What the religious life teaches is us to embrace constraint as freedom

IT IS a paradox familiar to artists, in addition to to those living the religious life, that rules can liberate moderately than imprison. Constraints can foster creativity. Wordsworth famously drew the parallel between the “prison” of the sonnet form and the monastic cell: nuns, he claimed, “fret not at their convent’s narrow room; and hermits are contented with their cells”:

In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be certain
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground. . .

If our problem is the “weight of an excessive amount of liberty”, as Wordsworth felt it to be, then constraining forms might offer freedom.

This relationship between creativity and constraint is a recurring theme within the Sainsbury Centre’s ambitious exhibition “Living by the Rule: Contemporary Meets Medieval”, curated by Dr Jessica Barker and Dr Ed Krcma. The exhibition and accompanying book arrange a sequence of half-rhymes, across time, between medieval (especially Benedictine) monasticism, and contemporary art.

Benedict saw his Rule as a “toolkit”, and the monastery as a “workshop”, for the shaping of life; many modern artists have shared the conviction that each day life must be its own murals, and have used their art to interrogate the principles that shape modern lives. And, just as Benedict offered rules for a radically different sort of living in response to the political turbulence of sixth-century Italy, so modern and contemporary artists, in one other era of political turbulence, have imposed rules and constraints on their very own practices. In the brave recent worlds of medieval Italy and late capitalism, consciously chosen rules have given creative and spiritual lives structure, allowing creativity to proceed amidst crisis.

Much of “Living by the Rule” is worried with the best way that rules can structure or pattern lives: routines of waking and sleeping, working and resting, and caring for the body, and the technologies that, then and now, have each enabled and recorded this structuring. Monastic calendars and complicated horological devices sit alongside modern time-card racks, “the office” making demands on each medieval monks and nuns and modern employees.

There is loads of attention to the ways during which rules may be oppressive and exploitative, or can dehumanise as an alternative of creating us fully alive. And yet the curators insist that there may be “something vital, potent, and even unruly” to be recovered from the fragments of monastic rules.

That “something”, it seems, concerns the connection between creativity and constraint. Why might it’s that constraint has creative potential? Most mundanely, constraints exist in Benedict’s rule because we humans have faults. Rules are the protection barriers that keep us on the road; they “safeguard love”, in Benedict’s memorable phrase: “The good of all concerned, nevertheless, may prompt us to a bit strictness to be able to amend faults and to safeguard love.”

TO ACCEPT the necessity for boundaries is to just accept a basic fact of anthropology — humans’ tendency to error — and, much more broadly, the truth of finitude: the finitude of bodies, language, even creation itself. There are constraints baked into reality: constraints of space and time, and of planetary resources, and of tradition and culture, of what is going to make sense to others. Accepting the constraints of a creative form or a rule of life puts us in contact with these fundamental constraints that are already there, whether we elect them or not.

But rules are about greater than mere damage limitation. Constraints stimulate inventiveness, forcing artists and contemplatives to shift out of their limited rationality and right into a way more expansive realm beneath consciousness. Don Paterson suggests that, as a poet, “form is your friend”: it makes it harder to say what you must say (which is usually dull and predictable) and as an alternative opens up memory and the unconscious, “that are the one places which may deliver up the shock into wakefulness your reader demands of you”.

The same is true for architects, composers, and designers of every kind, who know by experience that too few constraints actually make creative invention harder moderately than easier. And so, whilst Modernism has abandoned the normal constraining forms, of sonnets and sonatas and the remaining, it has found itself inventing others: Stravinsky submitting to the principles of Serialism as a sort of “voluntary limitation”; Sol LeWitt surrendering his drawings to the principles of algorithms; or the Oulipo movement experiencing with arbitrary constraints, comparable to writing a complete novel without the letter “e”.

