The Break with the World

by

Tom Cheetham

Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was one of the great figures of 20

century Christianity. He was a unique and
emphatic voice who variously annoyed, surprised and stimulated both conservatives and liberals
inside and outside of the Catholic Church. Of his fame among many on the Left in the America of
the 1960s he once said, I am so conservative that people think Im a radical. But he was indeed in
many ways a radical, and his social, political and theological thought is penetrating, challenging and
profound. He was a historian of rare creativity and insight. The influential and powerful philosopher
Charles Taylor, himself a Catholic, in his recent magisterial study
A Secular Age
acknowledges his
debt to Illich in trying to come to understand the history and origins of the modern world. Illich, he
says, saw the actual development of the Christian churches and Christian civilizationas a
corruption of Christianity.
[1]
He regarded the history of the West as the story of the perversion

and betrayal of the message of the Gospel. Illich himself put it as follows:

[The] central reality of the West is marvelously expressed in the old Latin phrase:
Corruptio optimi quae est pessima
[the corruption of the best, which is the worst] the
historical progression in which Gods Incarnation is turned topsy-turvy, inside out. I
want to speak of the mysterious darkness that envelopes our world, the demonic
night paradoxically resulting from the worlds equally mysterious vocation to glory.
My subject is a mystery of faith, a mystery whose depth of evil could not have come
to be without the greatness of the truth revealed to us.
[2]

In order to begin to appreciate Illichs position we need to understand the history of what he called
the institutionalization of grace in the Western world. It is not really possible to understand this
history unless we have a grasp of what the Christian liturgy meant to people for over a millennium.
One of the great students of the liturgy has written,

Medieval public worship...was a fundamental factor which inspired whatever man

made and thought and which, at the same time, was the result of his daily work, his
beliefs and his needs. The history of medieval liturgy must be treated as one of the
main sources of western culture...
[3]

It was Illichs profound claim that the most ominous expression of secularization in the West was
not the death of nature (although this was related), nor a misnamed materialism, nor sexual
freedom, but the decline of liturgy, the routinization and emptying out of religious ritual in the
churches.
[4]
This remarkable assertion can have real meaning for us only if we properly understand

the intimate relations among the spiritual rebirth of the individual, liturgical acts of worship, and the
th

communities in which they occur.

Illich presents the analysis of the idea of reform in early Christianity developed by Gerhart
Ladner.
[5]
During late antiquity the Christian experience of rebirth in Christ was conceived as a

revolutio
,

a change-of-heart or
metanoia
the word that came to be translated as repentance. This
crystallized into an understanding of conversion that was entirely new and unprecedented in the
ancient world. This revolution was understood to be both personal and social. Illich says:

This idea animates the practice of the Christian monks, particularly Irish and Scottish
monks, who go out to strange desert islands and leave the world without leaving life.
They make themselves responsible for turning away from their culture and from its
assumptions and towards the kingdom of God, towards something new, for which
they are willing to turn themselves inside out. [Ladner] follows this example of the
monks because it is an extreme representation of what early Christianity demanded:
self-renewal, the renewal of the person, which God will perform, as the major
social
task of a Christian community.
[6]

In other words: the Christian revolution, and the Christian

idea
of revolution, is grounded in the
realization that the most important service to the world and to others consisted in turning around
ones own heart.
[7]
The vocation the early Christians saw as setting them apart was the attempt to

bring about a renewal of the world by means of ones own personal conversion.
[8]

The connection between turning ones own heart inside out, and the wider community is partly this:
The communal rituals, the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, which signal and call forth the
descent of the Holy Spirit, were also public re-affirmations of promises made to oneself, ones
community, and to God, that one had been reborn in the Spirit and had accepted the rights and
responsibilities of the new covenant with God. This marks the actualization through grace of the
ultimate value of each person as a member of the greater community of the Church, what Illich calls
the glory of being you and me.
[9]

For Illich the tragedy of the corruption of the best into the worst is most evident in the
transformation, perversion and emptying out of rituals. One early example of this corruption is what
happened to the ritual of the confession. Illich writes:

The new Christian idea of reform found one of its concrete expressions in early
penitential practices. These were meant for men, converts or sons of converts, who
had slid back into forms of violence pagan decency would have demanded of them,
but that were part of this world from which they had promised to turn away when
they accepted baptism. By publicly accepting a penitential ritual, they publicly gave
expression to their inner reform. In the confessional, this public and precise
statement of an attitude was replaced by the intimate, secret commitment to
contrition and amendment pastoral care began to inculcate. The courtroom within
called for a place for quantitative accounting in the beyond.
[10]

