The Break with the World

by

Tom Cheetham

Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was one of the great figures of 20^th century Christianity. He was a unique and emphatic voice who variously annoyed, surprised and stimulated both conservatives and liberals inside and outside of the Catholic Church. Of his fame among many on the Left in the America of the 1960’s he once said, “I am so conservative that people think I’m a radical.” But he was indeed in many ways a radical, and his social, political and theological thought is penetrating, challenging and profound. He was a historian of rare creativity and insight. The influential and powerful philosopher Charles Taylor, himself a Catholic, in his recent magisterial study A Secular Age acknowledges his debt to Illich in trying to come to understand the history and origins of the modern world. Illich, he says, “saw the actual development of the Christian churches and Christian civilization…as a ‘corruption of Christianity.”[1] He regarded the history of the West as the story of the perversion and betrayal of the message of the Gospel. Illich himself put it as follows:

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

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

Medieval public worship...was a fundamental factor which inspired whatever man made and thought and which, at the same time, was the result of his daily work, his beliefs and his needs. The history of medieval liturgy must be treated as one of the main sources of western culture...[3]

It was Illich’s profound claim that “the most ominous expression of secularization in the West was not the death of nature (although this was related), nor a misnamed materialism, nor sexual ‘freedom,’ but the decline of liturgy, the routinization and emptying out of religious ritual in the churches.”[4] This remarkable assertion can have real meaning for us only if we properly understand the intimate relations among the spiritual rebirth of the individual, liturgical acts of worship, and the communities in which they occur.

Illich presents the analysis of the idea of “reform” in early Christianity developed by Gerhart Ladner.[5] During late antiquity the Christian experience of rebirth in Christ was conceived as a revolutio, a change-of-heart or metanoia – the word that came to be translated as “repentance.” This crystallized into an understanding of conversion that was entirely new and unprecedented in the ancient world. This revolution was understood to be both personal and social. Illich says:

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

In other words: the Christian revolution, and the Christian idea of revolution, is grounded in the realization that “the most important service to the world and to others consisted in turning around one’s own heart.”[7] The vocation the early Christians saw as setting them apart was “the attempt to bring about a renewal of the world by means of one’s own personal conversion.”[8]

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

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

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

Thus begins the long complex process by which liturgical actions animated by grace and trust are replaced by mechanical techniques fostered by mistrust, fear and the desire for assured and assuring measures of one’s sanctity. Lee Hoinacki, Illich’s long-time friend and colleague, writes that the decline of liturgy “began with clerical actions to establish various assured institutional responses to God’s calling, later legitimated by a juridical or legal order; men hesitated to rest all hope on gratuitous gifts of grace.”[11] Illich referred to this process as “the criminalization of sin.” He regarded it as one of the most fateful perversions of the Gospel. Distrust of the gifts of grace, and a desire for control based upon human fear lie deep at the roots of modern society. He argued that the rituals of modern society are based upon need, fear, mistrust and the desire for power rather than on faith in the gifts and grace of the world.

Illich argued that the chief characteristic of Westernization is the appearance of Homo oeconomicus. “We call a society ‘Western’ when its institutions are reshaped for the disembedded production of commodities that meet this being’s basic needs.”[12] All the terms here seem entirely normal: production, commodities, and needs. What Illich is saying is that all of these are peculiarly modern abstract concepts that only make sense in a world where disembedding is the norm. They only make sense if human acts have already been ripped out of the fabric of a truly social and interpersonal society. Production replaces work, commodities replace the fruits of our labors, and “needs” are conceived as required inputs that can be satisfied impersonally by institutions. This disembedding is profoundly anti-social and dangerously impersonal. It turns persons into consumers, the fruits of the earth into commodities, and the complex interplay of personal relations into institutions that attempt to manage the flow of goods and services. The disappearance of the person of which Henry Corbin has warned us can for Illich only be properly understood as a social, political, technological and economic phenomenon.[13]

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

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

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

By late in his life Illich had abandoned his earlier hopes that the course of history could be changed. But in spite of this claim that the worldliness of the world is gone, he never gave up hope for us as members of small and committed communities, analogous in some ways to those of the early Church. In the end it is not society and its institutions that support us. The only access we have to God is through encounters with other people, not en masse, but as individuals with whom we choose to recapture access to the grace and beauty of the world.

