in the service of others, which is understood as “Christian heroism.” The chapter is divided into three major sections. The first section sketches Alfred Delp’s early life and life as a Jesuit in formation. The second section presents Delp’s time in theology and his early priestly ministry and writing, including his work with the anti-Nazi resistance group—the Kreisau Circle. The third section details Delp’s imprisonment, trial, sentencing, and prison reflection from that poignant period in his life.
With the aid of recent scholarship, chapter 2 elucidates the writings of Ernst Jünger, one of the twentieth century’s most controversial authors. A decorated front-line officer of the First World War, a Conservative Revolutionary intellectual of the interwar period, and a military officer during the Second World War, Jünger was an outspoken critic of liberal democracy and its aspirations to comfort and equality. I show how he made militant heroism appealing by examining the Nietzsche-inspired writings of his experience in the First World War,45 his political journalism during the interwar period,46 and his attempts to harmonize an extreme-right desire for an authoritarian state with modern industry and technology in two of his works from the 1930s, The Worker 47 and On Pain.48 Drawing on Balthasar, it argues that Jünger’s philosophy sees deeply into the dark soul of modernity and embodies its disontents.
Chapter 3 treats Delp’s engagement of Nazism as a radical distortion of the modern age. The chapter consists of four major sections. The first section introduces Delp’s understanding of self-emptying as encountered in his 1941 homily on the martyrdom of St. Stephen. The second section discusses Delp’s 1936 sermons on the relationship between finite and infinite freedom.49 They criticize German society’s absolutization of human liberty. The third section examines Delp’s “War as an Intellectual Achievement,”50 and “On the Image of the Human Person in the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus.”51 Published in the Jesuit journal Stimmen der Zeit, the former is an article in which he confronts and condemns the aestheticization and glorification of war. The latter, a retreat talk given to brother Jesuits, includes a criticism of Jünger’s savage heroism. The fourth section engages Delp’s writings on the role of Christians in the modern world. It engages “The Christian Understanding of the World,” which is a series of three talks that Delp gave in the autumn of 1942, in which he addresses the relevance of Christian service and witness in a militant secular world.52 This section also examines his writings for the anti-Nazi resistance group, the Kreisau Circle, that envision a post-Nazi democratic German society enlivened by Christian principles. It concludes with a discussion on “Trust in the Church,” a paper given in autumn of 1941, wherein Delp laments the lack of heroic witness from the Catholic hierarchy against Nazism.53 Collectively, these texts warn against the dangers of people making themselves the center of the world, absorbing the world into their horizon, and instrumentalizing the world for their own desires. With the help of Balthasar, this chapter demonstrates that a proper response to the distorted human desire “to be as gods” is to show that existence is itself a gift to be received, nurtured, and surrendered.
Chapters 4 and 5 deepen and sharpen Delp’s rich theology of discipleship as kenosis in relationship to Christology and Trinitarian theology. In particular, chapter 4 examines Delp’s meditations on the Sacred Heart devotion in conjunction with Balthasar’s Trinitarian theology. The chapter consists of five sections. The first section opens with a discussion of Delp’s homily on the Fourth Sunday of Lent from 1943, which grapples with the theme of anxiety and suggests that the remedy to the problem of anxiety is found in an encounter with God in Christ, who underwent human anxiety and redeemed it.54 The second section examines Delp’s 1938 retreat journal from his tertianship, where he made the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.55 The diary introduces us to Delp’s devotion to the Heart of Jesus, imbuing his thought with a spirituality of kenosis that would play a significant role during his imprisonment. The third section analyzes his two prison meditations on the Sacred Heart.56 These meditations communicate that the heart paralyzed by anxiety or the heart seduced by a reckless hubris is renewed toward an essential intactness when the innermost core of the believer is configured to the innermost core of God through prayerful dialogue with Christ. The self-emptying love of Christ re-creates persons as “sons and daughters” of God. The fourth section discusses Delp’s 1942 homily on the Sacred Heart.57 This homily expresses the belief that being a child of God in the face of sin does not mean that one foists the Cross on others but instead that one takes up a personal cross in the name of Christ’s Cross—in order to bear the anguish and destitution of others. The fifth section returns to the theme of an encounter with Christ; it examines an undated homily on the Massacre of the Innocents. In this homily, Delp exhorts Christians not to turn away from tragedies but to encounter Christ precisely in the victims of the world. Delp’s call to be in solidarity, to defend, and protect the vulnerable completes the logic of self-emptying love encountered in Delp’s writings on the Sacred Heart.
Chapter 5 argues for the importance of the Holy Spirit in the maturation of Delp’s discipleship. The redemptive work of Christ becomes intelligible in the context of the Spirit. One does not achieve the status of being a child of God in the face of sin through one’s own achievements and virtues. The chapter consists of four sections. The first section in conjunction with Balthasar’s pneumatology explores Delp’s prison meditation on the Third Person of the Trinity, in which he writes that the Spirit renews persons, bringing them into the inner attitude of Christ.58 The second section examines the Christian life under the guidance of the Spirit. Delp’s writings on the Spirit’s role in redeeming the world from the grips of totalitarianism include his meditations on the saints and martyrs of the Advent and Christmas seasons,59 his parish talks on the sacraments of Confirmation,60 Holy Orders,61 and Eucharist,62 and a parish retreat talk on the spiritual meaning of the Cross.63 Collectively, these writings offer an anthropology that emphasizes a courageous kenotic disposition amid anguish, doubt, and violence. The last section brings Delp’s writings on the Christian life informed by the Spirit into dialogue with Balthasar’s theology of the saints. This chapter concludes by acknowledging the kenotic dynamic at work in Delp’s life, prayer, and witness. When read together, the writings on the Heart of Christ, the Spirit, the saints and martyrs, and the sacraments represent a spiritual bulwark against the titanic orientation of fascism. Instead of summoning the will-to-power, the saint or martyr amid adversity and anxiety takes up the yoke of others, not his or her own, and participates in the great work of redemption whose author is God alone.
Against the Titans concludes by asserting that in a world where power has such a hold on our imagination, Alfred Delp’s life is a counter-witness to this tendency. The journey into real personhood is rooted in the gift of self, offered in service to God and neighbor. Far from understanding care for the destitute and persecuted as a feeble act, Delp views it as an act that requires nothing less than a great heart. Such an understanding of being human, which leaves no room for half-heartedness or mediocrity, is a fitting response to an age marked by both a profound anxiety and a will-to-violence ethos.
NOTES
1. Alfred Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 3: Predigten und Ansprachen, ed. Roman Bleistein (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1985), 303.
2. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 3, 314.
3. A decorated frontline officer of the First World War, Conservative Revolutionary intellectual of the interwar period, and military officer during the Second World War, Jünger was an outspoken critic of liberal democracy and its goal of comfort and equality. During the Weimar Republic, Jünger proved to be a prolific writer, writing five books and over one hundred essays as well as editing a collection of essays on the experience of the First World War. His writings advanced a post–World War I German far-right ideology. He made appealing a militant heroism in his antiliberal writings based on his experience in the First World War, his anti–Weimar Republic essays in far-right newspapers and journals, and his 1930s books The Worker and On Pain, which attempted to harmonize an extreme-right desire for an authoritarian state with modern industry and technology. In
