Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology from Roman Syria (Oxford Early Christian Studies) 2021934259, 0198856962, 9780198856962

Table of contents :
Cover
Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature: A Cosmopolitan Anthropologyfrom Roman Syria
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Author’s Note
Note on Citations
Prologue: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology of Late Antiquity
1: Ideas for a Reconstruction
Augustine of Hippo and a Treatise On the Nature of Humankind
Nemesius of Emesa and His Treatise On Human Nature
The Rise of Emesa (Homs)
Three Inferences Concerning Nemesius
Two Conjectures Regarding Nemesius
Misperceptions of Nemesius and On Human Nature
The Ontological Structure of On Human Nature
Idea for a Reconstruction
2: The World City: On Human Nature 1
What Is Confessed by All Humans
The Creation of the World City
The Choice to Live a Human Life
The Cosmopolitan Drama of Genesis 1–3
Excursus: The ‘Hebraic’ Concept of Potential Immortality
The Rise of Human Cities
The Principle of Human Governance
Humankind in the World City
3: The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5
The Aporia of Soul and Body
The Edifice of Cosmic Elements
The Nobility of the Human Body
Excursus: The ‘Pagan’ Concept of Reincarnation
Union without Confusion
The Conflict of Soul and Body
4: The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28
En Route from Substance to Act
Schematizations of Soul and Body
The Hegemony of Thought
Excursus: The ‘Pythagorean’ Theory of Divination in Dreams
Guarding the Natural Familiar Order
The Life of Necessity
5: The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43
Carneades’ Legacy
The Absurdity of Fate
The Evidence of Law
Excursus: The Platonic, Stoic, and ‘Egyptian’ World Cities
The Prevalence of Dioikēsis
The Incomprehensibility of Providence
Epilogue: The Legacy of an Early Christian Anthropology
Titles of Ancient Works
Bibliography
Consulted Editions of Nemesius of Emesa’s De Natura Hominis
Ancient Works
Modern Works
Index

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OX F O R D E A R LY C H R I ST IA N ST U D I E S General Editors

G I L L IA N C L A R K   A N D R E W L O U T H

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T H E OX F O R D E A R LY C H R I ST IA N ST U D I E S Series includes scholarly volumes on the thought and history of the early Christian centuries. Covering a wide range of Greek, Latin, and Oriental sources, the books are of interest to theologians, ancient historians, and specialists in the classical and Jewish worlds. Titles in the series include: The Minor Prophets as Christian Scripture in the Commentaries of Theodore of Mopsuestia and Cyril of Alexandria Hauna T. Ondrey (2018) Preaching Christology in the Roman Near East A Study of Jacob of Serugh Philip Michael Forness (2018) God and Christ in Irenaeus Anthony Briggman (2018) Augustine’s Early Thought on the Redemptive Function of Divine Judgement Bart van Egmond (2018) The Idea of Nicaea in the Early Church Councils, ad 431‒451 Mark S. Smith (2018) The Many Deaths of Peter and Paul David L. Eastman (2019) Visions and Faces of the Tragic The Mimesis of Tragedy and the Folly of Salvation in Early Christian Literature Paul M. Blowers (2020) Art, Craft, and Theology in Fourth-­Century Christian Authors Morwenna Ludlow (2020) The Acts of Early Church Councils Acts Production and Character Thomas Graumann (2021)

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Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature A Cosmopolitan Anthropology from Roman Syria DAV I D L L OY D D U SE N BU RY

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © David Lloyd Dusenbury 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021934259 ISBN 978–0–19–885696–2 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856962.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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for my beloved mother, B. Q. Dusenbury Surrexerunt filii eius, et beatissimam praedicaverunt

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The hardest of all things is to know oneself. Basil of Caesarea, Sermons on the Six-­Day-­Work

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Contents Author’s Note Note on Citations Prologue: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology of Late Antiquity

xi xiii xv

1. Ideas for a Reconstruction 1 Augustine of Hippo and a Treatise On the Nature of Humankind1 Nemesius of Emesa and His Treatise On Human Nature5 The Rise of Emesa (Homs) 8 Three Inferences Concerning Nemesius 10 Two Conjectures Regarding Nemesius 19 Misperceptions of Nemesius and On Human Nature24 The Ontological Structure of On Human Nature25 Idea for a Reconstruction 28 2. The World City: On Human Nature 1 What Is Confessed by All Humans The Creation of the World City The Choice to Live a Human Life The Cosmopolitan Drama of Genesis 1–3 Excursus: The ‘Hebraic’ Concept of Potential Immortality The Rise of Human Cities The Principle of Human Governance Humankind in the World City

36 36 40 48 51 56 60 65 67

3. The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5 The Aporia of Soul and Body The Edifice of Cosmic Elements The Nobility of the Human Body Excursus: The ‘Pagan’ Concept of Reincarnation Union without Confusion The Conflict of Soul and Body

72 72 76 80 84 90 94

4. The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28 En Route from Substance to Act Schematizations of Soul and Body The Hegemony of Thought Excursus: The ‘Pythagorean’ Theory of Divination in Dreams Guarding the Natural Familiar Order The Life of Necessity

100 100 105 110 115 120 123

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x Contents

5. The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43 127 Carneades’ Legacy 127 The Absurdity of Fate 129 The Evidence of Law 133 Excursus: The Platonic, Stoic, and ‘Egyptian’ World Cities 148 The Prevalence of Dioikēsis155 The Incomprehensibility of Providence 165 Epilogue: The Legacy of an Early Christian Anthropology Titles of Ancient Works Bibliography Consulted Editions of Nemesius of Emesa’s De Natura Hominis Ancient Works Modern Works Index

171 181 183 183 183 187 201

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Author’s Note A research fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem permitted me to finish this book in the tumultuous summer of 2020. Signal debts are owed to my colleagues at the Center for the Study of Christianity—Brouria Bitton-­Ashkelony, Francesco Celia, Oded Irshai, Isidoros Katsos, Yonatan Moss, and Guy Stroumsa. It is an honour to conduct research with them in Jerusalem, a veritable templum mundi. My intrigue with Nemesius began a half-­decade before coming to Jerusalem, during a doctoral and then postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Leuven. It is gratifying that my energies went in those years to a text which has long held a fascination for Flemish humanists, from Nicaise van Ellebode (died 1577) to Gerard Verbeke (died 2001). I am deeply grateful to my Doktorvater, Gerd Van Riel, for his unfailing consideration and insight. Without his liberality and trust, this research could never have been undertaken. Frequent conversations at the De Wulf-­Mansion Centre with Jules Janssens, Jan Opsomer, Andrea Robiglio, and Carlos Steel greatly enriched my thinking and helped to clarify my questions. Within the Lectio cohort, my debts to Wim Decock, Erika Gielen, Benjamin Gleede, Geert Roskam, and Joseph Verheyden are most pronounced.1 It was a pleasure to share a garret office in Leuven with an early modernist, Erik De Bom, and to share a corridor with three medievalists, Lisa Devriese, Tilke Nelis, and Céline Szecel. I have benefited from conversations with Mauro Bonazzi, George Boys-­Stones, Gillian Clark, Kate Cooper, Randall Lesaffer, Josef Lössl, Samuel Noble, Vivian Nutton, Fabio Pagani, Antoine Pietrobelli, Simon Swain, Teun Tileman, Peter Van Nuffelen, Iolanda Ventura, and Johannes Zachhuber. My sense of Nemesius’ thought was deepened by a brief but idyllic fellowship at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C. Chapters-­in-­draft were read at the University of Leuven in 2015, at Cardiff University in 2018, and at the University of Oxford 2019.

1  Lectio is the Leuven Centre for the Study of the Transmission of Texts and Ideas in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.

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xii  Author’s Note Portions of this book have appeared in volume 25 of Early Science and Medicine,2 in volume 104 of Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum,3 and in volume 102 of Studia Patristica.4 I wish to thank Brill, Mohr Siebeck, and Peeters for permission to reproduce some of that material here. Since a notable edition of Nemesius’ De Natura Hominis was printed at Oxford in 1671, it is immensely gratifying that this book bears the Oxford imprint. My editors at the Press, Karen Raith and Tom Perridge, were expert and obliging. It is a pleasure to thank the series editors, Gillian Clark and Andrew Louth, for their gracious and skilful handling of the manuscript. I am indebted to them, and to the scholarly readers they consulted, for many clear-­sighted criticisms. I stress, however, that any errors here are mine. I owe a thousand debts of love and honour to O.D. Plato says somewhere that ‘everyone that is either faithless or foolish is ­friendless’. My family have conclusively disproved this.

Jerusalem, 2020

D.L.D.

2  D. L. Dusenbury, ‘The Government of the Body: A Reconstruction of the Physiological Chapters in Nemesius of Emesa’s De Natura Hominis’, Early Science and Medicine 25 (2020), 480–506. 3  D. L. Dusenbury, ‘Judaic Authority in Nemesius of Emesa’s De Natura Hominis (390 ce)’, Light on Creation: Ancient Commentators in Dialogue and Debate on the Origin of the World, ed. J. Verheyden and G. Roskam (Tübingen, 2017). 4 D.  L.  Dusenbury, ‘World City: Towards a New Reading of Nemesius of Emesa’s De Natura Hominis’, Studia Patristica 102, ed. N. Baker-­Brian and J. Lössl (Leuven—Paris, 2021).

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Note on Citations Wherever a citation takes the form Alex. Fat. or Vind. Nat. Gen., it refers to a work written before 750 ce. Consult the ‘Titles of Ancient Works’ list at the back of the volume. Nemesius is cited as Hum. Nat. (English) in the text, and Nat. Hom. (Latin) in the notes. I have leaned heavily on the English translation in Nemesius, On the Nature of Man—drafted by the late Oxford philosopher, J. O. Urmson (deceased 2012); revised and annotated by R. Sharples and P. van der Eijk.1 My debts to this volume are immense, but its wording has been modified throughout in light of my readings of Nemesius’ Greek, which I take from the Teubner edition, Nemesii Emeseni, De natura hominis, by M. Morani.2 Translations of other Greek and Latin texts are rarely my own, but they have throughout been compared to the originals, and often modified. Consult the editions and translations listed in the bibliography.

1  For the curious fact that Urmson made the first draft of this translation: R. Sharples and P. van der Eijk, Nemesius, On the Nature of Man (Liverpool, 2008), vii. 2 M. Morani, Nemesii Emeseni, De natura hominis (Leipzig, 1987).

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Prologue A Cosmopolitan Anthropology of Late Antiquity

Nemesius of Emesa’s On Human Nature, or De Natura Hominis, is the first Christian anthropology.1 Belgian patrologist David Amand suggested that this Greek text by a bishop of Roman Syria, written circa 400, is ‘perhaps even the first treatise on anthropology tout court—composed in a systematic form, liberated from the tyranny of commentary’.2 What is more, Nemesius’ treatise can lay claim to being one of the first titles issued by the university press housed in a new-­built Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, in 1671.3 And this is the first monograph in English on Nemesius.4 Largely forgotten today, Nemesius’ On Human Nature was read and recopied in half a dozen languages, from Baghdad to Oxford, well into the early modern period.5 It circulated in more than one Latin version during the centuries that saw the rise of European universities, influencing scholastic master-­thinkers such as William of Conches, Alexander of Hales, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas.6 1 One of many such descriptions is B.  Motta, ‘Nemesius of Emesa’, The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, ed. L. Gerson (Cambridge, 2010), 519. 2  D. Amand (or E. Amand de Mendieta), Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque. Recherches sur la survivance de l’argumentation morale antifataliste de Carnéade chez les philosophes grecs et les théologiens chrétiens des quatre premiers siècles (Louvain, 1945; reprint Amsterdam, 1973), 557. (My translation.) 3  Presses were installed at Oxford in the late 15th century, but Nemesius’ De Natura Hominis is among the first titles printed at ‘a seminal moment’ in the early history of the press: V. Larminie, ‘The Fell Era 1658–1686’, The History of Oxford University Press, Volume I: Beginnings to 1780, ed. I. Gadd (Oxford, 2013), here 79. For the ‘new enterprise’ in which the 1671 edition of De Natura Hominis seems to have figured: Larminie, ‘Fell Era’, 94–5. 4  Note, however, that the modern English editions of Nemesius offer a learned commentary and an irreplaceable set of notes: W.  Telfer, Cyril of Jerusalem and Nemesius of Emesa (London, 1955); R. Sharples and P. van der Eijk, Nemesius, On the Nature of Man (Liverpool, 2008). Other monographs published in the last half-­century are, in chronological order: G. Verbeke, Filosofie en Christendom in Het Mensbeeld van Nemesius van Emesa (Brussels, 1971); A. Siclari, L’antropologia di Nemesio di Emesa (Padova, 1974); A. Kallis, Der Mensch im Kosmos. Das Weltbild Nemesios’ von Emesa (Münster, 1978); M. Morani, La tradizione manoscritta del ‘De natura hominis’ di Nemesio (Milan, 1981); B. Motta, La mediazione estrema. L’antropologia di Nemesio de Emesa fra platonismo e aristotelismo (Padova, 2004); M.  Streck, Das schönste Gut. Der menschliche Wille bei Nemesius von Emesa und Gregor von Nyssa (Göttingen, 2005). 5  H.  B.  Wicher, ‘Nemesius Emesenus’, Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries. Volume VI, ed. P. O. Kristeller and F. E. Cranz (Washington, D.C., 1986), 32–44. 6  T. Silverstein, ‘Guillaume de Conches and Nemesius of Emesa: On the Sources of the “New Science” of the Twelfth Century’, Harry Austryn Wolfson Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of his Seventy-­fifth Birthday (Jerusalem, 1965); I.  Brady, ‘Remigius—Nemesius’, Franciscan Studies 8 (1948), 275–84; P.  M.  Quantin, ‘Le traité des passions chez saint Albert le Grand’, Recherches de

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xvi  Prologue: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology of Late Antiquity During the Renaissance, On Human Nature saw a flurry of Greek, Latin, and vernacular editions, helping to inspire the early humanists’ theme of human dignity (dignitas hominis).7 And in 1636, it finally debuted in English in a Fleet Street edition titled The Nature of Man: A learned and useful Tract written in Greek by Nemesius, surnamed the Philosopher, sometime bishop of a City in Phoenicia.8 Until the latter part of the 17th century, Nemesius’ On Human Nature was regarded as a physiologically and philosophically important text. A notable French humanist, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (died 1536), enthused that Nemesius was a ‘most-­divine’ (divinissimus) patristic thinker.9 ‘We may conclude from reading this book’, said an Alsatian humanist, Beatus Rhenanus (died 1547)—who printed a Latin edition of On Human Nature—that humans ‘sin so much precisely because they forget their own dignity’.10 And a Latin preface to the 1671 Oxford edition affirmed that every human is, as the Syrian bishop believed, the ‘living image’ of a ‘world-­governing deity’. The writer, likely Dr John Fell (died 1686), hoped that Nemesius’ text would halt the rise of the ‘Cartesian automaton’ in European philosophy.11 It did not. Rather, the fortunes of On Human Nature fell steeply in the 18th century, in tandem with those of Galenic medicine and patristic philosophy. In the 19th and 20th centuries, on the increasingly rare occasions that scholars consulted it, they tended to handle Nemesius’ text in terms dictated by the methods and concerns of source-­research (Quellenforschung).12 Modern commentators have often seen in Nemesius a ‘limited man’ who exhibits, in Werner Jaeger’s phrase, a ‘total dependency’ on his sources.13 If the reconstruction offered here is correct, that is a mistake. For it will be argued in the coming chapters that Nemesius should be read as, among other things, a cosmopolitan philosopher of late antiquity.14

théologie ancienne et médiévale 17 (1950), 90–120; E.  Dobler, Nemesius von Emesa und die Psychologie des menschlichen Aktes bei Thomas von Aquin (S. Th. Ia–IIae, qq. 6–17). Eine quellenanalytische Studie (Werthenstein, 1950). 7 E.  Garin, ‘La “dignitas hominis” e la letteratura patristica’, La Rinascita 1 (1938), 102–46; E. F. Rice, ‘The Humanist Idea of Christian Antiquity: Lefèvre d’Étaples and his Circle’, Studies in the Renaissance 9 (1962), 126–60; G. Verbeke, ‘La dignité de l’homme dans le traité De Hominis Opificio de Grégoire de Nysse’, Annales de Philosophie 27.1 (1979), 139–55. 8 G. Wither, The Nature of Man . . . (London, 1636). 9  Cit. Rice, ‘Humanist Idea of Christian Antiquity’, 129. 10  Cit. Rice, ‘Humanist Idea of Christian Antiquity’, 137. Note that Lefèvre d’Etaples and Rhenanus were friends; and that Rhenanus emended the composite Latin translation which he printed (and attributed to Gregory of Nyssa): idem, ‘Humanist Idea of Christian Antiquity’, 136, 148–9. 11  ‘Praefatio editoris Oxoniensis’, reproduced in C.  F.  Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus. De natura hominis, Graece et Latine (Magdeburg, 1802), 30. (My translation.) 12  For more on which: G. W. Most, ‘The Rise and Fall of Quellenforschung’, For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, ed. A. Blair and A.-S. Goeing (Leiden, 2016). 13 W. W. Jaeger, Nemesios von Emesa. Quellenforschungen zum Neuplatonismus und seinen Anfängen bei Poseidonios (Berlin, 1914), 68. (My translation.) 14  For an elegant defence of cosmopolitan philosophy in the longue durée: J. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. L.  S.  Roudiez (New York, 1991); and for a recent critique: M.  C.  Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal (Cambridge, Mass., 2019).

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Prologue: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology of Late Antiquity  xvii That there are cosmopolitan motifs in some of the earliest Christian texts requires no argument. It will suffice to recall the much-­cited lines of a brief apologetic text, Epistle to Diognetus—from an unknown hand, probably composed in the mid-­2nd century—where we read that Christians ‘do not inhabit cities of their own’.15 Why is this fact worth noting for the unknown writer of the Epistle to Diognetus? The name Christiani in Latin, Christianoi in Greek, originally denotes a cohort of partisans—thus Caesar’s partisans are Caesariani, Herod’s are Hērōdianoi.16 The morphology of the name ‘Christian’ makes it ‘paradoxical’ that Christians ‘inhabit both Greek and barbarian cities’; for though Christians are partisans, their form of life is cosmopolitan. The letter-­writer continues: They show forth the character of their [heavenly] citizenship in a mar­vel­ ous . . . way by following local customs in what they wear, and what they eat, and in the rest of their lives . . . Every foreign territory is a homeland for them, every homeland foreign territory . . . They live on earth but participate in the city-­life of heaven (en ouranō politeuontai).17

By living as partisans of heaven, the Epistle to Diognetus suggests, Christians are cosmopolitans par excellence on earth. This is one of the earliest articulations of what Guy Stroumsa would call ‘Christian humanism’ (in a passage where he stresses that pre-­Constantinian Christians ‘lacked an ethnic identity’);18 and what we could call patristic cosmopolitanism. But it remains to be seen what cosmo­pol­ itan could mean in a reconstruction of Nemesius’ 4th-­century anthropology. What is meant by ‘cosmopolitan anthropology’, in the first place, is that Nemesius’ world-­picture and, thus, his anthropology are structured by the idea of a city. There is nothing odd in this. In his Sermons on the Six-­Day-­Work, Basil of Caesarea (died 378/379) offers to lead his hearers ‘like strangers through . . . this great city’.19 And what is this ‘great city’? The Cappadocian calls it the world, and, echoing Plato’s Timaeus, ‘the constitution of the world’.20 It has long been recognized that Basil’s Sermons on the Six-­Day-­Work are informed by Platonic and Stoic ideas of a world city. Even the ‘great and wide sea’ is, for him, a divinely governed ‘city’.21 And it is suggestive 15  Epist. Diog. 5.1–2. 16  E. J. Bickerman, ‘The Name of Christians’, Studies in Jewish and Christian History: A New Edition in English including The God of the Maccabees, ed. A. Tropper (Leiden—Boston, 2007; reprint of a 1949 article); J. Taylor, ‘Why Were the Disciples First Called “Christians” at Antioch? (Acts 11, 26)’, Revue Biblique 101.1 (1994), 75–94, here 76, 93–4. 17  Epist. Diog. 5.1–5, 9. 18 G.  G.  Stroumsa, The Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, Mass., 2016), 48; idem, The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2015), 177–80. 19 Bas. Hex. VI 1 (117b–c). 20 Bas. Hex. VI 1 (117c). ‘Constitution of the world’ is an echo of Pl. Tim. 32c: tou kosmou sustasis. 21 Bas. Hex. VII 3–4 (156a–157c). Compare J. F. Callahan, ‘Greek Philosophy and the Cappadocian Cosmology’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 12 (1958), 29–57, here 49–51; and—though Stanislas Giet’s

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xviii  Prologue: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology of Late Antiquity that Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyssa (died 394/395), can refer to the ‘city of our mind’ in his text On the Creation of Humankind.22 According to Gregory, the human mind resembles an ‘extensive city’ that nature—and through nature, God—has ‘established in us’.23 For Nemesius, too, city-­ like structures are intrinsic to his conception of being—from the continuous flux of the elements to the free decisions of his God.24 This reveals itself in a host of ways in On Human Nature, one of which— Nemesius’ theory of animal ‘cities’—could be seen as an anticipation of a ‘cosmopolitical’ tendency in late-­modern philosophy.25 Like ‘the divine Basil’,26 who observes that certain animals form ‘a government’ for themselves, Nemesius tells us that many animals live in their own quasi-­cities, ‘of which’—he comments— ‘there are many types’.27 For this bishop of Roman Syria, what he calls ‘irrational creatures’ are not utterly without rights, as in Stoic doctrine;28 and they are certainly not ‘beast-­machines’, à la René Descartes and his modern epigones.29 Rather, they seem to compose ‘beast-­worlds’, something like the Umwelten von tieren of Jakob von Uexküll’s anti-­Cartesian theoretical biology.30 Nemesius holds that even ‘beast-­worlds’ are governed by the deity, which is why he insists in the first pages of his treatise that humans incur guilt when they treat animals hubristically.31 Nemesius seems to think that most animals have a share in what he calls the ‘shadow of reason’.32 What could this mean? It is not only humans, he writes, who are ‘governed by certain forms of rule and hegemony’.33 On the contrary, human cities are built amid a near-­infinite number of quasi-­cities in which animals ac­tual­ize their own natural forms of ‘rule and hegemony’. What is unique about the human polis, for Nemesius, is that only humans are ‘receptive of governance

commentary can be questioned, here—Basil of Caesarea, Homélies sur l’Hexaéméron, ed. with French trans. S. Giet (Paris, 1968), 326 notes 1–2, 328 note 1. 22  Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 10.4 (Forbesius I: 152–155). 23  Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 10.4–7 (Forbesius I: 152–157). 24 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 110,14–111,13). 25  For the term ‘cosmopolitical’, though it has a different meaning here: I. Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, trans. R.  Bononno (Minneapolis—London, 2010); idem, Cosmopolitics II, trans. R.  Bononno (Minneapolis—London, 2011). 26 Dam. Fid. Orth. II 6 (Kotter and Ledrux 240,16–17): ho theios Basileios. 27 Bas. Hex. VIII 4 (172d); and Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,8). 28  For ‘irrational creatures’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 12,7). For ‘Stoic doctrine’: Cic. Fin. III 67. 29  Compare Basil’s lines on certain animals’ ‘affections of the soul’: Bas. Hex. VIII 1 (165b–c). For ‘beast-­machines’: L. C. Rosenfield, From Beast-­Machine to Man-­Machine: The Theme of Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie (New York, 1940); J. Riskin, ‘The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life’, Critical Inquiry 29.4 (2003), 599–633; idem, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-­Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (Chicago, 2016). 30  J. von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, with A Theory of Meaning, trans. J. D. O’Neil (Minneapolis—London, 2010). 31 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 12,3–9). 32 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 36,18). Compare Bas. Hex. VIII 5 (176b). 33  Compare Bas. Hex. VIII 4 (172d–173b).

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Prologue: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology of Late Antiquity  xix and care by lawgivers’.34 It is worth recalling that in his text On the Creation of Humankind, Gregory calls Moses ‘the lawgiver’.35 But the highest lawgiver is the one Nemesius calls, echoing many centuries of Platonic tradition, the ‘Lord and Maker’ and the ‘first and highest God’—namely, the Christians’ deity.36 Harking back to Eden, Basil asserts in his Sermons on the Six-­Day-­Work that our ‘ancient native country’ was a sort of city—an unfallen Garden—within the ‘great city’ of this world.37 And like Basil, Nemesius holds that the world is a divinely governed ‘city’ which was inaugurated by the promulgation of a divine law and a trial of human freedom in Eden—or, as he prefers to call it, ‘Paradise’.38 To be human, in Nemesius’ treatise, is to live in the Christian Demiurge’s ‘world city’ (though the Greek portmanteau, kosmopolis, is not his).39 Like most of his Christian, ‘pagan’, and Judaean contemporaries, Nemesius’ world is a sublime jurisdiction which we come into by birth—together with ‘our enemies and those who live a long way off ’—and within which we will all be judged after death.40 The world is a divine, archaic polity.41 This is why Nemesius calls God ‘the Maker and Guardian of things’, and providence ‘the Guardianship of things’.42 In one of his critiques of the Platonic world-­picture, Nemesius writes that the Christians’ God ‘is authority and his nature is authoritative’ (exousia gar ōn kai phusis exousiastikē).43 What could this mean? Unlike Plato’s fate-­constrained ‘first God’ (on Nemesius’ interpretation),44 Nemesius’ deity ‘does nothing either by natural necessity nor by the dictate of law (oute phuseōs anankē oute thesmō nomou)’. His God is not a creature of necessity, but ‘the Demiurge of necessity’. Human nature is itself a reflection of the unconditioned freedom of the one Nemesius calls—with Plato, but within a critique of Platonic theology—‘Lord and Maker’.45

34 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,6–12). 35  Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 8.5 (Forbesius I: 142). 36  For God as ‘highest lawgiver’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 130,2–5). For ‘Lord and Maker’: Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 111,1–2). For ‘first and highest God’: Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 109,13–14). How close the latter epithet comes to naming Nemesius’ God is a question of interpretation, but compare to later occurrences of ‘the first God’: Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 125,23 and 126,13–14). 37 Bas. Hex. VI 1 (117c–d). 38  For ‘Paradise’ (only occurrence): Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,11). Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 30 (Kotter and Ledrux 370,64–78). 39  References to the Christian dēmiourgos are frequent, beginning at Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 3,3–5); but relevant occurrences of the term kosmopolis significantly postdate Nemesius: C. Edwards and G. Woolf, ‘Cosmopolis: Rome as World City’, Rome the Cosmopolis, ed. C. Edwards and G. Woolf (Cambridge, 2003), 2–3. 40 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 102,24). 41  Compare Theoph. Autol. II 34 (Grant 84–5). 42 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 125,10) and Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 133,22). 43 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 111,3). 44  The concept is ‘pagan’, but Nemesius makes use of it: Nem. Nat. Hom. 18 (Morani 79,15–16); Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 691. For more on ‘pagan monotheism’: P. Athanassiadi and M. Frede, eds., Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1999); S. Mitchell and P. van Nuffelen, eds., One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2010). 45 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 110,20–111,4).

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xx  Prologue: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology of Late Antiquity What human cities and animal ‘cities’ prove in On Human Nature is that there is no terrestrial or celestial body, no ‘atom’ of corporeal being,46 which is ‘unreceptive of providence’.47 Providence is the divine governance of all things in a humanly incalculable way. Why incalculable? Because the ‘differences’ (diaphora) in human experience are ‘unlimited’ (apeiros), and ‘if unlimited, then un­know­ able for us’.48 Although Nemesius thematizes differences in human experience, and although he occasionally refers to different ‘nations’ or ‘peoples’, On Human Nature is cosmo­pol­itan because it is neither ethnographic nor ethnocentric.49 Rather, to recall a comment by Michel Foucault on early Christian episcopal government, which obliquely describes the Syrian bishop’s theory of divine world-­governance: ‘It individualizes.’50 Nemesius grants that ‘providence is in a way common, in a way individual (idiazousēs)’;51 but his definition is centred on the claim that the deity apportions ‘to each what is beneficial for each’ (to hekastō nemein kata to sumpheron hekastō).52 This is reflected in one of Nemesius’ most concentrated passages on human differences, which includes a glance at ‘the difference of colour’ (tōn chrōmatōn diaphoran). The passage in question is in no sense ethnocentric. On the contrary, the bishop’s argument here is that a ‘continual difference in form’ among humans signals a divine concern, not for ‘nations’ or ‘races’, but for humans in their individuality. It is fascinating that Nemesius compares ‘the difference of colour’ to other perceptible differences, such as visage and voice, which individualize humans within a city or a tribe. If parents could not recognize their children, or if criminals could not be identified, ‘there would be no law or political order’—he reasons—‘nor would anything human survive’. If human individuals were not identifiable, he warns, the world would roil like Chaos in a fragment by Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (died c.428 bce). But the world is a divine polity, he concludes, and there is ‘providence for individuals (ta kath’ hekasta)’.53

46 For atomos in Nemesius’ theory of creation: Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 3,4–7). And for atomos in his theory of providence: Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 133,9–11). 47 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 131,25–132,6). Compare Bas. Hex. VII 5 (157c–160b), Hex. VIII 5 (177b), and Hex. IX 3 (193b–c). 48 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 133,19–21). Compare Max. Amb. Ioh. 10.104 (Constas I: 316–18); Dam. Fid. Orth. II 29 (Kotter and Ledrux 364,72–4). 49  The importance of this fact is heightened by recent work on ethnicity in Christian late antiquity: A. Johnson, Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica (Oxford, 2006); P. Wood, ‘We Have No King but Christ’: Christian Political Thought in Greater Syria on the Eve of the Arab Conquest (c.400–585) (Oxford, 2010); and on Byzantine ethnicity and ethnography: A. Kaldellis, Ethnography after Antiquity: Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature (Philadelphia, 2013); idem, Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium (Cambridge, Mass., 2019). 50 M.  Foucault, ‘Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of “Political Reason” ’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values II, ed. S. M. McMurrin (Cambridge, 2011), 237. 51 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 116,9). 52 Nem. Nat. Hom. 37 (Morani 108,13–14). 53 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 123,21–4,16). For the exact wording of Nemesius’ testimony to this fragment, compare Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 124,1); and P.  Tzamalikos, Anaxagoras, Origen, and

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Prologue: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology of Late Antiquity  xxi Nemesius’ treatise on human nature seeks to define the human ‘qua human’ (kath’ ho anthrōpos).54 And his concept of human nature is cosmopolitan. ‘Things that are natural’, he writes towards the end of On Human Nature, ‘are the same for all’.55 To be sure, Nemesius’ 4th-­ century anthropology is composed for Greek-­ reading strata of the peoples then living within the Roman ecumene. (After the year 720, when On Human Nature seems to have been put into Armenian, its reception is not limited to readers of Greek.)56 Yet this sort of contextualization can conceal as much as it reveals. For Nemesius seems to be utterly uninterested in whether humans are ‘Greek-­reading’ or not—or, for that matter, in whether they are Romans or Cretans, Judaeans or Egyptians, Babylonians or Ethiopians.57 His text is meant to indifferently describe 4th-­century denizens of, say, the Syrian littoral and ‘those who’, in his phrase, ‘live a long way off ’—meaning, the vaguely heard-­of nations the bishop never calls ‘barbarian’.58 It may worth noting that there is no mention of Persians in On Human Nature, unless the Romans’ rivals are referred to sine nomine in the one place where we read of ‘our enemies’.59 But however that comment is to be read, it cannot be doubted that Nemesius’ anthropology embraces Romans and Persians, Hellenes and Judaeans—and the myriad nomadic tribes of late antiquity.60 Because Nemesius’ world is a divine city, humans qua human are ‘world citizens’ (though the Greek portmanteau, kosmopolitēs, is not his).61 A ‘citizen’ in antiquity is, by definition, a free person; and all humans, for Nemesius, are strongly marked by natural freedom—whether they live in an imperial city, a pastoralist’s tent, or

Neoplatonism: The Legacy of Anaxagoras to Classical and Late Antiquity, Volume I (Berlin, 2016), 108 note 13. 54  In a passage on intellection: Nem. Nat. Hom. 18 (Morani 80,6). 55 Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 120,4–5). 56 Morani, La tradizione manoscritta del ‘De natura hominis’, 68–88, here 71. 57  For ‘Rome’ (only occurrence): Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,1–2); ‘Crete’ (only occurrence): Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 114,8); ‘Judaean’ (only occurrence, though there are a number of references to ‘the Hebrews’): Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 120,15); ‘Egyptian’ (only occurrence): Nem. Nat. Hom. 36 (Morani 106,15); and for ‘Babylon’ (only occurrence): Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 120,18). Nemesius’ only mention of ‘Ethiopians’ calls for comment. It is unflattering; but this is purely circumstantial. The scene in which his ‘Ethiopians’ appear, likely fabricated by anti-­Origenists, is that of a ‘pagan’ magistrate’s judicial torture of Origen in Egypt: Nem. Nat. Hom. 30 (Morani 95,18–19). Compare Epiph. Panar. 64.1–2, here 2.2–3; Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 879. 58 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 102,24). 59 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 102,23–4). The mention of ‘our enemies’ (hoi polemioi) is unique, but compare Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 123,25–8) and Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 136,11–13). 60  It is impossible not to think of the much-­cited scene of 5th-­century nomadic tribes embracing the message of Simeon the Stylite, as recounted by Theodoret of Cyrus (like Nemesius, a Syrian bishop): R. MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (a.d. 100–400) (New Haven, 1984), 1–3. 61  Kosmopolitēs is rare, but antedates Nemesius: Dio. Laer. Vit. VI 63. Occurrences in Nemesius’ text of polis and a cluster of other terms—politeia, politeuomai, politikos—will be analysed in chapters 2 and 5; but ‘citizen’ (politēs) is a hapax. It only occurs in a dream-­like scene of Stoic return-­of-­the-­ same in which Socrates and Plato are alive again. They have ‘the same friends and fellow-­citizens (politais)’, writes Nemesius, and ‘the same experiences’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 111,20–3).

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xxii  Prologue: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology of Late Antiquity an anchorite’s cave. He takes it to be an ontological given—on which, regrettably, he never elaborates—that ‘women have free will (to autexousion)’.62 Moreover, the Aristotelian theory of natural slavery—which Christian philosophers will begin to revive with ruinous consequences in late medieval Europe—has no place in On Human Nature.63 The philosopher-­bishop of Emesa is silent on the matter of slavery,64 but his anthropology is perfectly congruent with a critique of slave-­trading and slave-­ holding by the philosopher-­bishop of Nyssa (c.380). ‘Your life’, Gregory says to both slave-­holders and slaves, ‘is of the same kind’.65 And in On Human Nature, human freedom is a natural inheritance with its origins in the divine will. It is therefore, in Nemesius’ words, ‘the same for all’.66 More than a century before Nemesius’ birth (for which no date can be obtained), Clement of Alexandria (died c.215) referred to the ‘truly noble freedom which belongs to those who are citizens under heaven (tōn hup’ ouranon pepoliteumenōn)’.67 For Nemesius, it is only because humans qua human live ‘under heaven’ in a divine ‘world city’ that their voluntary acts, committed ‘during their lifetime in this world’, can be judged by God.68 It is only because humans qua human are free that Nemesius can insist, with late-­antique Platonists (and various others), that the human soul not only ‘survives after this life’ but ‘undergoes justice for its transgressions’.69 For only those who are free, Nemesius believes, can transgress.70 Only the free can be guilty, or indeed can repent and seek to share in what he calls, in some of the last lines of his treatise, ‘something great and wonderful’—‘the salvation of humans through the Cross’.71 On the reconstruction offered here, this is one of Nemesius’ core an­thropo­ logic­al data: ‘It is in our power (eph’ hēmin) to be just or unjust.’72 This is a demonstrable recollection of Aristotle’s theory in Nicomachean Ethics III: ‘Virtue is in

62 Nem. Nat. Hom. 25 (Morani 87,12–13). (Though Morani brackets these lines, they have since been restored: Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 797.) Compare Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 55,5–6). 63 A.  Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1999), 27–56. 64  The word ‘slave’ (doulos) only appears once in Nemesius’ treatise; significantly, he is not referring to humans: Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 14,20). The figure of a ‘servant’ or ‘house-­servant’ (oiketēs) appears, or rather disappears—flees the household—in Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 129,24–6). Note, too, an ennobling mention of those who—like the martyrs for God—have ‘sacrificed themselves for . . . their masters (despotōn)’: Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 134,16–20). 65  Greg. Nyss. In Eccl. 4; Alexander 334,5–338,22. Glossed in M. M. Bergadá, ‘La condamnation de l’esclavage dans l’Homélie IV’, Homilies on Ecclesiastes: An English Version with Supporting Studies, ed. S. G. Hall (Berlin—New York, 1993). 66 Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 120,4–5). 67 Clem. Prot. 1. 68 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 10,13–14). 69 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 133,1–2). 70 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,13–23). 71 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 134,6–8). Compare Bas. Hex. VI 7 (133c); Dam. Fid. Orth. II 29 (Kotter and Ledrux 360,34–7). 72 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 114,2).

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Prologue: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology of Late Antiquity  xxiii our power (eph’ hēmin), and so also is vice.’73 And to Nemesius’ mind, this datum is no less decisive for the Hellenes, Judaeans, and Christians of Roman Syria than it is for the first humans in Eden. It is therefore arresting that this claim, that ‘it is in our power to be just or unjust’, is made in one of the only ethnographic passages in On Human Nature. ‘By nature’, Nemesius writes there, ‘every people (ethnos) makes use of some laws, knowing that it is in their power to observe the laws’. He then adds that ‘most peoples (ethnōn) name gods as their lawgivers’. But the Syrian bishop shows no interest in what his African contemporary, Augustine of Hippo, might call— after Varro’s Divine Antiquities—the ‘civil theologies’ of Mediterranean peoples.74 On the contrary, his purpose here is to deliver a plainly cosmopolitan thesis: ‘A knowledge of what is in our power (eph’ hēmin) is naturally inbred in all humans.’75 Throughout On Human Nature, as here, Nemesius is uninterested in ethnic differences. Rather, he is intent on defining a natural inheritance that is alive within ‘all humans’ qua human. That reason (logos) and choice (prohairesis), a divine double-­strand of powers, are a natural human inheritance—and thus, that much is ‘in our power’ (eph’ hēmin)—is the architectonic idea in On Human Nature.76 To be sure, Nemesius sees that there are inborn conditions and cranial injuries which can render us physiologically ‘incapable of choice’.77 He does not believe that infants behave rationally or that young children can act, in a strict sense, ‘by choice’ (kata prohairesin), though he stresses that they possess a ‘rational soul’.78 He claims that dreams are not in our power.79 He concedes to Hippocratic–Galenic medical theory that certain ‘natural faults’ can ‘come upon us humans’ through the workings of a ‘bodily mixture’. (A prevalence of ‘bitter bile’ can make us irascible, and so on.)80 And finally Nemesius calls habit an ‘acquired nature’ (phusis epiktētos), citing Aristotle as his authority. Habit is a potent force in On Human Nature, a ‘master’ of human desires.81 Nevertheless, for this Syrian bishop, it is a natural power of the human soul to decide which is reflected in the organs and passions of the human body, as in the

73 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 5.2 (1113b6–7). 74 Aug. Civ. VI 3–7. A path-­breaking reconstruction of Varro’s theologia civilis, freed of ‘Augustinian distortions’, is P.  Van Nuffelen, ‘Varro’s Divine Antiquities: Roman Religion as an Image of Truth’, Classical Philology 105.2 (2010), 162–88, here 170. 75 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 114,6–10). 76  For an illuminating early reference to logos in humans: Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 14,8–10); and for a late formulation of the ‘double-­strand’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 117,8). 77  Compare Nem. Nat. Hom. 13 (Morani 70,12–22) and Nat. Hom. 37 (Morani 108,19–20). 78 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,18–20) and Nem. Nat. Hom. 33 (Morani 99,15–17). Compare Nat. Hom. 32 (Morani 98,19–99,11); Dam. Fid. Orth. II 24 (Kotter and Ledrux 346,44–7). 79 Nem. Nat. Hom. 25 (Morani 85,23–86,1). Compare Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 119,25–120,5). 80 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 25,20–3). Compare Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 116,9–18). 81 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 113,16–22). Compare Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 119,7–120,5).

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xxiv  Prologue: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology of Late Antiquity legal institutions of late-­antique cities such as Emesa and Nyssa, Caesarea Mazaca and Hippo Regius.82 It is for these reasons that Nemesius’ anthropology can be called cosmopolitan. In his treatise, a host of authoritative texts and discourses—medical and biblical, legal and philosophical—are made to converge upon a decisive tenet of Christian anthropology and Roman ideology in late antiquity: humans’ natural freedom. Two brief lines must be made to represent these two diffuse and conflicted discourses of human freedom—Christian and Roman—in late antiquity. For Pseudo-­Justin in On Monarchy, a minor Christian text of uncertain date (3rd century?), it is beyond dispute that ‘free will . . . lies within every human’.83 And according to Justinian’s Institutes, a legal formulary that postdates Nemesius by more than a century—but the substance of which predates him: ‘By the law of nature, all humans were initially born free.’84 Our ultimate concern in this book is therefore with a question—human freedom—which is not only salient in some Greco-­Roman and many Christian texts of late antiquity, but which is glaringly contemporary. As a father of the Syrian church, as a transmitter of Greek medical lore, and as a late-­antique cosmopolitan philosopher, Nemesius deserves to be read in a way that draws upon, yet passes decisively beyond, the 19th- and 20th-­century practice of Quellenforschung. That is our objective in the coming chapters.

82 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 113,22–114,10). For ‘Caesarea Mazaca’: R.  Van Dam, Becoming Christian: The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia (Philadelphia, 2003), 93–5; R.  L.  Mullen, The Expansion of Christianity: A Gazeteer of Its First Three Centuries (Leiden, 2004), 121–2. 83 Just. Mon. 6.1. For a comparable formulation from Nemesius’ milieu: Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 17.11 (Forbesius II: 202). 84 Justin. Inst. I 2.2. For more on this: D. L. Dusenbury, The Innocence of Pontius Pilate: How the Roman Trial of Jesus Shaped History (London, 2021), ch. 1.

