Man cannot violate the laws of nature, or they wouldn't be laws. But he can steer them, and in so doing transcend them. He can similarly steer his own nature, which means he has free will. Our nature itself can't be absolutely free -- i.e., without the limitation of form -- otherwise there would be nothing to steer and nowhere to go anyway.
In short, form is always a constraint on possibility, even while the existence of so many forms is a consequence of the all-possibility of God, which is to say, his inexhaustible creativity. For what is creativity, exactly? It must be an orthoparadoxical combination of form and formlessness; or, to be precisely precise, it is the essence in existence, or substance in form, or perhaps "bounded freedom."
Come to think of it, Schuon describes art in exactly this way: its essential function
is to transfer Substance, which is both one and inexhaustible, into the world of accident and to bring the accidental consciousness back to Substance.
This explains why man is compelled to create art on the one hand and attracted to it on the other, and indeed why it is so central to what man is. For art
transposes Being to the world of existence... it transposes in a certain way the Infinite to the world of the finite, or Essence to the world of forms; it thereby suggests a continuity proceeding from the one to the other, a way starting from appearance or accident and opening onto Substance or its celestial reverberations.
As to the complementarity of creation-exteriorization and attraction-interiorization, Schuon points out that this function
is both magical and spiritual: magical, it renders present principles, powers and also things that it attracts by virtue of a “sympathetic magic”; spiritual, it exteriorizes truths and beauties in view of our interiorization, of our return to the “kingdom of God that is within you.”
The Principle becomes manifestation so that manifestation might rebecome the Principle, or so that the “I” might return to the Self; or simply, so that the human soul might, through given phenomena, make contact with the heavenly archetypes, and thereby with its own archetype.
I don't want to get sidetracked into a discussion of art. The bottom line is that man is a form; the top line is that this form is an image of the Creator, and the Creator is -- obviously -- beyond form.
Therefore, if you're following me, man, alone among creatures, is an orthoparadoxical -- no joke! I always mean this term literally -- complementarity of form and formlessness. Which is why we can -- and must -- grow and develop. We are created for purposes of transcendence or even transfiguration, AKA theosis.
All of this no doubt sounds more than a bit abstract, and it is, and yet, the consequences could scarcely be more concrete. If they're not, then to hell with it.
"Man," writes Schuon "is as if suspended between animality and divinity." As Life Itself clamors up the biological teloscape from veggies to insects to reptiles to mammals, there's more wiggle room at the top, but not much. Only in man is there a real breakthrough of form into the Great Wide Open of the formless, and vice versa.
I was thinking about this ladder just yesterday. Every science has its proper object, and an object is -- duh -- a form, otherwise we'd be unable to study it. Now, what is the form of theology? Correct: it is God. And God is? Correct: beyond form. Therefore, theology is the formal study of the formless.
Now, one reason, and maybe even the biggest reason, God is formless is that he's a person. In other words, there is an irreducible complementarity in persons qua personhood between form and formlessness, and now we're getting somewhere, because this again goes to the Trinity, since the Son is the engendered form of the "non-engendered" but engendering Father.
We'll no doubt return to this principle as we proceed, but to en-gender is to give form, AKA to in-form. That being the case, a little gratitude is in order: thanks for the information!
But I'm running short on time this morning, so TBC.
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