Paul Kennedy
Good evening and welcome to Ideas. I'm Paul Kennedy. This is Part 2 of David Cayley's continuing series on "The Corruption of Christianity," with Ivan Illich.
Ivan Illich
The ability to make Church law into a type of norm the disobedience to which leads to condemnation and hell is a fantastic achievement and, I would argue, one of the most interesting forms of perversion of that act of liberation from the law for which the Gospel stands.
Paul Kennedy
This series presents a hypothesis: That modern Western society is a corruption of Christianity. The things that are unique and unprecedented about the modern West, Ivan Illich claims, can be grasped only as the outcome of the Roman Church's attempt to institutionalize the freedom promised by the Christian gospel. Our vast institutions of education and health, our economic and technological dynamism, and the relationship we take for granted between the citizen and the state all can be traced back, he argues, to Christian originals.
Ivan Illich began his career as a Roman Catholic priest, then withdrew from the active priesthood in 1969 after his ideas brought censure and controversy from the Vatican. Now in his seventies, he is the author of many books, including, most recently, In the Vineyard of the Text, and he's a lecturer at universities in both Europe and the United States. In tonight's program, he looks back to the Christian Middle Ages, where he finds the origin of contemporary ideas of conscience, the rule of law, nature and technology. "The Corruption of Christianity," Part 2 by David Cayley.
David Cayley
In the year 1075, at the end of the first Christian millennium, Pope Gregory VII initiated a revolutionary change in the Western Church. In a document called The Dictates of the Pope, he proclaimed, in the words of historian Harold Berman, "the legal supremacy of the Pope over all Christians and the legal supremacy of the clergy, under the Pope, over all secular authorities." During the centuries that followed the Church would transform itself into what a later church council called "a perfect society," an independent, legally constituted, bureaucratically organized state exercising a dominion of an entirely new kind over the lives of the faithful.
Ivan Illich discerns in this transformed Church the seeds of the modern state. He also sees a profound corruption of the New Testament's proclamation of the Christian's freedom from law. We discussed the implications of this change in the Church, while I was his guest in the Mexican village where he lives during part of each year. You may particularly notice the rooster who sometimes underlined his points from the yard outside the room where we sat.
He began at the period I just described, when the Church, for the first time, began to try to impress its laws into the lives of its members. It was a time when the landscape of northern and western Europe was changing rapidly. The adoption of the horse collar had greatly increased the pulling power of draft animals, allowing people to live further from their fields. Now they could gather together in villages, which were numerous enough and prosperous enough to support a local parish church and priest. And, with the sprouting of these new steeples across the land, Illich says, the Church underwent a major change.
Ivan Illich
As these steeples rose, a new approach of the church to what we call pastoral care appeared. And by 1215, a major church council, the Fourth Lateran Council, has a sentence which has several times in my life been important to me. It reads, "Every Christian will go, under penalty of going to hell otherwise, grievous sin, once a year to their own pastor and confess their sins." Two things are remarkable about it. One, is the idea of establishing the pastor as somebody who, in secret, judges or has a position in front of each Christian male or female, which make the forgiveness of sin in an entirely new way, a juridical act. And the second is that this is a juridical act organized on a model of hierarchy, reaching down to the steeple, a court structure far beyond what any emperor could have even thought of creating. It was a first step towards the Church actually organizing itself in practice, as the realization of the idea of a societas perfecta, a perfectly legally constituted entity and doing this around the idea of sin depending on the act of confession, of private confession in front of the judge, not in public confession and publicly practised penance as had generally been done up to this moment.
David Cayley
With the institution of private confession, Illich says, the forgiveness of sin was made into a juridical or legal act. This represented a profound change in the meaning of both law and sin. Christians of the first millennium had understood themselves to be living, in the apostle Paul's words, "not under law, but under grace." "We are released from the Law," Paul wrote to the Christians at Rome, "having died to what was binding us, and so we are in a new service, that of the spirit, and not in the old service of a written code." Sin was seen as the denial of this new freedom to live in the spirit. With its transformation into a legal offense, Illich believes, a new age opened.
Ivan Illich
Sin is an evil of a kind which could not exist except through the denial of grace. It is not in any sense offensive of a law, it is always a personal offense against a person. It's an infidelity. The sense of sin of the first millennium becomes now a sense of sin as a transgression of a norm. It becomes a transgression of a norm because it must be accused ... by myself to a priest, who is a judge, as my transgression of a Christian law. Grace becomes juridical. Sin acquires a second side, that of the breaking of the law, which implies that in the second millennium the charity, the love of the New Testament, has become the law of the land.
