On the nature of exceptions

There is an awful commotion at the moment about rules and those who want them. If you insist on black and white laws, you are, it is said, unmerciful and rigid. And when such rigid folk ask referees to clarify the exact meaning of some ruling, it is said that they need to get with the programme and stop being so hidebound. Rules are out and mercy is in! Welcome to the Brave New Church.

If only the internet allowed one to blow a big, fat raspberry. Hang on a minute, it probably does.

Rather satisfying that.

As I was saying, there are few things sillier than labelling the need for rules as something inherently rigid. Au contraire, mes amis, in a sense nothing is beyond the rules. Even exceptions to rules are only the effect of lower rules yielding to more important rules higher in the hierarchy of norms until, of course, we reach the goodness of God which allows of no exceptions.

Let me state that again in another way for clarity. Those who think exceptions are less 'rule-led' than rules are hardly lucid. Exceptions are only 'rule-less' when one does not admit a higher law.

The paradoxical conclusion, therefore, is that when Jesus gets tough on the Pharisees for their rule-bound rigidity, it is only because they are binding themselves within one category of law without seeing how lower categories of law depend on higher categories for their life and virtue. Jesus is totally black and white; it's just that on the electromagnetic spectrum of the law, some rules are only visible to reason, while others are visible to faith and some are only visible to divine wisdom. How unsearchable are His ways, right? Well, indeed.

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There is another way to go about this argument and it lies in considering the virtue of rules, rather than their vices. Yes, yes, yes, everyone knows about their vices. But what about their virtues?

Great minds seize on their fecundity immediately. It was said, for example, that Stravinsky was mad about compositional rules. You might find that difficult to believe by the time you get 10 minutes into The Rite of Spring - the opening-night's audience in Paris in 1913 certainly did! - but he affirmed that compositional rules were the absolute condition of creativity. He wrote, for example, about the 'abyss of freedom' that opened up without rules, and complained, moreover, of the terror he felt without first establishing his compositional presuppositions. And with rules in place, the creativity could flow and lead him to write things like this, for example:

Another example that springs to mind is Chesterton's famous walled garden analogy. It comes in Chapter 9 of Orthodoxy and Chesterton uses it to explain how Christianity could incorporate all the pleasures of Paganism in their place, i.e. in the wider order of norms that all come ultimately from the goodness of God. The great man writes as follows:

Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.

This is not just some Chestertonian paradox to be enjoyed and then ignored. As I argued above, exceptions are only applications of some higher law. Tearing down rules in the name of getting away from the supposed rigidity of law is to misunderstand fundamentally what exceptions do for us. It is implicitly to undermine the order of the universe, not by requiring an exception but by only looking at the exception as a liberation ... whereas in truth it is only a statement of fidelity to some higher rule.

And the corollary follows. If an exception is not in fact an admission of the higher law, then an exception simply serves as a principle of anarchy. In this light, asking for clarity about the laws that apply is not Pharisaical. It is merely a request that exceptions be placed in the context of the higher order of norms, above and beyond which we finally arrive at the goodness of God. To block or crush this process, to behave as if exceptions speak for themselves because exceptions are always liberating, is to obscure the reason for the exception in the first place.

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Well, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, so what else is there to do but bid you a pleasant evening? I'm off to listen to Stravinsky at his most hidebound, as he was by the late 1930s. How interesting that he was dabbling in apparently rule-lite chaos in The Rite of Spring on the eve of the First World War, a war that interrupted the famous garden-party atmosphere of the Belle Epoque. And how interesting, in the same light, that he was dabbling in the rule-bound straightjacket of neo-classicalism in the late 1930s when just about everyone knew what was on its way.

A lesson for those who would muck about with rules perhaps...? When you sow the wind, expect to reap what's coming to you.

PS The Rite of Spring does in fact have its own almost inscrutable rules, but I'll leave that for another time.