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ОглавлениеWhile giving a talk to his parishioners on the theology of Baptism in the fall of 1941, Alfred Delp, a German Jesuit priest who was executed in 1945, commented on the dilemmas of anxiety and violence engulfing and distorting the human person. Accusing his compatriots of a Promethean hubris, Delp asserted, “The German person approaches life with a titanic pride. He dreams of mastering, harnessing, and subduing life through his own power and strength.”1 This willful pride is nothing less than an attempt to claim divinity for oneself. Delp goes on to describe how the endeavor to seize infinite freedom and power has corrupted people. In contradistinction to the deluded attempt to usurp the role of God, the Holy Spirit in Baptism offers divine life to the human person. This gift of divine life, however, relates the person to a God bound to the Cross, who represents everything that the ethos of Promethean apotheosis spurns: the kenotic disposition to descend to the limitations of creaturely finitude. From Delp’s perspective, one encounters the Divine at the nadir of human existence: “Hoc signo crucis: in the sign of the Cross, one is drawn not just to the ruins [of life], but to the overcoming of the ruins, to new life.”2 In a world governed by vengeance, power, and self-idolatry, through faith and Baptism, the being and doing of men and women are transformed by being placed next to Christ’s Cross. Thus, beginning in Baptism, the Christian way of life concerns the incorporation of humans into a supernatural way of life that confronts the idolatry of power and the resulting paralysis of the human spirit caused by a titanic orientation.
Against the Titans: The Theology and Martyrdom of Alfred Delp addresses the philosophy that drove the Promethean response of the Conservative Revolutionaries to the social crisis in Germany that was the prelude to Nazism. It argues that a theology of Christian martyrdom is the proper mediating force of rehumanization amid the feeling of powerlessness and estrangement in modernity. In Against the Titans, I offer a reading of martyrdom in order to demonstrate that the witness unto death of Alfred Delp, SJ, who resisted the Nazis, is a testimony against the cult of the human will and the rejection of the objective reality of the supernatural realm. Through a comparison with Ernst Jünger,3 an intellectual champion of the Conservative Revolution, I show that Delp, in his fidelity to Christ, even suffering and dying at the hands of the Nazis, witnessed through his life and death as well as his writings to a Christian heroism that opposes the modern age’s “Promethean heroism.” By way of comparison to Jünger’s antidemocratic, war-for-the-sake-of-war way of life, Delp’s life and teaching constitute a more authentic, and no less demanding, existence that comes not from self-mastery but rather from an emptying of self through a radical dependence upon God.
Against Jünger’s active nihilism, Delp envisions an emptying of self—an indiferencia, a spiritual freedom, an unselving—that is accomplished through a life of prayer. Against the Titans also uncovers the Christological and Trinitarian dimensions of Delp’s self-emptying as a means of healing the distorted aspiration to self-idolatry. The most common trait in the writings of Delp and Jünger concerns the question and centrality of the act of resoluteness before suffering and death. In Jünger’s writings, one becomes an authentic person in the resolve to overcome modernity’s fear of death and of killing and be killed. In Delp’s writings and witness, the resoluteness before modernity’s uncertainty with suffering and death involves an obediential response to God to love without remainder. Against the Titans offers readers an exploration of the vital significance of martyrdom as exemplified by Delp.
The book’s arguments address the issues of anxiety and heroism, issues that concerned Delp as he faced the tyranny of National Socialism. Drawing on Delp’s writings, the book takes anxiety as one of modernity’s fundamental conditions and problems, a condition that can lead people either to conduct small and ungenerous lives or to attempt to master existence through power and violence. It seeks to show, through a discussion of Delp’s witness, why it is essential to live heroically, with a willingness to undergo uncertainty, suffering, and death in the modern world. The book thus details critical aspects of Delp’s life and presents his writings as those of a disciple and an intellectual who endeavored to engage his world’s anxiety and to confront the seemingly limitless violence and depravity committed by twentieth-century man.
Methodological Considerations
Against the Titans interweaves the life of a martyr with Christological and Trinitarian theology. To illustrate the need for heroes in a world dominated by the competing influences of an ethos of fear and one of militant zeal, the book stages an interplay between spirituality and theology. It demonstrates how the saving love of God in Christ transforms the interiority of a person through the Spirit. If Christianity is a way of life and not merely an idea, then the Triune God is not a concept but rather the means by which one walks the path as well as the goal of that path.
Therefore, Against the Titans supplements the theology and witness of Alfred Delp with the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar.4 Balthasar recognizes that holy men and women are the living expository and repository of the Christian God, emphasizing that God is encountered through the holiness of persons, who reveal the saving love of God in the Trinitarian movements of self-emptying (kenosis), receptivity, and obedience. Though it would be difficult to make a causal link between Delp and Balthasar, both thinkers recognize in their writings the need for courageous, heroic testimony against what Thomas Merton in his introduction to Delp’s prison writings refers to as the “willfulness, self-assertion, and self-arrogance” of a “Promethean” ethos.5 Moreover, against the backdrop of the titanism of modern humankind, Delp puts forth a Christic “obedience unto death.”6 Delp’s eventual resolve to give his life away is an obediential response to God’s call to love without remainder.