Thus begins the long complex process by which liturgical actions animated by grace and trust are

replaced by mechanical techniques fostered by mistrust, fear and the desire for assured and assuring
measures of ones sanctity. Lee Hoinacki, Illichs long-time friend and colleague, writes that the
decline of liturgy began with clerical actions to establish various assured institutional responses to
Gods calling, later legitimated by a juridical or legal order; men hesitated to rest all hope on
gratuitous gifts of grace.
[11]
Illich referred to this process as the criminalization of sin. He

regarded it as one of the most fateful perversions of the Gospel. Distrust of the gifts of grace, and a
desire for control based upon human fear lie deep at the roots of modern society. He argued that the
rituals of modern society are based upon need, fear, mistrust and the desire for power rather than on
faith in the gifts and grace of the world.
Illich argued that the chief characteristic of Westernization is the appearance of
Homo oeconomicus
.
We call a society Western when its institutions are reshaped for the
disembedded
production of
commodities that meet this beings basic needs.
[12]
All the terms here seem entirely normal:

production, commodities, and needs. What Illich is saying is that all of these are peculiarly modern
abstract concepts that only make sense in a world where disembedding is the norm. They only make
sense if human acts have already been ripped out of the fabric of a truly social and interpersonal
society. Production replaces work, commodities replace the fruits of our labors, and needs are
conceived as required inputs that can be satisfied impersonally by institutions. This disembedding is
profoundly anti-social and dangerously impersonal. It turns persons into consumers, the fruits of the
earth into commodities, and the complex interplay of personal relations into institutions that
attempt to manage the flow of goods and services. The disappearance of the
person
of which Henry
Corbin has warned us can for Illich only be properly understood as a social, political, technological
and economic phenomenon.
[13]

In the long run we find all the attempts to assure ourselves of control and impose order converging
on a common ritually organized set of institutions that dominate our collective lives. And it is on
Illichs view the Church itself that is the archetypal Institution on the basis of which all other
modern institutions have their being. Much of Illichs life was devoted to analyzing and revealing the
community-destroying and life-denying nature of the institutions of the modern world. And in the
extremities of contemporary life dominated by technologies controlled, or more often let loose, by
human agency, too many of us are finally victims of what Illich calls the break with the world.
What used to be Creation is conceived instrumentally, organized and manipulated by human, or
inhuman hands. The world of the person, of flesh and sacrament is gone. In one of his bleaker
pronouncements, Illich refers to the great Jewish poet Paul Celan with whom he felt considerable
affinity. Illich wrote that the children of today,

are offspring of the epoch after Guernica, Dresden, Bergen-Belsen, and Los Alamos.
Genocide and the human genome project; the death of forests and hydroponics;
heart transplants and medicide through insurance - all these aretasteless, without
smell, impalpable and un-worldly. .

Paul Celan knew that only smoke remains from the world-dwindling that
we have experienced. It is the virtual drive of my computer that serves me as the
symbol for this unretrievable disappearance, and through which the loss of world
and flesh can be envisaged. The worldliness of the world is not deposited like ruins
in deeper layers of the ground. It is gone, like a deleted line of the RAM drive.
[14]


By late in his life Illich had abandoned his earlier hopes that the course of history could be changed.
But in spite of this claim that the worldliness of the world is gone, he never gave up hope for us as
members of small and committed communities, analogous in some ways to those of the early
Church. In the end it is not society and its institutions that support us. The only access we have to
God is through encounters with other people, not
en masse
, but as individuals with whom we choose
to recapture access to the grace and beauty of the world.
I do think there has been a break with the world in Western technological culture. And I think it has
been going on for a long time. Something like this refusal of grace is a potential each of us carries I
suspect that something like it occurs in every culture, to one degree or another and for different
reasons. The struggle to maintain a connection to the world in Illichs sense, in the face of all in our
culture that would destroy it, is a challenge that we refuse at our peril. To bring to light the
sacredness of the world is the most profound vocation.
[15]
The Liturgy at the Center of the World
In his powerful book on the meaning of liturgy, Aidan Kavanagh reminds us of Hannah Arendts
penetrating comments on
Homo oeconomicus
. It may well be that the modern age began with the
disappearance of transcendence, that the secular world denies its sacred ground, but, writes Arendt,

it would by no means follow that this loss threw men back upon the world. The
historical evidenceshows that modern men were not thrown back upon this world
but upon themselves. One of the most persistent trends in modern philosophy has
been an exclusive concern with self . The greatness of Max Webers discovery
about the origins of capitalism lay precisely in his demonstration that an enormous,
strictly mundane activity is possible without any care for or enjoyment of the world
whatever, an activity whose deepest motivation, on the contrary, is worry and care
about the self. World-alienation, and not self-alienation as Marx thought, has been
the hallmark of the modern age.
[16]

