by Ivan Illich

(*) This speech was given by Ivan Illich on 24 May 1997 to celebrate the conclusion of a two-day long conference organized by various scholars for the coming fifth centenary of Savonarola’s death (1498-1998). While all the academic interventions of the participants were in the book: Savonarola. Democrazia, tirannide, profezia a.c.d. Gian Carlo Garfagnini, SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, Firenze, 1998, Illich’s contribution was omitted. This speech was transcribed in Italian and then translated into English by Leonardo Christopher Eck Glenewinkel, supported by Sajay Samuel and Samar Farage. The speech itself was delivered in Italian by Ivan Illich and is still available online: https://www.radioradicale.it/scheda/94189/savonarola-democrazia-tirannide-profezia-convegno-su-girolamo-savonarola?i=2073054.  The speech itself was not in any way modified in its content, but the grammatical structure was minimally altered and adapted to the current written form for better readability; the English translation tries to follow the rhythm of the original Italian speech, but the inevitable gap between the spoken and the written form required some structural interpolations for the English-speaking audience. To contextualize and promote a better understanding of this speech, a rich apparatus of footnotes is added. It was formulated following Illich’s example as he exemplified it in one of his books: “These footnotes are not meant to prove but to illustrate and qualify my arguments; they are marginal glosses written in counterpoint to the text, outlines of my lectures to students who have prepared themselves by reading this book. The notes relate to the text as formerly quaestiones disputatae related to the summa” (Gender, ed. New York edition, Pantheon Books, 1982, New p. vii).  

Thank you, Professor Miegge,¹⁾

Now, what should be done is to start a three-day-long discussion! Unfortunately, our host here, Father Verde,²⁾ tells us that this [meeting] is going to end within the next half an hour […]³⁾.

What I would like to know is how it is possible, in our world of risk, probability and virtuality, to talk [not only] about Savonarola but also about Kant, who are almost equidistant to each other.⁴⁾ Almost! Once, for some reason, I had to work on the worst of all heretics, a prophet, who during the Middle Ages was represented –as you well know⁵⁾– sitting on a horse and dressed like a cardinal,⁶⁾ and this heretical cardinal had the name Mohammed. I know that in Arabic, the horse Buraq⁷⁾, which then enters the Book of Muhammed’s Ladder⁸⁾, is seen as a nightmare on which someone can ride … how wonderful would it be to now start such a conversation!

[But] first a confession. All my close friends here know it: I was never frightened to give a speech. This is the first time that I am frightened! My friendship for Paolo Prodi⁹⁾ drove me to start this foolishness, this foolish idea to conclude a meeting of great philologists, historians of philosophy etc, with an intermezzo, a thematic reflection, a bit like a clown who ends a great theatrical performance. It is friendship which drives me. This is not the friendship of Phaedo’s philia,¹⁰⁾ which leads to the flourishing of the politeia. That art of living together according to virtue requires a “we” —the first plural form of the personal pronoun— formed of those who were born from the womb of the same city. [However,] in my own experience –I was born in 1926– friendship doesn’t rise any more from an us, but –in the forms I have experienced it– it rises sometimes with great surprise from a thou: the “thou” which has been fostered with discipline.¹¹⁾

But why do I say this at the beginning? Because today, the organizers have chosen me to give a speech on prophecy. I remember, Paolo, how I once had the inkling that perhaps I too could somehow be a prophet.

So let me tell you a story! Four years ago,¹²⁾ the text I was working on during that semester, during the whole year, every Friday, from two to seven p.m., in the Aula Magna, was a text by Aelred of Rievaulx, a Benedictine monk from Scotland around 1100 AD. From an audience of two hundred –in order to tell you to whom I was speaking–only seventeen knew the prayer of the Pater in any language. The text on which I was working was De ortu amicitae¹³⁾ and this dialogue of Aelred had an incipit: “Ecce, ego, tu et spero tertius, evidente, qui est Christus”.¹⁴⁾ But that was not what I discussed with the students during the evening in the aula. No, but I must tell you what happened with the students! Those conversations were shaped by two authors¹⁵⁾ who in that particular year, one in London and one in Chicago, both –more or less– respectable¹⁶⁾ medievalists, had published two heavy books which presented the abbot Aelred as a model –I don’t know the term in Italian– of a gay person. A concept, which according to my knowledge, did not exist in 1148.