For this reason, Against the Titans utilizes Balthasar’s exposition of the saving love of the Triune God in Jesus Christ under five soteriological motifs, which are centered on the Cross and Resurrection. The five motifs are as follows:
(1) The Son gives himself, through God the Father, for the world’s salvation. (2) The Sinless One “changes places” with sinners. While, in principle, the Church Fathers understood this in a radical sense, it is only in the modern variation of the theories of representation that the consequences are fully drawn out. (3) Man is thus set free (ransomed, redeemed, released). (4) More than this, he is initiated into the divine life of the Trinity. (5) Consequently, the whole process is shown to be the result of an initiative on the part of divine love.7
These five motifs of the Trinity’s saving love in Jesus Christ reveal “the kenosis of divine love” and indicate that human maturation is one of the results of this kenosis. In the context of kenosis, God’s saving love in relation to finite persons is characterized by his self-gift in Jesus Christ. Such self-giving transforms human persons trapped in sin and evil, which obscure the innermost purpose of human existence.
Moreover, for Balthasar, such self-giving is encountered in the person of Jesus, who is the focus of Christian living and in whom we gain access to the Triune God. Christian living is Trinitarian, because the human person's capacity to imitate and be in communion with Christ is given to him or her by the Spirit, who is sent by Christ, the divine–human mediator who intercedes for human beings with the Father. The gift of the Spirit, who assists humans in their prayer, worship, and loving deeds for others, is the result of the fruit of the saving event of the Paschal Mystery. For Balthasar, in the event of the Incarnation and in Christ’s existence leading up to His crucifixion and Resurrection, Jesus surrenders himself to the Spirit, whom He receives from the Father. At the consummation of his mission, Christ breathes forth the Spirit to the Father and upon the world, and as the resurrected Christ, Jesus gives the Spirit as the fruit of his work of redemption on the Cross. Jesus entrusts His Spirit to the Church so that we can share in the freedom brought about by His Resurrection.
Against the Titans is indebted to recent scholarship on Balthasar’s theology by Timothy Yoder, Matthew Möser, and Fr. John Cihak. Yoder’s “Hans Urs von Balthasar and Kenosis: The Pathway to Human Agency”8 investigates the kenotic motif in Balthasar’s theology in the light of human agency. It argues that the disposition of self-emptying is the path to true human flourishing. Möser’s Love Itself Is Understanding: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of the Saints 9 examines Balthasar’s treatment of the saints as agents of the truth of God. The book considers the witnesses of the saints as sources for theological and philosophical reflections. Cihak’s Balthasar and Anxiety 10 deepens Balthasar’s own work on the redemption of anxiety.11 Cihak’s book investigates the phenomenon of anxiety in the modern world and offers a Balthasarian theological response to the problem of anxiety.
With all this in mind, Against the Titans characterizes Delp’s heroic resistance against the Nazis and witness unto death as being transformed and configured to Christ through the Spirit. His transformation includes the difficult redemption of his anxiety while in prison. He struggled to give himself away at the end of his life as he confronted the fear of uncertainty, loneliness, and impending death. His ability to cast himself on God is the result of his encounter and experience with Christ. Delp’s path back to God does not happen without the Spirit, who incorporates Delp in the redemptive work of Christ. Moreover, the book utilizes Delp’s prison meditations on the Heart of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the saints and martyrs of the Advent and Christmas seasons to weave a Trinitarian-inspired bulwark against the titanic orientation of fascism.
Against the Titans also draws on Thomas R. Nevin, Thomas Rohkrämer, and Roger Griffin’s scholarship on the controversial godfather of the German extreme right, Ernst Jünger.12 Nevin’s Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914–1945 13 examines the writer’s first fifty years from the late Wilhelmine era of the Kaiser to the end of Hitler’s Third Reich. Nevins addresses the memoirs of the highly decorated First World War lieutenant who was highly regarded by Hitler and the Nazis. Nevins also sheds light on Jünger’s political writings, which fiercely criticize democracy and herald the rise of an authoritarian militarist regime united with technology. Nevins offers a portrait of a man who, though he possessed extreme-right leanings, refused to join the Nazi movement and withdrew from political activism during the 1930s. In portraying Jünger as Germany’s living conscience during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic, Nevins in effect depicts Germany’s attempt at suicide as it marched toward and under the banner of the swastika.
Rohkrämer’s A Single Communal Faith? The German Right from Conservatism to National Socialism 14 examines the German political right’s radicalization in response to people’s desire for identity and belonging in a world lacking metaphysical security. Among the leaders of the Conservative Revolution, the book counts Ernst Jünger, who aimed to replace the Weimar Republic with an authoritarian, nationalist regime in order to give persons a sense of purpose.