David Cayley
When sin is made subject to judgement and remission by a legal authority, Illich says, two new things happen. First, the categories of sin and crime are merged. And second, a kind of inner court begins to be constituted within each person.
Ivan Illich
Not only was a juridical state structure created and sin was criminalized, made into something which could be dealt with along the lines of criminal justice even if under self-accusation, but also the concept of the forum internum came up. Forum is the general word for the court in front of which you have standing. The very idea of a forum internum implies that the law governs what is good and bad, not what is legal and illegal. How enormous a cultural achievement it was to create the sense for a forum internum.
David Cayley
The forum internum, Illich believes, is the forerunner of conscience in the modern sense of the term. It is the bar before which I call myself, in the apprehension of judgement and punishment. When Hamlet, for example, concludes his speculations on the afterlife — "To be or not to be" — with the reflection that "conscience makes cowards of us all," he does not appear to mean consciousness of sin, but rather the fear of hell, which perfectly expresses the change Illich is talking about.
This new moral solitude into which modern persons are plunged is but one aspect of a larger change that Illich sees taking place as the church tries to install the Kingdom of God as a legal regime on earth. Another example is the legalization of marriage. Marriage, until this time, had been an affair of families and communities. After the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 — the same gathering that pronounced the duty of annual private confession — it became a contract between two individuals witnessed by God.
Ivan Illich
The constitution of the union or relationship of love in its supreme form, namely commitment of a man and a woman to each other for ever on the model of the Gospel became defined as a juridical act through which an entity comes into existence which is called marriage, and for this juridical act, God becomes, so to speak, the necessary instrumentality, asking him to be present and a witness to what you say to each other, therefore using God as a juridical device. And this idea of taking oaths with God as a witness reached a new high point when the Church defined the formation of the basic cell of society, namely the family, as a contract entered freely and knowingly by a man and a woman, not by their families, not by their milieu, constituting a legal reality which has standing in heaven. It is therefore simultaneously a statement about individuality and the coming into existence of conscience and about the legal equal standing of man and woman. The idea that households are founded by the free choice of one man and one woman is a major turning point — or at least the manifestation of a major social turning — in the formation of the individual. And it is, as I suggested, the foundation of the idea that social entities come into existence by contract, by mutual contract.
David Cayley
One of the most striking elements, for Illich, in this new understanding of marriage is the employment of an oath by which the parties swear their fidelity before God. Drawing on the work of his close friend, Italian historian Paolo Prodi, Illich argues that this constitutes a profound change in Christian practice. The taking of oaths is something that is found in every society as a way of giving an utterance reliability and substance. The sailor swears by his ship, the peasant by a clod of his soil, I give you my word. But in the Bible, oaths are forbidden in recognition that only God's word is reliable and substantial. The context for this proscription, Illich says, was the covenant, or alliance, between God and His people.
Ivan Illich
The alliance of the Old Testament consisted in God taking an oath to Abraham. He can take an oath and thereby establish Abraham and his descendants as His people. You do not swear in front of God. He's the only one who incarnates Himself in the word of the prophet and in His people. The New Testament is the continuation of the old alliance and excludes the oath. You may not swear by God in heaven or by His footstool, which is the earth. And it goes on. This is, again, one of those rule-breaking innovations which the New Testament brought.
David Cayley
The passage, to which Illich refers, from the Sermon on the Mount, is as follows: "You have heard," Jesus says, "how it was said to our ancestors, You must not break your oath, but must fulfill your oaths to the Lord. But I say this to you, do not swear at all, either by heaven, since that is God's throne, or by earth since that is His footstool, or by Jerusalem since that is the city of the great King. Do not swear by your own head, either, since you cannot turn a single hair white or black. All you need to say is, Yes, if you means yes, No, if you mean no. Everything else comes from the Evil One." I quote this at length because I think it underlines how radical, how rule-breaking, as Illich says, was the Christian commitment to live entirely by trust in God's word. And it shows what a change had occurred when Christians began to establish solidarity by an oath, whether it was two individuals swearing their fidelity in marriage or citizens swearing their commitment to one another in a city or guild in a first instance of what today is called the social contract.
To understand the depth of this change, Illich says, it is helpful to look back at the way in which the early Christians formed community.
