Nils Christie

From: Nils Christie

Date: Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 1:50 PM

Subject: Friends of Ivan

Dear friends of Ivan, and of Hedda and me.

I have been working with questions of development recently, its dubious benefits. And then of course, Ivan appears in my thoughts. And with him you all; Barbara, Silja and Matthias, and further off to Feodor in East and Jutta and David in the West. I have so many good memories from rich encounters we have had.

But why work on development?

Because of overdevelopment. This little society has been severely hit by affluence. It has not been good for us that we found oil. We are tempted to believe we can manage our lives independent of other human beings. We have a political party here named “Fremskrittspartiet”, – the Progress Party. I argue for an alternative party. I call my party “Tilbakeskrittspartiet.” The party for stepping backwards.

I fear we are losing one of our most important fortunes; the trust in other people. On international studies, we are generally rated as being at the top in trusting others (naiveté it is also called). But independence creates distance to others. Distance is an enemy of trust. We will need “experts” to compensate. When neighbourhoods, kept together by close associations between those that live there, become anomic, experts on social control take over.

But we are of course envied by most of the world. One consequence of our wealth is an extreme influx of foreigners. Immigrants are a blessing, – but as a river, not a flood. Is it in this situation possible to preserve a national identity? I happen to like that identity, – it was this one that made our welfare state possible. I do also think it is easier to raise defences against the wild forms of capitalism from small, easily over-viewed systems than from the large systems so difficult to see and understand.

* * *

As to other aspects of life: Hedda is in full job as a professor of Criminology. I have of course been pensioned since long. I hate the title of “emeritus”, who knows if I am, but enjoy not being responsible for teaching, and especially not to examine students, and instead having time for writing and participating in the public debate.

Some health problems are inevitable at my age. A leg would not follow my commands some months ago, and forced me on crutches. But two or three weeks ago I could tear them away, and now I am back on the bike! And what a bike! An electric one! The pedals are there for use, but if needed, a little engine to one of the wheels give me the extra push I need. Other bikers will often not observe the little engine, and I have to tell them that I cheat, this to prevent their depression when the old man passes them uphill.

And I can continue on my bike also these days. The catastrophic development of the heating of the globe has kept snow completely away from Oslo. It is as in Italy. We were there some weeks ago, invited by Beppe Grillo, the “clown” (they call him so) who attempts to change Italy. He got 25 % of all votes at last election. He had read one of my books, just translated to Italian (A suitable amount of crime) and wanted me to participate. I could not resist. The greatest audience I have ever had, 100 000 at the place of victory, build by Mussolini. He was to receive the applause from here, if he had not been hanged. But now it was Beppe and Dario Fo and me and some I have forgotten. We all talked from a huge platform. It was a great experience. I attach what I said, and some other speeches, if I find them.

Then one more thing: Thanks for all good encounters I have had with and from you all,

Jan 13, 2014, 6:30 PM

to Nils

Dear Nils,

How good to receive the letter you sent just after Christmas. I enjoyed both papers you attached, especially the longer one, Beyond the Obvious, where you had a little more chance to develop your argument. The Beppe Grillo event sounds quite remarkable. I had only a superficial Canadian newspaper level knowledge of his movement, when we got your letter, so we looked him up, but even from more extensive sources on-line, I'm still not sure I've completely grasped its nature. Perhaps it's somewhat ambiguous, as so many populist phenomena are. I'm sure, at least, that his followers can only have benefited from your counsel.

I don't know if it will reassure you at all, but winter has been pretty old-fashioned in Toronto this year: snow, a fairly damaging ice-storm around Christmas time which left many people without electricity, as falling branches knocked out power lines, and extreme cold in early January. Now a thaw has hit, but the city still somewhat resembles a skating rink.

Silya Samerski wrote just the other day and suggested that she, or I should be interviewing what she called witnesses to Ivan's life and time - she mentioned particularly you, Theodor and Majid. I think this is a good idea, and, with the approval of the witnesses, I may try to do it - with Silya or by myself - when I'm next in Europe. Sajay and Samar, when I last spoke to them, were planning to convene a gathering of friends in northern Italy in late June. Perhaps we could entice you and the other elders there.

My hopes for the year just beginning involve my getting to grips with this book about Ivan's life and thought that I have been talking about, working up to, and walking around. The first year of retirement allowed me a wonderful freedom to explore many of the paths that CBC-work had been kept me from following. Now it's time to begin stalking Ivan in a much more focused way.

Fri, Apr 18, 2014, 3:34 PM

to me

Dear David,

Fine that you phoned. I had not opened the mail for some days, struggling with a resistant article. I think the system for what in English literature is called "restorative justice" is endangered by its success. Many want to use these boards in the service of the penal system. It will kill the system. I attach the manuscript, finished yesterday. Now I am back to life and repeat what Hedda certainly said; some changes in the dates for your arrival does not matter at all! But tell us, when you know, so that the table will be set, for talks and other pleasures!

Dara Malloy

From Jutta, Sept.15, 2026

Dear Dara, I came across this obituary for Ivan by you  https://www.aislingmagazine.com/aislingmagazine/articles/TAM31/IvanIllichobituary.html. Could I reproduce it on David's website, under your name? I can also just link it, but so many older documents disappear, and I think this one is a keeper. 

——

From Dara, Sept.16, 2026

Hello Jutta, I heard of David's death almost as soon as it happened, and we too are grieving his loss….. David's contribution was immense on many fronts, but for me he brought us into the mind and thoughts of Ivan in a way that nobody else could or did. I have spent my life trying to get to the bottom of Ivan's insights and feel I still have a long way to go. All of David's books are to hand on my bookshelf and he also had been sending me all his podcasts. He never did get to visit us here and I am sad about that.   

You may know that Ivan would have been 100 on September 4th this year. To mark the occasion, there will be a public gathering in Galway city, Ireland, on October 31st. It will be interesting to see who turns up. I am in touch with quite a few 'next generation' Illich followers who were too young to ever meet Illich or know him personally. 

Yes, of course, you have my permission to put the obituary on David's website.

——

From https://www.aislingmagazine.com/aislingmagazine/articles/TAM31/IvanIllichobituary.html by Dara Malloy. Reprinted by permission.

On the day that Ivan Illich died, Monday December 2nd, 2002, I was eating my dinner in the evening when a phone call came for me. The speaker introduced himself as a South American lawyer who was phoning from Shannon airport after spending a week in Ireland. He told me that he had spent 3 weeks with Ivan Illich in Bremen prior to his visit to Ireland and during that time that Ivan had spoken about us on Aran and insisted that he visit us or at least make contact. Having failed to visit, he was now making contact and communicating warm wishes from Ivan.

It turned out that these warm wishes from Ivan came four hours after his death, when his body was already cold.

At that time of the evening, I still did not know that Ivan was dead. Later that same evening I had an intuition to phone Lee Hoinacki, a close friend and co-worker of Ivan’s, who was living in Philadelphia. I had not spoken to him for a full year, in fact since I had visited him and Ivan a year previous in Bremen. My purpose was to find out how Lee was, not thinking at all of Ivan. But of course the first words out of Lee’s mouth were: “Have you heard the news?”. With that he told me that Ivan had died earlier that day.

Ivan had close friends living all over the world. It was highly unlikely that I was going to be told of his death in time for me to make the funeral. My phone call to Lee was a graced moment. Getting the news on Monday night gave me the time to book my flight to Germany on Tuesday, travel on Wednesday, and be on time for the 9.15 funeral Mass on Thursday morning in Bremen.

I first came across Ivan Illich while I was attending University College Dublin in the early 70s. His book Deschooling Society made a deep and instant impression on me. I responded to reading the book by writing a paper on the subject and circulating it among my friends in college. So began my journey of opposition to the educational system. I spent six years teaching, trying to change it from the inside. Then in 1983, I began to make public protests against the education system. Twenty years later, my wife and I have three small children, and we intend to keep them away from established schooling.