Our secular civilization is not at all what it proudly thinks it is: worldly. It is just the opposite. We
have plunged into ourselves and lost the world. I want to think some more about this worldliness.
What can worldliness be, if we lose it when we lose transcendence?
We should be clear about the distinction between the personal on the one hand - what Henry
Corbin and C.G. Jung call the individual - and the private, the egotistical, on the other. The first is
fundamentally a
theological
category. The second is
economic
as Illich and Arendt use term. The strictly
mundane activity that Weber is concerned with is the realm of the private: here we speak of private
property, of private lives and of the inalienable rights of privacy and freedom. This view of the
human person can admit little qualitative difference between a society of ideal consumers and an
ideal gas. Both states of matter are best understood statistically. And the driving force behind the
desire to understand them in this way is power: the desire for control. In the world of the private,
there can only be operational truths: power relations among more or less complex objects. This is
the totalitarian metaphysics that Corbin so abhorred.

A person inhabits another level of being entirely. It is only where there are persons that there can be
community. A person is a mystery. A mystery in the sense of
sacrament
, which is the word the third
century Latin Fathers used to translate the New Testament Greek (
mysterion
).
This mystery is rooted in the Mystery of the divine Communal Person. For Corbin the human being
must finally meet the Celestial Twin, the Divine Face of the Lord who is the guarantor of
individuality through the divine community of persons. And in Trinitarian theology, the Godhead is
three-fold and communal in essence. It is only among such persons that a true society can exist.
Among
egos
there can only be external relations of power, never internal relations of sympathy.
But breaking through the shell of the
ego
involves opening to more than other human persons in a
merely human society. It opens the doorway onto the world as a whole. The world which we lose
when we lose transcendence, the worldliness of our existence, is what the Abrahamic Tradition calls
Creation, and it is teeming with life and mystery. Everything is holy, alive, and animated. It is a world
replete with personifications. It is a world suffused with images and imaginings. Within this
context there may be cause to treat some beings as objects, and to base our actions on relations
merely of power - but this occurs within a larger context which is sacramental and sympathetic and
mysterious to the roots. We can, that is to say, conceive of Creation scientifically, but if that is all we
do, then we end with what the post-modernists call a totalizing discourse a master narrative that
blinds us to the complexities and the particularities that characterize the world as it is inhabited and
lived by persons.
What then is the function of the human person in the world? In this Abrahamic scheme of things,
the human person is the image, the
eikon
of God. Human personhood, if and when we attain it - for
it is to be attained and is not merely given - is the most perfect representation in Creation of the
Mystery of the Divine Person. As Corbin has shown us, the supreme act of the creative imagination
is prayer. And this is because it is an image on Earth of the Divine act of Creation which
continuously breathes the world into being. It is the con-spiration of Lord and creature. In the
cosmic liturgy each being prays to its Lord in the manner of which it is capable. The fundamental act
of all beings is prayer, worship and celebration.
Metanoia
, the conversion and change of heart that lies at the root of the Christian experience consists
in realizing that we are not masters of ourselves. We cannot, in the end, save ourselves. Jung knew
this. He knew that
in extremis
the psychological torments which the alchemists so vividly describe are
not conquerable until we know that we cannot escape them on our own. Only when we fully
acknowledge our fundamental inability to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, can the coincidence
of opposites come about. It cannot happen through any will of our own. In Christian terms, we are
in need of grace.
Orthodox theologian Olivier Clment writes,

In the Gospel the very root of sin is the pretence that we can save ourselves by our
own effort, that we can find security in ourselves and one another . To save
ourselves we must give up all security, any notion of being self-sufficient; we must
look at the world with wonder, gratefully receiving it anew, with its mysterious
promise of the infinite.
[17]


Our chief work is first of all to open ourselves to the gifts that lie around us, to break out of the
loneliness of the closed
ego
and come into communion with the life and lives of the world. To
become as children, startled and in wonder at the mere fact that we are here. Our Fall is to refuse
these gifts and to live as if we are abandoned and alone. As Clment says,

From the beginning grace is inherent in the very fact of existing. The human
vocation is to become the willing and conscious celebrant of this great mystery.

