By Carlos Mendoza Álvarez
0. Following in the footsteps of the theologian
I never met Ivan Illich in person. As a young university student in Puebla, I only knew of his namesake in Tolstoy's novel “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” which I read with awe in those years as a disturbing meditation on death.
I belong to a generation that came after Illich's creative period in Mexico. I witnessed the first effects of the Cuernavaca School as a young Dominican novice in Amecameca in 1979, thanks to the discussions of several international groups who came on retreat to Agua Viva, inspired by the debates between Don Sergio Méndez Arceo, the Benedictine Abbot Lemercier, and the art of Friar Gabriel Chávez de la Mora. And I mustn't forget, in this account of that generation, the ever-present figure of the Abbess of Ahuatepec, Mother Benedicta Quijano, who appears in one of Javier Sicilia's novels as a witness to the spiritual journey of “a country priest” on the Morelos plateau.
As a philosophy student at the Dominican Studium and at UNAM during the 1980s, I began hearing about Illich in Margarita Vera's Philosophy in Mexico class. She cited him as an atypical thinker within that academic discipline, but one whose critique of modernity deserved careful consideration. At the time, I didn't fully grasp the significance of the thought of this brilliant Austrian Catholic priest, the son of a Jewish mother, who had broken with the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Rome and the United States. After a brief stint in Princeton and the Bronx in New York, he moved to Cuernavaca, where he wrote his “pamphlets”—a powerful critique of instrumental modernity that remains relevant today.
Already well into the new century, following Javier Sicilia's invitation to participate in the editorial board of the magazine Ixtus first, then in Conspiracy, I began to read Illich attentively, thanks to the editorial work that prepared the two volumes of his “Collected Works” under the editorial care of Javier Sicilia and Valentina Borremans, published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica, from that glorious publishing era that we long for today in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In more recent years, my relationship with Illich as a reader has intensified. I attended the symposium “Ivan Illich: The Political in Apocalyptic Times,” held ten years ago here in Cuernavaca in 2016, with the participation of David Cayley, Valentina Borremans, and Javier Sicilia, among other friends and colleagues. There, I could perceive the contrast between the critical reception of his work by the group of academics from the North, preoccupied with the author's exegesis, and a more creative reading from the group in Morelos and Mexico, focused more on the social impact of his thought. Subsequently, thanks to the Spanish translation of “The Rivers North of the Future,” published by Alios Ventos in 2023, a step forward was taken in the dissemination of this work, allowing today's readers a retrospective look at the entirety of Illich's thought, with an introduction by David Cayley and Gustavo Esteva.
Last summer I was able to attend the colloquium on Illich as a theologian in Rome, which brought together European colleagues—organized by Isabella Bruckman of the Anselmiano College as host, Gema Serrano of the Les Bernardins Institute in Paris, and Ana Sjöberg of Uppsala University as co-hosts—and held at that emblematic Benedictine college on the Aventine Hill. There I observed a high-level academic approach to the exegesis of an author, with little or no interest in discerning the social implications of his thought in today's world, with a few exceptions regarding agriculture in Tuscany and medicine and psychiatry in Germany. I proposed a meeting of Illich scholars from the North and South in the coming years, an initiative that was initially met with enthusiasm but will not materialize until 2028.
And to conclude this chronological review of my relationship with Illich's thought, I discovered a few years ago a new generation of young writers in Mexico, such as Elías González and Carlos Tornel, as well as bicycle activists, popular educators and herbal doctors in Puebla, Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas, who translate and enrich Illich's critical intuitions into practices of communal resistance against the power of the devices of instrumental reason so criticized by the thinker of conviviality.
My purpose in this presentation is to recover the theological and theologian profile of a complex thinker who experienced firsthand the process of “deprofessionalization” as a cleric and as a priest, but not as a believer or as a theologian. In this regard, Agamben wrote in his prologue to *The Church Without Power*:
“The hypothesis we would like to suggest is that the conceptual idea of Illich as a critic of modernity and archaeologist of conviviality arises as a radical and coherent development of theological categories already present in the priest's thinking.” (The Church Without Power, Prologue, p. 2).