It never struck me in those early days that I would one day meet Ivan Illich, become friends with him, bring him to Ireland on a number of occasions and eventually have him as a godfather to one of my children. But that is what happened, something for which I feel eternally grateful, a grace and privilege that was bestowed upon me and for which I would not have dreamt of asking.

Ivan’s death on December 2nd came as a shock but not as a surprise. Those close to him knew for a number of years that he was dying. The cancerous growth on the right side of his face left him in tremendous pain, for which he would not take any standard medication. On the appearance of the cancer in the mid-seventies, medical experts who were friends of his predicted that he would not live five years longer unless he had surgery. But Ivan, who published his book Medical Nemesis in 1976 (a book which condemned the medical system as one which made you sick) was not prepared to subject himself to the disempowerment the surgery would cause him, and so ignored medical advice. His decision meant that, despite the pain, he was able to continue working right up to his death.

At the age of 76 Ivan had slowed down a lot. Nonetheless, he was still hosting conversations among students and intellectuals in his home, still receiving a regular stream of visitors from across the globe, and still offering a series of lectures at Bremen university during the winter semester.

Ivan died while taking a siesta after his lunch. There was no struggle and no indication beforehand that his death was imminent. In one of his papers he had written of Posthumous Longevity - the modern phenomenon of people being kept alive by the medical system beyond the natural moment of their death. Ivan kept a rosary beads at all times in his pocket and had changed the wording of the Hail Mary to: “...pray for us sinners now and that we may not miss the hour of our death”. Thankfully his prayer was answered in his own case. His body remained on the couch where he had died for three days while those who knew and loved him came and said their farewells. No surgical knife came near him to “establish the cause of death” something which, in the context of his life and what he stood for, would have been a desecration of his body.

In November 2001 I had visited Ivan in Bremen, Germany, for a few days, knowing that it would probably be the last time I would see him. He greeted me with his usual warmth and I basked in the hospitality of his and Barbara Duden’s home. I attended one of his formal conversations with his co-workers and students before I left. Nonetheless it was clear that he was in dreadful pain and that this was sapping his energy and his concentration. As I left, I hoped that I would be able to attend his funeral but I knew that the reality was his death could take place in any of a number of places: Mexico, California, Pennsylvania or Germany. In recent times, he had spent part of every year in these places.

The following year, back home in Aran in August 2002, I had chosen a good dry day to go to a field in Kilmurvey to harvest the rye. We stacked the rye on the trailer of our tractor, all the workers climbed on top, including the children, and we made our way home in the late afternoon. While rounding the bend at Kilmurvey beach, we were signalled by a passing mini-bus to pull over. Not knowing what was going on, I stopped the tractor and walked over to the minibus driver. He told me that one of his passengers wanted to speak to me. In the bus was Daniel Berrigan, on one of his regular visits to Ireland and Aran. We had met on a few previous occasions due to an introduction from an Irish priest friend of his, Pat O’Brien. On this occasion, time was short as we were blocking traffic and these passengers were on their way to catch the ferry. Nonetheless, in the few minutes we had to us, Daniel told me that Ivan had been close to death during the summer and was not sure how well he had recovered.

That evening I phoned Bremen. Ivan was not there but I was told he would be arriving within the week. I was told that he had recovered fully from an infection, which did indeed nearly kill him, and that he was back to himself. That event had taken place in Florence.

I subsequently wrote to Ivan enquiring after his health and recounting my meeting with Daniel Berrigan. A reply to this letter came exactly a week before his death. I later discovered that during this week he had been frantically writing letters to all and sundry. It may be that he had some intuition of his impending death.

Ivan is buried in a Protestant graveyard (there are no Roman Catholic cemeteries in Bremen) at Friedhof Oberneuland, Hohenkampsweg, 28355 Bremen. The grave is unusual in that it is the only grave in the graveyard facing east. It is to be found by walking up the centre path at the back of the church and turning left at the first junction. The grave is then immediately on the left. I am sure that this grave will become a place of pilgrimage, especially as Ivan’s life and writings become more appreciated and understood. I intend to bring my family there some day.

My first direct contact with Ivan was in 1988. I was organising a conference on Alternatives in Education, to be held at Clonard, County Meath, at the site of one of the greatest Celtic monastic schools of the early Christian period. The conference was to coincide with the sitting of the Leaving and Inter Certificate school examinations in June. I needed a high-profile speaker to open the event, and so I wrote to Paulo Freire in Brazil, Fernando Cardenal in Nicaragua, and Ivan Illich in the U.S., hoping for one of them to respond positively. Ivan was the only one to reply. He said he would come, but he told me the title of the conference should be changed to: Alternatives TO Education.

However, a week or so before the event, I phoned Ivan to confirm that all the arrangements were in order. He then told me that there was no way he could leave the bedside of his close friend Erich Fromm who was dying. And so the conference went ahead without him, and my hopes of meeting this famous and inspirational man faded.

Sometime the following year, I came home to find a message waiting for me. I was to phone a person called Ivan at the given number. This was very strange to me. I phoned the number in the U.S. and found myself speaking to Ivan Illich. He said he wanted to apologise for letting me down the previous summer, and wanted to make himself available to me this year instead as a way of recompense.

I could not believe what I was hearing. I have to admit, my first reaction was; the conference is over, it is a bit late now! But on reflection, I realised that any opportunity to meet the man and spend time with him was going to be a bonus, so I accepted his offer and we began to arrange his visit to Ireland.

At the height of his fame in the 70’s, Ivan Illich had visited Ireland and lectured in Dublin to packed attendances. It was early 1974. I had not encountered him at this time, living as I did a secluded life in a Dublin seminary, cut off from the world. However, in the late 80’s, his name had faded off the headlines and only those really interested in his work kept in touch with his flow of ideas.

Ivan said to me that he did not want to give a lecture tour, but preferred if I would bring him around to meet small groups of people throughout the country doing interesting things. In order to cover the costs of his visit, he was willing to give one public lecture, for which we could charge an admission. We needed to make enough money at this lecture to pay for his travel and all the other expenses. He did not want payment of a fee, but requested that I acquire for him some homespun material that he could have made into a suit.

And so the adventure began. He arrived towards the end of May 1989 and stayed in Ireland for three nights. On his arrival, I presented him with our itinerary which included a public lecture at Trinity College, a meeting with the justice office of the Conference of Major Religious Superiors of Ireland (now CORI), a visit to Corofin, Co. Clare, and a visit to Inis Mór. Included were the filming of a television programme to be made by Kairos at Maynooth, and the recording of a radio programme by John Quinn of RTE at Corofin.

Here we hit the first major snag. Ivan told me he had not appeared before television cameras for twenty years and could not bring himself to do so now. I had to phone Kairos in Maynooth and cancel the whole thing, with great personal embarrassment and a lot of people put out. With the proposed radio programme, there was also a problem, but in the end he agreed to go ahead with it provided the recording of the programme was merely as a fly-on-the-wall, without any direct interviewing of him. More about this anon.

The first evening was a lecture in the largest theatre at Trinity College, Dublin. This lecture was organised by the Curriculum Development Unit of TCD who had been very keen to get involved with his visit. It was a great success in the sense that we got a full house and made enough money on the door to cover all the expenses of the trip.

The lecture itself was a bit rambling, given roughly on the theme of “corruptio optimi quae est pessima” (the corruption of the best is the worst), a topic which has been a constant theme of Ivan’s life. He directs his criticism particularly at Christianity. His point is that institutions which grow beyond a certain size end up doing the opposite of what they were set up to do. So, for example, schooling becomes the first obstacle to learning, the medical system requires people to be sick, and the transport system has people stuck for hours in traffic jams. In the case of the caring and healing professions, the gospel injunction to love one’s neighbour has been corrupted so that hospitality, which is to do with friendship and an I-Thou relationship, has been institutionalised to become hospitals, hospices and hostels where the true meaning of hospitality is no longer practiced.

