Against the Titans. Peter Nguyen
Delp, in his first play, portrays men in need of conversion to Christ. Such conversion comes not by a violent storming of the heavens, but instead by an act of humility.
In the second play, much like the first, Delp stirs the imagination of his students concerning the meaning of true fulfillment amid desperate situations. In The Mine Workers, the five miners, including a young apprentice, are trapped in a collapsed mine. In the initial aftermath of the implosion, the miners find themselves staring at the corpse of one their co-workers. The surviving miners mourn their friend’s death, as he now leaves behind a wife and two young boys. A couple of the survivors, who attended the dead man’s wedding, reminisce about how he had dreamt of building a happy home. Subsequently, the apprentice, who lost his father in a previous mine accident, expresses his own desires. He would like to taste his mother’s cooking again and to attend his youth group meeting. The foreman consoles the boy, telling him that it is natural to have desires for things great and small because the yearning for happiness is what makes one alive and human. He states that “we have a heart full of longing and homesickness. Our entire life consists of the search for happiness.”53 As the tunnel suffers another implosion, the foreman tells the boy that ultimately the things of this earth will not satisfy one’s yearning for happiness. He says, “Earthly things do not bring peace to the heart. One day somebody has to come and open all the windows, the doors, and the lock to the human heart with his holy eyes. He touches our hearts with his healing hands.”54 The play ends when the last of the miners’ lights goes out.
In the third play, Delp grapples with the question of social justice for workers against the background of increasing technological industrialization, understood as “rationalization.” This term, according to Peukert, refers to the modernization of the economy, including the introduction of new manufacturing methods based on high technology, resulting in the replacement of manual operations by machine tools. The “surge of rationalization” delivered increased production but brought about “health damages” and reduced “the number of working faces.” Furthermore, in the shadow of economic crises, the increased productivity was not met with a corresponding demand. As a result, the numbers of workers employed dropped sharply. It is also important to highlight that rationalization in an era of economic stagnation caused a more pronounced divide “between the skilled and unskilled; between those in regular work and those casually employed or unemployed. Rationalization mitigated against solidarity.”55
Though he would later address the question of solidarity in a more robust manner, while a member of Kreisau Circle, at that point in his life, Delp attributed the inability to find the shared goodness among persons to the problem of moral failure. The main character in this play is a priest who attempts to mediate the confrontation between a director of a factory and his angry workers, whom he had fired before the Christmas holiday due to their complaints about the lack of safety with the new machinery. When the owner threatens to call the police to disperse the gathering of the revolting workers, the priest steps in from the streets and offers to mediate a truce. The fired workers will not hear of it, accusing the priest of speaking from the position of comfort—in possession of “a warm bed, a full stomach, and no hungry mouths to feed”—whereas they “are thrown into the streets” before Christmas as “worthless and vulnerable” persons.56 They charge him of sermonizing but not advocating for a change of any sort. The priest presses on and calls for common ground, saying that much has to change, but the first change must occur in the human heart. The priest agrees that it is not right to have a class of human beings who live off the labor of another class of human beings. Also, Delp has the priest repeat an insight from the previous play—that one has to feed the hunger or longing in one’s heart. The priest states, “Yes, many things are not just. The outside world has to change, but the first change must come from the person’s interior. Things are corrupt on the outside because things got corrupt in the heart.”57 Nevertheless, one of the workers responds, “However, it is not right to shut the door on us before Christmas. Think of our children. How will they celebrate Christmas?”
The worker’s matter-of-fact question leads the priest into a discussion on the essence of Christmas with the desperate men. He asks them, “How should Christmas be celebrated?” To this question, the men responded that Christmas is celebrated with a party for children full of toys and food. The priest affirms that Christmas does include a celebration with family, food, and presents, but he then rhetorically asks the men, “However, tell me, is this truly Christmas? Is this Christmas? When you hear the Christmas bells ringing, does the ringing usher in a celebration of the yearnings for material goods?”58 Going into a soliloquy, the priest says that Christmas is not the feast of treats and gifts, Christmas is the feast of the transformation of the heart. Reading out loud from his breviary, the priest says, “The people who are living in bitter misery and dire straits, a bright light will light up for this people. Behold, the Lord will come, and a great peace will come on earth. Today, the Messiah is born to you, our Savior and Redeemer.”59 Then the priest puts down the prayer book and addresses the workers,
This is Christmas. Christmas is not a sweet fairytale for little children. It is a serious feast that inspires adults to die for it. Christmas involves God entering our lives, taking our hands and bring them to his heart. Christmas is God becoming one of us and setting us free. Nothing else is Christmas.60
In this play, Delp communicated the doctrine of the Incarnation in relation to the liberation of people from the distress and injustices of human existence. The freedom won by Christ involved the restoration of men and women’s capacity to respond to God’s call to be in a relationship with him. Such a response included the possibility of dying for Christ. As such, a youthful Alfred Delp criticized both the domestication of faith by bourgeoisie sentimentality and the reduction of life to materialism. At the young age of twenty-six, Delp was already bringing up the issue of martyrdom, conceived as a fruit of an interior liberating communication between Christ’s heart and the human person’s heart. The question of social justice was included within the message of the Incarnation, but Delp wanted to make clear that genuine salvation came from God, not from human revolution.
Overall, these Advent plays revealed a Delp who was sensitive to the injustice, needs, and travails of people of his time. They showed that he was searching for answers to big questions and represent a critical stage in his intellectual and spiritual development. In these three one-act plays, Delp stood in the tradition of Jesuits who employed theater to dramatize, educate, evangelize, and reflect on human experience.61 Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, understood the theater as a means to reach the unconverted. Ignatius believed it was a dramatic way to assert, encourage, and express human flourishing or “the full promotion of the human person.”62
Delp aimed to use his plays to teach his young students to approach the Christmas Feast with seriousness and to awaken in them the desire to encounter genuine fulfillment in Christ. In particular, he hoped to stir within his students the desire to search for and to meet real joy and the Divine amid desperate, chaotic situations. This aspiration to find meaning amid anxiety, suffering, and death is in significant part due to his grappling with Heidegger’s philosophy, which he was writing on while a regent and would eventually criticize. Moreover, it bears repeating that the shared trait in the writings of Delp and Jünger concerns the question of the act of resoluteness before death. For Delp, the resoluteness entails a self-surrender to God. Whereas for Jünger, overcoming the fear of killing and being killed resolves the challenge of death. The Eternal Advent, with its engagement with searching for meaning amid impending death and apparent meaninglessness, was an imaginative exercise of his thinking on the question of humankind falling under the threat of anxiety.
Delp grappled with the question of deep fulfillment in the face of the sensemaking crises63 which were quite tangible in his time. At that time in late 1933, Germany was still recovering spiritually from the blood-soaked trenches of the First World War. The Great Depression had left a staggering 6 million Germans unemployed. Last but not least, the rise of National Socialism, the appointment of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship in January of 1933, and the Reichstag Fire on February of 1933, which empowered Hitler to suspend civil liberties, eliminate political opposition, and seek dictatorial powers herald the rise of totalitarian nihilism. These events