Griffin views fascism as a revolutionary form of modernity bent on mobilizing all healthy social and political energies to resist the onslaught of decadence to achieve the goal of national rebirth.15 Within this framework, the orgy of destruction which accompanied the rise of the Third Reich was not wanton nihilism but rather the will to destroy in order to build something new and stronger.16 Griffin places Jünger’s writings and activism on the spectrum of such reactionary modernism. For Griffin, Jünger championed a heroic, Promethean image of humanity, awakening in the German people the desire to seize divine power, freedom, and knowledge through technological mastery.17 The First World War, with its militarization and nationalism of the masses, acted as an ideological accelerator, and the sensemaking crises of Western society during the interwar period acted as an incubator for the desire to reduce the old and the decadent to ashes in order to construct a new Phoenix. Jünger’s heralding of the new human as a technocratic, militant Titan is vital for comprehending the attitude that empowered the rise of Nazism.
Overall, Against the Titans interprets Delp’s witness and writings in sharp contrast to Jünger’s Promethean mentality in order to explore the following question: Why is it essential to live heroically in the modern world, including a heroism that is willing to undergo uncertainty, suffering, and death? In a certain manner, fascism, according to Griffin, can be understood, as an “attempt to resolve the existential crisis of modern society by replacing a morally bankrupt age of decadent individualists with a new age based on the heroic man.”18 Such type of human being would live out modernity not in a materialistic, calculative manner but in a communal spirit of extreme courage that holds no fear of death.19 For this reason, Jünger’s homage to a new race of warrior or Titan helps to understand the ethos that led Germany into Nazism.
Against the Titans maintains that a life of heroic Christian witness, a life lived under the guidance of the Spirit, incorporating one into Christ’s redemptive mission, can remedy either an active nihilism or a modern life weighed down by anxiety. Delp’s experience with the resistance movement, his imprisonment, and his trial were all parts of a spiritual journey that entailed a self-surrender to Christ. Delp recognized that the way forward would proceed not from heroic actions based on his own prowess but rather from a heroism rooted in an ongoing lived encounter with Christ in prayer enabled by the Spirit. Such a relationship would be neither an occasion for an escapist fantasy nor a reckless suicidal mission. It demanded the conversion and surrender of Delp’s whole self to Christ. Surrender of the self, even unto death, in which human persons achieve their deepest identity, consists not of the destruction of the self but the veritable realization of the self as created by God.
Delp’s personal writings provide essential material for the book’s theological examination of the saving relationship that animates Delp’s efforts to remain faithful to God, to his fellow imprisoned members of the Kreisau Circle, and to his self-identity during difficult times. The book draws on primary sources from Alfred Delp’s writings, spanning his earliest writings in 1933 up to the writings preceding his execution on February 2, 1945; English translations throughout are my own.
The vast majority of these writings are found in Alfred Delp: Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1 bis Band 5.20 The secondary sources include Mary Frances Coady’s biography With Bound Hands: A Jesuit in Nazi Germany: The Life and Selected Prison Letters of Alfred Delp,21 Roman Bleistein’s intellectual biography Alfred Delp: Geschichte eines Zeugen,22 and Andreas Schaller’s study of Delp’s theological anthropology, Lass dich los zu Deinem Gott.23 Other sources include a recently discovered retreat talk on the Feast of the Veneration of the Cross24 and some of his homilies and prison letters translated into English—Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings, 1941–1944 25 and Alfred Delp, S.J: Prison Writings.26
Central Terms
Against the Titans draws from several schools of thought, each of which uses a distinct technical language. Although I make a careful effort to define terms throughout the book, several terms need to be clarified at the outset.
The theme of prayer is significant in Delp’s writings. He understands prayer as the path to true freedom and the most critical service he can offer other persons. Prayer as openness to transformation is a work of the Spirit within the human person, not just a creaturely activity. Encountering the saving love of God in Christ and being in a relationship with God cannot be the result of human achievement because of the ontological chasm between the Creator and the creature. For Aristotle, the deepest friendship occurs between two equals,27 which in the pagan world precludes the potential of intimacy between God and human persons. The possibility of friendship between God and the human person within the Christian tradition, however, comes from the Holy Spirit working through the prayer of the Christian person.28 Human persons cannot earn their way into a transformative relationship with Christ; rather, the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Christ, is poured out upon the person in prayer.29 The Spirit comes to make His home in and change the person, who then comes into communion with Christ: the Spirit gives and sustains the love of Christ within Delp, making it ever more real and intensifying its significance in his life. As a consequence of the work of the Spirit, Delp gains firsthand knowledge of the Christological encounter, and the Spirit makes a relationship with Christ a lived experience that is the source of his freedom. Accordingly, Christian martyrdom, as exemplified by Delp, proceeds from the initiative of God and is the ultimate act of human freedom, which bears witness to communion with God.