If this is our vocation, to be conscious celebrants of mystery, con-spirators with the living God, then
it seems necessary that we understand something of what the traditions have understood about
liturgy, ritual and the rites of worship. For both Corbin and Illich, in different ways, it has been by
the degradation of just these liturgical enactments of mystery that the break with the world has
occurred. If we are to heal that break, then we must know what it can mean to be liturgical beings.
When Henry Corbin discusses liturgy and the liturgical structure of Creation in the context of Ibn
Arabis mysticism or that of the Shiites, the rituals and what we might call the structures of praise
and submission are based primarily upon the
salat
, the obligatory daily prayer. Fundamental to the
practice of this liturgy is the intent of the faithful to embody the word of God, the Quran. Islamic
spirituality is always understood as essentially and necessarily concrete and embodied. The ritual
prayer involves the entire body, it orients and opens the believer onto the mystery of the world.
The central liturgy of Christianity is the Eucharist.
[18]
The term is derived from a Greek word for

thanksgiving. As a sacred meal it is both sacrament and sacrifice, and the incorporation of the death,
resurrection and glorification of Christ. Jesus said Unless you eat of the flesh of the son of man and
drink his blood, you shall not have life in you
[19]
This version of ritual sacrifice was understood by

some early Christians as perfecting the sacrificial rituals of the Jews. This is of course one source of
the animosity which was to develop between Jews and Christians. For if the Holy Supper is not
merely a new means of enacting our relation with the divine from whom all food flows, but is rather
an abrogation of the sacrificial meals that came before, then Judaism, and implicitly, all other
religions, must be regarded as imperfect at best, and at worst, false and blasphemous. The orthodox
position came to be that Christs sacrifice replaced all others, and from that moment on, acceptable
sacrifice must be a representation of the death and resurrection of the flesh and blood of Christ. It is
undertaken as a gift to God, for the purposes of adoration, thanksgiving, petition and atonement.
This sacred meal was understood by the tradition until the time of the Reformation as both the
symbolic and the
actual
consumption of the flesh and blood of the Christ, and so as a radically
incarnational act paradoxically uniting transcendence and immanence in the real presence of Christ
in the bread and wine of the Mass. It is the original and final mystery made present and immediate in
the consecrated fruits of the earth. The Eucharist is the consummation and repetition of the two
poles of the Christian scheme of salvation, the Incarnation and the Transfiguration. The former is
the actualization of Spirit in matter, and the latter is the spiritualization of matter in both human and
natural existence. The Eucharist is the means through which Gods redemptive and transfiguring
activity continues through time.
[20]

Kavanaghs orthodox Catholic account of this central sacrificial meal tells us something profound

about the nature of our immersion in the world. Sacrifice, and a bloody one at that, is at heart of
reality. Every dish on our table contains something which has died violently at our hand. We are
not constitutionally angels but omnivorous carnivores.
[21]
We cannot avoid the murderous

transaction with reality which one creatures giving up its life for another entails.
[22]
Our problem

is not slaying, but learning to slay rightly. To slay rightly is to transact the inexorable business of
life. But we are a bloody bunch who have made the world a bloody place and we continually
refuse to come to grips with the fact that we are unable to save ourselves - the society and the form
of life we hope for is at best forever just out of reach. The City we try to make for ourselves over
and over again is doomed to war, famine, blight and chaos. Our mistake is not to slay, but to slay
wrongly, to slay in order to be as gods, and thus to act against the common good and so destroy
the communion of all in all. This is the perversion of food, of creation and of the life that it gives,
and makes death into little more than a capricious and useless rape of life.
[23]
This butchery can

only come to an end through being intensified and offered up by the sacrifice of Christ. Kavanagh
writes:

We had to learn how to slay rightly again, to commerce in vital deaths so that the
communion of all in all might be restored. There could be no shortcuts. We had to
look the lamb in the eye as we cut its lovely throat, and we had to keep that awful
memory as we dined thankfully upon its flesh to live. Without this unspeakable
memory, we found that we grew quickly cold once again - calculating, unworldly
about the world, forgetful that the carrots we pulled in our gardens and the wheat we
cut in our fields died no less really than the lamb of liquid eye so that we might live.
And we entertained the distant possibility that our own lives might have to be
yielded up in the same spirit for the life of all; that, as someone finally said, we could
discover life only in throwing it away.
[24]

This then is what came to be the orthodox meaning of the Eucharist, the enactment of the sacrifice
of Christ as the perfection of the pagan and the Hebrew sacrifices. It is the worlds common dance:

the solemn liturgy no longer of a lamb led to sacrifice but of a perfect Lamb who
leads all of us to the Worlds altar and then concelebrates there his own sacrifice with
all that is. Here alone are we able to transact business with reality on the most
radical level.
[25]