Anyway, after four hours of class, two dozen students and some professors came to my home for a plate of pastasciutta. This pastasciutta is eaten in a land where another concept is unthinkable: you cannot present it –as you say in Italian– al dente. It’s impossible!

Around 11 p.m. –with my head bursting– I went to rest in my room under the rooftop, but at around 2 in the morning I went downstairs again to the kitchen to prepare myself a cup of tea, without anyone noticing me, because there were still a dozen people discussing. And what do I hear? A professor of linguistics, a colleague of mine, says to the biologist¹⁷⁾: “Professor Illich is smart. He knows quite well what he’s doing. Look! All of us here who have earned a certain right–to enter this house, Barbara’s house, with its keys¹⁸⁾–have gotten used to lighting a candle when we meet, even if we drink just a cup of tea.” “And the professor,” she continued, “is smart, he knows what he’s doing. And you know that the professor believes in this spero tertius. And without willing it, we all have come to suspect what he believes”. For this reason, I was happy for a moment.

Now, when the organizers sent me this invitation, I told myself: “How do I come to know about my topic when I talk about prophecy?” Therefore, I went to my computer and requested from the university library two years of periodical abstracts and articles from the social sciences and humanities about prophecy. And within two minutes I got three hundred eighty-one of them. You have them here! This word has lost all its semantic borders!

For me, the introduction to the historicity of prophecy, to the idea, as you Paolo said, that Savonarola was probably the last one who could appear to be a prophet¹⁹⁾, opened my eyes! It opened my mind! But I don’t know where all this is going to take me!

“The professor usually knows what he’s doing. He eventually took inspiration from the Indios”.²⁰⁾ Yes. Yes. Yes. I started with friendship, with philia: the philia which today is the only possibility that I know of by which to establish what, in a second moment, becomes a us. In other ages it was the consequence [of politeia], when I²¹⁾ knew how to consciously blend the wine, the krasis (mixture) of the wine, of a city, of a politeia. As far as I know, friendship is the only balance which I can oppose to utopia.²²⁾ The ecce²³⁾ you see when gazing in her eyes and seeing in the pupilla—this strange thing about which [Titus] Livius and others have very interesting texts—through which I receive Ivan from her²⁴⁾, because I cannot meet nor find him elsewhere. This ecce is the only response I can develop against—and now I’m saying something very risky—the tyranny of our days, which is the tyranny of need. I would like to talk about that!

But let us return to Paolo Prodi. I immediately obeyed because he, more than a friend, is a maestro²⁵⁾ of the historical enterprise done by a believer. He –more than anybody else except Gerhard Ladner²⁶⁾ –left a visible impression on my mind. Ladner opened my eyes to the fact that the reformation, after which comes the revolution, is a concept which was mediated by the Gospel. And it was he who helped me to think about this peculiar problem.²⁷⁾ As an historian, I must recognize that there were people who believed in personal reformation, in conversion as the only contribution which can be done—to change myself so that I can change the world. And it is Paolo Prodi who has said what yesterday Professor Leonardi²⁸⁾ had beautifully called “la conoscenza soprannaturale per profezia,”²⁹⁾ referring it to this concrete historical person: me! But more than anything else, it was the love and the esteem of this disciple³⁰⁾ that drove me to say “yes” to Paolo, despite my great discomfort.

May I be excused for talking in such ways about an experience. The audience will understand that otherwise I have no clue how to conclude this very rich paella –I don’t know how to say it in Italian– this pasticcio fantastico³¹⁾, because I deeply believe it is absurd that I should speak on this topic. My competence in this matter—Florence in its last decades of the Quattrocento or Savonarola [himself]—is abysmal compared to the academics here, this dozen scholars to whom Father Verde–to whom I say: two times felice³²⁾–has exposed us. My competence is abysmal because until the day you, Paolo, called me in Mexico, I was–I didn’t find a dictionary today in this beautiful library– vergine³³⁾ in front of Fra Girolamo. And as you may see immediately, I didn’t lose this verginità. Some months later, this more than seventy-year-old man had to say to him: “This time, Girolamo, you caught me!”³⁴⁾ I cannot add anything to the knowledge about this man or his background. However, I do know one thing about prophecy. I did for theology the same thing I did for the social sciences, and I was surprised by how much the concept of prophecy in the Old Testament has changed in the last thirty years. I want people to understand that prophets do not appear among the Jews, but the Jews appear because there were prophets. The causality is reversed!

