THE APOCALYPTIC ILLICH:
The changing place of apocalypse in Illich's thought, and the significance of this figure in our time
The following is a lecture, delivered on May 14, 2026 to a conference held at the Ponficio Ateneo [Pontifical University] Sant’ Anelmo in Rome. The topic was: Corruptio Optimi Pessima Quae Est Pessima: Exploring Ivan Illich as a Theological Thinker
The figure of the apocalypse has a peculiar place in the thought and the imagination of our time, as an idea that is at once familiar and obscure. One hears the word all the time. A Google search for “apocalyptic films” turns up hundreds of titles and offers links to hundreds more under cognate labels like dystopian, disaster, and post-apocalyptic. But all that is signified is disaster or devastation of some kind. There is rarely a reference to the original meaning of the term in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Rene Girard once pointed out to me how strange this is. The Christian Bible not only ends with an apocalypse – there is also, in each of the three Synoptic Gospels, a discourse which predicts the end of the world and goes on to describe it in precise detail. How odd, said Girard, that people studied these passages closely during the ages when people lacked the capacity to destroy themselves, but forgot them as soon as they gained this capacity – whether by nuclear war or out of control AI, by catastrophic climate change or a more gradual ecocide hardly matters. The idea that the impending end of the world might have anything to do with the way in which the New Testament formulates this idea is so far off the table, as to constitute in Girard’s eyes a fairly systematic repression, and even a form of madness.[1]
The purpose of this lecture is to locate the apocalypse now haunting everyday talk in its Biblical context, and to show that this context is necessary to make sense of a way of speaking that is, at the moment, quite reckless and unmoored. I will do this by examining the way the idea is treated in the work of Ivan Illich.
Illich, at first, more or less disavows the idea. I’ll take as an example the talk he gave in Cuernavaca 1966 which is printed in the volume The Powerless Church under the title “Concerning Aesthetic and Religious Experience.” His theme, as it often was around that time, was the maturation of humankind, or what Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his prison letters called “mankind’s…coming of age.”[2] Modernity, Illich says, has produced a humanity that has outgrown its religious and mythic childhood. “We have,” he goes on, “lifted the veil from the organisms that produce our idols.” This salutary disillusionment, he thinks, has left people open to the experience that the Gospels call the kingdom of heaven – as something that can be experienced here and now by a celebrating community, rather than remaining sequestered within religious institutions. (He is careful here to keep the word experience in brackets when applied to a mystery which stands beyond experience, even as it opens itself to us.) He speaks of this experience as entering “the density of the real,” a phrase he ascribes to Nicholas of Cusa, though I think the phrase is actually Illich’s way of condensing Cusanus’s meaning. “The kingdom is fulfilled,” Illich says, “without utopic completion, and it will come about without being apocalyptic.”
Illich believed, and said again and again during the 1960’s, that what he called “humanistic maturity” had made possible a new church, that would realize the kingdom as something that exists “among us,” and constitutes what might be called the essence of our sociability insofar as we are what the apostle Paul calls “members incorporate of one another.”[3] This is a vision of a now and forever community that can be realized in con-celebration anywhere, and at any time. To say that it is not apocalyptic is to say that “the new heaven and new earth” observed by John of Patmos only after “the first heaven and the first earth had vanished” can be apprehended here and now without any cataclysm, rapture, or Last Judgment intervening. Poet William Blake, in a commentary he wrote on his engraving of the Last Judgment, said that the Last Judgment ‘is a Representation of what Eternally Exists” and that “whenever any Individual Rejects Error and Embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual.”[4] Illich is in accord, I think. The new church that he envisioned and spoke about in the years between 1951 and 1969 had passed beyond old mythological and religious horizons in order to enter “the density of the real,” and the apocalypse as the projection of a mythical idea into history had no place in this vision. “The meaning of history,” Eric Voegelin wrote, “is an illusion, created by treating a symbol of faith as if it were a proposition concerning an object of immanent experience.”[5] This statement, written not long before the talk of Illich’s that I have been quoting, is one that I think Illich would have agreed with.
