Review of Tyranny of the Banal in Reviews in Religion and Theology

The reviews of Tyranny of the Banal have been great, but few if any have understood the goals and strategies of the book as well as Tom Gourlay in his review from the current issue of Reviews in Religion and Theology. The review is below.

The Tyranny of the Banal: On the Renewal of Catholic Moral Theology, David Deane, Lanham, Lexington Books/ Fortress Academic, 2023 (ISBN 9781978700819), xviii + 290 pp., Hb $110

When Pope Benedict XVI took to the dais to address his former colleagues at the University of Regensburg, the world seemed to shake with the reverberations of his insight. While certain reports of the event missed the main thrust of his argument—to tragic consequences—the underlying point remains one of incredible pertinence. The malady confronting not only the West today but indeed the world is not so much a crisis of faith, as it is a crisis of reason. The scope of reason, he argued, has suffered a drastic reduction in the modern era and short of a renewal and indeed a broadening of reason, the crisis of faith cannot be adequately addressed, and the task given the Church will continue to flounder in the modern era. In this compellingly argued and masterfully written volume, David Deane, Associate Professor of Theology at the Atlantic School of Theology, makes a significant contribution to the broadening of reason, so astutely called for by the theologian-pontiff.

In a truly illuminating opening chapter, Deane forcefully argues that certain piously motivated but theologically inept philosophical manoeuvres by Immanuel Kant effected a particular reduction in modern reason, which had led to the particular circumstances which faces the Church today as it struggles to articulate persuasively its moral teaching in a manner convincing to its own membership, let alone an increasingly secularized world. By means of a remedy to this profound malaise, Deane proposes what is in essence a renewal of fundamental moral theology by reconnecting it to its spiritual and metaphysical roots, ultimately a renewal of a transubstantive grammar, and a grounding in trinitarian ontology.

As he describes in the opening two chapters of the book, the severance of moral theology from its roots has its genesis in the early modern era. According to Deane, in an attempt to respond adequately to Kant's provocation, the Church's moralists of the modern period recast their positions in such a way as to accommodate the rationalistic form of reason that Kant's system had constructed. Thus, as Deane persuasively argues, in seeking to shore up the reasonableness of the Church's moral teaching in strictly modern/Kantian terms, the Church's moralists had unwittingly succumbed to the reduced form of rationality that was gaining ascendancy. Resorting to what was in essence a positivistic casuistry, they effectively reduced the morality of the sequela Christi to a simple moralism, replete with a legalistic and positivistic list of 'dos' and

'don'ts'. The system of moral reasoning that they constructed, with which they attempted to articulate the Church's moral teaching in the terms of Kantian rationality alone, unwittingly saw this form of rationality usurp the basic trinitarian grammar that gave the moral teaching its own integrity and coherence in the first place. The emaciated form of moral reasoning which permeated the Church was then, and has since continued to be, unable to withstand the devastating critique of Nietzsche, rendering Catholic Christian moral theology not only incoherent to modern peoples—regardless of their faith commitment—but also repugnant to their own moral sensibility.

After laying the epistemological and metaphysical groundwork in chapters one and two, illustrating the effects of the capitulation of Catholic Christian moral teaching to this Kantian framework, and the devastating effects of the Nietzschean wrecking ball, Deane proceeds to atreatment of the moral theology that undergirds some of the most contentious issues of our time, namely, life issues, treating abortion and euthanasia in chapters three and four, respectively; and issues pertaining to gender and sexuality in chapter five. These chapters provide something of a testing ground for Deane's theory, allowing him ample space to establish the credibility of his proposal. Each of these chapters begins with Deane drawing on sociological evidence to demonstrate the abject failure of the Church's efforts to adequately propose its moral teaching to its own members—let alone the world at large.

Deane then proceeds to apply a twofold methodology which he posits will bring about the renewal of Catholic moral theology (to which he hopes to contribute). The first step of his twofold methodology is deconstructive, by which Deane means that his task is initially to expose the cultural hegemony of the kind of reason dominant in the modern West. This initial 'deconstructive' mode of engaging is not simply an attempt to ape post-modern theorists but instead is in itself a traditional Christian approach: 'Paul', he argues, 'does not simply speak about who Jesus Christ is and how he can save, he also needs to loosen the hold that the Law has on his hearers'. The example of St Paul is not an isolated one in the tradition. Deane continues, pointing out that '...the Fathers respond to heresy to express the beauty and coherence of orthodoxy. Aquinas begins each question with arguments to the contrary of his position before proceeding to demonstrate problems in them and so on...' (119).

Deane's second step is to articulate carefully the trinitarian grammar within which basic Catholic moral positions are formulated and in which context they are both coherent and indeed beautiful. Drawing on a wide range of authoritative sources, notably Saints Augustine and Thomas, among many others, Deane illustrates a deeper ontology of the moral act—one which includes the moral act as always already intrinsically related to the life of grace or sanctity. He writes:

Throughout this book, my goal is to show the foundational logic on which Catholic moral positions have been based. The coherency of Catholic positions are dependent on the understanding of the human person and the goal (or 'end') of life from which they flow. Without these understanding the traditional Catholic positions seem irrational... only by reconnecting them with this foundational theology can Catholics once again see the coherence and beauty in them. This is the core element of this book—to illustrate the coherency and beauty of the Catholic approaches by reconnecting them with their doctrinal foundations. (117)

The book then approaches a climactic point, drawing all this towards the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass in the sixth and final chapter. In this stunning argument, Deane shows how the rejection of the transubstantive logic of St Thomas in and through the theology of the Reformers (primarily Luther, but also Cranmer, Zwingli, and Calvin)—both a product and a driver of the metaphysical and epistemological trajectory of modernity—as well as the effect of certain Catholic reactions to this rejection, has led to a disenchantment or banalization of the created order. In proposing a renewal of this transubstantive grammar, Deane argues that the Church can develop a 'Eucharistic hermeneutic of suspicion' (235), which will allow believers a way beyond the banal materialism of the present cultural moment, and the opportunity to recognize and to habituate the recognition of the genuine sacramentality of all creation through the contemplation of the transubstantiated species.

Aside from its brilliance in theological argumentation and cultural critique, Deane does the Church a great service in the publication of The Tyranny of the Banal and makes a tremendously valuable contribution to the practice of theology in an academic context which would otherwise see moral theology as a subdiscipline of theology, cordoned off from other subdisciplines of theology. Deane's theology is a truly integrated one, eschewing as it does the purely positivistic boundaries of university specializations and theological subdisciplines, freely drawing on the great scriptural, spiritual, and metaphysical traditions of the Church, from Trinitarian theology, pneumatology, and Christology; from the Fathers, and the great medieval, early and late modern

thinkers. Deane shows that while the Church's moral teaching is indeed rational, it is only really coherent and persuasive; indeed, it is only achievable within the Trinitarian framework within which it has been worked out, that is, it requires reason to be functioning at its fullness. Growth in the moral life for the Christian is not so much in the attaining of self-mastery, or in the following of extrinsically imposed laws, but in the active receptivity of the gift of God the Father in the person of Jesus the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit, as one submits and conforms oneself to the gift of theosis.

Thomas V. Gourlay Catholic Institute of Western Australia