The following morning we had a working breakfast at the house of Joe Dunne, a lecturer in St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, where we were joined by Sean Healy and Brigid Reynolds from the CMRS Justice Office. Then, it was just a short hop down to the Milltown Institute of Philosophy and Theology where we met with a select group of religious sisters, priests and brothers. Ivan claimed it was the first time he had addressed such a church gathering since he had resigned from the priesthood in the 1970’s, due to a promise he had made to himself at that time.

In the afternoon, we made our way by train to Galway where we were whisked away by car to a place known as The Shed outside Corofin in County Clare. This was the location of an experiment in alternative living where a group of people had set themselves up as a co-operative and were determined to create employment in the area and stem emigration. As part of their project, they had built a community centre which included a work place, a shop, a school for their children, and a community dining area. Other elements of their project were; shared ownership of cars, community house building, and their own banking system. They created employment for themselves in turf and slate production, organic vegetables, window making, house building and the teaching of English to foreign students.

When we arrived at The Shed, we were sat down to a meal, served by the children of the co-operative, so that the adults could participate in a conversation around the table. After dinner, everybody gathered with Ivan in one of the school rooms and he was asked some pre-prepared questions. Then it was off down to the Corofin village hall for a public meeting. As we drove through the main street of Corofin, a village of a few thousand people at most, a large white banner spanned the street with the words emblazoned on it: COROFIN WELCOMES IVAN ILLICH. It was one of my most memorable moments of the trip.

The meeting at the village hall was a meeting that most people who attended it will never forget. It was chaired by Tom Collins, at that time a lecturer in Community Development at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. When we arrived, the hall was packed to the doors. People had travelled from all over the west and midlands of Ireland to meet and hear this great man. The stage was decked with an array of microphones, and RTE’s John Quinn had set himself up with his tape recorder close to the stage to be the fly-on-the-wall for his radio programme. Ivan was presented with a gift of flowers by some local children, who then appeared on stage to give a performance of Irish dancing and singing.

The whole scene had completely the wrong effect on Ivan, so that by the time he got his turn to address the crowd he was in a rage. He told the assembled audience that he would not speak to them through a microphone, because he would not have any technology get in the way of his face to face encounter with them. He criticised the adults who had organised the singing and dancing of the children, accusing them of turning something at the heart of their culture into a package for the entertainment of tourists and visitors. And finally he said he would not speak from the stage but wanted everybody to turn their seats towards him while he stood in the middle of the hall. This latter was a major logistical nightmare as the hall was completely packed and it meant every single chair had to be moved.

The ensuing discussion was fiery. Quite a number of people from the audience got involved, and Ivan himself, already hot under the collar from the welcoming reception, got even hotter. Tom Collins, the chairman, had an impossible task trying to contain and direct the discussion. It was not what one would call a pleasant evening, unless one could be so detached from the proceedings as to enjoy the cut and thrust of passion-filled arguments and Ivan’s impatience with and intolerance of “fools”. Many people probably went home feeling insulted. On that particular evening, Ivan was all barb and no balm.

As it turned out, the radio crew were delighted. They got enough material on tape to make two half-hour programmes, and John Quinn, who has now just retired, still speaks of the occasion as one of the highlights of his radio career.

The following day was more relaxed and far less hectic. We travelled to Inis Mór, via car and plane, and arrived at my home, a small thatched cottage in the middle of the island, around 11 a.m. The day itself was idyllic, with blue skies and a warm, balmy breeze. It was to be a day of religious ritual rather than discussion and debate.

Ivan met the members of my household. He drank tea, perused the daily paper (something he rarely ever did), and dandled a child on his lap. Then we headed off to the village of Kilronan, a journey of about two miles, on pony and trap courtesy of my neighbour. It was the feast of Corpus Christi and there was to be a Eucharistic procession through the streets of the village. Ivan was ecstatic to discover it and wanted to participate in it to the full. He produced a rosary beads from his pocket, and we joined in the procession, the worship and the singing.

In the afternoon, it being a holy day, we celebrated Mass in Killeany Lodge, where Ivan met more of the extended group who were part of our project on Aran. Ivan called our project an experiment in living and was very supportive of it. I invited him to concelebrate the Mass with me and offered him a stole, but he declined.

By 5 p.m. we had to leave Aran by plane (for which he criticised me ó why could we not have travelled by boat? The answer of course was that time would not permit), in order to catch the last train from Galway to Dublin. Ivan was to take a plane to Germany early the next morning. On the train he relaxed and became very warm towards me, inviting me to come and live with him in Penn State (Pennsylvania State University) in September. I could stay for a month or two and participate in some conversations he was organising, attend his lectures in the college, use the university library, have access to all his writings, and meet many of his friends.

This is exactly what I did; an experience that has been a major watershed in my life. I stayed six weeks with him, in a rented house that was shared by a number of other people, all co-workers of his. The conversations that took place were weekend events with invited participants from all over the world, mainly Europe, the States, and South America. Up to twenty people participated. Each session began with a presentation on some topic and continued with open discussion under the direction of a chairperson. Meals were prepared and eaten communally, where discussion continued informally and people got to know one another.

I felt very privileged to be at these gatherings, and a little out of my depth, as all of these participants were established intellectuals well accustomed to research and intellectual debate and many of whom had published books. Participants included, for example, Wolfgang Sachs (German), Gustavo Esteva (Mexican), David Abram (U.S.), Hans Achterhaus (Holland) and Majid Rahnema (Iran), all of whom are now well-known names in their fields.

I came home from Penn State with a large bundle of Ivan’s writings and lectures (many unpublished), as well as other material. I had written permission from Ivan to publish anything of his in Ireland. From this came the impetus to launch the AISLING Magazine, the first issue of which came out a little over a year later, in January 1991.

Since that time, Ivan has been to Ireland on two further occasions. The first was in 1990 to attend a conversation we organised in Killeany Lodge, Inis Mór, on the subject of education. On that occasion he travelled with Lee Hoinacki and Manfred Verner, two of his co-workers. The conversation was modelled on the conversations I had experienced at Penn State, and in attendance were people we had invited from all over Ireland. It was at this meeting that Ivan first met John Seymour, the well known writer and campaigner on environmental matters. John subsequently went to Germany to work with Ivan and others on a “Statement on Soil”.

The second occasion was a brief visit in November of 1999 to attend the baptism ceremony of our twin daughters, Macha and Surnaí, and to act as godfather to Surnaí. It was to be his first and last time to meet the child. However, I think that Surnaí will be aware of him all through her life.

Ivan was a nomad on this earth. He owned no property, never married or had children, lived with friends, and took on work only where he was invited to do so by friends. He told me he made very little money out of his publications. His contracts with universities were always on the basis that he could lecture on topics he had chosen himself. At lectures that I attended in Penn State, most of those attending were members of staff, there out of interest. He was ruthless with college students who chose his courses simply to get points. He would weed them out on their first day, tell them they had their points and order them not to come back.

From the late 60ís onwards, Ivan’s ideas were foundational for such diverse causes as the green movement, the deschooling/homeschooling movement, basic Christian communities, liberation theology, alternative medicine, appropriate technology, and the survival of indigenous peoples and their cultures.

I have often wondered why I was privileged to be so close to Ivan. He surrounded himself with intellectuals, most of whom worked in universities, or spent their time writing books and lecturing. His work against the institutionalising and technologising of life was always at an intellectual level. Unlike Gandhi, he never took on physical work or walked on the campaign trail. I surmise that the reason he warmed to me and to our project on Aran was that he saw that we too were doing the same work as he, but at a practical level; creating a way of life that was subsistent in itself, true to its cultural tradition, and resistant to the inroads of institutionalisation, technology and the market. Perhaps he also saw in me a priest like himself, one who in time had become disillusioned by the institutional church, but who was still fired by the ideals of the gospel.