This is liturgy at the center of the world. Liturgy as

the most worldly act.
It provides the central pivot
around which the community revolves and so ensures that a society can exist at all; a society that is
made up of persons, not a crowd of isolated
egos
. Only in this City can there be any
res publica
, for
without this central sacrifice, this Holy Wound, there can be only closed and isolated selves. The
existence of Persons and the sympathy and communion that they entail requires the sacrifice, the
deep and inner wound. This wound is so deep, so interior, so central, so powerful that it escapes
from the bondage of interiority and refigures, transforms and turns the world inside out. Kavanagh
writes

Every sacrament, being an act of faith, inverts the perspective natural to humanitys
city, putting the cross of Christ not on the distant horizon of possible human

options but deep into the mind and heart of the spectator who comes close to it in
faith. It kills in order that life might flow.
[26]

The Perversion of Orthodoxy

Worship and liturgy stand at the center of the Christian experience. They provide, says Kavanagh,
the primary experience of God for the faithful. Liturgy provides the ontological condition of
theology and so is the source of primary, primitive and original theology. Liturgy is the cause of
prima theologia
and is the original content with which theologians in the usual sense, concern
themselves. In liturgy the community which is that Church stands in the presence of the living God.
This is not an easy place to be: The liturgical assemblys stance in faith is vertiginous, on the edge
of chaos.
[27]
Being brought to the brink of chaos causes deep, long term changes, however slight

or great they may be, in the lives of the participants. The slow adjustment to these changes results in
alterations in the subsequent liturgical acts. This is theology being born. To detect these changes is
to discover where theology has passed, rather as physics detects atomic particles in the tracks of
their passage through a liquid medium.
[28]
This view of theology is at odds with modern

assumptions about the bookish and intellectual nature of theology and the tasks of theologians.
Kavanagh writes,

To argue with minds accustomed to thinking of theology in such a manner that

theology at its genesis is communitarian, even proletarian; that it is aboriginally
liturgical in context, partly conscious and partly unconscious; that it stems from an
experience of near chaos; that it is long term and dialectical; and that its agents are
more likely to be charwomen and shopkeepers than pontiffs and professors - all this
is to argue against the grain. It is to argue that the theology which we most readily
recognize and practice is in fact neither primary nor seminal but secondary and
derivative:
theologia secunda.
[29]

This is to say, in the words of Prosper of Aquitaine, that it is the law of worship which founds or
establishes the law of belief.
[30]
Something vastly mysterious occurs, however unpredictably,

when the church stands in the Presence of the Lord, and it is only grace and charity that permit the
assembly, like Moses, to come away whole from such an encounter, and even then it is with wounds
which are as deep as they are salutary.
[31]

Standing before the living God is a risky business. People dare to do so not because
they are irrational but because they have found it plausible that they, like others
before them (even Moses), might do so without actually being incinerated, and that
the advantages of doing so outweigh the disadvantages of not doing so, the deity
remaining all the while alarmingly unpredictable. Whom God loves he chastises. It is
risky to sit at the Lords table, and there is absolutely no certainty that one will not
end up on it with ones own body broken, ones own blood poured out. But it is
plausible in faith that one might risk the whole thing and even be the better for
it.
[32]

And so we can grasp the absolute primacy of the original meaning of

orthodoxy
: Ortho-doxy in this
original sense is a sustained life of right worship and it is the fundamental act of the assembly of
the Church, the primordial action and practice of primary theology. But somewhere along the way
orthodoxy
became
orthopistis
or
orthodidascalia
- right belief or right teaching, and its antithesis
metamorphosed into heresy rather than wrong worship. The language of dogma and doctrine
began to take primacy over the first order language of the liturgy.
[33]
Everything turned upside

down:

the liturgical assembly, which has been meeting under God fifty-two times a year for
the past 2,000, now must be regarded as a theological cipher drawing whatever
theological awareness it has not from its own response to its graced encounter with
the living God, but from sources found in ecclesiastical bureaucracies and within the
walls of academe. The served has become servant, mistress has become
handmaid.
[34]

Once this inverted world becomes commonplace it seems evident that it is the law of belief that
must regulate the law of worship. And yet this makes a mockery of the essence of the religious
experience: It was a Presence, not faith, which drew Moses to the burning bush, and what
happened there was a revelation, not a seminar.
[35]

Kavanagh associates this inversion of priorities with the rise of literacy and the accompanying
emphasis on textual approaches to Revelation, and with the direct effects of the Reformation and
Counter-Reformation. Liturgy, as a medium of communication and action, is a kind of language, But
it is a first order language, concrete and embodied, not abstract and textual. It is a symbolic,
vernacular language of the most primary kind, akin to art and poetry. It stands to secondary theology
as the vernacular stands to linguistics. And in first order matters, anonymity is the rule, intentions
are obscure, and meaning is less precise than it is richly ambiguous.
[36]
As with all language it is a

social transaction with reality whose ramifications escape over the horizon of the present and
beyond the act of speech itself.
[37]
That is to say, it is a language which is not amenable to control.

