was not the destruction of the self but a testimony to a more in-depth and broader vision of human fulfillment. His martyrdom was the result of accepting oneself as God’s gift. This sacrificial death was not an escapist notion that considers the body to be a tomb. Such a notion would lead to the quest for disembodiment and an abandonment of the world. It would lead to wallowing in the misery and sinfulness of the world. The resultant reaction would be the self-seeking heroism amid a nihilistic context that Delp warns us of. Furthermore, Delp’s letters from Tegel Prison revealed anxiety in the face of torture, pressure to renounce his Jesuit identity, and impending death. Despite his undergoing anguish, Delp’s faith in Christ did not waver. In fact, his trust in the Divine increased and his friendship with the members of the Kreisau Circle, especially Moltke, deepened.
Accordingly, the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, a contemporary of Delp, sheds light on the issue of human agency amid tribulations and the salvific relationship with Jesus Christ. Although it would be difficult to build a direct causal connection between Delp and Balthasar, the themes in Delp’s writings treated in this book, such as anxiety and Christian discipleship amid Promethean strivings, anticipate and dovetail with Balthasar’s theology. For example, a Balthasarian reading of Delp’s witness in the ensuing chapters addresses the problem of the human seizure of absolute power and freedom, understood as titanism, heralded in the writings of Jünger. Also, a Balthasarian understanding of the phenomenon of anxiety in Delp’s writings offers insight on how one can experience at the same time interior anguish and dryness while committing oneself to a more profound love and coming to a greater likeness of Christ.
The hermeneutical key that makes Balthasar a fitting facilitator between Alfred Delp’s grappling with martyrdom at the end of his life and Ernst Jünger’s appeal to martyrdom encountered at the start of this chapter is the kenotic love which characterizes the Triune God and shapes the human person. Balthasar interprets the inner life of God as an eternal emptying-of-self in love and gratitude among the Three Persons. The Incarnation is the continuation of the Son’s eternal kenosis of thanksgiving to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ love for the Father takes the form of filial obedience to redeem humankind from sin and the consequences of sin.
The grace that comes to the Christian entails Ignatian indifference—a disposition that Delp referred to in his prison letters. Indifference characterizes the disciple’s receptivity before God, the surrender of self to Christ and readiness to undergo whatever mission God wills. Balthasar himself described the modern age as beset by titanism—“sophistical short circuits in reasoning” that has served over time to convince human freedom to seek fulfillment in itself, involving the idolatrous drive to be gods and to reject God’s sovereignty. A striving for power now constitutes the human being who should be constituted by his or her receptivity before God and fellow neighbor. The temptation toward absolute autonomy, which brings forth a relentless struggle for power, overtakes a person’s indifference.
Thus, Delp’s decision to witness Christ unto the very end amid the anguish and fear of death was an attempt to heal the human condition from the short circuits in reasoning. He did not view his self-sacrifice as an annihilation; instead, he grasped it as a response in loving obedience to the will of God. Jünger, in contrast, understood self-sacrifice within the human bid for self-mastery. Again, it bears recalling that the common mark in Delp and Jünger’s writings concerns the question of the resolve of the person before the challenge of death. Whereas Delp surrendered his fear of death to Christ, Jünger makes the intellectual case to overcome this fear in violent self-seeking. The following chapter examines the logic of titanism—the pursuit of absolute power, the rationalization of violence as an end, and the identification of technology as a means to power—in Jünger’s writings from the 1920s and 1930s. As embedded as it was in the specific situation of Germany, Jünger identified the dark side of the human person that glorified war in the age of industrial-techno slaughter. In chapters 3, 4, and 5, one will enter into a theological read of Delp’s witness in response to Jünger’s challenge to recreate the human person into a titan, a being who usurps divine power and freedom.
NOTES
1. David C. Durst, “Translator’s Introduction,” in On Pain, n.d., xxxv.
2. Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern: aus dem Tagebuch eines Stoßtruppführers (Berlin: Mittler & Sohn, 1926), 282.
3. The term “modern life” describes the totalizing effects of modernity from the nineteenth century in the industrializing world. This is not restricted to the increasing mechanization of commerce, transport, and production but includes the codification of secular authority, the rise of capitalism, bureaucracy, and professionalization in the human, social, and medical sciences, while men and women undergo an experience of fragmentation and alienation. Against the tide of the disorientation, commodification, and the loss of identity, extreme right or fascist intellectuals advocated a revolution to recreate a sense of belonging and certainty. See Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007).
4. Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Form, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming, trans. Bogdan Costea (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), 173–87.
5. Jünger, The Worker, 92–93.
6. Helmuth James Graf von Moltke was the founding member of the Kreisau Circle. This was the name given to a group of men who opposed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The Kreisau Circle got its name from the group’s frequent meeting place—an estate in Kreisau that was owned by Moltke. Of the six members of the Kreisau Circle, who were tried on January 9–10, 1945, three were sentenced and put to death: Helmuth James von Moltke, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Franz Sperr. The other three, Eugen Gerstenmaier, Franz Reisert, and Josef Ernst Fürst Fugger, were given prison sentences. Their involvement in the Kreisau Circle was not seen as of such prominence as that of Moltke, Delp, and Sperr.
7. The German word for “empty” is “hergeben” which can mean “to give away,” “to hand over,” or “to yield.” In the reflexive, the word can mean “to lend oneself,” “to lower oneself,” or “to prostitute oneself.” In the context of this letter, “hergeben” communicates the Christian notion of self-emptying.
8. Alfred Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 4: Aus dem Gefängnis, ed. Roman Bleistein (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1984), 110.
9. Delp’s letter underscores Michael P. Jensen’s Martyrdom and Identity’s argument that Christian martyrs witness to both their relationship with Christ and their self-understanding. See Michael P. Jensen, Martyrdom and Identity: The Self on Trial (New York: T&T Clark), 2010.
10. A. Sims, Symptoms in the Mind: An Introduction to Descriptive Psychology (London: Saunders Ltd., 2003), p. 335, quoted in John R. Cihak, Balthasar and Anxiety (New York: T & T Clark, 2009), 2.
11. Roman Bleistein, Alfred Delp: Geschichte eines Zeugen (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1989), 23.
12. Bleistein, Alfred Delp, 27.
13. Rerum Novarum (RN), published by Leo XIII on May 15, 1891, emerged out of critical discussion on the modern forces of change and upheaval in industry, science, and labor along with the increasing disparities between rich and poor. Workers were no longer protected by guilds or supported by public institutions of religion. RN defended the right of private property, criticized unrestricted capitalism, argued for a living wage for workers, and affirmed the right of labor to organize and, when necessary, strike. For further analysis see: Richard Rosseau, Human Dignity and the Common Good: The Great Papal Social Encyclicals from Leo XII to John Paul II (London: Greenwood Press, 2002), 9–54.
14. Mary Frances Coady, With Bound Hands: A Jesuit in Nazi Germany: The Life and Selected Prison Letters of Alfred Delp (Chicago, Ill: Loyola Press, 2003), 6.
15. Bleistein, Alfred Delp, 1989, 33.
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