Nearly forty years later, in 1992, when I was interviewing Illich about his claim that Life, understood as object of administration, is “the most powerful idol which the Church has had to face in the course of her history,”[6] he made the following statement: “I have always abstained from making apocalyptic statements or interpreting the apocalypse. I don’t want to get into that kind of fundamentalism. I’d rather stay in history.”[7] His view then was the same as it had been in 1966. Then, five years further on, at the conclusion of the two-week interview that comprises the first part of The Rivers North of the Future, came a surprise: Illich told me that our present epoch might be “quite close to the end of the world.” Let me quote him in full:
I claim that the mysterium iniquitatus [the Latin Bible’ phrase for the evil that the Second Letter to the Thessalonians claims has entered the world with the Incarnation[8]] has been hatching [and] I dare say that it’s now more clearly present than ever before. It is, therefore, completely wrong to ascribe to me the idea that this is a post-Christian era. On the contrary, I believe this to be, paradoxically, the most obviously Christian epoch, which might be quite close to the end of the world.”[9]
Later he says explicitly, “I live in an apocalyptic world.”[10] And yet, elsewhere in these interviews, Illich seems to continue his abstention from apocalyptic statements and speaks as before – for instance when he says that “The Apocalypse is the moment at which the meaning of my own life will be revealed to me.”[11]
Has something changed? I don’t think so, unless it’s Illich’s willingness to be more explicit about his view of the relationship between the Gospel, the Church, and the Western-becoming-worldwide society to which they gave birth. What has become clearer is that Apocalypse has two distinct meanings for Illich, and as his work progresses the accent shifts from one to the other.
The 20th century was both a cataclysmic end and the seeding of a new beginning, and Illich is one of the 20th century prophets in which both the ending and the beginning are visible. Many examples are possible. Here I’ll mention just two. The first, already cited, is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, arrested in 1943, jailed for two years at Tegel Prison in Berlin, and then hanged at Schlossenbürg Concentration Camp just weeks before the war’s end. Bonhoeffer witnessed, and suffered the implosion of German civilization, but his thoughts in his letters from prison are often of a new era of what he called “religionless Christianity.” Another example, less known, but most undeservedly so in my opinion, is Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. His vision of the end came at the battle of Verdun, where he served as a captain of artillery in the Imperial German Army, and where he witnessed, during eleven nightmarish months, what he would later call “a Last Judgment…on Wilhelm II’s Germany.”[12] 300,000 died; 400,000 more were wounded and maimed. Before the war Rosenstock Huessy had been an academic prodigy – already at 24 a full professor at the University of Leipzig – the youngest man in Germany to gain this rank. After the war, he was invited to continue this prodigious career in a position of his choice – he could go to Berlin as an undersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior where he would help to write the constitution of the new German Republic, he could assume the editorship of Germany’s leading religious magazine, the “Hochland,” or he could return to Leipzig as a professor. Instead he refused all three offers and took an obscure position at the Daimler Benz automobile factory in Stuttgart, where, among other things, he edited a newspaper for the workers. The old order had died, he said, and he had been “called,” in his own words, “into a new, dangerous form of existence which did not yet exist.”
Illich’s life, in my eyes, shows the same pattern. He told me of a moment, just before the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938, when he realized that, in his words, he would “never give children” to the old domain of the Illich family in Dalmatia. When I asked him if this represented a feeling about the fate of Europe, and not just a personal vocation to celibacy, he said yes. Old Europe was dying, and a new era was beginning – an era so extraordinary that, in Illich’s words, “it is surprising that we still call ourselves human and still consider ourselves descendants of history.”[13] In this new world, he said, he would have no home, but live “always…in a tent.”[14] Like Rosenstock-Huessy he would be a nomad called “into a new, dangerous form of existence which did not yet exist.”