On Kavanaghs account the perversion, or perhaps better, inversion of

orthodoxy
came about as
scripture began to be given far more weight than liturgy. There are, he says, good reasons that this
occurred. At the end of the Middle Ages the liturgy of the Church was extraordinarily elaborate and
complex: there was simply more of it around than any but ecclesiastical experts could bear. But
more important was the rise of textual literacy and the availability of printed books. The emphasis of
Reformation humanists on the centrality of the Bible and the individuals immediate relation to God
through His printed Word made uncertain the function of communitarian worship and the meaning
of traditional rites and liturgies. Printing made the Word visible to all as lines of text:

A Presence which had formerly been experienced by most as a kind of enfolding

embrace had now been modulated into an abecedarian printout to which only the
skill of literacy could give complete access. Rite and its symbols could be displaced
or got round altogether, and so could the whole of the living tradition which
provided the gravitational field holding them together in an intelligible union.
[38]

But is not only the ability to step outside the constraints and supports of tradition that is at issue.
The extensive and complex liturgies which formerly were understood and orchestrated only by a few
ecclesiastical experts able to master the intricate liturgical manuals were now open to editorial
revision:

The technology of printing made it possible to put the texts of pruned liturgies into
the hands of worshippers very quickly indeed for the first time ever and at decreasing
cost. This rendered the extensive, complex, and expensive libraries of liturgical
booksobsolete in one stroke . It also speeded up liturgical change by giving
thisprocess over to committees of experts whose work was predominantly textual
and theological rather than ritual and symbolic. This in turn made the liturgy of
Christians much easier to control by positive ecclesiastical law administered through
centralized bureaucratic offices of church government .
[39]

And so the rites of worship changed in accordance:

The liturgy began to shift from rite as an enacted style of common life carried on in
rich symbolic ambiguity to the simultaneous reading and recitation of printed texts
which were increasingly didactic in nature.
[40]

The entire symbolic order that had provided the meaning of Christianity since its inception was
coming apart. Those who sought to re-establish a Christian foundation for their contemporaries
were already acting within the new framework. The literate Church was based on a different
symbolic order:

It was a new system of worship which would increasingly do without rite, one in
which printed texts would increasingly bear the burden formerly borne by richly
ambiguous corporate actions done with water, oil, food, and the touch of human
hands.
Orthodoxia
as a life of right worship modulated into a literate effort at
remaining doctrinally correct. Liturgy had begun to become worship, and
worship to become scriptures stepchild rather than its home.
[41]

For Kavanagh as for Illich, the same forces which produce the disembedded and asocial individual
who is
Homo oeconomicus
are responsible for the perversion of liturgy from its primary theological
function of revelation, into what can in the end become not a graced and trusting form of life, but a
means of social control based upon fear and greed.
[42]
The communal, embodied and richly

imagined life of right worship based on grace and trust, perishes entrapped within competing
systems of abstract doctrines propounded by experts whose fundamental stance towards the world
is not trust but suspicion.
If the break with the world is to be mended we must find our way towards forms of life which are
liturgical in the senses that Kavanagh, Illich and Corbin outline. For liturgy, and the prayer which is
its heart, are the central features not only of what we today call religious psychology, but of
cosmology. If the world has been inverted and eviscerated, then we must work to make it whole.
This means standing before the mystery, and offering thanks in celebration of the fullness and the

beauty of things. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, man is conceived as the priest of Creation. It is
the human vocation to make an offering of the world to God in thanksgiving and in praise. We are
responsible for the glorification of the Earth, and all our acts, all our transformations of the gifts of
Creation, our arts and sciences and social forms are so many offerings to those we love, to the
community and to God. By accepting the gift of the world, transforming it and releasing it back
towards the mysterious source from which it flows, we transform both the world and ourselves.
[43]

