Thread by @johnmilbank3

‘God is that, in comparison to whom, substance is accident and accident nothing’. (Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers VI, circa 1200).

Deus est monos, monadem ex se gignens, in se unum reflectens ardorem. (Book of the Twenty-Four Philophers I)

In prima causa id a quo vita
Et sperma quo vita tota.

(VIII)

The Anon Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers echoes Marius Victorinus not only in its focus on definitions but also in its stress on the category of life and its linkage of Life to the second person of the Trinity, Intelligence to the Third. Neoplatonic esse/vivere/intellegere.

‘The creature is destined to return to Father and Son simply by living’ (paraphrase). ‘The more you are vilified, the more you are exalted and the more love (which is the way of return) will exalt you’. (VIII).

Apologies that should be vivified of course.

Like Alain of Lille the circa 1200 Book of the 24 Philosophers sees God as ‘finished’ infinite and cosmos as ‘open infinite’ bounded only by God’s presence. It also sees the Logos as equality to Father mediating the emanation of plurality. Another proto-Cusan text.

French Ed tends to talk of its ‘modernity’ on the cusp of the Thirteenth Century. But while it seems to invoke Aristotle’s De Caelo and known echoes of his lost books it builds on Boethian Chartrian writings only revived by Cusa 250 years later. And lost books more Platonic.

Deus est Opposita ut mediatio entis.
‘God is opposites as the mediation of being’ (XIV) The Book also anticipates Cusa’s view that negative theology transgresses the law of non-contradiction.

This includes at XIV the view that God includes in some manner nothing in himself as coinciding with being, since by his goodness he can bring existence about.

It goes on to say obscurely that if God is ‘attracted’ to act he ‘remains in hope’, if to possibility he returns to nothing.

The view that God transcends the contrast of being and nothing is also in Victorinus, besides Eriugena later on.

‘God is life whose way to form is unity, towards unity goodness’. (XV) (Echoing Victorinus but here unlike him son seems to Being, Spirit Goodness and Life at once the Father and the ‘moving’ essence of the Trinity.)

‘[God] does not receive predication, but always understands himself because he engenders himself’. (XVII, elaboration) It is implied that nothing is predicated of God because he is himself perfect self-predication, perfect self-naming. Trinitarian rendering of negative theology.

‘God is a sphere which has just as many circumferences as points’ (XVIII). In other words God is as much outside as inside himself. He is not in any way ‘in excess’ of his omnipresence to his Creation. That’s an easy mistake to make which this text resists.