Liberty . . . is limited to the extent that it is relative, but it is really liberty in so far as it is liberty and not something else.
What then is liberty considered independently of free creatures, or of the particular case of a free creature? It is the consciousness of an unlimited diversity of possibilities, and this consciousness is an aspect of Being itself. To those who maintain that only a given experience of liberty such as that of a bird is concrete, and not liberty in itself (which in their view is no more than a purely mental abstraction), the reply must be made, without it being necessary to deny the existence of abstraction in the reason, that liberty in itself is an immutable essence in which creatures may either participate or not participate, and that a given experience of liberty is only an "accident." Defined in positive terms liberty is the possibility of manifesting oneself fully, or being perfectly oneself, and this possibility (or this experience) runs through the universe as a real, and hence concrete, beatitude in which animate beings participate according to their natures and their destinies; the animate Universe is a being that breathes,and that lives both in itself and in its innumerable individualized constituents; and behind all this there subsists the ineffable liberty of the Infinite . . . When a bird escapes from its cage we say that it is free;we might just as truly say that liberty has erupted at a particular point on the cosmic shell, or that it has taken possession of the bird, or that it has manifested itself through this creature or that form; liberation is something that occurs, but liberty is that which is, which always has been and always will be. The prototype of all liberty, and the reality expressed in every particular or "accidental" phenomenon of liberty, is the limitlessness of principal or Divine activity, or the consciousness God has of his All-Possibility. Frithjof Schuon .