In Tegel Prison, Delp speaks of the devotion to the Heart of Jesus as the offer of a friendship that seeks the world’s lost and wretched.30 In one of his earliest homilies, he articulated that Christian salvation is friendship with Christ.31 For Delp, Christ’s offer of self-sacrificial friendship enables us to respond by giving our lives to others. The concept of friendship elaborated in Delp’s homily is drawn from the Gospel of John, which refers to the giving of one’s life for others because one has been drawn into intimacy with Jesus Christ.32 The Gospel of John indicates that for Jesus, friendship is the most profound relationship of the human person with God and with others, because a friend is immediately understood as “one who loves.” This connection between friendship and a love on the basis of which one is willing to lay down one’s life for another is vital for understanding Delp’s martyrdom. Because Jesus’ whole life is an incarnation of the ideal of friendship, the pattern of his life and death transforms the saying of John’s Gospel from an idea to an embodied gift. The friendship that Jesus displays, one that leads him to lay down his life for humanity, is not only a model for human love and friendship; it becomes the source of Christian freedom and of a profound fellowship that gives rise to the possibility of giving one’s life for others. The devotion to the Heart of Jesus teaches Delp that faith is a form of courage and selfless giving in the midst of anxiety and violence.
The theme of anxiety pervades many of Delp’s writings. He uses the German words Not and Angst to convey this theme. Not can mean “need,” “want,” “necessity,” “trouble,” “difficulty,” “peril,” “danger,” and “emergency.” Angst can mean “anxiety,” “fear,” “anguish,” “phobia,” and “dread.” Anxiety surfaces in Delp’s first writings, respectively in 1933 and 1935, with his play The Eternal Advent 33 and book Tragische Existenz,34 both of which deal with humankind confronting the fear of death, particularly violent death, and the dread of an existence without meaning. Delp uses the term Not to refer to a particular fear of a current or looming troubling event that one is unable to escape. In Delp’s writings, Angst refers to a general disposition of fear or dread in the human condition that perceives the universe as violent, arbitrary, and veering toward an abyss of nothingness. According to Cihak’s Balthasar and Anxiety, fear of an identifiable object can be considered a form of anxiety, which is understood as a fundamental condition of contemporary humanity.35 For Delp and Cihak, God redeems humanity from anxiety by joining himself to humanity’s anxiety. Consequently, human redemption entails confronting anxiety by surrendering oneself to Christ as opposed to avoiding anxiety or overcoming it with a militant divinization of the self.
The theme of self-surrender plays a particularly strong role in Delp’s prison writings. In his prison meditations on the Christmas season, Delp describes the saints and martyrs associated with the season as persons who surrendered themselves to God. They made themselves available to God’s call and obeyed the mission that God gave them. Their openness and willingness to do God’s will indicate a commitment of self to a being greater than them. The saint’s commitment to God is a response to God’s love in Jesus Christ. Moreover, the commitment of one’s very self to the mission, according to Delp, brings forth genuine human fulfillment or selfhood. In his letters and spiritual writings, Delp uses terms such as “dedication,” “self-surrender,” “self-giving,” “self-abandonment,” and “self-sacrifice” to describe the particular Christian experience of self-emptying that took place in his life, especially during his imprisonment. Against the Titans connects this group of words to the term kenosis. In Christian theology, kenosis describes a specific self-emptying of Christ that includes His self-sacrificial death on the Cross for the love of humankind. This definitive form of divine self-giving establishes a kenotic disposition for discipleship that leads to a life of service and counters the Promethean attitude of titanism.
In his writings, Delp time and again accuses his fellow Germans of a “titanic pride,” a sentiment that alludes to Goethe’s protagonist Faust, whose thirst for infinite knowledge and power led to his corruption. In Delp’s writings, the concept refers to an egoism that attempts to seize Godlike power, freedom, and knowledge. Such a proclivity leads to a disposition of reckless violence that consumes the human person. Delp charges Ernst Jünger with representing such a disposition of violence stemming from a titanic pride. Against the Titans utilizes the term “Titanism” to describe such a disposition.
Hans Urs von Balthasar uses the term similarly to represent contemporary humanity’s tragic rebellion against God.36 He describes the condition of the modern person as an attempt to achieve unrestrained self-divinization. Whereas authentic human existence, according to the Christian faith, involves a disposition of receptivity, thanksgiving, and self-emptying; people are now characterized by their striving for power and the endeavor to make themselves the center of the universe. Of course, the titans of the twentieth century sought to storm the heavens in vain; their strivings led to cataclysmic disasters that threatened to engulf the world. Roger Griffin describes Jünger’s writings as attempts to forge a Promethean human from the ashes and slaughter of the First World War. Such humans would wed themselves to technology and wrest control of the world from anything that would attempt to limit them. Hence, Griffin ties the mentality of titanism to that of fascism.