In contrast, Gustavo Esteva denies that theological content, emphasizing Illich's strength in thinking about instrumental modernity from its contradictions.
Here I intend to resolve the false dichotomy generated by Gustavo Esteva's discussion with Giorgio Agamben regarding the theological profile of Illich's work, by recovering an “apophatic” sense of theology always present in Ivan's thought, from his youth, through the reflections gathered in the “Alternatives” section of his Collected Works, to the vision he himself would retrospectively offer in the book “The Rivers North of the Future.” Let's proceed step by step.
1. The theological seeds of Ivan Dominic Ilic.
In a brilliant lecture given a few months ago during the aforementioned Rome colloquium, Fabio Milana presented an ongoing documentary investigation into the texts and photographic images of Ivan's childhood and youth—which will form part of the introductory study he is preparing with Giorgio Agamben for the publication of the complete works in Italian—focused on explaining the “theological” character of his work.
Milana went to the Illich family archive to retrieve valuable documents from her childhood, among which I was particularly struck by a report card from her elementary school, along with some photographs of Ivan as an altar boy in religious processions in Vienna, and fragments of letters to her mother. These findings reveal the experience of a traditional Viennese Christianity, with a strong liturgical emphasis, typical of any European Catholic parish in the first half of the 20th century.
Fabio Milana reconstructs Illich's theological journey from the thesis of the second canonical cycle in philosophy (corresponding to a civil master's degree) on the thought of the Russian thinker Vladimir Sergei Soloviev, which was defended by the young Illich at the age of 23 at the Gregorian University of Rome in 1947.
This philosophical thesis highlights the idea of an ontology of the human-divine correlation, which implies a theological epistemology of “integral knowledge,” in the sense of an understanding of human knowledge intimately linked to the power of the incarnation of the divine Word. This is a principle of theological epistemology that, in my view, will mark all of Illich's subsequent work.
Illich's postgraduate thesis in philosophy on Soloviev was also masterfully analyzed in Mexico by Rafael Mondragón. In the Russian author's thought lies the seed of a theological perspective on reality that would remain throughout the work of the migrant thinker, Illich. It is a key idea of Orthodox theological thought, rooted in the councils of the first millennium of Christianity and in the work of the great Orthodox theologians, from the Cappadocian Fathers to Bulgakov in more recent times. I am referring to the theosis or the process of divinization that designates the dynamis of the grace sown by the incarnation of the Word of God in Jesus of Nazareth, Messiah and Son. But this divinization is only possible because it is preceded by the kenosis of the divine Word, that is, by his abasement as δοῦλος (doûlos) or slave, according to the hymn in the Letter to the 2:7. Negation that makes divinization possible. Kenosis that opens the way to theosis.
Therefore, I propose that we focus precisely on this intelligence of the kenosis-theosis as “original grace” prior to all sin or distortion of the divine in the cosmos and history, to understand the mystical and apophatic sense of Soloviev's philosophy that profoundly influenced the young Illich's thought. Divine kenosis is the self-abasement that the divine incarnation carries out as a loving process of emptying itself in creating the cosmos and in the incarnation of the divine Logos in Christ Jesus. Theosis is “the other side of the moon” of that same loving process, for it designates the divinization of all creation, which it nourishes and remains untouched despite the evil in the world. God incarnates himself in a loving act of self-emptying to give life to the cosmos and remains in solidarity and silence with all creation to “overcome evil with good,” as Paul says in Romans 12:21. We will return later to this “theological” core that is latent in Illich's work until the end of his oeuvre.
To close this first section, it is worth highlighting two little-known elements of the Austrian thinker's life: his early passion for liturgy and his pre-conciliar ecclesiastical training in childhood as a Viennese acolyte, which later gave way to the conciliar aggiornamento thanks to the return to the sources that was the air du temps of the sixties of the twentieth century.
