The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich

by David Cayley

In this provocative new book, respected Canadian journalist David Cayley compiles and reflects upon the thoughts of Ivan Illich, one of the 20th century's most visionary cultural critics. Illich believed that the West could only be understood as a corruption of the Christian New Testament. Cayley presents Illich's exploration of this idea, illuminating Illich's thoughts on the criminalization of sin, on how the Church has become a template for the modern nation-state, and how contemporary society has become a congealed and corrupted Christianity. These critiques are as timely and valuable as Illich's prescription for fixing them.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Christianity, Nonfiction, Theology, History, Politics

274 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 10, 2005

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

A broad ranging interview with Ivan Illich: catholic priest, philosopher, dissident, and most importantly, friend. Touches on many different aspects of illichs work(though I think he would object to me even calling what he does and writes as “work”), including his views on the body, systematized medicine and education, technology and disembodiment, and the root of the Christian calling. Perhaps one of the most influential Christian books I have read yet, and what a mysterious grace that I would finish reading his thoughts on the very meaning of the word became flesh on the day of Christ’s incarnation.

[David Shane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm still somewhat new to Illich, but I suspect this book is a good survey of all of his thinking, developed from some interviews he gave shortly before his death. Illich was a sort of Roman Catholic priest (who disliked institutionalism) + medievalist + sociologist (probably a term he would have despised), and he gives here a very fundamental critique of modern life and thinking... and that, it seems to me, is almost the only sort of critique worth reading.

I can't summarize this book in a review, but perhaps a theme that is preserved through the whole work is that "the corruption of the best is the worst". The best is true and original Christianity, and the worst may be the world we are living in today, which is a perversion of Christianity. He leans a lot on the story of the good Samaritan as a free choice to love another human. Over the centuries, though, that free choice was institutionalized and become an institutional duty, the story of the good Samaritan became a nice liberal fantasy, and now we have a world in which we might feel responsible to go bomb the Iraqis (or, say, lock you in your own home for a month) for their own good. That sort of thing is a result of Christianity, institutionalized, and then perverted, the corruption of the best is the worst.

That paragraph, though, although it is one example he provides, doesn't do the book justice. I was introduced to Illich on Twitter as a sort of anti-technocracy thinker, and he is. Many valuable comments here as well about how we think about school, and the body, and health, and tools, and systems, so differently from the way our ancestors did. Illich reminds me of Machen a bit in that, here is a man who understands that creating rules and institutions for everything makes us less human, and our data-obsessed world can't even see that anymore. Definitely a recommended read, I'm going to jump right from this to another book by Illich.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

The closest one can come to a philosophical antidote to the problems of our times (outside acceptance of Christ) is through the thought of Illich. These interviews with Illich stress how he came to his worldview through his education and priesthood. As one of the other reviewers notes, Illich was one of the last universally-educated men and one of the greatest thinkers of the past few centuries. Illich's gentle goodness, his dedication to people rather than systems, his humility, and his luminous brilliance are on every page of this work.

If there is anything I would most want readers to take away from the book, it is Illich's interpretation of the mystery of iniquity. This warning from St. Paul tells us so much about ourselves and the techniques we develop to control the world so we don't have to encounter suffering or the reality of a world we did not create. To see Illich wrestle with the true danger and rebellious temptation of credentialism, while yet holding on to the Eucharist, well, it's very beautiful. I only wish I knew more of Illich's pupils and what they're doing and writing now.

[Siddiq Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A rousing view into the way Illich lived his vocation, embodied his vision, and constantly focused his life´s work in an historical, compassionate, religious perspective on the present and future. The religiousity may not agree with all people at all times, but the thesis here is a compelling explanation for the vexing question of why the christian west emerged out of obscurity and poverty at the birth of the modern era to become the single culture best suited to midwife that particular bureaucratic, abstract, impersonal system known as industrial civilization into the position of world domination it occupies today. Most touchingly, for me, is the conclusion where he outlines a way back from the ruins of a corrupted Christianity back to the source via a form of collective enquiry into truth based on friendship -- philia -- conspiracy, agape, and conviviality.