On the day Ivan died, Monday December 2nd 2002, I had the feeling that his soul travelled to Aran and hovered over our house sometime between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. Doubtless he was on his way to Scellig Michael, the monastic island off County Kerry, where souls are gathered by the archangel Michael to prepare for their journey to heaven.

Dara Molloy is co-editor of The AISLING Magazine.

Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham are the editors of a timely new book on Ivan Illich entitled The Challenges of Ivan Illich. It is a collection of reflective essays on the work of Illich. See Bookshelf.

Wayne Northey

May 19, 2014, from Wayne

Has CBC pulled together all your online broadcasts?  That would be a worthy venture.  I for one would be directing people to them all - as I often do to various in any event...

May 20, 2014, from David

I wouldn't say pulled together no.  I have more the impression of having sunk without a trace.  The woman who took over from Bernie Lucht at Ideas in late 2012 never even rebroadcast After Atheism and The Myth of the Secular, my two final series, so I have had to lobby her successor - she only lasted one season, a story in itself - to put them on again.  He has now told me that After Atheism will be rebroadcast this summer.  A number of things are still on-line, but I think that's mainly inertia.  I'm afraid that it's all just Content, and that nobody really sees that what I did over the years constitutes either a resource worth preserving or even a coherent body of work.  However your question is timely, and I will keep thinking about to keep my work available to those who might find it helpful.

May 20, 2014, from Ron ???

Hi David,
Over the years, I numerous times direct people to your broadcasts by going to an online CBC link, copying and pasting it into the e-mail for instant access. I'm populating now a personal website.  I do that same thing in the documents themselves (MS Word allows such "hotkeying"), and on WordPress, the backdoor software used for the website. It's easy to use html code to do that for online publication...  You'll see it all over on my website.

Though I have only listened to a small portion of your overall broadcast work, some quick observations:

• there is coherence of themes at many levels, as wide-ranging as your subjects are, not least of course your consistent (literal) "voice" throughout.

• topics you have chosen over the decades, thanks to previous producers so I understand, according to primarily what interested you.  Those interests could readily be basis of a Master's or Ph.D thesis on David Cayley's "Ideas" (double entendre).  They do form a vast "body of work" to be discovered by many, abundantly well worth it. 

• art form: radio broadcasting, for all Ivan Illich's misgivings around the technology of it, is a unique art form.  My friends and I out here are agreed: you have elevated that art form significantly over your decades of broadcasting.  (I cannot compare widely to prove that, I/we can only "witness" to its effect on me/us.)  I know this: it is rare gift that another's ideas can be taken, rebundled, and literally broadcast with such (often for me greater) clarity and impact into the anonymous audience airwaves.   C. S. Lewis for one had that rare gift...  I even possess a series of radio broadcast cassettes he did on the "Four Loves".  That's how your series on Nils Christie years ago impacted me, and every experience since...  (I first contacted you with appreciation after that series, and have been so grateful for our friendship since.)  Others have done/do it well at "Ideas" and elsewhere.  But few with such impact, I speak experientially.  Your broadcasts "satisfy"...  Much more can readily be said.

• on any level, such a body of work should not be lost (that's why you're continuing to work on Ivan Illich's body of work!), let alone be allowed to be "sunk without a trace".

• The weekend (first one of February) after my last day of work (retired officially March 31 this year - party for that this Saturday - you're welcome to drop in - ha!) we visited Roy Henry Vickers' art studio in Tofino.  Besides loving his work over the years, I love his brief introductions/stories to the genesis of every painting!  Such as it is, I've taken that as model on the website a friend developed for me and I'm populating with alacrity: I'm telling the genesis story most times.  That's invaluable to some (however large or small the circle, right?)  It's ubiquitous of course that we all want such accounts.  

In light of all that, a proposal of sorts:

• if CBC will not pull your works together, surely you have right of access to all the archived material - perhaps have them at your home anyway.

• why not make them available for digitilization (even I have the software and hardware to do that flawlessly - and have done so with 30 years of home video for instance - so not very high end technical know-how needed!)?  Much over the last many years of your work is already digitalized.

• why not offer it as a body of work to UFV for instance (Ron are you listening)?  A techy Masters student on a  Work Grant could digitalize and categorize everything, in turn then it could be made available ultimately online, thus to the world as a "body of work" by a significant CBC Ideas broadcaster.  You could interactively introduce all the works, making the "coherence" connections to your heart's content, as you have time and interest.   Then, an annual lecture series in your honour could be initiated by UFV that you would speak at each until your death (you are "advancing" in years of course!.  In that case: written into the contract of course would be an "Institute" on the side at our place... :-) )

Something like that.  Then when my grandson (okay, he's only 12 now, but a bright kid!) is casting about for a Master's or a Ph.D thesis, I have just the project for him! :-)

I really am, all lightness aside, dead serious, David!

I'm guessing that you have one or more techy grandkids who could do that digitalization project, and could get a grant to do it as a Summer job, or whatever, with even a tiny bit (surely!) of CBC backing...

Anyway... Glad about the After Atheism rebroadcast.  Glad that you will "keep thinking" - I mean about such a project as above ...  I rather think you will "keep thinking" regardless.  "David Cayley on David Cayley" is so worthwhile however it comes out!

——

May 21, 2014, from David

Dear Wayne,

  Thanks for words of praise and for the attention you've devoted to the whole issue. The main things I got out of my blessed years at Ideas was a lot of splendid friends, as you've just proved once again.

         Up 'til now, I've been hoping, without reason, that CBC Radio will want to do something to preserve my work and make it available, since that is now so easily done.  However I haven't taken any steps to promote the idea.  So I guess, if I'm serious, exploring that avenue should be my first move.  The second possibility is to make it available though a web-site of my own. . …..You've now suggested a third possibility - that someone else would do it.  I find this an appealing idea, as might CBC Radio, but I don't know if it's very likely to fly.

        Anyway thank you for the encouragement, and the nudge to get me going on this.  It may be fall before I begin to follow up, but I will.

P.S. I do have a complete sound archive, some of it already digitalized, and transcriptions of all shows between 1982 when we began transcription and 2006 when the CBC lost interest and could no longer understand why a print record might have a unique value (e.g. citability, and easy reference) in a world of proliferating "platforms" - God save us.  

May 21, 2014, from  Brad

Dear David,
Brad Jersak weighing in here with my 'amen.' About 18 months ago, I finished writing my PhD (under Ron Dart's supervision) on George Grant and Simone Weil. Throughout that process, I think I bought or read virtually everything on or by Grant and I must say that your George Grant in Conversation was by far the most helpful, dog-eared and highlighted resource on my bookshelf. Your poignant questions drew out answers from Grant available nowhere else and probably saved me either hundreds of hours or hundreds of mistakes.

Then onto the After Atheism series ... I know both Girard and Caputo personally, and can't honestly think of a close second to your fair and accurate summaries of their work. Simply the best out there ... and actually, the piece on Kearney was my favourite. I've passed it on to friends for whom it virtually saved their faith and others who needed the recovery message. Thank you so much! 

I'm 'gutted' to hear that your visit out west would be while I'm at Nottingham for post-doc work this fall, but please know that all of us hear recognize your long-term faithfulness to the Good. This is what is driving all these inquiries.
——

May 22, 2014, from Wayne

Given you have the complete sound archive, that so much is already digitalized, it is not a huge stretch to have a website done up by a professional designer (I asked such at our church to do mine, and am pleased with the outcome.  The $900 or so was worth it, and the $15/month keeps everything actively secured, etc... - check it out below if you wish); and the uploading of digitalized material - or any kind of file - is a piece of cake.  I'm doing it all the time through back door software called "WordPress", for instance - with commentary.  Lots of fun!