It is worth recalling here a testimony from Ramon Xirau about Illich's religious practice during his years in Cuernavaca:
“It has been written that Ivan Illich was a “revolutionary humanist”, although in his case definitions are of little value, and that is because definitions are always too vague and general when it comes to the living thought, always in motion, always renewing itself, of this authentically religious Ivan Illich, Christian in his life and in his work: in his work, so to speak, living.
In Cuernavaca, one could hear the mass that Iván officiated apart from the research at the Center: the mass officiated by this tall, lean, upright man, with the verticality that, with his eyes raised, was devotion, contemplation, perhaps not far removed from mysticism.
Contemplative and active, often smiling, full of affection, Illich had undertaken a true struggle against what he saw as the enslavement of modern man. Thus, when he criticized school education and “schooling,” which he saw precisely as an instrument of the domination exercised by the industrial world. This does not mean that he denied education. What Ivan Illich desired, and tried to achieve with children in Cuernavaca, was a living education or, better yet, a form of coexistence—this word, coexistence, essential to understanding the life and work of Ivan Illich.” (Apud. Hornedo Rocha 2017, 156-157).
In our view, both passions can help us understand the spirit of Illich's childhood traditional Christianity that marked his choice of the ministerial priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church, his philosophical and theological formation prior to his priestly ordination, as well as his subsequent pastoral work with Puerto Rican migrants in New York.
A path that ultimately led to his final distancing from the priestly ministry to become a “deprofessionalized theologian,” that is, outside the clerical institution that he so criticized.
2. Overcoming ecclesiastical Christianity
Illich's break with Rome occurred in ecclesiastical terms, but not in terms of faith or theology. As Illich himself stated in his 1969 letter of resignation from ecclesiastical privileges, addressed to Monsignor John Joseph Maguire, Apostolic Administrator of the Archdiocese of New York, following the death of Cardinal Spellman, who had been his protector:
“These problems have cast upon me the shadow of a notorious “man of the Church,” and this interferes with my ministry, my work as an educator, and my personal decision to live as a Christian […]. Therefore, I inform you of my irrevocable decision to renounce entirely the service of the Church, my functions as a priest, and all titles, offices, benefices, and privileges as a cleric.”
The language of his letter of resignation from the priesthood has a strong ecclesiastical, that is, institutional, accent, with expressions typical of canonical jargon. A first reading of this letter might disappoint readers critical of the Church as a hierarchical institution, since in it Illich seems to submit without question to the ecclesiastical authority of Rome, without directly criticizing its control as a power structure, as he did in his writings on development, schools, and hospitals. In fact, there are phrases typical of filial obedience that irritate anticlerical sensibilities, but which we could also read as an Illichian irony toward the authority from which he is distancing himself. As Hornedo-Rocha comments in this lengthy quote:
“In the second half of the 1960s, Archbishop Illich leveled severe criticisms against the Catholic Church. In a lecture, he even compared it to the Ford Motor Company, pointing out that, to make matters worse, it was less efficient and productive. He accused the Church of being nothing more than another corporate bureaucracy promoting that collective poison called economic development. The book *Celebration of Awareness* (1970) compiles texts published years earlier by Archbishop Illich. One of them, titled *Vanishing Clergyman* (translated into Spanish in the book *Alternativas* as *La metamorfosis del clero*), has been considered one of the most controversial articles of that already contentious era. This text was presented as a paper at a congress of theologians in 1959 and originally published in *CIF Reports* and shortly thereafter in *The Critic*, vol. XXV, no. 6, June-July 1967. In it, Archbishop Illich proposes that the Church should be…” to carry out a permanent de-professionalization of the Catholic Church, in order to recover and preserve its original foundations of voluntary union among equals, and not the mega-corporate bureaucratic structure into which it has been transformed. He also argues in favor of the free election of episcopal structures at the local level (direct and participatory ecclesial democracy), in contrast to the centralized, vertical, and authoritarian impositions that exist to this day. Finally, the article proposes the free personal choice of chastity and voluntary ordination. Across the geometric spectrum of political ideologies, neither the right nor the left wing of the Catholic Church and other governmental bureaucracies tolerated Ivan Illich's criticisms. Even the pro-institutional Jesuit, Dan Berrigan, accused him of intellectual violence. In 1967, the high hierarchy of the Catholic Church censured CIDOC and its honorary director through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the former Holy Office). Shortly thereafter, Illich decided to resign. privileges of that enormous corporate bureaucracy called the Catholic Church. He renounced distinctions and the ability to act as a professional in the service of the Church. He refused to speak publicly again in the future as a clergyman, but he never renounced his faith or the vows of his ordination (chastity and poverty). Nor, above all, his status as a Christian and a practicing theologian of apophatics. That is, believing that human understanding, at best, can only learn what God is not. Therefore, it is not possible to speak of the true nature of God. Nothing can be said about the deity, according to this position.” (Hornedo Rocha 2017).