[John Dawson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read (more accurately tried to read) a few of Illich's better known writings. They are all both fascinating and hard going. The present work takes the form of interviews between the writer and David Cayley, perhaps one of the few people Illich trusted enough for this project. No better way of getting an insight into this sophisticated and deeply knowledgeable writer.

[Stan · Rating 5 out of 5]

De Clarke, friend and feminist writer, dropped Ivan Illich on me (decades after he had been dropped on the public). This has been a few years now. My gratitude still runs deep, and I go back to Illich again and again and again. Illich was a thoughtful polemicist back in the day. His pamphlets on education-as-product (Deschooling), medicine as radical monopoly (Medical Nemesis), society and energy (Energy and Equity), to name a few, were characterized with an amazing clarity... but to get the clarity, you have to shift off many of the assumptions of modernity which Illich criticizes to devastating effect. His skill at re-seating a reader that way is incomparable.

His "testament," as recorded during these conversations with David Cayley, goes way behind the practical clarity of his earlier analytical work. Illich talks about his faith in this book, the deep background for all he had written before. In 22 sections, Illich - while claiming not to espouse a theology - leaves behind a powerful theological document.

The section names are a glossary of Illich's faith vocabulary: Gospel, Mysterium, Contingency, Criminalization of Sin, Fear, The Gospel and the Gaze, Health, Proportionality, School, Friendship, The Age of Systems... and so it goes.

Highly recommended.

[ariana · Rating 5 out of 5]

The more I read Illich, the more I am convinced he was a prophet.
This was recommended to me as an introduction to Illich’s thought, and it blew me out of the water. An array of modern ills are discussed, and all his assessments on the spiritual state of humanity have remained true or even become more apparent.

His primary thesis is this: corruptio optimi quae est pessima. The corruption of the best is the worst. The modern world is not post-Christian but rather Christianity in active self-betrayal. It is so thoroughly Christian that its ills are the result of its own effectiveness. The West presumes, in hubris, to do what God cannot: manipulate others for their own salvation. (In Illich’s words, it is the “nice liberal fantasy, which is something horrible. You have the basis on which one might feel responsible for bombing the neighbor for his own good.” p. 207)

The Church capitulates to worldly powers, and by institutionalizing the acts of Christian charity which are by nature gratuitous, grace itself is lost, and great evils ensue. Evil itself has taken on a new character with the Incarnation of Christ… the possibility of greater, infinite good with His marriage to mankind means also the possibility of greater, depraved evils.

The eradication of mystery, the mathematical assessment and nervous management of risk, the criminalization of sin, the disembodiment of health, the transformation of gaze into mechanism, the replacement of the good with the idea of values… these are all aspects of the modern West that showcase its brokenness.

“I, at least, believe that I do not live in a post-Christian world, I live in an apocalyptic world. I live in the kairos in which the mystical body of Christ, through its own fault, is constantly being crucified, as his physical body was crucified and rose again on Easter day. I am therefore expecting the resurrection of the Church from humiliation, for which the Church itself must be blamed, of having gestated and brought forth the world of modernity.” p. 179

What a scandal the Incarnation. What a scandal Jesus’ teachings. I’ve never read a satisfying explanation of the difference between “niceness” or “caring” (a word with a derogatory taste in Illich’s mouth) and true Christian charity before Ivan Illich. Others rely on a sort of brusque machismo for such a stance. Not Illich. I trust his judgment, as a man whose actions were in accord with his word, continually turning down power and notoriety in favor of humble servitude. He is not angry, not dogmatic, not ideologically postured. He is a man who has contemplated seriously the implications of God who is Love taking on flesh, and that very God’s scandalizing response to the question, Who is my neighbor?

I call him a prophet, but Illich himself did not want to revive that office. “The vocation by which I try to live today I would call that of the friend.”

I recommend this to absolutely everyone.