Delp composed all of his writings under the fascist tyranny of National Socialism. Griffin defines fascism as an ideological movement that advances a radical alternative to the liberal37 and Marxist visions of modernity and attempts to anchor people within an uber-nationalist, totalitarian state with its aggressive social control and engineering.38 Fascism rejects the materialism and collectivism of Marxist socialism, and it spurns the materialism and individualism of a morally bankrupt liberalism. Fascism opposes all aspects of modernity associated with what it perceives to be decadent: pluralism, equality, materialism, and the pursuit of comfort.
Nonetheless, these rejections of certain aspects of modernity do not preclude fascists from experiencing a deep awe at the transforming power of modern technology once it is purged of decadence. Griffin states, “Hitler's Reich was inconceivable without modern forces such as massification, social engineering, bureaucratization, the technologizing of warfare, social Darwinism, nationalism, and racism. The Reich was a permutation of modernity.”39 On these grounds, according to Griffin, fascism cannot be seen as conservative or traditional, because it is a movement to liberate a particular segment of humanity from any traditional religious mores or any Enlightenment principles of the equality of every human being.
Finally, the theme of modernity pervades Against the Titans. In his writings, Delp views modernity as an age riddled with immanentism, anxiety, the commodification of relationships,40 and a will-to-power. In his judgment, National Socialism is the fruit of an erroneous line of ideological developments in Western civilization, one that starts with ego-cogito of the Enlightenment and entails the loss of God and genuine personhood, leading to anomie, estrangement, and massification.41 In short, Nazism radicalizes the malaises of modernity. That said, Delp does not see modernity as irredeemable. As a member of the Kreisau Circle, he puts forth a blueprint of a post-war Germany envisioned as a liberal democratic society, where justice could prevail if there is a recovery of the Divine and moral life.
Delp’s evaluation notwithstanding, let us establish a more empirical and descriptive definition of the elusive term “modernity.” Drawing from Detlev J.K. Peukert, modernity is the form of a fully fledged industrialized society that has emerged in the early twentieth century and has become global in its scale.42 In the economic sphere, modernity is distinguished by rationalized industrial production, complex technological infrastructures, and bureaucratic administration. In its social and cultural life, modernity is defined by the division of labor, urbanization, mass media, and mass consumption. Instrumental reason, the pervasiveness of techno-science, and the belief in progress characterize its intellectual sphere. The term “modernization” describes the complex interwoven set of unceasing changes on human existence due to the growth of industrialization, increasing urbanization, and mass media and mass consumption’s commodification of relationships.
Since we are wrestling with fascism as a historical movement of modernity, I advert once more to Roger Griffin, who argues that fascism is a revolutionary form of nationalism that reorders the forces of modernization to construct a secular utopia. Modernity, according to Griffin, is the product of a complex and ongoing interaction between particular forms of traditional society and special forces of modernization stemming from the Enlightenment. Griffin notes that modernization constitutes transformations in the ideological, technical, political, social, and economic realms.43 Ideological changes, for Griffin, include the expansion of Enlightenment humanism, the myth of progress, the cult of techno-science, the rise of materialism and consumerism, and the dominance of instrumentalized rationality. Technological shifts involve the industrialization of production and the arrival of the military complex and the professionalization of war. Political changes entail the entry of the masses into the political arena, the emergence of the nation-state with its centralization of power, the bureaucratization of power, the establishment of a planned society and economy, and the growth of state-employed military violence and social engineering. Social transformations involve the urbanization of living, the spread of literacy, the growth of the division of labor, the ascent of individualism, and the breakdown of the extended family. Economic changes entail the rise of laissez-faire individualism and the commodification of existence.
Given all this, fascism with its promise to provide stability and common purpose constituted a seduction for many persons. For a number of Europeans in the early twentieth century, the effects of these transformations, including the impression of being torn “from traditional communities” and their comforting worldviews, and “the creeping sense of isolation and anomie” left behind a wreckage of existence.44 Consequently, modernity’s disembedding of the human person helped to fuel deep-seated anxiety. Fascism, in the view of Griffin, becomes one response to the uncertainties caused by modernity and is a reordering of the forces of modernization to create a new sociopolitical order based on a heroic will-to-violence ethos. For this reason, Delp judged that the crisis of modernity that spawned fascism could not be overcome unless Christianity helps persons recover their moral agency and the sense of the world as gifted from God and ordered to divine justice.
Procedure
Chapter 1 introduces the witness of Alfred Delp, SJ, who resisted and was martyred by the Nazis. It demonstrates that sustained and guided by the Spirit, Delp increasingly lived in response to the living Christ in such a way that he emptied himself in the service of others, which is understood as “Christian heroism.” The chapter is divided into three major sections. The first section sketches Alfred Delp’s early life and life as a Jesuit in formation. The second section presents Delp’s time in theology and his early priestly ministry and writing, including his work with the anti-Nazi resistance group—the Kreisau Circle. The third section details Delp’s imprisonment, trial, sentencing, and prison reflection from that poignant period in his life.
