Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to offer a new and coherent interpretation – a ‘reconstruction’ – of the cosmopolitical idea of humankind which is set out in Nemesius of Emesa's conspectus of ancient anthropology, De Natura Hominis. The Stoics held that "the world is governed by divine will, and that it is like a city and a polity of which both men and gods are citizens." This Hellenistic cosmopolitical theory implied that "all other things were generated for the sake of humans and gods," and that "human nature" subsists "like a code of civil law... between human persons and the human species, so that the one who observes this code will be just, and the one who departs from it, unjust". Now, Nemesius rejects numerous Stoic tenets in the Nat. Hom., and his 'world city' is not theirs. For instance, Nemesius holds that “those commit sin who mistreat irrational creatures”; whereas one of the Stoic tenets is a cold assertion that “no right” – which is to say, no form of obligation – “exists between humans and beasts”. The intent of the present thesis is thus by no means to suggest that Nemesius’ idea of humankind is in a doctrinal sense Stoic. Nemesius twice calls the Platonists “the wisest of the Hellenes,” yet his world city is not purely Platonic. The bishop of Emesa criticizes aspects of the Platonic world city – as set out in the Timaeus – in Nat. Hom. 2, and he returns to this critique in Nat. Hom. 38. Nevertheless, for Nemesius – as for Plato – the human person is a natural-born citizen of the world who is imputable, because free, and who is in communion with the whole of creation – and indeed with the Demiurge, since humankind is a “child of God”. It is argued in this thesis that Nemesius opens the Nat. Hom. with an elaborate description of divine creation as οἰκείωσις, and that he closes his text with a highly structured defence of divine providence as διοίκησις. Nemesius’ theory of body and soul turn upon the soul’s power to ‘conquer’ the body’s mixtures, and the human body is itself devised like a city in which reason is to govern the organs of spirit and desire. Nemesius writes in Nat. Hom. 1 that humankind is “by nature … a political animal,” and his description of humankind is thoroughly political. It is the idea of a ‘world city’, it is claimed here – a world that is made for the ‘political animal’ to inhabit – which gives structural and conceptual unity to the Nat. Hom. Wherever this idea may have originated, it is the world city idea which permits us to reconstruct Nemesius’ text as a formal unity. Without denying or diminishing Nemsius' habit of copying and paraphrasing, layering and interlacing others’ texts, the fact that Nemesius offers a systematic account of human nature – its substance, its powers, and its acts – in light of the world city idea is what separates him decisively from the ‘servile copyist’ or ‘vulgar compiler’ that he tended to be in the eyes of 19th and 20th-century source-critical scholars. If the reconstruction offered here is correct, Nemesius’ horizons are broad and his basic intuitions deep. The status of the ‘person’ – which is to say, the ontological status of a legal and juridical ‘subject’ – is the decisive anthropological question in the Nat. Hom. The basic question of humanity therefore concerns the principle of imputability. Are we free? And thus, can we be innocent and guilty? This is a question which orients some of the most recent contributions to philosophical anthropology, and which unsettles the discipline. It is not unthinkable that a renewed encounter with Nemesius’ text could help us to face it with greater honesty and acuity.