Ivan Illich on "A Kind of Treason"

An Interpretation of The Good Samaritan

I just recently did a podcast interview with my friend Sam Ewell, partly on his brilliant book about that very difficult-to-place radical Ivan Illich, and also partly about soil, because any conversation with Sam is a conversation about soil.

I met Sam about ten years ago. It was as though he had an imaginary friend called "Illich" whose thoughts and opinions on matters he would routinely bring into conversation. Illich has become a paradigm-marking figure for me, though I won't try and say too much about why just now. 

Here I wanted to think a little bit about Illich's subtly devastating interpretation of the parable of the good Samaritan. In Rivers North of the Future he talks about time he spent reading through archives of sermons on this messianic tale from the earliest Christian sources to the present. The story has nearly always, he says, been explained as a morality tale about civil conduct; that is, how one ought to behave if one sees a person in difficulty. The kind of tolerance that keeps the polis peaceful.

This, says Illich, is precisely the opposite of the parable's meaning. It answers the wrong question…

"He [the messiah] had not been asked, how should one behave toward one's neighbour, but rather, who is my neighbour? And what he said, as I understand it, was, My neighbour is who I choose, and not who I have to choose. There is no way of categorising who my neighbour ought to be."

He continues,

"In antiquity, hospitable behaviour, or full commitment in my action to the other, implies a boundary drawn around those to whom I can behave in this way. The Greeks recognised a duty of hospitality toward the xenoi, strangers who spoke a hellenic language, but not toward the babblers in strange tongues who they called barbaroi."

These freely chosen connections and associations work against boundaried groupings of all kinds: political, social, religious etc. They're "a kind of treason" says Illich; "utterly destructive of ordinary decency." What is safe now that anyone can befriend the enemy any time they choose? This is a wild human ecology.

For Illich, there was a disastrous folly in trying to hold these messianic pronouncements within the form of an institution. This practice of love, exercised in total freedom, is almost destroyed by attempts to manage or institutionalise it. This practice unmakes institutions and institutions unmake this practice.

Illich was a catholic priest, and it's perhaps not surprising that his activities and ideas led to a run-in with the Vatican which saw him removed from all parish duties. Interestingly, he chose to remain a priest, keeping the prayerful office for the rest of his days. He was not at all wanting to be shot of the church. He believed and belonged steadfastly to some mystery held therein, while at the same time often quoting the proverb "the corruption of the best, is the worst…"

This reading of the good Samaritan leads me to ideas about destituent life, as Giorgio Agamben called it. States love to fix things down in constitutions and laws and borders. Religious and social groups tend to require a way of managing what's inside and what's outside. But if there is such a thing as a messianic community, in the image of this parable, then it would be something that unmakes and relativises itself as it goes. It would be something unmanageable and unmappable. It would be a start to say that its borders are unknown. It would be better to say that it continuously reappears out beyond itself, in the other space; to say that it has no borders. This is bizarre to modernity and to every controlling instinct. How can a thing be distinct, how can it have an authentic isness, if one cannot encircle it?