Worlds end. For Bonhoeffer, Rosenstock-Huessy and Illich it was the world of the West, so-called – of Latin Christendom become Europe. But other worlds have also ended. One that has always served as a memento mori for me is the world of the Blackfoot Confederacy in Western Canada, symbolized in the person of Chief Crowfoot who led his people through the time when the railway, European settlement, and the virtual extinction of the buffalo destroyed their way of life.[15] Crowfoot’s courage and vision were, for me, a warning against sentimentality about the disintegration of Western culture, and a reminder that many worlds have ended, and these endings have each been no less poignant, no less excruciating, and no less significant than the loss of old Europe was for the men I have named. In a similar way, many other religious traditions show analogues of the Biblical apocalypse. Ragnarok in Norse mythology, Kali Yuga in Hinduism, or the tradition of the Five Suns among the Aztecs are examples, but hundreds of others could be given – all showing that worlds ending and beginning is a staple idea – an archetype – shared across diverse cultures. This is one meaning of apocalypse.
But the term has another meaning in Biblical tradition, and that is its literal meaning in the Greek – revelation. In the New Testament, in several places, Jesus portrays the uncovering of secret and hidden things as a crucial element of his ministry. He will, he says, reveal “things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.”[16] He characterizes this unveiling as both necessary and inevitable. “For whatever is hidden,” he declares, “is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open.[17]
But what has been hidden – let alone hidden from the beginning of the world – must have remained secret for a reason. It must be something that human beings have so far been unable or unwilling to recognize. So, Jesus also predicts that his coming will create discord and dissension. He will set “father against son and…mother against daughter,” “cast fire on the earth,” bring “not peace but a sword” – to quote just a few of these many predictions.[18]
The exposure of dark secrets, and the initiation of a time of conflict, typify the “apocalyptic” tendency in the New Testament. This tendency has had a formative influence on Christian societies and cultures, and yet today the word is badly misunderstood. In popular usage, as I’ve said, it generally just signifies great destruction of some kind. The New Testament itself bears some responsibility for this, since it ends with a book called Apocalypse – a book comprising, on a literal level, a rather lurid revenge fantasy in which all those not inscribed in “the book of life” are cast into a lake of burning sulfur and Jesus appears at the head of the “armies of heaven,” armed with “a sharp sword with which to smite the nations.”[19] This violence and Schadenfreude has certainly had a strong influence on the understanding of apocalypse in once-Christian lands. But the word’s primary meaning remains revelation, or, more literally uncovering and unveiling, and this is the meaning I want to emphasize here.
Since Jesus made his claim that even humanity’s oldest and best kept secrets were about to be brought to light, many thinkers have drawn attention to the focus, dynamism and direction that this apocalyptic principle has imparted, for good and ill, to societies influenced by Christianity. Time was endowed with an orientation and an inclination that it had formerly lacked among peoples who took their main bearings from the past and conceived history as an endless cycling of the same. What historian of religions Mircea Eliade calls “a valorization of time” began to take place, eventually giving birth to an expansive concept of Progress.[20] René Girard supposed that what had been hidden since the foundation of the world was the role of scapegoating in holding human groups together. Human beings, he said, are mimetic creatures who are bound, by their nature, to fall into violent and socially destructive rivalries. To have survived, they must at all times and all places have learned the same lesson: that the way to restore peace is for all to turn against one more or less arbitrary victim. In the Passion story in John’s gospel, the high priest Caiphas expresses this principle when he advises the ruling council that Jesus should be executed because “it is expedient that one man should die for the people, and the whole nation perish not.”[21] A little violence inoculates society against a lot of violence. According to Girard, Christ’s life, death and resurrection disables this effective and immemorial mechanism by declaring the innocence of the victim, the forgiveness of sin, and the end of scapegoating sacrifice. This produces, he says, an either/or – without the therapeutic sacrifice of agreed and recognized victims, human groups will either have to face and forsake their violence, or fall into chronic an ever-worsening discord. This is the apocalyptic principle at work.