Consider a theological slant on this. Perhaps constraint liberates since it someway suits our finite nature? When we indulge fantasies of infinite reach and capability, we discover we will do nothing. Yet, in accepting our limitedness and selecting a shape for our projects which echoes it, we’re let loose to do something that, counterintuitively, channels a much less limited creativity. There is an incarnational shape here: the infinite coming to dwell within the finite; the acceptance of limitation becoming the option to a life less limited.

It is difficult to assume a more total constraint than the constraint of the cross — or a more profound creative freedom than the liberty of the resurrection. The Christian tradition has subsequently been confident to show constraint as a path to freedom: the Desert Father Abba Moses encouraged restless novices to “go to your cell: your cell will teach you every thing”, just as Jesus encouraged his followers to take up their cross. The constraints of cell, form, and medium are where the monk, the artist, and the Christian learn to be free.

PERHAPS not all constraint is freeing. A monastic cell may resemble a jail cell, but there is no such thing as a lock on the door: as Sara Maitland writes in A Book of Silence, there may be an ideal difference between selecting silence and being silenced. Wordsworth’s qualifier is that, in art and life, it’s freely chosen constraint — the “prison into which we doom ourselves” — which liberates.

Yet, faced with “an excessive amount of liberty”, we’re quite capable of selecting toxic constraints for ourselves moderately than life-giving ones; because the psychoanalyst Eric Fromm suggested, our “fear of freedom”, of “an excessive amount of liberty”, could make even the constraints of authoritarianism and fascism appealing in times of social crisis — a really present danger today.

The curators of “Living by the Rule” are aware that nostalgia for an idealised Middle Ages is dangerous: it could have even played a component in enabling modern injustices and atrocities. They are, subsequently, determined to emphasize the truth of medieval monasticism — its “difficulty, unevenness, failures and compromises”. They point to the shadow sides of discipline, constraint, and ascesis, and clearly these are to be navigated with utmost caution and discernment.

But the curators also consider that, for all of the chequered history of their application, it’s price sitting with the concept of rules. So, a way of ambivalent fascination runs throughout the exhibition: monasticism held up as each an important inspiration for our own days, and as cautionary tale; each “attractive and repulsive”, as a quote from Andrea Büttner within the accompanying book suggests.

To consider rule-bound ways of life as someway exemplary — even on this qualified way — is countercultural. Büttner’s experience of being someway “repelled” by the monastic life is, I feel, not unusual amongst those that have really considered the truth of monastic vows of stability, fidelity, and obedience. It will not be just the hypocrisies and failures of non secular communities that may repel (though that’s, after all, a part of it), but their “successes”, too — since the austere constraint of the religious life is so deeply unlike the best way that almost all of our society imagines flourishing, as unconstrained, footloose, and fancy free. Neoliberalism has been so concerned to eliminate all limits on life that we’ve got overpassed the creaturely and artistic potential of constraint.

The complex and punctiliously caveated suggestion of “Living by the Rule” is that, in an age of “an excessive amount of liberty”, rules might once more set us free. And excited about constraints as creative does indeed seem essential, now. It holds open the chance that essentially the most fundamental constraints of our lives — our mortality, our limited personal energies, our finite planetary resources — might yet be creative opportunities to be embraced, moderately than inconvenient obstacles to be overcome.

This is an urgent idea, if we’re to start to grapple with our climate and ecological crises, for instance. To construct a standard life that may exist inside the limits of reality, in what the economist Kate Raworth, the creator of “doughnut economics”, calls the “protected and just” space for humanity (between planetary limits on the one hand and acceptable standards of living on the opposite) would require a radical reorientation of our relationship with the entire notion of limits and rules.

We might want to regain the imagination to embrace constraint and flourish inside it moderately than run from it; to see it as a friend, just like the metre of a poem, which can encourage greater compassion and deeper community than would otherwise have been achieved. Perhaps monks and nuns, artists and poets — the virtuosos of constraint — will give you the option to point to the trail that leads from cell to freedom.

The Revd Dr Rob Hawkins is Chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He is a member of the editorial team for Art+Christianity.

“Living by the Rule: Contemporary meets Medieval” is on the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, until 4 October. The exhibition is reviewed [here]