Seen in this light, all of Creation is involved in the Eucharist; everything we do is a potential offering
and sacrifice. But this of course is not the kind of human society that we have made in the modern
West. Our world is dominated by human desires, by suspicion and mistrust, by the will-to-power
and the dominion of the individual. Our rituals are based largely on the management and control of
things, and of people regarded and managed as things, and not on the plenitude and mystery of an
animated and personified cosmos.
Citizens of technological societies are almost entirely ignorant of the non-human world. In so far as
we live as consumers embedded within a culture of consumption we are trapped inside ourselves.
We swell with self-importance because we fear that if we dont regard ourselves as the most serious
thing, then we will disappear into the darkness of the impersonal matter of which we believe we are
composed. But we have just seen that our Western sense of the supreme importance of the
autonomous individual has resulted in the break with the world, that as Arendt said, by losing touch
with transcendence we have become the most unworldly culture there has ever been.
So what, practically speaking, does transcendence mean? How do we prepare ourselves to be open
to transcendence? If we have lost touch with it, how do we touch it again? How, in Henry Corbins
terms, do we make ourselves capable of God? I have come to think that the answer is quite simple.
We need to be free. We need, I need, to simply relax. This means I think, to be open to, receptive of
what Christians call
grace
. And grace is an essentially
personal
phenomenon it occurs only in the
presence of another person. The God of Abraham, the Jewish, Christian and Muslim God, is a
personal
God. Unfortunately, for some of us at least, learning to be open to others and so open to
grace is the work of a lifetime it is the Great Work, the only real work. Being free and open is not
a passive activity but neither does the strength required of us have much at all to do with the will
to power or the desires of the ego. We must love Life, and this requires passion. We must love
others, and this requires humility. We must be free of fear and this requires courage.
Listen to Ivan Illich speaking to us of the life of grace:

hand-in-hand with the increasing intensity of instrumentalization in Western society

goes a lack of attention to what one traditionally called gratuity. Is there another
word for the non-purposeful action, which is only performed because its beautiful,
its good, its fitting, and not because its meant to achieve, to construct, to change, to
manage? ... [T]he Samaritan acts because his action is good, not because this man can
be saved or not saved, not because this man needs medical attention, or needs food,
but because, imagining that I am the Samaritan, he needs me. What the beaten-up
Jews presence evokes in the Samaritans belly is a response which is not purposeful
but gratuitous and good. [This reveals to us] ... the possibility that a beautiful and

good life is primarily a life of gratuity, and that gratuity is not something which can
flow out of me unless it is opened and challenged by you. ...[G]ratuity in its most
beautiful flowering, is praise, mutual enjoyment; and what some people discover...is
that the message of Christianity is that we live together, praising the fact that we are
where we are and who we are, and that contrition and forgiveness are part of that
which we celebrate, doxologically.
[44]

The world is a gift. Our lives, in spite of everything, are gifts. And the way you receive a gift is with
thanks, with praise. Listen carefully again to Illichs words with which we began:

I want to speak of the mysterious darkness that envelopes our world, the demonic
night paradoxically resulting from the worlds equally mysterious vocation to glory.

Illich speaks to us from a place which is truly a

mysterion
, truly beyond understanding. The demonic
night and our vocation to glory are inseparable. We must accept our vocation to glory, not in spite
of, but
because
of Guernica, Dresden, Bergen-Belsen, Los Alamos and all the rest. This is Illichs
message. For Illich it is the message of the Cross, of Golgotha. And yet I think that it is the central
message of the prophetic tradition itself. The Jewish poet Allen Afterman has put it, for me, most
lyrically:

The Jewish way is to know the world, to deny nothing holding the Holocaust,
holding the anger and bitterness and sing Despite everything, the Jewish people
is alive. Despite our brokenness, were still able to sing The Jews, the most
wounded people, always find ways to praise life, to praise, to praise, to praise
[45]

Works Cited

Afterman, Allen.
Kabbalah and Consciousness and the Poetry of Allen Afterman.
Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 2005.
Arendt, Hannah.
The Human Condition.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.
Bradshaw, Paul F.
Eucharistic Origins
. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Cayley, David.
Rivers North of the Future. The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley
,.
Toronto, Ontario: Anansi, 2005.
_____
Ivan Illich: In Conversation
. Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1992.
Cheetham, Tom.
The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism
. New Orleans:
Spring Journal Books, 2003.
Chryssavgis, John. The World of the Icon and Creation: an Orthodox perspective on
ecology and pneumatology, in D. Hessel and R. Radford Ruether (eds.),
Christianity and

Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans

, Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2000, 83-96.
Ellul, Jacques.
The Technological Society.
Translated from the French by John Wilkinson.