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1

Ideas for a Reconstruction Augustine of Hippo and a Treatise On the Nature of Humankind ‘You—who are you?’ This is a soliloquizing question that Augustine of Hippo puts to himself in Confessions X, a book he appears to have written in the late 390s. The bishop’s initial reply to this question is simple. ‘A human’, he says. But the sim­pli­ city of this reply is only momentary. For Augustine senses within himself a duplicity which disconcerts him throughout the Confessions. ‘Look’, he says, ‘a body and a soul are present in me—one outward, and the other inward’.1 To inter­ rogate oneself is to interrogate this duplicity. Later in Confessions X, Augustine restates his question in its most intimate form: ‘What then am I?’ Interestingly, he modulates this question in a way which reveals its link to the root-­question of anthropology. ‘What nature am I?’, he asks.2 Because all humans have been born—this is the immemorial fact with which Augustine opens his virtuosic book of memory, the Confessions—the question of a singular ego necessarily involves the question of an inherited nature.3 A human is the bearer of a common nature, and according to the bishop of Hippo Regius, this nature is elusive.4 Augustine senses within himself ‘a shifting, variegated life’ which is ‘exceedingly vast’, but not limitless.5 For human life is, as he says—echoing the Roman poet Lucretius—a ‘mortal life’.6 If the vicissitudes of birth reveal that humans bear an inherited nature, the cer­ tainty of death serves to define that nature.7 Thus Augustine, writing in Numidia (now Algeria) in a dialogue dated to 389/90, approves Porphyry of Tyre’s ca­non­ ic­al definition of humankind—in current terms, Homo sapiens sapiens—as the ‘rational mortal animal’.8 Crucially for us, the same definition appears in a Greek patristic text of the 390s, in which the bishop of a city in Syria Phoenice observes

1 Aug. Conf. X 6.9. 2 Aug. Conf. X 17.26. 3 Aug. Conf. I 6–7. For Lucretius’ presence in the first pages of the Confessions: D. L. Dusenbury, The Space of Time: A Sensualist Interpretation of Time in Augustine, Confessions X to XII (Leiden, 2014), 90–5. For ‘human nature’: Aug. An. Orig. IV 2.3. 4  He even hazards the claim in An. Orig. IV 5.6 that humankind is harder to comprehend (difficilius cognoscuntur) than the deity. Compare Bas. Hex. IX 6 (204b–c). 5 Aug. Conf. X 17.26. 6 Aug. Conf. I 6.7; Lucr. Rer. Nat. III 867–89. 7 Aug. Enarr. 38.19. 8 Aug. Mag. 8.24. Compare Por. Is. 3 (Busse 9,7–12,11). This definition is mocked by a 2nd-­century Syrian apologist: Tat. Orat. 15.1.

Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature:  A Cosmopolitan Anthropology from Roman Syria. David Lloyd Dusenbury. Oxford University Press. © David Lloyd Dusenbury 2021. DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198856962.003.0001

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2  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature that late-­antique philosophers ‘define the human as a rational mortal animal’.9 But this is to anticipate. We will soon turn to this Syrian bishop and his text. Augustine helps to introduce this study because he makes a colossal contribu­ tion to philosophical anthropology in the late 4th century,10 and because his cor­ pus gives evidence of a sustained engagement with late-­antique medical data and philosophy.11 Although he confesses a profound ignorance of human nature,12 and although he is certain that humans cannot comprehend themselves (nos non possumus capere nos),13 Augustine is the most prolific patristic anthropologist. In his late polemic On the Soul and Its Origin (c.420),14 in which he counters the arguments of a young Christian named Vincentius Victor,15 Augustine tells us that he could fill many volumes on the topic of human nature (de hominis natura).16 This is no empty boast. Nevertheless, there is no text by Augustine—no single volume—bearing the generic title On Human Nature (De Natura Hominis). Augustine left no formal and methodical statement about his anthropology. His epoch-­making theorizations of human nature must be reconstructed from his numerous polemical and exegetical texts. This is indicative. For there is no sys­ tematic patristic text on anthropology before the 390s—with one possible exception.17 We possess a fragmentary text titled On the Nature of Humankind (De Natura Generis Humani)—or, variously, and in epitomic form, Gynecology (Gynaecia)18—which is attributed by some to Helvius Vindicianus (flourished 9 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 11,3–4). Note that Nemesius’ slightly more elaborate definition (abridged here) may be taken from Pseudo-­Galen’s Medical Definitions: M. Morani, Nemesii Emeseni, De natura hominis (Leipzig, 1987), 11. 10 A useful study of his anthropology up to the Confessions is D.  A.  Napier, En Route to the Confessions: The Roots and Development of Augustine’s Philosophical Anthropology (Leuven, 2013). 11 For Augustine’s use of medical authors: G.  Bardy, ‘Saint Augustin et les médecins’, L’Année Théologique Augustinienne 13 (1953), 327–46; F.-X. Bernard, ‘Le corps malade et les pratiques medi­ cales chez Augustin’, Les pères de l’Eglise et la chair—entre incarnation et diabolisation. Les premiers chrétiens au risque du corps, ed. P.-G. Delage (Royan, 2012), 375–92. 12 Aug. An. Orig. IV 2.3. 13 Aug. An. Orig. IV 6.8. Compare Aug. Conf. X 8.15: nec ego ipse capio totum quod sum. 14  Note that in a significant number of manuscripts, On the Soul and Its Origin (De Anima et eius Origine) is transmitted under the title, On the Nature and Origin of the Soul (De Natura et Origine Animae). 15  The most recent study is L. S. Kergoat, Saint Augustin aux prises avec Vincentius Victor. Le droit au doute en théologie (Paris, 2009). 16 Aug. An. Orig. IV 2.3. 17  This is not to deny a centuries-­long patristic engagement with Greco-­Roman anthropology prior to the 390s, which is perhaps most impressive in Tertullian’s De Anima (c.210). Note, too, that a lost treatise On Human Nature (Peri Phuseōs Anthrōpou) is dubiously credited to Melito of Sardis, a ­2nd-­century poet-­bishop: S. G. Hall, ‘Introduction’, Melito of Sardis: On Pascha and Fragments, ed. and trans. S. G. Hall (Oxford, 1979), xiii. 18 Thus D.  R.  Langslow, Medical Latin in the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2000), 65: ‘Ascribed to Vindicianus are . . . fragments of 3 versions known as (1) De natura generis humani, (2) Gynaecia (in various versions) and (3) Epitome altera, of which (1) is the nearest to the original and (3) derives from both (1) and (2).’ Contrast this, however, with L.  Cilliers, ‘Vindicianus’s Gynaecia: Text and Translation of the Codex Monacensis (Clm 4622)’, The Journal of Medieval Latin 15 (2005), 153–236, here 154 note 6. Our argument is unaffected by De Natura Generis Humani’s connection, or lack of one, to the Gynaecia.

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  3 365–385).19 A native of Roman Africa (he is cited as Vindicianus Afer in a ­surviving medical formula),20 Vindicianus served as a court physician to Valentinian I (reigned 364–375) at the ‘sacred palace’ in Trier, and was later made count of the phys­icians (comes archiatrorum) in Rome.21 Ultimately, in 380, Vindicianus was made proconsul of his native province of Africa (proconsul Africae).22 The text in question, which circulated in Europe throughout the medieval period,23 contains a description of the human body from head to foot (a capite ad calcem).24 The deity is alluded to in the incipit of On the Nature of Humankind as the human body’s ‘contriver and fashioner’, and the soul’s control of the body is vaguely related to the world’s governance by divine command.25 But the author of this text states that his intention is to treat ‘our nature’ (natura nostra) primarily in terms of the body. The topic of this text On the Nature of Humankind is not the human soul, or the soul’s passions and operations in the body, but only the forma­ tion and organization of the human body from conception to maturity.26 Like the Hippocratic treatise On Human Nature (c.390 bce), which seems to have inaugurated the anthropological genre, this late-­antique fragment On the Nature of Humankind treats human nature within the limits of medicine alone.27 Importantly for us, however, the author of this late-­antique text correlates his state-­of-­the-­art physiological descriptions with a symbolic conception of the human as a ‘little world’—in his Latin this is minor mundus, from the Greek mikros kosmos.28 In chapter 2, we will encounter a similar little-­world concept in a Greek patristic text of the same period. The possibility that On the Nature of Humankind is composed by Vindicianus, who is securely credited with a couple of surviving letters (one addressed to Valentinian I) and an anatomical treatise surviving in fragments,29 gains immensely in interest once we recall that several of his testimonia come from

19 F.  Fiorucci, ‘Elvio Vindiciano. Pagano o cristiano?’ Giornale Italiano di Filologia (NS) 2.1–2 (2011), 225–35, here 225. 20 L.  Cilliers, Roman North Africa: Environment, Society and Medical Contribution (Amsterdam, 2019), 121 note 20. 21  For the ‘College of Physicians’: Cilliers, Roman North Africa, 100–1. 22  L. Cilliers, ‘The Contribution of the 4th Century North African Physician, Helvius Vindicianus’, Medicine and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean World, ed. D. Michaelides (Oxford, 2014), 120–1; idem, Roman North Africa, 121–3. 23  A.  Touwaide, ‘Vindicianus’, Brill’s New Pauly, ed. H.  Cancik and H.  Schneider (Leiden, 2006), archived online at brillonline.com, consulted on 17 July 2017. 24 M.  Vázquez Buján, ‘Vindiciano y el tratado De natura generis humani’, Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandum 2 (1982), 25–56, here 48–56. 25 Vind. Nat. Gen. Incipit (Vázquez Buján 4–6). 26 Vind. Nat. Gen. Incipit (Vázquez Buján 2–3). 27 Hipp. Nat. Hom. 1.1–3; Vind. Nat. Gen. Incipit (Vázquez Buján 2). 28 Vind. Nat. Gen. 26 (Vázquez Buján 266–70). 29 Cilliers, Roman North Africa, 128–35.

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4  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature Augustine’s hand.30 Vindicianus is a recurring figure in the Confessions,31 and the bishop of Hippo Regius describes him in a letter as an ‘eminent physician of our times’.32 The Confessions suggest that Vindicianus had a marked influence on Augustine in a critical period. They met at Carthage circa 381, when Vindicianus was pro­ consul of Africa and Augustine was a brilliant young rhetor and a Manichaean auditor.33 A priori, there is no compelling reason why an observation in On the Nature of Humankind that the human heart and brain never cease to move, and that neither the heart nor the brain is given a moment’s rest in this life (nec otio neque quiescere permittitur),34 cannot be listed among the possible influences on Augustine’s image of the restless heart in Confessions I.35 Their connection is, thus, a suggestive one. It is rightly intriguing that a much-­copied anthropological text, this fragment On the Nature of Humankind, conceivably originates in Augustine’s circles and dates from the 370s or 380s. But this text is unconcerned with the human soul; its contents are purely physiological. Furthermore, it is far from certain that it should be credited to Vindicianus; and if that attribution is correct, doubts persist that later hands may have blurred its original outlines.36 Finally, there is no conclusive evidence that Vindicianus was himself a Christian; in fact, the last scholar to examine the question concluded that Vindicianus likely remained a ‘pagan’.37 It is therefore unwarranted to treat On the Nature of Humankind as the first patristic treatise on anthropology. For that, we must turn to a Greek text by Nemesius of Emesa, written circa 400, which carries a Hippocratic title, On Human Nature.38 (This title is not exclusively Hippocratic, however.)39 According to a scholarly custom which had become marked by the middle of the 16th century and fixed by the turn of the 19th century,40 Nemesius’ text is commonly referred to by a Latin title, De

30  The most recent contribution is F. Fiorucci, ‘Agostino e Vindiciano. Aspetti prosopografici e let­ terari. Una nuova citazione agostiniana?’ Museum Helveticum 65.2 (2008), 114–27. 31 Aug. Conf. IV 3.5; VII 6.8. 32 Aug. Epist. 138.1.3. 33 Cilliers, Roman North Africa, 109–11, 122–3. 34 Vind. Nat. Gen. 10 (Vázquez Buján 67–9). Compare Cal. Plat. Tim. 100: ‘The heart [is] always in motion (semper in motu).’ 35 Aug. Conf. I 1.1. 36  Vázquez Buján, ‘Vindiciano’, 45. 37  Fiorucci, ‘Elvio Vindiciano’, 225–35. 38  Nemesius’ primacy is a commonplace in the literature. Of the many texts that could be cited: W. Telfer, ‘Autexousia’, The Journal of Theological Studies (NS) 8.1 (1957), 123–9, here 127; or, more recently, M. Streck, Das schönste Gut. Der menschliche Wille bei Nemesius von Emesa und Gregor von Nyssa (Göttingen, 2005), 16. 39  The reference, here, is to a subtitle of one of Zeno’s lost treatises—On Impulse, or On Human Nature—according to Dio. Laer. Vit. VII 4. 40 The titles of Nemesius’ first Renaissance edition and first critical edition are representative: G. Valla, Nemesii philosophi clarissimi De natura hominis liber utilissimus (Lyons, 1538); C. F. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus. De natura hominis, Graece et Latine (Magdeburg, 1802).

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  5 Natura Hominis.41 The purpose of this book is to offer a new and coherent in­ter­pret­ation—a reconstruction—of the cosmopolitan idea of humankind which is set out in this De Natura Hominis.

Nemesius of Emesa and His Treatise On Human Nature On Human Nature can be reasonably dated on internal, heresiographical grounds to the last decade or so of the 4th century. The first modern critic to date the treatise to ante 400 may have been Dietrich Bender in his 19th-­century Heidelberg dissertation, ‘Studies on Nemesius of Emesa’.42 But Bender’s reasoning had been anticipated by patrologists in the 17th and 18th centuries, and it has led to a stable consensus in the long 20th century.43 On Human Nature can be confidently attributed to a figure named Nemesius, and the grounds for this confidence have hardly changed since the 18th century, when the baroque polyhistor Johann Fabricius (died 1736) published his colossal Greek Library.44 From early in the manuscript tradition, however, there is a recur­ ring misattribution of On Human Nature to the Cappadocian philosopher-­bishop, Gregory of Nyssa. And as Michael Chase reminds us, there are still columns of

41  The definitive transmission and reception history is M.  Morani, La tradizione manoscritta del ‘De natura hominis’ di Nemesio (Milan, 1981). 42  D. Bender, ‘Untersuchungen zu Nemesius von Emesa’ (Doctoral thesis of Heidelberg University, December 1898), 13–30 (ante 400). 43 B.  Domanski, Die Psychologie des Nemesius (Münster, 1900), vii–xi (c.400); W.  W.  Jaeger, Nemesios von Emesa. Quellenforschungen zum Neuplatonismus und seinen Anfängen bei Poseidonios (Berlin, 1914), 5–6 (c.400); B. Einarson, ‘Studies in Nemesius’ (Doctoral thesis of The University of Chicago, June 1932), 6–7 (ante 428); W. Telfer, Cyril of Jerusalem and Nemesius of Emesa (London, 1955), 206 (ante 400); G. Verbeke and J. R. Moncho, ‘L’anthropologie de Némésius’, Némésius d’Émèse, De natura hominis. Traduction de Burgundio de Pise, ed. G. Verbeke and J. R. Moncho (Leiden, 1975), v (ante 400); A. Siclari, L’antropologia di Nemesio di Emesa (Padova, 1974), 10–12 (c.400); H. B. Wicher, ‘Nemesius Emesenus’, Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries. Volume VI, ed. P.  O.  Kristeller and F.  E.  Cranz (Washington, D.C., 1986), 32 (ante 400); B. Motta, La mediazione estrema. L’antropologia di Nemesio de Emesa fra platonismo e aristotelismo (Padova, 2004), 28–31 (c.400); M. Chase, ‘Némésius d’Émèse’, Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, IV. De Labeo à Ovidius, ed. R. Goulet (Paris, 2005), 626–7 (ante 400); Streck, Das schönste Gut, 19–21 (c.400); R.  Sharples and P.  van der Eijk, Nemesius, On the Nature of Man (Liverpool, 2008), 2 (ante 400); B. Motta, ‘Nemesius of Emesa’, The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, ed. L. Gerson (Cambridge, 2010), 509 (c.400); S. Swain, Themistius, Julian, and Greek Political Theory under Rome: Texts, Translations, and Studies of Four Key Works (Cambridge, 2013), 46 (ante 400). 44 J. Fabricius, Bibliotheca Græca. Sive, Notitia scriptorum veterum græcorum, quorumcunque monumenta integra, aut fragmenta edita exstant tum plerorum e MSS. ac deperditis (Hamburg, 1727), VII:549–50 (reproduced in Matthaei, De natura hominis, 32–4). Fabricius’ conclusion is upheld by modern scholars, including Chase, ‘Némésius d’Émèse’, 626–31; Morani, La tradizione manoscritta del ‘De natura hominis’, 150–1; Motta, ‘Nemesius of Emesa’, 509–10; Siclari, L’antropologia di Nemesio di Emesa, 9–10; and Wicher, ‘Nemesius Emesenus’, 32–3. Ascriptions in the manuscript tradition are collated in Morani, De natura hominis, 1.

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6  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature ‘Nyssa’ in J.-P. Migne’s Patrologia Graeca which have been taken from Nemesius’ On Human Nature.45 Composed in Greek—with lines and blocs of text being lifted from Nemesius’ sources—On Human Nature seems to have been translated into Armenian by 720,46 Syriac by 820,47 Arabic by 880,48 Latin by 1060,49 and Georgian by 1130.50 Nemesius’ text was for many centuries ‘intensively received’, as Martin Streck writes, in both the Byzantine east and Latin west; and it was read closely by both Christian and Muslim intellectuals, as Simon Swain notes, in the Islamicate east.51 Without entering further into Nemesius’ transmission history, we could note the appearance of three humanist editions (and numerous printings) in the 16th ­cen­tury—by Johannes Cono Norimontanus (Strasbourg, 1512); by Giorgius Valla (Lyons, 1538); and by Nicasius Ellebodius (Antwerp, 1565).52 Stripped of its medical and doctrinal authority in the 18th and 19th centuries, On Human Nature is treated by modern commentators as one philosopher-­ bishop’s ‘conspectus’ of anthropology in Roman Syria.53 However, On Human Nature is currently being read as a more subtly conceived treatise than

45  Chase cites a pseudo-­Nyssene opuscule, On the Soul, which proves to be ‘nothing but an extract’ from the Emesene’s opus: Chase, ‘Némésius d’Émèse’, 627. (My translation.) 46 Morani, La tradizione manoscritta del ‘De natura hominis’, 68–88, here 71. Compare Verbeke and Moncho, Némésius d’Émèse, lxxxvi; Chase, ‘Némésius d’Émèse’, 651. 47 Morani, La tradizione manoscritta del ‘De natura hominis’, 97–100. Compare M.  Zonta, ‘Nemesiana Syriaca: New Fragments from the Missing Syriac Version of the De natura hominis’, Journal of Semitic Studies 36 (1991), 223–58; J. W. Watt, Rhetoric and Philosophy from Greek into Syriac (Aldershot, 2010), II.37, XII.269. 48 Morani, La tradizione manoscritta del ‘De natura hominis’, 90–6, here 90. Compare G. Klinge, ‘Die Bedeutung der syrischen Theologen als Vermittler der griechischen Philosophie an den Islam’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 58 (1939), 346–86; S. Van Riet, ‘Stoicorum veterum fragmenta arab­ ica. A propos de Némésius d’Émèse’, Mélanges d’islamologie. Volume dédié à la mémoire de Armand Abel par ses collègues, ses élèves et ses amis, ed. P. Salmon (Leiden, 1974); M. Haji-­Athanasiou, ‘Le traité de Némésius d’Émèse De natura hominis dans la tradition arabe’ (Doctoral thesis of the University of Paris I, October 1982); K.  Samir, ‘Les versions arabes de Némésius de Homs’, L’eredita classica nelle lingue orientali, ed. M.  Pavan (Rome, 1986); S.  Swain, Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam: A Critical Edition, English Translation, and Study of Bryson’s Management of the Estate (Cambridge, 2013), 64, 126–9. 49 N.  Alfanus, Nemesii episcopi Premnon Physicon sive ΠΕΡΙ ΦΥΣΕΩΣ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΥ liber, a N.  Alfano archiepiscopo Salerni in Latinum translatus, ed. C.  Burkhard (Leipzig, 1917); Morani, La tradizione manoscritta del ‘De natura hominis’, 18–28. Compare H. Bloch, ‘Monte Cassino, Byzantium, and the West in the Earlier Middle Ages’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Number 3, ed. R.  P.  Blake, W. Koehler, and P. J. Sachs (Cambridge, Mass., 1946), 163–244. 50 Morani, La tradizione manoscritta del ‘De natura hominis’, 88–90. Compare A.  C.  McCollum, ‘Greek Literature in the Christian East: Translations into Syriac, Georgian, and Armenian’, Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3 (2015), 15–65. 51 Streck, Das schönste Gut, 24 (my translation); Swain, Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam, 55–6. 52 Wicher, ‘Nemesius Emesenus’, 42, 55–67. Note that Valla’s edition is posthumous; he died in 1500. 53 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,16).

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  7 commentators took it to be in much of the 19th and early 20th centuries.54 ‘The content of the work’, in Beatrice Motta’s words, ‘presents several peculiarities which are not immediately evident’; and Nemesius’ arc of thought presents, in her judgement, ‘interesting and even original characteristics’.55 On Human Nature is unfinished,56 and divided into forty-­three chapters which are early if perhaps not original.57 In bare outline, Nemesius’ treatise consists of (i)  a prologue that ends in a striking—and highly influential—panegyric to humankind (Hum. Nat. 1);58 (ii) a pair of chapters on the human soul and its union with the human body (Hum. Nat. 2–3); (iii) a pair of chapters on body qua body and the ‘cosmic elements’ which con­ stitute all bodies (Hum. Nat. 4–5); (iv) a medically informed description of human organs, powers, and passions (Hum. Nat. 6–28); and (v) a critique of fate and a defence of human freedom and divine providence (Hum. Nat. 29–43). We have no definite information regarding Nemesius apart from the fact that he reigned as a bishop of Emesa—now Homs, Syria—in the Roman province of Syria Phoenice.59 The rise of Nemesius’ episcopal city in the first centuries of our era is worth recounting—and it is certainly worth recalling, apropos of Syria Phoenice, that Jesus is confronted in Mark by a ‘Syrophoenician’ woman; and that the presence of Christians in ‘Phoenicia’ is noted in Acts of the Apostles.60

54  Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, 20, 23–5, 30–2. 55  Motta, ‘Nemesius of Emesa’, 510. 56  This is uncontroversial: Domanski, Psychologie des Nemesius, 80 note 1; Einarson, ‘Studies in Nemesius’, 6–8; and so on. The end of chapter 43 is jagged, and for this reason alone the text could be regarded as unfinished. But there are other indications that On Human Nature is unfinished (or, what is less likely, mutilated). The most unequivocal appear in Nem Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 123,1–14). William Telfer conjectures that Nemesius was ‘still working on it when he died’: W. Telfer, ‘The Birth of Christian Anthropology’, The Journal of Theological Studies (NS) 13.2 (1962), 347–54, here 351. 57  Wicher, ‘Nemesius Emesenus’, 34 (citing unpublished research by Benedict Einarson). 58  For the influence of Nemesius’ panegyric on the Renaissance trope of dignitas hominis: E. Garin, ‘La “dignitas hominis” e la letteratura patristica’, La Rinascita 1 (1938), 102–46; E.  F.  Rice, ‘The Humanist Idea of Christian Antiquity: Lefèvre d’Étaples and his Circle’, Studies in the Renaissance 9 (1962), 126–60; G. Verbeke, ‘La dignité de l’homme dans le traité De Hominis Opificio de Grégoire de Nysse’, Annales de Philosophie 27.1 (1979), 139–55. 59  For the provinces of Roman Syria: F. Millar, The Roman Near East, 31 bc–ad 337 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 121–3. 60 Compare Mark 7:26; Acts 11:19. Both fascinating observations are owed to the paragraph on Syria Phoenice in R. L. Mullen, The Expansion of Christianity: A Gazeteer of Its First Three Centuries (Leiden, 2004), 35.

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8  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature

The Rise of Emesa (Homs) As late as the middle of the 1st century bce, there is no written evidence of a city of Emesa (or Emisa), but only of a ‘people’ or ‘tribe’ (ethnos) called the Emesenes.61 At some point during the 1st century ce, the Emesenes founded an eponymous city on the east bank of the Orontes River, ‘upstream from Antioch’ (because the Orontes flows north).62 Elements of their nobility seem to have been granted Roman citizenship in the 1st century ce, as indicated by the presence of the Julian gentilicium in tomb inscriptions.63 And towards the end of the 2nd century an Emesene lady, Julia Domna, married an African senator who would become emperor, Septimus Severus (reigned 193–211).64 Because of this union, the sun-­god Elagabal—a Semitic deity whose aniconic cult centred on the veneration of a huge black stone housed at Emesa—rose to spectacular heights, along with Julia Domna and her kin.65 After Severus’ death, Emesa obtained the status of Roman colonia by the grant of her son Caracalla (reigned 211–217). After Caracalla’s assassination and a brief interregnum, the enthronement of a pubescent high-­priest of Emesa who was rumoured to be Caracalla’s natural son, Varius Avitus Bassianus or ‘Elagabalus’ (reigned 218–222), marked the zenith of the Emesene dynasty.66 (Although Julia Domna herself died in 217, the new emperor was her grandnephew.) As Fergus Millar reports, coins minted in Elagabalus’ reign depict him in Syrian robes sacrificing at Rome to Emesa’s god.67 This zealotry, aggravated by Elagabalus’ other passions, led to his assassination before the age of 20.68

61 Millar, Roman Near East, 302 (citing Strabo). Note that the following description of Emesa and the cult of Elagabal is heavily reliant on Millar, Roman Near East, 300–9. His picture of the city’s ori­ gins is complemented by a sketch of the site’s pre-­urban past in J. D. Grainger, The Cities of Seleukid Syria (Oxford, 1990), 130: ‘In the second century [bce], the site of Emesa became the base of one of the Arab tribal dynasties from the desert. The vigour of the dynasty and its accumulated loot will have stimulated the growth of the place.’ 62 R. E. Winn, Eusebius of Emesa: Church and Theology in the Mid-­Fourth Century (Washington, D.C., 2011), 20. For Juvenal’s complaint that the Orontes flowed straight into the Tiber, a bitter meta­ phor for the influence of Helleno-­Syrian ‘language and customs’ (linguam et mores) on a changing Rome: Juv. Sat. III 60–5, here 62. 63 Millar, Roman Near East, 303–4. 64  Severus created the imperial province of Syria Phoenice in 194/195: G. W. Bowersock, Roman Arabia (Cambridge, Mass.—London, 1983), 112–18, here 113 note 18. 65 Millar, Roman Near East, 304–5. Compare I. Shahîd, Rome and the Arabs: A Prolegomenon to the Study of Byzantium and the Arabs (Washington, D.C., 1984), 33–6; J. Langford, Maternal Megalomania: Julia Domna and the Imperial Politics of Motherhood (Baltimore, 2013). 66  Or turned differently, ‘the ultimate Antonines . . . were the Arab emperors from the family of Julia Domna’: Bowersock, Roman Arabia, 128. 67 Millar, Roman Near East, 307–8; M. Icks, The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome’s Decadent Boy Emperor (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), 44–60. 68  For a critical reading of the sources: Icks, Crimes of Elagabalus, 92–122.

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  9 After the death of Elagabalus, Emesa suffered a steady but by no means ruinous decline.69 It remained a prosperous city, linked by trading routes to Antioch and Damascus—and far beyond—throughout the 3rd and 4th centuries.70 And in brief, Emesa is ‘an important city’ of late antiquity.71 It is known that by the year 312, Emesa had a bishop; and Eusebius of Caesarea records his name, Silvanus.72 The winter of 312 in Roman Syria marked a period of heavy persecution by the pagan Maximin Daza (reigned 308–313).73 Thus, in the first year of the Constantinian revolution,74 Silvanus was ‘handed over to the beasts for food’ in the arena at Emesa.75 In this way, says Eusebius, he was taken up into ‘the chorus of martyrs’.76 The death of Silvanus should be recalled in chap­ ter 5, when, on the last page of On Human Nature, Nemesius evokes the wrongful deaths of ‘Socrates and the saints’.77 Nemesius appears to have been the fifth bishop to hold the Emesene see,78 but he never alludes to his predecessors. There is no mention in On Human Nature of Silvanus or his martyrdom. What is perhaps more surprising, no use seems to be made of the writings of a learned, twice-­exiled bishop of the mid 4th century, Eusebius of Emesa (died 359/360).79 This Eusebius authored a significant Genesis commentary in the Antiochene style, which is notable for its inclusion of mid­ rashic elements.80 69 Millar, Roman Near East, 305–9. This decline was not halted by the imperial claims of a bizarre Emesene pretender, Lucius Julius Aurelius Sulpicius Uranius Severus Antoninus, in 252/253: Bowersock, Roman Arabia, 128; Millar, Roman Near East, 308–9. 70 Bowersock, Roman Arabia, 155. 71 Streck, Das schönste Gut, 18. (My translation.) 72  Eusebius styles Silvanus, more precisely, a ‘bishop of the churches in the vicinity of Emisa (sic)’, at Eus. Hist. Eccl. VIII 13.3. The Christianization of Emesa and its territorium is sketched by F.  R.  Trombley, Hellenic Religion and Christianization, c. 370–529 (Leiden—New York, 1994), II:147–55; and Mullen, Expansion of Christianity, 36. For a broader account of the Christianization of ‘the Arabs of the Syro-Mesopotamian steppe’ in the 4th and 5th centuries: G. Fisher, Between Empires: Arabs, Romans, and Sasanians in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2011), 34–71. 73  The term ‘pagan’ is, of course, problematic—not least, in the present context, because of its Latinity. Consult C. P. Jones, Between Pagan and Christian (Cambridge, Mass., 2014), 2–5. 74  A relevant contribution is T.  Barnes, ‘Was There a Constantinian Revolution?’ Journal of Late Antiquity 2.2 (2009), 374–84. 75 Eus. Hist. Eccl. IX 6.1. Compare this to the report that Polycarp was ‘sent from Syria to Rome to be eaten by beasts in testimony to Christ’ at Eus. Hist. Eccl. III 36.3. For the historicity and specificity of Silvanus’ death—not only his form of punishment (damnatio ad bestias), but his death as recounted by Eusebius—see I. S. Gilhus, Animals, Gods and Humans: Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman and Early Christian Ideas (London—New York, 2006), 196: ‘[It] cannot be doubted . . . that in these cases the martyrs were not only killed by animals but eaten by them as well.’ 76 Eus. Hist. Eccl. VIII 13.3–4 and IX 6.1. For the political context of Silvanus’ martyrdom: G. S. R. Thomas, ‘Maximin Daia’s Policy and the Edicts of Toleration’, L’Antiquité Classique 37.1 (1968), 172–85, here 178–9. And for ‘chorus of martyrs’, compare IV Macc. 18:23, where we read that Judaean martyrs were ‘gathered together into the chorus of the fathers (paterōn choron)’. 77 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 136,3). A relevant contribution is G. Bady, ‘Socrate entre païens et chrétiens. Procès sans fin ou héritage commun?’ Revue des Études Grecques 127.2 (2014), 377–95. 78  Wicher, ‘Nemesius Emesenus’, 32. 79 B.  Baldwin, ‘Eusebios of Emesa’, The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A.  Kazhdan, A.-M. Talbot, et al. (New York—Oxford, 1991), II:752. 80  R. B. ter Haar Romeny, A Syrian in Greek Dress: The Use of Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac Biblical Texts in Eusebius of Emesa’s Commentary on Genesis (Leuven, 1997); idem, ‘Eusebius of Emesa’s

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10  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature On Human Nature is Nemesius’ only text, extant or attested, and in its pages he makes no reference to his ecclesiastical office, to the city of Emesa, or to the prov­ ince of Syria Phoenice. The documentary record contains no direct testimony to his identity beyond a name and a prelacy inscribed at the head of a dense and unfinished, but rich and intriguing book: Nemesios episkopos Emesēs. This being the case, what can be inferred about Nemesius from his text?

Three Inferences Concerning Nemesius In the first place, there is no reason to doubt that Nemesius is, as the most credit­ able manuscripts attest, a bishop of Roman Syria. His tone is irenic, but he is meticulous in his ‘orthodoxy’.81 He is abreast of the writings of his more conten­ tious contemporaries, such as the schismatic Apollinaris of Laodicea (died c.390),82 and the radical Arian Eunomius of Cyzicus (died c.393),83 and he takes a measured distance from them. Nemesius’ handling of Origen of Caesarea (died c.254) is by no means uncritical,84 yet suggests that he is writing before the formal condemnations of ‘Origenism’ at Alexandria in 399, and at Rome in 400.85 The Manichaeans are frequently criticized,86 which could remind us of Augustine’s concentration on anti-­Manichaean polemic in the 390s. And as Michael Chase observes—recalling observations made in the 17th and 18th centuries87—there is no mention in On Human Nature of 5th-­century ‘heretics’ such as the Eutychians and Nestorians.88 Nemesius’ silence on Pelagius (died 418) and the Pelagian con­ troversy is notable, too.89 All this supports a terminus ante quem of 400. There is nothing ‘heterodox’ in Nemesius’ rare comments on ‘the incarnation of God’,90 or ‘the salvation of humans through the Cross’.91 He believes Christ to be the revelation of ‘God the Word’,92 and he displays a cleric’s command of the

Commentary on Genesis and the Origins of the Antiochene School’, The Book of Genesis in Jewish and Oriental Christian Interpretation: A Collection of Essays, ed. J. Frishman and L. Van Rompay (Leuven, 1997), 125–42; W. Liebeschuetz, ‘How God Made the World in Seven Days: The Commentaries on Genesis of John Chrysostom (Homilies 1–12) and of Eusebius of Emesa (1–10), Two Distinct Representatives of the School of Antioch’, Antiquité Tardive 22 (2014), 243–53; and R.  Hennings, ‘Eusebius von Emesa und die Juden’, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 5 (2001), 240–60. 81  Telfer, ‘Birth of Christian Anthropology’, 350–1; Streck, Das schönste Gut, 19–20. 82  Apollinaris (in the manuscripts, Apolinarios) is named at Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,11–14); Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 32,3); and Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 53,10). 83 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 30,18): Eunomios; and Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 43,17): Eunomianoi. 84 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 44,20); and Nat. Hom. 30 (Morani 95,18). 85  Chase, ‘Némésius d’Émèse’, 627. 86 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 17,13); and Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 32,20). 87 Compare ‘Praefatio editoris Oxoniensis’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 27–8; and ‘Jo. Albertus Fabricius de Nemesio’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 32. 88  Chase, ‘Némésius d’Émèse’, 627. 89 Streck, Das schönste Gut, 9–17. 90 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 120,21). 91 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 134,7–8). 92 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,13–15). Compare Streck, Das schönste Gut, 35.

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  11 books containing the Christians’ (and the Judaeans’) ‘divine oracles’.93 He takes care, for instance, to specify that Israel’s philosopher-­king, Solomon, is the son of David ‘by the wife of Uriah’.94 Solomon is not merely a type or a symbol for him, but a personage whose descent—involving David’s adultery with Bathsheba, and the murder of her husband—is recorded in scripture. Egypt and Babylon are mentioned—not as ancient kingdoms, but as Israel’s captors.95 Joseph and Susannah are noted for their choice of ‘the distressing’ over ‘the shameful’—which is to say, in both cases, their decision to face lurid accusations rather than engage in unchaste acts.96 Elijah and Enoch are cited as mortals who have been swept alive into heaven, and so forth.97 Nemesius’ citations of Jesus’ sayings are philosophically oriented and reflect the norms of patristic interpretation. In On Human Nature 38, he appeals to ‘the oracles of Christ’ to differentiate the Christian hope of resurrection from the Stoic doctrine of eternal return of the same (to echo Friedrich Nietzsche’s modern reformulation of Stoic doctrine),98 and in On Human Nature 43 he invokes Jesus and the Greek dramatist Menander together.99 Nemesius is cognizant of the life of that ‘holy man’, Paul of Tarsus (died c.67),100 as it is variously reported in Acts of the Apostles,101 II Corinthians, and II Timothy.102 More could be said, but this should suffice to place it out of doubt that Nemesius is a skilful reader and inter­ preter of the Christians’ holy books—and, as the best manuscripts attest, a bishop of Roman Syria.103

93 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 38,6). The reference to ‘books’ here is meant to recall a point made by A. Grafton and M. Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge, Mass.—London, 2006), 57: ‘In antiquity, pandect Bibles—copies of the entire Christian Scriptures in a single volume—were rare.’ 94 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 32,17–19). 95 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 120,15–19). 96 Nem. Nat. Hom. 30 (Morani 95,15–17). 97 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 111,10–13). 98 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 112,1–6). 99 Nem. Nat. hom. 43 (Morani 134,11–16). 100 Nem. Nat. hom. 43 (Morani 134,9). The literature on ‘holy men’ in late antiquity is massive, and the inclusion of Nemesius’ description of Paul—‘holy man’—is meant to evoke it. In the present con­ text, the most interesting figure—even though he post-­dates Nemesius by roughly a century and a half—may be that of Symeon of Emesa (flourished c.550–600), the first ‘fool for Christ’ in Byzantine tradition. Derek Krueger has convincingly shown that his behaviour, as reported by Leontius of Neapolis in his Life and Conduct of Abba Symeon Called the Fool for the Sake of Christ (c.650), is influenced by the traditions concerning the ‘pagan’ philosopher, Diogenes of Sinope (died c.323 bce): D. Krueger, ‘The “Life of Symeon the Fool” and the Cynic Tradition’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 1.4 (1993), 423–42; idem, Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley— Los Angeles, 1996), 90–107. Note, in passing, that some have argued for the presence of Cynic themes in the canonical sayings of Jesus. Compare G.  Boas, ‘Christianity and Cynicism’, Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages (Baltimore—London, 1948); F. G. Downing, Christ and the Cynics: Jesus and Other Radical Preachers in First-­Century Tradition (Sheffield, 1988). 101 Nem. Nat. hom. 1 (Morani 15,1–3). 102 Nem. Nat. hom. 43 (Morani 134,8–10 and 135,3–5). 103 Nemesius’ treatise was not, as some modern critics have conjectured, ‘originally a pagan an­thropo­logic­al treatise’: Motta, ‘Nemesius of Emesa’, 510. For a formulation of the conjecture: Telfer, ‘Birth of Christian Anthropology’, 351–2.

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12  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature No one denies, in the second place, that Nemesius is a profoundly Hellenized bishop.104 His choice of title indicates his acquaintance with a Hippocratic text bearing the same title, On Human Nature (Peri phuseōs anthrōpou).105 According to medical historian Jacques Jouanna, this text On Human Nature—which Jouanna attributes to a physician of Hippocrates’ immediate circle, Polybus of Cos (flourished 400–370 bce)106—remained one of the most-­cited medical texts in antiquity.107 Vivian Nutton calls it the ‘supremely authoritative’ Hippocratic text.108 The enduring influence of this 4th-­century bce text is due, in no small measure, to the fact that Galen of Pergamum (died 216/217), a towering figure in the history of medical philosophy and practice,109 penned two commentaries on it in the 2nd century ce. There thus seems to be a double reference contained in Nemesius’ Greek title— first, to the short Hippocratic text On Human Nature; and second, to Galen’s two-­ part commentary on that work. The bishop of Emesa seems to have meant for his On Human Nature to make a contribution, however modest, to the Hippocratic– Galenic tradition of medical philosophy, and Nemesius’ text exhibits ‘the most extensive use of medical material’ in any patristic composition.110 Nor is this chain of Hellenic references disrupted by the customary use of a Latin title, De Natura Hominis, for Nemesius’ treatise. For the Hippocratic On Human Nature is not infrequently cited as De Natura Hominis, while one of Galen’s Greek com­ mentaries is catalogued by modern scholars under the Latin title, On Hippocrates’ De Natura Hominis.111 Thus, wherever Nemesius’ On Human Nature is cited, we should not fail to hear the echoes of Hippocrates’ (or Polybus’) On Human Nature, and of Galen’s commentaries on that text.112 But how can it be asserted that Nemesius knew the Hippocratic text On Human Nature, and its twinned Galenic commentaries? Nemesius himself quotes from

104 ‘Hellenized’ is a contested term, but can be used to describe Nemesius in a precise way: C. Markschies, ‘Does It Make Sense to Speak about a “Hellenization of Christianity” in Antiquity?’ Church History and Religious Culture 92.1 (2012), 5–34, here 27–34. 105 Hippocrates, De natura hominis. La nature de l’homme, ed. with French trans. and comm. J.  Jouanna (Berlin, 1975). Consult E.  M.  Craik, The ‘Hippocratic’ Corpus: Content and Context (London—New York, 2015), 207–13. 106  L. Käppel and V. Nutton, ‘Polybus’, Brill’s New Pauly, ed. H. Cancik and H. Schneider (Leiden, 2006), archived online at brillonline.com, consulted on 1 July 2017. 107 J. Jouanna, Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen (Leiden—Boston, 2013), 313. 108 V. Nutton, Ancient Medicine (London—New York, 2004), 59. 109 Consult the essays in Galen and the World of Knowledge, ed. C.  Gill, T.  Whitmarsh, and J.  Wilkins (Cambridge, 2009), and especially—given our theme—the fine contribution by R.  Flemming, ‘Demiurge and Emperor in Galen’s World of Knowledge’, Galen and the World of Knowledge, ed. C. Gill, T. Whitmarsh, and J. Wilkins (Cambridge, 2009). 110 Nutton, Ancient Medicine, 302–3. 111 Galen, In Hippocratis De natura hominis commentaria tria, ed. J.  Mewaldt (Leipzig— Berlin, 1914). 112  The other commentary on Hipp. Nat. Hom. is Galen, On the Elements According to Hippocrates. De Elementis ex Hippocratis Sententia, ed. with English trans. and comm. P. de Lacy (Berlin, 1996).

