Hermes on being asked, What is God?—replied: The Demiurge of wholes,—the Mind most wise and everlasting. The whole Excerpt XXII is this one sentence — an apophthegm, a saying of the master preserved in isolation from its original setting. The compression is total. God is the maker of wholes (not of parts, not of fragments — God’s work is integrities). God is Mind, not separate from intellect but identical with the highest intellect. God is most wise and everlasting. Three predicates, no rhetoric, no apologetics, no proof. The Hermetic literature is occasionally aphoristic in this way, and the aphorisms tend to be the most quoted parts in later Patristic and medieval reception.