Against the Titans. Peter Nguyen
cataclysm. Indeed, the drama of finding fulfillment through choosing God amid a sensemaking crisis became a consistent theme throughout his Jesuit ministry. And this drama rose to a crescendo at the end of Delp’s life, when he discerned and decided to bear the name of Christ while imprisoned and awaiting execution.
Another point to consider regarding Alfred Delp’s early years as a Jesuit was that he displayed a sharp critical attitude toward his Jesuit brothers. He was argumentative, which made his confreres wary of him, and there were times when his superiors considered dismissing him.64 When Delp began his regency at Stella Matutina in 1931, he had severe clashes with his superior, Agustin Rösch,65 who would later become provincial of the Upper German Province of the Society of Jesus. Though he was aware of Delp’s intellectual gifts and enormous energy, Rösch found Delp rebellious and intractable. Delp’s boisterous immaturity would later be humbled by imprisonment and transformed gradually by God’s love.
Theology and Young Priest Years: Resisting National Socialism
By the time Delp finished his regency in 1934, the Nazis had taken control of the government in Germany. In April, Delp left Germany to pursue theological studies at Ignatiuskolleg at Valkenburg, in the Netherlands.66 The institution endured financial hardship in the wake of a 1934 Nazi law that forbade sending money outside the country, though the difficulty did not keep Delp from thriving in his theological studies and publishing. The aforementioned Tragic Existence was published in 1935 by Herder.
In December 1935, along with his Jesuit brethren he planned to author The Rebuilding, a publication that would outline the kind of German society that should be established after the demise of National Socialism.67 The book aimed to go beyond the church’s defensive attitude toward the modern world and offer the German people a different way of being. Delp’s Jesuit collaborators formed an impressive group of bright men that included one of Delp’s theology professors—Hugo Rahner—and future scholars such as Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Delp was assigned to write the first chapter, which concerned a description and a genealogy of the crisis of modernity in Germany.68 He was also delegated to write the chapter on political rights, addressing issues of racism, the realities of different communities in a society, the place of the individual in the state, and the importance of the family in society.69 In a letter to his Jesuit brothers, Delp viewed this joint project as crucial because it would witness a mutual sharing of ideas in an era where collaboration in the intellectual and spiritual life was diminished. Moreover, he was excited over the potential of “un-fractured Catholics, alive and awake in their faith, addressing contemporary people,” showing them a path from the current crisis.70 Unfortunately, the book project did not materialize. The outbreak of the war disrupted the collaboration. Delp was executed on February 2, 1945. Hans Urs von Balthasar left the Society of Jesus in 1950. Consequently, any hope of accomplishing this book project fell by the wayside.
In 1935–1936, Delp was the editor of Ignatiuskolleg’s theological journal Chrysologus, which published selected sermons and theological treatises of the Jesuit students of theology. For that academic year, Delp intended to outline the conflict between Catholicism and the neo-pagan aspirations of National Socialism. The 1936 edition of Chrysologus published thirty-eight essays articulating the distinction between Catholicism and Nazism and offered critiques of the Nazis’ depictions of the Divine, the human person, and human society.71 Delp contributed eleven of these sermons.72 As National Socialism was pervading German society, he desired to illustrate to German Catholics the fundamental truths of the Christian faith and to delineate the irreconcilable differences between the teachings and claims of Catholic Christianity and fascism, particularly National Socialism.
Delp’s appeal to his fellow Catholics in the 1936 edition of Chrysologus to reject Nazism’s allure of self-idolization and perversion of freedom was a crucial piece in the Catholic Church’s multifaceted struggle with the temptation of fascism in its soul. According to Renato Moro, Nazism appealed to a minority of Catholics, including the clergy, who longed for transcendence and a broader sense of purpose.73 They saw Nazism as a bulwark against the destabilizing influence of modernity on the person, the family, and the community. Both Catholicism and Nazism, though for different reasons, were against the two other political movements of modernity: liberalism and communism. Catholicism and Nazism regarded the former as individualistic and decadent, valuing the individual over the community. The latter, they judged materialistic and collectivist. Both perceived modernity, again for different reasons, to be what Walter Benjamin describes from the point of view of the Angel of History as:
One single catastrophe which keeps piling upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we called progress.74
The convergences and collusions, in the view of Roger Griffin, between Catholics and Nazis were based on the opposition to modernity’s bewildering, destructive dynamism. Progress—one of modernity’s defining traits—was judged to be corrosive to the bonds of communal life, disseminating isolation, collectivism, and anomie.
Consequently a resentful nationalism, sown in the chaos of the Weimar Republic, bloomed in Nazi Germany. Young adults on the far right in the Weimar Republic, according to Peukert, had grown up with the desire to destroy and replace liberal democracy with a form of “‘socialism’ that would somehow also be ‘national,’ with a strong state and martial ruling ethic.”75 Eric Weitz indicates that the German far right’s socialism, embodied by intellectuals like Oswald Spengler, who wrote about “Prussian socialism” or Ernst Jünger’s “Frontline socialism,” were attempts to transform “the collectivist strains of socialism to the cause of nation [or] race, and to decouple socialism from [Marxist’s] egalitarianism and internationalism.”76 Social Darwinian struggle couched in national and racial terms characterized the socialism of the German far right. Essentially, the constant pressure of modernization and its economic, political, social, and intellectual upheavals produced social anxiety because of the perceived increase in materialism, moral decadence, individualism, and the collapse of the sense of communal life:
Both fascists and Catholics were intensely concerned, not just with the external symptoms of the breakdown of history, but with secular progress’s destruction of meaning and morality. They were acutely aware that, not just violent upheavals in modern history, but modernity itself has stripped human beings living in the West of an overriding worldview.77
Though there was no official collaboration with National Socialism, intersecting concerns led some Catholics to see a useful ally in the Nazis.
Harboring a distrust of the forces of modernization, these Catholics looked to mesh the Catholic faith with fascist ideology and identified fascism, including National Socialism, as an instrument for achieving a Christian civilization.78 That is, they understood Nazism to be a vessel to deliver a Catholic solution to the crisis of modernity, all the while never considering fascist movements, such as the Nazis, to be the outcomes of modernity itself.79 Sadly, they failed to see the profoundly un-Christian notion of the idolatry of the nation-state and the cult of the human will-to-power. Delp’s project to sever conceptual ties between the fascism of National Socialism and the Catholic faith—an important contribution to the Catholic Church in Germany—will be given greater attention in chapter 3. These sermons and essays will be an evolution of his concern with the angst of contemporary humankind threatened by the forces of modernization as articulated in The Eternal Advent and the dangers of overcoming that angst of modern life via the human will, articulated at the end of Tragic Existence:
We will have to get used to the fact that we are living in a world of alienation and that human beings are divorced from each other. There will be persons who preach, dream, and fancy of small gods, who were once humans but wanted to be more, and therefore, became less.80
For the Jesuit Alfred Delp, it was always a matter of course that persons find themselves when