of the yearnings for material goods?”58 Going into a soliloquy, the priest says that Christmas is not the feast of treats and gifts, Christmas is the feast of the transformation of the heart. Reading out loud from his breviary, the priest says, “The people who are living in bitter misery and dire straits, a bright light will light up for this people. Behold, the Lord will come, and a great peace will come on earth. Today, the Messiah is born to you, our Savior and Redeemer.”59 Then the priest puts down the prayer book and addresses the workers,
This is Christmas. Christmas is not a sweet fairytale for little children. It is a serious feast that inspires adults to die for it. Christmas involves God entering our lives, taking our hands and bring them to his heart. Christmas is God becoming one of us and setting us free. Nothing else is Christmas.60
In this play, Delp communicated the doctrine of the Incarnation in relation to the liberation of people from the distress and injustices of human existence. The freedom won by Christ involved the restoration of men and women’s capacity to respond to God’s call to be in a relationship with him. Such a response included the possibility of dying for Christ. As such, a youthful Alfred Delp criticized both the domestication of faith by bourgeoisie sentimentality and the reduction of life to materialism. At the young age of twenty-six, Delp was already bringing up the issue of martyrdom, conceived as a fruit of an interior liberating communication between Christ’s heart and the human person’s heart. The question of social justice was included within the message of the Incarnation, but Delp wanted to make clear that genuine salvation came from God, not from human revolution.
Overall, these Advent plays revealed a Delp who was sensitive to the injustice, needs, and travails of people of his time. They showed that he was searching for answers to big questions and represent a critical stage in his intellectual and spiritual development. In these three one-act plays, Delp stood in the tradition of Jesuits who employed theater to dramatize, educate, evangelize, and reflect on human experience.61 Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, understood the theater as a means to reach the unconverted. Ignatius believed it was a dramatic way to assert, encourage, and express human flourishing or “the full promotion of the human person.”62
Delp aimed to use his plays to teach his young students to approach the Christmas Feast with seriousness and to awaken in them the desire to encounter genuine fulfillment in Christ. In particular, he hoped to stir within his students the desire to search for and to meet real joy and the Divine amid desperate, chaotic situations. This aspiration to find meaning amid anxiety, suffering, and death is in significant part due to his grappling with Heidegger’s philosophy, which he was writing on while a regent and would eventually criticize. Moreover, it bears repeating that the shared trait in the writings of Delp and Jünger concerns the question of the act of resoluteness before death. For Delp, the resoluteness entails a self-surrender to God. Whereas for Jünger, overcoming the fear of killing and being killed resolves the challenge of death. The Eternal Advent, with its engagement with searching for meaning amid impending death and apparent meaninglessness, was an imaginative exercise of his thinking on the question of humankind falling under the threat of anxiety.
Delp grappled with the question of deep fulfillment in the face of the sensemaking crises63 which were quite tangible in his time. At that time in late 1933, Germany was still recovering spiritually from the blood-soaked trenches of the First World War. The Great Depression had left a staggering 6 million Germans unemployed. Last but not least, the rise of National Socialism, the appointment of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship in January of 1933, and the Reichstag Fire on February of 1933, which empowered Hitler to suspend civil liberties, eliminate political opposition, and seek dictatorial powers herald the rise of totalitarian nihilism. These events instigated the most severe sensemaking crisis for Germans like Delp who feared an impending cataclysm. Indeed, the drama of finding fulfillment through choosing God amid a sensemaking crisis became a consistent theme throughout his Jesuit ministry. And this drama rose to a crescendo at the end of Delp’s life, when he discerned and decided to bear the name of Christ while imprisoned and awaiting execution.
Another point to consider regarding Alfred Delp’s early years as a Jesuit was that he displayed a sharp critical attitude toward his Jesuit brothers. He was argumentative, which made his confreres wary of him, and there were times when his superiors considered dismissing him.64 When Delp began his regency at Stella Matutina in 1931, he had severe clashes with his superior, Agustin Rösch,65 who would later become provincial of the Upper German Province of the Society of Jesus. Though he was aware of Delp’s intellectual gifts and enormous energy, Rösch found Delp rebellious and intractable. Delp’s boisterous immaturity would later be humbled by imprisonment and transformed gradually by God’s love.
Theology and Young Priest Years: Resisting National Socialism
By the time Delp finished his regency in 1934, the Nazis had taken control of the government in Germany. In April, Delp left Germany to pursue theological studies at Ignatiuskolleg at Valkenburg, in the Netherlands.66 The institution endured financial hardship in the wake of a 1934 Nazi law that forbade sending money outside the country, though the difficulty did not keep Delp from thriving in his theological studies and publishing. The aforementioned Tragic Existence was published in 1935 by Herder.
In December 1935, along with his Jesuit brethren he planned to author The Rebuilding, a publication that would outline the kind of German society that should be established after the demise of National Socialism.67 The book aimed to go beyond the church’s defensive attitude toward the modern world and offer the German people a different way of being. Delp’s Jesuit collaborators formed an impressive group of bright men that included one of Delp’s theology professors—Hugo Rahner—and future scholars such as Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Delp was assigned to write the first chapter, which concerned a description and a genealogy of the crisis of modernity in Germany.68 He was also delegated to write the chapter on political rights, addressing issues of racism, the realities of different communities in a society, the place of the individual in the state, and the importance of the family in society.69 In a letter to his Jesuit brothers, Delp viewed this joint project as crucial because it would witness a mutual sharing of ideas in an era where collaboration in the intellectual and spiritual life was diminished. Moreover, he was excited over the potential of “un-fractured Catholics, alive and awake in their faith, addressing contemporary people,” showing them a path from the current crisis.70 Unfortunately, the book project did not materialize. The outbreak of the war disrupted the collaboration. Delp was executed on February 2, 1945. Hans Urs von Balthasar left the Society of Jesus in 1950. Consequently, any hope of accomplishing this book project fell by the wayside.
In 1935–1936, Delp was the editor of Ignatiuskolleg’s theological journal Chrysologus, which published selected sermons and theological treatises of the Jesuit students of theology. For that academic year, Delp intended to outline the conflict between Catholicism and the neo-pagan aspirations of National Socialism. The 1936 edition of Chrysologus published thirty-eight essays articulating the distinction between Catholicism and Nazism and offered critiques of the Nazis’ depictions of the Divine, the human person, and human society.71 Delp contributed eleven of these sermons.72 As National Socialism was pervading German society, he desired to illustrate to German Catholics the fundamental truths of the Christian faith and to delineate the irreconcilable differences between the teachings and claims of Catholic Christianity and fascism, particularly National Socialism.
Delp’s appeal to his fellow Catholics in the 1936 edition of Chrysologus to reject Nazism’s allure of self-idolization and perversion of freedom was a crucial piece in the Catholic Church’s multifaceted struggle with the temptation of fascism in its soul. According to Renato Moro, Nazism appealed to a minority of Catholics, including the clergy, who longed for transcendence and a broader sense of purpose.73 They saw Nazism as a bulwark against the destabilizing influence of modernity on the person, the family, and the community. Both Catholicism and Nazism, though for different