I wonder that it is best to have a grandkid or some such do all that in your home - so there is no chance of loss of the material.  Software and hardware are cheap, and flawless, provided you can hook up the tape player of the master tape to a USB port on a computer.  Digitalized also means a more permanent record.  Even more so once uploaded to a website...

Enough said.  There is huge benefit in completing such a project!  Man: I'll be listening on my old iPhone/now ipod anytime I travel on my own... am now to some of the earlier ones!  

——

May 22, 2014, from David

Dear Brad,

         Thanks for your letter.  George Grant - I think it's in Grant in  Conversation - remembered hearing Leo Strauss advise teachers to remember that among their auditors there might, at any given moment, be someone more attentive, more ardent, more serious than they.  (That's not exact - I'm paraphrasing.)  I always remembered that, and it was born out again and again when I would learn, sometimes years after the fact, how much something I had written or said on the CBC had meant to someone else, perhaps even more than it had meant to me - and all unknown to me at the time.  (Broadcasting can be unhappily promiscuous, but it does have this resemblance to the sower of the parable as well.)  Anyway I'm very happy to know that various works of mine were helpful to you, and, through you, to others.  I hope we'll meet up one day.

——

March 21, 2024

From Wayne,

Our enterprising pastor, Ian Funk (copied), at Langley Mennonite Fellowship has asked 5 of us to preach over the next month or so, each based on one of the After Atheism series. He did not know before of my connection to you. I've agreed to do the first one of the series: Richard Kearney. I told you once how much in an existentially difficult time external to me (a few nasty fundamentalist board members) I happened to listen to the first airing on CBC after a difficult board meeting, and felt refreshed as I pulled into the driveway an hour later! Again, thank you!

A few things:

• are there any manuscripts available from any of that series?

• can you point me to anything more current about Richard Kearney? I'll also be looking. Or to any of the others interviewed?

• would you be open to do a Zoom call about the series, where essentially you'd do the talking? It could be made available on the LMF YouTube channel, for those interested. You might wish to explain how you came to do the series, why it was divided into 2 sections, and what overall you were getting at in these two, as it turned out, last of your broadcasts on Ideas.

This should not involve more work, other than the Zoom time. But fully understood if it does not work for you. If you agree, presumably you would be open to have it posted both on LMF's site, and on mine?

Finally, you recall that (Anglican) scholar Ron Dart took part in our Ivan Illich book discussions. He retired last year after almost 40 years of teaching at University of the Fraser Valley. Some of us undertook to produce a Liber Amicorum (his choice over just an academic Festschrift), and I've completed the second round of copy-editing (first done by another friend, Matthew Steem, who also participated in that Illich group of discussions), also completed all the formatting, and am waiting only for another friend (Brad Jersak) to add ISBNs to each cover of the two-volume set (which he did in the first place), then publishing on Kindle Direct Publishing: one totalling 1,059 pages!

Ron is one of the relatively unsung Canadian-oriented academics whom retired Political Science prof, John Redekop, calls in the tome a "Renaissance Man." There are 82 contributors. It will appear as a two-volume set, titled:The Scholar-Gipsy: Thrownness, Memoricide & The Great Tradition .

Thanks, David.

Best to you.

Wayne

Attached Quotes and Pieces

——

Mar 23, 2024, from Wayne

Dear Wayne,

         Nice to hear from you.  I'm delighted to hear that those broadcasts are inspiring sermons, and especially one by you.

         There is no transcript of the series.  But the time it was broadcasting, the CBC, over my strenuous but unavailing objections, had discontinued transcripts.

          I've had no contact with Richard since the Illich book was published.  I had a copy sent to him in hopes of a review, and he said he would have his most recent book - on touch, as I recall - sent to me.  I never got his book, and he never produced a review so far as I know, and there the matter stands.  I did an earlier series with Richard, as you probably know, called The God Who May Be, which surveyed his work up to the time of the broadcast in 2006.  The three programs are on my site, and there is a transcript of that one on the transcripts page. 

           I'd be happy to do a Zoom call.  Might you interview me, just so I have someone to talk to, rather than my just having to orate into the void?  I'm very happy to know of your tribute to Ron Dart.  I know shockingly little of his work - hard to keep up - but we're still in touch from time to time, and perhaps I'll catch up one day.  

——

Mar 24, 2024, from Wayne

It's definitely a great idea to lift off from the broadcasts in brief, pithy sermons--Ian Funk's hope. I'll happily send you mine, though have no clue yet about what I'll present.

I think you had mentioned before CBC's failure to keep doing transcripts. Such a shame. Yes, I know of your earlier series, but never had accessed it. I have now downloaded the transcripts. checked Kearney's Boston College website. He has not been idle! There you will find this clickable list, that I quickly scanned tonight:

Books

Recent Books
Trilogy: Philosophy at the Limit
Other Books
Essay Monographs
Fiction & Poetry
Edited Volumes
Chapters & Articles in Books
Books on Kearney’s Work
Translations of Kearney’s Work

Thanks for your willingness to do a Zoom for subsequent posting. I did chuckle at the thought of my interviewing you. . .

But I have an idea: were we to wait until the series is done (see list below), then we collectively could take an hour or so "Zooming" with you about it. Some of the more general questions--as already mentioned--I could pose after introducing you and them. Then we presenters may each have questions for you that arise from our talks, possibly limiting it to three or something like that. This way, as we prepare the "sermons", we could think of questions to ask you on Zoom later. Then, we could have a general discussion, given that many may listen to all five, and unless truant (shame on them!), all will have listened to each other, so that a more informed discussion might take place. (Of course we may all listen to the recordings anytime, too!) I think this would create definite interest for several in our congregation, once posted to, and promoted on, the YouTube channel. And I'll also post it on my website.

The premise of the proposal is of course that Ian and the others think this an okay idea. I'll defer initially to Ian on this (he does two of them), and see if we proceed from there. (Ian: no feelings hurt if you think we shouldn't do this. I'm fine if not, and David, who is so gracious, I'm sure agrees.)

Following is the series, as described by Ian:
As you know, we are working with the radio series After Atheism.  This is a new link to the series.  https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/After+Atheism.  We will begin with an introductory Sunday on April 7.  I will speak about how the disciples, when in hiding after Jesus' crucifixion/resurrection, mourned the death of the Christ they knew, and were now getting reacquainted with a risen Christ and anticipating the leading of the Holy Spirit. Moving from there, I propose the following;

April 14 Lisa will respond to John Caputo (Program 2).  She has chosen Acts 15 as the scripture for April 14
April 21  Ian will respond to Roger Lundin (Program 5)  Scripture TBD
April 28  Wayne will respond to Richard Kearney (Program 1)  Scripture TBD
May 5  Ian will respond to William Cavanaugh (Program 3)  Scripture TBD
May 12  Juliet will respond to James Carse (Program 4)  Scripture TBD

Just some initial thoughts.

As to Ron Dart. Here are links to the Kindle versions of the two-volume set, which I've made free for five days:

The Scholar-Gipsy Volume 1: Thrownness, Memoricide & The Great Tradition

The Scholar-Gipsy Volume 2: Thrownness, Memoricide & The Great Tradition 

Apr 11, 2024, from Ian

Hello Wayne, Hello David,
I just thought that I'd chime in and thank you both, Wayne for creatively thinking of generative possibilities, and David for responding generously to Wayne's suggestion that we have a Q & A on Zoom.  I am open to any good interaction that we might have.  A Zoom meeting, mid May would be great!!