Another version comes from the British priest and sociologist David Martin in his book The Breaking of the Image. He compares the Incarnation to the splitting of the atom – “the breaking of the tiniest unit… release[s] a locked-up power capable of filling the whole cosmos.”[22] The atom, in his image, is religion and its priestly containments, broken by the Son of Man whose first words in Mark’s gospel are, “The time has come at last – the kingdom of God has arrived. You must change your hearts and minds and believe the good news.”[23] “I call you not servants…but… friends,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel, for “everything I have heard from my father, I have made known to you.”[24] The truth is present and available right now. Religious authorities will try to contain and restrain this explosive power, but again and again, says Martin, this “time-bomb” will explode.[25] In Martin’s history, there is a constant tension between the apocalyptic element in the Gospel and society’s interest in conservation and continuation. The power is held back, contained, metered out in tolerable doses – part pedagogy, part inoculation – but again and again it breaks out. This picture is mirrored in Eugen Rosenstock Huessy’s monumental history of revolution – which appeared in English in 1938 as Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man. “Every revolution starts from faith,” Rosenstock asserted, and draws on the characteristic Christian conviction that “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” and that all things can be “made new.”[26] He, therefore, dares to characterize the history of European revolutions as “the march of the Holy Spirit through the nations.”[27]
Illich has yet another version of this apocalyptic principle – of the way in which the Gospel acts on the societies in which it is implanted. Secularization theory has tended to see Christianity as either transformed or rejected by modern society. There is a tradition running from Karl Marx through Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, and on into Karl Löwith and Carl Schmidt, which sees modernity as a metamorphosis of Christianity. Schmidt says, for example, without exception, that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”[28] Reactionaries have supposed that modernity is a forgetfulness of Christianity. A few like Hans Blumenberg have tried to feather their way in between, arguing that modernity shares a set of questions with Christianity, but that it gives distinctive answers – answers that are something more than just the transformation of a common substance. Modernity has its own dignity, its own essence, and its own, in Blumenberg’s word, legitimacy. Illich offers a new account, as Charles Taylor points out in his introduction to The Rivers North of the Future. Modernity, he says, is neither Christianity’s fulfilment, nor its replacement, but its perversion – not its completion, but its betrayal. In the history of the West, “God’s Incarnation is turned…inside out.”[29]
Illich calls this inversion, by which the world’s “mysterious vocation to glory” becomes “demonic night,” the mystery of evil.[30] He takes the expression from the Second Letter to the Thessalonians. In that letter, its author, who may or may not have been the apostle Paul, addresses the expectation of the church in Thessalonika that the day of the Lord is imminent. He advises the Thessalonians not to become “excited” or “shaken in mind” because, he says, that day cannot come before “the rebellion” which will reveal “the man of sin” who “proclaim[s] himself to be God.” He tells them that “the mystery of iniquity,” which will ultimately produce this result, is “already at work,” but that it is currently being “restrained.” Neither “he who now restrains,” nor the mode of this restraint, is further described.[31]
From this passage, Illich adopted the term “the mystery of evil,” which he sometimes rendered in the Latin of the Vulgate as the “mysterium iniquitatis.” The phrase has been variously translated. The King James version kept iniquity, the Revised Standard Version substituted “the mystery of lawlessness,” which is probably closest to the Greek anomias, the New English Bible reverted to wickedness. What was important to Illich was the claim that this mystery was “already at work” and could be expected to mature into a full-blown declaration of independence in which the “man of sin” would declare himself to be God. Illich interprets this passage as saying:
…that the final evil that would bring the world to an end was already present. This evil was called Anti-Christ, and the Church was identified as the milieu in which it would nest. The Church had gone pregnant with an evil which would have found no nesting place in the Old Testament. Paul in the second chapter of his second letter to the Thessalonians calls this new reality the mystery of evil. He says that something unbelievably horrible has come into being and begun to grow with his foundation of communities around the Eastern Mediterranean, something whose full extent won’t be grasped until some future moment at which he places apocalypsis, meaning the end of time and the world.[32]
In this passage, Illich ascribes four characteristics to the mystery of evil. It was unprecedented - unknown to the Old Testament. It was endemic, and uniquely proportioned to the Church – the Church was its the proper and only “nesting place.” It was progressive – the Church had “gone pregnant” with something that could be expected to increase. And it was final – it could and would “bring the world to an end,” if not recognized and counteracted. I leave it to more competent authority to judge whether the text warrants this interpretation. My suspicion is that Illich puts more weight on this passage than it can properly bear, and ascribes to the early Church an awareness of the evil it was incubating that it generally lacked. But, be that as it may, it certainly tells us what Illich thought was the case.
