Against the Titans
Against the Titans
Theology and the Martyrdom
of Alfred Delp
Peter Nguyen, SJ
LEXINGTON BOOKS/FORTRESS ACADEMIC
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nguyen, Peter, (Assistant Professor of Theology), author.
Title: Against the Titans : theology and the martyrdom / Peter Nguyen, SJ.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020013532 (print) | LCCN 2020013533 (ebook) | ISBN 9781978704770 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978704787 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Delp, Alfred. | Jünger, Ernst, 1895-1998. | Heroes. | Martyrdom—Christianity. | Sacrifice—Christianity.
Classification: LCC BX4705.D422 N48 2020 (print) | LCC BX4705.D422 (ebook) | DDC 271/.5302 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013532
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013533
This book is dedicated to my family, the first school of faith.
Contents
1 Alfred Delp’s Faith and Ministries
2 The Militant Appeal of Titanism
3 Against the Hypertrophy of Sacrifice
4 The Heart of Christ and the Theology of Kenosis
5 Pneumatic Existence
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
I am grateful to all of my conversation partners for this book. I especially acknowledge Sherri Brown, Dulcinea Boesenberg, Jean-François Garneau, Faith Kurtyka, Tracy Leavelle, Bronwen McShea, Claude Pavur, SJ, Gordon Rixon, SJ, Ross Romero, SJ, Artur Rosman, Pamela Runestad, Peggy Rupprecht, Tom Simonds, SJ, and Zachary Smith. I am also much indebted to Philip Amidon, SJ, Christof Betschart, OCD, André Brouillette, SJ, Charles Kerstermeier, SJ, Seth Meehan, and Anthony Soohoo, SJ for their comments at various stages of this project. I especially acknowledge the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies for granting me a fellowship in Spring Semester 2018 to facilitate my research. At Lexington Books I would also like to thank Neil Elliott, Gayla Freeman, and Michael Gibson, as well as the anonymous readers for their comments.
While giving a talk to his parishioners on the theology of Baptism in the fall of 1941, Alfred Delp, a German Jesuit priest who was executed in 1945, commented on the dilemmas of anxiety and violence engulfing and distorting the human person. Accusing his compatriots of a Promethean hubris, Delp asserted, “The German person approaches life with a titanic pride. He dreams of mastering, harnessing, and subduing life through his own power and strength.”1 This willful pride is nothing less than an attempt to claim divinity for oneself. Delp goes on to describe how the endeavor to seize infinite freedom and power has corrupted people. In contradistinction to the deluded attempt to usurp the role of God, the Holy Spirit in Baptism offers divine life to the human person. This gift of divine life, however, relates the person to a God bound to the Cross, who represents everything that the ethos of Promethean apotheosis spurns: the kenotic disposition to descend to the limitations of creaturely finitude. From Delp’s perspective, one encounters the Divine at the nadir of human existence: “Hoc signo crucis: in the sign of the Cross, one is drawn not just to the ruins [of life], but to the overcoming of the ruins, to new life.”2 In a world governed by vengeance, power, and self-idolatry, through faith and Baptism, the being and doing of men and women are transformed by being placed next to Christ’s Cross. Thus, beginning in Baptism, the Christian way of life concerns the incorporation of humans into a supernatural way of life that confronts the idolatry of power and the resulting paralysis of the human spirit caused by a titanic orientation.
Against the Titans: The Theology and Martyrdom of Alfred Delp addresses the philosophy that drove the Promethean response of the Conservative Revolutionaries to the social crisis in Germany that was the prelude to Nazism. It argues that a theology of Christian martyrdom is the proper mediating force of rehumanization amid the feeling of powerlessness and estrangement in modernity. In Against the Titans, I offer a reading of martyrdom in order to demonstrate that the witness unto death of Alfred Delp, SJ, who resisted the Nazis, is a testimony against the cult of the human will and the rejection of the objective reality of the supernatural realm. Through a comparison with Ernst Jünger,3 an intellectual champion of the Conservative Revolution, I show that Delp, in his fidelity to Christ, even suffering and dying at the hands of the Nazis, witnessed through his life and death as well as his writings to a Christian heroism that opposes the modern age’s “Promethean heroism.” By way of comparison to Jünger’s antidemocratic, war-for-the-sake-of-war way of life, Delp’s life and teaching constitute a more authentic, and no less demanding, existence that comes not from self-mastery but rather from an emptying of