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A few of my highlights:

“Through the Incarnation, a new kind of betrayal becomes possible. The Christian is called to be faithful not to the gods, or to the city’s rules, but to a face, a person, and, consequently, the darkness he allows to enter him by breaking faith acquires a completely new taste. This is the experience of sinfulness. … but it always holds the possibility of sweet tears, which express sorrow and trust in forgiveness. This dimension of very personal, very intimate failure is changed through criminalization, and through the way in which forgiveness becomes a matter of legal remission. Once the sinner is obligated to seek legal remission of a crime, his sorrow and his hope in God’s mercy becomes a secondary issue. This legalization of love opens the individual to new fears. Darkness takes new shapes, the fear of demons, witches, magic…the idea of hell becomes more prominent and the fear of hell increases. The devil takes on his strange embodiment, the disembodiment of man. These are what I call UFOs, and they express the fear of the void when you move from the orderly pattern of the heavens to the cold net of geometry underlying Descartes.” p. 93-94, 98

“I’m speaking of a type of renunciation which has been, from the beginning, the logical precondition for the practice of love. I think I would start a little bit too high if I began now to speak about Jesus’ absolute request that, if you came from solid, middle-of-the-road, practicable Judaism into his little sect, you renounced the freedom to separate from your wife. You renounced an opportunity which the Jew had. You renounced the need to belong to the ‘we’ in order to find your ‘I’. The place outside Jerusalem, Golgotha, where the cross was put up, became the symbol of this renunciation. As in the Temptation, he renounced changing the world through power. Christians who imitate him soon discover that little practices of renunciation, of what I won’t do, even though it’s legitimate, are a necessary habit I have to form in order to practice freedom.” p. 101

“The cross doesn’t cease to be something evil, even when I bear it. … The cross is somehow paradoxically glorified by the belief that God has become man in order to bear it. This is not the glory of Constantine’s in hoc signo vinces, by which the cross becomes an instrument of power, but the cross as a sign of shame and defeat, which the Son of God took upon himself.” p. 167

“Faith in the Incarnation can flower in our time precisely because faith in God is obscured, and we are led to discover God in one another.” p. 176

“[We are in the age of systems.] … This computer here on the table is not an instrument. It lacks a fundamental characteristic of that which was discovered as an instrument in the twelfth century, the distality between the user and the tool. A hammer I can take or leave. It doesn’t make me into part of the hammer. The hammer remains an instrument of the person, not the system. In a system the user, the manager, by the logic of the system, becomes part of the system. …The systems analyst imputes to the patient what he or she is…” p. 204

[Ibrahim Agić · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in the German translation. I'm very impressed about the deep insights of Ivan Illich on the World we live in. This is one of those books that is need to be read a couple of times. Without doubt is Ivan Illich one of the greatest and important thinkers of the twentieth century. Maybe one of the last universal educated people.

Here I also wanna say that the first time I heard about Illich was in a recorded lecture of the well known philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr, my great teacher whom I never met.

[Allan Savage]

I was given this book to read by a postgraduate student-friend whom I had taught. He inscribed it, “an excellent volume, enjoy!” The book had remained on my bookshelf for three years before I got around to reading it. Interestingly, in the early 1970’s during my undergraduate years at the University of Toronto I had been exposed to the religious and sociological views of Illich, (either through courses by Gregory Baum or Leslie Dewart, I actually forget which), and found his views to be of peripheral significance. Today, however, I find that his perspective has informative value and is worth considering from an academic and philosophical point of view.

Cayley obviously thinks so, as well. Cayley wants to get at the bottom of Illich’s view that the corruption of the best is the worst and selects Illich’s religious writings to test this thesis. Religious institutions that regulate Revelation are an evil in Illich’s view. That such regulation, when it impedes personal choice, is an evil that slowly grows in human consciousness. According to Illich we choose our relationships with others and any institution that impedes our ability to choose is corrupt to some degree.

Cayley gives us 44 pages of Illich’s background by which he accounts for Illich’s understanding of the deformation of faith. Illich became perplexed in his theological studies by the notion of Revelation as it was theologically understood in a fallen world which was governed through various processes of institutionalization. Also, Illich was not a supporter of Vatican II and he believed the priestly office should be kept separate from civil politics.