David, I've been listening to the After Atheism series a few times now and appreciate them greatly.  Our series begins this Sunday.  I am sorry, logistics determined that we respond to each of the episodes but out of order; I hope that the cohesion and flow of the series isn't too disrupted by this.

We are calling our worship series; God. Then & Now; Always and Eternal, hopefully conveying that God/church looks and is different through time while the lasting/sustaining qualities of God and religious life remain.  I am hoping this title offers some assurance of unchangeability while not softening too much our challenge of the status quo; some are truly traumatised by change, or even the prospect of it.

Nonetheless, there is a keen interest at Langley Mennonite to know a living, present and relevant God who speaks to us in real and meaningful ways.  Many of us also understand that we need to deconstruct and relearn to get there.  There is also an anxious (yet vibrant) sense that we don't know what new looks like or how to do new stuff...so that's the spirit that brought us to After Atheism.  Some have already expressed excitement and intrigue over the upcoming series...so I am excited too.  We will have 5 speakers respond to the 5 episodes, most of whom have been called from the pew to speak.  You're invited to listen in if you ever are interested.

John Milbank

John Milbank

Mon, Jul 6, 2026

Although David passed away in such good circumstances, he was far too young to die for these days, and was such a remarkable person. It was a real privilege to know him and he helped and encouraged me enormously. Without him surely Ivan Illich’s thought would not have reached its crucial final form. David was far more than a mere promoter; in the end more a co-elaborator. Along with Charles Taylor, Illich’s legacy is surely now much indebted to Canadians!

Ideas, John Milbank, The Myth of the Secular, Part Six, Radical Orthodoxy

Chrissy Reichert

From Jutta to Marcus, July 13, 2026:

A parcel arrived in the mail from Chrissy Reichert, who until two years ago helped me in the house and the garden, and who worked to help us bring structure and grace to some family gatherings and also to some community gatherings when those were temporarily illegal due to the public health rules.

The parcel contained three sets of garden gloves, a secateur, a package of herb tea, a copy of C.S.Lewis’ book on his grief, and a card with a collage of David playing the guitar plus a vase of flowers (another little picture of birds flying on the back of the envelope), and this text:

“First time I heard his voice was in 2001 in a tiny apartment that had one window facing a brick wall, and it was dreadful. One of the good memories (before I had a computer) was listening to the radio and the only thing I remember was David’s “The Scapegoat” series with Renee Girard. It was so valuable to me at that time, and I never forgot it.

Then in 2012 I met a girl during a show and she mentioned “The Scapegoat” series & we bonded and were so excited to talk about it. Who knew that I would have the privilege to meet this wonderful broadcaster and his beautiful wife, and be working with them for several years Who knew that I would meet his entire family, witness his daily rituals of coffee and the newspaper with his wife, then upstairs to write, the down for lunch & see his love for sports & fellowship with his beloved. Who knew I would get to witness his love for family & friends, to get to see his beautiful floral arrangements, to find out what things were on his mind, & what he was working on, & see his cool little work space, art on the walls & wonderful book collection. To see his love and admiration for his wife, and daughter Kate, because it was very obvious how in love he was. And that I would get to share Christmas with him & his family, & sing the most beautiful carols, ones I never even heard at church. And that this man would come to one of my music shows, before my own father would, and that we would survive a weird pandemic. Who knew that I would fall in love with him& his family. Thank you Lord.”

Brother John, Taize

Brother John, Mar 14, 2022

Dear David,

Profiting from some days alone in Italy and inspired by a second reading of your book, I wrote the article about Illich and apocalypse that you suggested. I'm sending it along to you, because I have no idea what to do with it. Personally I don't have access to any journals or publications that would publish it. If you have ideas, wonderful.

You'll see that I take issue to a certain extent with your own reading of the New Testament. I think Illich is far closer to the Book of Revelation than you (or perhaps even he) thought. But we agree on everything else, and I don't need to say again how indebted I am to your book to show me the unity of Illich's thought.
——
David, Mar 15, 2022,

Dear John,

         I was happy to receive your letter and happier still with your "Apocalypse Now." 

        As to what you say, I think we essentially agree, although emphasizing different aspects of John's apocalypse.  [Revelations is] a book that makes me uneasy from the outset - the failings of the seven churches that are in Asia - and that feeling - that a spirit of schadenfreude and revenge is at work in the background - never really leaves me.  I'm sure that influences my reading, as does the reception history of the book.  I know it can be read as you do and all the violence, and swords in teeth, etc. resolved into symbolism, and I'm respectful of that reading.  "Mythological" might have been an ill-judged word on my part - I was struggling for a term to convey what Ivan accepted and what he didn't accept.  It was probably also clumsy to call him a non-apocalyptic thinker, even if I specified the sense in which I spoke, since I clearly think he is an apocalyptic thinker through and through, and I am delighted by your designating his work as a whole as a contemporary apocalypse.

       Many thanks to you for this essay.  There has been little engagement so far with the aspects of the book you take up, and I think they are crucial in understanding Illich.  May I also share your essay with a reading group here in Canada that has been meeting monthly by Zoom to discuss the book?  The Apocalypse chapter is on the agenda for this month, and I'd like to throw your essay into the discussion.

all best for now,

David

——

Brother John, Jun 26, 2025

Dear David,

It was great to see you in Lucca and glad you made it home safely.….. I promised to send the manuscript I completed on the man-woman dichotomy in the Bible, a thorny subject today if there ever was one. My conclusion is "equal but different" which may dissatisfy everyone. Don't know if and when it will be published so I send you the manuscript.

——

David, Jun 26, 2025

Dear John,

I'm glad to have your manuscript. Thank you. I'll have it printed out next time I'm by my favourite copy shop. I can only stand so much screen reading. I'm sure it will advance my thinking. Do you know the passage in The Rivers North of the Future - on p. 198, if you have it - in which Ivan explains Hugh of St. Victor's account of why "male and female [God] created them" and his own idea of "dysymmetrical complementarity"?

——

Tue, May 26, 2026 12:44 PM

Dear John,

I've read your book, your comments on my Jung essay, and the First Things article on Jung's Gnosticism that you linked.

Springtime, first of all, is wonderful – wonderfully concise, which I appreciated, but also inspiring. It agrees very well with part of my understanding of Ivan's corruptio as a call to return to the source. You emphasize more the disintegration of "Christian" civilization, while he talks more of its perverse fulfillment, but I think there is a lot of agreement there.

The disagreement appears more in your comments on my Jung essay, and, a fortiori, in Satinover's critique of Jung. I want to say first that I don’t think Jung is a consistent thinker, or a man with a “system.” But, of course, he did elaborate a system of a sort, and a vocabulary to go with it, and I think that generates a lot of confusions and misunderstanding, and opens the door for cramped, hostile misreadings of the kind which I think Satinover is sometimes guilty. For me, as I think I said in that essay, Jung is a Christian who is trying to understand what that means in view of the crisis of faith that he already observed in his parent’s generation. And he is a pilgrim soul – a man in process, if you like - who is trying to use a language - science - which is often refractory to his purposes but which he sometimes succeeds in enlarging in promising ways.

I think I probably identify with Jung as someone who feels himself to be in the same situation. I was deeply steeped in Anglican Christianity as a boy, so much so that it became, I would say, the very structure, or substructure of my understanding. But, as my horizons widened, what I had understood was subject to challenges that I could barely grasp, let alone respond to. Jung’s Aion, like Bonhoeffer’s (very different) prison letters, pushed me to the thought of a new age – of a reformulation and a reworking of what had been handed over to us in the light of an increasingly apocalyptic reality.