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  13 the classical On Human Nature113—whether directly, which cannot be ruled out, or indirectly—and seems to make use of both of Galen’s imperial commentaries. It therefore seems assured that Nemesius’ late-­antique Christian anthropology situates itself within a tradition of Greco-­Roman medical philosophy that ori­gin­ ated in pre-­Christian antiquity.114 The source of the bishop’s anthropological genre is, as his title signals, the Hippocratic therapeutic centre on the Greek isle of Cos in the 5th and 4th centuries bce.115 As could be predicted, Nemesius’ On Human Nature contains both marked and unmarked borrowings from the Hippocratic and Galenic corpora, and nuanced criticisms of Hippocratic and Galenic theories.116 The bishop exhibits no doctrinaire attachment to their doctrines. Against the ‘medical materialism’ of Hippocrates and Galen,117 for instance, he cites the Neoplatonic master-­thinker Plotinus (died 270),118 and more exceptionally, the young Plotinus’ master, Ammonius Saccas (died 242).119 As this suggests, non-­medical Greek literature is prominent in On Human Nature. Nemesius cites the dicta of Thales,120 Heraclitus,121 Anaxagoras,122 and other pre-­Platonic thinkers. Thucydides’ history is quoted (by way of Galen, it seems) in Nemesius’ chapter on fear,123 while Euripides’ and Menander’s lines ornament his chapters on providence.124 Philosophical texts commended to Nemesius’ readership include Plato’s Phaedo,125 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,126 and a lost treatise on reincarnation by the Syrian scholarch, Iamblichus of Chalcis (died c.320).127 Momentarily recalling the Emesene priest-­emperor Elagabalus, we could observe that Iamblichus was a scion of Emesa’s line of priest-­kings.128

113 Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 53,20–54,10). See Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 486. 114  Pace Telfer, ‘Birth of Christian Anthropology’, 351: ‘[Nemesius’ Hippocratic] title was chosen for an earlier draft, which was itself pure Gentile anthropology.’ 115 J. Jouanna, Hippocrates, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Baltimore—London, 1999), 42–55, 210–42. 116  Nemesius’ account of corporeity and the ‘cosmic elements’ in Nat. Hom. 4–5, for instance, proves to be a skilful—yet severe—compression of Gal. Elem. 7. 117  S. Wessel, ‘The Reception of Greek Science in Gregory of Nyssa’s De Opificio Hominis.’ Vigiliae Christianae 63 (2009), 26. 118 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,5–11). 119 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 17,16–18,5). See  J.  Charruee, ‘Ammonius et Plotin’, Revue Philosophique de Louvain 102.1 (2004), 72–103, here 80–5. 120 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 17,1–2); and Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 54,12–14). 121 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 16,19–21); Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 54,17–20); and Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 127,1–2). 122 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 124,1). 123 Nem. Nat. Hom. 21 (Morani 82,13–18). 124 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 127,22–128,1). 125 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 22,19–22). 126 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 127,15–21). 127 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,7–13). 128  J. M. Dillon, ‘Life and Works’, in Iamblichi Chalcidensis, In Platonis Dialogos Commentariorum Fragmenta (Leiden, 1973), 3–25, here 4–6; H. Marx-­Wolf, ‘High Priests of the Highest God: Third-­ Century Platonists as Ritual Experts’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 18.4 (2010), 481–513, here 506–10.

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14  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature Hellenistic and post-­Hellenistic philosophy are very much in evidence in On Human Nature.129 Nemesius accepts the Epicurean hierarchy of pleasures,130 though he rejects the Epicurean definition of pleasure,131 and condemns Epicurus’ denial of providence (for which he still gives a generous testimony).132 The Emesene bishop copies out, collates, or paraphrases a lengthy dialectical refuta­ tion of Stoic arguments regarding the soul’s materiality which he attributes to Cleanthes of Assos (died 232/231 bce) and Chrysippus of Soli (died c.206 bce).133 He uniquely cites a lost treatise on fate by an obscure 2nd-­century Stoic philosopher, Philopator (flourished c.140), whose only other attestation is in a memoir by Galen.134 Nemesius is notable for the frank use he makes of Aristotle.135 He borrows freely, too, from Aristotelian commentators such as Alexander of Aphrodisias (flourished c.210), a scholarch in Athens;136 and Themistius (died c.385),137 a ‘pagan’ philosopher-­courtier who seems to have held the office of proconsul, or prefect of Constantinople during the steely reign of a Christian emperor, Theodosius I (died 395).138 Nemesius’ closeness to the Peripatetic tradition is a rarity in the patristic corpus. David Runia cites a Christological contest in which both disputants say, testily: ‘I do not follow Aristotle’.139 It is in a markedly differ­ ent tone—though in a different context—that Nemesius writes in Hum. Nat. 4: ‘If there are those who wish to pursue this . . . let them read Aristotle’s History of Animals’; or, at a decisive moment in Hum. Nat. 15: ‘Aristotle says in the books on natural philosophy [that the human soul has five parts], but in his ethical books

129  The handling of ‘post-­Hellenistic philosophy’ in a monograph by that name is singularly il­lu­ min­at­ing: G.  Boys-­Stones, Post-­Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of its Development from the Stoics to Origen (Oxford, 2001). 130 Nem. Nat. Hom. 18 (Morani 76,19–77,8). See Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 669. 131 Nem. Nat. Hom. 18 (Morani 78,15–22). 132 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 127,1–14). 133 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 20,12–22,18). See Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 277. 134 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 105,6–106,13). Compare R. Sharples, ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias, De Fato: Some Parallels’, The Classical Quarterly 28.2 (1978), 243–66, here 255–6; E.  Eliasson, The Notion of That Which Depends on Us in Plotinus and Its Background (Leiden, 2008), 10. 135  D. T. Runia, ‘Festugiere Revisited: Aristotle in the Greek Patres’, Vigiliae Christianae 43.1 (1989), 1–34, here 9–10. This shapes the medieval reception of Nemesius, according to Rice, ‘Humanist Idea of Christian Antiquity’, 139: ‘Nemesius’ discussion of free will . . . attracted Aquinas only in its Aristotelian source, not for what he had taken from Origen.’ 136 Sharples, ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias, De Fato’, 253–60. For Alexander’s dates: R.  Sharples, ‘Implications of the New Alexander of Aphrodisias Inscription’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 48 (2005), 47–56, here 47. 137 Swain, Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam, 55–6. 138  The office held by Themistius is disputed (proconsul? prefect?), but Susanna Elm concludes that he ‘[u]ndeniably . . . held a public position of some prestige (which he called leitourgia and prostasia)’: S. Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome (Berkeley—Los Angeles, 2012), 100. 139  For the exact wording: Runia, ‘Festugiere Revisited’, 24.

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  15 he divides the soul into . . . the rational and the irrational’.140 Of course, it is im­ port­ ant for Nemesius—and other patristic philosophers—that the last-­ mentioned division of the soul, into ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’, is shared by Peripatetic and Platonic traditions.141 Nemesius is, sensu lato, a Christian Platonist; and this is not the place to cata­ logue his Platonic influences, borrowings, and critiques.142 Suffice to say that it may be Plotinus’ great disciple, Porphyry (died c.305), who inspires the boldest modification of Platonic tradition in On Human Nature. Porphyry is a Platonist who had, in Nemesius’ phrase, ‘raised his own voice against Christ’; yet Porphyry’s Miscellaneous Investigations are ingeniously quoted in defence of Nemesius’ Christology in Hum. Nat. 3.143 Other tantalizing references include a lost text by the 2nd-­century Neopythagorean philosopher, Cronius,144 and a lost treatise by one of Iamblichus’ disciples, Theodorus of Asine (died c.360).145 This catalogue is far from complete, but shows that Nemesius’ text is rich in Hellenic material. In keeping with its Hellenic tenor—and in the third place—On Human Nature is a philosophical text. This is true, even though ‘philosophy’ is a hapax in its ­pages.146 ‘We do not deliberate’, Nemesius points out in Hum. Nat. 34, ‘about what is called theoretical philosophy’. What ‘theoretical philosophy’ denotes here are questions, in the first instance, ‘concerning God’ and ‘concerning things that come-­to-­be from necessity’.147 But Nemesius writes in Hum. Nat. 34 that ques­ tions of theoretical philosophy concern a host of ‘natural things’,148 and there is no reason to doubt that the bishop sees his anthropological questions as the­or­et­ ic­al ones. ‘The theoretical’, he states in Hum. Nat. 41, ‘is that which comprehends the nature of things that are (ta onta)’.149 Since ‘human nature’ is manifestly a

140 Nem. Nat. Hom. 4 (Morani 46,20–47,1) and Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,17–20). In one place, he both commends and chides Eunomius for his use of Aristotle: Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 30,18–22). 141 Nem. Nat. Hom. 6 (Morani 57,5–15). Compare Runia, ‘Festugiere Revisited’, 21: ‘Various aspects of the Aristotelian psychology are perfectly acceptable to the Fathers, notably the distinction between rational and irrational parts or powers shared with Plato.’ 142 For the roots and meanings of this tradition: I.  Ramelli, ‘Origen, Patristic Philosophy, and Christian Platonism Re-Thinking the Christianisation of Hellenism’, Vigiliae Christianae 63.3 (2009), 217–63. 143 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,22–43,16). For Nemesius’ use of Porphyry: Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, 18–19. 144 Cronius is a vague figure: J.  Whittaker, ‘Cronios’, Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, II. Babélyca d’Argos à Dyscolius, ed. R. Goulet (Paris, 1994). 145 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,4–6). 146  But note the early occurrences of both theoria and philosopheo (a hapax), both of which refer to Aristotle’s thought: Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,15–2,1). 147 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 102,11–14, here 12): theōretikēs . . . philosophias. 148 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 102,15–19). Compare Nem. Nat. Hom. 18 (Morani 80,4–7). 149  The contrast being made is not that between temporal and eternal realities. Rather, Nemesius is contrasting ‘the theoretical’—here, and in other places—to ‘the practical’, which ‘defines right reason in practical questions’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 117,17–19).

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16  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature question concerning ‘things that are’, nothing prevents us from reading On Human Nature as a piece of late-­antique theoretical philosophy.150 But there are other senses in which On Human Nature is a philosophical text. More than one commentator has noticed that there is ‘no trace of odium theologicum’ in its pages.151 Nemesius’ irenicism may be due to the fact that, as he sug­ gests in a number of passages, he means for his text to be read by non-­Christians.152 The bishop alerts us to this early on. ‘For us’, he says to Christian readers at the end of Hum. Nat. 2, ‘let the teaching of the divine oracles suffice as a proof of the soul’s immortality’; but different modes and orders of proof must be offered to ‘those who do not accept the Christian writings’.153 There is a similar marker much later in the treatise. Having cited Judaic history in defence of providence, Nemesius states in Hum. Nat. 42 that his reasoning is ‘not directed to these alone’—he means, ‘not to Judaeans alone’.154 Though he is addressing both Christians and Judaeans, Nemesius tells us that he is speaking ‘also to Hellenes’ (or in a harsher Latin lexicon, to ‘pagans’).155 The bishop is therefore required to ‘demonstrate that there is providence from things that the Hellenes themselves believe’.156 Nemesius then tries to prove that there is providence from Hellenic history, which is set down—like Judaic history—in a body of authoritative texts. He com­ pares, for instance, the ‘revelation’ of Susanna’s persecutors in Judaic history to the ‘revelation’ of Ibycus’s murderers, by god-­inspired birds, in Hellenic history.157 ‘Both the Hebrews’ scriptures and the Hellenes’ writings’, says Nemesius, ‘are full of such histories’.158 Indeed, the accounts of divine solicitude ‘recorded by the ancients’ are so numerous that a collection of them would be ‘endless’ (apeiron).159 For Nemesius, to believe such ‘histories’ is not to believe ‘without reason’ in providence. Yet he voices a concern, in an earlier chapter of On Human Nature, that his readers should not ‘appear to believe what is being said without reason 150  We might only be permitted to take the ‘things that are’ to be humans, rather than humankind, for there is one nominalistic moment in the treatise concerning the ‘species’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 130,12–22). 151 Telfer, Nemesius of Emesa, 210. 152  This is uncontroversial. Compare Einarson, ‘Studies in Nemesius’, 2: ‘He professes to write for pagan and Christian alike’; Verbeke and Moncho, Némésius d’Émèse, v: ‘Némésius ne s’adresse pas seulement aux chrétiens’. 153 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 38,5–10). 154  Pace Telfer, Nemesius of Emesa, 424 note 3; Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 990. This reading is justified at D. L. Dusenbury, ‘Judaic Authority in Nemesius of Emesa’s De Natura Hominis (390 ce)’, Light on Creation: Ancient Commentators in Dialogue and Debate on the Origin of the World, ed. J. Verheyden and G. Roskam (Tübingen, 2017), 131 note 30. 155  For a brief, skilful report on ‘pagans’ in the Christianizing Roman orient: Jones, Between Pagan and Christian, 126–43. 156 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 120,15–23). 157 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 121,6–25). Compare Bas. Hex. VIII 7 (181b–c). 158 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 121,9–10). Compare Theoph. Autol. II 9 (Grant 38–9): ‘There were . . . [true prophets] among the Hebrews, as well as the Sibyl among the Greeks.’ 159 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 121,19–21).

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  17 (alogōs)’. To prevent this, he stresses there that ‘it is necessary to demonstrate’ in a rational manner the force of his claims.160 In this case, having cited both Judaic and Hellenic histories in defence of providence, he notes that some doubt or reject such histories. Democritus and Epicurus, he tells us, deny providence with their ‘first principles’.161 Nemesius therefore moves in the last pages of his (unfinished) treatise into a formal defence of providence. On Human Nature ends with dark scenes of the ‘bitter deaths’ which are inflicted—in Nemesius’ day and ours—by judicial tor­ turers, war criminals, and mercenaries. His conclusion? ‘The murderer murders unjustly’; and yet, it is an incomprehensibly ‘just providence’ (dikaia pronoia) which does not ‘prevent the murder’.162 This theory of providence, which is not lacking in subtlety, will be reconstructed in chapter 5. Regardless of how we may assess his reasonings, Nemesius is a philosopher-­ bishop. Taken in context, what he calls ‘demonstrations’ in On Human Nature could be described as empirical (concerning the body), dialectical (concerning the soul), and formal (concerning human freedom and divine providence). Other terms could of course be used—‘empirical’ must be divorced from its meaning in the Galenic corpus, and so on—but Nemesius’ distinctiveness in the patristic trad­ition would remain. This distinctiveness is sharply stated by David Amand in his study of Fatalism and Freedom in Greek Antiquity. Nemesius, he concludes, does not write an exegetical treatment of a biblical book. He does not produce a theological or moralizing homily. He does not compose a great work of dog­ matic contestation. He studies, he examines, he contemplates in a Hellenic man­ ner the ‘microcosm’, the ‘celestial plant’ which is man—in his body and his soul, in his relations with God and with the cosmos.163

Writing roughly half a century after Amand, Runia concurs. ‘Works like Nemesius’ De natura hominis’, he stresses, ‘are exceedingly rare in the Patristic corpus’.164 The reception history of On Human Nature reflects this. In the medieval period, Christian authors in the Islamicate zone—the pur­veyors of Hellenic philosophy and medical theory to a new Arabic elite165—consistently 160 Nem. Nat. Hom. 13 (Morani 69,22–4). 161 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 127,6). Though Nemesius intends to refute ‘Democritus, Heraclitus, and Epicurus’, he fails to deliver: Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 127,1–14). See Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, notes 1012, 1017. 162 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 135,18–136,13). 163 D.  Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque. Recherches sur la survivance de l’argumentation morale antifataliste de Carnéade chez les philosophes grecs et les théologiens chrétiens des quatre premiers siècles (Louvain, 1945; reprint Amsterdam, 1973), 558. (My translation.) 164  Runia, ‘Festugiere Revisited’, 13–14. 165  G. Klinge, ‘Die Bedeutung der syrischen Theologen’, 346–86; D. Gutas, Greek Philosophers in the Arabic Tradition (Aldershot, 2000); J.  W.  Watt, ‘Syriac and Syrians as Mediators of Greek Political Thought to Islam’, The Greek Strand in Islamic Political Thought: Proceedings of the Conference held at

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18  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature refer to Nemesius as a philosopher. In the late 8th century, for instance, writing to a Christian scholarch in the mountains northeast of Mosul (in present-­day Iraq),166 the Nestorian patriarch of Baghdad, Timothy I (died 823), urges him to obtain a copy of a book ‘by a certain philosopher called Nemesius, on the structure of man’.167 Since Timothy’s letter contains his report on a new translation of Aristotle’s Topics for the Abbasid caliph al-­Mahdi (reigned 775–785), and since he calls the Stagirite—a habit the Latin scholastics will circuitously acquire—‘the Philosopher’, this is a mark of high esteem.168 Similarly, at the turn of the 10th century, for the Jacobite bishop of Mosul, Moses bar Kepha (died 903), Nemesius is ‘the Christian philosopher’ (in a Latin report, philosophus Christianus).169 Centuries later, in the north of Europe, when the treatise appears in its first English translation, The Nature of Man (London, 1636), by poet and polemicist George Wither (died 1667),170 it carries an attribution to ‘Nemesius, surnamed the Philosopher’.171 In this, as in other respects, Wither follows the humanist Latin versions by Giorgius Valla and Nicasius Ellebodius.172 And Wither returns to this in his preface, where he writes that Nemesius ‘argues philosophically, rather than by proofs of scripture, and citeth Moses not as a divine prophet, but a wise man’. Intensely devout himself, Wither defends Nemsesius’ method. ‘This course’, he argues, ‘was practiced by the apostles themselves; to the Jews and believing Gentiles, they brought the testimony of the prophets: but to unbelievers, they cited their own poets, or convinced them by reason’.173 The second Fleet Street edition of Nemesius, The Character of Man (London, 1657), is billed as ‘a Philosophical Discourse’.174 the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, 16–27 June 2003, ed. E. Gannagé, P. Crone, et al. (Beirut, 2004); idem, Rhetoric and Philosophy from Greek into Syriac; idem, ‘The Syriac Aristotle between Alexandria and Baghdad’, Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 7 (2013), 26–50. 166  S. P. Brock, ‘Two Letters of the Patriarch Timothy from the Late Eighth Century on Translations from the Greek’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 9 (1999), 233–46, here 240 note 28. 167  Brock, ‘Two Letters of the Patriarch Timothy’, 237. 168  Brock, ‘Two Letters of the Patriarch Timothy’, 236: ‘You are aware of the style of the Philosopher in matters of logic, and how and to what extent he infuses obscurity into the beauty of (his) meaning and sense.’ 169 Cit. Wicher, ‘Nemesius Emesenus’, 38: ‘Hanc sententiam firmat Numysius philosophus Christianus sic scribens.’ 170  A. Pritchard, ‘George Wither: The Poet as Prophet’, Studies in Philology 59 (1962), 211–30. 171 G.  Wither, The Nature of Man: A learned and uſefull Tract, written in Greek by Nemeſius, ſurnamed the Philoſopher . . . (London, 1636), Title page. (Typography modernized.) According to Wicher, ‘Nemesius Emesenus’, 44: ‘[Wither] apparently could not read the original Greek; so he made an English translation from the Latin ones at hand.’ 172  Nemesius is a ‘philosopher’ on the title pages of both Valla’s and Ellebodius’s editions: Valla, Nemesii philosophi clarissimi; N.  Ellebodius, Nemesii episcopi et philosophi De natura hominis, Lib. unus . . . (Antwerp, 1565). And Wither states in his preface that he ‘made use’ of both their translations ‘out of Greek into Latin’. (Typography modernized.) 173 Wither, The Nature of Man, ‘A Preface to the Reader’ (unnumbered). (Typography modernized.) 174  The Character of Man. Or, His Nature exactly displayed, in a Philosophical Discourse by the Learned Nemesius. Now made English (London, 1657), Title page. (Typography modernized.) More precisely, the 1636 edition was sold on Fleet Street, and the 1657 was sold on Chancery Lane. But

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  19 In 1671, the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford issued a new Greek-­cum-­Latin ­edition of On Human Nature. Ever since Fabricius published his Greek Library (Hamburg, 1705–28),175 the Oxford edition has been regarded as the work of John Fell, a vice-­chancellor of the University and ultimately bishop of Oxford.176 In the preface to this edition, Fell calls Nemesius ‘an initiate of the mysteries of philosophy and bishop of the faith’.177 He believes that Nemesius’ anthropology has relevance for 17th-­ century controversies. The reader is promised, in Nemesius’ text, a vision of humankind which surpasses the ‘Cartesian automaton’ and restores in us ‘the living image of a world-­governing deity’.178 It can thus be inferred, not only from On Human Nature but from its centuries-­ long reception, that Nemesius is a Hellenized bishop of Roman Syria and a phil­ oso­pher of late antiquity. Beyond that lies conjecture. However, a couple of conjectures regarding Nemesius call for brief comment.

Two Conjectures Regarding Nemesius The first conjecture is that Nemesius was a medical practitioner (iatros) or profes­ sor (iatrosophistēs) prior to his ordination. Helen Wicher states that this can ‘hardly be questioned’, but that is overconfident.179 What cannot be denied is that Nemesius’ physiological reports and medical opinions are remarkably well informed. On Human Nature is particularly notable, in terms of the history of science and medicine, for its descriptions of the motion of the blood and the localization of cognitive functions in the brain. Nemesius’ description of the blood’s motion appears in Hum. Nat. 24, ‘On Pulsation’. The excellence of this description was recognized in the decades fol­ lowing the publication of William Harvey’s anatomical treatise On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (Frankfurt, 1628).180 In the Oxford 1671 edition of On Human Nature, Fell even credits Nemesius with having anticipated Harvey’s epoch-­making demonstration of the circulation of the blood (ratio circulationis according to Telfer, Nemesius of Emesa, 220, this Chancery Lane edition is ‘nothing but the remainder stock’ of Wither’s first edition ‘stripped of the first two leaves’ and sold under a new title page. 175  ‘Jo. Albertus Fabricius de Nemesio’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 32–4, here 34. 176 For Fell’s role during the press’s occupancy of the Sheldonian Theatre, compare R.  Sharpe, ‘Selling Books from the Sheldonian Theatre, 1677–1720’, The Library: Transactions of The Bibliographical Society (7th ser.) 11.3 (2010), 275–320, here 277–80; and V.  Larminie, ‘The Fell Era 1658–1686’, The History of Oxford University Press, Volume I: Beginnings to 1780, ed. I.  Gadd (Oxford, 2013). 177  ‘Praefatio editoris Oxoniensis’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 23. 178  ‘Praefatio editoris Oxoniensis’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 30. For Fell’s opposition to both René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes: N. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), 23–4, 348–9. 179  Wicher, ‘Nemesius Emesenus’, 32. 180 W.  Harvey, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus, Guilielmi Harvei Angli, Medici Regii  .  .  .  (Frankfurt, 1628). Harvey’s epoch-­ making conclusion is formulated in chapter 14.

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20  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature sanguinis), urging doubters to read Hum. Nat. 24 for themselves.181 A half-­ century earlier, Fabricius had recognized in Nemesius’ text a description of the blood’s circulation in the body. Like Fell, Fabricius cites Harvey in his comments on Nat. Hom. 24.182 But what did Nemesius say about the motion of blood? He traces it to an artery which ‘expands (diastelletai) and contracts (sustelletai) according to a certain rhythm and ratio’. The origin of this pulsation, says Nemesius, is the heart, which ‘distributes the natural and vital warmth to every part of the body (panti moriō tou sōmatos) through the arteries’. He then writes: As [the heart] expands it draws light blood forcibly from the adjacent veins, which is vaporized and becomes nourishment for the vital breath; as it contracts it empties the sooty element in [the blood] through the whole of the body (dia pantos tou sōmatos) and through the invisible channels, just as the heart thrusts out its smoky impurities through the mouth and the nose in exhalation.183

Whatever its place in the history of physiology, Nat. Hom. 24 is a striking pre­ modern description of the heart’s propulsion of blood through the body. Nemesius’ description of the brain is concentrated in Hum. Nat. 13, ‘On Memory’, where he seeks to prove that the soul’s cognitive powers are channelled by and through three substructures which he calls ‘ventricles of the brain’.184 Present sensations occur in the front of the cerebrum; thought is actualized in the organ’s core; and past sensations are ‘housed’ in the back of the cerebrum.185 This topology turns out to be of immense significance in the history of science and medicine, and survives in recognizable forms into the 16th century.186

181  ‘Praefatio editoris Oxoniensis’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 29. 182  ‘Jo. Albertus Fabricius de Nemesio’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 33–4. Lest the reference to Harvey be missed, he is named in 33 note 5: ‘illum antiquae aetatis detractorem, quo judice, ante­ quam Guil. Harvei oritur ingenium . . .’ 183 Nem. Nat. Hom. 24; ed. Morani 84,25–85,21. 184 Nem. Nat. Hom. 13; ed. Morani 69,20–2. Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 17 (Kotter and Ledrux 318,10–11: anterior ventricle), II 19 (324,9–11: middle ventricle), and II 20 (326,21–3: posterior ventricle). 185  Nemesius calls memory a ‘storehouse’ at Nem. Nat. Hom. 13; ed. Morani 68,15. 186  Having examined a comparable passage in the fragments of one of Nemesius’ contemporaries, Posidonius of Byzantium (flourished c.400)—note that this is not Posidonius of Apamea (died c.51 bce)—Philip van der Eijk concludes that Nat. Hom. 13 is ‘the oldest evidence’ on record of this top­ology: P. van der Eijk, ‘Nemesius of Emesa and Early Brain-­Mapping’, The Lancet 37 (2008), 40–1. And this is the customary account: C. G. Gross, ‘Aristotle on the Brain’, The Neuroscientist 1.4 (1995), 245–50, here 249. For the later history of this topology: T.  Manzoni, ‘The Cerebral Ventricles, the Animal Spirits and the Dawn of Brain Localization of Function’, Archives Italiennes de Biologie 136 (1998), 103–52; C. G. Gross, ‘Leonardo da Vinci on the Brain and Eye’, Brain, Vision, Memory: Tales in the History of Neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 99–107; M.  R.  Bennett and P.  M.  S.  Hacker, History of Cognitive Neuroscience (Chichester, 2008), 201–5; F.  C.  Rose, ‘Cerebral Localization in Antiquity’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 18 (2009), 239–47.

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  21 There is, therefore, evidence in On Human Nature of a precise and extensive knowledge of the medical and physiological literature of the day. It is not im­plaus­ ible that Nemesius had received formal training in what he calls ‘the medical art’.187 (Eusebius of Caesarea describes an earlier bishop, Theodotus, as being skilled in ‘the science of healing bodies’ and devoted to ‘the study of divine matters’.)188 This conjecture takes on added depth and appeal if Magnus of Nisibis (flourished c.370), a renowned iatrosophist of the late 4th century,189 is to be identified with Magnus of Emesa, the author of a path-­breaking text on the inspection of urine.190 This could lend the city of Emesa in the 4th century a certain visibility in the his­ tory of medical theory, but the identity Magnus of Nisibis and Magnus of Emesa is not secure. Moreover, On Human Nature is lacking in conclusive evidence that the bishop of Emesa had practiced medicine. In Hum. Nat. 34, Nemesius classifies medicine— together with navigation—as one of the ‘stochastic arts’ (technōn . . . stochastikōn).191 But his own knowledge of medicine seems to be encyclopaedic (derived from ­medical texts), not ‘stochastic’ (informed by his own medical practice). It is signifi­ cant that the only ‘case history’ in Nemesius’ treatise, in which a phrenitis-­sufferer attacks a worker for no discernible reason, is taken from the pages of one of Galen’s books.192 The second conjecture is that Nemesius was a Roman provincial governor (praeses) prior to his conversion and ordination. This is plausible.193 It turns on the identification of Nemesius of Emesa, an orthodox bishop in the 390s, with a pagan Nemesius who governed the province of Cappadocia Secunda in the 380s.194 Gregory of Nazianzus (died 389) addressed several surviving letters— and indeed, a 300-­line poem—to this pagan office-­holder (flourished c.386), not­ ing that Nemesius had been recognized by the emperor for ‘shining upon the tribunal for the most holy Cappadocians’.195 The first to put forward this identity appears to have been the celebrated Antwerp printer, Christophe Plantin (died 1589), in his foreword to the first edi­ tion of the Greek text of On Human Nature (Antwerp, 1565).196 This edition is the 187 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 25,8). 188 Eus. Hist. Eccl. VII 32.23. 189 M.  Plastira-­ Valkanou, ‘A.P.  11.281: A Satirical Epitaph on Magnus of Nisibis’, L’Antiquité Classique 72.1 (2003), 187–94. 190  V.  Nutton, ‘Magnus [1]’ and ‘Magnus [5]’, Brill’s New Pauly, ed. H.  Cancik and H.  Schneider (Leiden, 2006), archived online at brillonline.com, consulted on 1 July 2017. 191 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 103,3–4). 192 Nem. Nat. Hom. 13; ed. Morani 70,12–22. Compare Gal. Loc. Aff. IV 2. 193  Pace R.  Van Dam, ‘Governors of Cappadocia during the Fourth Century’, Medieval Prosopography 17.1 (1996), 7–93, here 62 note 80: ‘This proposed identification of the governor Nemesius with the bishop Nemesius should be ignored.’ 194  Van Dam, ‘Governors of Cappadocia during the Fourth Century’, 62. 195  Greg. Naz. Carm. Nem. lines 1–6 (Migne 192, col. 1551), here in the translation of Van Dam, ‘Governors of Cappadocia during the Fourth Century’, 61. Compare the letters he addressed to Nemesius: Greg. Naz. Epist. 198–201 (Migne 192, cols 323–30). 196  ‘C. Plantinus Lectori S[alve]’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 22.

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22  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature work of a Flemish humanist, Nicasius Ellebodius (died 1577), who coupled Nemesius’ Greek with a fresh Latin translation. In his foreword, Plantin—who refers to his edition in quasi-­mystical terms (Nemesium nunc primum in lucem producimus)—begins by stating that the bishop of Emesa is a ‘philosopher and bishop’. The proof of this, Plantin says, lies in Nemesius’ book itself. But Plantin then cites a further proof, one which lies outside On Human Nature. It is not difficult to gather from letter 79 of Gregory of Nazianzus, he says, Nemesius’ stature as a philosopher (quantae fuerit auctoritatis ac nominis philosophus). What is more, Plantin infers from Gregory’s correspondence that Nemesius flourished during the reigns of Gratian (reigned 367–383) and Theodosius I (reigned 379–395), and had Libanius of Antioch and Basil of Caesarea as contemporaries.197 From the outset, this identification of Gregory’s addressee with the author of On Human Nature has divided scholars. In the 1671 edition, Fell reports that Marguerin de La Bigne (Bignaeus, died 1597) accepted Plantin’s claim in his monumental Sacred Library of the Holy Fathers (Paris, 1575).198 But Fell then adds, without giving a reference, that a prolific translator of patristic texts, Jacques de Billy (Billius, died 1581),199 and a number of other scholars held it to be highly improbable (minime verisimile) that a ‘pagan’ governor of Cappadocia (praeses Cappadociae)200—or, as Fell terms him, a prefect of Cappadocia (praefectus Cappadociae)—could have so rapidly come into high ecclesiastical office.201 In line with Billius, Fabricius warns in the 18th century that the bishop of Syria Phoenice must not be confused with the governor of Cappadocia, who is praised by the Cappadocian father for his expertise in Roman law (legis peritus).202 We will return in the sixth section (‘Misperceptions of Nemesius and On Human Nature’) to Fabricius’ concern with Nemesius of Emesa’s legal expertise. In the preface to his 1636 translation, The Nature of Man, George Wither gives a robust defence of Plantin’s hypothesis. He writes of Nemesius: This author was as honourable in his generation, as those that are more vo­lu­ min­ous, and more frequently named. For, he was not only so eminent for his natural philosophy, as to be called (by way of excellency) Nemesius the philosopher; but, so good a moralist also, and so expert in the laws of the Roman empire,

197  ‘C. Plantinus Lectori S[alve]’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 22. 198  ‘Praefatio editoris Oxoniensis’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 25. 199  A. C. Way, ‘Gregorius Nazienzenus’, Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries. Volume II, ed. P. O. Kristeller and F. E. Cranz (Washington, D.C., 1971), 45–192, here 77–85. 200  M.-M. Hauser-­Meury, Prosopographie zu den Schriften Gregors von Nazianz (Bonn, 1960), 128. 201  ‘Praefatio editoris Oxoniensis’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 25–6. 202  ‘Jo. Albertus Fabricius de Nemesio’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 32–4, here 32.

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  23 that, the most reverend, learned and devout Gregory Nazianzen (among whose poems are verses written to this Nemesius) hath highly magnified him, both for his learning, and uprightness: and left it witnessed, likewise, that he was digni­ fied with a presidentship in Cappadocia.203

Wither is unimpressed by those who ‘have doubted whether [the bishop of Emesa] were the same Nemesius mentioned by Gregory, only, because he was a lawyer and a temporal magistrate’. To him, this doubt is unfounded, for: ‘He that was once an infidel, and afterward a believer, might as well have been, also, a divine, and a bishop, after he had exercised the functions of a lawyer and a judge; seeing it is no new matter, [to] execute a double-­calling’.204 John Fell, too, is inclined in the 1671 Oxford edition to accept Plantin’s claim. He points out that a rapid elevation of illustrious converts is by no means unheard of in the 4th ­cen­tury.205 And a Jansenist érudit of Fell’s period, Louis-­Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (died 1698), also accepts Plantin’s conjecture. In an ‘article’ of his immense Memoirs in Service of the Ecclesiastical History of the First Six Centuries (Paris, 1714), titled ‘Saint Gregory labours for the conversion of Nemesius’—he means, here, Nemesius the Roman governor—Tillemont concludes: ‘We have one treatise by a Christian philosopher, Nemesius, and I see nothing that prevents us from believing that the former is the latter.’206 This is a wonderfully elegant con­ clusion. And there is still nothing that prevents us from believing that the praeses of Cappadocia Secunda in the 380s could become the bishop of Emesa in the 390s.207

203 Wither, The Nature of Man, ‘A Preface to the Reader’ (unnumbered). (Typography modernized.) 204 Wither, The Nature of Man, ‘A Preface to the Reader’ (unnumbered). (Typography modernized.) 205  ‘Praefatio editoris Oxoniensis’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 25–6. For correlations of high birth and wealth, and the holding of high ecclesiastical office in late antiquity: C.  Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley—Los Angeles, 2005), 183–203. 206  L.-S. Le Nain de Tillemont, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire écclésiastique des six premiers siècles (Paris, 1714), IX:541. (My translation.) Compare Telfer, Nemesius of Emesa, 209: ‘Having passed [out of] a governorship [in the late 380s], no obstacles to ordination under the Theodosian code of 390 against ordaining curials could apply to him. We might almost expect him to be a bishop before the century ended.’ 207  Tillemont’s formulation is more precise than Simon Swain’s claim that ‘there is every reason to suppose’ that the author of the Nat. Hom. is the recipient of Gregory’s letters: Swain, Themistius, Julian, and Greek Political Theory under Rome, 49–50. A signal debt to Swain must be registered here, how­ ever. It is thanks to his urging in a conversation at the University of Warwick, in 2014, that Plantin’s conjecture—which ‘nothing prevents us from believing’—figures in this book.

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24  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature

Misperceptions of Nemesius and On Human Nature In his 1898 dissertation on Nemesius, Dietrich Bender explicitly criticizes Tillemont,208 and effectively translates Fabricius’ warning not to identify the pagan governor Nemesius with the Christian bishop.209 Elaborating on a contrast which is subtly present in Fabricius’ text,210 Bender claims that the former Nemesius could not be the latter, because the pagan is a legal expert (legis peritus) while the Christian is a medical expert (medicinae peritus).211 To suggest that Bender’s—and, centuries before him, Fabricius’—contrast is more apparent than real, it suffices to glance back at the terrain covered in the first section (‘Augustine of Hippo and a Treatise On the Nature of Humankind’). When Augustine introduces Vindicianus in Confessions IV, he is a man of philo­ sophical inclinations (vir sagax), a high Roman official (proconsul), and a man consummately skilled in the art of medicine (medicinae artis peritissimus).212 It is certainly not impossible that the author of On Human Nature resembled Vindicianus in this way. Crucially, however, Bender proceeds to argue from Nemesius’ text. He first points out that there is no mention in On Human Nature of Gregory of Nazianzus, of the office of provincial governor (praeses), or of Cappadocia Secunda. The philosopher-­bishop Nemesius therefore never mentions his former interlocutor, his former high office, or his former Roman province (on Plantin’s hypothesis). This is correct, but totally inert. For there is also no mention in On Human Nature of Nemesius’ episcopal precursors (such as Eusebius of Emesa), of his current high office (as Emesene bishop), or of Syria Phoenice (his current Roman province).213 Even for an argumentum ex silentio, Bender’s lacks weight. Yet Bender then claims, more materially—and this is crucial for us—that even on those occasions when Nemesius touches on legal or political matters (Bender

208 Bender, ‘Untersuchungen zu Nemesius von Emesa’, 4–5: ‘damit ist aber auch Tillemonts Beweisführung erschöpft, und der Möglichkeit stehen solche Unwahrscheinlichkeiten gegenüber, dass sich die Gleichsetzung nicht halten lässt.’ 209  Compare ‘Jo. Albertus Fabricius de Nemesio’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 32: ‘Nemesius Emesenus in Phoenicia Episcopus non confundendus cum Nemesio, qui antea a Christo alienus Cappadociae praefectum egit  .  .  .’ (typography modernized); and Bender, ‘Untersuchungen zu Nemesius von Emesa’, 4–5: ‘der Bischof von Emesa darf nicht mit dem Adressaten von Gregors Briefen verwechselt werden (Fabricius bei Mattaei pag. 32).’ 210  The contrast is not made explicitly by Fabricius, as later by Bender. See ‘Jo. Albertus Fabricius de Nemesio’, repr. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, 32–4. 211  Bender, ‘Untersuchungen zu Nemesius von Emesa’, 5: ‘mit seiner guten philosophischen und medicinisch-­physiologischen Sachkenntnis mehr auf stille Studien in dieser Richtung als auf eine rhetorische Ausbildung und juristische Carriere hin.’ 212 Aug. Conf. IV 3.5. 213  Other scholars refer to Nemesius’ province as ‘Phoenicia Libani’, but there is no occurrence of that name, either, in the Emesene bishop’s treatise: Motta, ‘Nemesius of Emesa’, 509.

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  25 cites only three),214 he displays no talent for juridical reasoning.215 This is a ­striking claim. It is misleading, but it has come to figure, in a tempered form, in the scholarly consensus about On Human Nature. In his mid-­20th-­century com­ mentary on Nemesius, for instance, William Telfer states that the bishop exhibits ‘no interest in questions of law’.216 And Michael Chase remarks in this century, in his perceptive and comprehensive entry for the Dictionary of Ancient Philosophers, that ‘the work of Nemesius only contains a few references which presuppose any legal formation’.217 The premise of this book is not that Nemesius of Emesa underwent a late-­ antique formation judiciaire in the technical sense, nor that he held the office of governor in Cappadocia Secunda. As stated at the end of the fifth section (‘Two Conjectures Regarding Nemesius’), our position is that articulated by Tillemont— there is nothing that prevents us from believing these things. They are plausible conjectures. It is our claim in here, however, that Nemesius exhibits a keen and recurring interest in fundamental legal questions; that On Human Nature contains passages which could suggest legal training or judicial experience; and that the bishop of Emesa possesses a capacity for legal reasoning. It is our claim, moreover, that the unity of On Human Nature is tied to Nemesius’ concept of a ‘world city’.218 It is unnecessary to report on the total literature concerning Nemesius.219 Our status quaestionis is centred on the scholarly judgement that Nemesius is in­cap­ able of legal reasoning and that On Human Nature is unconcerned with legal questions. Still, several further comments on the state of modern interpretation will help to introduce our reconstruction of Nemesius’ text.

The Ontological Structure of On Human Nature In the early 20th century, the unity of On Human Nature was indirectly denied by a scholarly verdict—articulated, here, by Werner Jaeger in 1914—that Nemesius is a ‘limited man’ (beschränkte Mann) who betrays a ‘total dependency’ (letzte Unselbständigkeit) on his sources.220 Perhaps inevitably, source-­critical research 214 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,18); Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 114,6); and Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,10). 215  Bender, ‘Untersuchungen zu Nemesius von Emesa’, 5. 216 Telfer, Nemesius of Emesa, 209–10. 217  Chase, ‘Némésius d’Émèse’, 628. (My translation.) 218  Note that kosmopolis is not a term used by Nemesius, or by any surviving author of antiquity, in a relevant sense. The term only occurs in the literary record ‘as the title of a magistrate in a handful of Greek city-­states’: C. Edwards and G. Woolf, ‘Cosmopolis: Rome as World City’, Rome the Cosmopolis, ed. C. Edwards and G. Woolf (Cambridge, 2003), 2–3. 219  The indispensable report on the Nat. Hom. in ‘modern criticism’ is still A. Siclari, ‘L’antropologia di Nemesio di Emesa nella critica moderna’, Aevum 47.5 (1973), 477–97. 220 Jaeger, Nemesios von Emesa, 68.

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26  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature tended to preponderate in the last century. And given that preponderance, our orientation will not be to Nemesius’ sources. The apparatuses in his most recent editions are generous and can be readily consulted.221 It is primarily where a new source may be indicated, or where earlier judgements are nuanced or diverged from, that we will engage the question of sources. One of this book’s tasks is to prove that Nemesius is ‘no servile copyist’, to bor­ row a phrase from an English Byzantinist, Norman Hepburn Baynes.222 Baynes’s objection in 1922 to Jaeger’s verdict in 1914 has been a recurring one, and to jus­ tify it has remained a pium desiderium in the literature. In 1945, David Amand criticized a modern tendency to ‘reduce Nemesius to the rank of a vulgar compiler’.223 And in 2010, Beatrice Motta stressed that On Human Nature is ‘far from being an unoriginal restatement of doctrines (a trait which is common to a good deal of the philosophical literature of the time)’.224 The problem is that, to date, no unity of concept or structure has been agreed upon which distinguishes Nemesius from a ‘servile copyist’ and a ‘vulgar compiler’.225 For it cannot be denied that he excerpts heavily from numerous texts (lost, attested, and extant); the only question concerns the subtlety with which he handles his materials, and the architectonic idea—or the lack of it—which underlies his conspectus of human nature. It is representative that Amand himself concedes of On Human Nature—after voicing his objection to Nemesius’ disparagers—that ‘the sequence of ideas is not very rigorous and the plan of the work lacks unity’.226 More focused observations on the structure of On Human Nature will be made in the coming chapters, but there is a simple scheme, stated by Nemesius but neglected by his commentators, which—it is proposed—illuminates the structure of his text. It is unnecessary to labour over the implications; this ontological scheme can be sketched in bare outline. Late in the treatise, which is doubtless why it has been overlooked, Nemesius introduces a three-­phase ontological scheme in which substance (ousia) gives rise to power (dunamis), and power gives rise to act (praxis). He writes this in Hum. Nat. 34: One must take care that nothing is lacking in our argument in terms of clarity. Those things are called ‘powers’ (dunameis) by which we have the power to do something (ti poiein). For whatever we do, we have the power to do it. On 221  The definitive apparatus fontium is now Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man. 222 N.  H.  Baynes, ‘Quellenuntersuchungen zu Nemesios von Emesa by Heinrich  A.  Koch’, The Classical Review 36.7 (1922), 183. 223 Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque, 560 note 1. (My translation.) 224  Motta, ‘Nemesius of Emesa’, 519. Compare Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, 32: ‘Nemesius is far from a passive transmitter of material.’ 225  This is not to deny the advances made since Jaeger which are elegantly tabulated in Motta, ‘Nemesius of Emesa’, 514–15, 518–19. 226 Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque, 551. (My translation; my italics.)

