Against the Titans - Peter Nguyen

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book’s arguments address the issues of anxiety and heroism, issues that concerned Delp as he faced the tyranny of National Socialism. Drawing on Delp’s writings, the book takes anxiety as one of modernity’s fundamental conditions and problems, a condition that can lead people either to conduct small and ungenerous lives or to attempt to master existence through power and violence. It seeks to show, through a discussion of Delp’s witness, why it is essential to live heroically, with a willingness to undergo uncertainty, suffering, and death in the modern world. The book thus details critical aspects of Delp’s life and presents his writings as those of a disciple and an intellectual who endeavored to engage his world’s anxiety and to confront the seemingly limitless violence and depravity committed by twentieth-century man.

      Methodological Considerations

      Against the Titans interweaves the life of a martyr with Christological and Trinitarian theology. To illustrate the need for heroes in a world dominated by the competing influences of an ethos of fear and one of militant zeal, the book stages an interplay between spirituality and theology. It demonstrates how the saving love of God in Christ transforms the interiority of a person through the Spirit. If Christianity is a way of life and not merely an idea, then the Triune God is not a concept but rather the means by which one walks the path as well as the goal of that path.

      Therefore, Against the Titans supplements the theology and witness of Alfred Delp with the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar.4 Balthasar recognizes that holy men and women are the living expository and repository of the Christian God, emphasizing that God is encountered through the holiness of persons, who reveal the saving love of God in the Trinitarian movements of self-emptying (kenosis), receptivity, and obedience. Though it would be difficult to make a causal link between Delp and Balthasar, both thinkers recognize in their writings the need for courageous, heroic testimony against what Thomas Merton in his introduction to Delp’s prison writings refers to as the “willfulness, self-assertion, and self-arrogance” of a “Promethean” ethos.5 Moreover, against the backdrop of the titanism of modern humankind, Delp puts forth a Christic “obedience unto death.”6 Delp’s eventual resolve to give his life away is an obediential response to God’s call to love without remainder.

      For this reason, Against the Titans utilizes Balthasar’s exposition of the saving love of the Triune God in Jesus Christ under five soteriological motifs, which are centered on the Cross and Resurrection. The five motifs are as follows:

      (1) The Son gives himself, through God the Father, for the world’s salvation. (2) The Sinless One “changes places” with sinners. While, in principle, the Church Fathers understood this in a radical sense, it is only in the modern variation of the theories of representation that the consequences are fully drawn out. (3) Man is thus set free (ransomed, redeemed, released). (4) More than this, he is initiated into the divine life of the Trinity. (5) Consequently, the whole process is shown to be the result of an initiative on the part of divine love.7

      These five motifs of the Trinity’s saving love in Jesus Christ reveal “the kenosis of divine love” and indicate that human maturation is one of the results of this kenosis. In the context of kenosis, God’s saving love in relation to finite persons is characterized by his self-gift in Jesus Christ. Such self-giving transforms human persons trapped in sin and evil, which obscure the innermost purpose of human existence.

      Moreover, for Balthasar, such self-giving is encountered in the person of Jesus, who is the focus of Christian living and in whom we gain access to the Triune God. Christian living is Trinitarian, because the human person's capacity to imitate and be in communion with Christ is given to him or her by the Spirit, who is sent by Christ, the divine–human mediator who intercedes for human beings with the Father. The gift of the Spirit, who assists humans in their prayer, worship, and loving deeds for others, is the result of the fruit of the saving event of the Paschal Mystery. For Balthasar, in the event of the Incarnation and in Christ’s existence leading up to His crucifixion and Resurrection, Jesus surrenders himself to the Spirit, whom He receives from the Father. At the consummation of his mission, Christ breathes forth the Spirit to the Father and upon the world, and as the resurrected Christ, Jesus gives the Spirit as the fruit of his work of redemption on the Cross. Jesus entrusts His Spirit to the Church so that we can share in the freedom brought about by His Resurrection.

      Against the Titans is indebted to recent scholarship on Balthasar’s theology by Timothy Yoder, Matthew Möser, and Fr. John Cihak. Yoder’s “Hans Urs von Balthasar and Kenosis: The Pathway to Human Agency”8 investigates the kenotic motif in Balthasar’s theology in the light of human agency. It argues that the disposition of self-emptying is the path to true human flourishing. Möser’s Love Itself Is Understanding: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of the Saints 9 examines Balthasar’s treatment of the saints as agents of the truth of God. The book considers the witnesses of the saints as sources for theological and philosophical reflections. Cihak’s Balthasar and Anxiety 10 deepens Balthasar’s own work on the redemption of anxiety.11 Cihak’s book investigates the phenomenon of anxiety in the modern world and offers a Balthasarian theological response to the problem of anxiety.

      With all this in mind, Against the Titans characterizes Delp’s heroic resistance against the Nazis and witness unto death as being transformed and configured to Christ through the Spirit. His transformation includes the difficult redemption of his anxiety while in prison. He struggled to give himself away at the end of his life as he confronted the fear of uncertainty, loneliness, and impending death. His ability to cast himself on God is the result of his encounter and experience with Christ. Delp’s path back to God does not happen without the Spirit, who incorporates Delp in the redemptive work of Christ. Moreover, the book utilizes Delp’s prison meditations on the Heart of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the saints and martyrs of the Advent and Christmas seasons to weave a Trinitarian-inspired bulwark against the titanic orientation of fascism.

      Against the Titans also draws on Thomas R. Nevin, Thomas Rohkrämer, and Roger Griffin’s scholarship on the controversial godfather of the German extreme right, Ernst Jünger.12 Nevin’s Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914–1945 13 examines the writer’s first fifty years from the late Wilhelmine era of the Kaiser to the end of Hitler’s Third Reich. Nevins addresses the memoirs of the highly decorated First World War lieutenant who was highly regarded by Hitler and the Nazis. Nevins also sheds light on Jünger’s political writings, which fiercely criticize democracy and herald the rise of an authoritarian militarist regime united with technology. Nevins offers a portrait of a man who, though he possessed extreme-right leanings, refused to join the Nazi movement and withdrew from political activism during the 1930s. In portraying Jünger as Germany’s living conscience during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic, Nevins in effect depicts Germany’s attempt at suicide as it marched toward and under the banner of the swastika.

      Rohkrämer’s A Single Communal Faith? The German Right from Conservatism to National Socialism 14 examines the German political right’s radicalization in response to people’s desire for identity and belonging in a world lacking metaphysical security. Among the leaders of the Conservative Revolution, the book counts Ernst Jünger, who aimed to replace the Weimar Republic with an authoritarian, nationalist regime in order to give persons a sense of purpose.

      Griffin views fascism as a revolutionary form of modernity bent on mobilizing all healthy social and political energies to resist the onslaught of decadence to achieve the goal of national rebirth.15 Within this framework, the orgy of destruction which accompanied the rise of the Third Reich was not wanton nihilism but rather the will to destroy in order to build something new and stronger.16 Griffin places Jünger’s writings and activism on the spectrum of such reactionary modernism. For Griffin, Jünger championed a heroic, Promethean image of humanity, awakening in the German people the desire to seize divine power, freedom, and knowledge through technological mastery.17 The First World War, with its militarization and nationalism of the masses, acted as an ideological accelerator, and the sensemaking crises of Western society during the interwar period acted as an incubator for the desire to reduce the old and the decadent to ashes in order to construct a new Phoenix. Jünger’s heralding of the new human as a technocratic,

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