All I can do is to explain the effect which it had on me, not the person you see present now, but on the person³⁵⁾ who came in first contact with these slopes, these Pre-Alps –this huge mountain of books which go under Savonarola’s [name]– [all] these studies on Frate Giovanni Savonarola –it was really beautiful, you couldn’t foresee it.³⁶⁾

It made me laugh when the ecclesiastical authorities insisted three times on Giovanni, because when I arrived in New York³⁷⁾, instead of going to Princeton where Kantorowicz³⁸⁾ was waiting for me to write a thesis, I discovered the Puerto Ricans. I applied for work in a Puerto Rican parish as a young priest of twenty-five years. I entered to meet monsignor Casey, but while going up the stairs, where I saw my first television showing MacCarthy between his lawyers, Casey asks me”³⁹⁾ “Excuse me, but don’t you have a Christian name?” I say: “Ivan, Johannes”. [Casey]: “Ah, that’s all right! We will call you Father Johnny.”⁴⁰⁾ I lived for five years as Johnny Illich, or Don Juan for los puertorriqueños. Father Verde, it was this symbolic gesture of the [ecclesiastical] authority that you could not foresee.⁴¹⁾

This morning, during your virtuous canto⁴²⁾—I heard it as I say it because it was a speech but also a canto— I continuously thought about Savonarola, not as [he is] usually discussed —as an incarnation of contradiction, or a coat-hanger of an arrabbiato,⁴³⁾or complexions of a cordero,⁴⁴⁾—but as visage, as a face, as a gaze. Savonarola died a bella morte,⁴⁵⁾ and when you spoke, I told myself: “This man is so right! Yes!”

However, your words did not say anything about what most fascinated me about this man, what happened to me during the last fifty days of reading him. Because his writings, conceived in the moment when Savonarola was confronted with his own death, that had the greatest influence—which destiny gave me to verify, not in Tuscany, but beyond the Arno, beyond the Apennine Mountains, beyond the Pyrenees, beyond the Ocean—were those written in his last days. Already in 1939, Vicente Beltrán de Heredia⁴⁶⁾ documented the influence of these writings on the reformation under Cisneros⁴⁷⁾ in Spain, on the convents of Toledo, on the Colegio de San Gregorio de Valladolid.

For some reason this remains forgotten: this was a Savonarolian convent, a place where the via espiritual and the Libro de la Oracíon y meditation by Luis de Granada⁴⁸⁾ were conceived.⁴⁹⁾ But that is my fault! I’m the curator–as you may know⁵⁰⁾–together with Valentina Borremans of this fantastic enterprise: 98 percent of printed books, pamphlets and stamped stuff with the ecclesiastical imprimatur, from 1820 onwards, has never been catalogued. They are considered ecclesiastical byproducts. And we catalogued hundred thousand of them and we inscribed them on microfilm.⁵¹⁾ But, again, my fault! I never collected, until now, the works by Luis de Granada and never took note of Savonarola's influence in these books. Bataillon,⁵²⁾ by simplifying it, sees in Luis de Granada the synthesis of Erasmus⁵³⁾ and the theology of the cross of Fra Girolamo.

Let us admit that this can take us a bit too far away. I have shown you this citation [to a homily by] the great bishop Sergio Mendez Arceo⁵⁴⁾of Cuernavaca, who had reformed his dioceses. In it, I found, looking for Savonarola, this phrase by the seventh bishop of Cuernavaca, as [Mendez] used to call himself: “Decirle a un obispo que es profeta no es añadirle nada. ¡Es decir que es obispo!”⁵⁵⁾ Take note of how the Church can deal with someone, even if he is a good man like Mendez, who studied the influence of Erasmus on the first ecclesiastical foundations in Latin America! He doesn’t use the name Giovanni, but he says the same thing regarding prophecy.

For my part, when I said “Girolamo, this time you amazed me, this time you caught me,”⁵⁶⁾ it was because of this beautiful sentence from the Miserere⁵⁷⁾ about his very last day when all things have turned into torment and bitterness: “Let the abyss of misery be absorbed by the abyss of mercy.”⁵⁸⁾ I meditated [on this sentence], and I say that in a very personal way, every day over the last two and a half months.