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  27 matters where we do not have power, we do not act. To act thus depends on power, and power on substance. For the act comes from power, and power comes from substance and is in substance.227

This is a Neoplatonic scheme with its roots in Plotinus.228 But whatever his influ­ ences, it is not in doubt that Nemesius believes there can be no human acts with­ out power, no human powers without substance.229 Much earlier in his treatise, he insists that because ‘every motion results from some power’, it is necessary to ask ‘what this power is and in what substance it resides’.230 However conscious or unconscious we may take the effect of this three-­phase scheme to be, the entire structure of On Human Nature appears to reflect it with considerable precision.231 In Hum. Nat. 1, Nemesius cautions that it would be ‘out of sequence’ to deal with the ‘functions’ (energeias) of the soul until the soul has been examined ‘according to its substance’ (kat’ ousian).232 The prologue introduces Nemesius’ treatise—and with it, subtly, his three-­phase schema. For, in Hum. Nat. 2–5, he treats the question of human substance (ousia)—which means, for him, a unique duplicity of body and soul. He treats soul qua soul in Hum. Nat. 2, body qua body in Hum. Nat. 4–5, and the union of soul and body—which he calls a ‘union of substances’—in Hum. Nat. 3.233 Nemesius then moves, in Hum. Nat. 6–28, from his question of human sub­ stance (ousia) to his question of human power (dunamis). He tells us that his physiological and psychological descriptions in Hum. Nat. 6–28 will chart out ‘the powers of the soul’.234 The thesis of Hum. Nat. 6–28 merely nuances Nemesius’ basic datum in Hum. Nat. 2–5, which is—to anticipate—that ‘the body . . . is divided up in correspondence with the powers of the soul’.235 Finally, Nemesius passes from human power (dunamis) to human act (praxis) in Hum. Nat. 29–43. The ontological status of the human act is his orienting con­ cern in the last chapters of his text—and indeed, if read with sufficient sensitivity, from the first chapter of his text. Nemesius believes that a human must be the ‘master of their acts’ (praxeōs kurios) when committing voluntary acts.236 What this means, he writes in Hum. Nat. 39, is that one who acts voluntarily is ‘the origin of their own acts’.237 This is a conscious echo of Aristotle’s principle of

227 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 103,10–15). 228  K. Corrigan, ‘The Sources and Structures of Power and Activity in Plotinus’, Divine Powers in Late Antiquity, ed. A. Marmodoro and I.-F. Viltanioti (Oxford, 2017). 229 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 103,11–17). 230 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 18,9–10). 231 It is interesting, too, that John of Damascus reproduces it with some precision in On the Orthodox Faith II, where Nemesius is a decisive influence: Dam. Fid. Orth. II 23 (Kotter and Ledrux 340,3–35). 232 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,3–5). 233 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 44,10). 234 Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 54,23–4). 235 Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 54,23–4). 236 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 113,11), etc. 237 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 113,8–9).

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28  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature imputability in Nicomachean Ethics III (a legal principle in a legal setting), namely, that ‘a human being is the origin of their acts’.238 The question of the act (praxis) is a question of human imputability—in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, as in Nemesius’ On Human Nature. And imputa­ bility is a question of human power (dunamis)—namely, of the power to act. ‘An act is a rational operation’, according to Nemesius’ definition, and it is only because of this that ‘acts attract praise and blame’.239 The political itself, it will be claimed here, is a form of order which is predicated on this human power—the power of choice and resolution (prohairesis). But this human power, in turn, arises from the human substance (ousia), or rather, from a uniquely human ‘union of substances’.240 It is because of this power—which is rooted in our substance—that humankind is, for Nemesius, ‘by nature . . . a political animal’.241 And it is because humankind is by nature political that On Human Nature is, predictably, a political text. Nemesius’ world is a city which is divinely created for the political animal to inhabit, and a human is naturally constituted as a ‘citizen’ (politēs) or ‘freeman’ of the world.242 Set in light of this three-­phase schema, it becomes clear that the structure of On Human Nature reflects Nemesius’ conception of being. It now becomes pos­ sible to simplify our five-­point outline in the second section (‘Nemesius of Emesa and His Treatise On Human Nature’). On Human Nature consists of (i) a prologue (Hum. Nat. 1); (ii) a series of chapters on the human substance (Hum. Nat. 2–5); (iii) a series of chapters on the human powers (Hum. Nat. 6–28); and (iv) a series of chapters on the human capacity to act (Hum. Nat. 29–43). This book’s chapters will follow this logic of exposition.

Idea for a Reconstruction It is possible that Nemesius draws, directly or indirectly, upon a lost an­thropo­ logic­al text—On Impulse, or On Human Nature—by the first Stoic master, Zeno of Citium (died 263 bce).243 What is certain is that Nemesius provides, in Hum. Nat. 15, one of only two testimonies to a doctrine of Zeno’s concerning the human soul, with the other testimony coming from Iamblichus (according to

238 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 3.15 (1112b32–3). For a tabulation of Nemesius’ many references to Aristotle: Runia, ‘Festugiere Revisited’, 9–10. Note, too, the references to Nemesius in Runia’s index on pages 27–8. 239 Nem. Nat. Hom. 29 (Morani 94,3–12). 240 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 44,10). 241 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,20). Compare Arist. Polit. I 1.9 (1253a). 242 Though kosmopolitēs antedates Nemesius, he never uses the term: Dio. Laer. Vit. VI 63. In fact, ‘citizen’ (politēs) is a hapax: Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 111,20–3). 243  Dio. Laer. Vit. VII 4, 87.

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  29 Stobaeus).244 Here, Nemesius remarks that Zeno held the soul to be a unity of ‘eight parts’—namely, the five senses, the powers of speech (to phōnētikon) and generation (to spermatikon), and finally, ‘the hegemon’ (to hēgemonikon).245 This is a crucial attestation, if nothing else, to Zeno’s use of the term ‘hegemon’—an enduring feature of Stoic psychology.246 What is more crucial in the present context, however, is that the possibility of a recollection of Zeno’s On Human Nature in Nemesius’ On Human Nature frees the latter text from the generic constraints of Hippocrates’ (or Polybus’) On Human Nature. The genre initiated by the Hippocratic text begins with this cau­ tion: ‘He who is accustomed to hear speakers discuss human nature beyond its relations to medicine will not find the present account of any interest.’247 This is perhaps not entirely true of the Hippocratic On Human Nature, and it is certainly less true of the Galenic commentaries on that book. But it is not remotely true of Nemesius’ On Human Nature. Nemesius’ anthropology is medically informed; it is not, however, medically defined. It is of course the case that physiology and medicine are the salient dis­ courses of the central chapters of On Human Nature, which describe the or­gan­ iza­tion of powers in the body (Hum. Nat. 6–28). But even there, Nemesius’ descriptions of the body feature a conscious use of legal and political terms (traced in chapter 4), which prepare us for his last, structurally decisive chapters (Hum. Nat. 29–43), on the juridical status of the ‘person’ (argued in chapter 5). It will be suggested, in this book, that one of the controlling discourses in On Human Nature—which infuses and organizes even Nemesius’ representation of the human body—is legal and political. In a word, Nemesius’ anthropological theory is cosmopolitan. This possibility has gone unnoticed in the literature to date,248 together with the possibility that Nemesius cites Zeno’s On Human Nature. Now, there is no cause to doubt that Nemesius deliberately echoes, with his title, the Hippocratic On Human Nature (detailed in the fourth section (‘Three Inferences Concerning Nemesius’)). Still, when he quotes from that text more than once— directly or not is immaterial for our purposes—he refers only to ‘Hippocrates’. The

244 H.  Von Arnim, ed., Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta. Volumen  I.  Zeno et Zenonis Discipuli (Stuttgart, 1964), 39 (Fr. 143). Von Arnim also collects reports of a Stoic ‘eight-­part’ soul from Porphyry (according to Stobaeus) and Philo, which lack, however, any reference to Zeno: H.  Von Arnim, ed., Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta. Volumen II. Chrysippi Fragmenta, Logica et Physica (Stuttgart, 1964), 226 (Fr. 830, Fr. 832). Other notable testimonies to the ‘eight-­part’ soul, one of which virtually attributes the idea to Zeno, appear in Dio. Laer. Vit. VII 110, 157. 245 Nem. Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,7–9). 246 A. C. Pearson, The Fragments of Zeno and Cleanthes, with Introduction and Explanatory Notes (London, 1891), 142; A. E. Ju, ‘Chrysippus on Nature and Soul in Animals’, The Classical Quarterly (NS) 57.1 (2007), 97–108, here 105–8. 247 Hipp. Nat. Hom. 1.1. 248 For a connection to Platonic legal-­political theory, see E.  Wyller, ‘Die Anthropologie des Nemesios von Emesa und die Alcibiades I-Tradition’, Symbolae Osloenses 44 (1969), 126–45.

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30  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature Hippocratic title, On Human Nature, is never cited by Nemesius.249 Though Nemesius echoes this genre-­inaugurating Hippocratic title with his own title, he concerns himself, throughout On Human Nature, with questions of human nature which subsist far beyond its relations to medicine. From the first sentences of Nemesius’ text, which centre on the concept of ‘intellectual soul’ (examined in chapter 2), to the last sentences of Nemesius’ text, which deal with larceny and the brutalization of prisoners of war (contextualized in chapter 5), Nemesius’ treat­ ment of human nature systematically transgresses the limits set by the Hippocratic circle, or even by Galen in his commentaries. Naturally, Nemesius’ concern with topics like the loss of innocence in Eden or the resurrection of the dead stem from his Christian confession. Similarly, his concern with Stoic fate or Iamblichus’ interpretation of Platonic reincarnation derive from themes in Hellenistic and post-­Hellenistic philosophy. No one doubts that Nemesius’ theory of elements, human physiology, humoral theory, and so on, come from Galenic medical philosophy. But what could account for the prominence that Nemesius gives, in the pro­ logue to his anthropological text, to the torture of animals as a question of ­in­just­ice? ‘Those commit sin’, writes the bishop, ‘who mistreat irrational creatures, for they do not fulfil the office of a ruler (archontos ergon)’.250 And what could link the question of injustice towards animals—as an anthropological question, in the prologue of On Human Nature—to Nemesius’ disquisitions on fate, choice, imputability, justice, and divine governance in the last chapters of On Human Nature? In a word, Zeno. Before proceeding, a clarification is in order. Nothing in our reconstruction of Nemesius’ On Human Nature rests on the supposition that he takes a doctrine from Zeno’s On Human Nature. When he reports Zeno’s singular conception of the soul, he cites no Zenonic title. There is thus no mention whatever, in Nemesius’ On Human Nature, of Zeno’s On Human Nature. With that being said, the possi­ bility that Nemesius knew or knew of Zeno’s anthropological treatise could help to account for his cosmopolitan treatment of anthropology in On Human Nature. And more importantly, the bare possibility of such a citation could help to free Nemesius’ commentators from the generic confinement of ‘anthropology’ to medical and physiological questions. For Zeno, anthropology is a discourse which occurs within a city and which interrogates the possibility of a city. Nemesius too regards the ubiquity of law and political order, the grim familiarity of crime and punishment, as anthropological data, and treats the origins of political order, the logic of law, and the legitimacy of punishment as anthropological questions. It is this that Nemesius’ commentators

249 Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 53,20–54,10).

250 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 12,3–9).

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  31 have, to date, failed to recognize.251 And it is this that a few brief remarks on Zeno’s anthropology—whether cited by Nemesius, or not—promise to contribute to our reconstruction. Zeno’s On Human Nature is lost, but Diogenes Laertius, writing in the 3rd cen­ tury ce, preserves the title and a substantial testimony. The title is placed high in Diogenes’ catalogue of Zeno’s books (not that this alone signifies much), where we read: ‘Besides the Republic, Zeno wrote the following: Of Life according to Nature. Of Impulse or On Human Nature’.252 Of course, the list continues. Diogenes records twenty titles, the most eye-­catching of which are, perhaps—in the present context—On Law and On the Whole World.253 Even taken in isolation, Zeno’s title informs us (i) that in addition to compos­ ing a Platonically titled Republic, he apparently composed a Hippocratically titled On Human Nature; and (ii) that his anthropology is linked by the concept of impulse (hormē) to the furthest reaches of oikeiōsis theory254—which is to say, of Stoic cosmopolitanism—which Zeno introduced to Hellenistic philosophy (according to a convincing reconstruction of the fragments by Katja Maria Vogt).255 From this, we can infer—and this is no minor gain—that the first ‘scho­ lastic’ text of Hellenistic anthropology must have been a thoroughly cosmo­pol­ itan text. And without entering into it further, we could note that much the same could be said of a monumental Latin text of Nemesius’ period, Calcidius’ com­ mentary On Plato’s Timaeus.256 Zeno’s text survives as more than a bare title, however. For Diogenes later sketches a Stoic edifice which he ascribes, in large measure, to Zeno’s Of Impulse or On Human Nature.257 This is a passage which must be quoted in extenso: Nature, [the Stoics] say, originally made no difference between plants and ani­ mals, for it oversees the life of plants too, in their case without impulse and sen­ sation—just as certain plant-­like processes occur in us. But in the case of animals, impulse has been added, by which they come to be able to seek their own proper sustenance—for them, say the Stoics, it is natural to be governed by impulse. But when reason is given to the beings we call rational, by way of a more perfect leadership—for them, to live according to right reason is to live according to nature, for reason skillfully supervenes to shape impulse. This is

251  Consult, however, Wyller, ‘Nemesios von Emesa und die Alcibiades I-Tradition’, 126–45; Siclari, ‘L’antropologia di Nemesio di Emesa’, 496–7. 252  Dio. Laer. Vit. VII 4. 253  Dio. Laer. Vit. VII 4. 254  This point is already made at Dio. Laer. Vit. VII 84. 255 K. M. Vogt, Law, Reason, and the Cosmic City: Political Philosophy in the Early Stoa (Oxford, 2008), 65–110, 161–216. 256  G. Reydams-­Schils, Demiurge and Providence: Stoic and Platonist Readings of Plato’s Timaeus (Turnhout, 1999), 207–43. 257 D. S. Richter, Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire (Oxford, 2011), 57–86, here 72.

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32  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature why Zeno was the first, in his treatise On Human Nature, to designate ‘living according to nature’ as the end258 . . . or in other words, living according to our own nature as well as that of the whole world, a life in which we refrain from every act which is prohibited by the law common to all things—that is to say, the right reason which pervades all things—and is identical with this Zeus, the lord and governor of all that is.259

Before we proceed, it is useful to set this testimony concerning Zeno’s world city in relation to Cicero’s Latin rendering of the world city espoused by later Stoics (and specifically, by Chrysippus): They hold 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 . . . For Chrysippus said correctly that all other things were generated for the sake of humans and gods, but that they exist for their own communion and society . . . And human nature, he said, is such, that like a code of civil law it subsists between humans and the human species, so that the one who observes this code will be just, and the one who departs from it, unjust.260

Now, Nemesius rejects numerous Stoic tenets in On Human Nature—including Zeno’s eight-­part partition of the human soul. Returning to a topic introduced earlier, Nemesius holds that ‘those commit sin who mistreat irrational creatures’;261 whereas one of the Stoic tenets is a cold assertion that ‘no right’— which is to say, no form of rational obligation—‘exists between humans and beasts’ (homini nihil iuris esse cum bestiis).262 The intent of the present book is thus by no means to suggest that Nemesius’ idea of humankind is in a doctrinal sense Stoic or Zenonic. This book is intended to demonstrate, however, that Nemesius’ On Human Nature—like Zeno’s On Human Nature—locates humankind, and thus the ques­ tion of human nature, within the elaborate conceptual edifice of a ‘world city’. Nemesius’ anthropology—like Zeno’s—is cosmopolitan. For the Stoic master and the Christian bishop, the world in which humankind is placed is constituted as a divine polity in which all created entities are ‘in communion’ and ‘akin’. Thus, despite Nemesius’ critiques of Stoic and Zenonic doctrine, Zeno’s depiction of

258  For more on this ‘telos-formula’: J. Mansfeld, ‘Zeno on the Unity of Philosophy’, Phronesis 48.2 (2003), 116–31, here 124–5. 259  Dio. Laer. Vit. VII 86–8. Compare Pos. Frag. 33 (Edelstein and Kidd); and Gal. Plac. V 476–7. 260 Cic. Fin. III 62–7. This text is cited, en passant, by Einarson, ‘Studies in Nemesius’, 15. 261 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 12,3–9). 262 Cic. Fin. III 67. Compare Pos. Frag. 39 (Edelstein and Kidd); Dio. Laer. Vit. VII 129; Sext. Adv. Phys. I 130–1.

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  33 humankind in his lost anthropological treatise can serve to illuminate Nemesius’ conception of humankind in On Human Nature. To limit ourselves to a single observation, it is striking that Zeno (according to Diogenes Laertius) calls the divine governance of the world—and the animals’ governance by impulse—a form of dioikēsis.263 Commentators have not taken notice of the fact, but dioikēsis is Nemesius’ Greek term of art for the operation of divine providence—and indeed, for the governance of human polities and animal quasi-­polities—in the last chapters of his text (demonstrated in chapter 5). As this indicates, a Christian variety of oikeiōsis theory—which is not to say a Stoic or Zenonic theory—structures and informs Nemesius’ anthropology. Significantly, in late antiquity, a concept of oikeiōsis was ascribed to the archaic philosophers.264 Oikeiōsis was not held to be a Hellenistic, and much less a uniquely Stoic theory.265 For instance, this is Sextus Empiricus (died c.210 ce): Pythagoras and Empedocles and the rest of the Italian crowd say that we have some communion (koinōnian) not only with other humans and with the gods, but also with the irrational creatures. For there is one spirit which, like a soul, pervades the whole world, and which also unites us with them. . . . For—look!— the spirit also passes through stones and through plants, so that we are akin to them.266

And this is Nemesius, sketching a theory of oikeiōsis which he ascribes to Plato, before he later concedes that it ‘differs only slightly’ from the world-­picture which is revealed in the ‘divine oracles’ that Christians read in the churches.267 [Plato] says . . . that the All-­Soul spreads out from the centre of the earth to the extremities of the heavens . . . It is this Soul, he says, that turns the Whole in its orbit and binds it together . . . Also, he says that everything is alive, but not every­ thing is an animal. For [the Platonists] distinguish plants from lifeless things by their growth and nourishment, that is, by their nutritive and vegetative power, irrational animals from plants by sensation, the rational from the irrational by reason. Thus, while saying that all are alive, they distinguish the nature of each . . . They say [that] the Soul which steers the world . . . sends out the particu­ lar souls which were produced earlier by the Demiurge, since clearly the Demiurge himself has both given to the Soul laws in accordance with which it

263  Dio. Laer. Vit. VII 88. 264 For the elevation of ‘primitive wisdom’ in the post-­Hellenistic period: Boys-­Stones, Post-­ Hellenistic Philosophy, 3–43. 265 I.  Ramelli, ‘The Stoic Doctrine of Oikeiosis and its Transformation in Christian Platonism’, Apeiron 47.1 (2014), 116–40, here 116–17. 266 Sext. Adv. Phys. I 127, 130. 267 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 110,11–13).

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34  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature must control the world, which [Plato] calls fate, and the Demiurge also provides a sufficient power to watch over us.268

It is the task of this book to show that, though other readings can be made, On Human Nature can be read in its fullest integrity in light of this type of world-­picture. Of course, Nemesius’ world city is not Zeno’s (according to Diogenes Laertius) or Pythagoras’ (according to Sextus Empiricus) or Plato’s (according to Nemesius). Nemesius twice calls the Platonists ‘the wisest of the Hellenes’, but his world city is not theirs.269 He criticizes the Platonic conception of the world city in Hum. Nat. 2 (examined in chapter 3), and he returns to this critique in Hum. Nat. 38 (ana­ lysed in chapter 5). Nevertheless, for Nemesius the human is a natural-­born citi­ zen of the world who is imputable, because free, and who is in communion with the whole of creation—and indeed with the Demiurge, since to be human is to be a ‘child of God’.270 Nemesius opens On Human Nature with an elaborate description of divine creation as oikeiōsis (shown in chapter  2), and he closes his text with a highly structured defence of divine providence as dioikēsis (proven in chapter  5). Nemesius’ theory of body and soul turn upon the soul’s power to ‘conquer’ the body’s mixtures (argued in chapter 3), and the human body is itself devised like a city in which reason is to govern the organs of spirit and desire (in chapter 4). Nemesius writes in Hum. Nat. 1 that humankind is ‘by nature . . . a political animal’,271 and his description of humankind is thoroughly political—or rather, cosmopolitan. It is the idea of a ‘world city’, it is claimed here—a world that is made for the ‘political animal’ to inhabit—which permits us to reconstruct the formal unity of On Human Nature.272 Without denying Nemesius’ habit of copying and para­ phrasing, layering and interlacing others’ texts (and fragments), the fact that he offers a systematic account of human nature’s substance (Hum. Nat. 2–5), and powers (Hum. Nat. 6–28), and acts (Hum. Nat. 29–43), in light of the world city idea is what separates him decisively from a ‘servile copyist’ or a ‘vulgar compiler’.273 Pace Jaeger, the bishop of Emesa is not a ‘limited man’ (beschränkte Mann);274 rather, he is a cosmopolitian philosopher of late aniquity. 268 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 33,23–34,16). 269 Nem. Nat. Hom. 37 (Morani 108,3–4) and Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,26). 270 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,10). 271 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,20). 272  For pre-­Hellenic roots of the concept in the Near East and Egypt: F. Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy: Origins and Background (Washington, D.C., 1966), I: 1–131; and for a ‘cosmopolitan’ interpretation of pre-­Platonic philosophy: A. Capizzi, The Cosmic Republic: Notes for a Non-­Peripatetic History of the Birth of Philosophy in Greece (Amsterdam, 1990). 273  Baynes, ‘Quellenuntersuchungen zu Nemesios von Emesa by Heinrich  A.  Koch’, 183; Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque, 560 note 1. 274 Jaeger, Nemesios von Emesa, 68.

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Ideas for a Reconstruction  35 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 onto­ logic­al status of a legal and juridical ‘subject’—is the decisive anthropological question in On Human Nature. The basic question of humanity therefore con­ cerns the principle of imputability. Are we free? (‘A city’, says Aristotle, ‘is a com­ munion of the free’.)275 And thus, can we be innocent and guilty? The question of natural human freedom is one which orients, not only Nemesius’ anthropology and that of other late-­antique Christian writers, but of countless philosophers in the later European tradition. This tradition crests in Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology lecture-­course and Critique of Practical Reason;276 and it breaks, perhaps, in Michel Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology and later writings.277 Yet Nemesius’ question still looms. Are we free?

275 Arist. Polit. III 4.7 (1279a21–2). 276  There is likely a demonstrable, but, as yet, undemonstrated influence of Nemesius’ anthropol­ ogy on Kant’s anthropology—via pre-­Reformation scholasticism, 17th-­century Protestant scholasti­ cism, and 18th-­century Schulphilosophie. Compare I.  Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. and trans. R.  B.  Louden, intro. M.  Kuehn (Cambridge, 2006); idem, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. M. Gregor, intro. A. Reath (Cambridge, 2015). For ‘Kant’s anthropology of man’s dual intelligible–sensible natures’ as being, mutatis mutandis, Platonic: I.  Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2001), 24. 277 M.  Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, ed. R.  Nigro, trans. K.  Briggs (Cambridge, Mass., 2008). It is not out of place to recall Foucault’s chilling last lines in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London—New York, 2002), 422, where the ‘Classical’ idea of humankind is effaced like a figure ‘drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.

2

The World City On Human Nature 1

What Is Confessed by All Humans The first sentence of Nemesius’ On Human Nature is this: ‘Many good men (andrasin) have held that humankind is nobly constructed out of an intellectual soul and a body—indeed, so finely that humans could not have been finely composed or have come-­to-­be in any other way.’1 Nemesius means to ‘set out’ or ‘sketch’ a comprehensive account of human nature in his text,2 and he introduces this topic by way of a conviction which was not uncommon in late antiquity, namely, that ‘humankind is . . . constructed out of an intellectual soul (psuchēs noeras) and a body’.3 No one doubts—or more precisely, no one in the pages of On Human Nature doubts—that a human is comprised of a body.4 The human soul, however, is a site of uncertainty and a source of controversy.5 Nemesius is perfectly aware of this. He will open Hum. Nat. 2 with a recognition of this fact. ‘Nearly all the ancients disagree’, he says there, ‘in their reasoning concerning the soul’.6 And here in Hum. Nat. 1, Nemesius adds in his text’s second sentence that the term ‘intellectual soul’—with which he has chosen to introduce his theme—is ‘doubtful’ or ‘contested’.7 In proof of this he cites the preeminent late-­antique Platonist, Plotinus;8 a schismatic bishop, Apollinaris of Laodicea;9 those—presumably the Stoics—who hold that ‘intellect is the soul’s hegemon (hēgemonikon)’;10 and finally, Aristotle’s allusions to ‘potential intellect’ and to an activation ‘from outside’ of intellect in the human soul.11 Nemesius’ brief characterizations of Plotinus and Aristotle, here, are not without interest.12 More important, though, is the fact that it is far from obvious why 1 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,3–5). Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 2 (Kotter and Ledrux 224,6–8). 2 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,20–2). 3 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,3). Compare Plot. Enn. I 1.3. 4  Compare Aug. An. Orig. IV 2.3. 5 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,23–4). 6 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 16,12). Compare Herm. Irris. 2–3. 7 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,5–6). 8 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,9–11). 9 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,11–14). Consult R. Sharples and P. van der Eijk, Nemesius, On the Nature of Man (Liverpool, 2008), note 185. 10 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,14–15). 11 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,15–2,1). 12  Consult the references in Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, notes 184 and 187–8. Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature:  A Cosmopolitan Anthropology from Roman Syria. David Lloyd Dusenbury. Oxford University Press. © David Lloyd Dusenbury 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856962.003.0002

The World City: On Human Nature 1  37 Nemesius opens his text with the term ‘intellectual soul’ and then proceeds to show its contentiousness in post-­Platonic tradition. This point of departure is obscure because Nemesius abandons the term twenty or so lines into his text (in Morani’s edition), and never returns to it. There is admittedly one mention of ‘intellectual natures’ slightly further on in his prologue, but these ‘natures’ stand in contrast to humankind inasmuch as they are ‘bodiless’.13 Again, much later in On Human Nature, Nemesius seems in an offhand way to differentiate the human soul and intellect,14 a move which we can take to reflect his reading of Plotinus (and Apollinaris of Laodicea) in Hum. Nat. 1.15 Beyond this, however, Nemesius exhibits no interest in the terminology of intellectual soul. (This is not to suggest that his concept of ‘intellectual soul’ is limited to his use of the term.) Why, then, does he open his text with this term, and then gesture towards the uncertainties surrounding it? What could appear to be a thoughtless or pointless overture proves, on further reflection, to be subtle and well considered. For the post-­Platonic question of intellectual soul permits Nemesius to introduce Plato as a decisive authority in On Human Nature; and by means of Plato, allows him to formulate a basic, hierarchic concept which is not only held by ‘many good men’16—the concept of intellectual soul would, because controverted, provide a poor basis for his text— but rather, a concept which is attested by ‘all humans’ (pasin anthrōpois).17 Nemesius’ paragraph-­length sentence on Plato is so full of anticipations of his later themes in the prologue, and in On Human Nature, that it should be quoted in its entirety: Plato does not appear to say that humankind is merely a complex—soul and body—but a soul that makes use of a certain type of body, having a more worthy impression of humankind; and he immediately turns us to the divinity of the soul alone and its care, so that—believing it to be the soul that is our true self— we should seek only the goods of the soul, the virtues and piety, and should not love the desires of the body, for they do not constitute the human qua human— they principally and directly constitute animals, and only humans as a consequence, since the human is also an animal.18

Since this sentence articulates, with considerable precision, the ‘impression of humankind’ that Nemesius’ prologue—and thus, the present chapter—is meant to convey, it is not necessary to list here the themes that will recur. The decisive function of this dense, opening characterization of Plato is to reduce the construction with which Nemesius opens On Human Nature—namely, ‘intellectual soul 13 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,22–3). 15 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,9–14). 17 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,9–10).

14 Nem. Nat. Hom. 18 (Morani 77,15–16). 16 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,5). 18 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,1–9).

38  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature and body’19—to a less speculative pairing of ‘soul and body’;20 and at the same time, to introduce a hierarchy within this pairing, since Plato maintains that it is ‘soul that makes use of a certain type of body’.21 Throughout On Human Nature, one of Nemesius’ most basic organizing principles is that ‘body is the instrument of soul’.22 This is a principle which is shared by Platonic philosophy and by Galenic medical theory. ‘The soul has a use for all parts of the body’, as Nemesius quotes Galen saying, ‘for the body is the instrument of the soul’.23 He has managed to introduce this principle rapidly, and not unnaturally, in the first sentences of his text. Nemesius’ report of Plato’s formulation of this principle, however, is still a weak introduction to his theme. For Nemesius wishes to root his anthropology, as he reiterates in his text’s penultimate chapter, in data which are ‘confessed by all humans in common’.24 Nemesius therefore concludes his paragraphs on intellectual soul with what he takes to be an unquestioned datum concerning the human soul. This is the datum upon which On Human Nature rests, and with which—in the fullest and most proper sense—it begins: The soul is in any case confessed by all humans in common to be superior to the body. For the body is moved as a tool by the soul. Death clearly shows this. For when the body is separated from the soul, it remains totally motionless and inactive, as tools remain immobile when a skilled worker is separated from them.25

Nemesius’ real point of departure in On Human Nature is not a speculative pairing of ‘intellectual soul’ and body—and much less, an anarchic pairing of soul and body. Rather, he begins with a superiority of soul which is revealed—even to those who deny the soul’s immortality—by the absolute inertness of the human dead. Already in Plato’s Phaedo, a dialogue that Nemesius refers to in Hum. Nat. 2, and that he appears to know,26 death is defined as a state in which ‘the body is separated from the soul and exists alone by itself ’.27 In neither the Phaedo nor On Human Nature is this definition of death taken to pre-­decide the question of the soul’s immortality. On the contrary, Socrates’ question in the Phaedo is whether a philosopher—‘a real philosopher’28—can believe, in light of this definition, that the soul might exist, after death, ‘alone by itself and separated from the body’.29 Similarly, in On Human Nature, the question of immortality—although it receives 19 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,3). 20 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,2). 21 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,3). 22 Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 54,23–4). 23 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,14–15). Compare Gal. Usu Part. I 1. 24 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 122,5–6). 25 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,9–13). 26 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 22,21–2). 27 Pl. Ph. 64c. 28 Pl. Ph. 64e. 29 Pl. Ph. 66e–67a.

The World City: On Human Nature 1  39 a preliminary treatment in Hum. Nat. 1—is only rigorously treated in Hum. Nat. 2. The definition of death introduces the question of the soul’s immortality, for Plato and Nemesius, but it does not resolve it. What the human cadaver reveals to us, therefore, and what is ‘confessed by all humans in common’, is not the immortality of the soul, but the superiority and authority of the soul.30 The human corpse, to Nemesius’ mind, reveals the body to have been a ‘living tool’,31 which is to say, recalling the ominous passage in Aristotle’s Politics, a natural slave of the soul.32 It is crucial to note, however, that the broader concept of ‘natural’ slavery in human cities, which Aristotle argues directly from the soul’s authority in the body,33 has no place in On Human Nature.34 This recollection of Politics I is perhaps not extraneous to Nemesius’ prologue. For, in addition to Aristotle’s thematic of ‘communion’ (koinōnia) in Politics I, which seems to find a number of echoes in Hum. Nat. 1 (on which, more presently); Nemesius arguably quotes from Politics I further on in Hum. Nat. 1, when he writes that humankind is ‘by nature . . . a political animal’.35 Without insisting on a citation here, it is still interesting that in Politics I, the human soul’s su­per­ior­ ity in the body at once reflects, and is reflected by—not only all human political order, but—a vast, intrinsic, ‘political’ order which structures ‘the totality of nature’.36 Aristotle’s world city, in Politics I, is mirrored in the hierarchic unity of soul and body. Similarly, the world city that Nemesius draws up in Hum. Nat. 1 is first in­tim­ ated by his use of the term ‘master’ (kurios)—albeit in a comparative form, ‘superior’ (kuriōtera)—to denote the soul’s authority in the body. Humankind’s unique duplicity of substance is not anarchic, but hierarchic. It is ‘confessed by all humans’ that the soul possesses a relative mastery in the body.37 The soul is not a tyrant or a god in the body; it is merely a superior. Nemesius’ choice of the comparative is not inadvertent. His later chapters on physiology and on autonomy

30 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,9–10). Compare Theoph. Autol. II 19 (Grant 58–9): ‘The soul is called immortal by most people (para tois pleiosi).’ 31 Arist. Polit. I 2.5 (1253b29–30). Compare Arist. Part. Anim. I 1 (642a9–13): ‘The [human] body, like an axe, is an instrument—just as much the whole body as each of its parts.’ 32 Arist. Polit. I 2.11–15 (1254b3–1255a2). 33 Arist. Polit. I 2.11 (1254b7–9): ‘It is natural (kata phusin) . . . for the body to be governed by the soul.’ Note that the same form of argumentation appears, with a citation of Posidonius of Apamea— long conjectured to be a source of Nemesius’ proem—at Sen. Epist. 90.4–5. 34  The word ‘slave’ (doulos) is a hapax, and Nemesius is not referring to humans: Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 14,20. For John Chrysostom’s critique of this Aristotelian concept: C.  De Wet, Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (Oakland, Calif., 2015), 54–64; and for Gregory of Nyssa’s critique of slavery: M. M. Bergadá, ‘La condamnation de l’esclavage dans l’Homélie IV’, Homilies on Ecclesiastes: An English Version with Supporting Studies, ed. S. G. Hall (Berlin—New York, 1993). 35 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,20). 36 Arist. Polit. I 2.8–9 (1254a20–33), here I 2.9 (1254a32). 37 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,9–10).

40  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature will finely shade the body’s actions into the soul’s passions.38 With regards to breathing, for instance, the body quickly proves to be the soul’s superior. ‘We cannot hold our breath’, as he points out in Hum. Nat. 28, ‘for even the tenth part of an hour’.39 Nevertheless, Nemesius’ basic datum in On Human Nature is that the human soul is superior to the human body. The significance of this datum is architectonic in On Human Nature. Most important, the forms and limits of the soul’s mastery in the body will determine Nemesius’ physiological schemas in Hum. Nat. 6–28 (outlined in chapter 4), and such mastery will be insisted upon as a brute fact—on the strength of universal legal phenomena—in Hum. Nat. 29–43 (reviewed in chapter 5). In fact, in the last pages of his text, Nemesius absolutizes in one respect the mastery which he introduces in a relative form in his prologue. For the basic anthropological datum in Hum. Nat. 1 is that the soul is ‘superior’ (kuriōtera) in the body; but in Hum. Nat. 39–41, this datum is both hardened and sharpened. For when committing voluntary acts, Nemesius holds that a human soul is not merely a ‘superior’ in the body, but a ‘master’ (kurios) of the body. He holds that this form of soul’s authority or control of the body is necessary for any human to be a ‘master of their acts’ (praxeōs kurios).40 Without this form of mastery, Nemesius seems to suggest throughout his text’s last pages, the world could not be—as he portrays it in his text’s first pages—a communion (koinōnia) or dwelling place (oikos), which is to say, in Peripatetic and Stoic terminology, a city (polis). It is time for us to proceed further into his prologue, in which—having stated his donnée fondamentale—Nemesius then places humankind within the world.41

The Creation of the World City Immediately after Nemesius obtains his donnée fondamentale—the human soul’s relative mastery in the human body—he gives a ‘concise account of the wisdom of the Demiurge’ in creating a world whose structural and ontological midpoint is

38  In fact, he observes the reversibility in a crucial sentence of his treatment of the union of soul and body—a relation which he describes, here, in terms of ‘affinity’ (oikeiotēs): Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,11–13). 39 Nem. Nat. Hom. 28 (Morani 90,3–6). And compare Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 103,21–2): ‘It is impossible for a living person not to breathe.’ 40 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 113,11), etc. Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 27 (Kotter and Ledrux 354,14–18). 41  Nemesius appears to use kosmos and to pan indifferently: Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 33,25–34,1); Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 111,14–25). Naturally, he takes both terms to denote what Genesis 1:1 calls ‘heaven and earth’: Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,23) and Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 53,9–13). Moreover, Nemesius’ term kosmos is close kin to ‘the whole’ in Plato’s Timaeus: Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 125,23–126,4).

The World City: On Human Nature 1  41 occupied by humankind.42 Despite its concision, this is a rich and intriguing piece of late-­antique Naturphilosophie, a finely drawn sketch of created ‘powers and natures’.43 In slightly fewer than three pages (in Moreno Morani’s edition), Nemesius observes how a complex substrate of inert matter gives rise to magnetite, a stone which ‘seems’, with its attractive properties, ‘to have exceeded the power and nature of other stones’.44 How a vast system of nutritive (plant) life branches, at its upper limits, into ‘bivalves and corals resembling sensitive trees (aisthētika dendra)’,45 that is to say, into certain types of quasi-­sensitive life which ‘the wise men of old were accustomed to call . . . “zoophytes” (zōophuta)’.46 How certain forms of sensitive (animal) life come, by virtually imperceptible degrees, to exhibit ‘natural forms of understanding, devices, and resources for their preservation, so that they seem to be near to rational creatures’.47 By way of example, Nemesius mentions ‘crows and imitative birds’.48 And how, finally, a ‘truly rational living thing’—namely, humankind—appears on the earth.49 In heaven, of course, dwells a nebulous tier of ‘intellectual natures’ that we have already glimpsed,50 while the deity beckons from beyond the summits of created being. In the surviving literature of late antiquity, Nemesius’ sketch of the scala naturae stands out for its subtlety and completeness.51 Since the publication of Werner Jaeger’s Nemesius of Emesa in 1914, this sketch has attracted more scholarly—and predominantly, source-­critical—attention than any other passage in On Human Nature. Moreover, the scholarly commentary since Jaeger has tended to fixate on a pair of terms that Nemesius attaches, here, to humankind.52 First, methorios—since Nemesius writes that humankind both 42 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,7–8). 43  G.  B.  Ladner, ‘The Philosophical Anthropology of Saint Gregory of Nyssa’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 12 (1958), 59–94, here 71–2. 44 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 3,17–22). 45 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 3,25–6). 46 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 4,4–5). In later tradition, compare Max. Amb. Ioh. 37.6, where a class of ‘zoophytes’ (zōophuta) is inserted between ‘animals’ (zōa) and ‘plants’ (phuta). 47 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 4,12–15). Note the sharp contrast, however, in Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,14–20). 48 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 4,16–20). For the—to us, surprising—mention of crows, it is in­struct­ive to look at Plin. Hist. Nat. X 60.124. For an intriguing scene in which Porphyry ‘converses’ with a tame bird: G. Clark, ‘Animal Passions’, Greece & Rome 47.1 (2000), 88–93, here 91. A recent comment on birds’ intelligence (with further references) is made by P. Godfrey-­Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (New York, 2016), 30. 49 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 4,16). 50 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,22–3). For Nemesius’ celestial hierarchy: Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 118,13–21 and 118,26–119.3). 51  Compare, however, Bas. Hex. VI–IX; and Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 7–8. 52 W. W. Jaeger, Nemesios von Emesa. Quellenforschungen zum Neuplatonismus und seinen Anfängen bei Poseidonios (Berlin, 1914), 96–120; E. Skard, ‘Nemesiosstudien 1. Nemesios und die Genesisexegese von Origen’, Symbolae Osloenses 16 (1936), 23–43; idem, ‘Nemesiosstudien 2. Nemesios und Galenos’, Symbolae Osloenses 17 (1937), 9–25; A.  Siclari, L’antropologia di Nemesio di Emesa (Padova, 1974), 29–50; A. Kallis, Der Mensch im Kosmos. Das Weltbild Nemesios’ von Emesa (Münster, 1978), 48–124; B.  Motta, La mediazione estrema. L’antropologia di Nemesio de Emesa fra platonismo e aristotelismo

42  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature occupies and marks a ‘boundary’ (methorios) which divides ‘irrational and rational natures’.53 Second, sundesmos—because Nemesius asserts that humankind also constitutes the ‘link’ or ‘bond’ (sundesmos) which ‘binds both of these natures together’.54 Without denying the significance of these terms or diminishing the usefulness of the literature that treats them, our reading of this passage will instead focus on a pair of terms which have not, to date, received the notice they deserve. First, koinōnia—which denotes ‘sharing’, ‘communion’, or ‘commonality’. Salient in Nemesius’ prologue, koinōnia remains a critical term as late as Hum. Nat. 33, where he underscores that ‘there is no commonality (koinōnian) between humans and irrational animals regarding choice, though there is with regards to desire and spirit; for we have the latter in common (koinōnoumen) with them, but we differ with regards to choice’.55 This is as sharp and consequential a statement as any in On Human Nature of the boundary (methorios) that marks off ‘irrational and rational natures’;56 we should not miss the fact that Nemesius conceives this ‘boundary’ in terms of ‘commonality’ (and its absence). Second, oikeiōsis—a term of art which denotes ‘kinship’, ‘affinity’, or ‘familiarization’. Here and hereafter, the term oikeiōsis is used for clarity and fluidity of exposition. It finds no match in the pages of Nemesius’ treatise, but is a rubric for a cluster of lexically and conceptually related terms that appear in On Human Nature.57 For instance, Nemesius is capable of giving something like oikeiōsis a neurological sense in Hum. Nat. 11, where he writes that ‘each of the sense-­organs grasps its specific objects of sense through a certain likeness and kinship (oikeiotēta)’,58 and a providential sense much later in his treatise, in Hum. Nat. 43.59 Oikeiōsis will roughly be used here to designate a nexus of creation and providence in Nemesius’ late-­antique Naturphilosophie. It is only by attending to Nemesius’ use, in his prologue, of koinōnia (and related terms), along with oikeiōsis (a set of related terms), that it becomes pos­ sible to perceive that he is not merely elaborating a ‘theory of the unity of the world’ (Welteinheitslehre) in these initial pages of On Human Nature.60 Rather, he is articulating a specific ancient conception of the world’s unity—the world as a city. We can only register, in passing, that koinōnia is a definitional concept in Aristotle’s Politics—the first sentence of which asserts that ‘every city is a sort of

(Padova, 2004), 45–122; idem, ‘Nemesius of Emesa’, The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, ed. L. Gerson (Cambridge, 2010), 510–12. 53 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,9). 54 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,6). 55 Nem. Nat. Hom. 33 (Morani 99,23–100,3). 56 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,9). 57  This technical term could find its closest match in Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 3,7): oikeiōs. 58 Nem. Nat. Hom. 11 (Morani 67,15–17). 59 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 133,15–22): oikeian . . . oikeian. 60 Kallis, Der Mensch im Kosmos, 60.

