On Surprise and the Indirectness of the Theological in the Work of Ivan Illich

This essay argues for a fresh interpretive approach to the work of the late Catholic radical, Ivan Illich, applied here to one specific dimension of his work – the theological – but with general relevance for all of it. Illich often, and in part for reasons specific to his biography, referred to his theological commitments only in indirect terms. This theological obliqueness is one aspect of the fragmentary and ‘open’ form of his work generally. This essay’s key claims are that the form and style of Illich’s work are significant for an interpretation of its meaning, rather than simply an obstacle to it, and that this is especially true when it comes to matters relating to theology. Illich’s indirect mode of expression has to do with his refusal of a certain kind of ecclesio-juridical power, and his affirmation of a mode of faith anchored in an openness to surprise and mystery. Illich’s ideas do not therefore need to be theologically ‘decoded’, as some have proposed, for them to yield a theological sense. Rather, by emphasising their form and elaborating upon it, their theological sense comes through all the more clearly, and in a way that reveals a greater degree of unity with his major themes and ideas than can initially be apparent. The second part of the essay seeks to demonstrate this by offering a constructive interpretation of surprise as a unifying theme in his work, showing how the theological here reinforces rather than displaces the social, political, and philosophical aspects of his thinking. It explains how Illich’s theological indirectness, and the open form of his work in general, dovetails with his broader emphasis on relationality, the interpersonal, particularity, and otherness, over against the depersonalising, disembodying, homogenising pressures of late modernity. It also reveals how this is concerned, in the end, with receptivity to the unforced and unexpected appearing of divine grace within the world, an outlook of faith. In this way, in refusing to bring forth the theological directly, his work paradoxically lies open to its unforced and gratuitous appearing, or ‘saves itself by appearing to lose itself’. This movement itself coheres with some of Illich’s favoured theological motifs around powerlessness.