At the end of the first part of The Rivers North of the Future, as I have already quoted, Illich claims – and this was nearly thirty years ago - that the mystery of evil is now hatching, which I take to mean, revealing itself in its mature or finished form, and that this might place us “quite close to the end of the world.” What did he mean? This brings us back to the second meaning of apocalypse – revelation. The history of the West is a demonstration, an acting out, a trial, if you like, of what happens when what is beyond price, beyond control, and beyond understanding – God’s very being given even unto death – is, so to speak, operationalized and brought under management. This revelation is now at the full, Illich says, and, even those without faith, and therefore without the key to understanding how this situation came about, can perceive something horrible and something uncanny in the extravagant perversities of our world. “Those who are willing to face this horror as something unexplainable,” Illich says, “act as witnesses for a mystery. That this mystery is the mysterium iniquitatis does not make it less fit to be the entrance door into the entire mystery of the Incarnation.”[33] This last sentence – about entering the mystery of the Incarnation through the back door, as it were – has always held great importance for me. It seems to intimate that the Great Commission at the end of Matthew’s Gospel to “make disciples of all nations” has been perversely fulfilled. The Gospel has been preached to all nations, but, as we can now begin to see, in its upside-down form.
Corruptio optimi pessima is a commonplace, a proverb, a condensation of something that happens at all times and all places, and that is evident to common sense. The bigger they are, the harder they fall is not an esoteric saying. It acquires its force in Illich by his having applied it to the highest truth and made us see that the perversion of this truth is the central motor of our history. He also called it a mystery of faith – that the best should become the worst in this way – and a mystery for Illich was something to be contemplated, not something to be penetrated or explained. This is a ground on which we should, therefore, tread very carefully. And yet I believe it is possible to go further than Illich was prepared to go in the interviews that comprise The Rivers North of the Future – a presentation that Illich himself insisted was nothing more than what he called “a pencil sketch,” or “a research hypothesis.”[34] One step concerns the mystery of evil, of which Illich says, with the author of Thessalonians, first that it is “at work,” next that its native milieu is the Church and by implication, the modern institutional complexes that descend from the Church, and finally that it is now coming, for those who have eyes to see, into full visibility. What Illich doesn’t explicitly say is that this mystery is inherent in the Incarnation – that it is its necessary and inevitable concomitant, that it belongs to its nature as a worldly occurrence, that, in short, there will never be heaven on earth. And yet he almost says so – both in insisting that the Church ought to have “centred faith” on the mystery of evil, and in admitting to me, quite unbidden, that contemplation of this mystery can produce “an intense temptation [to] curse God’s Incarnation.”[35]
Illich’s thought, as I have come to understand it, returns again and again to an idea that is rarely made explicit: the coincidence of opposites. Contradiction, says Simone Weil, is “the criterion of the real.”[36] Philosophy has generally insisted, and sometimes called it a law, that contraries cannot simultaneously be true. I think Illich finally stands with Weil. A few examples: In the years of his visible and official priesthood from 1951 to 1969, Illich evoked, again and again, “a new church” – a church which, he said, must be utterly traditional and radically new at the same time. In his pursuit of a moderated and sustainable modernity, in his institutional critiques of the 1970’s, he sought a balance between opposed domains – vernacular and professional. He claimed that understanding scripture was like “getting” a joke, and once said that that “we don’t understand any Gospel story unless at the end of it we can smile a smile which comes up from our stomach, from the depths of our being.”[37] This again is a tribute to contradiction – we laugh at ambiguities, incongruities, and violations of logic.