Let me immediately talk about the meeting of the three brothers⁵⁹⁾ in case someone does not know this last day! I cite directly from Ridolfi’s book.⁶⁰⁾ [Savonarola] speaks [to] Fra Domenico: “It has been revealed to me that you desire to be burned alive. Know you not that it is not permitted to choose one’s manner of dying, but that you must joyfully accept that which is prepared for you by God? Who knows whether you will be able to bear that which is made ready for you?”⁶¹⁾ And then he turns to Fra Silvestro, about whom another text says: “qui timidissimum omnium […] futuraeque mortis horrore tremebundus”⁶²⁾ –this is what the text says–, and tells him that he [Savonarola] knows already that he, [Fra Silvestro] wants to declare their innocence before being burned alive, and says to him: “And it has been revealed to me that you intend before dying to protest to the people that we are innocent. You must not do that, for not even Christ proclaimed his innocence from the cross.”⁶³⁾ And both kneel and Frate Domenico starts [to say]: “Ecce quam bonum et quam jucundum habitare fratres in unum.”⁶⁴⁾ Finally, he leaves and those sent by the General, come “to strip them off the habit [and Savonarola] “flevit”⁶⁵⁾!In Mexico we are used to this, because the hidalgos in Morelos–[the federal Mexican] state in which I live–still during the Revolution of 1820, had their internal organs, which were consecrated before killing them, cut away.

And, finally, comes the declaration that they are “heretics and schismatics”⁶⁶⁾, in front of [Francesco] Romolino⁶⁷⁾, who not only condemns them, but who also says: “It pleases His Holiness to free you from the pains of Purgatory, giving you plenary indulgence for your sins, and restoring you to your pristine innocence. Do you accept this? And the [heretical and schismatic] friars piously bowed their heads and signified their consent.”⁶⁸⁾

What happened here? I cannot ever forget these three bowed heads. Expelled, separated from the community, they accept the indulgence, which the boia⁶⁹⁾ –you say boia, right? – grants them. They die testifying in name of the Church. I believe that this attitude is the attitude by which I can indicate the direction towards which I have tried to act over these thirty-five years of apophatic ecclesiology.⁷⁰⁾ [With their bowed heads] they prophesize⁷¹⁾–but not with their promises, not with the threat of torments⁷²⁾ and not even with their suffering⁷³⁾–the face of Jesus, which they disclose and which is disclosed within them,⁷⁴⁾ as the acceptance of powerlessness!⁷⁵⁾

Now, our meeting here was not only–as I believed–about prophecy but also about the relation between tyranny and prophecy […].⁷⁶⁾ I don’t know if –because of this invitation you made me–what I started to grasp here with great surprise can be considered doctrina communis⁷⁷⁾ or not. But in the sense that the prophet is an individual who appears somewhere in Palestine, and a community is formed just because there is a prophet —it is not possible any more to be a prophet today. You⁷⁸⁾ said the same thing—excuse me if I’m exaggerating another time and I drive you crazy: let us say that you are very patient with me, but you gave me the possibility to say what I want—something like the tyranny of what [today] is called “need”, something which was unimaginable for Savonarola, not to mention Amos.⁷⁹⁾

What am I trying to say? Father Verde, forgive me for the way I talk here––I will write it down in a more appropriate manner.⁸⁰⁾ There is this Palestinian –no, you don’t say Palestinian, you say Samaritan, but he is [in fact] a Palestinian–whose deed⁸¹⁾ Jesus⁸²⁾ does not take as an answer to how I ought to behave towards my neighbor. That is the canonical interpretation of this passage, which we discovered when we once studied it in hundreds of cases. But rather the question is ‘who is my neighbor’? ⁸³⁾ And Jesus says: “Who you want, who you choose!” By saying that, Jesus broke, in a certain way, the frame of decency. Zeus [was] Xenios⁸⁴⁾ for the Greeks but not for the barbarians.⁸⁵⁾ [But] Jesus made and, as in many other things–and I take this as a particular example–turned topsy-turvy the tradition of hospitality in such a way that I can actually choose! And what does the Church do in order to realize that? [It creates] the institution!