With the aid of recent scholarship, chapter 2 elucidates the writings of Ernst Jünger, one of the twentieth century’s most controversial authors. A decorated front-line officer of the First World War, a Conservative Revolutionary intellectual of the interwar period, and a military officer during the Second World War, Jünger was an outspoken critic of liberal democracy and its aspirations to comfort and equality. I show how he made militant heroism appealing by examining the Nietzsche-inspired writings of his experience in the First World War,45 his political journalism during the interwar period,46 and his attempts to harmonize an extreme-right desire for an authoritarian state with modern industry and technology in two of his works from the 1930s, The Worker 47 and On Pain.48 Drawing on Balthasar, it argues that Jünger’s philosophy sees deeply into the dark soul of modernity and embodies its disontents.
Chapter 3 treats Delp’s engagement of Nazism as a radical distortion of the modern age. The chapter consists of four major sections. The first section introduces Delp’s understanding of self-emptying as encountered in his 1941 homily on the martyrdom of St. Stephen. The second section discusses Delp’s 1936 sermons on the relationship between finite and infinite freedom.49 They criticize German society’s absolutization of human liberty. The third section examines Delp’s “War as an Intellectual Achievement,”50 and “On the Image of the Human Person in the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus.”51 Published in the Jesuit journal Stimmen der Zeit, the former is an article in which he confronts and condemns the aestheticization and glorification of war. The latter, a retreat talk given to brother Jesuits, includes a criticism of Jünger’s savage heroism. The fourth section engages Delp’s writings on the role of Christians in the modern world. It engages “The Christian Understanding of the World,” which is a series of three talks that Delp gave in the autumn of 1942, in which he addresses the relevance of Christian service and witness in a militant secular world.52 This section also examines his writings for the anti-Nazi resistance group, the Kreisau Circle, that envision a post-Nazi democratic German society enlivened by Christian principles. It concludes with a discussion on “Trust in the Church,” a paper given in autumn of 1941, wherein Delp laments the lack of heroic witness from the Catholic hierarchy against Nazism.53 Collectively, these texts warn against the dangers of people making themselves the center of the world, absorbing the world into their horizon, and instrumentalizing the world for their own desires. With the help of Balthasar, this chapter demonstrates that a proper response to the distorted human desire “to be as gods” is to show that existence is itself a gift to be received, nurtured, and surrendered.
Chapters 4 and 5 deepen and sharpen Delp’s rich theology of discipleship as kenosis in relationship to Christology and Trinitarian theology. In particular, chapter 4 examines Delp’s meditations on the Sacred Heart devotion in conjunction with Balthasar’s Trinitarian theology. The chapter consists of five sections. The first section opens with a discussion of Delp’s homily on the Fourth Sunday of Lent from 1943, which grapples with the theme of anxiety and suggests that the remedy to the problem of anxiety is found in an encounter with God in Christ, who underwent human anxiety and redeemed it.54 The second section examines Delp’s 1938 retreat journal from his tertianship, where he made the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.55 The diary introduces us to Delp’s devotion to the Heart of Jesus, imbuing his thought with a spirituality of kenosis that would play a significant role during his imprisonment. The third section analyzes his two prison meditations on the Sacred Heart.56 These meditations communicate that the heart paralyzed by anxiety or the heart seduced by a reckless hubris is renewed toward an essential intactness when the innermost core of the believer is configured to the innermost core of God through prayerful dialogue with Christ. The self-emptying love of Christ re-creates persons as “sons and daughters” of God. The fourth section discusses Delp’s 1942 homily on the Sacred Heart.57 This homily expresses the belief that being a child of God in the face of sin does not mean that one foists the Cross on others but instead that one takes up a personal cross in the name of Christ’s Cross—in order to bear the anguish and destitution of others. The fifth section returns to the theme of an encounter with Christ; it examines an undated homily on the Massacre of the Innocents. In this homily, Delp exhorts Christians not to turn away from tragedies but to encounter Christ precisely in the victims of the world. Delp’s call to be in solidarity, to defend, and protect the vulnerable completes the logic of self-emptying love encountered in Delp’s writings on the Sacred Heart.
