specific form that the theological takes in (many of) his writings. It overlooks how Illich's theological demurral – his refusal to speak directly to matters divine – discloses his posture of ‘freely willed powerlessness’ (p. 150), linked to faith. Illich's enigmatic writings must not be decoded out of their mode of theological obliqueness, in other words, but read in and through it for their theological meaning to resonate in its full paradoxicality – the theological returns as it is given up (see here John 12:24, ‘unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies…’). A literary rather than technological hermeneutic is needed. The foregoing is related to the larger problem of Hartch's sharp indictment of Illich's actions as a Catholic believer and priest, insofar as Hartch only occasionally (e.g. on pp. 150–151; 169–170) touches on this deeper theological position, which was never about Christian mission per se, so much as the fundamental relation of humans to worldly power and to divine grace and love. In an interview on French television in 1972, Illich remarks that ‘Present-day institutions, and even the Church, are trying to produce grace, whereas they should be tables around which we can find each other, in a mysterious way’ (“Un Certain Regard: Ivan Illich”, RTF: Paris, 1972). The difference delineated here between what humans can produce of their own power, and what they can only receive from beyond themselves, and so only really prepare a space for, is the crux around which all else revolves. In the period on which Hartch focuses, development and mission were for Illich two sides of the same coin in Latin America; he saw both as seeking, through the imposition of a predetermined blueprint by a powerful international actor, to produce what one can only make room for – whether human happiness or faith in God (see ‘The Lord's Supermarket’ mentioned on p. 150). Hartch may well be right that Illich overlooked the nuances of missionary experience and failed to devote enough time to a proper analysis of mission itself (pp. 161–167), but to emphasize this above all else is to neglect his more substantive point about the distinction between divine grace and human power, between receptivity and productivity, the spirit of gratuity and the spirit of utility. Pre-eminently, Illich was a thinker of gratuity in a utilitarian age, calling us to ‘the joyful acceptance of our uselessness’ (p. 27). The lack of attention Hartch gives to Illich's contemporaneous socio-political critique of development, which he seems to regard merely as a ‘secular’ counterpart to the missionary issue, may ironically have contributed to his under-appreciation for how theologically significant a statement that is. My own conviction is that Illich was often guilty of drawing too thick a line between the useful and the gratuitous, struggling to think beyond and between this dualism. He is not in this sense immune from critique. Yet, in The Prophet of Cuernevaca, Todd Hartch's inordinate focus on Illich's attitude to Catholic mission and his formal relation to the Church hierarchy lend the analysis an air of superficiality. This is unfortunate, because there is an important point to be made about Illich's substantive relation to faith and theology, and in the parts of the book less concerned with the missionary initiative, this begins to emerge. It should be stressed that anyone writing a monograph on Ivan Illich currently faces a perilous task, because of the paucity of good secondary literature and the absence of any scholarly consensus as to how best to read Illich's disparate, fragmented, and unsystematic body of work. Hartch must be commended for throwing his hat into the ring and for his diligent archival research. Even so, while his book does move the debate on in some areas, a seeming lack of theological imagination, combined with a hastiness to pass judgment, ultimately render the work somewhat limited in its insights.