Corruptio optimi quae est pessima

Exploring Ivan Illich as a Theological Thinker

This colloquium invites participants to read Ivan Illich as a theological thinker of modernity. In his conversations with David Cayley, Illich argues that the modern world becomes intelligible only when understood as both an extension and a perversion of the Christian message. This is not merely a polemical thesis but a method of discernment.

His analysis traces a genealogy of evangelical corruptions: charity becomes administered service, hospitality becomes hospitalization, care becomes sanitary management, teaching becomes compulsory schooling, mission becomes development. What once arose from gratuity, relation, and personal responsibility is thus absorbed into apparatuses that promise the good while organizing its corrupted form.

Illich offers no programme. He proposes instead a critical practice of perception: stripping words bare, identifying thresholds of inversion, defending the vernacular, speaking from the margins without turning them into authority. His work enacts a theology of lucidity—at once ascetic and prophetic—grounded in what is fragile, embodied, and exposed.

The colloquium seeks to examine this method and its contemporary urgency: w Where do vernacular spaces still remain beyond administration? What kind of theology may emerge outside dispositifs of control? And how can resistance endure without itself being captured? To read Illich today is to learn how to name the corruption of the good without reproducing it.