Against the Titans. Peter Nguyen
the project of the day.”38 The solipsism or titanism in Heidegger’s philosophy, in Delp’s view, would not bring persons to genuine flourishing. The pessimistic individual existence meant that persons would be unable to find meaning in the relationship with others, especially the Absolute Other—God, who was the ground and goal of existence. From a Christian view, Delp asserted, “the tragedy” of Heidegger’s philosophy and our time was that “one does not encounter humanity because one does not find God, and one does not find God because one has no humanity.”39
The key for genuine living, for Delp, consisted in encountering the center that transcended finitude and connected all life. If people could find and return themselves to this center, who was God, then persons could overcome the crisis of the contemporary time. This center, which grounded and related all things, enabled persons to find a new depth of meaning in all things, including misfortunes, hardship, and even death. For Delp, a relationship with God offered the security and assurance that life was not condemned to creaturely freedom in the face of a cold, arbitrary existence. He wrote, “Where existence is liberated from a tragic worldview, then whoever loses his [or her] life, will find it again overflowing.”40
The immediate reaction to Delp’s first academic work was modest in the face of a growing totalitarian state and impending war.41 Heidegger, who during this time was a member of the Nazi Party and the rector of Freiburg University, did not respond. Later criticisms rebuked Delp for taking a condemnatory and moralistic approach to Heidegger’s project. The war and the execution of Delp interrupted the discussion of the first engagement of Heidegger’s philosophy from the Catholic side. Even though his work on Heidegger was considered to be an early and immature grasp of a formidable system by a young scholar, Delp’s grappling with Heidegger’s thought was significant insofar as it represented another crucial stage in his intellectual progression. As he attempted after his criticism of Heidegger, Delp often returned to engage the anxiety of contemporary humankind, created by the crisis of meaning, and to confront the false paths taken by men and women that lead them away from God and their fellow human beings.
While in philosophy studies, in addition to engrossing himself in studying the philosophy of Heidegger, Delp also showed a loved of history, particularly the history of politics and political change. He also enjoyed academic debates with his classmates and showed a keen interest in the new social teaching of the church, which had emerged with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Delp was to become an expert in this field, especially in matters concerning Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (In the Fortieth Year).42 One of his Jesuit brothers, Josef Neuner described Delp as a man of enormous energy—someone who threw himself into books and possessed a deep and intense prayer life.43 Such interests in politics, justice, and prayer, while a young Jesuit, help set the foundation for Delp’s ardent love of God and love of neighbor amid the Nazi oppression and persecution. In the political turmoil in Germany of the 1920s and 1930s, Delp was also sensitively aware of the changing political events. Toward the end of his letter to his brother Ewald, dated September 4, 1930, Delp appealed:
Keep your spirits up. On September 14, perform your civic duty.44 If the Christian parties are not careful during these years, you can visit your brother in exile in a few years. If certain political movements get the majority, they will come for us first with a knife. If you can, support the Centre Party and Brüning’s election campaign.45
This letter revealed both Delp's political leanings and trepidation for Germany’s future.46
Regency and The Eternal Advent
As a regent at Stella Matutina, Delp found the ministries of teaching, being a prefect, and chaperoning to be successful matches for his creative, restless energy. One of his successes entailed writing and directing three melancholic one-act plays performed by and for the young men on December 21, 1933. The three together are called the Eternal Advent titled, respectively: The Dead Soldiers, The Mineworkers, and The Worker Priest. 47 The first play deals with six soldiers who are sentries, isolated from their base and facing an enemy attack. The second involves five miners who are trapped in a collapsed tunnel and confronted with death. The third play concerns a priest who tries to mediate the dispute between a factory owner and revolutionary workers before the Christmas holidays, though the priest eventually gets assaulted by the workers. In these one-act plays, the anxiety, the arbitrariness, and the sinfulness of the human condition accosting the characters is an aesthetical and dramatic embodiment of Delp’s intellectual grappling with Heidegger’s philosophy.
In the tradition of Jesuit theater, the drama of Delp’s plays presented didactic moments. Jesuit dramatists, according to Kevin Wetmore, employed three dramaturgical rules.
First, the protagonist had to undergo a moral struggle that ended in a noble decision, so the audience would have a model for proper decision making in their own lives. Second, the characters needed to be close to the age and class of the audience, so that they might be better able to understand the struggle. Third, there must be a villain who is punished in the end, so the consequence of the negative moral action can be seen.48
Delp employed two of the three markers. The struggle in the drama involves the decision to seek and encounter a vertical truth—God, who is the source of human flourishing, especially as one is faced with death.
Overall, Delp wanted to his students to make a decision for Christ, to trust that Christ would be there at the end of their life. As such, the characters in the first two plays are young men, full of hopes and aspirations, enabling the student audience to empathize with the struggle. While the obvious villains in these three plays are war, natural calamity, and greed, the ultimate antagonist in all three plays is the decision not to choose God—a fulfillment that undergirds all human existence, even in suffering and death. Since the inter-related themes of God supporting humanity in threatening situations and human freedom accepting God’s love pervaded Delp’s later writings and own witness, these theatrical dramas as Delp’s first published works provide important insight into the origins of his thought.
In The Dead Soldiers, Delp wanted not only to teach his high school students empathy for the enemy but also to stir in their hearts the question of real happiness. Five of the soldiers in this play are teenage, conscripted privates. One young private shoots an enemy combatant, who happens to be a fellow teenager. The sober scene leads the young men to doubt their duty. Subsequently, the veteran member of the sentry unit, a sergeant, urges the young soldiers to do their job without questioning, since the safety and security of their families depend on them. A teenage soldier retorts that the enemy soldiers on the other side of the front care for their families and loved ones as well:
These men, too, care for their mothers, sisters, wives, and children with whom they want to be happy. They also think about building a home and living an ordinary happy life. They lie there and dream and wait and hope [for the end of the war]. They lie there with the cold rifle in their hands or the grenade in their fist, but their hearts yearn for something else . . . They all want to be happy, and they all stretch out their arms and hands for happiness. But nobody fills their empty hands with happiness and peace. On the entire front, on our side and the enemy’s side, and in the entire world, everyone seeks happiness.49
At the end of the play, the sentry unit is overwhelmed by an attack leaving all the men dead. The audience hears the soliloquy of a dead soldier. “Someday a moment will come; a hand will reach in from another life,” he says “It will take all the hands—the ones that sought happiness. It will be the hand of God and yet the hand of a faithful brother.”50
Furthermore, Delp’s The Dead Soldiers challenges his adolescent male students not to fall prey to his country’s burgeoning virile fundamentalism. For over a decade in the Weimar Republic, according to Detlev J.K. Peukert, former soldiers, such as Ernst Jünger, continually put forth an “aggressive apologia for the superior warrior male.”51 They generated disturbing images and roles of “aggressive masculinity” in nationalistic writings. Portrayals of soldierly doubt and empathy for enemies were regarded as weak and effeminate. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they killed the Weimar Republic’s ideals of equality and put forth “the rules