He addressed his concern via religious studies, rather than strict theology. In addressing his concern as a theologian he would have acquired an institutional authority, he maintained. He is an historian and reminds the reader frequently of his status in this book. Illich maintained that he was not a theologian, yet, in truth, he discussed historical records from a theological perspective, and not simply religious studies. (I suspect that some who have read the book missed this point.)

This book is worth reading, but I caution the reader to distinguish between the faith of an individual Christian and institutionalized Christianity. It is the latter that Illich criticizes. Yet, there is much here, when properly understood, to encourage an individual’s faith.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across this book with almost no introduction and was somewhat surprised, but also very drawn in by the contents. So much historical perspective which can transform your view of the present and even as a non-religious person, be led to appreciate the impact of Christianity on the western world systems we take for granted. I’ve never read so much theological content in one book and yet also felt so safe from any risk of preaching.

[Willem Maarten · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interessante, maar fragmentarisch gebleven filosofische gedachten over de betekenis van het geloof in onze tijd. Volgens Illich leven we niet in een post-christelijke maar apocalyptische tijd, de tijd van de pervertering van het christendom. We proberen de christelijke ethiek los te maken van Christus en te institutionaliseren, maar zo creëren we juist een verdorven wereld. De corruptie van het beste is het slechtste. Hij illustreert dit aan de gezondheidszorg, het onderwijs en meer.

[David Doel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the most thought provoking books I've ever read. For about the first 150 pages, I even thought it had communicated effectively. Somewhere past that threshold, it seemed to lose that; I no longer understood the thoughts being presented. Perhaps I will revisit the book some time in the future to see if I am able to overcome that hurdle.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating book, but also far too cursory for me to gain a deep understanding of Illich's claims. This book is more of a call and guide for future research than a stand alone book. Still interesting as always, though I confess I was expecting a slightly different book.

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first book on Illich, not quite his writings, but I enjoyed and will read more.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very intriguing thesis, his thoughts due to being in an interview style are somewhat scattered but his overall thesis is clear and fascinating - the corruption of the best is the worst.

[Mathilde · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has become very difficult at the end of the modern time to imagine actions which are good and beautiful without in any way being purposeful!!

[matthew harding · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book! Ivan Illich is both a reactionary curmudgeon and a brilliant and creative thinker. Sure, he's stuck inside of his religious perspectives, but when he pops his head out you can never be too sure about what he's going to say and for the most part the stuff that comes out will blow your mind--or at least temporarily dislodge your consciousness from its ideological cocoon.

[Bradley Andrews · Rating 5 out of 5]

In RNotF, intimate interviews with Ivan Illich are brought out of the archives to do a deep dive into some of his key insights. Illich levels a bold and provocative assertion that should cause pause for any self-respecting social or ecclesiological critic; that modern Western society can only be understood as being a corruption of Christianity. In typical Illichian fashion, the weightiness of his arguments send shockwaves through every familiar institution- especially the Church. I recommend this book to any believer open to hearing some hard truths about the vanity of Christendom, the hypocrisy of modern ministry, and the way that the Kingdom was maybe meant to unfold all along.

[John Roberson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Radical social critic Ivan Illich provides a bigger picture of modernity in this work, adapted from interviews with him near the end of his life. He basically argues that modernity is a corruption of Christianity, which has both good and bad consequences. His ideas are nothing if not thought-provoking; he highlights many features of modern society we take for granted and offers unexpected alternatives. As a work of refined philosophical history this book is insufficiently organized and argued, but its ideas are certainly fertile.

[Harry Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ivan I. presses the uncomfortable notion of who's really your brother and what are you going to do about it. He sees the current control of the modern nation state as a perverted hybrid of the Christian Church. Not a pleasant read at times but even at it's tangled reasoned worse, it still rings authentic across a clanging chorus of new age self help writings competing for the readers attention.

[JAVIGAVIERO · Rating 4 out of 5]

cast: conversaciones con ivan illich