The World City: On Human Nature 1  43 communion (koinōnian)’;61 and that oikeiōsis is a political concept whose influence on late-­antique Christians has only recently begun to be recognized.62 Cicero’s definition of the ‘world’ (mundus) as ‘one city common to both gods and humans’ (una civitas communis deorum atque hominum) seems to be dimly reflected, as R.  A.  Markus intuited, in the Christian idea of the communion of saints (communio sanctorum).63 Ilaria Ramelli points out that ‘Christian receptions’ of oikeiōsis ‘focused most on the Stoic doctrine’—though oikeiōsis is not uniquely Stoic—‘for its orientation to the social sphere’.64 But space permits no more than a mention of the literatures that deal with a Christian concept of koinōnia,65 and with Stoic and Christian concepts of oikeiōsis.66 Briefly put, koinōnia and oikeiōsis are fundamental terms in the political and cosmopolitical lexicons of post-­Platonic philosophy.67 By tracking briefly Nemesius’ introduction of terms which are closely related to koinōnia and oikeiōsis, therefore, we will not only provide a supplement to the philological work that has been done on this part of On Human Nature, but more significantly, we will begin to reconstruct the cosmopolitan logic which underlies On Human Nature. Returning for a moment to Nemesius’ basic datum—the hierarchic pairing of the human soul and body—we must register the fact that he refers to it now as a sort of koinōnia. The condition of possibility of human virtue, he says—and thus, we add, of human cities—is a ‘communion of soul and body’ (koinōnian psuchēs kai sōmatos) in which ‘the soul makes use of the body’.68 There is manifestly, then, a koinōnia within the human; and without this koinōnia, there is no possibility of human virtue (aretē)—Nemesius’ great concern in On Human Nature.69

61 Arist. Polit. I 1.1 (1252a1). Compare Arist. Eth. Nic. VIII 12.1 (1161b12–13): ‘All friendship, as we have said, consists of communion (koinōnia).’ 62  Of special relevance, in this context, is the influence of oikeiōsis theory on Gregory of Nyssa: I.  Ramelli, ‘The Stoic Doctrine of Oikeiosis and its Transformation in Christian Platonism’, Apeiron 47.1 (2014), 129–35. 63 Cic. Leg. I 7.23; R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1998), 23, 147. 64  Ramelli, ‘Oikeiosis and its Transformation’, 116–17. 65  J. M. Ogereau, ‘The Jerusalem Collection as Κοινωνία: Paul’s Global Politics of Socio-­Economic Equality and Solidarity’, New Testament Studies 58.3 (2012), 360–78; idem, Paul’s Koinonia with the Philippians: A Socio-­historical Investigation of a Pauline Economic Partnership (Tübingen, 2014). 66  M.  Pohlenz, ‘Die Oikeiosis’, in Grundfragen der stoischen Philosophie (Göttingen, 1940; New York—London, 1987); L.  C.  Winkel, ‘Die stoische οἰϰείωσις-Lehre und Ulpians Definition der Gerechtigkeit’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-­Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte. Romanistische Abteilung 105.1 (1988), 669–79; T.  Engberg-­Pedersen, The Stoic Theory of Oikeiosis: Moral Development and Social Interaction in Early Stoic Philosophy (Aarhus, 1990); C.-H. Lee, Oikeiosis. Stoische Ethik in naturphilosophischer Perspektive (Munich, 2002); G. Reydams-­Schils, ‘Human Bonding and Oikeiôsis in Roman Stoicism’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 22 (2002), 221–51; R. Bees, Die Oikeiosislehre der Stoa. I. Rekonstruktion ihres Inhalts (Würzburg, 2004); Ramelli, ‘Oikeiosis and its Transformation’, 116–40. 67  Katja Maria Vogt quite recently notes, however, that the Stoic ‘theory of the cosmic city has, surprisingly, not . . . been interpreted as closely connected to the theory of oikeiôsis’: K.  M.  Vogt, Law, Reason, and the Cosmic City: Political Philosophy in the Early Stoa (Oxford, 2008), 71. 68 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,20). 69  Nor is he alone in this. Compare, for instance, Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 17.11.

44  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature Nemesius’ use of koinōnia (and related terms) in Hum. Nat. 1 suggests that its reach for him is extensive. Consider that the philosopher-­bishop begins with what he calls a ‘familiar’ observation, namely, that humankind ‘has a share in (koinōnei) lifeless things’.70 This ‘familiar’ idea of Nemesius’ bears a certain resemblance to the pre-­Platonic world-­city idea of ‘Pythagoras and Empedocles’ that was cited in chapter  1. We may recall that they claimed (according to Sextus Empiricus) that we have some communion (koinōnian) not only with other humans and with the gods, but also with the irrational creatures. For there is one spirit which, like a soul, pervades the whole world, and . . . passes through stones and through plants, so that we are akin to them.71

Nor is it far removed from Nemesius’ sketch of the Platonic world-­city idea in Hum. Nat. 2, where—we may recall—he says that [Plato] says . . . that the All-­Soul spreads out from the centre of the earth . . . It is this Soul, he says, that turns the Whole in its orbit and binds it together, and holds together the corporeal cosmos . . . Also, he says that everything is alive, but not everything is an animal. For [the Platonists] distinguish plants from lifeless things by their growth and nourishment, that is, by their nutritive and vegetative power, irrational animals from plants by sensation, the rational from the ir­ration­al by reason . . . So [Platonists] say that even utterly inanimate things live a life of endurance, in which they are sustained by the All-­Soul.72

This vital Whole is governed, Nemesius then informs us, by ‘laws in accordance with which [the All-­Soul] must control the world’.73 Nemesius’ world is not that of Plato or the Neoplatonists. He nevertheless seems to set out, in On Human Nature, from some such a ‘familiar’ idea of a spirit-­harmonized world city.74 A glance at one of the Cappadocians shows why this type of world-­picture might have been familiar to the Syrian bishop’s readers. Gregory of Nyssa ascribes his notion of a scala naturae to Moses ‘the lawgiver’—an eye-­catching epithet, in a hexaemeral commentary—in his treatise of 379 ce, On the Creation of Humankind. ‘It is confessed by all’, he writes, ‘that there is a share in us of all that we observe as elements in the cosmos’.75 And for Gregory, it is the plainly governmental thesis that God ‘governs all things in a certain order and sequence’ which determines the order of the world. It is because 70 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,13–14). 71 Sext. Adv. Phys. I 127, 130. 72 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 33,23–34,11). For the Neoplatonic idea that ‘utterly inanimate things live a life’: Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 350. 73 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 34,11–17). 74  Compare Iamb. Vit. Pyth. 167–9. 75  Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 31.5 (Forbesius II: 294–295).

The World City: On Human Nature 1  45 God ‘governs all things in a certain order and sequence’ that, Gregory reasons, ‘nature advanced in an orderly course’ during the six-­day work narrated in Genesis—from bare matter to plant life; from plants to animal life; and from animals to the life of rational animals. ‘That which is perfect comes last’, Gregory says of the logic of creation in the narration of Moses (‘the lawgiver’). This is why humans were ‘made last’, after the animals, and indeed, after the plants, the rocks, and the seas.76 And that Gregory’s is a world-­picture which is ‘confessed by all’ could remind us of the fact that Nemesius, too, seeks to root his theory in data which are ‘confessed by all humans in common’.77 Whatever echoes we may choose to hear—or not—here, it is clear that Nemesius elaborates, in Hum. Nat. 1, on what he calls a ‘familiar’ idea. He seeks to show that there is a human ‘communion’ with all created beings which arcs from the cosmic elements into the human body, and from the organs of the body and their functions to the rational perfections of the incorporeal entities in heaven. This is the bishop of Emesa: It is a familiar idea that humankind has a share in lifeless things, partakes in the life of irrational animals, and participates in the intelligence of rational beings. Humankind has a share in lifeless things on account of the body and the mixture of the four elements; in plants on account of the powers of nutrition and gen­er­ ation; in irrational animals . . . on account of movement by impulse, on account of desire, spirit, and the powers of sensation and respiration—for these are all shared by humans and by irrational animals. But humankind is bound by rationality to the incorporeal and intellectual natures, in reasoning and comprehending and judging each matter, pursuing the virtues and embracing piety, the summit of the virtues.78

Other creatures, too, are perceived to be in communion with creatures outside of their phylum and kingdom,79 though not with incorporeal and intellectual natures, with whom humans can only commune by means of reason. For instance, in his description of ‘corals resembling sensitive trees’,80 mentioned above, Nemesius includes the stock observation that taction is ‘the sense shared by (koinēn) all animals’, before he adds that liminal lifeforms such as coral ‘have a 76  Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 8.7 (Forbesius I: 144–145). On which: L.  Turcescu, ‘Gregory of Nyssa’s Biblical Hermeneutics in De Opificio Hominis’, The Reception and Interpretation of the Bible in Late Antiquity, ed. L. DiTommaso and L. Turcescu (Leiden—Boston, 2008), 513–19. 77 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 122,5–6). 78 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,13–21). This remains a ‘familiar idea’ in later tradition, in part due to John of Damascus’ reception of Nemesius’ text: Dam. Fid. Orth. II 12 (Kotter and Ledrux 304,81–97). 79 Compare the ‘kinship’ (sungeneia) that Basil posits between fish and birds: Bas. Hex. VIII 2 (169a). 80 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 3,25–6).

46  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature share in (koinōnein) plant life by having roots . . . and in animal life by the sense of touch’.81 However interesting Nemesius’ scalariform doctrine of koinōnia, it would of course be possible to doubt or to deny a specifically cosmopolitan meaning in Nemesius’ repeated use of related terms. A cosmopolitan meaning is rendered more secure by the fact that a bit further into his prologue, Nemesius returns to koinōnia to formulate his definition of, precisely, the city. Still in Hum. Nat. 1, he writes this: ‘Because we have need of others, we assemble in numbers and hold in common with others what is useful for life in common dealings, and this assembling and uniting they [the world’s first city-­dwellers] called “a city”’.82 Simon Swain has noticed that this definition of the city is extremely close to that found in Bryson’s Management of the Estate and Themistius’ Letter on Government.83 And it is immediately after this—possibly echoing Politics I, in which koinōnia figures so decisively—that Nemesius makes his assertion that humankind is ‘by nature . . . a political animal’.84 We will later return to this paragraph. For our present purposes, Nemesius’ definition of the city puts it out of doubt that to ‘hold in common with others’ (koinōnoumen allēlois) is a necessary condition of the political—and thus, by inference, of the cosmopolitan.85 This is not a negligible gain, but neither is it demonstrative. Nemesius has by no means stated that a cosmopolitan bond subsists between humankind and mountains or rivers because humankind ‘has a share in (koinōnei) lifeless things’,86 or that humankind has a cosmopolitan obligation towards coral reefs, say, because they ‘have a share in (koinōnein) . . . the sense of touch’.87 To ‘hold in common with others’ is a conditio sine qua non of the political; but it does not follow from this that to ‘hold in common with others’ is political. The cosmopolitan meaning of koinōnia in Nemesius’ prologue is rendered more certain once we have correlated his use of the Peripatetic language of ‘sharing’, ‘communion’, and ‘commonality’ (koinōnia) with the Stoic-­derived language of ‘kinship’, ‘affinity’, and ‘familiarization’ (oikeiōsis). Note, first, that these dis­par­ ate (but not unrelated) term-­clusters virtually touch in his definition of the city, quoted above. If one precondition of the city is that citizens must ‘hold in

81 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 3,25–4,2). 82 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,16–18). 83 S.  Swain, Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam: A Critical Edition, English Translation, and Study of Bryson’s Management of the Estate (Cambridge, 2013), 56. Compare Bry. Oecon. 14 (436–7 Swain), and, excerpted here, Them. Epist. 11–12 (140–3 Swain): ‘Thus man needed the crafts and the sciences by which he might undertake these things. But because it was impossible for any one man to undertake all of the crafts, people had a need of other people, and because of this mutual need many of them joined together in a single location and assisted one another in their transactions and business. Thus they formed cities so that people could enjoy the advantages of proximity.’ 84 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,20). 85 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,17). 86 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,13–14). 87 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 3,25–4,2).

The World City: On Human Nature 1  47 common’ (koinōnoumen) certain needs and desires, another is that they must ‘unite’ or ‘form a household’ (sunoikian).88 The last term, sunoikia, is polysemous. In classical Greek, it can denote a wedding and the founding of a city or a colony;89 and in patristic usage, it comes to include the covenanted life of monastics and the ecclesiastical ‘city’ which is inhabited by believers in Christ.90 In all these senses, sunoikia could be correlated to Peripatetic—and in due course, Christian—meanings of koinōnia. What is striking, however, is that Nemesius himself correlates the terminologies and their meanings in his text. We have already considered the long sentence in which Nemesius upholds the notion that humankind ‘has a share in’ (koinōneō) all forms of terrestrial life and the lifeless elements that sustain them.91 On the following page (in Morani’s edition), Nemesius glosses this koinōnia in terms of what we are calling oikeiōsis.92 He writes this: The Demiurge appears to link the disparate natures by slight differences, so that the whole creation is one and akin (sungenē), by which it is clearly manifest that the Demiurge of all things is one. For he not only unified each composite being, but he also fittingly related them to all the others. . . . So he did in each of the other types of created things, linking them by means of a slightly differentiated affinity (oikeiotēti).93

What does Nemesius mean, when he writes that ‘humankind has a share in (koinōnei) lifeless things . . . in plants . . . [and] in irrational animals’?94 He tells us here. He means that humankind is related (oikeios) to all created things.95 What is the real significance, for Nemesius, of the fact that there exist ‘nutritive’ stones (such as magnetite), ‘sensitive’ plants (such as coral), and ‘rational’ beasts (such as imitative birds)? The world consists of beings which can be tabulated in such a way that they display a finely graded scala naturae, because they share an ontological affinity (oikeiotēs).96 And what of the more intimate ‘communion (koinōnian) of soul and body’ in humans?97 In Hum. Nat. 3, this koinōnia will be described in terms of an affinity (oikeiotēs).98

88 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,17–18). 89  H.  G.  Liddell and R.  Scott, A Greek-­English Lexicon, rev. H.  S.  Jones with R.  McKenzie, et al. (Oxford, 1996), 1721–2. 90 G. W. H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford, 1961), 1335–6. Compare C. Rapp, ‘City and Citizenship as Christian Concepts of Community in Late Antiquity’, The City in the Classical and Post-­ Classical World: Changing Contexts of Power and Identity, ed. C.  Rapp and H.  A.  Drake (Cambridge, 2014). 91 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,13–21). 92  Compare Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 8.7. 93 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 3,3–12). 94 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,13–21). 95 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 3,7). 96 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 3,12). 97 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,20). 98 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,11–13).

48  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature In short, Nemesius systematically treats the koinōnia of all created things to be the sign of a divine oikeiōsis. And it is this interlinking of cosmopolitan terms and intuitions in Hum. Nat. 1—this subtle but systematic correlation of koinōnia and what we are calling oikeiōsis—which prepares Nemesius’ assertion in his prologue’s last sentences that humankind is ‘the image of the whole creation’, that is, a ‘little world’ (mikros kosmos).99

The Choice to Live a Human Life As we have already seen, the human power of choice (prohairesis) marks the hardest and most sublime boundary line within the teeming koinōnia of terrestrial life. For as Nemesius writes in Hum. Nat. 33, ‘there is no commonality (koinōnian) between humans and irrational animals regarding choice’.100 Choice is the boundary between ‘irrational and rational natures’,101 because— as Nemesius writes twice in Hum. Nat. 41—‘autonomy enters the world with reason’.102 In On Human Nature, autonomy (autexousiotēs) is merely the power of choice (prohairesis). (This is argued in Hum. Nat. 40, after Nemesius observes that many speak ‘in ignorance of what is meant by “autonomy”’.)103 Therefore, choice too enters the world with reason—and beings who lack reason must lack the power of choice. Questions concerning choice will occupy Nemesius in the last chapters of his text, and predictably, the term prohairesis occurs most frequently in those chapters. Since the term is hardly represented in Hum. Nat. 1–28, it is notable that prohairesis appears—and in close succession to hairesis—in a pivotal sentence of Hum. Nat. 1.104 This is Nemesius’ first use of prohairesis, a term which then falls out of sight for more than eighty pages (in Morani’s edition): ‘Those who choose to live a human life as that of a human, and not just the life of a mere animal, pursue the virtues and piety.’105 Since this sentence has not received any definitive commentary to date,106 it is worth pausing to make a couple of contextual notes before taking up the question of its meaning.

99 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,5–6). For indications of Nemesius’ place in the glacial history of ‘microcosmic’ theory: R. Allers, ‘Microcosmus: From Anaximandros to Paracelsus’, Traditio 2 (1944), 319–407, here 351, 373, 404 note 234; P. Argárate, ‘El hombre como microcosmos en el pensamiento de San Maximo el Confesor’, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 63 (1996), 177–98, here 179, 185–8. 100 Nem. Nat. Hom. 33 (Morani 99,23–100,3). 101 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,9). 102 Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 117,8 and 117,13–14); compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 27 (Kotter and Ledrux 354,3–31). The connection is already made a couple of centuries before Nemesius: Clem. Strom. V 13. 103 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 115,21–116,9). 104  Or more precisely, prohaireō and haireō. 105 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,23–6,1). 106  The most recent treatment of this passage and theme is Motta, La mediazione estrema, 62–112.

The World City: On Human Nature 1  49 First, the thematization of ‘bestiality’ or ‘brutality’ (thēriotēs) in book VII of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics should be recollected here.107 Nemesius claims to know Aristotle’s ‘ethical books’,108 and in the final chapter of On Human Nature he cites by name book zēta of the Nicomachean Ethics.109 It is hard to identify the passage to which Nemesius refers—which, as it happens, concerns the instinctual promptings of animals.110 However, Nemesius’ most recent editors have suggested that he may not be drawing on Nicomachean Ethics VI (the alphabetical position of zēta),111 but on book VII (the numerical value of zēta).112 As they point out, in his medieval Latin translation of Nemesius, Burgundio of Pisa (died 1193) took this to be a reference to book VII of the Ethics. (Burgundio writes, in septimo Ethicae, here.)113 None of this might be worth mentioning if Aristotle had not written, in the first sentences of Nicomachean Ethics VII, that ‘as the opposite of bestiality (thēriotēs), it will be most fitting to speak of superhuman virtue, heroic or divine virtue’;114 while Nemesius writes, in Hum. Nat. 1, that one who flees a bestial life will ‘enter into the divine life’, and will become ‘like a heavenly being’.115 Whether immediately, or mediated by a late-­antique commentary trad­ ition, Aristotle may be an influence here.116 Second, the figure of Nebuchadnezzar—a king of Babylon who is dethroned by the God of Israel in the book of Daniel as a punishment for his pride and made to live like a wild beast—is not evoked, for us, by Nemesius’ sentence. Nevertheless, Matthias Henze has documented the special relevance of Nebuchadnezzar in the Syrian Christianity of Nemesius’ period.117 Interestingly, Henze translates a number of passages in which Ephrem the Syrian (died 373) treats Nebuchadnezzar as a psychological and soteriological archetype. And it is very shortly after Ephrem wrote, in his Hymns on Paradise, that ‘the fool . . . prefers to become just an animal’,118 that Nemesius urged his text’s recipients not to live ‘just the life of a mere animal’.119 For Ephrem, then—and conceivably, for Nemesius—the image of Nebuchadnezzar would have loomed behind a warning against the bestial life,

107  Compare Arist. Eth. Nic. VII 1.1–3 (1145a15–33) and VII 6.6–7 (1149b27–1150a8). 108 Nem. Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,12–21). 109 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 127,16). 110 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 127,15–21). 111 See M. Morani, Nemesii Emeseni, De natura hominis. Leipzig, 1987, 127 app. font. 112  Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 1018. 113  G. Verbeke and J. R. Moncho, Némésius d’Émèse, De natura hominis. Traduction de Burgundio de Pise (Leiden, 1975), 161. 114 Arist. Eth. Nic. VII 1.1 (1145a18–20). 115 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,13–16). 116  For a precis of early Christian critiques of Aristotelian ethics, none of which is re-­elaborated by Nemesius: D. T. Runia, ‘Festugiere Revisited: Aristotle in the Greek Patres’, Vigiliae Christianae 43.1 (1989), 1–34, here 20–1. 117 M. Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar: The Ancient Near Eastern Origins and Early History of Interpretation of Daniel 4 (Leiden, 1999). 118  In the translation of Henze, Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 159. 119 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,23–6,1).

50  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature much as Circe’s swine would have informed a ‘pagan’ Platonist’s warning in late antiquity.120 In any case, Nemesius tells us that his contrast of the bestial and the divine life is authorized by verse fragments which he takes from Genesis 3, Psalms 49 (LXX 48), and I Corinthians 15.121 The rest is context.122 The question remains, what this contrast means in Nemesius’ prologue and for On Human Nature. Nemesius himself deflects this question, saying that ‘as long as we do not know what our soul is according to its substance, it is out of sequence to deal with its functions’.123 This reminds us of the three-­phase scheme laid out in Hum. Nat. 34 (discussed in chapter 1), according to which there is an order of ontological precedence—from ‘substance’ to ‘power’ to ‘act’. This order should be reflected, he here seems to suggest, in the sequence of philosophical exposition.124 And since Nemesius will take up the question of ‘our soul according to its substance’ in Hum. Nat. 2, this signals to us that his treatise is coherently structured. It is nevertheless both possible and desirable to sharpen our conception here, in a preliminary way, of the decision which confronts ‘those who choose (prohairountai) to live a human life’—and those who do not—beyond the fact Nemesius clearly believes that all should ‘pursue the virtues and piety’.125 In contrast to the repetitive spectacle of purely instinctual behaviour, which—according to Nemesius—unerringly runs in species-­specific channels, he writes in Hum. Nat. 2 that ‘human acts take a thousand different routes’.126 Nemesius takes the variability of human acts to be a sign of humankind’s innate liberty. All humans are born free in On Human Nature (as in the first principles of Byzantine code law).127 What is more, only humans are born free in On Human Nature, since—as we will recall—‘autonomy enters the world with reason’.128 Irrational animals are not free because they are irrational.129 Crucially, however, Nemesius holds that the human power of choice touches not only our acts— which take a thousand different routes—but our natures. He states this forcefully in Hum. Nat. 41: ‘We have changeable powers of choice so that we may be changeable in our nature’.130

120  But for the valorization of wild animals by late-­antique Christians—and indeed, by Ephrem: G. B. Ladner, God, Cosmos, and Humankind: The World of Early Christian Symbolism, trans. T. Dunlap (Berkeley—Los Angeles, 1995), 154–6. 121  Nemesius quotes here from Genesis 3:19; Psalms 48:13, 20–1 (LXX); and I Corinthians 15:48. 122  It is curious to note that Tatian of Adiabene, with characteristic ferocity, accuses late-­antique philosophers of resembling beasts. ‘They leave one shoulder bare’, he says, ‘and wear their hair long and grow beards, sporting the nails of wild animals (thēriōn)’: Tat. Or. 25.1. 123 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,3–5). 124  See Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 103,11–17). 125 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,23–6,1). 126 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 36,26). 127 Justin. Inst. 1.2: iure enim naturali ab initio omnes homines liberi nascebantur. 128 Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 117,8). 129  Nemesius argues this with exemplary clarity in Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 118,1–9). 130 Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 119,3–5).

The World City: On Human Nature 1  51 It is because we are situated at the ontological midpoint of the scala naturae, have a unique affinity to all bodily and bodiless beings—rooted in our unique duplicity of substance—and possess a power of choice which touches our very nature, that humans in On Human Nature must ‘choose to live a human life as that of a human’.131 No other creature, on earth or in heaven, bears its own nature as a question which calls for a decision. And because we are situated at the singular and precise midpoint of the scala naturae, this decision—the decision of our nature—cannot, like our acts, take a thousand different routes. On the contrary, the decision of our nature can only take two routes in On Human Nature— descent or ascent, degradation or perfection, bestialization or divinization. According to Nemesius, a decision not to ‘enter into the divine life’ is a decision to live ‘the life of a mere animal’.132 In other words, the only way to live a human life is to rise. To ascend is the only way to ‘preserve our nature’.133 What is more, Nemesius believes that humankind originated in a Garden with a world-­ disrupting decision not to rise. Like the fallen angels,134 the first humans chose not to preserve their nature, not to remain ‘as they were made in the beginning’.135 This being the case, it is impossible for Nemesius to treat human nature entirely within the horizons of what he calls ‘the present condition of our life’.136 He therefore treats humankind in his prologue, as he must, ‘in Paradise’.137 And he is at pains to establish that and how his topic, human nature, came to be divided into two violently contrasting epochs—before the Fall, and after the Fall.138

The Cosmopolitan Drama of Genesis 1–3 In the central paragraphs of his prologue, Nemesius sketches a theory of human origins, and more specifically, of the Fall in Eden.139 Since there has been no systematic investigation, to date, of Nemesius’ use of scripture,140 and since this reading of the first chapters of Genesis is in a number of respects surprising, it will be useful to note some of its features and to reconstruct its logic. On the

131 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,24). 132 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,13–6,1). 133 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,22–3). 134  He believes in a virtually simultaneous Fall of humans and angels: Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 10,14–19). 135 Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 118,24). 136 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 14,18–19). 137 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,11). 138  For ‘the Fall’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,9–11), etc. 139 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,6–8,16). 140 Note, however, Tables II and III in F.  M.  Young, ‘Adam and Anthropos: A Study of the Interaction of Science and the Bible in Two Anthropological Treatises of the Fourth Century’, Vigiliae Christianae 37.2 (1983), 110–40; and D. L. Dusenbury, ‘Judaic Authority in Nemesius of Emesa’s De Natura Hominis (390 ce)’, Light on Creation: Ancient Commentators in Dialogue and Debate on the Origin of the World, ed. J. Verheyden and G. Roskam (Tübingen, 2017), 127–56.

52  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature reading that will be offered here, Nemesius’ theory of the Fall is both elemental and cosmopolitan. The first claim might seem to be obscure, but it can be clearly articulated. ‘A human being’, Nemesius now informs us in his prologue, ‘is composed of body, and every body is constituted by the four elements’.141 This is precisely the doctrine that we will encounter in Hum. Nat. 4.142 It is by no means a distinctly Hippocratic–Galenic doctrine, but that it is argued with tireless rigour in Galen’s Elements according to Hippocrates is significant for us, since Nemesius is definitely acquainted with that commentary on the Hippocratic treatise On Human Nature.143 ‘Necessarily’, Nemesius then reasons from this doctrine, humans are ‘subject to the same affections as the elements are, to division and change and flux, which occur only to bodies’.144 Though this is registered neither in Christian Matthaei’s animadversiones,145 nor in Moreno Morani’s far more comprehensive apparatus fontium,146 the sentence just quoted—and indeed, much of this paragraph of Hum. Nat. 1—is Nemesius’ paraphrase of Galen’s treatment of elemental theory in Elements according to Hippocrates 6–7.147 This source-­critical note is rendered at least slightly piquant by the fact that Galen is totally uninterested at this—as indeed, at every—point of his Hippocratic commentary, with Hellenic or Mosaic notions of the Fall. Nemesius nevertheless skilfully stitches this material onto his exotic lapsarian backcloth in Hum. Nat. 1, by arguing that the Fall occurred when humans became prematurely aware that they were ‘subject to the same affections as the elements are, to division and change and flux’.148 In its pre-­lapse condition, Nemesius holds, humankind was serenely ‘unaware of itself ’.149 He seems to mean by this that the original humans—whom Nemesius leaves unnamed (they are not ‘Adam and Eve’)—were neither conscious of, nor concerned by, their ‘bodily needs’.150 In Eden as in the late-­antique episcopal city of Emesa, ‘a human being is composed of body’.151 Accordingly, humans can be presumed to have been ‘subject to the same affections as the elements’, even in Paradise.152 But the critical term in this latter formulation is the plural dative of pathos: ‘affection’. For, much later in 141 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,12–14). 142 Nem. Nat. Hom. 4 (Morani 44,23–4). 143  Consider, for instance, Gal. Elem. 7.10: ‘Composite and blended body . . . has a share of all the elements.’ 144 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,12–15). 145 C. F. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, De natura hominis, Graece et Latine . . . (Halle an der Saale, 1802), 48. 146 Morani, De natura hominis, 7. 147 Gal. Elem. 6.41–7.12; Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,12–8,15). The interface is lexical, topical, and structural. Naturally, Nemesius reorders and condenses the Galenic material, and relates it to his reading of the Fall narrative in Genesis 2–3. 148 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,12–15). 149 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,7). 150 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,5). 151 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,12–13). 152 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,14).

The World City: On Human Nature 1  53 On Human Nature, Nemesius will observe that pathos is an ‘equivocal’ term.153 On the following reading of Hum. Nat. 1—which cannot hope to touch upon, much less to examine, many other senses of pathos which could be introduced— his theory of the Fall hinges upon this equivocity. What is an ‘affection’ (pathos)? In Hum. Nat. 16, Nemesius offers this by way of a general definition: ‘They define an “affection” generically in this way—an affection is a motion in one thing that comes from some other thing.’154 The vaguely invoked source of this definition can be identified without any doubt as Galen, albeit perhaps—in light of Nemesius’ plural—mediated by purveyors of Galenic material in the 3rd and 4th centuries. For it is not only this general definition of pathos,155 but much of the rest of Hum. Nat. 16, which is taken—in a reduced state, but nearly verbatim—from a series of densely argued pages in Galen’s polemic On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato.156 In this most general, Galenic sense of pathos, then, Nemesius holds that humans must have been ‘subject to the same affections as the elements’, even prior to the Fall.157 But immediately before Nemesius introduces this general definition of pathos in Hum. Nat. 16, he transcribes a non-­Galenic,158 special definition of pathos: ‘A definition of an “affection” of the soul is this—an affection is a perceptible motion in the desiderative soul on the occasion of an imagination of good or evil.’159 It is this special definition of pathos which elucidates Nemesius’ theory of the Fall in Hum. Nat. 1. Let us call the general (Galenic) definition of pathos, ‘elemental’, and the special (non-­ Galenic) definition of pathos, ‘spiritual’.160 According to Nemesius’ own definitions, therefore: (i)  An elemental affection (pathos) is ‘a motion in one thing that comes from some other thing’.161 (ii) A spiritual affection (pathos) is ‘a perceptible motion in the desiderative soul on the occasion of an imagination of good or evil’.162 In light of these definitions, it seems that Nemesius conceives of the original humans as having been subject to elemental affections in Eden without their having been subject to spiritual affections. According to the statements made here in his prologue, Nemesius believes that the human body is necessarily ‘subject to the same affections as the elements’; but 153 Nem. Nat. Hom. 16 (Morani 73,20–1). 154 Nem. Nat. Hom. 16 (Morani 74,6–7). 155  Compare Gal. Plac. 6.1.5; Nem. Nat. Hom. 16 (Morani 74,6–7). 156  Compare Gal. Plac. 6.1.5–16; Nem. Nat. Hom. 16 (Morani 74,6–75,1). 157 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,14–15). 158  Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 645: ‘Exactly this definition is found in an anonymous commentary On Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics . . . but it is cited without attribution.’ 159 Nem. Nat. Hom. 16 (Morani 74,3–4). 160  Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 22 (Kotter and Ledrux 328,3–18). 161 Nem. Nat. Hom. 16 (Morani 74,6–7). 162 Nem. Nat. Hom. 16 (Morani 74,3–4).

54  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature that the human soul is only potentially sensitive to the body’s ‘division and change and flux’.163 It is therefore possible for him to conjecture that, originally, the human soul was ‘beside itself ’ (en ekstasei auton)—or perhaps, to render that more precise, beside its body.164 It is only with the Fall that the human soul took cognizance of the elemental flux which, even then, constituted and sustained the first humans’ bodies. The Fall in Eden, therefore, must have actualized the human soul’s potential to perceive the elemental mixture and flux that necessarily constitutes the human body. On this reconstruction of Nemesius’ theory, the Fall was precisely marked by a sudden irruption of spiritual affections in human consciousness. The Fall catastrophically altered humankind’s threshold of ‘perceptible motions’, thereby sensitizing humans to a ceaseless flux of elemental affections which had not— before that time—been present to the soul. A novel and self-­incurred sensitivity to the human body, in Eden, produced a novel type of imagination—namely, the ‘imagination of good or evil’. This connexion is made in Nemesius’ gloss on Edenic nudity, and humankind’s first taste of shame.165 The bishop of Emesa holds it to be reasonable that humankind’s spiritual cap­ tiv­ation by elemental change—in short, by ‘bodily needs’166—was activated by the ‘taste of some fruit’ in a perfectly literal and naturalistic sense.167 The Fall is a virtually pharmacological event in On Human Nature. He believes that the ‘tremendous powers in plants’—namely, in the one forbidden tree in Paradise—sufficed to imbalance the order of creation at ‘the very origin of creation’.168 And even though Nemesius does not himself refer to a ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’—for him, it is simply a ‘tree of knowledge’169—this reconstruction allows us to glimpse an appealing symmetry between the human acquisition of a ‘knowing of good and evil’, in the LXX text of Genesis 2,170 and the inadvertent activation of a human ‘imagination of good or evil’, in this seminal text of late-­antique Christian philosophy.171 But if Nemesius’ theory of the Fall is elemental, in what sense is it cosmo­pol­ itan? This aspect of the Fall is far more momentous, but it can also be far more concisely stated and demonstrated. The Fall is political because it is preceded by a law, occasioned by a delict, and concluded with a penalty; and the Fall is cosmo­ pol­itan because the setting of its law, its delict, and especially its penalty is not merely Eden, but the totality of nature. 163 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,14–15). 164 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,6). 165 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,5–9). 166 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,7). 167 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,24). 168 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,22–4). 169 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,21). 170  Genesis 2:17 (LXX); compare Genesis 3:5 (LXX). 171 Nem. Nat. Hom. 16 (Morani 74,4). Compare the different reconstructions of the Fall narrative in one of Nemesius’ sources: Theoph. Autol. II 25–6 (Grant 66–9); in one of his contemporaries: Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 19–20 (Forbesius II: 214–225); and in one of his transmitters: Dam. Fid. Orth. II 11 (Kotter and Ledrux 286–98).

The World City: On Human Nature 1  55 It is not controversial to insist that the promulgation of a law, the investigation of a crime,172 and the infliction of a punishment could only occur within a Garden which is constituted—in a pristine, idyllic, and prehistoric form—as a sort of city. For as early as the Gorgias, Plato postulated that a new city is instituted by ‘the promulgation of laws’, and by the provision for ‘court-­process’ or ‘the satisfaction of justice’.173 Nemesius concurs with this bipartite scheme in Hum. Nat. 35, where he stringently links ‘the whole of the political’ (pasan politeian) to the institution and operation of ‘the laws . . . [and] the law-­courts’ in human cities.174 Therefore, if the ‘very origin of creation’ is a legal ordeal which ends in a penalty that alters the whole of creation, it follows that the created order is itself a divine polity—or put differently, that the world is a city. Though this line of reasoning may seem eccentric to Nemesius’ late-­modern readers, it is anticipated by John of Damascus’ chapter on Paradise in On the Orthodox Faith II, where no one denies that the Emesene’s influence is strong.175 The divine prohibition in Eden is simple, and Nemesius states it twice in On Human Nature with the most minor variations. God commanded the first humans not to ‘eat from the tree of knowledge’ (in Burgundio of Pisa’s medieval Latin: prohibuit eum gustare de ligno cognitionis),176 and not to ‘partake of the fruit of knowledge’ (again, this is Burgundio: prohibuit eum sumere de fructu cognitionis).177 The delict occurred when the first humans ‘disobeyed’ this command and ‘came to know themselves’—meaning here, their bodies.178 The divine punishment in Paradise is severe. It is what the forensic orator Lysias (died c.380 bce) would call ‘the most extreme penalty’—meaning, death.179 For Nemesius writes that humankind in Eden is ‘condemned (katedikase) . . . to death’.180 The deity sentences the first humans—and through them, us—to bodily death as a ‘punishment (dikēn) for their sins’.181 As we will see presently, the fear of death seems to loom behind Nemesius’ theory of the rise of human cities in Hum. Nat. 1. A sentence of death handed down by a divine judge in the beginning—a sentence which corroded, without destroying, the koinōnia of created being—is ultimately why ‘every nation

172  Recalling here that the divine interrogation of Adam and Eve at Genesis 3:8–13 (LXX) had an influence on criminal procedure in European law: F. Mastroberti, S. Vinci, and M. Pepe, Il Liber Belial e il processo romano-­canonico in Europa tra XV e XVI secolo, con l’edizione in volgare italiano (Venezia 1544) trascritta e annotata (Bari, 2012). I am grateful to a colleague at the University of Leuven, Wim Decock, for providing this reference in 2017. 173 Pl. Gorg. 464b. 174 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,14–16). 175 Dam. Fid. Orth. II 11 (Kotter and Ledrux 286–98). 176 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,21); and Verbeke and Moncho, Nemesius d’Émèse, 11.50–1. 177 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,3–4); and Verbeke and Moncho, Nemesius d’Émèse, 11.58. 178 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,4–5). 179 Lys. Erat. 37. 180 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,10–11). 181 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,16–17). Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 28 (Kotter and Ledrux 356,6–14).

56  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature observes laws’ (pan ethnos nomois chrētai).182 The ubiquity of law in human cities is traceable to the conclusion of a legal ordeal in Eden. Before we turn to the rise of cities, however, it will be useful to clarify how death and immortality are the­or­ ized in On Human Nature.

Excursus: The ‘Hebraic’ Concept of Potential Immortality Nemesius first cites ‘the Hebrews’, a vague but recurring source of authority in On Human Nature,183 in the fascinating section of his prologue in which he suggests that the first humans were ‘potentially immortal’ (dunamei athanatos).184 Immortality in Paradise, like virtue in ‘the present condition of our life’, hangs in the balance of a free-­born human soul.185 On Human Nature will close with a return to this theme, in chapters which are structured by Hellenistic and late-­antique philosophical controversies (dealt with in chapter 5). Here in Hum. Nat. 1, however, it is a non-­Hellenic authority which introduces the theme. Nemesius reports what ‘the Hebrews say’ in the following terms: The Hebrews say that humankind came into existence in the beginning as neither incontestably mortal nor immortal, but at the boundary of each nature, so that, if they should pursue bodily passions, they would be subjected also to bodily alterations, whereas, if they should rank more highly the goods of the soul, they might be thought worthy of immortality.186

This is perhaps the passage of On Human Nature in which the likelihood of a Philonic influence—hypothesized by Werner Jaeger,187 and modified by Eiliv Skard188—is highest. Nemesius’ phrase, ‘at the boundary of each nature’,189 seems to recollect Philo’s text On Creation,190 in which humankind occupies ‘the

182 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 114,6). 183  It is generally not clear precisely which sources lie behind Nemesius’ citations of ‘Hebrews’. Moreover, there always remains the possibility that he spoke directly to Christian ‘Hebraists’—or indeed, to Syrian Jews—rather than relying upon texts. In any case, Nemesius seems to have meant for Hebraioi to be a vague appellation: Dusenbury, ‘Judaic Authority in Nemesius of Emesa’s De Natura Hominis’, 155–6. This excursus is taken, with minor revisions, from that essay; and I am indebted to Joseph Verheyden for comments made on that essay during a conversation at the University of Leuven in 2017. 184 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,19–20). 185 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 14,18–19). 186 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,6–10). 187 Jaeger, Nemesios von Emesa, 141: ‘Es ist klar, die “Hebräer,” welche Nemesios als Quelle zitiert, sind Philon, nach bekannter Zitierweise steht der Plural. Auch für Basileios oder Gregor von Nyssa ist dieser stets typische Theologe der Ἰουδαῖοι.’ 188  Skard, ‘Nemesiosstudien 1’. 189 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,7). 190  Consult the sentences tabulated in Motta, La mediazione estrema, 96.

The World City: On Human Nature 1  57 boundary between mortal and immortal nature, participating in each to the extent that is necessary’.191 Nevertheless, the logic of these sentences contradicts Philo’s in On Creation, while it seems to closely resemble the reasoning in a chapter in the apology To Autolycus of a 2nd-­century Syrian bishop, Theophilus of Antioch (died c.183).192 This is Theophilus: [Humankind was created] neither mortal nor immortal by nature. For if God had made humans immortal from the beginning, he would have made them God. Again, if he had made humans mortal, it would seem that God was the cause of their death. God therefore made them neither immortal nor mortal, but, as we have said before, capable of both. If humans were to incline to the things of immortality by keeping the commandment of God, they were to have received immortality as a reward from him and would become a god. But if they turned to the things of death, disobeying God, they would themselves be the cause of their death.193

There are a couple of striking correspondences between Nemesius’ first report of a doctrine of ‘the Hebrews’ in On Human Nature, and these sentences in Theophilus’ To Autolycus. These correspondences also mark Nemesius’ divergence from the Philonic interpretation of Eden in On Creation—and thus, compromise Jaeger’s hypothesis. In the first place, Nemesius’ report of what ‘the Hebrews say’ takes the form of a double negation: ‘Humankind came into existence in the beginning as neither . . . mortal nor immortal’.194 This matches Theophilus’ formulations, in which humankind is originally ‘neither mortal nor immortal by nature’,195 for the reason that ‘God made them neither immortal nor mortal’.196 Philo’s doctrine, on the contrary, takes the form of a double assertion: ‘Humankind was born at the same time, both mortal and immortal’.197 In the second place, Philo writes in On Creation that humans were originally ‘mortal as to the body, but immortal as to the intellect’; by which he means, ‘mortal according to that part . . . which is visible’, but ‘immortal according to that part which is invisible’.198 Philo therefore inscribes the body of his ‘first human’ among

191 Philo Op. Mund. 46.134–5. 192  Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, notes 193, 214. Beatrice Motta challenged ‘the Jaeger–Skard hypothesis’, citing Theophilus’ To Autolycus, half a decade or so before this: Motta, La mediazione estrema, 79–81, 93–103. Note that while I have proceeded independently, my treatment in this excursus will converge at points with Motta’s. 193 Theoph. Autol. II 27 (Grant 68–71). Compare Theoph. Autol. II 24. 194 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,6–10). 195 Theoph. Autol. II 27 (Grant 68). 196 Theoph. Autol. II 27 (Grant 70). 197 Philo Op. Mund. 46.135. 198 Philo Op. Mund. 46.135.

