Ivan Illich, the Good Samaritan and Table Manners
I am falling behind on my blog with life getting in the way of retirement. Given the current conflict in Israel here is modified excerpt from a conference paper I presented a few years ago. It is a commentary on the parable of the Good Samaritan inspired by the late Ivan Illich (1926-2002) an author, Catholic priest, philosopher, professor and social critic. But if Illich wanted to be identified by one qualifier, it would be as a sower of friendships.[1] For Illich, friendship corresponding to God in the flesh is the Christian virtue par excellence. It is the true practice of faith. Central to his understanding of the relation between friendship and the Gospel itself, Illich directed our attention to the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Luke 10:25-37
25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[c]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[d]”
28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
30 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. 32 So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii[e] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
36 “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
37 The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
Who is my neighbour? And Jesus tells a story - a story that Illich suggests is utterly destructive of ordinary table manners. The lawyer in the story is in search of boundaries. Afterall loving your neighbour as yourself is fraught with danger if there are not some limits. So, Jesus doubles down on the lawyers’ inquiry and goes after the “question behind the question” namely: who can I exclude from the neighbour list? In so doing Jesus chooses a Samaritan as the lead protagonist in our story. No people group threatened Jewish identity more than the Samaritan’s. They worshiped in a rival place. They freely intermarried with other cultures. They were more threatening to the Jews than the Romans because when it was all said and done, Judaism identified more closely with the Samaritans and thus they were perhaps Judaism’s greatest existential threat.[2] In the minds of the Jewish faithful, at stake was maintaining orthodox teaching and practices, family values and the list could go on. Besides did Jesus not himself warn his disciples, “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans.” (Matthew 10:5)
The choice of the Samaritan as the anti-hero in the parable, suggests Illich, was undoubtedly chosen for its shock value. This becomes foundational for Illich and stands as his hermeneutical key to unpacking Gospel teachings in general. In a word, it is “surprise.” Jesus had a habit of overturning religious table manners.[3]Unfortunately, explains Illich, churches tend to domesticate this reading of the text. They resist in any deep sense surprises. “Short term surprises are often praised, they can even be simulated, but they are rarely welcomed. “The only surprises we like are those that aren’t surprises at all, just the occurrence of something expected at an unexpected time or place,”[4] such as the destitute man who ends up in a ditch victimized by brigands. Wrong place at the wrong time we might conclude. But there is little surprise here. “Thoroughfed” from a young age, we know the world is filled with tricksters, deceivers, racists, and scoundrels. We are warned, “don’t talk to strangers”, “buyer beware”, “lock your doors,” and don’t eat any Halloween candy that is not professionally packaged. To warn that sin/evil is always “crouching at the door,” is no more a surprise to the contemporary person as it was to people in Jesus’ time. Our embattled victim in the ditch could be anybody whose tribal horizon[5] through no fault of their own has broken down because of circumstances, be it sickness, abuse, estrangement or a crumbling theological base.
But to marshal a Samaritan as the anti-hero is a real surprise. In contemporary terms Illich likens the Samaritan to a Palestinian as in the modern proverbial Jewish/Palestinian conflict.[6] But I think Illich could equally imagine the Good Samaritan as a Muslim or a Gay man or woman. And for equal good measure, we could imagine in this case the victim in the ditch is a white evangelical whose faith lies tattered by circumstances. Or perhaps our good protagonist is a woman. She is a known pro-choice advocate and is coming to the aid of a pro-lifer who has just suffered a miscarriage. The point for Illich is to keep the surprising disparity and/or tension between the two parties operational and in that regard, there are no limitations to the modern permutations we can make. Further I submit, Illich would agree that any attempt to smooth over this anxious polarity risks putting the reader in the place of the robber.
A priest and a Levite, the story continues, happen upon the scene and pass by our victim who appears dead in the ditch. Here our contemporary sensibilities may be challenged but in the contextual framework of the story, our disinterested observers are simply operating within the ethos of their tribal horizon. If our victim is dead or “not quite dead yet”, they must now contend with issues of ritual impurity or the very real possibility that the man in the ditch is the result of losing God’s divine favor through his own maleficence.[7] At best this is a matter for the civic authorities to sort out. Sympathies aside, the victim is an outsider, akin to the woman at the well, the woman with an issue of bleeding, Zacchaeus the tax collector, the lame and blind, the demon possessed, all who have fallen out of normal referential ties and experienced loss.