New
York: Knopf, 1964.
Fisch, Thomas J. (ed.)
Primary Readings on the Eucharist
. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press,
2004.
Hoinacki, Lee. Reading Ivan Illich.
in
Hoinacki and Mitcham (eds.), 1-7.
_____ and Carl Mitcham (eds.).
The Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection.
Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 2002.
Illich, Ivan. The Scopic Past and the Ethics of the Gaze: A Plea for the Historical Study of
Ocular Perception. Unpublished; available online through the
Thinking After Illich
website,
n.d.
_____ Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show. Unpublished; available online through the
Thinking After Illich
website, n.d.
_____
Gender
. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1982.
_____
H
O
Dallas: Dallas
and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of Stuff.
Institute of Art and Humanities, 1984.
_____ The Loss of World and Flesh. trans. by Muska Nagel and Barbara Duden.
Available online through the
Thinking After Illich
website. In German as Verlust von Welt
und Fleisch, in
Freitag
51(13). December 2002, s. 18, 1993a.
_____
In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon
. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993b.
_____ To Honor Jacques Ellul. An address given at Bordeaux, Nov. 13, 1993. available
online through the
Thinking After Illich
website, 1993c.
Illich, Ivan and Sanders, Barry.
ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind
. New York:
Random House, 1988.
Kavanagh, Aidan.
On Liturgical Theology.
Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1984.
Kilmartin, E. J. Eucharist (as Sacrifice) in
New Catholic Encyclopedia,
v. 5, 1967. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Ladner, Gerhart B.
The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the
Fathers
. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959.
Rubin, Miri.
Corpus Christi:

The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture

. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1991.
Sherrard, Philip.
The Sacred in Life and Art.
Ipswich: Golgonooza, 1990.
Smith, Dennis E.
From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World
.
Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2003.
Staniloae, Dumitru.
The Experience of God. Orthodox Dogmatic Theology. Vol 2. The World: Creation
and Deification.
Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2000.
Taylor, Charles.
A Secular Age.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.
van Dijk, Stephen J. P. and Walker, J. Hazelden,
The Myth o f the Aumbry: Notes on Medieval
Reservation Practice and Eucharistic Devotion.
London: Burns & Oates, 1957.
2

15

[1]
Talyor, 2007, 737.

[2]
Quoted in Cayley, 2005, 29.

[3]
van Dijk and Walker, 1957, 14.

[4]
Hoinacki 2002, 4.

[5]
Ladner, 1959.

[6]
Illich in Cayley, 1992, 211. I cant resist pointing out that this metaphor of turning inside out is a central one for Henry

Corbin as well. See Cheetham, 2003.

[7]
Ibid.

,
213.
[8]
Illich, 1982, 158.

[9]
Cayley, 1992, 213.

[10]
Illich, 1982, 159.

[11]
Hoinacki, 2002, 4. With particular reference to the Eucharist, see Rubin, 1991.

[12]
Illich, 1982, 10.

[13]
It should be noted that Illichs perspective owes a great deal to the work of Jacques Ellul, as Illich himself mentions

more than once. See esp. Ellul, 1964. Also, Illich, 1993c, unpublished.
[14]
Illich, 1993a, 3.

[15]
Chyrssavgis, 2000, 89.

[16]
Arendt, 1953, 253f. Quoted in Kavanagh, 1984, 27-28.

[17]
Clment, 2000, 20-21.

[18]
For an overview from the Catholic prespective see articles by W. F. Dewan and E. J. Kilmartin, 1967. More detailed

treatments can be found in Bradshaw, 2004, Fisch, 2004, Rubin, 1991 and Smith, 2003.
[19]
John 6:54 RSV.

[20]
Sherrard, 1990, 73.

[21]
Kavanagh, 1984, 34-35.

[22]
Ibid., 34.

[23]
Ibid.

,
35.
[24]
Ibid.

,
36-37.
[25]
Ibid.

[26]
Ibid.

,
42.
[27]
Ibid.

,
75.
[28]
Ibid.

.
74.
[29]
Ibid., 74-75.

[30]
Ibid.

.
3. ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi.
[31]
Ibid.

,
75.
[32]
Ibid.

,
125-126
[33]
Ibid.

,
. 81-83.
[34]
Ibid.

,
83.
[35]
Ibid.

,
92.
[36]
Ibid.

,
85.
[37]
Ibid.

,
86.
[38]
Ibid.

,
104.
[39]
Ibid., 105.

[40]
Ibid., 106.

[41]
Ibid.

,
108-109.
[42]
Illich has written extensively on the effects of literacy on the old symbolic order, and his work is congruent with

Kavanaghs claims. See Illich (1993b) and Illich & Sanders (1988). Miri Rubins (1991) account of the institutionalization of

the Eucharist locates this trend in the social and political context of the medieval Church and points out that it begins as

early as the 10th

century.
[43]
See Staniloae, 2000.

[44]
Cayley, 2005, 226-7, 229.

[45]
Afterman, 2005, 212.