Angelus News | January 14, 2022 | Vol. 7 No. 1

Not your standard intellectual
Dismissed as a radical in his day, onetime priest
and Catholic thinker Ivan Illich predicted
the confusion of the digital age.
BY ROBERT INCHAUSTI
David Cayley is a Canadian
writer and broadcast journalist
who has made a career
interviewing and explaining notable
Christian intellectuals, including
Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye,
George Grant, and René Girard.
In his new book “Ivan Illich: An
Intellectual Journey” (Penn State University
Press, $42.75), Cayley offers us
the fruits of his 32-year relationship
with Ivan Illich as his friend and
student.
Illich (not to be confused with
Tolstoy’s famous character of a very
similar name) was a onetime Catholic
priest and controversial social theorist
in the ’60s and ’70s, whose radical ideas
are only now beginning to receive
their due.
A historian of the Middle Ages, Illich
saw the institutions of the modern
world largely growing out of the
early and medieval Roman Catholic
Church. But over time this process
distorted and corrupted the original
teachings and inverted the virtues and
values of Christ, transforming hospitality
into hospitals, know-how into
schooling, health care into a commodity,
and death into a disease.
As a consequence, modern men
and women have made impressive
demographic advances in terms of life
spans and mortality rates, but lost their
self-sufficiency, personal integrity, and
religious faith.
These, Illich theorized, have been
replaced by economic dependence,
collective thinking, and a distorted
sense of personal entitlement, making
good on Chesterton’s witticism: “We
live in a time when it is harder for a
free man to make a home than it was
for a medieval ascetic to do without
one.”
It may sound like a pretty outrageous
assessment — until we listen
with care to what Illich actually
meant by these charges. Dismissed
as an anarchist by the liberal left and
falsely appropriated by the extreme
right, Illich saw himself as bringing
the good news of the gospel to bear
on the many crises afflicting our
institutions, from church to school to
government.
For him, the way forward was backward,
back to the original virtues that
predated modernity and shaped and
defined both classical civilization and
the Medieval Synthesis.
Cayley’s serious dive into Illich’s life
as a cultural critic and social activist is
a deep one — 560 pages deep, to be
precise. For Cayley, who posthumously
published a series of interviews
conducted late in Illich’s life in 2005,
it is the latest valuable contribution
to a figure whose radical ideas were
not fairly understood the first time
around.
We now can see the Christian sources
of Illich’s views. Not to mention
that much of what Illich warned us
about has come true — including our
increasing inability to fathom what
has happened to us!
Take Illich’s most infamous book
“De-Schooling Society” (1971). As
absurd as that title may (still) sound to
those of us who depend upon schools
to help raise our children and prepare
them for jobs in an increasingly
technological and professionalized
workplace, public education must
take at least
some responsibility
for our
increased dependence
on secondhand
thinking
(aka “the nonthought
of received
ideas”) that make us
so vulnerable to demagogues
— including the
hustles of robo-calls and the
extortions of conspiracy theorists.
Increasingly our authorities are
22 • ANGELUS • January 14, 2022