And the surprises in the story keep coming. Illich notes the dominate historical approach to this parable is to instruct readers in how then should they respond to someone who is in need? [8] But while there may be some derivative ethical implications in the parable, Illich reminds readers the question is not how but who is our neighbour?[9] Explains Illich, the parable is intended to open the door to a new “kind of mutuality” which finds its origin in God made possible by the incarnation. It is a mutuality that transcends economic, religious, gender, tribal or ethnicity barriers.[10] The tragedy of the Levite and the Priest is not their seemingly disinterest in the wounded man, it is that, entrenched in their religious tribal horizon, carefully constructed through millennia, they are incapable of neighboring this man. “Corruption of the best becomes the worst,” says Illich when the obvious decision to neighbour the half-dead man is obscured by their system of rules/laws/table manners that may have been originally put in place with the intention to protect those in their tribe from contamination and/or harm. But tragically their blind adherence to the very laws designed for the well-being of their tribe have not only perpetuated further harm to the man in the ditch but by association they also do significant damage to the Levite and the Priest as they idly walk by.
Enter the Samaritan. What is essential for the Samaritan, Illich insists, is that he has the freedom to choose whom he will love. There is no duty on his part to respond. It is based on a “call” originating from the gut.[11]For the Samaritan not to respond would be to deny his humanity, but that too is his choice. And yet once he has responded, explains Illich, now and only then our Good Samaritan is obligated to maintain fidelity. This will of course necessitate mutual self-limitations as a condition of any relationship. Something new has been created and for that relationship to flourish “I must put myself, below the other,[12]” since it is through the other that the ‘call’ comes.” But this is not based on a set of moral codes, old or new, it is a call in this instance that transcends existing tribal horizons.
And here Illich alerts readers to a surprising evil crouching at the door. The temptation, says Illich, is now to colonize the actions of the Samaritan and turn those actions into a new duty. Should we create a school of hospitality replete with a new set of table manners and rules for behaving in these situations, we risk endangering any further freedom to exercise mercy and offer friendship to perhaps a new “other” we encounter along our path. It is akin to giving your significant other a bouquet of flowers and when queried what is the occasion, you respond, “it is your birthday.” “It is my duty.” There can be no ethos of the love of one’s neighbour. Dutiful flowers do not exist. The action may be right but in the words of philosopher Martin Buber, any potential I-thou moment that could have occurred has been reduced to an I-it. Here “The corruption of the best which is the worst” is the result of any
attempt to use power, organization, management, manipulation, and the law to ensure the social presence of something which, by its very nature, cannot be anything else but the free choice of individuals who have accepted the invitation to see in everybody whom they choose the face of Christ.
Further, the vocation, the ability, the empowerment, the invitation to choose freely outside and beyond the horizon of my ethnos what gifts I will give and to whom I will give them is understandable only to one who is willing to be surprised, one who lives within that unimaginable and unpredictable horizon which I call faith, and the perversion of faith is not simply evil…It is sin, because sin is the decision to make faith into something that is subject to the power of the world.”[13]
For Illich what separates the three instigators in our story is that the Samaritan is the only one who exercises faith by freely choosing to respond mercifully in this situation. Faith, in this instance,
"is a mode of knowledge which does not base itself on either my worldly experience or the resources of my intelligence. It finds certainty on the word of someone whom I trust and makes this knowledge which is based on trust more fundamental than anything I can know by reason. This, of course, makes…sense only if the One whom I trust is God. But it also rubs off on my relationship to other people. It makes me aim at facing people with a willingness to take them for what they reveal about themselves – to take them, therefore, at their word – and not for what I know about them.[14]