Chapter 5 argues for the importance of the Holy Spirit in the maturation of Delp’s discipleship. The redemptive work of Christ becomes intelligible in the context of the Spirit. One does not achieve the status of being a child of God in the face of sin through one’s own achievements and virtues. The chapter consists of four sections. The first section in conjunction with Balthasar’s pneumatology explores Delp’s prison meditation on the Third Person of the Trinity, in which he writes that the Spirit renews persons, bringing them into the inner attitude of Christ.58 The second section examines the Christian life under the guidance of the Spirit. Delp’s writings on the Spirit’s role in redeeming the world from the grips of totalitarianism include his meditations on the saints and martyrs of the Advent and Christmas seasons,59 his parish talks on the sacraments of Confirmation,60 Holy Orders,61 and Eucharist,62 and a parish retreat talk on the spiritual meaning of the Cross.63 Collectively, these writings offer an anthropology that emphasizes a courageous kenotic disposition amid anguish, doubt, and violence. The last section brings Delp’s writings on the Christian life informed by the Spirit into dialogue with Balthasar’s theology of the saints. This chapter concludes by acknowledging the kenotic dynamic at work in Delp’s life, prayer, and witness. When read together, the writings on the Heart of Christ, the Spirit, the saints and martyrs, and the sacraments represent a spiritual bulwark against the titanic orientation of fascism. Instead of summoning the will-to-power, the saint or martyr amid adversity and anxiety takes up the yoke of others, not his or her own, and participates in the great work of redemption whose author is God alone.
Against the Titans concludes by asserting that in a world where power has such a hold on our imagination, Alfred Delp’s life is a counter-witness to this tendency. The journey into real personhood is rooted in the gift of self, offered in service to God and neighbor. Far from understanding care for the destitute and persecuted as a feeble act, Delp views it as an act that requires nothing less than a great heart. Such an understanding of being human, which leaves no room for half-heartedness or mediocrity, is a fitting response to an age marked by both a profound anxiety and a will-to-violence ethos.
NOTES
1. Alfred Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 3: Predigten und Ansprachen, ed. Roman Bleistein (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1985), 303.
2. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 3, 314.
3. A decorated frontline officer of the First World War, Conservative Revolutionary intellectual of the interwar period, and military officer during the Second World War, Jünger was an outspoken critic of liberal democracy and its goal of comfort and equality. During the Weimar Republic, Jünger proved to be a prolific writer, writing five books and over one hundred essays as well as editing a collection of essays on the experience of the First World War. His writings advanced a post–World War I German far-right ideology. He made appealing a militant heroism in his antiliberal writings based on his experience in the First World War, his anti–Weimar Republic essays in far-right newspapers and journals, and his 1930s books The Worker and On Pain, which attempted to harmonize an extreme-right desire for an authoritarian state with modern industry and technology. In his writings, Jünger called for a type of German man who would be willing to seek death for his country in military adventures.
4. It is important to note that though Alfred Delp overlapped with Hans Urs von Balthasar at Stimmen der Zeit in the latter half of 1939 and planned a collaborative project with Balthasar and Karl Rahner, a greater intimacy existed between Delp and Rahner. Besides, there existed a tension between Balthasar and Rahner. In The Moment of Christian Witness, Balthasar argues that Rahner’s theology, particularly his concept of the anonymous Christian, could never sustain a heroic Christian witness in the modern world. He accuses Rahner of lacking a confident faith amidst growing Enlightenment secularism. As such, Balthasar’s theology of martyrdom, as Philip Endean argues, is unrealistic and ahistorical in light of Alfred Delp, who struggled with bouts of anxiety and self-doubt at the end of his life. Against the Titans acknowledges that Balthasar’s criticism of Rahner, particularly in The Moment of Christian Witness, is unfair and meanspirited. That said, Against the Titans puts Balthasar’s ideas in dialogue with Delp’s. It will demonstrate that Delp’s writings concerning anxiety, self-emptying, and discipleship amidst the modern age’s Promethean heroism dovetail well with Balthasar’s theology. For more of Endean’s analysis of Delp, Balthasar, and Rahner see Philip Endean, “Von Balthasar, Rahner, and the Commissar,” New Blackfriars 79, no. 923 (1998): 33–38; “A Symbol Perfected in Death,” The Way 43, no. 4 (2004): 67–82.
5. Thomas Merton, “Introduction,” in Alfred Delp, SJ: Prison Writings (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), xxxiv.
6. Merton, “Introduction,” xxxii.
7. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama IV: Theological Dramatic Theory: The Action, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 317.
8. Timothy Yoder, “Hans Urs von Balthasar and Kenosis: The Pathway to Human Agency” (PhD diss., Loyola University Chicago, 2013).
9. Matthew A. Rothaus Möser, Love Itself Is Understanding: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of the Saints (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016).
10. John R. Cihak, Balthasar and Anxiety (New York: T & T Clark, 2009).
11. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian and Anxiety (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000).
12. Ernst Jünger’s life covers one hundred years (1895–1998) and five eras of contemporary German history: the late Wilhelmine era, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, Germany divided, and the new Germany. Against the Titans focuses on Jünger’s violent, militant writings during the Weimar Republic. Though there was an initial sympathy toward the Nazis, the book recognizes that Jünger rejected Hitler’s overture to join the Nazis. That said, Jünger’s biting criticism of liberalism, hubristic desire for power through technology, and idolatry of war permit a glimpse into the unstable era of the 1920s and 1930s.