I do think there has been a break with the world in Western technological culture. And I think it has been going on for a long time. Something like this refusal of grace is a potential each of us carries – I suspect that something like it occurs in every culture, to one degree or another and for different reasons. The struggle to maintain a connection to the world in Illich’s sense, in the face of all in our culture that would destroy it, is a challenge that we refuse at our peril. To bring to light the sacredness of the world is the most profound vocation.[15]

The Liturgy at the Center of the World

In his powerful book on the meaning of liturgy, Aidan Kavanagh reminds us of Hannah Arendt’s penetrating comments on Homo oeconomicus. It may well be that the modern age began with the disappearance of transcendence, that the secular world denies its sacred ground, but, writes Arendt,

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

Our secular civilization is not at all what it proudly thinks it is: worldly. It is just the opposite. We have plunged into ourselves and lost the world. I want to think some more about this worldliness. What can worldliness be, if we lose it when we lose transcendence?

We should be clear about the distinction between the personal on the one hand - what Henry Corbin and C.G. Jung call the individual - and the private, the egotistical, on the other. The first is fundamentally a theological category. The second is economic as Illich and Arendt use term.  The strictly mundane activity that Weber is concerned with is the realm of the private: here we speak of private property, of private lives and of the inalienable rights of privacy and freedom. This view of the human person can admit little qualitative difference between a society of ideal consumers and an ideal gas. Both states of matter are best understood statistically. And the driving force behind the desire to understand them in this way is power: the desire for control. In the world of the private, there can only be operational truths: power relations among more or less complex objects. This is the totalitarian metaphysics that Corbin so abhorred.

A person inhabits another level of being entirely. It is only where there are persons that there can be community. A person is a mystery. A mystery in the sense of sacrament, which is the word the third century Latin Fathers used to translate the New Testament Greek μυστήριόυ (mysterion). This mystery is rooted in the Mystery of the divine Communal Person. For Corbin the human being must finally meet the Celestial Twin, the Divine Face of the Lord who is the guarantor of individuality through the divine community of persons. And in Trinitarian theology, the Godhead is three-fold and communal in essence. It is only among such persons that a true society can exist. Among egos there can only be external relations of power, never internal relations of sympathy.

But breaking through the shell of the ego involves opening to more than other human persons in a merely human society. It opens the doorway onto the world as a whole. The world which we lose when we lose transcendence, the worldliness of our existence, is what the Abrahamic Tradition calls Creation, and it is teeming with life and mystery. Everything is holy, alive, and animated. It is a world replete with “personifications.” It is a world suffused with images and imaginings. Within this context there may be cause to treat some beings as objects, and to base our actions on relations merely of power - but this occurs within a larger context which is sacramental and sympathetic and mysterious to the roots. We can, that is to say, conceive of Creation scientifically, but if that is all we do, then we end with what the post-modernists call a totalizing discourse – a master narrative that blinds us to the complexities and the particularities that characterize the world as it is inhabited and lived by persons.

What then is the function of the human person in the world? In this Abrahamic scheme of things, the human person is the image, the eikon of God. Human personhood, if and when we attain it - for it is to be attained and is not merely given - is the most perfect representation in Creation of the Mystery of the Divine Person. As Corbin has shown us, the supreme act of the creative imagination is prayer. And this is because it is an image on Earth of the Divine act of Creation which continuously breathes the world into being. It is the con-spiration of Lord and creature. In the cosmic liturgy each being prays to its Lord in the manner of which it is capable. The fundamental act of all beings is prayer, worship and celebration.

Metanoia, the conversion and change of heart that lies at the root of the Christian experience consists in realizing that we are not masters of ourselves. We cannot, in the end, save ourselves. Jung knew this. He knew that in extremis the psychological torments which the alchemists so vividly describe are not conquerable until we know that we cannot escape them on our own. Only when we fully acknowledge our fundamental inability to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, can the coincidence of opposites come about. It cannot happen through any will of our own. In Christian terms, we are in need of grace.

Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément writes,

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

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

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

If this is our vocation, to be conscious celebrants of mystery, con-spirators with the living God, then it seems necessary that we understand something of what the traditions have understood about liturgy, ritual and the rites of worship. For both Corbin and Illich, in different ways, it has been by the degradation of just these liturgical enactments of mystery that the break with the world has occurred. If we are to heal that break, then we must know what it can mean to be liturgical beings.

When Henry Corbin discusses liturgy and the liturgical structure of Creation in the context of Ibn ‘Arabi’s mysticism or that of the Shi’ites, the rituals and what we might call the “structures of praise and submission” are based primarily upon the salat, the obligatory daily prayer. Fundamental to the practice of this liturgy is the intent of the faithful to embody the word of God, the Qur’an. Islamic spirituality is always understood as essentially and necessarily concrete and embodied. The ritual prayer involves the entire body, it orients and opens the believer onto the mystery of the world.

The central liturgy of Christianity is the Eucharist.[18] The term is derived from a Greek word for thanksgiving. As a sacred meal it is both sacrament and sacrifice, and the incorporation of the death, resurrection and glorification of Christ. Jesus said “Unless you eat of the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you”[19] This version of ritual sacrifice was understood by some early Christians as perfecting the sacrificial rituals of the Jews. This is of course one source of the animosity which was to develop between Jews and Christians. For if the Holy Supper is not merely a new means of enacting our relation with the divine from whom all food flows, but is rather an abrogation of the sacrificial meals that came before, then Judaism, and implicitly, all other religions, must be regarded as imperfect at best, and at worst, false and blasphemous. The orthodox position came to be that Christ’s sacrifice replaced all others, and from that moment on, acceptable sacrifice must be a representation of the death and resurrection of the flesh and blood of Christ. It is undertaken as a gift to God, for the purposes of adoration, thanksgiving, petition and atonement. This sacred meal was understood by the tradition until the time of the Reformation as both the symbolic and the actual consumption of the flesh and blood of the Christ, and so as a radically incarnational act paradoxically uniting transcendence and immanence in the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Mass. It is the original and final mystery made present and immediate in the consecrated fruits of the earth. The Eucharist is the consummation and repetition of the two poles of the Christian scheme of salvation, the Incarnation and the Transfiguration. The former is the actualization of Spirit in matter, and the latter is the spiritualization of matter in both human and natural existence. The Eucharist “is the means through which God’s redemptive and transfiguring activity continues through time.”[20]

Kavanagh’s orthodox Catholic account of this central sacrificial meal tells us something profound about the nature of our immersion in the world. Sacrifice, and a bloody one at that, is at heart of reality. “Every dish on our table contains something which has died violently at our hand. We are not constitutionally angels but omnivorous carnivores.”[21] We cannot avoid the “murderous transaction with reality which one creature’s giving up its life for another entails.”[22] Our problem is not slaying, but learning to slay rightly. “To slay rightly is to transact the inexorable business of life.” But “we are a bloody bunch who have made the world a bloody place” and we continually refuse to come to grips with the fact that we are unable to save ourselves - the society and the form of life we hope for is at best forever just out of reach. The City we try to make for ourselves over and over again is doomed to war, famine, blight and chaos. Our mistake is not to slay, but to slay wrongly, to slay in order to be as gods, and thus to act against the common good and so destroy “the communion of all in all.” This is the perversion of food, of creation and of the life that it gives, and makes “death into little more than a capricious and useless rape of life.”[23] This butchery can only come to an end through being intensified and offered up by the sacrifice of Christ. Kavanagh writes:

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

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

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

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

Every sacrament, being an act of faith, inverts the perspective natural to humanity’s city, putting the cross of Christ not on the distant horizon of possible human options but deep into the mind and heart of the spectator who comes close to it in faith. It kills in order that life might flow.[26]

