fear, restlessness, vulnerability, and being trapped.10
Delp’s openness and willingness to do God’s will indicated a commitment of self to something or someone greater than himself. The devotion of the German Jesuit to God is a response to God’s love in Jesus Christ. Moreover, Delp’s gift of himself, according to his letter, brought forth in hope a genuine human fulfillment, understood as “a fruitful and healthy seed.” Altogether, in his letters and writings, Delp used terms such as devotion of self, self-surrender, self-giving, self-abandonment, and self-sacrifice to describe the Christian experience of self-emptying that took place in his life, especially during his imprisonment. This book connects this group of words to the term kenosis. In Christian theology, kenosis describes the self-emptying of Christ that includes his self-sacrificial death on the Cross for the love of humankind. This divine condescension and self-giving establishes a kenotic disposition for discipleship that leads to a life of service.
Henceforth, this chapter introduces the context of Alfred Delp’s witness, which is foundational for a systematic theological understanding of his martyrdom in the ensuing chapters. Delp’s testimony in life and death is critical because he reminds us to seek a vertical or transcendent truth that encompasses the horizontal in a society. As such, a martyr like Delp is a point of intensification that a militant secular society suffering a crisis of truth and goodness needs. His experience of discipleship, which involved the gift of self unto death, is the fruit of a lifelong active receptivity understood as obedience to the will of God. Martyrdom, as exemplified in Delp, takes the form of a decision to attune oneself to God’s will, requiring an inner freedom. From an Ignatian standpoint, inner freedom is referred to as indifference and is a disposition geared toward helping a person to discern and walk the path which he or she receives from God. For Delp, the specificity of his experience of indifference—the experience of an emptying-of-self to a sacrificial death—precluded a discipleship based on sentimentality, lacking truth, or rigid obedience, bereft of love.
This chapter presents Delp’s witness amid the horrors and profound revolution in human self-understanding of freedom and identity as embodied in the writings of Ernst Jünger, who saw deeply into the dark soul of the modern person and exploited its apprehensions. Radical right movements, heralded by Jünger, presented themselves as spiritual alternatives to the materialistic ideology of liberalism. Unfortunately, the transcendence offered by the extreme right in the interwar years emerged as idolatrous, and the meaning of sacrifice became perverted, enshrining violence that sacrificed the lives of millions of people deemed useless in the quest for power, identity, and national stability.
The Young Alfred Delp
Alfred Delp was born and nurtured in a faith-filled environment, which ultimately enabled him to receive and respond to God’s call. Delp’s parents and, eventually, the Society of Jesus nurtured his faith in God. For Delp, the maturation into the obedience to God, intrinsic to discipleship, was a process that occurred in incremental steps. Born in Mannheim, Germany, on September 15, 1907, Delp was the second child of unwed parents. His mother, Maria Bernauer, was a kitchen worker and a Catholic. His father, Friedrich Delp, was an office worker and a Protestant. Delp had a sister, Justina, born two years earlier. A month after his son’s birth, Friedrich decided to take responsibility for the family and married Bernauer. Eventually, Alfred was joined by two more sisters, Gerda and Greta, and two brothers, Ewald and Fritz. In 1914, the Delp family relocated to the town of Lampertheim, south of Frankfurt. They moved into a three-bedroom apartment above a restaurant, located a few steps from the Catholic Church of St. Andreas and across the street from the Lutheran Church of St. Luke’s. At his father’s insistence, Alfred, though baptized a Catholic, received religious instruction from the Lutheran school.11
Alfred, according to his family, was considered a bright student, an avid reader, and a mischievous boy. He also became friendly with the Catholic pastor of St. Andreas, Father Unger. In March 1921, Alfred was confirmed in the Lutheran Church. But, after being slapped across the face by the Lutheran pastor for being late to a religious lesson, Alfred left the church and vowed never to return, instead turning to the Catholic pastor as a teacher. Father Unger began instructing Alfred in the Catholic faith. On June 19 he made his first communion and was confirmed in the Catholic Church nine days later. The following year he entered the minor seminary in Dieburg, a town several miles north of Lampertheim, with a desire to study for the priesthood. His classmates all spoke of his service, cheerfulness, and, above all, his restless and keen intelligence. He enjoyed partaking in philosophical and theological disputations. The classmates judged that the young Delp had already decided to serve God by becoming a theologian.12 Since he was considered a budding intellectual, according to his teachers, it was arranged for him to attend the Germanicum in Rome, the seminary dedicated to the most intellectually promising German candidates for the diocesan priesthood.
The young Alfred, however, developed other aspirations. During his time in the minor seminary, he joined a Catholic youth movement—the Neudeutschland—which was run by a Jesuit, Ludwig Esch. After the First World War, the Catholic Church in Germany wanted to apply the social Catholicism laid out in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (The Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor)13 to the lives of young Germans so that they could contribute to the rebuilding of German society. The Neudeutschland was one of the many idealistic Catholic youth movements that arose during this period. Such exposure to Catholic social teaching would lay the foundation for Delp’s desire to plan for a postwar Germany based on the social values of the Catholic Church while he was a member of the Kreisau Circle. Through his contacts in Neudeutschland, he had learned about some of the Jesuit saints, and he went on a retreat based on St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises.14 Delp was attracted to the spiritual legacy of the Society of Jesus, so he decided to enter the Jesuit order in 1926. When Father Unger heard about Delp’s decision to leave the diocesan priesthood for the Jesuits, he exclaimed, “What is [Delp] thinking! He has disgraced me! With the Jesuits, he’ll waste away somewhere as prefect of students!”15 Delp’s mother, however, stated, “In my opinion, the Lord God wanted Alfred [with the Jesuits].”16
Philosophy Studies
In 1928, Delp pronounced his perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and moved into philosophy studies from 1928 to 1931 in Berchmanskolleg near Munich. As a young Jesuit, Delp was deeply engaged in his studies. The Jesuit faculty of philosophy was transitioning between two worlds—neo-scholasticism and modern philosophy as embodied by Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger.17 In fact, Delp threw himself into an evaluative study of Heidegger’s “Being and Time.” His Jesuit brothers often found Delp pacing the school corridors, grappling with Heidegger’s philosophy. Delp demonstrated a grasp of Heidegger’s ideas and the desire to argue with them. The fruits of his intellectual labor led Delp to publish, in 1935, Tragic Existence, which criticized Heidegger’s philosophy as a reductive understanding of existence.18
With intellectual restlessness and zeal, Delp had spent his weekends and holidays during his philosophy studies and regency,19 where he taught and ministered at Stella Matutina, an all-boys boarding school in Feldkirch, Austria, writing his book. This project was the first critical study of Heidegger’s philosophy from the Catholic intellectual world. As such, though it was a bold attempt by a young Jesuit, it was an immature and moralistic criticism of Heidegger.20 Notwithstanding, Delp’s concern over the reduction of humankind’s existence and the need for the Divine to broaden and deepen humankind’s horizon remained consistent themes throughout his later writings.
The Denunciation of Titanic Heroism in Tragic Existence
Delp characterized Heidegger’s philosophy as centered around the situation (Befindlichkeit)21 of the contemporary person, consumed by the anxiety (Angst)22 over the meaning of existence.23 The etymology of anxiety communicates a constriction in the throat or heart.24 Anxiety, for Heidegger, ultimately brought existence to its completeness. It revealed existence as “a being thrown” into the edge