Thanks to later texts such as “The Metamorphosis of the Clergy” and “The Other Side of Charity,” we can read this renunciation in a different light. Between the lines, we can glimpse a crucial distinction for understanding Illich the deprofessionalized theologian: he distances himself from the clerical office, taking refuge in the work of the historian, but vigorously maintains his “theological” character, founded on his understanding of the ecclesial community as that humanity recreated through conviviality because it is nourished by the Incarnation of the Word.
From this distinction it is possible to connect Illich's critique to the power mechanisms that pervert conviviality, including ecclesiastical institutions, as diverse and interconnected modes of counterproductivity.
But the core of his argument persists as a properly theological rationality that consists in the radical nature of the Incarnation of the Word of God, a gratuitous act that is the “apophatic” foundation of all reality, which endures in the face of all idolatries that supplant divine glory, to paraphrase Agamben’s expression in his critique of modernity. It is, therefore, an apophatic perspective insofar as it negates ecclesiastical, clerical, and institutional mediations while simultaneously designating the ineffable nature of the human condition, bound by the gratuitous gift of love to the divine condition.
3. The historian's intuitions: the other possible Christianity…
In Illich's long period as a historian of the West, in his works such as “In the Vineyard of the Text” and others from the post-pamphlet era, this archaeological reading of modernity emerges, which is applied to the foundational institutions of the counter-productive society.
It is worth highlighting here Illich's idea of the systems age, which, although preceding the phenomenon of artificial intelligence, already foresaw the collapse of Western Christianity and its modern incarnations, precisely because of its forgetting of Being, as Heidegger would say, but of the Being that is the source of everything insofar as it is non-being, that is, God as the “loving ground of the real,” according to David Tracy's apophatic expression. The deprofessionalization of the clergyman Illich is, therefore, directly related to his choice of the ineffable divine mystery, which is the wellspring of the word and of communication in the here and now of language and its devices.
“My world is that of letters. I feel at home nowhere else but on the island of the alphabet. I share this island with many people who cannot read or write, but whose mentality is fundamentally alphabetic—like mine. And they are threatened, as I am, by the betrayal of those who, among the clergy, disintegrate the words of the book into a mere code of communication.” (In the Mirror of the Past, “Toward a Study of the Alphabetic Mentality,” AERA, San Francisco, 1986, Collected Works II, 575)
Illicha's rejection of the technical world of communication and its digital avatars has an apophatic basis insofar as it opts for the recovery of the vernacular as a place of humanity.
Let us briefly examine the ecclesiological significance of this rejection of the machine and the devices of the systems age. Illich had a personal passion for ecclesiology that evolved from a systematic reflection on the body of Christ in the liturgical community to a vision of human society linked to the Kingdom of God. In Illich's words:
“In ecclesiology, my favorite subject of study has always been the liturgy. It is a field of research that deals with the role of worship in the constitution of the phenomenon that is the Church. The liturgy studies the processes by which solemn chants and gestures, hierarchies and ritual objects create not only faith, but the reality of the Church community, the object of this faith.” (“In the Mirror of the Past,” Collected Works II, 559).
And then he connects this taste for liturgy with other rituals of perversion of the mystery, such as school rituals:
“Comparative liturgy sharpens the intellect to recognize rituals that are fundamentally myth-generating, as opposed to incidental practices. Sensitized in this way, I began to consider what happens in the classroom as liturgical acts. Accustomed to the beauty of Christian liturgy, I was understandably disconcerted by the poverty of style that characterizes the school.”.