Ivan Illich
What has strangely been overlooked very frequently by people who try to retrace the history of our political concepts, and particularly that of the citizen, is the fact that the Christian assembly of the very first Christian centuries was an explicit way of claiming that in that assembly, in the Eucharistic assembly, a "we," a new "we," the plural of the "I" was established which was not of this world, of politics in the Greek sense. These guys got together for a celebration which had two high points, one of them called conspiratsio and the other one comestio. Conspiratsio mustn't be translated too easily into English as 'conspiracy' because spiritus — spirit, ghost, holy spirit — was the meaning which led to the conspiratsio, not what we call today a bunch of rebels trying to subvert the political community. This conspiratsio was expressed by the mouth-to-mouth kiss. The Christians adopted this symbolism to signify that each one of those present around the dining table contributed of his own, spirit of, if you want, the Holy Spirit, which was common to all, to create a spiritual community, a community of one spirit, before they sat down and shared the same meal, the Eucharist. Why do I bring in this strange oddity, novelty of the Christian simple dinner table as their liturgical central function, the function at which ecclesia, calling together — that's what the term means — took on body and soul? Because it is in antiquity unique insofar as slave and master, Jew and Greek, each equally contributed to make the community to which, through his contribution he then could belong. It gave to those who participated at the ceremony the idea that community can come into existence outside of or other than the community into which I was born and in which I fulfill my legal obligations, in which all those who are present equally share in the act of its establishment.
David Cayley
The freedom and equality of these early Christian communion meals prefigured modern ideas of political community. But there was a crucial difference, Illich says. The Eucharistic meal manifested an other-worldly reality, the body of Christ, through something evanescent and yet deeply personal, a kiss. And this reality could not be understood in a legal or contractual sense. It was guaranteed only by God's breath, God's promise, God's word. This understanding was gradually lost, Illich thinks, with the growth of the Church as an establishment. The conspiratsio, the kiss in which the breath of the spirit was mingled, became first the kiss of peace, and then just the peace. The frank, mouth-to-mouth embrace of the early Christians had become an embarrassment.
Ivan Illich
This idea began to be shocking by the high Middle Ages. It seemed in contradiction to the feudal ideal of the time, of the hierarchical assumption about how society comes into existence. And by the tenth century, the mode of performing this ceremony changed. The priest, instead of sharing the peace with everybody, kissed the altar as though he were taking something from the altar which stands for Christ, and then handing it down to the others. The priest's kiss since the twelfth century is handed down from the altar and, thereby, not only did the word kiss move into the background, conspiratsio moved into the background, but during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries an instrument was developed called an osculatorium, a kissing object — you can see it in museums, sometimes made beautiful wood with precious stones — which the priest kisses after he has kissed the altar and hands down to the community. It makes it rounds through the church.
David Cayley
This washing out of the original sense of conspiratsio in the Roman Church symbolizes the epoch-making change that Illich sees in the Church in the high Middle Ages. The breathing together of the spirit in the conspiratsio becomes the swearing together of citizens in the social contract that will eventually define the modern state. It is Illich's hypothesis in these programs that the coming into being of the modern world can only be understood as a gradual working out of the explosive novelty of the Christian gospel. But this working out is, at the same time, a deep corruption because it alters, in a fundamental way, the original meaning of Christian freedom. And that is what he sees in this case. The bedrocks of modern political society — the citizen, the state, and the social contract — are ideas that become thinkable only as the church undertakes to embody the gospel in legal, bureaucratic institutions. But, in the process, the original inspiration is betrayed.
Ivan Illich
The Christian idea or, let's say, the Christian practice of the first few centuries, this total innovation that a community can be established, acquire somatic characteristics through an equal contribution of everybody of the spirit that is within him, then eating from it, remained in some faint way valid, meaningful throughout the two millennia, but not for the purpose of establishing the conspiratsio around the Eucharistic table, but with the idea of creating a social body which can get recognition from the emperor and civil law. An attempt is made by contractual arrangements to give this worldly solidity and clarity and definition to the conspiratsio. It is established, legalized and formalized and the Church acquires increasingly contractual characteristics.
David Cayley
When the Roman Church adopted the rule of law, Ivan Illich claims, it laid down many of the tracks within which modern society would run. Conscience, as the inner imprint of the fear of judgement, and contract, as an oath sworn with God as a witness, are both ideas that will become crucial for the modern nation-state. Their origins can be traced back as far as the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but they received their final mature expression, he says, in the sixteenth century during the Church's 18-year Council at Trent in northern Italy.
