Against the Titans. Peter Nguyen
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