58  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature ‘the mortal things’ (ta thnēta).199 When he sets humankind at ‘the boundary between mortal and immortal nature’,200 he makes this boundary cut between the first human’s body and soul. Mortality, for Philo, is intrinsic to corporeity—and therefore, to the human body in Paradise. Theophilus’ objection to the Philonic logic is that it renders God, as creator of the first humans’ bodies, ‘the cause of their death’.201 When Theophilus writes that ‘God made [the first humans] neither immortal nor mortal’,202 he refers specifically to the human body. Theophilus, like Philo, holds that the human soul is ‘immortal from the beginning’.203 Unlike Philo, however, Theophilus conceives of the human body as ‘neither mortal nor immortal by nature’.204 It is not corporeity, in To Autolycus, but autonomy that ensnarls humankind in ‘the things of death’.205 The in­de­ter­ min­acy of Theophilus’ doctrine of human mortality in Eden is precisely an in­de­ ter­min­acy that is afforded and required by his doctrine of human autonomy. Because the human body in Paradise is ‘capable of both’ mortality and immortality,206 the first human couple is ‘the cause of its own death’.207 The human body is not predestined to die, in Theophilus’ To Autolycus, because the human soul is not predestined to sin. What Philo calls ‘the boundary between mortal and immortal nature’—a boundary which falls between the first humans’ bodies and souls, in On Creation—rather falls within the souls of the first humans, in Theophilus’ 2nd-­century Syrian text. And in this, Nemesius follows the trad­ ition that Theophilus represents.208 When he writes in Hum. Nat. 1 that the first humans were ‘potentially immortal’,209 Nemesius—who will patiently defend the immortality of the human soul in Hum. Nat. 2—means that their bodies were potentially immortal. The human soul, in On Human Nature, is necessarily immortal. This coheres with, and perhaps explains, Nemesius’ interpretation of what he calls ‘the fruit of knowledge’ in Genesis.210 For Nemesius observes that ‘there were—or rather, still are now—tremendous powers (dunameis) in plants’. He then speculates that, ‘as it was the very origin of creation, these powers were intact and their potency (energeian) was at its strongest’.211 Since it is, for Nemesius, precisely the mortality of the body that is at stake in Eden, it is not illogical to trace

199 Philo Op. Mund. 53.151. 200 Philo Op. Mund. 46.134–5. 201 Theoph. Autol. II 27 (Grant 70–1). 202 Theoph. Autol. II 27 (Grant 70–1). 203 Theoph. Autol. II 27 (Grant 68). 204 Theoph. Autol. II 27 (Grant 68). 205 Theoph. Autol. II 27 (Grant 70–1). 206 Theoph. Autol. II 27 (Grant 70–1). 207 Theoph. Autol. II 27 (Grant 70–1). 208  What is more, a rich tradition follows Nemesius. A masterful introduction to this tradition is G. Verbeke, ‘Man as “Frontier” according to Aquinas’, in Aquinas and the Problems of His Time, ed. G. Verbeke and D. Verhelst (Leuven—The Hague, 1976), esp. 202–14. 209 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,19–20). 210 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,3–4). 211 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,22–4).

The World City: On Human Nature 1  59 death to the ‘tremendous powers’ that suffused fruits at ‘the very origin of creation’.212 Moreover, this coheres with Nemesius’ concept of bodily immortality in the last paragraphs of Hum. Nat. 1, where he writes that ours is ‘the only body’ on earth which is destined to be ‘immortalized’.213 Nemesius stresses this in the latter part of his prologue. Humankind is ‘alone among the other living creatures’, because it is only the human body that ‘resurrects after death and proceeds to immortality’.214 In On Human Nature, bodily immortality—like laughter—is a unique prerogative of humankind.215 In conclusion, it is possible to link Nemesius’ first report of what ‘the Hebrews say’ to a passage in Philo’s On Creation, but it is necessary to link this report to a passage in Theophilus’ To Autolycus. The decisive influence here—direct or ­in­dir­ect—seems not to be that of Philo, but of Theophilus. The question therefore presents itself, why Nemesius credits ‘the Hebrews’ with an Eden-­interpretation which he takes over—directly or not—from a 2nd-­century Syrian apologist. Theophilus himself does not attribute his Eden-­interpretation to ‘the Hebrews’, and neither Theophilus’ nor Nemesius’ text contains any explicit citations that would permit us to settle this question. However, the ‘Judaizing tendencies’ of Theophilus,216 and the ‘numerous parallels between Theophilus’ exegesis and the Jewish tradition of the midrashim, the targumim, and the Talmud’, have been noted by Nicole Zeegers-­Vander Vorst;217 and there is no reason to suspect that Nemesius’ first reference to ‘the Hebrews’ is calculated to mislead. Throughout On Human Nature, Nemesius proves himself ready—according to the norms of his epoch and genre—to cite his sources. We may therefore conclude that Nemesius believed Theophilus’ conception of autonomy and potential bodily immortality in Eden to have been present in certain texts or oral trad­itions of ‘the Hebrews’. In his account of the rise of human cities, however, Nemesius’ reasoning takes a certain distance from the Hebrew scriptures.218

212 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,22–4). 213 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,24). 214 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 10,21–3). 215 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 10,9–12). A fascinating gloss is made by A.  Pizzone, ‘Towards a Byzantine Theory of the Comic?’ Greek Laughter and Tears: Antiquity and After, ed. M. Alexiou and D. Cairns (Edinburgh, 2017), 159: ‘Nemesius significantly couples laughter and the ability to repent, thus casting a not entirely negative light on the human ability to laugh.’ 216 N.  Zeegers-­Vander Vorst, ‘La création de l’homme (Gn 1,26) chez Théophile d’Antioche’, Vigiliae Christianae 30 (1976), 258–67, here 260. 217 N.  Zeegers-­ Vander Vorst, ‘Satan, Ève et le serpent chez Théophile d’Antioche’, Vigiliae Christianae 35 (1981), 152–69, here 162. (My translations.) Compare R. M. Grant, ‘The Problem of Theophilus’, Harvard Theological Review 43 (1950), 176–96, esp. 188–96. 218  For the most thorough treatment, to date, of the rise of cities in Nat. Hom. 1: Kallis, Der Mensch im Kosmos, 70–81. While I have on the whole proceeded independently on this topic, a debt to Kallis should be registered.

60  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature

The Rise of Human Cities The book of Genesis contains a brisk and bloody account of the rise of cities shortly after the Fall. In Genesis 4, we read that the one who first ‘founded a city’ (oikodomōn polin, in the Septuagint’s Greek) was humankind’s first murderer, and first exile, Cain.219 Later in Genesis 4, the sacred text tells of Cain’s repellent descendant Lamech, who introduced the practices of polygyny and blood-­feud, and who boasted to his wives: ‘Because seven-­times vengeance has been exacted by Cain, by Lamech seventy-­ times-­ seven!’220 We are informed that one of Lamech’s sons, Tubal, first made implements in bronze and in iron.221 Several chapters on, in Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel is erected (and deserted),222 with the Flood intervening in Genesis 7–8.223 In Genesis 9, a compact table of divine law is handed down to the Flood’s ragged survivors, and thereby to humankind. (This table gives rise to the so-­called Noachide Laws—praecepta Noachidarum—which will powerfully influence European political theory in the early modern period.)224 Nemesius recollects this postdiluvian law code in Hum. Nat. 1, when he observes that: ‘After the Fall, humankind was permitted to feed on flesh—whereas before the Fall, God had commanded humankind to be satisfied with the fruits of the earth. For these were plentiful in Paradise. But when perfection was lost, humans were subsequently permitted luxuries.’225 This recollection has been marginalized by Nemesius’ editors and commentators,226 but there can be no doubt that his authority here is Genesis 9:2–4, where the divine concession is made to Noah and his clan—and thereby, to humankind—that meat may be consumed once the ‘blood of life’ has been drained out.227 The contrast is explicitly made in these verses with the herb­ iv­or­ous diet which had been divinely ordained—and observed—in the Garden, and which had high-­minded advocates in late-­antique Christian circles, as of course in Neoplatonic.

219  Genesis 4:17 (LXX), compare Genesis 4:1–17, 25; and Theoph. Autol. II 30 (Grant 74–5): ‘At that time [the days of Cain and his son Enoch] came the beginning of the founding of cities (oikodomeisthai poleis), before the Deluge and not as Homer falsely says [at Iliad XX 217]: “For a city of mortal men had not yet been built”.’ 220  Genesis 4:18–24 (LXX). Compare Theoph. Autol. II 30 (Grant 74–5): ‘Lamech took for himself two wives . . . At that time came the beginning of polygamy.’ 221  Genesis 4:22 (LXX). 222  Genesis 11:1–9 (LXX). 223 Compare Genesis 6–10 (LXX). 224 E.  Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 114–17. 225 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,9–12). 226 Matthaei, De natura hominis, 48; Jaeger, Nemesios von Emesa, 141–2; Verbeke and Moncho, Nemesius d’Émèse, 11; Morani, De natura hominis, 7. William Telfer is misled by his reading of Nemesius’ phrase, ‘after the Fall’: W. Telfer, Cyril of Jerusalem and Nemesius of Emesa (London, 1955), 240 note 6. And Telfer seems to be followed in this by Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 218. 227  Genesis 9:4 (LXX).

The World City: On Human Nature 1  61 Apart from this, Nemesius makes no real use of sacred history in his sketch of the rise of cities.228 But if the sacred page is not much in evidence in this part of Nemesius’ prologue, neither is the Hellenistic polemic that Seneca (died 65 ce) conducts in Epistle 90, to limit ourselves to a single text which is frequently cited in the literature on oikeiōsis.229 In this letter, Seneca rejects a notion that he ascribes to a Syrian philosopher, Posidonius of Apamea (died c.51 bce), whom he calls ‘one of those who has given the most to philosophy’.230 More to the point, Posidonius is conjectured to have been one of the philosophers who has given most to Nemesius.231 And Posidonius apparently held that philosophers had invented all the ‘techniques . . . we rely on in everyday life’ (artes . . . quibus in cotidiano vita utitur).232 Which techniques? Seneca refers to shorthand writing;233 to ‘vaulted baths’ which were evenly heated by complex networks of pipes;234 to panelled ceilings which shifted to change the scene ‘as often as the courses’ of a feast;235 to a penchant for high-­risk, high-­rise architecture in Rome;236 and to a then current— now again current—taste for sheer clothing ‘which conceals nothing’ (nihil celatura).237 But Seneca not only denies that spectacular baths, revolving ceilings, and gauzy robes are the legacy of philosophy. He ascribes the rise of cities to human vice,238 and to the sort of low cunning—the instrumental, commercial use of reason239—which is brought to its highest pitch by those he calls ‘the most contemptible slaves’ (vilissimorum mancipiorum).240 There is none of Posidonius’ vanity, Seneca’s irascibility, or Genesis’ bloodiness in Nemesius’ theory of the rise of cities. His theory is informed by the Fall—and thus, by the penalty of human mortality and an inborn susceptibility to vice—but the bishop of Emesa is relatively sanguine about the origins of human cities. On the whole, his tone is urbane. (And on the whole, it appears likely that he is

228  Notably absent from this sketch is the invention of viniculture—a Hellenic theme which even figures in Genesis 9:20–7 (LXX), at Noah’s expense. Nemesius mentions wine in his proem, but not viniculture: Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 8,3–6). 229  For instance: Bees, Die Oikeiosislehre der Stoa, 117–19, 186 note 207, 294, etc. For an engrossing reading of Epistle 90 in the broader context of late-­antique philosophy: G. Boys-­Stones, Post-­Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of its Development from the Stoics to Origen (Oxford, 2001), 18–26, 45–9. 230 Sen. Epist. 90.20. 231  Jaeger, ‘Die Weltanschauung des Poseidonios bei Nemesios’, Nemesios von Emesa, 68–96; Siclari, L’antropologia di Nemesio di Emesa, 29–31, 50–9; Kallis, Der Mensch im Kosmos, 48–64; Motta, La mediazione estrema, 46–59. 232 Sen. Epist. 90.7. 233 Sen. Epist. 90.25. 234 Sen. Epist. 90.25. 235 Sen. Epist. 90.15. 236 Sen. Epist. 90.7–10. 237 Sen. Epist. 90.20. Seneca may have in mind Roman garments made of Chinese silk: P. Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (New York, 2017), 19. See the ‘garment of wind’ and ‘clouds of muslin’ in Petr. Satyr. 55: ‘Aequum est induere nuptam ventum textilem, palam prostare nudam in nebula linea?’ 238  Avarice, and not philosophy, invented lock and key: Sen. Epist. 90.8. 239 Sen. Epist. 90.24: ‘Reason did devise all these things—but it was not right reason (recta ratio).’ 240 Sen. Epist. 90.25.

62  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature drawing on Themistius’ Letter on Government.)241 Where Posidonius believes (here reported by Seneca) that it was only ‘after viciousness crept in’ that ‘a need arose for laws’,242 Nemesius believes that a form of positive divine law—or perhaps, a form of divine ‘pre-law’ (à la Louis Gernet)—antedates the Fall.243 According to Nemesius, the rise of human cities has occurred within a profoundly disordered world city—nature itself has become imbalanced, disjointed, and debilitated—but the fact of human cities is nevertheless natural and laudable. In Hum. Nat. 1, that is to say, the rise of human cities is not due to Posidonius’ philo­ sophers or to Seneca’s slaves, but to human nature per se. In Republic II, Plato has Socrates claim that ‘a city comes into being because each of us is not self-­sufficient (ouk autarchēs)’.244 This too is Nemesius’ position. We have already taken note of Nemesius’ definition of the city. It is ‘because we have need of others’, he writes, that ‘we assemble in numbers and hold in common with others what is useful for life’. The word polis simply designates ‘this assembling and uniting’.245 With Aristotle, he asserts that humankind is ‘by nature . . . a political animal’; and with Plato, he resolves this into the brute fact that ‘no one person is self-­sufficient (oudeis autarchēs) in all things’.246 But what precisely are the ‘needs’ to which Nemesius refers here? And in which crucial matters are humans not self-­sufficient (autarchēs)? Nemesius lays out in Hum. Nat. 1, with exemplary clarity, a scheme in which four core human needs underlie and necessitate the rise of cities. These core needs are: (i) food and drink, (ii) clothing, (iii) housing, (iv) regimen and medicine (therapeia).247 It is hard to deny that Nemesius is relying here on Themistius’ Letter on Government,248 but regardless of his sources, his reasoning can be further contrasted with that in Seneca’s Epistle 90. For unlike Seneca, Nemesius regards the city as a natural, not an intrinsically corrupt setting in which to meet these needs; and unlike Posidonius, he ascribes to philosophers none of the techniques developed for meeting them.

241 Them. Epist. 1–23 (134–47 Swain). 242 Sen. Epist. 90.6–7: sed postquam subrepentibus vitiis . . . opus esse legibus coepit. 243  L. Gernet, ‘Droit et prédroit en Grèce ancienne’, L’Année sociologique (3rd ser.) 3 (1949), 21–119. 244 Pl. Resp. II 369b. 245 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,16–18). 246 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,20–1). 247 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,8–13). 248  Compare Them. Epist. 6–10 (136–41 Swain); Bry. Oecon. 6–11 (432–5 Swain).

The World City: On Human Nature 1  63 Nevertheless, all human cities are situated ‘in the shadows of death’ (to recall the Hebrew psalmist’s phrase),249 and the core needs which underlie cities reflect, for Nemesius, the punitive disordering of the world city after the Fall. (i)   Food and drink. As discussed above, Nemesius stresses here that it is only ‘after the Fall’ that humankind is ‘permitted to feed on flesh’.250 The sus­ ten­ance of the body is now hemmed in by death. The economy of life is now intrinsically violent, and human cities reflect this. Having pointed this out, Nemesius takes the occasion to introduce his elemental theory (Elementenlehre), to which he will return in Hum. Nat. 5 (see chapter 3). (ii)   Clothing. Nemesius believes that ‘we inevitably (anankaiōs) need clothing’.251 For, out of a concern for human ‘beauty’ and ‘sensitivity of touch’, the Demiurge has not given us hide like oxen, hair like sheep, or scales like fish.252 We need clothing, in short, because ‘we have no strong natural covering’.253 Yet the need for such a covering is post-­lapse. This is put out of doubt by Nemesius’ comment on Genesis 3:7, ‘and they knew they were naked’.254 The need for clothing is by no means vicious, yet it is still out of keeping with our original nature. (iii) Housing. ‘In the beginning’, Nemesius writes at the close of Hum. Nat. 1, ‘none of the other animals dared (etolma) to harm humans’.255 This changed after the Fall. ‘Along with sin’, he states, ‘came harm from other animals’.256 In the passage presently under consideration, Nemesius says that we need housing ‘to provide refuge from wild beasts’.257 Again, this is a necessity—but a post-­lapse necessity. The contrast here with Seneca’s Epistle 90 is especially sharp. Posidonius speculates that philosophy itself taught our ancestors to erect lasting structures; Seneca shoots back that ‘any chance covering’ (fortuitis tegi) should suffice for a philosopher.258 For Nemesius, the need for housing has nothing to do with philosophy. He agrees with Seneca that the golden age (felix . . . saeculum) fell ‘before there were architects’, but disagrees with him that architecture is ‘born of luxury’ (nascente luxuria).259 Architecture in On Human Nature is born

249  Psalms 22:4 (LXX): en mesō skias thanatou. 250 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,9–12). 251 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 8,20–3). 252 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 8,15–23). 253 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,10). 254 Note that Nemesius, like Philo, tends to reduce the original couple to a solitary human. Compare Genesis 3:7 (LXX): kai egnōsan hoti gumnoi ēsan; and Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,6): egnō hoti gumnos ēn. 255 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 14,19–20). 256 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 14,23–4). Compare Theoph. Autol. II 17 (Grant 54–5) on the harmlessness of animals before the Fall. 257 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,1–2). 258 Sen. Epist. 90.7–8. 259 Sen. Epist. 90.9.

64  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature of harsh necessity, since the first humans—still naked in Paradise—opted out of the golden age. (iv) Regimen and medicine. This is the most singular of Nemesius’ core needs. (Suggestively, it is also one of Themistius’ core needs.)260 We will recall Vivian Nutton’s claim that On Human Nature displays ‘the most extensive use of medical material’ in any patristic text.261 This is reflected in Nemesius’ high valuation of medicine—which is not treated as a luxury, but as a post-­lapse necessity that can only be met in the context of cities. What is it that renders the practice of medicine a human necessity? ‘Because of the imbalance of the body’s qualities’—after the Fall—‘we came to be in need of physicians and medical treatments’.262 The Hippocratic–Galenic concept of elemental and humoral—or in modern parlance, hormonal—‘imbalance’ (duskrasia) will prove to be a decisive one in On Human Nature. In his first commentary on the Hippocratic text On Human Nature, Galen defines an ‘element’ as a ‘body that is unblended and unmixed’.263 Given this definition, it is logical for him— and for Nemesius—to derive compounded bodies from a ‘mixture’ (krasis) of the elements.264 And pre­dict­ably, the concepts of ‘mixture’ and ‘imbalance’ figure later in Nemesius’ discussion of habit (Hum. Nat. 17),265 and in his closing defence of human freedom (Hum. Nat. 40).266 What is most important to notice, with regards to Nemesius’ core needs, is that it is the Fall which not only disordered the archaic koinōnia of humankind and the other species—resulting in (i) carnivorous practices and (iii) the need for housing; and the koinōnia of the elements and the human sexes in Paradise— resulting in (ii) the need for clothing; but most intimately, the koinōnia of the body itself and its conjugation with the soul—resulting in (iv) the need for medicine. A single delict in Paradise bent the world on its axis, disjointed the totality, precisely because the world is constituted as a divine city in which a transgression by its first citizens—the first humans—sufficed to incur a lasting, totality-­altering penalty. Nevertheless, the rise of human cities is for Nemesius a natural process (pace Posidonius) and a laudable development (pace Seneca). It cannot be denied that death and the fear of death—by hunger, exposure, predation, or plague—inform, at the most basic level, Nemesius’ theory of the rise of human cities. Yet Nemesius holds that it is no less possible and necessary in a late-­ antique Mediterranean city, than in the Garden of Eden, to ‘choose to live a human

260 Them. Epist. 6–8 (136–41 Swain). 261 V. Nutton, Ancient Medicine (London—New York, 2004), 302–3. 262 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,2–4). 263 Gal. Elem. 6.40. 264  For the connection between ‘compounding’ and ‘mixture’: Gal. Elem. 6.23. 265 Nem. Nat. Hom. 17 (Morani 75,26–76,4). 266 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 116,9–117,5).

The World City: On Human Nature 1  65 life as that of a human, and not just the life of a mere animal’.267 The rise of human cities, therefore, is driven by four bodily necessities in Hum. Nat. 1; yet human cities, like the divine world city, ultimately serve as an arena in which human virtue is cultivated and vice is punished. Nemesius makes this abundantly clear towards the end of On Human Nature.

The Principle of Human Governance If the promulgation of a divine law in Eden and the infliction of a punishment— death—on the original humans are intrinsically political acts, so, too, is the divine assertion of human rule in Genesis.268 It is therefore a salient proof that Nemesius holds a cosmopolitan theory that he asserts, in the latter part of his prologue, that humankind is ‘ruler’ or ‘governor’ (archōn) of the earth.269 This should place it out of doubt that he posits a divine, cosmopolitan bond, not only within humankind but between humankind and the rest of the terrestrial koinōnia. Nemesius’ assertion of human governance marks the second occurrence of the term ‘Hebrews’ in On Human Nature, and has led Skard and others to conjecture that the term refers to Origen (and through him to Philo),270 and that the report it introduces is likely taken from Origen’s Homilies on Genesis,271 or perhaps his Against Celsus.272 But it is not Skard’s fixation on the term ‘Hebrews’ which proves to be illuminating. This is Nemesius: It is a doctrine of the Hebrews that all things came to be because of humankind—immediately for his sake such things as beasts of burden and oxen used for farming, and fodder for their sake. For of things that came to be, some did so for their own sake, some for the sake of others; for their own sake all rational beings, for the sake of others irrational creatures and lifeless things.273

Both the context of this passage and the phrase ‘doctrine of the Hebrews’ suggest that the function of the term ‘Hebrews’ is not to encrypt Nemesius’ sources, but rather to introduce ideas which he believes to have originated with one his three divisions of humankind—Hellenes, Judaeans, and Christians.274 267 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,23–6,1). 268  Compare Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 2.1–2 (Forbesius I: 120–123), etc. 269  Echoed in Dam. Fid. Orth. II 30 (Kotter and Ledrux 366,25–30). 270  Skard, ‘Nemesiosstudien 1’, 32. 271 Orig. In Gen. 1.12 (Doutreleau 54–5), extant only in Rufinus of Aquileia’s Latin translation: Vult enim Deus ut magna ista Dei factura homo, propter quem et uniuersus creatus est mundus, non solum immaculatus sit ab his quae supra diximus [at In Gen. 1,11—quoting Colossians 3:5] et immunis, sed et dominetur iis. 272 Orig. Cels. IV 74 (Borret II: 366–71). 273 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 11,15–19). Compare Theoph. Autol. II 18 (Grant 56–7). 274 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 120,15–23).

66  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature The context suggests this, because his ‘doctrine of the Hebrews’ follows a half-­ page gloss on the quintessentially Hellenic definition of humankind as ‘rational animal’. Nemesius is allusive when he introduces this definition. ‘They define the human’, he writes, ‘as a rational animal, mortal, and receptive of intellect and knowledge’.275 In his apparatus fontium, Morani notes an exact antecedent to this definition in Pseudo-­Galen’s Medical Definitions, and gestures towards ‘many other sources’ (aliique multi) in which it appears.276 Nemesius may very well have lifted this definition from Pseudo-­Galen, but it is likely that he cites no source for it because he takes it to be emblematic of Hellenic anthropology. And similarly, it is likely that he takes his ‘doctrine of the Hebrews’ to be emblematic of a Judaic discourse concerning human nature. The phrase ‘doctrine of the Hebrews’ (Hebraiōn . . . dogma) is suggestive,277 because the word dogma in On Human Nature tends to register a distinctive tenet or conviction. This could of course be predicted, but consider the following: Nemesius refers to a ‘characteristic doctrine’ (to oikeion dogma) of Apollinaris of Laodicea on the first page of his text,278 and later to the ‘personal doctrine’ (to idion . . . dogma) of Thales, Heraclitus, and other pre-­Platonic figures.279 In Hum. Nat. 2, Nemesius remarks that ‘all the Hellenes . . . who declared the soul to be immortal held the doctrine (dogmatizousin) of reincarnation’, but that Plato’s statements ‘concerning this doctrine (dogma)’ gave rise to sharply diverging opinions.280 At the close of Hum. Nat. 3, Nemesius warns that certain elements of Origen’s corpus are ‘not in harmony with Christian doctrine (tōn Christianōn dogmasi)’.281 Hellenes and Christians hold distinctive but collective dogmata, whereas ‘characteristic’ or ‘personal dogmata’ are labelled as such in On Human Nature and linked to exponents’ names (Thales, Heraclitus).282 We can infer from this that when Nemesius cites a ‘dogma of the Hebrews’ he is not obscuring his debts to the ‘personal dogma’ of a given author (Origen, Philo). He is instead orienting his inquiry, successively and periodically, to what he takes to be authentic dogmata of one of the ancient Mediterranean’s most revered sects—‘the Hebrews’. Regardless of his sources, what Nemesius calls here the ‘servitude’ (douleian) of irrational creatures implies a cosmopolitan bond,283 much as servitude implies a political bond for Aristotle in Politics I.284 Nemesius cautions that ‘much could be said’ on the ‘servitude’ of irrational creatures; it calls for ‘a separate treatise (sungraphēs)’. He adds that On Human Nature is less a treatise than a ‘conspectus’ 275 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 11,3–4). 276 Morani, De natura hominis, 11. 277 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 11,15). 278 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,13–14). 279 Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 54,10–20). 280 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 34,18–35,22). 281 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 44,20–1). 282  D. T. Runia, ‘Philo of Alexandria and the Greek Haeresis-Model’, Vigiliae Christianae 53 (1999), 117–47, here 121: ‘Each haeresis had a body of distinctive doctrines, the ἀρέσκοντα or δόγματα, [which were] generally attributed directly to the founder rather than to the haeresis as a whole.’ 283 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,11–13). 284 Arist. Polit. I 2.12 (1254b10–13).

The World City: On Human Nature 1  67 or ‘brief ’ (suntoma).285 Nevertheless, he restates this cosmopolitan bond with great force, now with reference to humankind. For the first time in On Human Nature, Nemesius’ sense of cosmopolitan obligation is given a sharp formulation. The principle of human governance that Nemesius posits manifestly binds humankind to all terrestrial life. Humans are obligated to behave towards other creatures in the divine world city like rulers towards the ruled in a late-­antique Greco-­Roman city—or, in Burgundio’s Latin, like a late-­medieval ‘prince’ (princeps) towards his people.286 This is Nemesius: Since, as we have demonstrated, it was for humankind [that irrational creatures have come to be], for that reason humankind was also set up as their ruler. But it is the office of the ruler to use the ruled according to the measure of need, not to insult and exploit them for pleasure without restraint, nor to behave towards the ruled with contemptuous disregard. Therefore those commit sin who mistreat irrational creatures, for they do not fulfil the office of a ruler.287

This formulation of cosmopolitan governance by humankind, which is thick with the terminology of political governance in the Hellenic tradition, establishes that Nemesius conceives of the vast koinōnia of terrestrial life on the model of a city. The lightly drawn lines of divine oikeiōsis which have run through his prologue here take definition and converge into a sharp, formal image of a Greco-­Roman city. The principle of human governance demonstrates that Nemesius conceives and depicts the world, in On Human Nature, as a divine city. And there is nothing strange in this. Even a glance at Basil’s Sermons on the Six-­Day-­Work or Gregory’s On the Creation of Humankind,288 proves that this is—as Nemesius says—a ‘familiar’ world-­picture in 4th-­century Roman Syria.289

Humankind in the World City As claimed earlier in this chapter, it is Nemesius’ systematic correlation of koinōnia and oikeiōsis which prepares his assertion, at the close of his prologue, that humankind is ‘the image of the whole creation’, which is to say, a ‘little world’ (mikros kosmos).290 It is because humankind must govern—and is free to govern—its own irrational urges, that it must govern—and is appointed to ­ 285 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,13–16). 286  Burgundio’s rendering of this passage, at Verbeke and Moncho, Nemesius d’Émèse, 17, is worth including here: Quia igitur propter eum, ut demonstratum est, facta sunt, propterea et princeps eorum constitutus est. Principis autem opus est secundum mensuram utilitatis his quorum principatum habet uti, et non ad voluptatem passionis deliciose abuti, neque graviter neque odiose his quibus principatur offerri. Peccant igitur quicumque irrationabilis non bene utuntur; non faciunt enim principis opus . . . 287 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 12,3–9). 288  Compare Bas. Hex. VI 1 (117b–120b). 289 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,13–4). 290 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,5–6).

68  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature govern—other forms of life on earth. As Nemesius’ references to arrogance (hubris) and self-­indulgence (akolasia) make clear,291 when humans misgovern others it is because they are misgoverning themselves.292 Nemesius himself forges this link between his prologue’s first pages and its last, in the transition which he begins to make towards his closing ‘panegyric’ (enkōmion). For having stated his principle of human governance, Nemesius then writes: If we should see things external to humankind reflected in human nature as in an image, we should be constructing our proofs from the very substance of the things under investigation.293 For we see in our soul the irrational and its parts (I am speaking of appetite and spirit) devoted to the service of the rational part—the latter ruling, the former ruled . . . and serving whatever needs reason indicates—when humans preserve their nature. If the rational part in us rules the irrational part in us, how is it not reasonable that it should also hold sway over the irrational things outside us? . . . For it is the natural role of the irrational to serve the rational, as we showed with regard to ourselves.294

The concluding phrase in this paragraph—‘as we showed with regard to ourselves’295—reminds us that in spite of what one commentator calls a ‘grotesque’ and ‘bizarre’ effect on the late-­modern reader,296 the structure of Nemesius’ prologue is coherent. This phrase also returns us, at once, to the beginning of the prologue and of this chapter. That ‘it is the natural (phusei) role of the irrational to serve the rational’297 is precisely the principle with which Nemesius opens On Human Nature, because it is—on his telling—attested by ‘all humans’ that the human body serves the soul.298 This is the basic datum—the decisive given—in Nemesius’ prologue and text, and it at once confirms and conforms to the principle which he here articulates. From the first pages of his prologue, Nemesius invites us to notice the ‘communion (koinōnia) of soul and body’. This koinōnia is not anarchic; it is constitutive of this microcosmic koinōnia that ‘the soul makes use of the body’.299 Nemesius now informs us—recollecting, without revisiting, the question of ‘intellectual soul’ with which he opened the prologue—that the soul not only makes use of the 291 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 12,5–6): akolastōs exubrizein. 292  Countless texts could be cited here, but recall Pl. Ep. VII 351a, where a tyrant is depicted as a ‘ruler’ who is ‘not his own ruler, but a craven subordinate of his pleasures’. 293  This is a striking phrase at Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,17–18). 294 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,16–26). 295 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,26). 296  W. Telfer, ‘The Birth of Christian Anthropology’, The Journal of Theological Studies (NS) 13.2 (1962), 347–54, here 352 (noting the caveat: ‘it is questionable whether it would have struck Nemesius’ first readers in that way’); idem, Nemesius of Emesa, 248. 297 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,25–6). 298 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,9–13). 299 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,20).

The World City: On Human Nature 1  69 body, but of the soul’s ‘irrational . . . parts’. To which parts of the soul is he referring? ‘I am speaking’, he says in an aside, ‘of appetite and spirit’.300 This aside not only illuminates Nemesius’ meaning here, it also signals that he is anticipating his assertion in Hum. Nat. 33, which there has already been occasion to note. ‘There is . . . commonality (koinōnian) between humans and ir­ration­al animals’, he writes there, ‘with regards to desire and spirit’.301 The ‘irrational creatures’ (tois alogois) that it is sinful to mistreat,302 according to Nemesius, occupy the wild places of the earth; but they also lure and drive us from within. Just as the human body is part mineral and part plant—so the human soul is part beast. Indeed, the human soul’s koinōnia with irrational creatures is extensive,303 when we recall—from the second page of On Human Nature—that ‘desire and spirit, and the powers of sensation and respiration . . . are all shared (koina) by humans and by irrational animals’.304 The singular, contested breach in this koinōnia of bodily powers is reason—‘the soul’s hegemon’305—and with it, choice. At the precise midpoint of Nemesius’ world is situated the human power of choice, a power which is united to a body— and as such, is exposed to elemental and physiological influences—but which is nevertheless so sublime that it, like Platonic virtue, can be said in On Human Nature to ‘have no master’.306 Because, for the philosopher-­bishop of Emesa, ‘it is the natural role of the ir­ration­al to serve the rational’;307 because humankind occupies a boundary (methorios) which divides ‘irrational and rational natures’;308 and because humankind constitutes the bond (sundesmos) which ‘binds both of these natures together’;309 it follows that humankind is at once ruler and ruled. This is the final image which emerges—it is both a concept and an image—at the close of Nemesius’ prologue. As ruler and ruled, humankind proves to be modelled on a city; and in this way, humankind provides a model for the world city. Humankind is ‘the image of the whole creation’, in On Human Nature, because it is the cosmo­ pol­itan entity par excellence.310 There is a heavy caveat here, however. This ‘image of creation’ is only preserved ‘when humans preserve their nature’.311 Having glanced, in his prologue, at humankind’s failure to preserve its original nature (the Fall), Nemesius nevertheless concludes his prologue with a hymn of praise for a creature that can only hope to preserve its nature by perfecting it. This is an intuition which is dense 300 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,20). 301 Nem. Nat. Hom. 33 (Morani 99,23–100,3). 302 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 12,7). 303  In the Republic, Plato indicates that ‘what strives and desires . . . is the largest part of the soul’: Pl. Resp. IV 442a. 304 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,18–20). 305 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,14–15). 306 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 110,6). Compare Pl. Resp. X 617e. 307 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,25–6). 308 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,9). 309 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,6). 310 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,5–6). 311 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,22–3).

70  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature with echoes, yet Nemesius handles it in a singular—and in later centuries, highly influential—manner,312 by returning to the theme of human nobility which appears in the first sentence of On Human Nature. After praising the semi-­divine powers of ‘those who have chosen the noble life’,313 Nemesius goes on to express his wonder at the ‘dignity’ of the nature— namely, our own—that ‘binds together in itself mortal and immortal things, and links the rational and the irrational’.314 It is this binding and linking which justifies for the bishop of Emesa—though not for the bishop of Nyssa—the idea of a ‘little world’ (mikros kosmos).315 This, and the principle of human governance— for Nemesius continues his panegyric in this way: Humankind is sovereign over the heavens . . . and surpasses all principalities and powers. Who could express the advantages of this living thing? Humankind crosses the seas, in contemplation enters into the heavens, recognizes the motions of the stars, their intervals and their dimensions, harvests the earth and the seas, thinks nothing of wild beasts and sea-­creatures . . . communicates by writing with those beyond the horizon, unimpeded by the body . . . rules all things, controls all things . . . and commands the whole creation.316

Much of this encomium—that humankind ‘thinks nothing of wild beasts and sea-­ creatures’, and so on—inevitably feels less thrilling and less ennobling in this first century of the ‘anthropocene’ than heretofore.317 Nemesius himself frets that he may be ‘writing a tasteless panegyric’.318 But however it may be perceived or judged, what requires no further proof is that Nemesius’ hymn—his highly rhetoricized, concluding depiction of humankind in Hum. Nat. 1—is extravagantly cosmopolitan. Nemesius continues, briefly, in much the same vein. He urges us ‘not to dishonour our nature’,319 and not to forfeit the rights of high office—‘power and

312  As noted before, Nemesius’ encomium contributed to the rise of a Renaissance discourse on the dignitas hominis: E.  Garin, ‘La ‘dignitas hominis’ e la letteratura patristica’, La Rinascita 1 (1938), 102–46; E. F. Rice, ‘The Humanist Idea of Christian Antiquity: Lefèvre d’Étaples and his Circle’, Studies in the Renaissance 9 (1962), 126–60; G. Verbeke, ‘La dignité de l’homme dans le traité De hominis opificio de Grégoire de Nysse’, Annales de Philosophie 27.1 (1979), 139–55. 313 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 14,22–15,1). 314 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,3–5). 315 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,5–6). 316 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,9–18). Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 12 (Kotter and Ledrux 300,28–42). 317 E.  C.  Ellis, ‘Anthropogenic Transformation of the Terrestrial Biosphere’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369 (2011), 1010–35, here 1026–27: ‘Human systems have, as of the past century at least, created a novel anthropogenic terrestrial biosphere that has permanently altered the Earth system at levels of equal consequence to that of past biospheric changes.’ 318 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,20–2). Apeirokalos is a rare term, and Christian Matthaei provides a rare gloss: Matthaei, De natura hominis, 65 note. Compare Bas. Hex. VIII 8 (185a). 319 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 16,1).

The World City: On Human Nature 1  71 glory and serenity’.320 For we are ‘high born’ (eugeneias),321 he says—‘a plant from heaven’.322 This image—which figures, too, in Basil’s Sermons on the Six-­Day-­ Work—is of course derived from Plato’s Timaeus.323 (Burgundio renders it beautifully: planta sumus caelestis.)324 But then suddenly, Nemesius concludes his prologue in a flat tone, stating that he will return in Hum. Nat. 2 to his point of departure in Hum. Nat. 1—namely, to the pairing of soul and body of which it is ‘commonly suggested that humankind consists’.325 He promises in the next chapters of On Human Nature—to which we now turn—to analyse the human soul and body, and the union of soul and body, in a way that ‘the masses’ can comprehend.326 What even ‘the masses’ are meant to have taken from Nemesius’ proem, on this reading, is what he calls, in his prologue, a ‘familiar’ (gnōrimon) idea: namely, that the world is a divine polity.327 This is a commonplace in the Cappadocians’ hexaemeral texts.328 What is more, the Platonic commentator Calcidius seems to have been a rough contemporary of Nemesius’, and he may have been a Syrian. (The aspirated form of his name, Chalcidius, could suggest a tie to the city of Chalcis— whence the great Syrian scholarch, Iamblichus.) In the first pages of his monumental Timaeus commentary, Calcidius alludes to ‘the common city or republic (urbe ac re publica) . . . of this sensible world’.329 Nemesius never uses such precise terminology, but there is much to suggest that he structures On Human Nature with an eye to the archaic, yet philosophically sophisticated picture of the world as a city.

320 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 16,2–3): exousias kai doxēs kai makariotētos. 321 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,24). 322 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,24–16,1). 323  Compare Pl. Tim. 90a; and Bas. Hex. IX 2 (192a). 324  Verbeke and Moncho, Nemesius d’Émèse, 22. 325 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 16,7–8). 326 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 16,8–10). 327 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,13–14). 328 Bas. Hex. VI 1 (117b–120b); Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 2.1–2 (Forbesius I: 120–123),; etc. 329 Cal. Plat. Tim. I 6.

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3

The Union of Substances On Human Nature 2–5

The Aporia of Soul and Body We may recall that the ‘viewing’ of a corpse occurs in the first pages of Hum. Nat. 1. ‘Death clearly shows’, Nemesius writes there, that ‘when the soul is separated (chōristheisēs) from the body it remains totally motionless and inactive’.1 In light of this, Nemesius remarks in Hum. Nat. 3 that ‘the soul is life’.2 He then renders this claim visible, as it were, by depicting the soul in the act of performing its vivifying office in the dead of night. Sleep, as the archaic Greeks intuited, is akin to death; and like death, sleep in On Human Nature is caused by the soul’s separation (chōrismos) from the body. Or more precisely, sleep is caused by a distancing of soul and body. During sleep, Nemesius writes in Hum. Nat. 3, the soul is ‘in a way separated from the body’ (tina chōrizomenēn tou sōmatos).3 The logic behind this description is intriguing. If the soul were in no degree separated from the body, dreams would be in our power, and Nemesius believes they are not. He will argue this much later, in Hum. Nat. 25.4 (In the same decade in which the bishop of Emesa writes this, the bishop of Hippo absolves us of acts done in dreams; the bishop of Nyssa is less forgiving.)5 And yet, if the soul were totally separated from the body, a sleeper would slip into a comatose state, cease to breathe, and ‘utterly perish’.6 In sleep, therefore, Nemesius believes that the soul ‘leaves the body lying like a corpse (hōsper nekron)’, but it still ‘breathes life into it’.7 This image of the human soul bent over a

1 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,9–13). 2 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 40,5). 3 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 40,13). 4 Nem. Nat. Hom. 25 (Morani 85,23–86,1). 5  Compare Aug. Conf. X 30.41–2; Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 14.17. For the ‘anthropological revolution of ancient Christianity’ and a concomitant revolution in ancient dream-­interpretation, with a glance at modern dream-­analysis, consult G. G. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity, trans. S. Emanuel (Chicago—London, 2009), 26: ‘The new discourse on dreams found in patristic literature also reflects the new status of the self among Christians . . . The revolution established by Freudian introspection finds its sources in the Christian thought and practice of Late Antiquity.’ 6 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 40,12–19). 7 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 40,12–15). Nemesius returns to this point at Nat. Hom. 28 (Morani 90,9–11).

Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature:  A Cosmopolitan Anthropology from Roman Syria. David Lloyd Dusenbury. Oxford University Press. © David Lloyd Dusenbury 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856962.003.0003

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The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5  73 barely moving body in the dead of night is meant to confirm, for Nemesius’ ­readers, that ‘the soul is life’.8 Notice, however, that thus far there is nothing perplexing about the soul’s union with—or distancing from—the body. In Hum. Nat. 1, quoting Psalms 48, Nemesius warns that we are not to resemble the ‘mindless cattle’.9 Galen too is concerned that humans should not be merely ‘led like cattle by the impression of our senses’.10 But even cattle sleep; and in their sleep, cattle breathe. It is in a Hippocratic text On Breaths that we read: ‘Sleep . . . is common to all the animals.’11 To breathe in sleep is certainly, as Nemesius writes in Hum. Nat. 2, ‘the surest sign of life’;12 but it is not the sign of an incorporeal soul that ‘breathes life’ into a ­sleeper.13 And since the aporia of the union (henōsis) of human souls and bodies in Hum. Nat. 3 concerns incorporeal souls and human bodies, not merely the presence of life in respiring bodies, sleep might seem to be an irrelevant phenomenon. Sleep is not irrelevant to Nemesius’ aporia of union since his description of sleepers in Hum. Nat. 3 is not centred upon the fact that they breathe. Looking beyond this, he is impressed by the fact—or rather, by the impression he takes to be a fact14—that during sleep the human soul remains ‘active in its dreams, foretelling the future and associating with things intelligible’.15 Like contemplation—which Nemesius later calls, in fine Neoplatonic fashion, a state of separation (chōrismos)16—oneiric divination and intellection in On Human Nature are natural potencies of the human soul in its interface with the organ of thought (dianoia). This means that contemplation and divination in dreams are both channelled by and through the human brain’s central ventricle and the psychic pneuma which saturates it—to introduce a physiological scheme that will appear in Hum. Nat. 12.17 (Nemesius’ massively influential cognitive topology will be sketched in chapter 4.)18 That Nemesius links oneiromancy and contemplative reason can be inferred from the foregoing sentence in Hum. Nat. 3, at ‘foretelling the future and associating with things intelligible’.19 But it is no less clear that Nemesius links oneiromancy and discursive reason. For as he notes in

8 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 40,5). 9 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,13); Psalms 48:13, 21 (LXX). Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 10 (Kotter and Ledrux 280,48–50). 10 Gal. Nat. Fac. I 12.29. 11 Hipp. Flat. 14.10–11. 12 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 27,24). 13 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 40,12–15). 14  Compare Hipp. Somn. 86.1–19. 15 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 40,15–16). 16 Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 118,21–2). 17 Nem. Nat. Hom. 12 (Morani 68,11–13). 18  T. Manzoni, ‘The Cerebral Ventricles, the Animal Spirits and the Dawn of Brain Localization of Function’, Archives Italiennes de Biologie 136 (1998), 103–52; P. Van der Eijk, ‘Nemesius of Emesa and Early Brain-­Mapping’, The Lancet 37 (2008), 40–1; F.  C.  Rose, ‘Cerebral Localization in Antiquity’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 18 (2009), 239–47; J.  L.  Wright, ‘Brain and Soul in Late Antiquity’ (Doctoral thesis of Princeton University, 2016), ch. 2. 19 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 40,15–16).