Ivan Illich
The Roman Catholic Church in the Council of Trento during the generation after Luther presented itself as a societas perfecta, as a law-based church whose laws were obligatory for the citizens in conscience. And in this way, it created the possibility — perhaps created is too strong — underpinned the tendency in legal thinking and philosophical thinking to conceive of the state as a perfect society, with citizens who have conscience, whose conscience reflects the constitution of the law of the society and the state within which they live. Through this criminalization of love perverted, Christian love perverted which we call sin, the basis was created for the new way of feeling citizenship as a command of my conscience, for the possibility of the state to claim raison d'etat, as guideline for its legislation which is obligatory in conscience, parallel to the Church's ability to confuse church law and doctrine, or to diminish, abolish, make permeable the frontier between what is true and what is commanded.
David Cayley
This confusion between what is believed to be true or good, and what is commanded, Illich believes, can be seen in the way the modern state trains its citizens, and in the belief that such training is necessary. The citizen's duty to maintain health and financial security, pursue extended schooling and insure himself against risk could all be cited as examples. A second major consequence of this criminalization, he thinks, is the isolation of the individual which occurs in the late Middle Ages and afterwards, an isolation produced by private conscience which makes the individual a prey to fears of a new kind. Common fears, Illich says, often unite people but the fears to which individuals now became subject tended to separate them from the collective.
Ivan Illich
Angst, anxiety can designate something deeply communally felt and therefore community creating. In the Roman breviary, in the Compline, the night prayer said when it's already dark and before complete silence begins, vigilate fratres, watch out, brothers, because the devil, like a hungry lion, turns around and looks whom he might devour. To cultivate such anxiety is extremely helpful to create, I think, a strong sense of fraternity, of commonality, of commonality in front of the unspeakable. None of us knows how to say it exactly. Pangs of conscience — in German they say Gewissensbisse, in mediaeval Latin also, "bites of conscience" — can be experienced only by an individual. The more he is detached from the community, the more he can become afraid of acting or not acting according to a norm. Conscience is experienced in the darkness of your inner chamber. It creates and reinforces the experience of individualism, not of solitude but of loneliness.
David Cayley
This new loneliness and isolation of the individual bitten by conscience is something quite different, Illich holds, than the consciousness of sin with which the early Christians lived.
Ivan Illich
Through the idea of Christian love and the Incarnation, the darkness to which I allow entry into me by betrayal and unfaithfulness, not to the gods, or to the city's rules, but to a face, a person, acquires a completely new taste, the experience of sinfulness, an experience, a state, in front of the infinitely good, a confusio, but also the possibility always of sweet tears, of the expression of the sorrow and of trust in forgiveness. This entirely new dimension of very personal, very intimate failure gets changed through criminalization, through the conditioning of forgiveness by the act of legal remission. Through this criminalization, the individual sinner feels himself obligated to seek, above all, forgiveness of the crime, and to deal with the deep sorrow and hope in God's mercy as, so to speak, a psychologically secondary issue. With this legalization of love, which finds its expression extremely strongly in the period of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the individual is open to a new type of fears, to new shapes which darkness takes — the fear of demons, the fear of witches, the fear of magic, the hope in science, the hope in alchemy and astrology. This new world of what in my index cards for subject matter I call unidentified flying objects, which, of course, is a very modern way of expressing it, is an almost inevitable condition created through the criminalization of sin and is constantly exploited by politicians to affirm the power of the state.
David Cayley
In Illich's view, the modern individual is uniquely vulnerable to state power because of his inner subjection to law. Through the criminalization of sin, the private, interior conscience of the individual has been made to mirror the external structure of laws which govern him. The wall of privacy which protects him also imprisons him. His situation, Illich claims, is unlike that of the earlier Christian, who still felt the sweet sorrow of contrition as the balm for his sinfulness, or the pre-Christian, who still possessed intact cultural defenses against whatever demons or wrathful gods haunted his people. He is alone in a new and unprecedented way. As the subject of an internalized Christian law, he no longer enjoys that free, trusting, unmediated relationship with God and other people that Illich believes is the essence of the new testament. In the first program of this series, Illich gave as an example of this Christian freedom Jesus' parable of a Samaritan, a foreigner, who reaches across the cultural divide between them to rescue a wounded Jew. The same idea is at work, he says, in the gospel story of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness.
