37 Facts About Ivan Illich

Ivan Dominic Illich was an Austrian Roman Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic.

Ivan Dominic Illich was born on 4 September 1926 in Vienna, Austria, to Gian Pietro Ilic and Ellen Rose "Maexie" nee Regenstreif-Ortlieb.

Ivan Illich's father was a civil engineer and a diplomat from a landed Catholic family of Dalmatia, with property in the city of Split and wine and olive oil estates on the island of Brac.

Ivan Illich's mother came from a Jewish family that had converted to Christianity from Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Ellen Illich was baptized Lutheran but converted to Catholicism upon marriage.

Ivan Illich's father, Friedrich "Fritz" Regenstreif, was an industrialist who made his money in the lumber trade in Bosnia, later settling in Vienna, where he built an art nouveau villa.

Ellen Ivan Illich traveled to Vienna to be attended by the best doctors during birth.

Ivan Illich's father was not living in Central Europe at the time.

When Ivan Illich was three months old, he was taken along with his nurse to Split, Dalmatia, to be shown to his paternal grandfather.

Ivan Illich finished high school in Florence, and then went on to study histology and crystallography at the local University of Florence.

Ivan Illich wrote a dissertation focusing on the historian Arnold J Toynbee, a subject to which he would return in his later years.

Ivan Illich was ordained as a Catholic priest in Rome in 1951 and served his first Mass in the catacombs where the early Roman Christians hid from their persecutors.

Ivan Illich later learned Croatian, the language of his grandfathers, then Ancient Greek and Latin, in addition to Portuguese, Hindi, English, and other languages.

Ivan Illich looked askance at the liberal pity or conservative imperiousness that motivated the rising tide of global industrial development.

Ivan Illich viewed such emissaries as a form of industrial hegemony and, as such, an act of "war on subsistence".

Ivan Illich sought to teach missionaries dispatched by the Church not to impose their own cultural values.

Unpopular with the local chapter of Opus Dei, Ivan Illich was called to Rome for questioning, due in part to a CIA report.

Ivan Illich, who had been made a Monsignor at 33 himself resigned from the active priesthood in the late 1960s, but continued to identify as a priest and occasionally performed private masses.

However, his influence declined after the 1981 election of Francois Mitterrand as Ivan Illich was considered too pessimistic at a time when the French Left took control of the government.

Ivan Illich held an appointment as a Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Science, Technology and Society at Penn State.

Ivan Illich taught at the University of Bremen and University of Hagen.

Goodman is credited in Deschooling Society with having "radically obliged" Ivan Illich to revise his thinking, and described with great affection in Ivan Illich's 1990s interviews with David Cayley:.

Ivan Illich had recently played a major part in getting a law passed which recognized that the state should not interfere with the private activities of consenting adults.

Ivan Illich called himself "an errant pilgrim", "a wandering Jew and a Christian pilgrim", while clearly acknowledging his Dalmatian roots.

Ivan Illich remarked that since leaving the old house of his grandparents on the island Brac in Dalmatia, he had never had a home.

Ivan Illich's lifework's leading thesis is that Western modernity, perverting Christianity, corrupts Western Christianity.

Ivan Illich often used the Latin phrase Corruptio optimi quae est pessima, in English The corruption of the best is the worst.

Ivan Illich believed that the Biblical God taking human form, the Incarnation, marked world history's turning point, opening new possibilities for love and knowledge.

Ivan Illich's first book, Deschooling Society, published in 1971, was a groundbreaking critique of compulsory mass education.

Ivan Illich argued the oppressive structure of the school system could not be reformed.

Ivan Illich became known worldwide for his progressive polemics about how activity expressive of truly human values could be preserved and expanded in human culture in the face of multiple thundering forces of de-humanization.

Health, argues Ivan Illich, is the capacity to cope with the human reality of death, pain, and sickness.

Ivan Illich gained public attention with his 1971 book Deschooling Society, a radical critique of educational practice in "modern" economies.

Further, Ivan Illich suggests reinventing learning and expanding it throughout society and across persons' lifespans.

Ivan Illich marshalled a body of statistics to show what he considered the shocking extent of post-operative side-effects and drug-induced illness in advanced industrial society.

Ivan Illich introduced to a wider public the notion of iatrogenic disease, which had been scientifically established a century earlier by British nurse Florence Nightingale.

Ivan Illich says that the presence of American "do-gooders" is causing more harm than good.