Thursday, February 9, 2017

Book Review of Todd Hartch’s “The Prophet of Cuernavaca: Ivan Illich and the Crisis of the West”



Among major Catholic figures of the last half of the 20th century, few or none rival Ivan Illich for his raw intellectual brilliance and creativity, his vast and eclectic erudition, his linguistic fluency (accent-free in nine languages), his electrifying and provocative eccentricity, his missionary spirituality of austerity and humility, his breath-taking critique of modernity as technocracy/bureaucracy, and his contempt for the proud, prosperous post-war American Church. He is probably also the least appreciated and understood thinker of the period. Todd Hartch does much to correct this in “The Prophet of Cuernavaca: Ivan Illich and the Crisis of the West.”

As the title suggests, he focuses on the Cuernavaca period of the 1960s when Illich operated a fine language school and a radical think tank in beautiful Cuernavaca, Mexico. Illich’s experience of the North American and Latin American churches had convinced him that the heralded crusade to flood the Southern hemisphere with priests and missionaries was a crude form of cultural imperialism. Hartch sees that Illich’s appreciation for the popular Catholicism of NYC Puerto Ricans in the 1950s had awakened in him a deep sense of mission as humility, poverty and kenosis: the one sent empties himself of his own culture in order to welcome, humbly, Christ as present in his new people and culture. Additionally, Illich had a keen sense that the adult experience of learning a foreign language...awkward, humbling, confusing...was already an emptying that could prepare the missionary to humbly receive. Unfortunately, Croatian warrior that he was, Illich could not be content to share this spiritual vision but waged a fierce, no-holds-barred, initially deceptive and finally successful war to stop the “invasion” of Yankee missionaries. Hartch has done his homework well in covering, in detail, this campaign including his ever-dramatic relationships with the episcopacy, the Vatican, Maryknoll Father Considine, his students at the school and his amazing network of talented thinkers and leaders. For example, early in the course of the Vatican Council he served as peritus to Cardinal Suenens, one of the very most admired, influential and progressive of the Council Fathers. But he left in disgust at the bishops’ reluctance to unambiguously condemn nuclear arms. His position here is typical of his radical aversion for the modernity of the West and much of the institutional Catholic Church.

Hartch also sees, however, that underlying Illich’s thought and life was a deep, barely articulated, mystical love of the Church in a most ancient and radical manner. For example, he willingly stripped himself of his priestly faculties when he entered more deeply into his vocation as polarizing critic and advocate because he realized that his (prophetic?) call of witness and argument conflicted with the priestly task, at the Eucharist, of being a source of unity. (This is in strong contrast with the clericalism, especially on the left, of priests and even conferences of bishops who abuse holy orders by using it to sanctify policy positions.) He also maintained throughout his life his loyalty to celibacy and the Liturgy of the Hours.

His conflicted, ambivalent relationship with the Church is perhaps best seen in his inquisition in the Vatican in the Spring of 1968. (Roughly when this reader studied Spanish at his Cuernavaca Institute and fell under his influences as a young, Maryknoll College seminarian.) Illich is summoned to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Church about vague charges of polytheism. He is warmly greeted by the head of the Congregation, fellow Croatian Cardinal Seper whom Illich later described as “very kind, very correct, most humane, rather apologetic ...acting like a man obliged to proceed in a transaction that embarrassed him profoundly.” They chat comfortably in their mother language. The mood changes abruptly: he is led down a hall to an underground room to meet a man in a dark cassock who only reluctantly gives his name and asks for a secrecy oath from the accused. Illich refuses the oath and asks for the questions in writing. The priest is finally directed by Seper to provide the questions in writing. The questions are an insult and include: “What do you have to do with the kidnapping of the Archbishop of Guatemala? Do you want to exclude the rich from the Church? What do you think of heaven and hell and also of limbo?” Illich delivers a letter, in which he refuses to answer the questions, to Seper who embraces him and says, most unexpectedly: “Get going, get going, and never come back.” These words, it happens, are the very words of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor as he sent Christ away. It is hardly possible that the Serbian prelate chose these words by coincidence. But lest we prematurely canonize Illich, Hartch notes that the lead up to the investigation was inflamed by a story of Illich telling a bishop, on a plane ride, that he practiced Afro-Caribean polytheism. This charge was, of course, ludicrous. But Illich, who enjoyed prank-type provocation and shock, may well have contributed to the furor by his intellectual antics.

In the end, Hartch makes the case that Illich was successful in his effort to stop the flow of missionaries. My impression was different: he was, for a time, provocative and (in)famous, but widely dismissed as an extremist and a crank and less influential that he should have been. The failure of the North American mission to the South was due more to the broader societal dynamics of the 1960s than to the efforts of this single, brilliant eccentric. Nevertheless, Hartch is a fine start to a retrieval of Illich. His work awoke, in this reader, a hunger for three more Illich books. First, we need a far more thorough treatment of his understanding of the crisis of the West (the subtitle of the work). Hartch focuses more narrowly on his ecclesial concerns and tends to see the later, broader, secular developments (about de-schooling society, medical nemesis, etc.) as outflows from these. But his broader cultural views may in the longer run be far more significant than the inner-Church fueds. His thought, hopefully, will be brought into conversation with similar culture critics like Ellul, Schumacher, Berry, as well as Schindler and the Communio School of the John Paul II Institute in DC. Secondly, we learn very little about the person of Illich: He remains an enigma! What about his early family life? His best friends? His loves? Why did he change his name from John to Ivan? Indeed, he remains a cold, detached figure: capable of befriending a wide range of talented, influential people but seemingly intellectual and distant if not manipulative. He was a close and trusted colleague of Fr. Considine even as he was quietly undermining that priest’s life work! “With friends like this, who needs enemies” the good Maryknoller must have wondered in hindsight. Nor do we learn from Hartch anything about his later years when he died of cancer and apparently refused medical aid in accord with his views. Lastly, Hartch hints at but does not fully develop his underlying spirituality: his mysterious call to the priesthood, his enchantment with St. Thomas under the tutelage of Jacques Maritain, his 40 days in the Sahara in the spirit of Charles de Focault, and his pilgrimage across Latin America. His was an ancient, deep vision that has not yet been articulated.

Illich has been largely disregarded as utopian and unrealistic. But I for one recall, with gratitude, the influence he had on me a half century ago. As a religion teacher in Catholic high schools I remained aware of the contradiction, or at least the tension, between the coercive nature of schooling and the glorious freedom of the Gospel...and I did my best to lean into the later. For 25 years I made a good living for my family in UPS as a loyal, enthusiastic supervisor but I retained a sense of the impersonal, mechanical pressures of that environment that granted me a degree of internal freedom. More recently I have been blessed by involvement with a modest residence for low-income women...a far more “convivial” and “Illichian” engagement.


Our Church and our entire culture will greatly benefit from a deeper encounter with the spirit of this profound, brilliant, elusive mystic! Todd Hartch has made a fine contribution.

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