[1] “After his (Ivan Illich) lectures in Bremen, during the last ten years of his life, anyone who wished could carry on discussion of the evening’s theme over an infinitely expandable “spaghetti” dinner at Barbara Duden’s house. During the years he taught at Penn State University, between 1985 and 1995, there were numerous ‘living room consultations’ that gathered groups of twenty or thirty people for three to five days of serious talk, well-watered with ‘ordinary but decent wine’ and interspersed with good meals and long walks. (“A good tax lawyer,” Illich recalled, ‘found a way of making it credible to the IRS that a certain number of cases of [such] wine are my major teaching tool.)” David Cayley, Ivan Illich: 21st-Century Perspectives (Penn State University Press) 508. [2] From a Jewish perspective, the Samaritan our savior in the story is anything but good. Did Jesus not say himself “enter no town of the Samaritans.” This was more than just a turf war. In Jewish terms Samaritans were outliers. Despite many shared customs and shared origin (albeit disputed) so embittered were relations between Samaritans and Jews, Judaism forbade any “conversion of Samaritans” or participation in Samaritan rituals and there was absolutely no question of intermarriage. At stake was the survival of the Jewish marriage. [3] The reference to Jesus “overturning the tables” outside the temple is found in all four Gospels. (Matthew 21:12-14, Mark 11:15-17, Luke 19:45-47, John 2:13-19) In the Matthew account, the blind and lame (a people group whose disabilities denied them access to the Temple) entered the Temple with Jesus. [4] David Cayley, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (Penn State University, 2021) 21. [5] Tribal horizons go by many names. German Philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) called it lebenswelt (literally, life world). By whatever name you give it, it is the generally the local worldview we have largely inherited. It comes with both an explicit and implicit ethos on how to live the good life. It tells us who is our neighbour and who is not. And it explains the mystery of good and evil. Outsiders may be converted into the tribe, but it is generally areligious even though religious values often play a significant part. It comes with boundaries, but those boundaries are capable of expansion thus the idea of horizon. Horizons are by nature elusive. For the courageous who dare to explore the horizon, the horizon itself keeps expanding. [6] “The Story is deeply familiar. The United States has so-called Samaritan laws, which exempt you from tort actions, if you inadvertently do harm while offering aid. This familiarity disguises the shocking character of the Lord’s tale. Perhaps the only way we could recapture it today would be to imagine the Samaritan as a Palestinian ministering to a wounded Jew or vice versa. He/she is someone who not only goes outside his ethnic preference for taking care of his own kind, but who commits a kind of treason by caring for his enemy. In so doing, he exercises a freedom of choice, whose radical novelty has often been overlooked.” Ivan Illich, Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as told to David Cayley (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2005) 50,51. [7] Presumably the Levite would have been familiar with such codes as found in Lev 21:16-20. 16 The Lord said to Moses, 17 “Say to Aaron: ‘For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. 18 No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; 19 no man with a crippled foot or hand, 20 or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles. Commenting on this passage Amos Yong writes, “These exclusive texts…are set within a worldview deeply shaped by dualistic notions of purity and defilement…In fact, this has been historically understood to have been an association made in the covenant itself: that disobedience would bring upon the people of Israel all manner of plagues, pestilence, consumption, disease, illness, madness, blindness, and other bodily affliction (Deut. 28:15-68; Zeph. 1:17). Amos Yong. Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity, (Waco, Texas: Baylor Press: 2007) 23. [8]It is telling that there is no shortage of benevolent organizations who have adopted the namesake “Samaritan” as their emblem for humanitarian help. A quick google count revealed at least ten hospitals in the USA with the name Good Samaritan and many others throughout the world. The question was, however, who is my neighbour? And if help is being offered it turns out in the story our neighbour might be the disadvantaged helping the advantaged. [9] Illich, 51. [10] Illich, 47-58. [11] Illich, 51. [12] A lecture cited in a Presbyterian chapel in Chicago in November 1988. “When I submit my heart, my mind, my body, I come to be below the other. When I listen unconditionally, respectfully, courageously with the readiness to take in the other as a radical surprise, I do something else. I bow, bend over toward the total otherness of someone. But I renounce searching for bridges between the other and me, recognizing that a gulf separates us. Leaning into this chasm makes me aware of the depth of my loneliness, and able to bear it in the light of the substantial likeness between the other and myself. All that reaches me is the other in his word, which I accept on faith.” David Cayley, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (Penn State University Press. Kindle Edition, 2021) 19-20. [13] Illich, 56,57. [14] Illich, 57.
Comments