The Perversion of Orthodoxy

Worship and liturgy stand at the center of the Christian experience. They provide, says Kavanagh, the primary experience of God for the faithful. Liturgy provides the “ontological condition of theology” and so is the source of primary, primitive and original theology. Liturgy is the cause of prima theologia and is the original content with which “theologians” in the usual sense, concern themselves. In liturgy the community which is that Church stands in the presence of the living God. This is not an easy place to be: “The liturgical assembly’s stance in faith is vertiginous, on the edge of chaos.”[27] Being brought to the brink of chaos causes deep, long term changes, however slight or great they may be, in the lives of the participants. The slow adjustment to these changes results in alterations in the subsequent liturgical acts. This is theology being born. To detect these changes is to discover “where theology has passed, rather as physics detects atomic particles in the tracks of their passage through a liquid medium.”[28] This view of theology is at odds with modern assumptions about the bookish and intellectual nature of theology and the tasks of theologians. Kavanagh writes,

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

This is to say, in the words of Prosper of Aquitaine, that “it is the law of worship which founds or establishes the law of belief.”[30] “Something vastly mysterious” occurs, however unpredictably, when the church stands in the Presence of the Lord, and it is only grace and charity that “permit the assembly, like Moses, to come away whole from such an encounter, and even then it is with wounds which are as deep as they are salutary.”[31]

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

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

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

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

Kavanagh associates this inversion of priorities with the rise of literacy and the accompanying emphasis on textual approaches to Revelation, and with the direct effects of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Liturgy, as a medium of communication and action, is a kind of language, But it is a first order language, concrete and embodied, not abstract and textual. It is a symbolic, vernacular language of the most primary kind, akin to art and poetry. It stands to secondary theology as the vernacular stands to linguistics. And “in first order matters, anonymity is the rule, intentions are obscure, and meaning is less precise than it is richly ambiguous.”[36] As with all language it is “a social transaction with reality whose ramifications escape over the horizon of the present and beyond the act of speech itself.”[37] That is to say, it is a language which is not amenable to control.

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

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

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

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

And so the rites of worship changed in accordance:

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

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

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

For Kavanagh as for Illich, the same forces which produce the disembedded and asocial individual who is Homo oeconomicus are responsible for the perversion of liturgy from its primary theological function of revelation, into what can in the end become not a graced and trusting form of life, but a means of social control based upon fear and greed.[42] The communal, embodied and richly imagined life of right worship based on grace and trust, perishes entrapped within competing systems of abstract doctrines propounded by experts whose fundamental stance towards the world is not trust but suspicion.

If the break with the world is to be mended we must find our way towards forms of life which are liturgical in the senses that Kavanagh, Illich and Corbin outline. For liturgy, and the prayer which is its heart, are the central features not only of what we today call “religious psychology,” but of cosmology. If the world has been inverted and eviscerated, then we must work to make it whole. This means standing before the mystery, and offering thanks in celebration of the fullness and the beauty of things. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, man is conceived as the priest of Creation. It is the human vocation to make an offering of the world to God in thanksgiving and in praise. We are responsible for the glorification of the Earth, and all our acts, all our transformations of the gifts of Creation, our arts and sciences and social forms are so many offerings to those we love, to the community and to God. By accepting the gift of the world, transforming it and releasing it back towards the mysterious source from which it flows, we transform both the world and ourselves.[43]

Seen in this light, all of Creation is involved in the Eucharist; everything we do is a potential offering and sacrifice. But this of course is not the kind of human society that we have made in the modern West. Our world is dominated by human desires, by suspicion and mistrust, by the will-to-power and the dominion of the individual. Our rituals are based largely on the management and control of things, and of people regarded and managed as things, and not on the plenitude and mystery of an animated and personified cosmos.

Citizens of technological societies are almost entirely ignorant of the non-human world. In so far as we live as consumers embedded within a culture of consumption we are trapped inside ourselves. We swell with self-importance because we fear that if we don’t regard ourselves as the most serious thing, then we will disappear into the darkness of the impersonal matter of which we believe we are composed. But we have just seen that our Western sense of the supreme importance of the autonomous individual has resulted in the break with the world, that as Arendt said, by losing touch with transcendence we have become the most unworldly culture there has ever been.