The essay that you read is an attempt to bring what I took from Ivan into consonance with this earlier intuition on which Jung had such an influence. I was very conscious in writing it that I was working at the limits of my understanding, and certainly at the limits of what I could express in intelligible sentences. In responding you have made a distinction between the God image and the Living God, to whom, you say, only Jesus offers perfect access. But I wonder about this distinction. Doesn’t it tend to disqualify what appears to the seeker who can’t know in advance what he’s seeking, and put God – as the “living God” – securely into the exclusive possession of those with faith? Isn’t the living God mediated by the images we form, even if they seem to form themselves? Jung, in his explorations during the First World War, working at the edge of what might easily have been madness, didn’t know what he was doing. I would say he put himself into the hands of the living God with unusual courage, and gave testimony to the complacent of how terrible the living God can be.

Jung said that because he lacked faith, he was thrown back on experience. That’s a way of speaking. But what do we mean by faith and what by experience? If God and humanity change in relation to one another – the bold supposition that Jung shares with Eckhart and others in his lineage – then can faith be said to apprehend some unchanging essence? Experience is an equally layered word, and a very confusing one in Jung because of his real, but also pretended, empiricism.

You imagine a new age of the church, and I think that is right. The Church was the first intuition of a universal community, and must somehow be the incipient or ghostly form of the coming community. But how? We have intuitions, like Illich’s “powerless,” declericalized church, Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity, or Rosenstock-Huessy’s “unlabelled…listening church” (in his wonderful The Christian Future, or the Modern Mind Outrun – I’ve take a crack at an introduction to the little known R.H. here: https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2025/6/2/rosentock-huessy) But these are only hints, and reachings after something untried and unknown. More will not be discovered without epistemic humility – a real, and not merely pretended state of not knowing.

Jung’s claims – for quadernity over trinity, for the inclusion of evil, matter and the feminine element in God, for a new style of “imitation” of Christ – are guesses, probes, as McLuhan’s says, explorations in a language that will hardly bear the weight of what it’s being asked to carry. I entertain these claims – odd word – test them – try to see through them or with them. I don’t say that I know what is the case. It’s the confident tone – Satinover sometimes gives examples of it – that needs to be dispelled in favour of the questioning tone, but the questioning tone – firm and tentative at the same time – is just as elusive as the future church.

Is the Gospel a closed book, the Incarnation a last word, or is there more still to be disclosed – a more towards which we can dispose ourselves in humility and attentive anticipation, but whose arrival we can’t hurry or force? Nicolas of Cusa says – if I’ve understood him correctly in his The Vision of God - that at the wall of paradise, which I take to mean the extremity of our discursive understanding, God appears as a coincidentia oppositorum. I’m not sure Jung says any more than this. To say that God contains, or even is, evil seems bizarre, and obviously Gnostic, in the despised and rejected sense of that word. And yet…does Ivan not confess to a temptation to “curse the Incarnation” when he contemplates the mystery of evil, and does he not come within a hair of saying that this mystery is inherent in the Incarnation and can therefore be understood as the will of God?

That’s where I am…at least as well as I can tell you in a short letter which I must now bring to an end. I’m glad to be in conversation with you.

In friendship,

David

——

May 28, 2026, Dear David,

Thanks for your reply. I appreciate your remarks on my latest manuscript and that you see it as basically consonant with Illich’s thought, from a different perspective. Coming from you, that means a lot.

To continue our discussion, I’d like to clarify my distinction between “the God-image” and “the living God,” which seemed problematic to you, if I understood correctly. From certain things you say in your latest letter, I don’t think our positions are that far apart. Let me try again.

First of all, I certainly don’t think that, as you put it, my outlook “tend[s] to disqualify what appears to the seeker who can’t know in advance what he’s seeking, and put God – as the ‘living God’ – securely into the exclusive possession of those with faith.” I don’t think those who consider themselves believers, nor the church as a whole, have any more of a monopoly on who God definitively is than anyone else. What they (we) have is rather the conviction that the revelation who God is in him/her/itself inevitably passes through the figure of Jesus the Christ.

And so for us the question also becomes “Who is Jesus?” The church(es) have sometimes acted as if they had a monopoly on knowing the identity of Jesus, and a complete knowledge of that identity, but I think that is incorrect. (In the gospels already the first disciples often got it wrong.) What I call “the living God” is so far beyond what our minds can capture—and therefore Jesus as the revealer of God is equally more than we imagine at any given moment—that we are all permanently seekers.

To put it in human terms, I would compare, analogically, the distinction between the God-image and the living God with the case of someone with whom we gradually establish a friendship. After meeting that person, we have an image of them in our mind. As the relationship grows, we refine that image, discarding some previous ideas and “getting to know them better,” as we would say. But the way we see that person is never simply identical to that person as they are in themselves. They are the “limit case,” to put it in mathematical terms, that we approach asymptotically.

This leads to the question of Jung’s own personal beliefs. I fully agree that he was not the builder of a hard-and-fast system, but rather a seeker with an amazing knowledge of all kinds of trends and thinkers. That, paradoxically, makes it harder to grasp where he stood, because one can find all sorts of quotes by him that seem to go in different directions. You see him as “a Christian who is trying to understand what that means in view of the crisis of faith that he already observed in his parent’s generation.” You may be right, and you certainly have read more Jung than I have, but there seem to be other quotes where he calls himself an agnostic or even someone interested in creating, out of the fragments of Christianity, a new religion relevant to our day. Naturally people are allowed to evolve, and do not always explain their thinking adequately, but the key question here seems to me to be the following:

Either one believes that God is a Reality beyond our understanding but existing in him/her/itself, that we have somehow encountered and which we can try and know more deeply, like the friend I talked about earlier, in which case all of our searching—based in part on our own experience, and for Christians in part on the witness of other believers across the ages, beginning with the Bible—is helpful, necessary and never-ending (no one has a monopoly).

Or else we don’t believe in that God who exists, or are not sure if there is anything “out there” independent of the human condition at all, and then it is logical to focus on the God-image in our minds, based on our experience and that of others. But, in the end, is that not just something we create, unless we have an inkling that there is something beyond our creation?

Here we come to the “epistemic humility” you mention; it is essential, and it is just as arduous for the non-believer as it is for the believer, though for different reasons. For both groups, to use my language, it is hard not to equate our God-image with the living God beyond our minds.

(By the way, I too found the Sandover article a little bit deficient in that humility. His tone is a bit too ex cathedra, too knowing. But I thought he had some good insights. I had the sense that he saw in Jung himself different outlooks that made him hard to categorize, though I may be wrong.)

So, to the extent that Jung was indeed a Christian trying to find a better way of understanding what it means to believe today, more power to him. If instead he saw the Christian view of reality as a kind of raw material that he could recompose into something more congenial to his own personal worldview, in the end that is less helpful for people like me.

I do realize that some Christian theologians—and here you and I probably differ—would agree, as you say, that “God and humanity change in relation to one another.” I’ve never gotten into Meister Eckhart, so I don’t know really what he meant, but certainly someone like Jürgen Moltmann might say that. To me that all goes back to Hegel, and it seems to me highly dubious.

I am not a Thomist per se, but I remain convinced that God is God and, though deeply involved with creation to the point of becoming one of us, God cannot change in his/her/its ultimate essence or identity, what the tradition calls his transcendence. I concede, to go back to my analogy with a human person (and it is only an analogy), that in a relationship we cause aspects of the personality of the other, previously only implicit, to be revealed, but nonetheless the person exists independently of the relationship.

This brings us to another question, that of the Incarnation and its meaning. But that is for another time.

Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to share thoughts.

John

PS After writing all this, I had a thought which I have no way of verifying, since I am not so acquainted with Jung’s life. I wondered if the problem many have of “classifying” him regarding his beliefs might not be due to the fact that not only did he evolve during his life, but that there was a real struggle in him between someone faithful to the Christian faith and someone in reaction against it and trying to replace it. It would be fascinating to see if one could demonstrate this from his biography.

PPS Thanks for the link to your introduction to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. I started reading his book The Christian Future some time ago and got bogged down.