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74  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature Hum. Nat. 14, ‘we frequently go through a whole reasoning process by ourselves in silence, and converse in dreams’.20 The crux is that oneiric ‘converse’ in On Human Nature is regarded as a natural form of human cognition which signals the presence of an incorporeal soul in a human body.21 It is therefore only with the soul’s oneiric and oneiromantic ac­tiv­ ities that Nemesius’ desultory, but not incoherent observations regarding sleep prove to bear upon his aporia of the ‘union of substances’ in humankind. This is meant to be illustrative. Out of a convoluted mass of data in Hum. Nat. 2–5, much of which can only be elucidated by reference to the text’s later chapters, a crucial part of the task of reconstruction is to identify which phenomena (or which aspects of which phenomena), which arguments (or which phases of which arguments), and which doxographic reports (or which elements of which reports) bear upon Nemesius’ recurring themes in, and structural intentions for, On Human Nature. In terms of the reconstruction offered in this chapter, it is necessary—in order to move through forty densely written, elusively structured Greek pages (in Morani’s edition)—to first identify the basic datum which helps to organize Nemesius’ material in Hum. Nat. 2–5, and which carries the argument of his text forward to its conclusion. There is a datum which lends coherence to Hum. Nat. 2–5, and which prepares the themes of the last chapters of Nemesius’ text. It is no different from the basic datum in Hum. Nat. 1—namely, that the soul is ‘superior’ (kuriōtera) in the body. As in Hum. Nat. 1, what this secures in Hum. Nat. 2–5 is the possibility that humans can be ‘master of their acts’.22 What Nemesius means by this is that humans can be ‘the origin (archēn) of their own acts’.23 This is a demonstrable recollection of Aristotle (and an anticipation of Kant).24 Nemesius believes that, for humans to be ‘the origin of their own acts’, it must be naturally possible for humans’ participation in reason to oppose humans’ temptation by desire. For that to occur, it must—on Nemesius’ reckoning—be naturally possible for the human soul to oppose the drives and impulses of the human body. And for the latter to occur, the human soul and body must be nat­ur­ al­ly united in such a way that a conflict is still possible—namely, a conflict of reason–desire, or soul–body, without which human autonomy is inconceivable. Nevertheless, that ‘the union of soul and body’ serves Nemesius as a model of the problem of human choice (prohairesis) is only stated with formal clarity quite late

20 Nem. Nat. Hom. 14 (Morani 71,10–11). This is copied word-­for-­word in Dam. Fid. Orth. II 21 (Kotter and Ledrux 326,6–7). 21  Nemesius’ choice of dialegomai, here, to denote this type of oneiric ‘converse’ is suggestive. At the height of his panegyric to human nature in Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,9–20), he says that humankind ‘crosses the seas . . . communicates by writing with those beyond the horizon, unimpeded by the body . . . converses (dialegetai) with angels and with God . . . discovers the nature of things’, and so on. 22 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 113,11), etc. 23 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 113,8–9). 24 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 5.14 (1114a19).

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The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5  75 in his text.25 It is thus in light of his later admissions that our reading of Hum. Nat. 2–5 will proceed. For us, the critical statement in these chapters occurs in Hum. Nat. 2: ‘The soul both opposes the body and imposes the word of command, being its ruler.’26 The political resonances confirm our reading of Hum. Nat. 1 in chapter  2. Yet this statement is only one moment in Nemesius’ refutation of the pre-­Platonic idea that the soul is an attunement. Its importance is signalled by the fact that Nemesius returns to the phenomenon of ‘opposition’ (enantiotēs) in his refutation of the Hippocratic–Galenic doctrine that the soul is a mixture. ‘Mixture does not oppose bodily desires’, he reasons in Hum. Nat. 2, ‘but the soul opposes’.27 Within the argumentive arc of On Human Nature, it is the soul’s opposition to the body, on occasions when the imperatives of reason (or the forms of law) conflict with the drives of the body, that should lead us. Without this power of op­pos­ ition, Nemesius could not write, for instance, in Hum. Nat. 25 (his chapter on the generative faculty),28 that ‘it is in our power (eph’ hēmin) to abstain’ from illicit sexual relations. For the body’s drives tend to become faits accomplis unless the soul retains a capacity to ‘conquer impulses’.29 Not much later, in Hum. Nat. 37, the phenomenon of ‘opposition’ virtually comes to define Nemesius’ concept of prohairesis. ‘Choice’, he says there, ‘is that which fights with desire’.30 And finally, Nemesius returns to his Galenic soul–mixture question in the powerful conclusion to Hum. Nat. 40. ‘It is in our power (eph’ hēmin) to consent to our “bodily imbalances” or “bad mixtures”’, he tells us, ‘or to oppose them’.31 Yet the vexatiousness of Nemesius’ aporia of soul and body is heightened by his sense of the soul’s ‘affinity’ (oikeiotēs) with the body.32 It is because of the human soul’s affinity with the human body that the human is at once ruler and ruled— and in that way, composes an image of the divine world city.33 But it is no less because of this affinity that the soul is not an uncontested ruler in the body. We observe, says Nemesius, that the soul is ‘sometimes mastering (kratein) the body, and sometimes being mastered (krateisthai)’.34 It is the task of the coming pages to show that Nemesius’ pair of chapters on the human soul and its union with the human body (Hum. Nat. 2–3), and his pair of chapters on body qua body and on the ‘cosmic elements’ that constitute all bodies (Hum. Nat. 4–5)—which will be considered, here, in reverse order—are informed by, and lay the groundwork for, his cosmopolitan anthropology.

25 Nem. Nat. Hom. 33 (Morani 101,6–8): ‘As we say that an animal (to zōon) is composed of soul and body, but is neither body as such nor soul on its own, but both together, so it is with choice’. 26 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 23,8–10). 27 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 24,25,1). 28 Nem. Nat. Hom. 25 (Morani 85,22). 29 Nem. Nat. Hom. 25 (Morani 85,25–86,1). 30 Nem. Nat. Hom. 37 (Morani 109,5–6). 31 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 117,1–2). 32 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,12). 33 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,3–6). 34 Nem. Nat. Hom.3 (Morani 42,11–16).

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76  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature

The Edifice of Cosmic Elements It is the rhetorically and thematically paired chapters of Hum. Nat. 4–5, ‘On the Body’ and ‘On the Elements’, that prepare the physiological and psychological core of Nemesius’ text, in which he sketches out the powers and organs involved in human pulsation, respiration, sensation, imagination, and so on (Hum. Nat. 6–28). Here and throughout, Nemesius’ philosophical positions are hemmed in by a rich and complex accumulation of doxographical reports, while his physiological descriptions reflect many centuries of Greco-­Roman medical observation, dissection, speculation, and polemics.35 As noted in chapter 1, Nemesius shows a special reverence for the Hippocratic– Platonic medical philosophy of Galen, whom he calls ‘the marvellous physician’,36 and from whom he borrows extensively, but not uncritically. It is not excessive to claim that the influence of Galenic theory in the Byzantine sphere, the Islamicate zone, and Europe cannot be fully appreciated without taking stock of Nemesius’ text. And as a 1938 source-­critical study by Eiliv Skard showed, the Galenic influence on Nemesius’ elemental theory (Elementenlehre) is especially pronounced.37 Nemesius attaches a complex structural significance to what he calls, in a Galenic vein, ‘the cosmic elements’ (to stoicheion to kosmikon).38 It is not unreasonable to suppose that Nemesius lifted this term directly from Galen’s first commentary on the Hippocratic treatise On Human Nature, in which the ‘cosmic elements’ figure prominently.39 Nemesius seems to be oblivious to the scriptural dissonances struck by this term. This is curious since his reading of the first pages of Genesis in Hum. Nat. 1 is astute, while later chapters of On Human Nature contain many biblical citations and linkages which evince a mastery of what he calls ‘the divine oracles’.40 Others could be cited, but two of these linkages are particularly impressive: (i) As we have had occasion to note, in his opening sketch of human nature (Hum. Nat. 1), which includes a summons to ‘enter into the divine life’,41 Nemesius places two lines from the books of Genesis and the Psalms between two phrases from I Corinthians 15.42

35  Consider the recent essays by Véronique Boudon-­Millot and Armelle Debru in Les Pères de l’Église face à la science médicale de leur temps, ed. V. Boudon-­Millot and B. Pouderon (Paris, 2005). 36 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,10). 37 E.  Skard, ‘Nemesiosstudien 3. Nemesios und die Elementenlehre des Galenos’, Symbolae Osloenses 18 (1938), 31–41. 38 Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 47,4). 39 Gal. Elem. 5.28 (De Lacy 455), 5.30 (456), 6.43 (472), etc. 40 Nem. Nat. hom. 2 (Morani 38,6). 41 Nem. Nat. hom. 1 (Morani 5,15). 42 Nem. Nat. hom. 1 (Morani 5,9–18).

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The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5  77 (ii) In his closing defence of God’s consent to human suffering, in which he cautions that ‘there are many forms of consent’,43 Nemesius links the Judaic figure of Job (Job 1:1–12) to the Christian figure of Lazarus the beggar (Luke 10:19–31), and then both, finally, to the apostle Paul with his ‘thorn in the flesh’ (II Corinthians 12:7).44 These complex doctrinal and typological linkages suggest a capacious know­ ledge of the Judaic and Christian scriptures. Returning to our point, though, Nemesius seems to be oblivious to the daemonic connotation of ‘cosmic elements’ in the Pauline epistles. First, in Galatians—likely one of his first surviving letters—Paul reminds the gentile Christ-­believers at Galatia that they had lived ‘in bondage to the cosmic elements (ta stoicheia tou kosmou)’ before the revelation of Christ.45 In Colossians (whose authorship is contested), the letter’s recipients are urged to reject any philosophy which orders life ‘according to the cosmic elements (ta stoicheia tou kosmou), and not according to Christ’.46 According to Clement of Alexandria, Paul is targeting the ‘elemental’ philosophy of Epicurus here.47 Believers at Colossi are finally reminded that they have ‘died with Christ to the cosmic elements (tōn stoicheiōn tou kosmou)’,48 and have thereby been released from the observance of ‘human precepts and doctrines’.49 There is no reference to Paul’s corpus in Christian Matthaei’s 19th-­century critical notes apropos of ‘the cosmic elements’;50 and according to Moreno Morani’s late 20th-­century apparatus fontium, Nemesius never cites Galatians or Colossians.51 It is therefore possible—but by no means necessary—to conjecture that Nemesius had simply taken no notice of the Pauline rhetoric of ‘cosmic elem­ ents’ when he lifted the term from Galen. Of course, subtler conjectures could also be made. In any event, the significance of Nemesius’ elemental theory is structural in at least a threefold sense. First, the ‘cosmic elements’ underlie the structure of all bodies—from the most inert mineral compounds (such as iron),52 to the most

43 Nem. Nat. hom. 43 (Morani 134,3–4). 44 Nem. Nat. hom. 43 (Morani 134,4–12). 45  Galatians 4:3. 46  Colossians 2:8. 47 Clem. Strom. I 11.5–6. 48  Colossians 2:20. 49  Colossians 2:21–2. 50 C. F. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, De natura hominis, Graece et Latine . . . (Halle an der Saale, 1802), 150. Nor is Paul cited ad loc. in W. Telfer, Cyril of Jerusalem and Nemesius of Emesa (London, 1955), 307–13; R.  Sharples and P.  van der Eijk, Nemesius: On the Nature of Man (Liverpool, 2008), 91–2. 51 Morani, De natura hominis, 138. The same could be said of the tabulations of biblical material printed in F. M. Young, ‘Adam and Anthropos: A Study of the Interaction of Science and the Bible in Two Anthropological Treatises of the Fourth Century’, Vigiliae Christianae 37.2 (1983), 110–40, here 134–7. 52  On magnetism: Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 3,17–22).

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78  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature acute human organs (such as the eye).53 Second—and in keeping with the first— the elements underlie the structure of all our ‘knowledge of natural things’.54 And third, Nemesius’ treatment of the elements notably contributes to the structure of his treatise. The term stoicheiōn is introduced early in Hum. Nat. 1, when Nemesius affirms that human nature ‘has a share in (koinōnei) lifeless things’.55 The last appearance of the term is in Hum. Nat. 6, where Nemesius responds to the question of why our senses number five when ‘there are four elements’, and when ‘each object of sense is of a nature to be recognized by its own sense-­organ’.56 Hereafter, admittedly, there is no explicit treatment of the ‘elements’ in On Human Nature. But the thematic and structural role of the elements in Nemesius’ anthropology is not concluded by this occurrence of stoicheiōn in Hum. Nat. 6. For when the term ‘elements’ first appears in On Human Nature, it is linked to the structuring term ‘mixture’ (krasis). It is not the elements in their purity—which is to say, in a separated state—that comprise a human being’s ‘share in lifeless things’.57 Rather, a human being’s share in the cosmic elements is produced by a specific and distinctive ‘mixture of the four elements’ (tōn tessarōn stoicheiōn krasin).58 This is entirely predictable, once we situate Nemesius within the Hippocratic– Galenic tradition of medical philosophy (an undertaking that Skard considerably advanced in the 1930s and 1940s).59 Since Galen, commenting on the Hippocratic De Natura Hominis, defines an element as a ‘body that is unblended and unmixed’,60 he logically derives compounded bodies from elemental mixture.61 This terminology of mixture62—and with it, inexplicitly, Nemesius’ theory of elements63—still figures prominently in later chapters of On Human Nature, and recurs in Nemesius’ closing defence of human freedom.64 What is more, the importance of Nemesius’ Elementenlehre in this chapter is ­signalled by the fact that he himself refers to it in Hum. Nat. 3. Here, in the opening

53  On extromissive vision: Nem. Nat. Hom. 7. 54 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,18). 55 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,13–14). 56 Nem. Nat. Hom. 6 (Morani 56,5–21). 57 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,15). 58 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,16). 59  Skard published his source-­critical studies of the Nat. Hom. in a numbered series: E.  Skard, ‘Nemesiosstudien 1. Nemesios und die Genesisexegese von Origen’, Symbolae Osloenses 16 (1936), 23–43; idem, ‘Nemesiosstudien 2. Nemesios und Galenos’, Symbolae Osloenses 17 (1937), 9–25; idem, ‘Nemesiosstudien 3, 31–41; idem, ‘Nemesiosstudien 4. Nemesios und die Physiologie des Galenos’, Symbolae Osloenses 19 (1939), 46–56; idem, ‘Nemesiosstudien 5. Galens Lehre von Tierischer und Menschlicher Intelligenz’, Symbolae Osloenses 22 (1942), 40–8. 60 Gal. Elem. 6.34 (468). 61  For the connexion between ‘compounding’ and ‘mixture’: Gal. Elem. 6.23 (463). 62  Nemesius also uses the related term ‘compound’ (sunkrima) in this context: Nem. Nat. Hom. 4 (Morani 44,23–45,4). But the language of ‘mixture’ (krasis) remains important for him in the later parts of the work, whereas the term ‘compound’ (sunkrima) disappears after Nat. Hom. 5. 63  Skard refers in this context to an ‘Elementen- und κρᾶσις-Lehre’: Skard, ‘Nemesiosstudien 3’, 35 note 1. 64 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 116,9–17,5).

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The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5  79 sentences of his section on the union (henōsis) of human souls and bodies, Nemesius points us to Hum. Nat. 5 on the elements. ‘As will be demonstrated in the treatment of the elements’, he writes in Hum. Nat. 3,65 any unification of elem­ents will necessarily result in an alteration of the elements which are unified (ta henoumena).66 Needless to say, for a late-­antique philosopher who is writing—like Nemesius— in Plotinus’ wake, the necessity of alteration (alloiōsis) is particularly unsettling when the type of unification in question is that of body and intellect.67 This is the metaphysical core of Nemesius’ problem in Hum. Nat. 3. And this is one of the problems that Plotinus seeks to resolve in the first tractate of Enneads I 1—in the very first pages, that is to say, of Porphyry’s edition of his master’s corpus,68 which happen to be among the last pages that Plotinus penned.69 Still, Nemesius refers us, for this difficulty—and for a grounding ontological principle that illumines it—to his chapters on elemental theory. There are not many such structural indicators in Nemesius’ text, which means that wherever they occur, the original structure of On Human Nature—which is to say, the bishop’s intention for his text—momentarily shines through. On the strength of this brief notice, then, we can infer that Nemesius’ doctrine of elem­ents, as set out in Hum. Nat. 5, underlies his exposition of the unity of intellect and body in Hum. Nat. 3, and in that way, undergirds the greater architecture of Nemesius’ text, which ‘certainly was not written quickly’ (in William Telfer’s words).70 Nemesius could not, himself, make this connexion any sharper in Hum. Nat. 3,71 especially in his use of a Plotinian—or less dogmatically, a Neoplatonic—emblem of light’s presence in air.72 This is Nemesius: ‘As the sun by its presence changes the air into light, making it have the form of light, and light is unified with the air, mixed without being compounded, in precisely this way is the soul unified with the body.’73 Here, air is the element which light informs, but Nemesius also introduces fire into this discussion.74 In the elements’ complex modelling of the unity of intellect and body—which is the unity, as he states several times in Hum. Nat. 3, of a sort of mixture75—Nemesius’ doctrine of elements helps to model the specific difference of humankind, and what is more august still, of Christ himself.76

65 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 38,16). 66 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 38,15). 67 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 38,13–14). 68 Plot. Enn. I 1.3–4, 7–10. 69  The tractate that is Enn. I 1 in Porphyry’s arrangement, is in fact Plotinus’ penultimate text (no. 53). 70  The contrast is to Gregory’s On the Creation of Humankind, which the Nyssene wrote ‘currente calamo to be ready as an Easter gift to Peter of Sabaste in 380’: W.  Telfer, ‘The Birth of Christian Anthropology’, The Journal of Theological Studies (NS) 13.2 (1962), 347–54, here 350. 71 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 38,20–3, here 21–2): hōs ta stoicheia. 72  It is probably Plot. Enn. I 1 which is alluded to at Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,3–9). Compare Plot. Enn. I 1.4.16. 73 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 40,22–41,2). 74 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 41,4–5). 75  For example, Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,17): tēs kraseōs ē henōseōs; and Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 43,14–15): kata krasin kai henōsin. Compare Plot. Enn. I 1.4.11. 76 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,9–43,16).

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80  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature This is not to imply that the mixture of cosmic elements is identical to the mixture of soul and body in On Human Nature. These genres of mixture are onto­ logic­al­ly distinct, and Nemesius opens Hum. Nat. 3 by cautioning against any strict analogy of elemental mixture to intellectual mixture.77 Nevertheless, later in Hum. Nat. 3, it is elemental mixture that Nemesius takes as a model of the more arcane mixture of humankind’s bodily and bodiless substances.78 It is also elem­ en­tal—and consequently, humoral—mixture which Nemesius draws upon in his account of human subjection and self-­mastery in the final chapters of On Human Nature. ‘It is in our power’, he writes there, ‘to consent to “bad mixtures” or to oppose them and to conquer’.79 It is in light of Nemesius’ concern with human autonomy, which only comes to the fore in Hum. Nat. 29–43, that we catch sight of the architectonic significance of his elemental theory in On Human Nature. For, according to Nemesius, the most rudimentary sense of human freedom is a rational mastery of the needs, impulses, and passions that arise in us due to the mixture of cosmic elements, the mixture of bodily humours, and the state of our organs.80 Without elemental theory, then, there could be no convincing demonstration of freedom; and without human freedom, Nemesius reasons, there could be no conception of human virtue or elaboration of civil law (argued in chapter 5). For the edifice that Nemesius’ elements ultimately comprise, in On Human Nature, is that of a divine city in which humankind can dwell.

The Nobility of the Human Body In the last sentences of Hum. Nat. 4, his chapter on body qua body—and in a cursory way, on ‘parts of the body’81—Nemesius refers us with a sweeping gesture, and a revealing aside, to Aristotle’s History of Animals (copies of which would have been hard to come by in late-­antique Syria).82 He writes here: ‘If there are those who wish to pursue this topic in real detail, let them read Aristotle’s History of Animals—for such detail has no place in the present book, which only sets out sketches, so to speak, and outlines.’83

77 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 38,14–40,7). 78 For a concise elucidation of this difficult manoeuvre: B.  Motta, ‘Nemesius of Emesa’, The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, ed. L. Gerson (Cambridge, 2010), 514–15. 79 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 117,1–2). 80 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 116,9–17,5). 81 Nem. Nat. Hom. 4 (Morani 45,4). 82  D. T. Runia, ‘Festugiere Revisited: Aristotle in the Greek Patres’, Vigiliae Christianae 43.1 (1989), 1–34, here 16–17. 83 Nem. Nat. Hom. 4 (Morani 46,20–47,1).

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The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5  81 To date, Nemesius’ interpreters have perhaps not given sufficient weight to the generic term that he applies here to On Human Nature. It is a sketch (hupographē), or, as he twice describes it in Hum. Nat. 1, a conspectus or brief (suntomos).84 (More precisely, On Human Nature is said to contain sketches and briefs.) The term hupographē is a relatively rare one, but suggestive.85 One relevant comparandum would surely be Nemesius’ use of the term sungraphē for ‘treatise’ in Hum. Nat. 1. He says there that he is intro­du­cing topics which call for a sungraphē— while he can only offer a suntomos.86 Another comparandum is Galen’s proem to his book On My Own Books (De Libris Propriis), an innovative memoir in which he recounts the birth of his oeuvre.87 In paragraphs 11 and 12 of his proem, Galen confesses that many of his ‘books’ were merely provisional texts which he had handed on sans title to his young auditors, and which they had then begun to circulate without his permission. Galen contrasts this situation with some of his predecessors who were content to title their writings ‘sketches’ (hupographas) and to publish them as such.88 Galen’s proem is not introduced here as a source for Nemesius’ use of the term hupographē, but it helps us to see how Nemesius could have signalled to his ­readers the provisional nature of his text by calling it a hupographē. Returning from genre to content, it is to Aristotle’s History of Animals that Nemesius directs the readers of Hum. Nat. 4. This reference occurs—as previously noted—in the chapter’s last sentences, in which Nemesius observes that: ‘Not all animals possess all the parts of the body, but some lack certain parts. For some have no feet, like fishes and snakes; some have no heads, like crabs; . . . But humankind has them all and perfect and could not have been finely composed in any other way.’89 The precise echo of the first sentence of On Human Nature should of course be registered. That Nemesius concludes Hum. Nat. 4 by asserting that humankind ‘could not have been finely composed in any other way’, after having opened Hum. Nat. 1 by asserting that humankind ‘could not have been finely composed or have come-­to-­be in any other way’, is not mere flourish.90 Nemesius’ decision to end his chapter on the body with this claim underscores that the first sentence of his work—in which ‘humankind is nobly constructed’—refers no less to the human body than to the intellectual soul.91

84  For ‘sketch’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 4 (Morani 47,1); and Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 30,24). And for ‘conspectus’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,7); and Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,16). 85  Hupographē is a hapax in the Nat. Hom., although it is interesting to note that the one occurrence of the verb, in Nat. Hom. 2, describes the narrative of Genesis 1. According to Nemesius, the prophet ‘sketched’ his account of creation: Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 30,23–5, here 24): hupographōn. 86 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13.14–16). 87  This Galenic text seems to be the only surviving antecedent, in terms of genre, to Augustine’s Retractations. 88 Gal. Libr. Pro. 11–12. 89 Nem. Nat. Hom. 4 (Morani 46.6–16). 90  Compare Nem. Nat. Hom. 4 (Morani 46.15–16); and Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,4–5). 91 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,3–4).

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82  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature This finally brings us to Aristotle’s History of Animals—or rather to its companion piece, On the Parts of Animals.92 For Nemesius’ conviction of the nobility of the human body, the main contention of Hum. Nat. 4, owes much to the latter work, evidently by way of Galen’s treatise On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body.93 And it is in Parts of Animals IV that Aristotle writes that ‘it must be incorrect to say, as some are saying, that humankind is not finely composed’.94 There is no need to labour the resemblance, here, to Nemesius’ opening claim in Hum. Nat. 1 and closing claim in Hum. Nat. 4 that humankind is ‘finely composed’.95 In Parts of Animals IV, Aristotle seeks to demonstrate that humankind is finely composed. Anthrōpos is ‘the only animal that stands upright’, the Stagirite r­ easons, ‘because its nature and essence is divine’.96 It is in this tradition that Nemesius derives his principle of human governance, in Hum. Nat. 1, from the ‘earthward’ posture of living things that ‘live only by natural impulse’.97 But more broadly, Parts of Animals IV alerts us to the fact that Aristotle’s morphological investigations, in what Nemesius calls his ‘books on natural philosophy’, are structurally linked to the investigations and concerns in his ‘ethical books’.98 It is impossible for Nemesius, as for Aristotle, to theorize body qua body and ‘parts of the body’ without reference to cosmopolitan questions of natural fitness and justice. His prosaic citation in Hum. Nat. 4 of Aristotle’s History of Animals contains within it a reference to these other, more far-­reaching questions. It is illuminating to turn with this in mind, momentarily, to Galen’s treatise On the Natural Faculties, in which he boldly asserts that the question of the nobility and demiurgic artistry of the human body introduces the ‘sects’ (haireseis) which dominate the parallel histories of ‘medicine and philosophy’.99 Galen ultimately recognizes only two such sects: (i) According to the first sect—which is represented, for him, by Plato and Hippocrates—‘nature is . . . more basic and more archaic than the primary bodies [atoms] . . . and therefore . . . it is nature which composes the bodies

92 For Parts of Animals as a ‘companion piece’ to History of Animals: Arist. Part. Anim. II 1 (646a8–12). 93  Nemesius’ use of Aristotle’s ‘books on natural philosophy’ at Nem. Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,12) could be taken to imply the possibility of his acquaintance with at least parts of Parts of Animals. Compare, for instance, Arist. Part. Anim. I 1 (641a33–641b10) and Nem. Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,12–20). By way of contrast, Nemesius’ acquaintance with Galen’s On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body is secure. He cites the title of that work towards the end of Nem. Nat. Hom. 2, and quotes accurately from its first book: Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,9–20). 94 Arist. Part. Anim. IV 10 (687a23–6). 95 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,4–5) and Nat. Hom. 4 (Morani 46.15–16). 96 Arist. Part. Anim. IV 10 (686a26–8). 97 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,11–13). Compare Bas. Hex. IX 2 (192a–b). 98 Nem. Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,12–21). 99 Gal. Nat. Fac. I 12.27.

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The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5  83 of both plants and animals, which she does by virtue of certain powers which she possesses’. This implies that ‘nature acts, throughout, in a highly skilled and just manner’.100 (ii)  According to the second sect—which is represented, in the pages of On the Natural Faculties, by Epicurus and a materialist medical philosopher, Asclepiades of Bithynia (flourished c.90 bce)101—‘there is no substance or power which belongs to nature or to the soul, but these result from the way in which the primary bodies [atoms] . . . collide’. The inference drawn from this ontology is that humankind is in possession of no ‘innate and archaic idea, whether of agreement or conflict, division or synthesis, justice or injustice’.102 What is of importance for us, here, is Galen’s double linkage of the question of the human body’s nobility to the question of natural justice. This link is not formulated in Hum. Nat. 4, yet the question of justice demonstrably informs Hum. Nat. 2–5 and comes to the fore in several passages of vital importance (see the fourth section in this chapter, ‘Excursus: The “Pagan” Concept of Reincarnation’). If the human body exhibits a ‘highly skilled’ design (à la Plato and Hippocrates), it is because the Demiurge is just; but if the human body is an aleatoric effect of atomic ‘collisions’ (à la Epicurus and Asclepiades), the idea of ‘archaic’ justice— and with it, of a divine world city—collapses. It is by appealing to Galen’s conception of demiurgic justice, and to the conviction which underlies Hum. Nat. 4—namely, that the human body is ‘the work of a skilled worker . . . who perceives order and harmony’103—that Nemesius seeks to rebut the Hellenic myth of reincarnation in Hum. Nat. 2.104 That Nemesius returns to this myth in his text’s final chapter, Hum. Nat. 43,105 shows that the significance of reincarnation is by no means confined to the numerous mo­ment­ ary, tactical engagements which occupy him (and cannot preoccupy us) in Hum. Nat. 2–5. Rather, this myth drives forward Nemesius’ argument—which is, as his reading of this myth confirms, a cosmopolitan argument—to its conclusion. Since Nemesius’ critique of reincarnation turns upon his Galenic concept of demiurgic justice, as it is reflected in the nobility of the human body (fitted, as it is, to the mastery of the human soul), it is not out of place for us to turn from

100 Gal. Nat. Fac. I 12.27–9. 101  V. Nutton, ‘Asclepiades [6]’, Brill’s New Pauly, ed. H. Cancik and H. Schneider (Leiden, 2006), archived online at brillonline.com, consulted on 1 July 2017. Despite his well-­attested atomism, Nutton concludes that Asclepiades is ‘certainly . . . no Epicurean, as Galen thought him to be’. This agrees with the conclusions reached in J.  T.  Vallance, The Lost Theory of Asclepiades of Bithynia (Oxford, 1990), 147–9. 102 Gal. Nat. Fac. I 12.27–8. 103 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,25–36,2). 104  For the portrayal of God as a conscientious ‘demiurge’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 131,19–23). 105 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,21–133,2).

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84  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature Hum. Nat. 4 to this myth in Hum. Nat. 2. The basic questions which concern us in this excursus are, first, whether the human body is uniquely fitted to receive the human soul; and, second, whether the Demiurge could conceivably unite a human soul and an inhuman body—even as a form of divine punishment.

Excursus: The ‘Pagan’ Concept of Reincarnation In much Hellenic thought and culture, the expectation of divine judgement takes a form which Nemesius calls ‘reincarnation’ (metensōmatōsis), but which other late-­antique philosophers call ‘regeneration’ (palingenesia).106 In an excursus in Nat Hom. 2 whose structural significance for On Human Nature has not been fully realized,107 Nemesius reports that ‘all the Hellenes who declare the soul to be immortal hold to the dogma of reincarnation’.108 Before we examine Nemesius’ treatment of this dogma in Hum. Nat. 2, we should take note of the significance it has for him—in his own words—in the concluding pages of his text: That the soul is not mortal and that human destiny is not bounded by this present life is shown by the fact that the wisest of the Hellenes believe in reincarnation, that is, the positions allotted to souls for the life each has lived, and the punishments of souls with which each is punished in exact measure. This [dogma], if defective in other regards, still confesses with us that the soul survives after this life, and that the soul undergoes justice for its transgressions.109

Here Nemesius formally links the immortality of the soul, his metaphysical topic in Hum. Nat. 2,110 to his concept of cosmopolitan justice—a divine and impartial

106  Nemesius cites a lost treatise by Cronius (2nd century ce), a Neopythagorean philosopher, for the term palingenesia: Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,4–5). 107  The most focused treatments appear in B. Domanski, Die Psychologie des Nemesius (Münster, 1900), 48–55; and in A. Kallis, Der Mensch im Kosmos. Das Weltbild Nemesios’ von Emesa (Münster, 1978), 113–21. There is a discussion of the context in H.  Dörrie, ‘Kontroversen um die Seelenwanderung im kaiserlichen Platonismus’, Hermes 85 (1957), 414–35, here 426–31. The reincarnation excursus is briefly noted in D. Bender, ‘Untersuchungen zu Nemesius von Emesa’ (Doctoral thesis of Heidelberg University, December 1898), 54–8; in W.  W.  Jaeger, Nemesios von Emesa. Quellenforschungen zum Neuplatonismus und seinen Anfängen bei Poseidonios (Berlin, 1914), 117–19; in A.  Ferro, ‘La dottrina dell’anima di Nemesio di Emesa’, Ricerche Religiose 1 (1925), 227–38; and again in B. Einarson, ‘Studies in Nemesius’ (Doctoral thesis of The University of Chicago, June 1932), 49–50. It is paraphrased with minimal commentary in A. Siclari, L’antropologia di Nemesio di Emesa (Padova, 1974), 109–15. For Nemesius’ use of Galen in Nat. Hom. 2 consult Skard, ‘Nemesiosstudien 5’, 40–8. 108 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 34,18–19). 109 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,24–133,2). 110  A fascinating and neglected contribution on what may be one of Nemesius’ sources on the immortality of the soul, a short treatise conjecturally emanating from the circle of Justin Martyr, is A.  Whealey, ‘ “To Tatian on the Soul”: A Treatise from the Circle of Tatian the Syrian and Justin Martyr?’ Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 63 (1996), 136–45, here 143–5.

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The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5  85 justice which all humans qua human will face.111 Reincarnation is precisely, for him, a myth (or a dogma) which validates the Christian belief that the human soul survives death as a culpable or imputable person.112 The afterlife of human souls, and ‘the punishments of souls’ (hai timōriai tōn psuchōn),113 is a dogma that the bishop of Emesa holds in common with ‘the wisest of the Hellenes’—he means the Platonists—in contrast to the Epicureans, who imagine that ‘the soul and the body suffer dissolution together’, as Nemesius points out in the immediately preceding sentences of Hum. Nat. 43.114 Reincarnation is essentially a myth of divine, cosmopolitan justice in On Human Nature, and it is for this reason that Nemesius commends the Hellenes in Hum. Nat. 43. By means of this myth, they have preserved a concept of post-­mortem justice for all human souls. In Hum. Nat. 2, however, it is the myth’s bodily aspect that Nemesius will criticize. Now, Nemesius writes in Hum. Nat. 1 that repentance is a human prerogative which is held by ‘every human and for ever throughout their lifetime in this world—but no longer after death’.115 On the strength of this remark in Hum. Nat. 1, we must conclude that Nemesius would not accept the recurrence of post-­ mortem judgement that is integral to the idea of reincarnation.116 Yet this is not his objection to reincarnation in Hum. Nat. 2. Rather, he here objects that—in keeping with his main contention in Hum. Nat. 4—the reincarnation of human souls in non-­human bodies would constitute ‘a reproach to God who provided an inharmonious body for the soul, since that is not the work of a skilled worker . . . who perceives order and harmony’.117 In this way, in Hum. Nat. 2, Nemesius links the question of the human body’s nobility to the question of cosmopolitan justice. The context for this linkage— which is of immense importance for us—is Nemesius’ precis in Hum. Nat. 2 of the Genesis-book of Platonic philosophy, Plato’s Timaeus. Nemesius introduces questions here—and more importantly for us, he introduces a Platonic conception of the world city—to which he promises to return in the last chapters of his text. ‘These matters will be discussed’, he writes in Hum. Nat. 2, ‘in our treatment of fate’.118 And fortunately, this promise—unlike certain others in On Human Nature—is one that he will keep.

111  Contrast this with the meanings of reincarnation in, say, Bas. Hex. VIII 2 (165d–168b). 112  For Nemesius’ definition of a legal ‘person’ (prosōpon): Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 97,15–17). We will return to this definition in chapter 5. 113 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,27–8). 114 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,22–3). 115 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 10,13–14). 116  Pace Einarson, ‘Studies in Nemesius’, 49; Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 360. 117 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,25–36,2). 118 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 34,16–17). For Burgundio’s mistranslation of this: Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 353.

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86  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature By way of his report on Plato’s concept of the divine governance of the world in the Timaeus, Nemesius sharpens in Hum. Nat. 2 an image of the world city which has come into view in Hum. Nat. 1, and which will occupy the foreground in his later chapter on Plato’s account of fate (argued in chapters 2 and 5, respectively). Ultimately, Nemesius will conclude that Plato’s conception of the world city ‘differs only slightly from the divine oracles’.119 What this means, more concretely, is that Nemesius’ conception of the world city in On Human Nature ‘differs only slightly’ from his conception of Plato’s in the Timaeus. What then is Plato’s world city, on Nemesius’ telling? And how is the myth of reincarnation, which Nemesius rejects, factored into it? First, this is his account (which we have read before) of Plato’s world city: Plato declares that . . . the Soul of the world is one, but there are also souls of particular things . . . They say [that] the Soul which steers the world . . . sends out the particular souls which were produced earlier by the Demiurge, since clearly the Demiurge himself has both given to the Soul laws in accordance with which it must control the world, which [Plato] calls fate, and the Demiurge also provides a sufficient power to watch over us.120

It is this part of his Timaeus precis that Nemesius concludes with a promise: ‘These matters will be discussed in our treatment of fate.’121 Nemesius’ basic objection to this Platonic world city in his later chapter on the Platonic idea of fate is that Plato’s Soul—the divine hand that ‘steers the world’— is, as Nemesius sees it, bound by ‘laws in accordance with which it must control the world’.122 Nemesius breaks decisively with this doctrine in On Human Nature, insisting that his God ‘does nothing by the necessity of nature or by the dictate of law’.123 Where Nemesius believes that fate binds the operation of Plato’s divine will in the Timaeus,124 Nemesius’ divine will binds fate. This later divergence in Hum. Nat. 38 bears materially on the myth of reincarnation in a way that Nemesius himself does not articulate in Hum. Nat. 2. For in Plato’s world city, reincarnation is a form of divine judgement which would be inflicted—if interpreted literally—‘by the dictate of law’. In Nemesius’ world city, by way of contrast, it could only be a form of divine judgement which would be inflicted by the divine hand in its absolute imperium. Since this form of judgement cannot be reconciled with Nemesius’ conception of demiurgic justice—for

119 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 110,11–13). 120 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 33,20–34,16). 121 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 34,16–17). 122 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 34,13–14). 123 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 111,3–4). 124  This should be compared to Pseudo-­Plutarch’s statements regarding ‘the highest and primary providence’ in Plato’s Timaeus: Plut. Fat. 9 (572f–573d). For further comments on Nemesius’ report of the Middle Platonic ‘theory of three providences’: R. Sharples, ‘Nemesius of Emesa and Some Theories of Divine Providence’, Vigiliae Christianae 37.2 (1983), 141–56, here 141–3.

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The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5  87 which, as we will see presently, he makes an appeal to Galen’s opus On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body—the myth of reincarnation becomes im­pos­ sible within Nemesius’ world city. Nemesius is inclined to believe, however, that the Platonic myth of reincarnation is not to be interpreted literally. What then is his account of this myth in Hum. Nat. 2? We have already seen that ‘all the Hellenes in common who declare the soul to be immortal hold to the dogma of reincarnation’.125 Plato is no exception, says Nemesius: For Plato said that fierce and proud and greedy souls [of humans] take in exchange [after death] the bodies of wolves and lions, those that were given to self-­indulgence assume the bodies of asses, and the like. Some understood this literally to mean lions and asses, while others discerned that he had spoken metaphorically, so obliquely referring to habits via beasts.126

Nemesius cites a 2nd-­century Neopythagorean philosopher, Cronius, who interpreted Plato’s reincarnation (or ‘regeneration’) myth literally in a lost treatise On Regeneration. According to Cronius, the souls of beasts are neither inhuman nor irrational; on the contrary, ‘all souls are rational’.127 Nemesius then cites a lost treatise by Theodorus of Asine (died c.360),128 in which a literalist reading of Plato’s reincarnation myth leads to the conclusion That the Soul is the Totality of Forms.129 This singular accumulation of references may indicate that the question of Platonic reincarnation held a special importance for Nemesius. Without committing himself on the question of Platonic interpretation,130 Nemesius clearly inclines towards a metaphorical reading of reincarnation in Plato’s corpus.131 He appeals for such a reading to Iamblichus, who presented his ethical interpretation of reincarnation in a lost ‘single volume’ (monobiblos).132 Nemesius’ gives Iamblichus’ title as, in part, That Reincarnations do not Occur from Humans into Irrational Animals or from Irrational Animals into Humans.133 125 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 34,18–19). 126 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 34,24–35,3). 127 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,4–5). 128 The testimonia, overwhelmingly from Proclus, are collected in W. Deuse, Theodoros von Asine. Sammlung der Testimonien und Kommentar (Wiesbaden, 1973). 129 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,5–6). 130  Pace Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 360, Nemesius is firmly committed to Iamblichus’ position—namely, that humans cannot be re-­embodied in inhuman bodies—but he is not firmly committed to Iamblichus’ reading of Plato as such. On the question of Platonic in­ter­pret­ ation, he maintains a pretence of neutrality. 131  See the hexaemeral ‘bestiaries’ in Theoph. Autol. II 16–17 (Grant 52–5). 132  Monobiblos is translated ‘monograph’ by Telfer, Nemesius of Emesa, 289; Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, 74. However, the Greek term seems to be more modest, and less de­ter­min­ ate, than the English ‘monograph’. 133 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,7–11). The authenticity of this ‘blatantly . . . unplatonic’ title has been questioned: A. Smith, ‘Did Porphyry Reject the Transmigration of Human Souls into Animals?’ Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 127.3 (1984), 276–84, here 282.

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88  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature ‘Iamblichus seems to me’, writes Nemesius, ‘to have discerned better not only Plato’s meaning, but also the truth itself, as can be established by many diverse proofs’.134 Nemesius agrees with Iamblichus ‘that reincarnations do not occur from humans into irrational animals’,135 but no textual proofs—no arguments from the Platonic dialogues—are adduced in Hum. Nat. 2. Moreover, in the numerous ‘diverse proofs’ that Nemesius puts down in the following pages, there is no further mention of either Plato or Iamblichus. It is therefore reasonable to infer that Nemesius is not concerned, hereafter, with ‘Plato’s meaning’—be it literally interpreted (à la Cronius and Theodorus), or metaphorically interpreted (à la Iamblichus).136 Rather, he is concerned with ‘the truth itself ’ of the Hellenic myth of reincarnation. The truth of this cosmopolitan myth consists, as we have seen, in the idea that ‘the soul survives after this life’ and ‘undergoes justice (dikas) for its transgressions’.137 But its falsity, for Nemesius, lies in its suggestion that justice could done by the Demiurge in uniting a human soul and an inhuman body. For Nemesius, this union could not conceivably be ‘just’, even as a form of punishment, because only the human body is fitted to receive the human soul. His demonstration of this can be correlated with three anthropological theses that we can draw from Hum. Nat. 41. The Hellenic myth of reincarnation runs afoul of these theses—and predictably, is rejected. (i) ‘In the beginning all rational natures were nobly created (dedēmiourgēntai).’138 In Hum. Nat. 2, Nemesius rejects a priori the demiurgic justice—which is to say, the divine ‘nobility’—of a rational soul being united with the body of an irrational animal. Such a body, he insists, would possess ‘a rational soul superfluously, since rational ability would be for it totally useless’.139 The ­definition of demiurgic justice, according to Nemesius—and he adds that ‘all confess this with one voice’—is that ‘nothing was produced by God that was superfluous’.140 Superfluity could never conceivably be the mark of a divine Demiurge—or for that matter, of a human demiurge—‘who perceives order and harmony’.141 To ‘provide an inharmonious body for the soul’,142

134 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,11–14). 135  Or, perhaps more precisely, Nemesius agrees with his impression of Iamblichus: Smith, ‘Did Porphyry Reject the Transmigration of Human Souls into Animals?’, 282–3. 136  For this contrast in Nemesius, and a claim that he ‘had access to original works of Porphyry and probably Iamblichus’ on reincarnation: Smith, ‘Did Porphyry Reject the Transmigration of Human Souls into Animals?’, 283. 137 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 133,1–2). 138 Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 118,22–3). 139 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,20–2). 140 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,22–3). Compare Bas. Hex. IX 5 (200b). 141 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,25–36,2). 142 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 36,1).