Ivan Illich
The devil came and took him out to the desert which was simply Satan, the tempter. But what the tempter tells Him ultimately is to worship power, the powers, the powers of this world and, by His saying to the temper, "You shall worship only God, not the power," the New Testament creates the atmosphere, the cosmic atmosphere in which the Samaritan can dare to step out from the guardian spirits that watch his culture and watch him in his culture, in his "we." He can claim that as a Samaritan finding his "I" as a singular of the "we," he can reach out to a Jew, he can transcend the limitation. In a certain way he is superior to the most powerful demons, watchdogs, dragons, menaces which in the world before guarded the "we." The believer is free of the terror which guards the We's unity. Because I'm standing here in His name, I can say I'm not afraid of the world. My inner sphere, atmosphere, horizon is not one of dread but one of union with the Lord of the Universe who became a man to make me divine. As the church fathers said, the ensarkosis, becoming flesh of God, is the other side of the other mystery of the theosis of man, man becoming divinized. He doesn't have to be afraid of dark powers unless he freely submits to them. And that he does through betrayal, through what we call sin. In the clarity of faith, sin, which is a betrayal of a love for which I was capacitated, which goes beyond anything which I could expect within history, goes hand in hand with sin as a willed step back into the fears of cosmic powers, only the sinner falls back into a world of powers which oppress him without the culturally shaped defence which the beliefs and rituals and traditions of each historical "we" provided. The sinner, as distinct from the evil man of the past, of other cultures, is a man who falls into the hands of the powers of this world without going back to a "we" which he has transcended by accepting the possibility of reaching beyond his own limits.
David Cayley
The Christian is no longer protected by the guardian dragons and sheltering limits of traditional society. His sole security and solace is his confidence in God's mercy. But with the criminalization of sin, Illich says, he is deprived of this solace.
Ivan Illich
The criminalization of sin generating the idea of conscience also obscures the fact that the answer to sin is contrition and mercy, and that therefore, for him who believes in sin, there is also a possibility of celebrating as a gift beyond full understanding the fact that he's being forgiven. Contrition can be a sweet glorification of the new relationship that has been established which is free, therefore vulnerable and fragile, but always meant, as nature itself was conceived, to be in the process of healing.
David Cayley
To this point in tonight's program, Ivan Illich has emphasized two key ideas that emerged from the Christian Middle Ages, contract and conscience. But he has also hinted at a third notion which was closely allied to these other two, and that is the idea of instrumentality, the idea that our purposes require tools by which they can be executed. When he discussed marriage, for example, he argued that the marriage contract, as an oath sworn before God, made God the necessary instrumentality for this union. God, as a witness, became the means by which contracts could be created, recognized and enforced.
It is Illich's view that this idea appeared suddenly and without precedent during the Middle Ages, as a product of the same milieu in which the ideas of citizenship, contract, and conscience took shape. His opinion is surprising, because tools have generally been treated, by historians and philosophers alike, as things that have always existed. Tool use, for most anthropologists, is what defines us as human beings. But Illich argues that the technical devices employed in previous societies were not tools in our contemporary sense. The old Greeks, for example, knew many arts, which they called techne, but they could not conceive of a tool as something separate from the hand of its user, as something adaptable to any purpose its user might devise. The tool as such did not exist.
Ivan Illich
So far, philosophers, and I think also historians, have dealt with tool, the concept of tool, as if it always had been around. If you look more carefully at what happened in the thirteenth century, this is not true. It's true that Aristotle has magnificent pages about the working devices which smiths use as opposed to woodworkers or jewellers. But what he speaks about are the organa. The word organon meant both this pencil which I am holding and the hand which holds it. My hand without a pencil is an organon, and my hand, armed with the pencil, is also an organon. Linguistically, there was no way of making a distinction between my hand and that pen. In the thirteenth century, a new box of beings is constructed. The possibility of putting together into one box a car, a school, a scalpel and an axe, seeing something common in them, is something which comes about in the thirteenth century.
David Cayley
So long as a pen, a hammer or a sword is indivisible from the hand that holds it, Illich says, these devices remain embedded within the crafts that they make possible. A tool, in the contemporary sense, is something distinct from the task it performs, something existing at our free disposal as a means to whatever end we choose for it. And this idea, he thinks, was able to come into existence only in the very special atmosphere of the Christian Middle Ages. This atmosphere was created by the idea of contingency, the idea that the world's existence depends, at every moment of its existing, on the creative will of God. And this moment by moment governance of the world, Illich argues, implied a medium, a means, a tool by which His will could be conveyed to His creation.