To distinguish without dividing was a hallmark of Illich’s thought. The phrase is associated with the English poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but the principle goes back to Jesus’ parable about the wheat being separable from the weeds only after the harvest.[38] Illich celebrated awareness – Celebration of Awareness was the carefully considered name of his first book – or recognizing the difference between things that cannot actually be taken apart without fateful violence. In a discussion with me about a passage in the Letter of James in the New Testament, Illich says that charity is a seed. “When it grows up, it will be buffeted, and perhaps the stem will even be broken, and it will never come to flower. What we hold on to is the seed.” A moment later, he changes the metaphor, and speaks of faith as “a deep root in the heart.”[39] In the same vein he speaks of the Church as “a divine bud that will flower in eternity” and as “the worldly sign of other-worldly reality.”[40] The world and the kingdom interpenetrate but remain distinct, the kingdom, as Illich says, is “already accomplished without yet being fulfilled.”[41]
Now let me at last try to bring these sprawling remarks to a point. Illich, I have said, is both an apocalyptic and a non-apocalyptic thinker. He rejects the mythological apocalypse, which informs the popular use of this word, and insists that the apocalypse is a motion of awareness occurring in the present. That’s his non-apocalyptic side. But he also believes that Western history becoming world history, and church history becoming modern history, is an inexorable revelation – a revelation, to put it bluntly and simply, of how not to understand the Gospel, and a revelation of the mystery of evil, which is, again speaking very simply, that evil and good are inseparable within the terms of worldly existence. That’s his apocalyptic side.
Where this points in my view is towards The Rivers North of the Future, and those rivers rise, according to my interpretation of Paul Celan’s enigmatic phrase, in the still undisclosed past – the past that will reveal new beginnings when seen through the eyes of an awakened present. English theologian John Milbank speaks of that mysterious place as “the unknown future that mankind has missed and must seek to rejoin.”[42] The theologians who were Illich’s teachers were sometimes grouped under the heading of ressourcement – return to the source – another name for this reinterrogation of the past. T.S. Eliot says at the end of his Four Quartets that “the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.”[43] All imagine a re-appropriation, on new terms, of what we have been given.
Let’s suppose that Illich is right that it is now “quite close to the end of the world,” and let’s suppose further that if he’d had more time to consider or edit this spur-of-the-moment remark that he might have said “quite close to the end of a world” rather than the world. That would be consistent with my claim that he did not anticipate what I’ve called the mythological apocalypse. In the face of this ending, our task will be to bring the unlived past back to life and steward it for a future north of the future that is being prepared by the warring gangs of reactionaries that are currently trying to restore modernity’s lustre – whether by making America great again or by renewing the image of science as immaculate and indefeasible knowledge or by bringing back objectivity in journalism hardly matters – a hundred such projects to avoid rethinking by refreshing modern certainties are currently underway.
The failure of the Church, Illich says, was its refusal to “centre faith” on the mystery of evil, succumbing instead to what he nicely called “a brutal form of earnestness.”[44] What would a church be like that did “centre faith” on the mystery of evil, did understand that “supreme folly” can never become “legislated duty,” did recognize its own shadow? Bonhoeffer looked for a religionless Christianity. Rosenstock-Huessy anticipated an invisible, unlabelled “listening church.”[45] Illich spoke of a declericalization, powerlessness, and a spirit of celebration. But such a church will have to be invented in practice, not prescribed. What Illich makes us see is that the future of the church is not an idle question, of concern only to those who recognize themselves as Christians. Rather it is the central question of our time. If modernity is the extension of Church history, as Illich claims, then we are all Christians and all following the perverse liturgies of the modern institutions that have been stamped from the Church’s mould. The Apocalypse that surrounds us is the mystery of evil demonstrated. It cannot be addressed, until it has first been recognized. Illich’s work, for me, provides the indispensable starting point.
