Against the Titans. Peter Nguyen
Friedrich Delp, was an office worker and a Protestant. Delp had a sister, Justina, born two years earlier. A month after his son’s birth, Friedrich decided to take responsibility for the family and married Bernauer. Eventually, Alfred was joined by two more sisters, Gerda and Greta, and two brothers, Ewald and Fritz. In 1914, the Delp family relocated to the town of Lampertheim, south of Frankfurt. They moved into a three-bedroom apartment above a restaurant, located a few steps from the Catholic Church of St. Andreas and across the street from the Lutheran Church of St. Luke’s. At his father’s insistence, Alfred, though baptized a Catholic, received religious instruction from the Lutheran school.11
Alfred, according to his family, was considered a bright student, an avid reader, and a mischievous boy. He also became friendly with the Catholic pastor of St. Andreas, Father Unger. In March 1921, Alfred was confirmed in the Lutheran Church. But, after being slapped across the face by the Lutheran pastor for being late to a religious lesson, Alfred left the church and vowed never to return, instead turning to the Catholic pastor as a teacher. Father Unger began instructing Alfred in the Catholic faith. On June 19 he made his first communion and was confirmed in the Catholic Church nine days later. The following year he entered the minor seminary in Dieburg, a town several miles north of Lampertheim, with a desire to study for the priesthood. His classmates all spoke of his service, cheerfulness, and, above all, his restless and keen intelligence. He enjoyed partaking in philosophical and theological disputations. The classmates judged that the young Delp had already decided to serve God by becoming a theologian.12 Since he was considered a budding intellectual, according to his teachers, it was arranged for him to attend the Germanicum in Rome, the seminary dedicated to the most intellectually promising German candidates for the diocesan priesthood.
The young Alfred, however, developed other aspirations. During his time in the minor seminary, he joined a Catholic youth movement—the Neudeutschland—which was run by a Jesuit, Ludwig Esch. After the First World War, the Catholic Church in Germany wanted to apply the social Catholicism laid out in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (The Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor)13 to the lives of young Germans so that they could contribute to the rebuilding of German society. The Neudeutschland was one of the many idealistic Catholic youth movements that arose during this period. Such exposure to Catholic social teaching would lay the foundation for Delp’s desire to plan for a postwar Germany based on the social values of the Catholic Church while he was a member of the Kreisau Circle. Through his contacts in Neudeutschland, he had learned about some of the Jesuit saints, and he went on a retreat based on St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises.14 Delp was attracted to the spiritual legacy of the Society of Jesus, so he decided to enter the Jesuit order in 1926. When Father Unger heard about Delp’s decision to leave the diocesan priesthood for the Jesuits, he exclaimed, “What is [Delp] thinking! He has disgraced me! With the Jesuits, he’ll waste away somewhere as prefect of students!”15 Delp’s mother, however, stated, “In my opinion, the Lord God wanted Alfred [with the Jesuits].”16
Philosophy Studies
In 1928, Delp pronounced his perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and moved into philosophy studies from 1928 to 1931 in Berchmanskolleg near Munich. As a young Jesuit, Delp was deeply engaged in his studies. The Jesuit faculty of philosophy was transitioning between two worlds—neo-scholasticism and modern philosophy as embodied by Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger.17 In fact, Delp threw himself into an evaluative study of Heidegger’s “Being and Time.” His Jesuit brothers often found Delp pacing the school corridors, grappling with Heidegger’s philosophy. Delp demonstrated a grasp of Heidegger’s ideas and the desire to argue with them. The fruits of his intellectual labor led Delp to publish, in 1935, Tragic Existence, which criticized Heidegger’s philosophy as a reductive understanding of existence.18
With intellectual restlessness and zeal, Delp had spent his weekends and holidays during his philosophy studies and regency,19 where he taught and ministered at Stella Matutina, an all-boys boarding school in Feldkirch, Austria, writing his book. This project was the first critical study of Heidegger’s philosophy from the Catholic intellectual world. As such, though it was a bold attempt by a young Jesuit, it was an immature and moralistic criticism of Heidegger.20 Notwithstanding, Delp’s concern over the reduction of humankind’s existence and the need for the Divine to broaden and deepen humankind’s horizon remained consistent themes throughout his later writings.
The Denunciation of Titanic Heroism in Tragic Existence
Delp characterized Heidegger’s philosophy as centered around the situation (Befindlichkeit)21 of the contemporary person, consumed by the anxiety (Angst)22 over the meaning of existence.23 The etymology of anxiety communicates a constriction in the throat or heart.24 Anxiety, for Heidegger, ultimately brought existence to its completeness. It revealed existence as “a being thrown” into the edge of the dark abyss—nothingness—from which it came.25 Persons must decide their fate in the face of this nothingness. In Delp’s view, in this philosophical system, the person “has nowhere to look beyond” him- or herself. He writes, “Behind [them] lies the nothingness of [their] origin. Before [them] lies [their] future,” which consists of decay, a sinking, and dying into death.”26 Consequently, existence is “hollowed-out,” devoid of depth and substance.27 For Delp, Heidegger’s philosophy left the question of one’s existence unfulfilled. Existence was narrowed or reduced to a finitude, only directed downward into a nothingness.28
Nonetheless, Heidegger, according to Delp, attempted to put forth a reason or a positive attitude for life despite the dread and finitude—“even if [one’s actions] are doomed, there will be a proud ending based on a clear knowledge and firm will!”29 Here, the German Jesuit charged Heidegger with bringing forth this philosophy into the hearts of young men and women, encouraging them to find the strength and determination to master and to overcome the nihilism of their existence. This approach corrupted persons, who “must live and die without dignity in the midst of a chaotic and desperate time.”30 This proposed ethos, according to Delp, was ultimately tragic because the appeal to live with resoluteness is one great deception in the face of anxiety and nothingness.31 Delp pronounced Heidegger’s worldview and way of being to be an “existence out of nothing, a heroism of finiteness! The gruesome attempt of our existence is always built and christened in a multitude of forms, only to founder again and again in a thousand shipwrecks!”32 That is, Heidegger’s will-to-live was without reason, substance, or purpose. Heidegger, for Delp, did not adequately solve the question of the meaning of existence.
In Delp’s analysis, Heidegger posited a worldview that holds no center or grounding; it was entirely horizontal or secular. As such, this philosophy merely corresponded to the ethos of the time, wherein men and women undergo anxiety, confusion, and the loss of self.33 Life was something to be suffered; a lonely world arose. Delp wrote of Heidegger’s philosophy:
This Being-in-the-world is dominated by a tremendous inner pessimism, whose most significant achievement is nothing more than possessing the courage “Yes” to the crash into nothingness. This tragic busy world of ours is a lonely world. The only community of existence is the man of everyday decay.34
There remained only a distressing anxiety. Delp concluded that in Heidegger’s philosophy, the creature would attempt to replace or usurp God in a titanist fashion and the meaning of existence would be sought solely within oneself. As a result, life was reduced to a solipsism or a monism, tempting the human person to be like God and inducing a breakdown of the real difference between the Creator and the creature.35
According to Delp, a philosophy that immanentized the world could not lead contemporary humanity out of its crisis of meaning. It told persons that what brought them liberation was the recognition of the inherency of “guilt, decay, arbitrariness, loneliness, and anxiety”36 in life, and the decision to live as if there was nothing beyond life. In a world without a divine foundation, the person “who conquers pain and fear will become a god himself.”37 Delp referred to this alluring but reductive view of existence as a “titanic finitism,” wherein the human person’s