Having rescued my books from storage when I moved into the new apartment in Morden College and having then arranged them carefully by subject and in alphabetical order of author, I rediscovered many wisdom books from the 60s, 70s and 80s. Glancing through them, it dawned on me that my contemplative Christian spiritual activist self was and is rooted in these books. I’ve also become aware that the flow of books written by Christians rooted in mystical, contemplative prayer, practice and vision effectively came to an end in the 1990s. There are very few Christian wisdom books on my shelves that were published in the last three decades - the wisdom stream has become a trickle within mainstream Christian publishing, “wisdom” having largely evolved into books that traditional Christians would categorise as ‘New Age’.
I’ve begun to re-read the ‘wisdom’ books, books by prophetic, visionary authors tracing the mystical, supernatural, metaphysical dimensions of faith and experience. Encouraged by a number of friends, I’ve started work on a book exploring vision of authors including William James, Mircea Eliade, Thomas Merton, Bede Griffiths, Teilhard de Chardin, F. C. Happold, Peter L. Berger, Theodore Roszak, Anthony de Mello, William Johnson, Matthew Fox and Fritjof Capra.
Where the Wasteland Ends
At the moment I’m re-reading Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society, first published in 1972 and republished with a new Preface in 1989. His book is having an even more powerful effect on me now than it did three and a half decades ago when I bought the 1989 edition. The Waste Land is, of course, the title of T.S. Eliot’s powerful poem published in 1922 exploring themes of disillusionment, despair, and the search for meaning in a post-World War I world.
Roszak was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1933 and died aged 77 at his home in Berkeley, California on July 5, 2011. An American academic and novelist, he first came to prominence in 1969 with the publication of The Making of a Counter Culture, chronicling and exploring the European and North American counterculture of the 1960s.
Roszak’s 1972 Introduction
Roszak begins his 1972 Introduction with a prophetic voice:
“The Last Days were announced to St John by a voice like the sound of many waters. But voice that comes in our day summoning us to play out the dark myth of the reckoning is our meagre own, making casual conversation about the varieties of annihilation . . . the thermonuclear Armageddon, the death of the seas, the vanishing atmosphere, the massacre of the innocents, the universal famine to come . . .Such horrors should be the stuff of nightmare or the merely metaphorical rancours of old prophecy. They aren’t.”
He would seem to have a very dystopic vision of contemporary societies but his concluding “they aren’t” suggests the presence of an optimism that outweighs his pessimism, and indeed, this is what I find in the book:
The religion he refers to is not that of the churches nor the religion of Belief and Doctrine but rather, religion in its perennial sense; ‘The Old Gnosis’, ‘Vision born of transcendent knowledge’, ‘Mysticism’, if you will” – though, he says, “that has become too flabby and unrefined a word to help us discriminate among those rhapsodic powers of the mind from which so many traditions of worship and philosophical reflection flow.”
His purpose in the book is to discover how this, the essential religious impulse, was exiled from our culture, what effect this has had on the quality of our life and the course of our politics, and, he adds, what part the energies of transcendence must now play in saving urban-industrial society from self-annihilation.
The death of God
In 1972 Roszak believed we were long past the time for pretending that the death of God is not a political fact. The repression of the religious sensibilities in our culture has been achieved with much ruthlessness.
The harsh secularisation of consciousness in culture has been attended by an idealism that many of the finest thinkers view not only as inevitable but as a prerequisite of freedom. The major movements of social justice have almost without exception joined in that celebration; drawing on a legitimate anti-clericalism and a healthy cynicism for pie-in-the-sky promises. Thinkers have been fiercely and proudly secular in their politics.
Loss of transcendent energies
Roszak says very few radical leaders of the past two centuries have taken the resulting loss of transcendent energies in society to be a privation as great as any loss due to physical hardship or the violation of personal dignity. It has not, mostly, been experienced as a loss at all, but as an historical necessity to which enlightened people adapt without protest and perhaps even welcome as a positive gain in maturity.
Now, Roszak says, all this is changing. There is a strange new radicalism abroad which refuses to respect the inherited conventions of secular thought and value. He views the religious renewal happening all around as a profoundly serious sign of the times, a necessary phase of the cultural evolution and – potentially - a ‘life-enhancing influence of incalculable value’. He believes this means that where the wasteland ends and where a culture of wholeness and fulfilment begins can at last be seen.
Religious renewal and spiritual regeneration
Roszak’s optimism believes it is the energy of religious renewal that will generate the next politics and perhaps the final radicalism of society. His book is intended to be an independent contribution to “the adventure of spiritual regeneration, a discussion of themes and problems of the religious sensibility” that have long held his attention. His hope is to give this regenerative movement some sense of cultural and sociological location so that its political intelligence may be sharpened.
William Blake, not Marx, says Roszak, is the prophet of our historical horizon. Blake saw in the steady advance of science and its machines a terrifying aggression against precious human potentialities - and especially against the visionary imagination:
“. . . Such is my awful Vision:
I see the Four-fold Man, The Humanity in deadly sleep
And its fallen Emanation, The Spectre and its cruel Shadow.
I see the Past, Present and Future existing all at once
Before me.”
Roszak’s Preface to the 1989 edition
When Roszak was writing Where the Wasteland Ends in the late 1960s the United States was undergoing a period of great social upheaval. It began with the civil rights movement of the late fifties and continued through to the Watergate scandal of the mid-seventies. This upheaval is reflected in his 1989 Preface. By then Roszak was observing two significant developments in global culture. It was becoming clear that the Waste Land Eliot had understood symbolically was in the process of becoming a literal one as the global climate environment began to crumble. Roszak was also aware that “the desiccation of the soul which Eliot lamented in his poem arose from forces of alienation that lay deep within the industrial process and within the scientific worldview which had provided the power behind that process.” By the last quarter of the twentieth century, the demonically anti-human aspects of science had become all too apparent to him.
Roszak notes that “changes of perception, of sensibility, of metaphysical conviction, take place much more slowly than politically revolutionary transfers of power; they evolve, usually under the subtle influence of sages, seers, artists and philosophers. Poets take a very long time getting their bills passed through the parliament of humankind.”
In a later book, Roszak concluded firstly, that our society had developed a more complex and modulated sense of the self that allowed for greater introspection and variety, and secondly, that society had also developed a keener sense of its ecological responsibility. He was convinced the two are one; personal and planetary aspects of the culture that awaits us on the far side of our troubled industrial adventure.
2026
I think something much more alarming is happening in both the personal and planetary aspects of global cultures.
The 2026 reality of Roszak’s 1972 and 1989 anxieties is that the planetary dimension - the troubled industrial adventure - has morphed into what is now an even more deeply troubled AI nightmare. We are losing, or have lost, the power to control what is happening in the development of AI and LLMs.
Roszak anxiety about the personal dimension, that the state of souls was being eroded in a similar way to the state of nature, has for me become a far more serious evolutionary loss. The desiccation of the human soul has continued. We have lost the wisdom stream in Christianity life, teaching and practice. The stream of the last century is now barely a trickle.
Changing Attitude and Unadulterated Love
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