anxiety by surrendering oneself to Christ as opposed to avoiding anxiety or overcoming it with a militant divinization of the self.
The theme of self-surrender plays a particularly strong role in Delp’s prison writings. In his prison meditations on the Christmas season, Delp describes the saints and martyrs associated with the season as persons who surrendered themselves to God. They made themselves available to God’s call and obeyed the mission that God gave them. Their openness and willingness to do God’s will indicate a commitment of self to a being greater than them. The saint’s commitment to God is a response to God’s love in Jesus Christ. Moreover, the commitment of one’s very self to the mission, according to Delp, brings forth genuine human fulfillment or selfhood. In his letters and spiritual writings, Delp uses terms such as “dedication,” “self-surrender,” “self-giving,” “self-abandonment,” and “self-sacrifice” to describe the particular Christian experience of self-emptying that took place in his life, especially during his imprisonment. Against the Titans connects this group of words to the term kenosis. In Christian theology, kenosis describes a specific self-emptying of Christ that includes His self-sacrificial death on the Cross for the love of humankind. This definitive form of divine self-giving establishes a kenotic disposition for discipleship that leads to a life of service and counters the Promethean attitude of titanism.
In his writings, Delp time and again accuses his fellow Germans of a “titanic pride,” a sentiment that alludes to Goethe’s protagonist Faust, whose thirst for infinite knowledge and power led to his corruption. In Delp’s writings, the concept refers to an egoism that attempts to seize Godlike power, freedom, and knowledge. Such a proclivity leads to a disposition of reckless violence that consumes the human person. Delp charges Ernst Jünger with representing such a disposition of violence stemming from a titanic pride. Against the Titans utilizes the term “Titanism” to describe such a disposition.
Hans Urs von Balthasar uses the term similarly to represent contemporary humanity’s tragic rebellion against God.36 He describes the condition of the modern person as an attempt to achieve unrestrained self-divinization. Whereas authentic human existence, according to the Christian faith, involves a disposition of receptivity, thanksgiving, and self-emptying; people are now characterized by their striving for power and the endeavor to make themselves the center of the universe. Of course, the titans of the twentieth century sought to storm the heavens in vain; their strivings led to cataclysmic disasters that threatened to engulf the world. Roger Griffin describes Jünger’s writings as attempts to forge a Promethean human from the ashes and slaughter of the First World War. Such humans would wed themselves to technology and wrest control of the world from anything that would attempt to limit them. Hence, Griffin ties the mentality of titanism to that of fascism.
Delp composed all of his writings under the fascist tyranny of National Socialism. Griffin defines fascism as an ideological movement that advances a radical alternative to the liberal37 and Marxist visions of modernity and attempts to anchor people within an uber-nationalist, totalitarian state with its aggressive social control and engineering.38 Fascism rejects the materialism and collectivism of Marxist socialism, and it spurns the materialism and individualism of a morally bankrupt liberalism. Fascism opposes all aspects of modernity associated with what it perceives to be decadent: pluralism, equality, materialism, and the pursuit of comfort.
Nonetheless, these rejections of certain aspects of modernity do not preclude fascists from experiencing a deep awe at the transforming power of modern technology once it is purged of decadence. Griffin states, “Hitler's Reich was inconceivable without modern forces such as massification, social engineering, bureaucratization, the technologizing of warfare, social Darwinism, nationalism, and racism. The Reich was a permutation of modernity.”39 On these grounds, according to Griffin, fascism cannot be seen as conservative or traditional, because it is a movement to liberate a particular segment of humanity from any traditional religious mores or any Enlightenment principles of the equality of every human being.
Finally, the theme of modernity pervades Against the Titans. In his writings, Delp views modernity as an age riddled with immanentism, anxiety, the commodification of relationships,40 and a will-to-power. In his judgment, National Socialism is the fruit of an erroneous line of ideological developments in Western civilization, one that starts with ego-cogito of the Enlightenment and entails the loss of God and genuine personhood, leading to anomie, estrangement, and massification.41 In short, Nazism radicalizes the malaises of modernity. That said, Delp does not see modernity as irredeemable. As a member of the Kreisau Circle, he puts forth a blueprint of a post-war Germany envisioned as a liberal democratic society, where justice could prevail if there is a recovery of the Divine and moral life.
Delp’s evaluation notwithstanding, let us establish a more empirical and descriptive definition of the elusive term “modernity.” Drawing from Detlev J.K. Peukert, modernity is the form of a fully fledged industrialized society that has emerged in the early twentieth century and has become global in its scale.42 In the economic sphere, modernity is distinguished by rationalized industrial production, complex technological infrastructures, and bureaucratic administration. In its social and cultural life, modernity is defined by the division of labor, urbanization, mass media, and mass consumption. Instrumental reason, the pervasiveness of techno-science, and the belief in progress characterize its intellectual sphere. The term “modernization” describes the complex interwoven set of unceasing changes on human existence due to the growth of industrialization, increasing urbanization, and mass media and mass consumption’s commodification of relationships.
Since we are wrestling with fascism as a historical movement of modernity, I advert once more to Roger Griffin, who argues that fascism is a revolutionary form of nationalism that reorders the forces of modernization to construct a secular utopia. Modernity, according to Griffin, is the product of a complex and ongoing interaction between particular forms of traditional society and special forces of modernization stemming from the Enlightenment. Griffin notes that modernization constitutes transformations in the ideological, technical, political, social, and economic realms.43 Ideological changes, for Griffin, include the expansion of Enlightenment humanism, the myth of progress, the cult of techno-science, the rise of materialism and consumerism, and the dominance of instrumentalized rationality. Technological shifts involve the industrialization of production and the arrival of the military complex and the professionalization of war. Political changes entail the entry of the masses into the political arena, the emergence of the nation-state with its centralization of power, the bureaucratization of power, the establishment of a planned society and economy, and the growth of state-employed military violence and social engineering. Social transformations involve the urbanization of living, the spread of literacy, the growth of the division of labor, the ascent of individualism, and the breakdown of the extended family. Economic changes entail the rise of laissez-faire individualism and the commodification of existence.
Given all this, fascism with its promise to provide stability and common purpose constituted a seduction for many persons. For a number of Europeans in the early twentieth century, the effects of these transformations, including the impression of being torn “from traditional communities” and their comforting worldviews, and “the creeping sense of isolation and anomie” left behind a wreckage of existence.44 Consequently, modernity’s disembedding of the human person helped to fuel deep-seated anxiety. Fascism, in the view of Griffin, becomes one response to the uncertainties caused by modernity and is a reordering of the forces of modernization to create a new sociopolitical order based on a heroic will-to-violence ethos. For this reason, Delp judged that the crisis of modernity that spawned fascism could not be overcome unless Christianity helps persons recover their moral agency and the sense of the world as gifted from God and ordered to divine justice.
Procedure
Chapter 1 introduces the witness of Alfred Delp, SJ, who resisted and was martyred by the Nazis. It demonstrates that sustained and guided by