Ivan Illich
In the universe in which contingency governs, or in which contingency was the basic sense which a person who contemplates it has to cultivate, God's free gift of existence to all the things He has invented in His mind, so to speak, a universe of continuous creation, lying continuously in the hands of God, that would disappear if His hands disappeared, which is necessary only insofar as it depends on His will, the question of how God governs the entire universe had to be re-thought. This universe was obviously governed by a king much greater even than Charlemagne who administered through angels who took over for Him the governance of the different planetary spheres. Now, angels, as one knows, are pure spirits, they have no materia. They aren't juicy beings. They are pure fiery beings of an extraordinary fire which is taken from God. These angels had to be given media, an intermediary, a means for influencing the area of material reality which they were to govern. These were called the heavenly bodies. And in order to distinguish the angel, which is a purely obedient governor executing the will of the Creator and his contact with reality, through the spheres, these spheres had to be conceived of as totally obedient to the intentional user who is the angel. There is a deep connection between the world conceived in the spirit of contingency, the necessity of explaining the connection between the macro and the micro cosmos, and the appearance of tools. If angels have tools, why shouldn't all professions, all estates — they then spoke about it more that way–have tools or devices? Why shouldn't it be legitimate then to speak about the tools of production? Why shouldn't it be possible to think about objects of daily use as products of human intention and the use of the appropriate tool?
David Cayley
By means of the idea of contingency, Illich holds, tools pass from the hands of God into the hands of people, and their use takes on a free, intentional character that was previously lacking. The discovery that tools can incorporate human intentions gives Western Europe after the twelfth century an increasingly instrumental tone. This new tone was evident, first of all, in the technological revolution of the time. Wind and water power were harnessed in new ways, coal and steel production grew exponentially, and various crafts began their transformation into industries. But it also showed up in philosophy and theology. It was at this time, for example, that theologians first spelled out the idea that among the myriad of blessings known to the Middle Ages, there were seven that had the special character of sacraments, marriage being one of these new devices. Sacraments, Illich says, are tools, instrumenta, which infallibly accomplish God's intention. And it on this basis, Illich says, that they are distinguished from mere blessings.
Ivan Illich
Blessings are activities by which anybody who is within the Church, the father of a household, a village priest or the pope could single out at this moment something by which to praise God and ask Him to look particularly favourably upon it. Sacraments are something else. They are actions which can be done by human beings which, however, inevitably, once someone undertakes them, are used by God himself as instrumenta, as devices, as instrumental cause for a certain end, for a certain purpose. Take water, say "I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost," even if you are a pagan and you do it for me — that's the extreme case — I will be a member of the Church. They thought about the sacraments as instrumenta divina.
David Cayley
Instrumentality, for Illich, is part of that complex of ideas, practices and institutions that defines the age that stretches over eight hundred years from the twelfth century to our own. The character of this age, he believes, can only be understood when it is seen both as an elaboration of Christian freedom, and at the same time as the corruption and eclipse of that freedom. All of the ideas he has discussed tonight in some way illustrate this dynamic. Conscience produces the law-abiding citizen but only at the cost of denaturing sin. Contract extends the scope of social relationships but at the same time locks them into the rigid framework of law. And the fate of the idea of contingency is just the same. Contingency originally expressed the feeling of the world's dependence on an ever-creating will. But it also gave rise to a technological will that eventually eclipsed what was most precious and beautiful in that feeling, the sense of existence as something gratuitous, something bestowed as a pure, unnecessary gift.
Ivan Illich
With the dominance of the idea of instrument during this 800-year period, increasing dominance, it became certain, obvious, natural that wherever something is achieved it is achieved by means of an instrument. The eye is perceived as an instrument for recording what's before me. Love is an instrument for satisfaction. It becomes almost unthinkable that I should pursue a goal without using an instrument for that purpose. In other terms, instrumentality implies an extraordinary intensity of purposefulness within society. And in the increasing intensity of instrumentalization in Western society goes hand in hand a lack of attention for what one traditionally called gratuity, non-purposeful action which is only performed because it's beautiful, it's good, fitting, not because it is meant to achieve, to construct, to change, to manage. It has become very difficult at the end of the modern time to speak about things which are not purposeful, but gratuitous and good.