Jun 8, 2026, David

Dear John,

Here I am at last - with an answer to your last letter. Thanks for trying to clarify the issue we've been discussing.

Jung is various and changing, as we've both now said, but I'm interested mainly in the old man, who wrote once to a young scholar who inquired about something he had said forty years before about "the incredible folly that filled the days of my youth”- perhaps I cite this remark in my essay. My sources are mainly Aion, Answer to Job, and the letters, particularly the ones that Edward Edinger collected in a useful book called The New God-Image (Chiron, 1996). There seems to me to be no doubt that, for Jung, at this late period, God is real, or that, as you say, "God is God." Peter Kingsley even quotes him as saying that he wants to "let God be God" free of human projection. The last words of Answer to Job, where he speaks of “the One who dwells within [us], whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses [us] on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky,” could have come from the mouth of the Psalmist. A "within us" that at the same time "encompasses us" without height, depth or limit, is not what we normally mean by "within" or by "subjectivity." These and other passages seem to me to bespeak an encounter with the living God, rather than an attempt, in your words, "to recompose [God] into something more congenial."

On the other hand there is no doubt that for Jung, a "new God-image" is an intelligible idea, though the phrase is Edinger's, not Jung's. He says that our image of God must be revised to include elements that have been excluded from God - matter, evil and the feminine essentially - and that quadernity is preferable to a trinity as an image of the divine. And he seems broadly sympathetic to the ideas he encounters in various mystical and esoteric literatures that humanity and God are finally inseparable, and even, when the idea is stated in its boldest form, like Hegel's saying that God's knows himself as a self-consciousness in man , or Silesius's "without me God can no moment live," that God becomes conscious in humanity.

These positions - that God is something that happens to us, not something we invent, but is also something that happens to us progressively, and in changing forms, through time - are reconciled for Jung in the figure of psyche, or as he sometimes says "objective psyche" - in order to stress exactly the element you're insisting on - that God "exists in his/her/itself." When psyche is translated into "psychology," and psychology into some sort of art of self-care and self-manipulation, and Jung himself is not blameless here, a lot of what is helpful in Jung's conception of psyche gets lost.

I wrote the essay I sent you to see if I could make my intuition that Illich, in his conception of "a mystery of evil," that shadows the Incarnation, and is, for all intents and purposes, inherent in it, can be related to Jung's suggestion that Christianity is not a finished structure - a story foretold that only awaits its inevitable dénouement - but rather a continuing revelation. I have that intuition - it is a germ, or a seed, or a bud of some kind - but I lack the language, and, in part, the confidence, to carry it much farther forward than I have done. That's why interlocutors like you are important to me at this stage.

I think perhaps that's all I can say at this point. Please don't feel any obligation to respond punctually. I'll be happy to hear from you, if you have something you want to tell me. And I'll certainly be in touch with you when I have more to say.

A warm embrace to you in the meanwhile,

David

John Winslow Verity (emails, 2013 - 2014)

From John Verity, May 15, 2013: 

I imagine you're aware of the doc. film shot at CIDOC in the mid-1970s by a German guy named Gordian Troeller: "No Respect for Sacred Cows":

German film with good English subtitles 1976, when Cidoc was closing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epD932IBF_Yb

There’s a 1972 French TV interview with Illich. I thought I had landed a scoop when I recently found that video for sale in France (I paid!), from an archive, but evidently not. I mentioned it on my blog and then, Sajay very quickly produced the transcripts that you'd provided to him a week earlier and someone else (a Marty Kent, out here in Calif.) wrote to point out that the program has been posted publicly on the Vimeo site:

    https://vimeo.com/58170701

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 3:24 PM, John W. Verity <john@jverity.com> wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/opinion/brooks-the-secular-society.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Hi,    Thought this might interest you.

On Jul 11, 2013, at 1:27 PM, david cayley wrote: Thanks, John...hoping I'm going to see you in Oakland at Sajay's conference at the end of the month.

Sat, Jul 13, 2013, 2:34 PM: you bet. I live an hour and a bit northwest of Oakland, in Sonoma Cty., so will be there. looking forward to it. perhaps there will be some time to hang out before the actual evening talks.

Fri, Mar 14, 2014, 6:45 PM

to Jutta

John Verity posted this interesting interview with Lee on his website New Scare City:
http://www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=5 It's long, but it brought it brought Lee very much alive in my mind,

Philippe Mesly

In the summer of 2021, a group of friends met regularly in Toronto parks, seated on blankets the approved 1 meter apart, to discuss David Cayley’s recently published Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey. Our group was not homogeneous: a recently ordained minister, a teacher, a gardener, a social worker, a human rights advocate, and a grad student, we were rarely in agreement, and certainly not all committed Illichians. I had been reading Illich for a few years by then and knew of David through his two books of interviews with him. He emerged as a distinct person for me when I came across his “Questions About the Pandemic” and, on a whim, decided to send him a response. What I found so refreshing in this text was not solely the ideas he threw out, but the expression of an earnest desire to discuss what was happening. I had observed how uncomfortable I made people in those days when I sought to debate the pros and cons of lockdowns, and in response I kept my views to myself or my closest friends. David announced his confusion publicly and dared others to take up the challenge to explain this new historical event to him.

Since that initial contact, I’ve gone through most of David’s archive of CBC Ideas documentaries (which he graciously made freely available on his website) and it is clear that the spirit of his “Questions” fits within a larger pattern. In the interviews he recorded with prominent thinkers of his age—Richard Sennett, René Girard, George Grant, and many others—he performed an incalculable service for future generations. But, despite what even he was probably inclined to think, this service was not limited to sussing out from them an elucidation of their thinking, but involved an actively creative exchange. In this, he revealed the meaning of “speech-thinking,” a notion developed by philosophers Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy which David himself only encountered late in life and whose proponents he described as follows: “They are able to know what they think only through the intermediation of some interlocutor. Their thoughts do not already exist in some pure and essential form in advance of their expression – they take shape in an encounter with some other on whom they depend and for whom they can only wait and hope.” David could reasonably have described his vocation (or job title) as that of interlocutor. Such a task cannot be accomplished by a neutral interrogator; it requires a grappling partner.

David’s persistence, a simultaneous intuitive grasp and stubborn incomprehension, were the necessary condition for getting thinkers to develop as fully as possible their ideas, while trusting that they were speaking to a sincere and interested person. When confronted with an idea he could not comprehend, he did the opposite of what many of us do: he doubled down in his quest to understand it, asking more questions, soliciting more opportunities to talk it over, getting more perspectives to weigh in and resting unsatisfied until he felt convinced that he had truly mastered it. Some highlights from his radio career, for me, are his series on Simone Weil (featuring his daughter Kate giving truly breathtaking readings of Weil); “Being Born,” a report on the wacky and niche field of prenatal psychology; and of course the conversations that would make up The Rivers North of the Future.

When I reached out to David regarding his “Questions,” he immediately invited me into a sphere of confidence and engaged me in dialogue. When I told him about the reading group we were planning, he gladly accepted the offer to come speak to us on the final day of our conversations. Around a table in my backyard and some cheap red wine, David gladly joined the discussion and fielded questions, even as things at one point got slightly heated. The group spawned many more reading groups, with people coming and going. Some continue to ponder the themes brought up then—the modern conception of death and medicine, the relations between Judaism and memory, professionalization, gender, institutionality and evil. Yet arguably, the framework of the discussions itself was the most influential result of the group, which we’ve since gone on to apply in more a formalized humanities project. It is likely that the shape of this model had much to do with the choice of text with which we began. I am grateful to David for providing the occasion as well as the support for our efforts to create para-academic spaces for intellectual practice, as well as for being an example, in the sense he ascribes to Illich in his biography, for how to remain intellectually curious, faithful, and rigorous.