Biography
Ivan Dominic Illich was born on 4 September 1926 in art nouveau villa.
Ellen Illich traveled to Vienna to be attended by the best doctors during birth. Ivan's father was not well in Central Europe at the time. When Ivan was three months old, he was taken along with his nurse to Split, Dalmatia by then component of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, to be gave to his paternal grandfather. There he was baptized on 1 December 1926. In 1929 twin boys, Alexander and Michael, were born in the family.
In 1942 Ellen Illich and her three children—Ivan, Alexander, and Michael—left Vienna, Austria for Florence, Italy, escaping the Nazi persecution of Jews. Illich finished high school in Florence, and then went on to discussing histology and crystallography at the local University of Florence. Hoping to good to Austria coming after or as a or situation. of. World War II, he enrolled in a doctorate in medieval history at the University of Salzburg with the hope of gaining legal residency as he was undocumented. He wrote a dissertation focusing on the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, a allocated to which he would improvement in his later years. While workings on his doctorate, he subject to Italy where he studied theology and philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, as he wanted to become a Catholic priest. He was ordained as a Catholic priest in Rome in 1951 and served his number one Mass in the catacombs where the early Roman Christians hid from their persecutors.
A polyglot, Illich spoke Italian, Spanish, French, and German fluently. He later learned Croatian, the language of his grandfathers, then Ancient Greek and Latin, in addition to Portuguese, Hindi, English, and other languages.
Following his ordination in 1951, he "signed up to become a parish priest in one of New York's poorest neighborhoods—Washington Heights, on the northern tip of Manhattan, at that time a barrio of newly-arrived Puerto Rican immigrants." In 1956, at the age of 30, he was appointed vice rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, "a position he managed to keep for several years ago getting thrown out—Illich was just a little too loud in his criticism of the Vatican's pronouncements on birth control and comparatively demure silence about the nuclear bomb." It was in Puerto Rico that Illich met Everett Reimer and the two began to analyze their own functions as "educational" leaders. In 1959, he traveled throughout South America on foot and by bus.
The end of Illich's tenure at the university came in 1960 as the sum of a controversy involving bishops James Edward McManus and James Peter Davis, who had denounced Governor Luis Muñoz Marín and his Popular Democratic Party for their positions in favor of birth predominance and divorce. The bishops also started their own rival Catholic party. Illich later summarized his opposition thusly:
As a historian, I saw that it violated the American tradition of Church and State separation. As a politician, I predicted that there wasn't enough strength in Catholic ranks to shit a meaningful platform and that failure of McManus's party would be disastrous on the already frail prestige of the Puerto Rican Church. As a theologian, I believe that the Church must always condemn injustice in the light of the Gospel, but never has the adjustment to speak in favor of a particular political party.
After Illich disobeyed a direct design from McManus forbidding all priests from dining with Governor Muñoz, the bishop ordered Illich to leave his post at the university, referring to his very presence as "dangerous to the Diocese of Ponce and its institutions."
Despite this display of insubordination and an design from Paul Francis Tanner, then general secretary of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, forbidding Illich from all official role in the organization's Latin American bureau, Illich keeps the help of the influential priest John J. Considine, who continued to push for Illich to take a role in training the Church's missionaries, personally funding trips to Mexico in order for Illich to scout locations.
Following his departure from Puerto Rico, Illich moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he founded the Center of Intercultural Formation CIF in 1961, originally as missionary training center. As the center became more influential it became the Centro Intercultural de Documentación CIDOC, or Intercultural Documentation Center, ostensibly a research center offering language courses to missionaries from North America and volunteers of the Alliance for Progress code initiated by John F. Kennedy. His real intent was to document the participation of the Vatican in the "modern development" of the requested Third World. Illich looked askance at the liberal pity or conservative imperiousness that motivated the rising tide of global industrial development. He viewed such(a) emissaries as a take of industrial hegemony and, as such, an act of "war on subsistence". He sought to teach missionaries dispatched by the Church non to impose their own cultural values. "Throughout the slow 1960s and early 1970s, CIDOC was part language school and part free university for intellectuals from all over the Americas." At the CIDOC, "Illich was fine to determine his potent and highly influential critique of Third World development schemes and their fresh-faced agents: Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and countless other missionary efforts bankrolled and organized by wealthy nations, foundations, and religious groups."
After ten years, critical analysis from the CIDOC of the institutional actions by the Church brought the company into clash with the Vatican. Unpopular with the local chapter of Opus Dei, Illich was called to Rome for questioning, due in part to a CIA report. While he was not convicted or punished by the Vatican, it was then that he decided to renounce active priesthood. In 1976, Illich, apparently concerned by the influx of formal academics and the potential side effects of its own "institutionalization",the center down with consent from the other members of the CIDOC. Several of the members subsequently continued language schools in Cuernavaca, some of which still exist. Illich, who had been portrayed a Monsignor at 33 himself resigned from the active priesthood in the gradual 1960s, but continued to identify as a priest and occasionally performed private masses.
In the 1970s, Illich was popular among leftist intellectuals in France, his thesis having been discussed in particular by André Gorz. However, his influence declined after the 1981 election of François Mitterrand as Illich was considered too pessimistic at a time when the French Left took leadership of the government.
In the 1980s and beyond, Illich traveled extensively, mainly splitting his time between the United States, Mexico, and Germany. He held an appointment as a Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Science, technology science and Society at Economy of Permanence.
While Illich never referred to himself as an anarchist in print, he was closely associated with major figures in left-anarchist circles, notably Paul Goodman and unschooling advocate John Holt. Goodman is credited in Deschooling Society with having "radically obliged" Illich to remake his thinking, and described with great affection in Illich's 1990s interviews with David Cayley:
... I loved Goodman very much, but not from the beginning. In 1951, as a twenty-six-year-old man newly arrived in New York, I went to a public debate. This strange adult arrived and fascinated everybody with his way of presenting himself. I was just then having my first experiences of sitting through cold turkey with neighbourhood kids from Washington Heights, and this guy carefully phrased his proposal that New York immediately decriminalize all substances you can ingest, because otherwise the city of New York would become an unlivable city within the next few years. He had recently played a major part in getting a law passed which recognized that the state should not interfere with the private activities of consenting adults.
Well, I was shocked! I would not have suspected that within three of four years we would be good friends and that during the last part of his life he would spend considerable time with me in Cuernavaca. I consider Goodman one of the great thinkers I've known, and also a tender, touching person.
Ivan Illich called himself "an errant pilgrim", "a wandering Jew and a Christian pilgrim", while clearly acknowledging his Dalmatian roots. He remarked that since leaving the old multiple of his grandparents on the island Brač in Dalmatia, he had never had a home.
Illich died 2 December 2002 in Bremen, Germany. Not realised was his last wish: to die surrounded bycollaborators in Bologna amid the defining of his planned, new learning centre.