Giordano Bruno - Circle and Centre

Alain de Lille, a 12th century theologian, borrowing from the Corpus Hermeticum of the 3rd Century:

"God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."

While Giordano Bruno wrote:

"We can assert with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference is nowhere."

Pascal used the following words:

"God is a circle; His centre is everywhere, His circumference is nowhere."

Or in another translation:

"Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere."

And in his short story: 'The Library of Babel', J.L.Borjes plays with the idea:

"The library is a sphere whose exact centre is in any one of the hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible."

Circle and Centre

"The famous saying that God is "a sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere" is, in fact, first found in a pseudo-Hermetic treatise of the twelth century, and was transferred by Cusanus to the universe, as a reflection of God, in a manner which is Hermetic in spirit..This concept was basic for Bruno, for whom the innumerable worlds are all divine centres of the unbounded universe."

Yates, Bruno, p. 247.

The Liber XXIV philosophorum, published by Clemens Baeumker, Das pseudi.hermetische Buch der XXIV Meister, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologue des Mittelalters, fasc.xxv, Munster, 1928.

The source of Cusanus, is: De docta ignorantia, II, cap.2; cf.Koyre, op. cit., pp. 10ff.