Confronted with that, I would like to be like Savonarola […].⁸⁶⁾ The Church establishes the xenodocheia (ξενοδοχεῖα) this extraordinary invention, the houses for the poor, for the miserable, an institution, which never existed in other parts of the world. And, immediately, John Chrysostom⁸⁷⁾ replies, in the same year of the so-called Constantinian Peace⁸⁸⁾: “Don’t do that! Otherwise, what characterizes a household, the threshold of a Christian, and the fact that there is a mattress and a bit of candle, in case Jesus should knock⁸⁹⁾, will become obsolete.”⁹⁰⁾

I must thank Jean Daniélou⁹¹⁾ who opened my eyes to this event, because he knew a Chinese person who was baptized. This guy went on a pilgrimage by foot from Peking to Rome; and he was always tolerated as a pilgrim and [always] found shelter when he still was in Asia; also, in the world of the Orthodox Church things still went for him in this way, but as soon as he reached Poland, people gave him money so that he could go to the house of pilgrims.

I take him to exemplify the idea that there is a need; that we are born into a society made of individuals who need services for a roof, who are in need [because] they are born with [the] deficiency of knowledge, which only an institution can give. Some of you may know about my reflection for over forty-years on this theme: from where else does the homo educandus come? Cicero tells me: “Educat nutrix, docet, vero instruit magister.”⁹²⁾ And [if] I give a look into the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae⁹³⁾, it tells me and shows me that educere requires a feminine subject, till Tertullian’s times. [The concept that] Christ’s milk⁹⁴⁾ –the supernatural revelation– cannot be obtained, unless by docentia, is transferred into a society which [then] develops the idea that everyone is in need of education.

Time is running out! My idea –let us say my intellectual experience–is to [discover], to dig in order to find out from where, historically, all these concepts, all these axiomatic notions, which are so characteristic of the West come from: from the conjuratio⁹⁵⁾ to the image⁹⁶⁾, from the idea of the text⁹⁷⁾ to the possibility –let us say– […]⁹⁸⁾ of the criminalization of sin.⁹⁹⁾ I find [that all this] is an effort by the Church to guarantee, to give [permanence], to make better than what the individual–who is the only who is actually called to do it– could do [by himself], and it creates the institution, which then becomes secularized. It is about the corruptio optimi –the grace– quae est pessima.¹⁰⁰⁾

And only if I look to the history of the axioms of the West without refusing to see it as a substantial part of the history of the Church, as the [history] of the assurance by Church, the [history] of institutionalization by the Church, can I reach the point from where I can grasp the Abyss in which we are today! This is because, after the last thirty or forty years of fighting for development, only now, finally, do people understand what “development” really means: “In the West as it is in Heaven”! My students didn’t know where this phrase comes from—only seventeen of them knew the Pater noster.¹⁰¹⁾ [But] In this condition I see not Evil but the Horror¹⁰²⁾ [and] the consequences of the sin in which I live—which takes away my breath.

Yes, I say it! There is a friend, who you all know. We were close –[I’m speaking of] Alex Langer¹⁰³⁾– and when I knew about his death, I thought I knew where he must have hanged himself, but when I was told: “No, no [it happened] elsewhere”, I said [to myself]: “Thanks God!”, because it was there that we talked exactly on this topic.¹⁰⁴⁾ I mention Alex to you because he is one of my many friends–I call them friends and not students–who had understood Evil in its mysterious aspect, that is Evil as mysterium iniquitatis,¹⁰⁵⁾ the mystery of impiety. And I firmly believe that to look in someone else’s eyes, by offering him what you see of him and permitting him to give you what he sees in you is the [only] way by which we can help each other to not hang ourselves.

Therefore, since we remain with the idea that we can further develop what you, [Father Verde] have so beautifully presented, which is that we can [actually] continue to talk about prophecy, we are perhaps –the Germans would say … Heidegger¹⁰⁶⁾ [would] say– on the Holzweg.¹⁰⁷⁾ [This] is the disciplined [and] serious offer of friendship which establishes an us: not [the kind of friendship] in which the “us” finds its flowering, but the one which enables us to see the truth, to have the courage to pick it up, to consider it as something possible, along the lines you have shown.

Father Verde, I thank you for the present you have given me! But I imagine that you gave it also to the others who are here, in whose name I would like to say thank you, to this extraordinary gathering of colleagues, both women and men, that made it possible to do [all this] and to all those, who spoke here, from whom I have learned [a lot]; even if some colleague told me: “All this is well-known!” [But] I did not know it, and I remain fascinated by it.

Thank you.