 This form is not terribly common in the medieval period. Two works worthy of mention are Al-Farabi’s political aphorisms and a text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, but thought to have been written in the 12th century by a Christian Neoplatonist, called The Book of Twenty-Four Philosophers. This text consists of twenty-four definitions of God, the most famous of which is, “God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere,” quoted by Alan of Lille, Meister Eckhart, and others (Hudry 1997). Al-Farabi’s work, known as “Selected Aphorisms”, gets this title from its opening lines, in which Al-Farabi says the work consists of selected aphorisms from the ancients (Plato and Aristotle) “concerning that by which cities ought to be governed and made prosperous...” (Butterworth 2001, 5–6). This “primer for politics” contains discussion of the nature of the soul, virtue, the virtuous regime, and happiness. Its disjointed character and the way in which Al-Farabi composes it not from his own views but those of Aristotle and Plato make the form of the work central to its meaning: Is Al-Farabi endorsing views but without saying outright that they are his own because to hold them might be dangerous? What are the principles of selection at work? What is not being said? The aphoristic form seems to raise some of the same questions about possible esoteric motivations as does the allegorical form. In the case of The Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers the form seems to derive from the inaccessibility of the divine nature to human intellection. Thus, one comes closer to avoiding misrepresentation of the divine nature by using paradoxical or metaphoric formulations rather than literal ones.