Book of the 24 Philosophers

The Book of the 24 Philosophers (Latin: Liber XXIV philosophorum) is a philosophical and theological medieval text of uncertain authorship.

Page from the Book of the 24 Philosophers in a 14th-century manuscript now in Paris. The name at the top of the page attributes the text to Hermes Trismegistus.

Overview

The book consists of twenty-four "sentences", "aphorisms" or "definitions" of God, attributed to as many philosophers attending a fictional gathering, each an attempt to answer their only remaining question, "what is God?" (quid Deus?). The first textual witness is from a 12th-century French manuscript currently at Laon.^[1] The definitions were often accompanied by a scholastic commentary in either of two redactions, the "shorter" and the "longer" commentary. Both definitions and commentary echo and weave numerous late ancient and medieval views on the first cause and the nature of divinity.^[2]

During the Middle Ages, the Liber was variously attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, Aristotle or simply quoted anonymously by theologians and philosophers. Contemporary scholarship is still inconclusive about the origin and authorship of the text. French scholar Françoise Hudry has argued for the attribution to Marius Victorinus (fl. 4th century).^[3] According to others, the text would belong to a lost work by Aristotle, the De philosophia, known to medieval Europe through the Arab translators of the Toledo School.

There are notably German, French and Italian studies of the text available,^[4] with no English translation yet in print, although online editions exist.^[5]

Influence

The influence of this work on medieval scholarship and literature has revealed traces of its ideas among the works of Jean de Meung, Dante, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Martin Luther,^[6] Robert Fludd, Pascal, and Leibniz.^[1]

The second definition in particular gained wide currency from early on in the High Middle Ages: “God is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” (Deus est sphaera infinita cuius centrum est ubique, circumferentia nusquam).^[1]