“Do you know that God has granted you a rare sensus supernaturalis (sense for the supernatural)? And do you realize clearly the responsibility that such a gift entails?”—Fr. Gustave Desbuquois to Dietrich von Hildebrand
“That damned Hildebrand is the greatest obstacle for National Socialism in Austria. No one causes more harm.”—Franz von Papen, Nazi Ambassador to Austria
It was pretty early when the Nazis recognized the threat posed by Dietrich von Hildebrand. Founded in 1919 by Anton Drexler, the German Workers’ Party was a militant nationalist response to the German surrender in the First World War, the ensuing Versailles Peace Treaty, and the pockets of revolutionary violence springing up throughout Germany. Later that year, a young, fiery German named Adolf Hitler would take the movement by storm with his rapier tongue and blistering rhetoric. By 1920, the party was re-branded the National Socialist German Worker’s Party and soon dubbed the Nazis.
Meanwhile, Dietrich von Hildebrand, a young Catholic convert and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Munich, spoke out at a 1921 post-war peace conference in Paris. Hildebrand had no reservations about publicly calling the German wartime invasion of neutral Belgium “an atrocious crime.” To openly declare this while Germany boiled in a cauldron of blood-and-soil nationalism and ideological radicalism, was to open himself to vitriol and death threats. The German Workers’ Party took special note of Hildebrand’s courage, principles, and perspectives and declared him an enemy. At the time of Hitler’s failed attempt to overthrow the German government in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Hildebrand’s name was already on the Nazi blacklist and marked for death.
But this didn’t sway Dietrich von Hildebrand.
In reading Hildebrand’s memoirs (translated and edited by John F. and John Henry Crosby), My Battle Against Hitler: Faith, Truth, and Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich, I discovered just why Hildebrand would be declared “enemy number one” by Hitler’s henchmen.
To be sure, Dietrich von Hildebrand was courageous. Like many dissidents or martyrs of the twentieth century (consider Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Leszek Kolakowski, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fr. Maximilian Kolbe), Hildebrand was fully committed. He scrupulously analyzed the Nazi ideological program, unflinchingly articulated myriad rebuttals, and fearlessly crusaded against the rising radical tide. Even though Hildebrand loved his job, his home, his country and his proximity to colleagues and friends, he nevertheless sacrificed everything to stand by the truth. In a position to obfuscate, he openly declared the Jewish status of his grandmother, which led to his removal from his professorship.
With gifts of great intelligence and eloquence to capably ingratiate himself to the Nazis, hedge on the truth, or keep quiet for personal advantage, he refused any such safe harbors unfailingly following his well-formed conscience. And having family and friends across Europe with whom he could easily have tucked himself away from danger and quietly minded his own business, he never countenanced such an abdication of responsibility. With the Nazis (as with any godless ideology), there could be no modus vivendi. Dietrich von Hildebrand stood for something and, in so doing, gave up everything.
What is even more impressive about Dietrich von Hildebrand, however, is his uncanny apprehension of the truth. Rooted in Scripture and the Sacraments, versed in the phenomenology and personalist philosophy, Hildebrand’s moral foundations were unshakeable. And this understanding gave him great comfort in his mission. “I had the consciousness that what I was doing was right before God,” he recalled, “and this gave me such inner freedom that I was not afraid.” In being well-formed, Hildebrand recognized the dangers of collectivism, where the God-given dignity of the individual is subsumed by the mood and caprice of the mob (and its inevitably self-appointed, power-hungry masters). He criticized the philosophy of reductionism and materialism that rationalized away morality and rendered consciousness a clunky matter of brain chemistry. He sensed the paradox of inhumane policies clothed in disingenuous humane language.
Finally, Hildebrand was blessed with a keen sense of human nature and the tendency (among family, friends, colleagues, and even himself) to fall prey to sloppy thinking. People, Hildebrand recognized, can become lazy in their understanding of truth and fearful about threats to their loved ones and themselves. It is natural. As such, Hildebrand saw friends rationalize and professors compromise, priests hedge and bishops obfuscate. Knowing that the Nazis cynically traded in half-truths and false assurances, Hildebrand’s good natured and fearful associates were easy to manipulate. And while Hildebrand was no scold, he called everyone to supreme alertness. One student recalled,
Heidegger’s melodies no longer had the power to seduce us, for our ears had become more discerning. Whoever understood von Hildebrand was saved. Despite many factors at work, I think one can rightly say that history might have been quite different had there been more professors like him.
In a way, Hildebrand considered this his greatest work:
The discernment of spirits, which alone mattered in that moment, simply required one to ask whether a person clearly grasped the nature of National Socialism and whether they rejected it completely on the basis of the right philosophical and moral reasons. Where this was the case, differences of opinion could be postponed for a later time.
To know the truth, yes. To stand up for the truth, for sure. But Hildebrand’s charge to alert others (even if, at times, serving as a Cassandra) that the deceptively soothing, but nefarious temptation to be agreeable with evil will end not in deliverance, but in perdition. Hildebrand reflected,
[I had to] shed new light, on the absolute impossibility of any kind of compromise with National Socialism. For it is unbelievable how vulnerable our human nature is to falling into illusions and to growing numb in our indignation over injustice which we come to accept. Here, as in so many others in life, we must be like the conductor of an orchestra, in continually renewing the call to alertness. The moment one lets up, people fall asleep, or at least become indifferent.
