Against the Titans. Peter Nguyen
und Kommentar,” 98–104.
Alfred Delp’s Faith and Ministries
The Situation of the Witness
Ernst Jünger, one of Germany’s most controversial twentieth-century writers, was an intellectual shock trooper for the burgeoning extreme-right movement in Germany in the years between the First and Second World Wars. A decorated soldier of the First World War, an activist of the interwar period, and a military officer during the Second World War, Jünger was an outspoken critic of the Weimar Republic’s ideals of liberty, ease, and comfort. He saw the nihilism of European civilization as a whole in the modern individual’s sensitivity to pain and inward acts of cowardice.1 At the conclusion of Storm of Steel, his autobiographical account of trench warfare, he writes, “Today we can no longer understand the martyrs who threw themselves into the arena. They were superior to all humanity, all phases of pain and fear. Their faith today, however, no longer exercises a living force.”2 Here Jünger perceived early twentieth-century Christianity as a spent faith, surrendered to bourgeois values. If a faith community no longer moves its members to sacrifice themselves, then it will wither away and die, becoming irrelevant in the world. The decline of contemporary Christianity, according to Jünger, serves as a warning for any society wishing to increase its greatness: it must nurture in persons the desire and hardness to sacrifice their lives to bear fruit for the body politic.
As such, “modern life”3 mediocritizes and hinders a nation’s capacity to produce the type of men who seek a heroic destiny, even in death. Jünger regarded the will-to-power as the central drive in human life and was committed to destroying democracy. He advocated in its place an authoritarian nationalism and affirmed the centrality of total war and the quest for power in the human condition. He considered that war-making would reveal the essential aspects of the human condition, standing at odds with modern civilization, which numbed and buried the authentic human in material comforts.
Nonetheless, Jünger found utility in modern technology and industrialization and saw in them the means to increase human power. Jünger anticipated that the combination of humanity’s elemental drive for conflict and modern technology would inevitably give rise to a state that was organized along the lines of a modern army at war—being “steel-like, dictatorial, and total.” An entire nation geared for total war and “planetary dominion” would necessitate the end of a pluralistic society and enforce a homogenization of peoples.4 Anyone not committed to the functionality of war and the quest for power would perish.5
According to Jünger, only a people deeply committed to destroying democracy, abandoning the pursuit of material happiness for the heroic destiny of planetary dominion, would be appropriate to ushering in a new age. The hero of Jünger’s world is the “Titanic figure,” an allusion to Nietzsche’s Superman and the pre-Olympian Titans of Greek mythology. The titans attempted to seize power and mastery over self, others, and nature. Jünger’s titans were considered demigods and enemies of the gods; they strove for power that did not originally belong to them. Negatively construed, the titans’ assault on the Olympus of the world would fashion a cataclysm. For Jünger, if the titans endured, they would triumph in the disaster. If the titans fell, then they would die a heroic death, manifesting the overcoming of the fear of suffering and death itself. Though Jünger rejected National Socialism’s racism and antisemitism and never became a Nazi, his dystopic vision founded on an absolutism and militarism provides a window into the intellectual and political mentality that led Germany into totalitarianism and war.
In contrast to Jünger and his exploitation of the discontent of the modern and advocation of a totalitarian state that became too real, a German Jesuit priest Alfred Delp at the end of the Second World War decided to offer his life in obedience to God’s will and for the betterment of others. Delp was executed for high treason on February 2, 1945, for being a leading member of an anti-Nazi resistance group—the Kreisau Circle.6 In a letter to his Jesuit brethren after being sentenced to death, Delp wrote,
I must relinquish and empty7 myself. It is time for the sowing, not the harvest. God sows and he will reap. I want, at least, to fall into the earth and the hands of God as a fruitful and healthy seed. I need to arm myself against the pain and melancholy that sometimes strikes me. If the Lord God desires this path—and everything points to it—then I must walk it freely and without bitterness. May others live better and happier because we died.8
This passage communicates a Christian paradox: the formation and the loss of the self.9 Delp discerned that he was being asked to surrender himself to God—the source of his existence—in a sacrificial death. Here, the loving relationship between God and the disciple, as exemplified by Delp, was not experienced in terms of a feeling or sentimentality. Instead, the relationship described in this letter involved the experience of resolving to be receptive to the will of God notwithstanding the “pain” and “melancholy.” Delp’s willingness to love to the very end occurs in the thick of anxiety, whose characteristics includes the feelings of constriction, fear, restlessness, vulnerability, and being trapped.10
Delp’s openness and willingness to do God’s will indicated a commitment of self to something or someone greater than himself. The devotion of the German Jesuit to God is a response to God’s love in Jesus Christ. Moreover, Delp’s gift of himself, according to his letter, brought forth in hope a genuine human fulfillment, understood as “a fruitful and healthy seed.” Altogether, in his letters and writings, Delp used terms such as devotion of self, self-surrender, self-giving, self-abandonment, and self-sacrifice to describe the Christian experience of self-emptying that took place in his life, especially during his imprisonment. This book connects this group of words to the term kenosis. In Christian theology, kenosis describes the self-emptying of Christ that includes his self-sacrificial death on the Cross for the love of humankind. This divine condescension and self-giving establishes a kenotic disposition for discipleship that leads to a life of service.
Henceforth, this chapter introduces the context of Alfred Delp’s witness, which is foundational for a systematic theological understanding of his martyrdom in the ensuing chapters. Delp’s testimony in life and death is critical because he reminds us to seek a vertical or transcendent truth that encompasses the horizontal in a society. As such, a martyr like Delp is a point of intensification that a militant secular society suffering a crisis of truth and goodness needs. His experience of discipleship, which involved the gift of self unto death, is the fruit of a lifelong active receptivity understood as obedience to the will of God. Martyrdom, as exemplified in Delp, takes the form of a decision to attune oneself to God’s will, requiring an inner freedom. From an Ignatian standpoint, inner freedom is referred to as indifference and is a disposition geared toward helping a person to discern and walk the path which he or she receives from God. For Delp, the specificity of his experience of indifference—the experience of an emptying-of-self to a sacrificial death—precluded a discipleship based on sentimentality, lacking truth, or rigid obedience, bereft of love.
This chapter presents Delp’s witness amid the horrors and profound revolution in human self-understanding of freedom and identity as embodied in the writings of Ernst Jünger, who saw deeply into the dark soul of the modern person and exploited its apprehensions. Radical right movements, heralded by Jünger, presented themselves as spiritual alternatives to the materialistic ideology of liberalism. Unfortunately, the transcendence offered by the extreme right in the interwar years emerged as idolatrous, and the meaning of sacrifice became perverted, enshrining violence that sacrificed the lives of millions of people deemed useless in the quest for power, identity, and national stability.
The Young Alfred Delp
Alfred Delp was born and nurtured in a faith-filled environment, which ultimately enabled him to receive and respond to God’s call. Delp’s parents and, eventually, the Society of Jesus nurtured his faith in God. For Delp, the maturation into the obedience to God, intrinsic to discipleship, was a process that occurred in incremental steps. Born in Mannheim, Germany, on September 15,