[1] The Scapegoat: René Girard’s Anthropology of Violence and Religion, Ideas, CBC Radio, March 5-9, 2001; audio: https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/2015/3/8/the-scapegoat-ren-girards-anthropology-of-violence-and-religion-2; transcript: https://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts (listed alphabetically by title), p. 42
[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, Simon and Schuster, 1997, p. 380. This is just one of many references in the book to what he also calls “a world come of age.”
[3] Luke 17:21; “members incorporate of one another” is the Anglican Book of Common Prayer’s version of Romans 12:5
[4] The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Anchor Books, 1988, p. 554, 562
[5] Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, University of Chicago Press, 1952, p. 120
[6] Ivan Illich, In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses, 1978-1990, Marion Boyars, 1992, p. 220
[7] David Cayley, Ivan Illich in Conversation, House of Anansi, 1992, p. 266
[8] 2 Thessalonians 2:7
[9] The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley, House of Anansi, 2005, 2005, pp. 169-170
[10] Ibid, p.179
[11] Ibid, p. 184
[12] From an unpublished lecture in 1941 quoted in Wayne Cristaudo’s article on Rosenstock in The Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy.
[13] Ivan Illich in Conversation, pp. 76-77
[14] Ibid, p. 80
[15] I became aware of the story, and held it always in my memory, as a result of a remarkable film, made in 1968 for the National Film Board of Canada by Mi’kmaq singer Willie Dunn and his crew. The film can still be seen here: https://www.nfb.ca/film/ballad_of_crowfoot/
[16] Matthew 13:35 (King James Version)
[17] Mark 4:22 (New International Version)
[18] Luke 12:49-53; Matthew 10:34
[19] Revelation 20:15; 19:14-15
[20] … Myths, Rites and Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader, ed. Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty, New York: Harper and Row, 1975, p. 243
[21] John 11:50
[22] David Martin, The Breaking of the Image: A Sociology of Christian Theory and Practice, Basil Blackwell, 1980, p. 71
[23] Mark 1:15; this is J.B. Philips’ translation in his The New Testament in Modern English (William Collins, Sons & Co., 1958). “Repent” is the common translation for what Phillips renders as “change your hearts and minds,” but, elsewhere in the New Testament the same word, metanoia, is often translated as a change of mind. The King James Version, for example, gives Romans 12:2 as “be not conformed to this world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
[24] John 15:15
[25] The Breaking of the Image, p. 160
[26] Matthew 4:17 – “From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’” Revelation 21:5 – “Behold, I am making all things new.”
[27] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man, William Morrow and Company, 1938, p. 229. I have substituted spirit for the word ghost in Rosenstock’s original. This word must have recommended itself to him by its common origin with the German Geist, but it has since grown strange, unfamiliar, and nearly archaic.[28] Carl Schmidt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, MIT Press, 1985, p. 36
[29] Ivan Illich, “Hospitality and Pain,” p. 2 - https://www.pudel.samerski.de/pdf/Illich_1423id.pdf
[30] Ibid, p. 2
[31] Second Thessalonians 2:1-7
[32] Rivers, 59-60
[33] Rivers, p. 170
[34] Ibid p. 146, 68
[35] Ibid, p. 60, 61
[36] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952, p. 89
[37] Ivan Illich, The Church, Change and Development, Urban Training Center Press, 1970, p.19; Ivan Illich, The Powerless Church, Penn State Press, 2018, p. 136 “The Meaning of Cuernavaca,” Jesuit Mission XLI, April, 1967, 20
[38] Matthew 13: 24-30
[39] Rivers, p. 183
[40] The Church, Change and Development, p. 87, 105
[41] The Powerless Church, p. 83
[42] John Milbank, “The Last of the Last: Theology, Authority and Democracy,” Telos, 123, 2002, p. 15
[43] T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1943, p. 39
[44] Rivers, p. 58
[45] Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future, or The Modern Mind Outrun, Barakaldo Books, 2020, p. 156