Beyond odd pockets in dark corners, National Socialism has been destroyed. But ideology has not. Nor has the human tendency to fool ourselves. When it comes to knowing (and embracing) the truth, having the courage to defend it, and the wisdom to sense our propensity to betray it, it would be difficult to find a better conductor than Dietrich von Hildebrand.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Thanks for this introduction to the other Dietrich.
More, please.
Well timed, CWR! To post this wonderful tribute to Dietrich von Hildebrand the day after Bergoglio urges Catholics to find common ground with Communists is too perfect to be coincidence.
What you are saying rings loud and clear.
Had the same thought, brineyman.
“Hildebrand recognized the dangers of collectivism…” Would that Pope Francis had such recognition. Rather Francis would undoubtedly criticize Hildebrand for his “rigidity” because “he sacrificed everything to stand by the truth.”
St. JP II pray for us.
About the supernatural, the lay theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand reports a revealing conversation with Teilhard do Chardin: “After a lively discussion in which I ventured a criticism of his ideas, I had the opportunity to speak to Teilhard privately. When our talk touched on St. Augustine, he exclaimed violently: ‘Don’t mention that unfortunate man; he spoiled everything by introducing the supernatural” (Appendix, “Trojan Horse in the City of God,” Franciscan Herald Press, 1967).
Thinking, now, about recent Church headlines, here and there, what if the game is not so much Teilhardian heresy or schism as it is about simple roundtable poker?
What if Fiducia supplicans (FS) is not so much theological “creativity” as it is a chip on the table, a gambling concession that der Synodale Weg might then abandon the rest of its cards (female ordinations, a never-ending German non-synod, etc.) and rejoin the fold. Such an FS gamble would be something like a secret “provisional agreement,” as with China rather than Hitler’s Germany, and that’s become a bit complicated (“not the best possible deal” said Archbishop Gallagher of the Vatican Secretariat of State).
To play and then lose now at strip poker might touch a “sensitivity” and merit an “investigation.”
In university, I’ve been initiated to and inflicted with the then trendy but sickish thought of Teilhard de Chardin. It took Dietrich Von Hildebrand’s short essay appendix cited here as medicine to cure and heal me.
Every thought that comes to a person, whether from hearing it, observing a reason to note it, or, perhaps, taught it, becomes a part of us whether or not we accept, reject or mentally toy with it. It requires humility to acknowledge that getting to see the worth of every thought is difficult and perhaps even impossible. It is always possible to end as confused and hence understanding that constant analysis of the value of thought is our fate. In humility it must be accepted that the human person is always an in-between in the realm of thoughts and that the certainty sought can never be fully grasped. The alternative is narcissism by grasping on some thoughts as if they were certainties and acting on them. Hitler and his like (Nazis, Marxists, …) adopted thoughts that they accepted as final and not “in-between” as virtues and acted on them. However, true virtue comes from God forming our consciences as insight into true virtues. This is what von Hildebrand understood and standing up against Nazi’s because of it – he understood that Nazis “virtue” is actually a “vice”. And, this remains true of all who pretend to know absolutely.
Von Hildebrand had to be spiritually gifted with insight to realize and withstand the evil of Nazism. Adolf was gifted too, former Catholic singer in the choir considering the priesthood, drawn from the true God to the gods of Norse mythology imbued in the thought and majestic works of Wagner. Transformation from the priestly man of forgiveness and mercy to the heroic German warrior of Die Walküre in Der Ring des Nibelungen [Tolkien was certainly inspired to add the theme of Wagner’s dwarves and the ring in his own more Christian trilogy The Rings].
Germany had cause to retaliate the unjust peace imposed by the Allies, one who predicted that the treaty enforced was really an armistice, that in 20 years there’d be at war again. The treaty left Germany its territory diminished, impoverished, many citizens starving in the streets. Adolf’s evil message of German pride and just retaliation was powerfully delivered in the quasi mystical form of a demonic messiah. Himmler SS chief developed Hitler’s religious Nordic theme adding it to SS ritual indoctrination at the castle of Wewelsburg.
Dietrich von Hildebrand was representative of the true religion instituted by Jesus of Nazareth, who Adolf despised as a weakling, but feared versus the religion of the mythical Nordic gods turned daemonic by both Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. There’s a putative link in this in Nazism’s hatred of Jews and fear of Catholics especially stalwarts like Archbishop Augustus von Galen and Dietrich von Hildebrand .
This reminds me to be sober-minded; to be alert, aware, and to look at things clearly. This if often very hard for me. Yet, I am also reminded that when I hold this life (my own life) lightly, I am better able to discern God’s will. It seems to be I have been holding on to life too tightly, and I’m starting to see it in our culture. We hold on to almost everything with a clutching, fearful grip! And because of that we are easily manipulated, prone to compromise, and live with inner-terror just under the surface. I don’t intend to be flippant about life and death, but “do not fear one who kills the body, only fear the one who kills the soul” has taken on a much deeper meaning as of late.
Great read. I think I will be adding some Hildebrand to my reading list!
I’ve seen it in grad schoo, in the religious orders, even in the diocesan seminary, what DvH said about the tendency of thinkers and Catholics:
“”Von Hildebrand recounts many stories of academic conferences with Franciscan priests and philosophy professors who “overemphasized the notion of community at the expense of the individual.” Because they were “infected by this collectivistic tendency,” they advocated ideas that deny the fundamental dignity of the human person. These ideas paved the philosophic path for collectivism and, in turn, a justification of anti-Semitism. The small concessions became large compromises. The philosophical rhetoric became physical reality. Eventually, the actions that flowed from the collectivism espoused at these conferences justified sending truckloads of Jews to the gas chambers. It all began with an idea, for which many lived and millions died.””