Ibid., 42.
40. In Delp’s writings, “commodification of relationships” describes how persons are no longer treated as ends but means. People are prostituted for profit or ideology.
41. “Massification” refers to the swallowing up of the individual into the state or an ideological movement.
42. Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 81–83.
43. Griffin, A Fascist Century, 26–28.
44. Ibid., 28.
45. Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis, fourth edition (Berlin: Mittler & Sohn, 1929); Ernst Jünger, Copse 125: A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of 1918 (New York: Howard Fertig, 2003).
46. Ernst Jünger, Politische Publizistik 1919–1933, ed. Sven Olaf Berggötz (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001).
47. Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Form, trans. Laurence Paul Hemming and Bogdan Costea (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017).
48. Ernst Jünger, On Pain, trans. David C. Durst (New York: Telos Press, 2008).
49. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 111–94.
50. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 2, 239–48.
51. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 213–36.
52. Ibid., 284–96.
53. Ibid., 263–83.
54. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 3, 188–98.
55. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 1, 245–62.
56. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 4, 242–62.
57. Delp, Advent of the Heart, 79–86.
58. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 4, 263–306.
59. Delp, Advent of the Heart, 21–32.
60. Delp, Gesammelte Schriften 3, 317–31.
61. Ibid., 347–60.
62. Ibid., 361–77.
63. Saltin, “Das Kreuz-Geheimnis Gottes und Lebensordnung des Menschen. Ein bisher nicht veröffentlicher Entwurf zu einem Einkehrtag: Bearbeitung und Kommentar,” 98–104.
Alfred Delp’s Faith and Ministries
The Situation of the Witness
Ernst Jünger, one of Germany’s most controversial twentieth-century writers, was an intellectual shock trooper for the burgeoning extreme-right movement in Germany in the years between the First and Second World Wars. A decorated soldier of the First World War, an activist of the interwar period, and a military officer during the Second World War, Jünger was an outspoken critic of the Weimar Republic’s ideals of liberty, ease, and comfort. He saw the nihilism of European civilization as a whole in the modern individual’s sensitivity to pain and inward acts of cowardice.1 At the conclusion of Storm of Steel, his autobiographical account of trench warfare, he writes, “Today we can no longer understand the martyrs who threw themselves into the arena. They were superior to all humanity, all phases of pain and fear. Their faith today, however, no longer exercises a living force.”2 Here Jünger perceived early twentieth-century Christianity as a spent faith, surrendered to bourgeois values. If a faith community no longer moves its members to sacrifice themselves, then it will wither away and die, becoming irrelevant in the world. The decline of contemporary Christianity, according to Jünger, serves as a warning for any society wishing to increase its greatness: it must nurture in persons the desire and hardness to sacrifice their lives to bear fruit for the body politic.
As such, “modern life”3 mediocritizes and hinders a nation’s capacity to produce the type of men who seek a heroic destiny, even in death. Jünger regarded the will-to-power as the central drive in human life and was committed to destroying democracy. He advocated in its place an authoritarian nationalism and affirmed the centrality of total war and the quest for power in the human condition. He considered that war-making would reveal the essential aspects of the human condition, standing at odds with modern civilization, which numbed and buried the authentic human in material comforts.
Nonetheless, Jünger found utility in modern technology and industrialization and saw in them the means to increase human power. Jünger anticipated that the combination of humanity’s elemental drive for conflict and modern technology would inevitably give rise to a state that was organized along the lines of a modern army at war—being “steel-like, dictatorial, and total.” An entire nation geared for total war and “planetary dominion” would necessitate the end of a pluralistic society and enforce a homogenization of peoples.4 Anyone not committed to the functionality of war and the quest for power would perish.5
According to Jünger, only a people deeply committed to destroying democracy, abandoning the pursuit of material happiness for the heroic destiny of planetary dominion, would be appropriate to ushering in a new age. The hero of Jünger’s world is the “Titanic figure,” an allusion to Nietzsche’s Superman and the pre-Olympian Titans of Greek mythology. The titans attempted to seize power and mastery over self, others, and nature. Jünger’s titans were considered demigods and enemies of the gods; they strove for power that did not originally belong to them. Negatively construed, the titans’ assault on the Olympus of the world would fashion a cataclysm. For Jünger, if the titans endured, they would triumph in the disaster. If the titans fell, then they would die a heroic death, manifesting the overcoming of the fear of suffering and death itself. Though Jünger rejected National Socialism’s racism and antisemitism and never became a Nazi, his dystopic vision founded on an absolutism and militarism provides a window into the intellectual and political mentality that led Germany into totalitarianism and war.
In contrast to Jünger and his exploitation of the discontent of the modern and advocation of a totalitarian state that became too real, a German Jesuit priest Alfred Delp at the end of the Second World War decided to offer his life in obedience to God’s will and for the betterment of others. Delp was executed for high treason on February 2, 1945, for being a leading member of an anti-Nazi resistance group—the Kreisau Circle.6 In a letter to his Jesuit brethren after being sentenced to death, Delp wrote,
I must relinquish and empty7 myself. It is time for the sowing, not the harvest. God sows and he will reap. I want, at least, to fall into the earth and the hands of God as a fruitful and healthy seed. I need to arm myself against the pain and melancholy that sometimes strikes me. If the Lord God desires this path—and everything points to it—then I must walk it freely and without bitterness. May others live better and happier because we died.8
This passage communicates a Christian paradox: the formation and the loss of the self.9 Delp discerned that he was being asked to surrender himself to God—the source of his existence—in a sacrificial death. Here, the loving relationship between God and the disciple, as exemplified by Delp, was not experienced in terms of a feeling or sentimentality. Instead, the relationship described in this letter involved the experience of resolving to be receptive to the will of God notwithstanding the “pain” and “melancholy.” Delp’s willingness to love to the very end occurs
