Against the Titans : Theology and the Martyrdom of Alfred Delp

Against the Titans examines Alfred Delp’s rejection of the perversion of heroism and sacrifice. Peter Nguyen, S.J., argues that Delp embodied a Christian theology of martyrdom that offered an alternative to Ernst Jünger’s belief that violent heroism, merged with technology, could resolve the discontentment with modernity.

Recent history has been marked by titans, those yearning for self-mastery in the face of death and denouncing modernity’s tendency to reduce the individual to the lockstep of need and gratification. But what of those few who rejected these militant desires to exert supremacy over all? The story recounted in Against the Titans: The Theology of the Martyrdom of Alfred Delp examines a martyr’s rejection of the perversion of heroism and sacrifice. The life of Delp, a Jesuit priest, embodied a Christian theology of martyrdom articulated against a virile fundamentalism’s rejection of divine sovereignty. Against Ernst Jünger’s active nihilism, Delp revealed a more authentic and no less demanding existence that came not from acquiring self-mastery but rather from an emptying out of self — an indiferencia, an unselving — through a radical dependence upon God.