Then I began to study the place that school liturgy occupies in the social construction of modern reality, and to evaluate to what extent it creates the need for instruction.” (Ibid).
Here we see a clear example of the transition from Illich the clergyman to Illich the archaeologist of the founding institutions of the West, where despite everything the apophatic sense of his understanding of the world remains.
4. Conclusion
In that context of conciliar theological effervescence, Illich took a bold step, going further in the way of envisioning another possible Christianity, as evidenced by his short text “The Metamorphosis of the Clergy”, from 1968:
“Christians who wish to radically practice the evangelical counsels no longer feel as much of a need to enter established communities, or even secular institutes. They do, however, recognize the effectiveness of a union, temporary or permanent, with other Christians who share the same desire, in order to find mutual support in a common spiritual adventure.”
And then, with visionary freedom, Illich announces the future of the liberating spiritualities that we have seen flourish in all latitudes of the planet in the first quarter of the 21st century:
“For the next generation, it is desirable that places of intense prayer, retreat houses, centers of spiritual formation, monasteries, and “deserts” flourish to sustain the whole Church in its renewal.”
It is worth noting that Illich is not referring to the clerical, hierarchical, and institutional Church from which he had already distanced himself, but to the Church as the mystery of the new creation that arose from the incarnation of the Word of God, the one that adorns itself for the banquet of the Kingdom of Heaven, having previously “washed its robes in the blood of the Lamb,” as the book of Revelation 7:14 says.
In his writings from his youth and period of deprofessionalization, collected in “The Church Without Power,” Illich further developed his idea of the Kingdom of God linked to poverty, detachment, and friendship as the nourishment of conviviality. In the words of Ivan Domenico at the end of his life:
“I think the Incarnation makes possible an unprecedented and surprising flowering of love and knowledge. For Christians, the biblical God can now be loved in the flesh. Saint John says that he has sat at the table with Him, that he has rested his head on His shoulder, that he has listened to Him, touched Him… smelled Him. And he said that whoever looks to Him looks to the Father and that whoever loves another loves Him in the person of that other. A new dimension of love opens up before us. But such an opening is also extremely ambiguous because of the way it potentially shatters certain universal assumptions about the conditions under which love is possible. Before that moment, my limits were marked, defined, by the people into whose midst I was born and by the family that raised me. Now I can choose whom I will love and where I will love. This is a threat because it undermines the traditional foundations of ethics, which has always been an ethnos, a historically assigned “we,” preceding any utterance of the word.“ ”I.” (The Rivers North of the Future, Chapter I Gospel).
That other possible Christianity is already in our midst, being born in the “here and now” of the clerical institution and extractive capitalism in its technofascist phase.
A quarter of a century after Ivan's death, we see blossoming in the cracks of the hegemonic world—as we are exploring in this colloquium in Cuernavaca—the conviviality of the Searching Mothers, of the Zapatista “common,” of the queer tables, and so many other rituals and performances of the people and communities of survivors who anticipate the “other” world, the one that comes from the incarnate God, from the divine Sophia of the kenosis-theosis who prepares a table for all, from the divine Ruah that blows from the four winds.
Let these pages serve to place on the table of conviviality the Eucharistic bread of the queer body of the Messiah Jesus, with his community of diasporic persons and collectives, where glimpses of the other world come from God and the survivors, illuminate the paths of peace with justice and dignity for all as a messianic gesture of redemption accomplished here and now.
Cuernavaca, November 12, 2026
NoteI am sharing with my blog readers this lengthy text from the lecture I gave at the colloquium “Acting and Thinking with Ivan Illich,” organized in November 2016 by colleagues from various institutions in Cuernavaca. I hope that a publication commemorating this event will be produced in the future. I thank the organizing committee for the invitation to participate in this stimulating conversation with both older and newer generations, engaging in dialogue with the great Dalmatian thinker who arrived in our lands sixty years ago.