So what, practically speaking, does transcendence mean? How do we prepare ourselves to be open to transcendence? If we have lost touch with it, how do we touch it again? How, in Henry Corbin’s terms, do we make ourselves capable of God? I have come to think that the answer is quite simple. We need to be free. We need, I need, to simply relax. This means I think, to be open to, receptive of what Christians call grace. And grace is an essentially personal phenomenon – it occurs only in the presence of another person. The God of Abraham, the Jewish, Christian and Muslim God, is a personal God. Unfortunately, for some of us at least, learning to be open to others and so open to grace is the work of a lifetime – it is the Great Work, the only real work. Being free and open is not a passive activity – but neither does the strength required of us have much at all to do with the will to power or the desires of the ego. We must love Life, and this requires passion. We must love others, and this requires humility. We must be free of fear – and this requires courage.

Listen to Ivan Illich speaking to us of the life of grace:

hand-in-hand with the increasing intensity of instrumentalization in Western society goes a lack of attention to what one traditionally called gratuity. Is there another word for the non-purposeful action, which is only performed because it’s beautiful, it’s good, it’s fitting, and not because it’s meant to achieve, to construct, to change, to manage? ... [T]he Samaritan acts because his action is good, not because this man can be saved or not saved, not because this man needs medical attention, or needs food, but because, imagining that I am the Samaritan, he needs me. What the beaten-up Jew’s presence evokes in the Samaritan’s belly is a response which is not purposeful but gratuitous and good. [This reveals to us] ... the possibility that a beautiful and good life is primarily a life of gratuity, and that gratuity is not something which can flow out of me unless it is opened and challenged by you. ...[G]ratuity in its most beautiful flowering, is praise, mutual enjoyment; and what some people discover...is that the message of Christianity is that we live together, praising the fact that we are where we are and who we are, and that contrition and forgiveness are part of that which we celebrate, doxologically. [44]

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

Afterman, Allen. Kabbalah and Consciousness and the Poetry of Allen Afterman. Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 2005.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.

Bradshaw, Paul F. Eucharistic Origins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Cayley, David. Rivers North of the Future. The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley,. Toronto, Ontario: Anansi, 2005.

_____ Ivan Illich: In Conversation. Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1992.

Cheetham, Tom. The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism. New Orleans: Spring Journal Books, 2003.

Chryssavgis, John. “The World of the Icon and Creation: an Orthodox perspective on ecology and pneumatology,” in D. Hessel and R. Radford Ruether (eds.), Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000, 83-96.

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Translated from the French by John Wilkinson. New York: Knopf, 1964.

Fisch, Thomas J. (ed.) Primary Readings on the Eucharist. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2004.

Hoinacki, Lee. “Reading Ivan Illich.” in Hoinacki and Mitcham (eds.), 1-7.

_____ and Carl Mitcham (eds.). The Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002.

Illich, Ivan. “The Scopic Past and the Ethics of the Gaze: A Plea for the Historical Study of Ocular Perception.” Unpublished; available online through the Thinking After Illich website, n.d.

_____ “Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show.” Unpublished; available online through the Thinking After Illich website, n.d.

_____ Gender. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1982.

_____ H₂O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of Stuff. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Art and Humanities, 1984.

_____ “The Loss of World and Flesh.” trans. by Muska Nagel and Barbara Duden. Available online through the Thinking After Illich website. In German as “Verlust von Welt und Fleisch,” in Freitag 51(13). December 2002, s. 18, 1993a.

_____ In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993b.

_____ “To Honor Jacques Ellul.” An address given at Bordeaux, Nov. 13, 1993. available online through the Thinking After Illich website, 1993c.

Illich, Ivan and Sanders, Barry. ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. New York: Random House, 1988.

Kavanagh, Aidan. On Liturgical Theology. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1984.

Kilmartin, E. J. “Eucharist (as Sacrifice)” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, v. 5, 1967. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Ladner, Gerhart B. The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959.

Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Sherrard, Philip. The Sacred in Life and Art. Ipswich: Golgonooza, 1990.

Smith, Dennis E. From Symposium to Eucharist: The Banquet in the Early Christian World. Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2003.

Staniloae, Dumitru. The Experience of God. Orthodox Dogmatic Theology. Vol 2. The World: Creation and Deification. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2000.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

van Dijk, Stephen J. P. and Walker, J. Hazelden, The Myth o f the Aumbry: Notes on Medieval Reservation Practice and Eucharistic Devotion. London: Burns & Oates, 1957.

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