13. Thomas R. Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
14. Thomas Rohkrämer, A Single Communal Faith? The German Right from Conservatism to National Socialism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007).
15. Roger Griffin, A Fascist Century, ed. Matthew Feldman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), xii.
16. Griffin, A Fascist Century, 42.
17. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 165.
18. Roger Griffin, Fascism, Key Concepts in Political Theory (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018), 47.
19. Griffin describes the methodological attempt to penetrate the fascist self-understanding as empathy. Methodological empathy allows one to enter the worldview of the protagonist of fascism. Adopting this approach does not mean that one accepts the fascist value-system. Griffin, Fascism, Key Concepts in Political Theory, 36–39.
20. Alfred Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1: Geistliche Schriften, ed. Roman Bleistein (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1982); Alfred Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 2: Philosophische Schriften, ed. Roman Bleistein (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1983); Alfred Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 3: Predigten und Ansprachen, ed. Roman Bleistein (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1983); Alfred Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 4: Aus dem Gefängnis, ed. Roman Bleistein (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1985); Alfred Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 5: Briefe – Texte – Rezensionen, ed. Roman Bleistein (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1988).
21. Mary Frances Coady, With Bound Hands: A Jesuit in Nazi Germany: The Life and Selected Prison Letters of Alfred Delp (Chicago, Ill: Jesuit Way, 2003).
22. Roman Bleistein, Alfred Delp: Geschichte eines Zeugen (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1989).
23. Andreas Schaller, Lass dich los zu deinem Gott: Eine theologische Studie zur Anthropologie von Alfred Delp SJ (Freiburg: Herder, 2012).
24. Günther Saltin, “Das Kreuz-Geheimnis Gottes und Lebensordnung des Menschen. Ein bisher nicht veröffentlicher Entwurf zu einem Einkehrtag: Bearbeitung und Kommentar,” in Alfred-Delp-Jahrbuch, vol. 4 (Berlin: Lit Verlag Dr. W. Hopf, 2010).
25. Alfred Delp, Advent of the Heart: Seasonal Sermons and Prison Writings, 1941–1944 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006).
26. Alfred Delp, Alfred Delp, S.J.: Prison Writings (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004).
27. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 8, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002), 143–62.
28. See Romans 8:26: “In the same way, the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings” (NAB).
29. See Romans 5:5: “And the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (NAB).
30. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 4, 243.
31. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 158.
32. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give to you. This I command you, to love one another” (John 15:12–17; NAB).
33. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 51–68.
34. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 3, 39–148.
35. Cihak, Balthasar and Anxiety, 2–3.
36. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama II: Theological Dramatic Theory: The Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 420–26.
37. The word “liberal” refers to liberalism, which as a philosophy espouses the primacy of individuals over social groups. It encourages the individual to choose his or her good life. It favors natural and spontaneous social relations over ones that are institutionalized and imposed. In terms of political theory, liberalism embraces the modern state founded on limited government and the autonomy of the individual, understood as liberal democracy. Nonetheless, the variants of liberal democracy that emerged in the “West” are not synonymous with modernity, but rather one contingent form of it. See Griffin, A Fascist Century, 30.
38. Ibid., 32.
39. Ibid., 42.
40. In Delp’s writings, “commodification of relationships” describes how persons are no longer treated as ends but means. People are prostituted for profit or ideology.
41. “Massification” refers to the swallowing up of the individual into the state or an ideological movement.
42. Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 81–83.
43. Griffin, A Fascist Century, 26–28.
44. Ibid., 28.
45. Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis, fourth edition (Berlin: Mittler & Sohn, 1929); Ernst Jünger, Copse 125: A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of 1918 (New York: Howard Fertig, 2003).
46. Ernst Jünger, Politische Publizistik 1919–1933, ed. Sven Olaf Berggötz (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001).
47. Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Form, trans. Laurence Paul Hemming and Bogdan Costea (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017).
48. Ernst Jünger, On Pain, trans. David C. Durst (New York: Telos Press, 2008).
49. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 111–94.
50. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 2, 239–48.
51. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 213–36.
52. Ibid., 284–96.
53. Ibid., 263–83.
54. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 3, 188–98.
55. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 245–62.
56. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 4, 242–62.
57. Delp, Advent of the Heart, 79–86.
58. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 4, 263–306.
59. Delp, Advent of the Heart, 21–32.
60. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 3, 317–31.
61. Ibid., 347–60.
62. Ibid., 361–77.
63. Saltin, “Das Kreuz-Geheimnis Gottes und Lebensordnung des Menschen. Ein bisher nicht veröffentlicher Entwurf zu einem Einkehrtag: Bearbeitung und Kommentar,” 98–104.