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The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5  89 even as a form of punishment, would necessarily signal demiurgic ­incompetence or injustice—in a word, ignobility. Therefore, for Nemesius, it is not a possibility. (ii) ‘We were born autonomous.’143 Human autonomy is a salient theme in Nemesius’ critique of reincarnation in Hum. Nat. 2. Although he praises animal ‘resourcefulness’,144 which he calls an ‘image of skill and shadow of reason’,145 Nemesius holds that ‘each species of irrational animal moves in accordance with its own impulse’ (kat’ oikeian hormēn),146 with the result that ‘the whole species is moved by a single impulse’ (kata mian hormēn holon to eidos kineisthai).147 It is in contrast to instinctual, species-­specific movement that Nemesius writes in Hum. Nat. 2 that ‘human acts take a thousand different routes’.148 He takes human variegation as a sign that we possess reason, because ‘reason is something free and autonomous’.149 Nemesius marks reason’s appearance in the world by shifting his descriptive terminology from kinēsis (‘movement’) to praxis (‘act’). Where instinct moves, reason acts. To unite a rational soul to a body belonging to an ir­ration­al species would be to annihilate the soul’s capacity to act. And this would contradict Nemesius’ unshakeable conviction that the human soul is, and must be, ‘born autonomous’.150 (iii) ‘We become bad by our choice, not by nature.’151 The principle of imputability ultimately refers back, in On Human Nature, to the Fall in Eden, and Nemesius in Hum. Nat. 2 rejects the myth of reincarnation in part because it conflicts with this principle ‘in the beginning’—which is to say, before the Fall. If this cosmopolitan myth—the myth of reincarnation—wishes us to believe that theriamorphic births are divine ‘punishments’ for wickedness committed ‘in human lives’,152 then why—Nemesius demands—were ‘rational souls cast into the first bodies of animals that came to be?’153 The only inference he will countenance is that these souls must have been ‘bad by nature’, rather than ‘bad by choice’. The Hellenic myth therefore contradicts the very principle of cosmopolitan justice which must be upheld if the world city is to be a just city. It is here that Nemesius cites Galen’s On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, commenting that ‘the marvellous physician seems to hold this view’—namely, that human souls could not be united to inhuman bodies—‘and to maintain that

143 Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 117,7). 144 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 36,17). 145 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 36,18). 146 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 36,13–14). 147 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 36,23–4). 148 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 36,26). 149 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 36,26–37,1). 150 Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 117,7). 151 Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 119,8–9). 152 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,4–7). 153 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,7–8).

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90  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature for each species of animal (eidos zōou) there is a different species of soul (psuchēs eidos)’.154 And it is here that Nemesius returns to his organizing principle—‘body is the instrument of soul’155—with which he effectively opens Hum. Nat. 1. He quotes Galen as saying, in On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, that ‘the body is the instrument of the soul’.156 Since a first principle obtained by reason and observation is that—in Galen’s words—‘the soul has a use for all parts of the body’;157 and since an inhuman body would be—in Nemesius’ words—‘totally useless’ for a human soul;158 the desire for cosmopolitan justice should not lead us to accept the ‘pagan’ myth of reincarnation.

Union without Confusion Nemesius is certain that the union of a human soul and an inhuman body is impossible, yet he is uncertain precisely how the union of a human soul and a human body is possible. It is this aporia of union (henōsis) which Nemesius treats in Hum. Nat. 3. Duplicity of substance is humankind’s specific difference in On Human Nature, but Nemesius recognizes that the logic of this difference is refractory. As he puts it in the first sentences of Hum. Nat. 3, ‘this matter is highly obscure (aporon)’.159 Nemesius’ core anthropological doctrine is aporetic because it concerns a ‘union of substances’ (tēn henōsin . . . tōn ousiōn),160 and because the soul is what he calls a ‘multitudinous’ (peplēthusmenōn) substance.161 Underlying and intensifying the logical aporia of union, therefore, lies Nemesius’ recognition that the human body’s union with the ‘multitudinous’ substance that vivifies it—the human soul— gives rise to a ‘multitude’ of duplicitous phenomena. In introducing this aporia, Nemesius returns—without alerting us to the fact— to the Platonic ‘impression of humankind’ with which he opens On Human Nature. We will recall this sentence from the first pages of Hum. Nat. 1: Plato does not appear to say that humankind is merely a complex—soul and body—but a soul that makes use of a certain type of body, having a more worthy impression of humankind; and he immediately turns us to the divinity of the soul alone and its care, so that—believing it to be the soul that is our true

154 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,9–11). Compare Bas. Hex. IX 3 (192b–c). 155 Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 54,23–4). 156 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,14–15). Compare Gal. Usu Part. I 1. 157 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,14–15). Compare Gal. Usu Part. I 1. 158 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,21). 159 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 38,12–13). 160 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 44,10). 161 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,11–12).

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The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5  91 self—we should seek only the goods of the soul, the virtues and piety, and should not love the desires of the body.162

We will now notice Nemesius’ inclusion, here in Hum. Nat. 1, of a stipulation that the human soul ‘makes use of a certain type of body’.163 This anticipates his treatment in Hum. Nat. 2 of the Platonic myth of reincarnation, which we have just examined. Restricting ourselves to the problematic of Hum. Nat. 3, however, recall that it is this Platonic ‘impression’ which leads Nemesius to first articulate the datum upon which On Human Nature rests, and which—he claims—is ‘confessed by all humans in common’.164 Namely, that ‘the body is moved as an instrument (organon) by the soul’.165 Having asserted this in Hum. Nat. 1, we will recall that in Hum. Nat. 2, Nemesius then quotes Galen with his unequivocal approval as saying: ‘The soul has a use for all parts of the body, for the body is the instrument of the soul.’166 Yet in the first pages of Hum. Nat. 3, citing Plato, Nemesius permits the ‘multitudinousness’ of the soul–body phenomenon to cast this datum into question: Because of this obscurity, Plato does not consider a living being to consist of soul and body, but to be a soul that makes use of a body. The soul, as it were, puts on the body like a garment. But this reasoning also contains an obscurity—for how can a soul be one with its garment? For a tunic is not one with its wearer.167

A tool or an instrument, of course, is no more ‘one’ with its user than a garment is with its wearer. Crucially, therefore, the ‘obscurity’ that vitiates Plato’s body-­as-­ garment simile, here in Hum. Nat. 3, also weakens Nemesius’ (and Galen’s) body-­ as-­instrument simile throughout On Human Nature. It is only in light of the human’s unity that Nemesius permits himself—or forces himself—to problematize his basic datum, that the soul treats the body and all its parts as instruments. Nemesius is unshakably committed to the unity of the human in part because it serves him as a model of his problem of choice (prohairesis). He adumbrates this correlation in Hum. Nat. 1, where he observes that ‘the virtues’ derive from ‘the communion (koinōnian) of soul and body’.168 He only formulates it clearly late in his text, but we should not let it go unremarked here.

162 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,1–7). 163 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,3). Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 12 (Kotter and Ledrux 302,53), where the soul is described as ‘making use of an organized body’ (organikō kechrēmenē sōmati). 164 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,9–10). 165 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,10–11). 166 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,14–15). Compare Gal. Usu Part. I 1. 167 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 39,12–16). 168 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,19–22).

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92  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature ‘As we say that an animal is composed of soul and body’, he writes in Hum. Nat. 33, ‘but is neither body as such nor soul alone, but both together, so it is with choice’.169 Just as human choice cannot be actualized (or analysed) without a union—Nemesius calls it a ‘mixed’ (miktos) union—of the body’s desire (orexis) and the soul’s decision (krisis);170 so a human cannot be actualized (or analysed) without a union—a real union—of body and soul. And a real union of body and soul is not, as Nemesius recognizes, purely instrumental. It is because the soul is a ‘multitudinous’ substance that Nemesius permits himself to observe that humankind’s union of substances—soul and body—is a ‘multitudinous’ union. The body is instrumental, but it is not merely instrumental; and the constitutive union of humankind is hierarchical, but it is not perfectly hierarchical. Thus, for instance, Nemesius starkly restates the human soul’s su­per­ ior­ity to the human body in Hum. Nat. 3. ‘The soul, being incorporeal’, he writes here, ‘is not mastered by the body, but itself masters the body’.171 The soul’s mastery of the body is the bedrock of Nemesius’ anthropology. Moreover, this mastery is solely and precisely secured—to his mind—by the bodilessness of soul. If the human’s unity were not produced by a ‘union of substances’,172 one bodily and the other bodiless, Nemesius believes that humans would exhibit kinēsis (‘movement’) but not praxis (‘act’). The mastery of the body by a bodiless soul is the conditio sine qua non of imputability, and Nemesius never doubts this mastery. Nevertheless, Nemesius profoundly complicates the human soul’s mastery of its body—and even appears to naively contradict it—without doubting it. For a page after he asserts that the human soul ‘is not mastered by the body, but itself masters the body’;173 Nemesius concedes that we observe the human soul ‘sometimes mastering the body, and sometimes being mastered’.174 It is in order to clarify the latter phenomenon—the soul’s imperfect mastery of the body—that Nemesius writes this: ‘The soul, being one of the things which are multitudinous, seems both to be affected with the body in a way through its affinity with it, and sometimes to master it.’175 It is precisely this duplicity which reveals, for Nemesius, the specificity of humankind. For this much can be reconstructed from Hum. Nat. 1–3: (i) If our soul never mastered our body and ‘conquered its impulses’,176 we would be beasts—who ‘live only by natural impulse’ (Hum. Nat. 1).177

169 Nem. Nat. Hom. 33 (Morani 101,6–8). 171 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 41,5–9). 173 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 41,5–9). 175 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,11–12). 177 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,11–13).

170 Nem. Nat. Hom. 33 (Morani 101,4–5). 172 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 44,10). 174 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,11–16). 176 Nem. Nat. Hom. 25 (Morani 85,25–86,1).

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The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5  93 (ii) If our soul were never affected with our body, we would be angels—who ‘have no compulsion that leads them to sin, but are by nature free from bodily affections’ (Hum. Nat. 1).178 (iii) If our soul were affected with our body but never mastered by it, we would be divine—which is to say, for the bishop of Emesa, we would be like Christ (Hum. Nat. 3). Nemesius himself argues the last point towards the close of Hum. Nat. 3. He there contrasts the human soul, which he writes is ‘affected with the body . . . through its affinity (oikeiotēta) with it’;179 and the sublimity of ‘God the Word’, which he believes is ‘in no way transmuted by this communion (koinōnias) of body and soul’.180 Note in passing Nemesius’ substitution, here, of the terms ‘affinity’ (oikeiotēs) and ‘communion’ (koinōnia). This should call to mind his systematic correlation of koinōnia and a concept-­field that we called oikeiōsis in Hum. Nat. 1. Moving towards a conclusion, however, we should observe that the singular union which Nemesius calls ‘the incarnation of God’ provides a model for the imperfect union of human soul and body.181 Nemesius appeals for this model to Porphyry, a Neoplatonist who had—in Nemesius’ phrase—‘raised his own voice against Christ’.182 In a rare flash of polemics, the bishop quotes Porphyry’s Miscellaneous Investigations in defence of his doctrine of Incarnation. ‘The testimonies of adversaries on our behalf ’, he fairly gloats, ‘permit no reply!’183 (Might this recollect a principle from the law-­courts?) Porphyry’s testimony, which Nemesius then refers to the union of God and humankind in Christ, is that the human soul can ‘become one’ with its body while remaining ‘untransmuted’.184 Earlier in Hum. Nat. 3, Nemesius quotes the young Plotinus’ master, Ammonius Saccas, to the effect that intelligible things ‘remain unconfused’ when they are united with sensible things.185 This is Nemesius’ solution—via Ammonius and Porphyry—to his aporia of the union of incorporeal soul and body in Hum. Nat. 3. He believes in a real union (and a sort of mixture) of the human soul and body, which entails no confusion of the soul. ‘The soul is not transmuted (alloioutai) in this union’, Nemesius states.186 He then elaborates further on this union sans confusion:

178 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 10,3–8). 179 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,11–12). 180 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,13–15). 181 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 120,20–1). 182 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,22–43,16). 183 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,23–43,1). For more on this: M.  Streck, Das schönste Gut. Der menschliche Wille bei Nemesius von Emesa und Gregor von Nyssa (Göttingen, 2005), 34–8. 184 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 43,1–16). 185 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 39,16–40,2). 186 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 40,7).

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94  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature The soul, then, is unified, and is unified to the body without being confused with it. Their being affected together shows that they are unified; for a living thing is affected as a whole, since it is one. But it is clear that the soul also remains unconfused from the fact that the soul is in a way separated from the body in sleep . . .187

The relevance of sleep to Nemesius’ concept of henōsis has already been sketched (in the first section of this chapter (‘The Aporia of Soul and Body’)). But the most decisive proof, for Nemesius, that the human soul remains ‘unconfused’ (asunchutos) with body in this life is that it remains capable of ‘opposition’ (enantiotēs) to the body and its urges. From Nemesius’ thematization of the harmony of soul and body in Hum. Nat. 3–5, we turn now to his thematization of inner conflict in Hum. Nat. 2. It is this duplicity—that the soul is at once a natural presence in the body, and a contested ruler in the body—which will orient Nemesius’ schematization of physiological powers in Hum. Nat. 6–28 (surveyed in chapter 4), and his cosmopolitan reasonings about human autonomy and civil law in Hum. Nat. 29–43 (reconstructed in chapter 5).

The Conflict of Soul and Body In Hum. Nat. 1, Nemesius cautions that ‘as long as we do not know that our soul is according to its substance, it is out of sequence to deal with its activities’.188 He then expresses his intention to treat ‘what belongs to virtue and what belongs to piety’ when the time comes, in On Human Nature, ‘for us to give an account (logon) concerning soul and body’.189 Significantly, Nemesius states his intention to ‘give an account concerning soul and body’ immediately after he claims that ‘the communion (koinōnian) of soul and body’ is a condition of possibility of ‘the virtues’.190 It should not be contentious to infer from this that Nemesius’ chapters on soul and body, namely Hum. Nat. 2–5, are—in the bishop’s own mind— orient­ed to the question of the possibility of virtue. The source-­critical optic of much of the literature on On Human Nature has tended to obscure the structural significance of Hum. Nat. 2–5, and especially of Hum. Nat. 2, which is arguably the most doxography-­ heavy chapter in a doxography-­heavy text. Yet we cannot fail to register the fact that Hum. Nat. 2 is the only chapter whose purpose, according to Nemesius, is to ‘rebut a multitude

187 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 40,10–16). 189 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,23–6,5).

188 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,3–5). 190 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,19–22).

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The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5  95 of opinions’.191 And we should not fail to report—in barest outline—the tenets which Nemesius seeks to disprove in this chapter. ‘Nearly all the ancients disagree’, Nemesius begins, ‘in their reasoning concerning the soul’.192 Originally a sceptic trope, this is for Nemesius a dogmatic patristic motif—namely, that of the incoherence of ‘pagan’ philosophy (dissensio philosophorum).193 For roughly fifteen pages (in Morani’s edition), Nemesius sets out what he takes to be convincing forms of refutations of ‘the doctrines of the ancients concerning the soul’.194 Nemesius’ intention here is not, as he tells us in the last sentence of the chapter, to prove the immortality of the soul. His more modest—but still, of course, formidable—task is to ‘demonstrate’ that the human soul ‘is none of those things that perish’.195 It is left to us to deduce from this that the soul is imperishable. A more comprehensive outline of Nemesius’ polemics in Hum. Nat. 2 could be drawn, but his own outline will suffice. At the close of the chapter, he tells us that he has sought to demonstrate that ‘the soul is neither a body nor a harmony nor a mixture nor any other quality’.196 This permits us to reconstruct this chapter, with welcome concision, under the following headings: (i) Nemesius’ argument that the soul is not a body features references to Critias (soul is blood), Hippo (water), Democritus (fire), Heraclitus (vapour), and the Stoics (breath).197 His refutation centres upon the Stoics, however,198 and he is especially impressed by an argument from hereditary dispositions that he attributes to the second Stoic scholarch, Cleanthes (died 232/231 bce). The fact that ‘we are born not only resembling our parents physically (kata to sōma), but also spiritually (kata tēn psuchēn) in our affections, ­habits, and dispositions’, Nemesius concedes, is ‘not easily dismissed’.199 He will return to the reality of heredity effects on humoral mixture—and thereby, on spiritual dispositions—in his conclusion to Hum. Nat. 40, ‘Concerning Which Things Are in Our Power’.200 (ii) Nemesius’ argument that the soul is not a harmony features references to the early Pythagorean Dinarchus—surely the early Peripatetic, Dicaearchus of Messene (died c.310 bce)?201—and to Simmias of Thebes in Plato’s 191 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 17,14–15). 192 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 16,12). Compare the more caustic tone in Herm. Irris. 2–3. 193  David Runia is right to point out ‘a nice paradox’ in the patristic corpus, namely, that ‘in their use of doxography the dogmatic Fathers have as allies the sceptical philosophers they held in such low regard’: Runia, ‘Festugiere Revisited’, 18. 194 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 30,15–17). 195 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 38,8–9). 196 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,21–2). 197 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 16,13–21). 198 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 18,5–22,18). 199 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 20,12–17). 200 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 116,9–117,5). 201 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 17,5–10); Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 262. It is worth noting that Morani prints ‘Deinarchos’ in keeping with the manuscript tradition, while Matthaei emends to ‘Dikaiarchos’: Matthaei, De natura hominis, 68; Morani, De natura hominis, 17.

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96  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature Phaedo.202 His refutation of this doctrine is drawn from Socrates’ reply to Simmias in that dialogue. (iii) Nemesius’ argument that the soul is not a mixture features references to Dinarchus (or Dicaearchus),203 and to Hippocrates and Galen.204 The target of his refutation is Galen,205 but Nemesius wishes us to note that Galen’s doctrine is ‘constructed out of Hippocrates’.206 It is therefore fair to describe the concept of the soul which he refutes, here, as Hippocratic–Galenic. (iv)  Nemesius’ argument that the soul is not a quality is restricted to a Peripatetic definition which he attributes to Aristotle, namely, that the soul is ‘the first actuality of an organic natural body which potentially has life’.207 Because Nemesius interprets the Aristotelian concept of actuality (entelecheia) in terms of quality (poiotēs),208 he faults Aristotle for implying that the soul—like any quality—‘cannot subsist on its own’.209 In his concluding summary of Hum. Nat. 2, Nemesius neglects to mention his pages on the representation of soul as number (Pythagoras and Xenocrates),210 and on the tenets of various late-­ antique ‘heretics’ (Eunomius of Cyzicus, Apollinaris of Laodicea, and so on).211 We too will be forgiven for skirting those pages without comment. Only headings (ii) and (iii) in this outline will concern us, and there is only a single phenomenon introduced under these headings that will detain us. The soul’s ‘opposition’ (enantiotēs) to the body is the only phenomenon which figures in a decisive way in Nemesius’ refutation (ii) of Simmias’ theory of soul-­as-­ harmony, and then in his refutation (iii) of Galen’s theory of soul-­as-­mixture. What is more, it later figures prominently in the final chapters of On Human Nature. This should suffice to establish the importance of this phenomenon, which is due to the fact that it represents a condition of possibility of what Nemesius calls ‘the virtues’.212 Although ‘the soul is life’,213 Nemesius’ fundamental question in Hum. Nat. 2 is not how the soul vivifies the body. He stresses that ‘the body is totally destroyed when the soul is cut off from it’;214 but as he also points out in this chapter, the

202 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 22,19–22). 203  When it is first introduced, the opinion of Dinarchus (or Dicaearchus) is described both in terms of harmonia and krasis: Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 17,5–10). 204 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 23,24–24,2). 205 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 23,24–6,9). 206 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 24,1–2). 207 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 17,4–5). 208 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 26,10–11). 209 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 26,10–29,18). 210 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 29,19–30,17). 211 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 30,18–33,19). 212 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,19–22). 213 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 40,5). 214 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,26–7).

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The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5  97 loss of most of our bodily constituents ‘brings an end to life’.215 After mentioning blood, phlegm, and bile, he adds ‘the liver, the brain, the heart, the stomach, the kidneys, the intestines and many other things’.216 Because of this, Nemesius’ basic concern in this chapter—and throughout On Human Nature—is not with bare life but with the condition of possibility of virtue (aretē). This condition of possibility, he believes, is autonomy (autexousiotēs). And in Hum. Nat. 2, he introduces the soul’s opposition (enantiotēs) to the drives and caprices of the body as an infallible sign of human autonomy. Against the pre-­Platonic notion (ii) that the soul is a harmony, Nemesius decides to ‘set out the refutations . . . found in Plato’s Phaedo’.217 What he then writes (or copies) is not much more than a bare list of Plato’s arguments in the Phaedo from recollection,218 from proportion,219 and so on. With one exception, none of these arguments will have the slightest significance in On Human Nature outside of the cursory ‘refutation’ in which they figure here. Nemesius’ argument from the soul’s opposition to bodily urges is the exception. He writes this: ‘The soul both opposes the body and imposes the word of command, being its ruler. But a harmony neither leads nor opposes. Therefore the soul is not a harmony.’220 Regardless of Nemesius’ source, his correlation of the soul’s ‘leading’ and ‘opposing’ is authentically Platonic,221 as is his representation of the soul’s ‘op­pos­ ition’ as a mode of ‘rule’.222 Nemesius cites the phenomenon of ‘opposition’, here and later in On Human Nature, as a common one. It introduces no arcane concepts, and it requires no dialectical proofs. As Socrates asks Simmias in the Phaedo, so Nemesius seems—implicitly—to ask us: ‘Do we not see the soul opposing the body in a thousand different ways?’223 Nemesius’ refutation of the Hippocratic–Galenic notion (iii) that the soul is a mixture is more elaborate and more elusive than this Phaedo-inspired refutation of Simmias. It is elusive, in the first place, because Galen ‘asserts nothing on this question’, even though ‘he seems on the whole to opine that the soul is a mixture’;224 and in the second place, because Galen is quoted as saying—nothing. ‘About the rational soul’, Nemesius reports, ‘Galen is in two minds, saying’—precisely nothing.225 The text is lacunar at this point, and no quote from Galen is

215 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 19,18). 216 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 19,15–19). 217 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 22,19–22). 218 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 22,22–3,5). Compare Pl. Ph. 72d–77a. 219 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 23,10–17). Compare Pl. Ph. 92e–93d. 220 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 23,8–10). 221 Pl. Ph. 93a: hēgeisthai . . . enantia . . . enantiōthēnai; 94c–d: hēgemoneuousa . . . enantioumenē. 222 Pl. Ph. 94d: despozousa; 94e: despozein. 223 Pl. Ph. 94b. 224 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 23,24–6). 225 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 24,3–4).

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98  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature preserved in the manuscripts. When Nemesius resumes, he is introducing his refutation of Galen’s putative notion.226 Having registered this caveat and this lacuna, we can now register the fact that Nemesius criticizes the Hippocratic–Galenic idea of soul-­as-­mixture on a number of grounds (which need not be gone into). As with refutation (ii), however, so with refutation (iii)—there is only a single, stripped-­down argument which helps to set the arc of On Human Nature. It is this: ‘Further, mixture does not oppose bodily desires, but even works with them. For mixture stimulates desire, while the soul opposes. Therefore the soul is not a mixture.’227 Nemesius immediately passes from this to a new objection to Galen’s doctrine: ‘Further, if the soul is a mixture . . .’228 He gives no formal indication that his argument from opposition is more important than, say, his argument from the pitifulness of the body: ‘It happens that the same person is at once misshapen, weak, and diseased. Therefore the soul is not a good mixture (eukrasia) of the body.’229 The importance of the fact that ‘the soul opposes’ is signalled by the fact that Nemesius returns to it in Hum. Nat. 2, and again in Hum. Nat. 40. Here in Hum. Nat. 2, he asks abruptly, before he transitions out of (iii) his Galenic paragraphs on soul as mixture to (iv) his Peripatetic paragraphs soul as quality: ‘How then do certain natural faults and virtues come upon us humans?’ Arrestingly, he replies: ‘Truly it happens because of the bodily mixture.’230 Of course, the human soul is not a ‘bodily mixture’ in On Human Nature. Nemesius elaborately argues this and tirelessly repeats it. The human soul is an incorporeal substance. Nevertheless, Nemesius holds that it is ‘because of bodily mixture’ that some of us are prone to rage, some to misery, some to lust.231 But the bishop interrupts this line of reasoning in a revealing way: ‘But some conquer and overcome. It is clear that they conquer their bodily mixture. But it is one thing that conquers, another that is conquered. So mixture is one thing, and soul another thing. For the body is an instrument of the soul.232 These curt, confident lines could be read as a summary of Nemesius’ cosmopolitan anthropology. His basic anthropological datum is political: ‘Some conquer’. The potency of human reason to originate—that is, to dictate—human acts is Nemesius’ controlling observation and innermost conviction. Human reason, as he asserts later in Hum. Nat. 2, is ‘free and autonomous’.233 Yet he situates human autonomy—the fact that ‘some conquer’—within a subtly theorized and comprehensively anatomized

226  Compare Matthaei, De natura hominis, 87; Morani, De natura hominis, 24; and G. Verbeke and J. R. Moncho, Némésius d’Émèse, De natura hominis. Traduction de Burgundio de Pise (Leiden, 1975), 32: ‘D’habitude Némésius cite par cœur: a-­t-­il voulu introduire ici une citation littérale? La formule par laquelle l’auteur annonce la passage qui manque, semble l’indiquer.’ 227 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 24,25–25,1). 228 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 25,2–5). 229 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 25,14–20). 230 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 25,20–1). 231 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 25,22–3). 232 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 25,24–6). 233 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 36,26–37,1).

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The Union of Substances: On Human Nature 2–5  99 account of the body and ‘bodily mixture’. So engrossing is Nemesius’ concern with physiological function and humoral influence that it is possible to lose sight of the fact that, throughout his text’s central chapters, it is nevertheless ‘one thing [a bodiless soul] that conquers, another [a body] that is conquered’.234 But as we will see, Nemesius’ guiding intuition in Hum. Nat. 6–28, derived ultimately from Plato’s Timaeus, is that the living human body is structured like a rational city in the which ‘the hegemony of thought’ governs the body through its system of organs.235

234 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 25,25). 235  Compare Pl. Tim. 69d–70d; and Nem. Nat. Hom. 6 (Morani 57,5–15).

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4

The Organization of Powers On Human Nature 6–28

En Route from Substance to Act The argument of this chapter is that the physiological and psychological chapters of Nemesius’ text (Hum. Nat. 6–28), in which the medical anthropology of the Hippocratic–Galenic tradition comes to the fore, are not random memoranda on the human organism or disjecta membra extracted from a range of late-­antique sources. On the contrary, they mark a decisive phase in the argument of Nemesius’ text. The human is defined by Nemesius as the only living being which is at once ruler and ruled. Because of this, the human—composed of body and soul—is for him an image of the world, or a ‘little world’.1 And in Hum. Nat. 6–28, this image of humankind is given an anatomical proof.2 It would be highly misleading to imply that the significance of Nemesius’ physio­logic­al and psychological chapters had simply gone unnoticed in the literature. Sensitive treatments of these chapters have been written in book-­length studies by Bolesław Domanski, Werner Jaeger, and Alberto Siclari,3 and more recently, in articles by Armelle Debru and Susan Wessel.4 The chapters’ thematic unity has been sketched by Nemesius’ most recent editors in the introduction to a lavishly annotated translation of On Human Nature.5 Though not inconsistent with that sketch, the reconstruction offered here seeks to make new connections and bring new clarity to this bloc of text. Perhaps most notably, this is the first contribution to highlight Nemesius’ use of governmental terms and images. To begin, it cannot be denied that the physiological and psychological chapters of On Human Nature seem disjointed. The first question which faces us is, therefore, not which argument Nemesius is advancing in these chapters, but whether 1 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,5–6). 2  This is confirmed by John of Damascus’ reception of Nem. Hum. Nat. 6–28: Dam. Fid. Orth. II 13–23 (Kotter and Ledrux 308–42). 3 B. Domanski, Die Psychologie des Nemesius (Münster, 1900), 80–129; W. W. Jaeger, Nemesios von Emesa. Quellenforschungen zum Neuplatonismus und seinen Anfängen bei Poseidonios (Berlin, 1914), 4–67; A. Siclari, L’antropologia di Nemesio di Emesa (Padova, 1974), 163–80. 4  A. Debru, ‘Le mouvement volontaire chez Némésius d’Émèse’, Les Pères de l’Église face à la science médicale de leur temps, ed. V. Boudon-­Millot (Paris, 2005), 89–103; S. Wessel, ‘Human Action and the Passions in Nemesius of Emesa’, Studia Patristica 47 (2010), 3–14. 5  R. Sharples and P. van der Eijk, Nemesius, On the Nature of Man (Liverpool, 2008), 9–11.

Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology from Roman Syria. David Lloyd Dusenbury. Oxford University Press. © David Lloyd Dusenbury 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856962.003.0004

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The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28  101 he is advancing one at all. After all, Hum. Nat. 6–28 is a bloc of chapters which ­differ wildly in terms of length—from six lines to six pages in Moreno Morani’s critical edition.6 They proceed, at first glance, haphazardly from the power of imagination (Hum. Nat. 6) to the panoply of sensation (Hum. Nat. 7–11); from intellection and memory (Hum. Nat. 12–13) to the varieties of discursive reason (Hum. Nat. 14); from a pair of excursuses on the soul (Hum. Nat. 15–16) to the desiderative passions (Hum. Nat. 17–18); from the spirited passions (Hum. Nat. 19–21) to a further excursus on the soul (Hum. Nat. 22); from the nutritive power and pulsation (Hum. Nat. 23–4) to the system of generative organs (Hum. Nat. 25); from a final excursus on the soul (Hum. Nat. 26) to voluntary motion and the physiology of the spine (Hum. Nat. 27); before Nemesius concludes with a physio­logic­al account of res­pir­ation and a peroration on organs qua organs (Hum. Nat. 28). Some of Nemesius’ commentators can be forgiven for treating this collection of themes more or less as a concatenation of chapters which present no single controlling intuition, much less a sharply defined line of reasoning.7 Nevertheless, there is reason to look for an argument here, because Nemesius himself states clearly—as we will see—that Hum. Nat. 6–28 contain an ‘argument’. And we will begin our reconstruction of this argument at the end of his chapter on the ‘cosmic elements’ (described in chapter 3).8 We have not had occasion to note that Hum. Nat. 5 features a Hippocratic rebuttal of the pre-­Platonic idea that ‘there is only one element’ such as ‘fire or air or water’. The anthropological corollary of this idea is that a human, too, is composed of ‘a single element’. But the latter cannot be true, according to Nemesius’ quotation from the Hippocratic On Human Nature. If one were composed of a single element, we read here, one ‘would never feel pain’; for ‘being one [element], there would not be anything to be pained by’.9 In this way, at the close of Hum. Nat. 5, Nemesius establishes his proximity to the Hippocratic–Galenic tradition. The bishop is referring, here, to an eponymous text.10 What matters for us is that Nemesius’ recollection of the Hippocratic On Human Nature prepares him to make the claim with which he closes off Hum. Nat. 2–5 (a set of chapters on soul and body), and with which he opens Hum. Nat. 6–28 (his chapters on human physiology and psychology). This is Nemesius, making his transition to Hum. Nat. 6: 6  Six lines: Nem. Hum. Nat. 10 (Morani 67,5–11). Six pages: Hum. Nat. 7 (Morani 57,17–62,25). 7 Domanski, Die Psychologie des Nemesius, 74; William Telfer, Cyril of Jerusalem and Nemesius of Emesa (London, 1955), 346 note 6. 8 Nem. Hum. Nat. 5 (Morani 47,4). 9 Nem. Hum. Nat. 5 (Morani 53,20–54,10). Both of Galen’s commentaries on the (pseudo-) Hippocratic De Natura Hominis seem to be known to Nemesius: Galeni In Hippocratis De natura hominis commentaria tria, ed. Johannes Mewaldt (Leipzig, 1914); and On the Elements According to Hippocrates. De Elementis ex Hippocratis Sententia, ed. with English trans. and comm. Phillip de Lacy (Berlin, 1996). 10 Nem. Hum. Nat. 5 (Morani 53,21–54,2 and 54,9–10).

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102  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature The body is the instrument of the soul and it is divided up in correspondence with the powers of the soul. For it is constructed to be serviceable and useful for these, so that none of the soul’s powers should be impeded by the body. At least, specific parts of the body are assigned to each power of the soul for its function, as the argument will demonstrate as it proceeds (hōs proiōn ho logos apodeixei). For the soul is in the position of a skilled worker, the body of an instrument, the matter is what the act is concerned with, the completion is the act itself.11

Notice in the first place that Nemesius tells us here that his text is entering a new phase and that beginning in Hum. Nat. 6 he will be presenting a distinct line of reasoning. He is thus introducing a longer ‘argument’; he is assigning a clearly defined purpose to Hum. Nat. 6 and the succeeding chapters. ‘As the argument will demonstrate as it proceeds’, Nemesius tells us, ‘specific parts of the body are assigned to each power of the soul for its function’.12 This is a new claim in Hum. Nat., even though it sharpens and reflects the Galenic thesis which Nemesius deploys in his criticism of reincarnation in Hum. Nat. 2. If humans souls are reincarnated in non-­human bodies, he argues there (against certain traditions of late-­antique Platonism), then it becomes false that ‘the soul has a use for all parts of the body’.13 And that is one of Nemesius’ most basic claims; it recurs throughout Hum. Nat. 6–28. From the power of im­agin­ ation in Hum. Nat. 6, in which the soul instantaneously ‘functions through the sense-­organs’; to the power of respiration in Hum. Nat. 28, of which Nemesius says that ‘the soul . . . sets in motion the respiratory organs’; the clearly defined purpose of Hum. Nat. 6–28 is to demonstrate that organs of the human body correlate to powers of the human soul and are brought into being to realize functions of the soul.14 It is because Nemesius theorizes the body as an organization of ­powers that the human body serves him as an image of the human soul. We should pause here to raise a question, however. For, granting that Nemesius’ argument concerning the organization of powers commences in Hum. Nat. 6, what permits us to locate the conclusion of his argument in Hum. Nat. 28? Is there evidence that allows us to treat Hum. Nat. 6–28 as a unity? In Hum. Nat. 28, there is a formal indicator which signals that the argument Nemesius introduced in Hum. Nat. 6 is being concluded. The bishop writes this in Hum. Nat. 28:

11 Nem. Hum. Nat. 5 (Morani 54,23–55,4). 12 Nem. Hum. Nat. 5 (Morani 55,1–3). 13 Nem. Hum. Nat. 2 (Morani 37,14–15). Compare Gal. Usu Part. I 1; and D. L. Dusenbury, ‘The Limits of Punishment: A Critique of Reincarnation in Nemesius of Emesa’s De Natura Hominis’, Studia Patristica (in press). 14  Sense-­organs: Nem. Hum. Nat. 6 (Morani 55,9–10); and respiratory organs: Nem. Hum. Nat. 28 (Morani 90,22–4).

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The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28  103 ‘Thus the most decisive parts of the body for existence itself and for the ne­ces­ sities of life are divided up among the powers of the soul. If anything has been omitted, it will readily be gathered from what has already been said.’15

This is a coda to Hum. Nat. 6–28, in which Nemesius echoes his overture to the bloc of chapters. For, when he is introducing the argument of Hum. Nat. 6–28, he states his thesis in these terms: ‘The body is . . . divided up in correspondence with the powers of the soul’.16 And having argued this for a third of his text— that is, for roughly forty pages (in Morani’s critical edition)—he restates it in virtually identical terms: ‘The most decisive parts of the body . . . are divided up among the p ­ owers of the soul.’17 There is no reason to doubt that this echo marks a formal completion, and a break, in On Human Nature. When Nemesius concludes that ‘if anything has been omitted, it will readily be gathered from what has already been said’, he is referring us to a phase of his text which begins in Hum. Nat. 6.18 This reading is confirmed by numerous other signals which occur in this bloc of chapters. Consider the following passages. In Hum. Nat. 12, Nemesius says: ‘The power of the imagination—its organs, its parts, and the commonality and difference of its parts—has been adequately described so far as possible in a brief account.’19 At the beginning of Hum. Nat. 15, he writes: ‘Some of the organs for these powers have already been stated, others will be stated in what follows.’20 And at the end of Hum. Nat. 26, Nemesius tries once again to orient us: ‘The organs of [involuntary motion] have already been described, and we shall now describe those of voluntary motion.’21 There is therefore no lack of textual evidence that Hum. Nat. 6–28 comprise a unity. These formal indicators are nevertheless obscured by Nemesius’ masses of material, and only become visible upon close reading, and once the structure and architectonic significance of this bloc of chapters has been identified. Having determined that Hum. Nat. 6–28 constitutes a formal unity, we now have to show that Nemesius’ incipit invites us to treat this bloc of chapters as the second phase of a three-­phase argument in On Human Nature. The structure of this argument is suggested by a three-­phase scheme that Nemesius alludes to in

15 Nem. Hum. Nat. 28 (Morani 91,19–22). Compare Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 851. 16 Nem. Hum. Nat. 5 (Morani 54,23–4). Compare Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 493. 17 Nem. Hum. Nat. 28 (Morani 91,19–21). 18 Nem. Hum. Nat. 28 (Morani 91,21–2). 19 Nem. Hum. Nat. 12 (Morani 68,4–6). Compare Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 585. 20 Nem. Hum. Nat. 15 (Morani 72,6–7). Compare Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 623. 21 Nem. Hum. Nat. 26 (Morani 87,25–6). Compare Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 802.

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104  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature Hum. Nat. 34, according to which there is an order of ontological precedence which proceeds from substance (ousia) to power (dunamis) to act (praxis).22 That this scheme structures Nemesius’ text is indicated by a comment in his proem (Hum. Nat. 1), where he cautions that it would be ‘out of sequence’ (ouk estin akolouthon) to deal with the ‘functions’ of the soul before the soul had been treated ‘according to its substance’.23 In fact, in Hum. Nat. 2–5, Nemesius addresses the question of human ‘substance’. It belongs to humans to be comprised of ‘an intellectual soul and a body’, as the first sentence of Hum. Nat. 1 suggests.24 Having justified his concept of the human ‘substance’ in Hum. Nat. 2–5, Nemesius transitions to the question of ‘power’ in Hum. Nat. 6–28. In the incipit to his physiological and psychological chapters, Nemesius embraces this idea of the soul’s presence in the human body: ‘The soul is in the position of a skilled worker, the body of an instrument.’25 His demonstration in Hum. Nat. 6–28, he tells us, will therefore concern ‘the powers of the soul’. The thesis of Hum. Nat. 6–28 is that ‘the body . . . is divided up in correspondence with the powers of the soul’.26 It is this correspondence that makes the body an ‘instrument’ of the soul, and parts of the body ‘organs’ of the soul. But we must also note that Nemesius anticipates his later transition from ‘power’ to ‘act’ in the final bloc of chapters in his (unfinished) text, namely, Hum. Nat. 29–43. For the bishop takes care to include the terminology of the ‘act’ in his incipit to Hum. Nat. 6–28, alluding to a matter that ‘the act is concerned with’, and then asserting that ‘the completion is the act itself’.27 Midway between substance (ousia) and act (praxis), in the three-­phase scheme of the Hum. Nat., is power (dunamis). It is therefore logical for Nemesius to place his treatment of power (Hum. Nat. 6–28) midway between his treatments of substance (Hum. Nat. 2–5) and of act (Hum. Nat. 29–43). Having dealt with the ontological status of the ‘skilled worker’ (technitēs) in Hum. Nat. 2–5 and intending to take up the juridical status of the soul’s specific ‘work’ (ergon) in Hum. Nat. 29–43, Nemesius here in Hum. Nat. 6–28 deals with the anatomical status of the worker’s living ‘instrument’ (organon): the human body. It will of course be asked how a number of Nemesius’ commentators could have failed to identify the architectonic significance of Hum. Nat. 6–28.28 This question becomes especially pressing if—as is claimed here—Nemesius’ thesis in  these chapters is clearly stated, their unity is formally denoted, and they are logic­al­ly situated within On Human Nature. This failure is perhaps due to 22 Nem. Hum. Nat. 34 (Morani 103,11–17). Compare Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 913. 23 Nem. Hum. Nat. 1 (Morani 6,3–5). 24 Nem. Hum. Nat. 1 (Morani 1,3–5). 25 Nem. Hum. Nat. 5 (Morani 55,3–4). 26 Nem. Hum. Nat. 5 (Morani 54,23–4). 27 Nem. Hum. Nat. 5 (Morani 55,3–4). 28  There is, however, a crisp description of its significance in Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, 9–11, which concludes: ‘Nemesius’ physiological treatment of soul functions prepares the ground for the discussion of free will in the next part of the treatise.’

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The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28  105 Nemesius’ distribution of material, in these chapters, in light of a number of physiological, psychological, and ethical schematizations. It is necessary to identify these rival schematizations before proceeding further in our reconstruction of Hum. Nat. 6–28.

Schematizations of Soul and Body Nemesius states in Hum. Nat. 1 that he believes in a ‘communion (koinōnian) of soul and body’.29 He furthermore believes that this ‘communion’ is not anarchic but hierarchic. For as he observes in Hum. Nat. 2, ‘the soul both opposes the body and imposes the word of command, being its ruler’.30 And, beginning in Hum. Nat. 6, Nemesius’ thesis is that ‘the body is . . . divided up in correspondence with the powers of the soul’.31 Given all this, it could be predicted that descriptions of the body in Hum. Nat. 6–28 would be structured by the bishop’s perception of the soul’s government of the body. In other words, it could be predicted that the organizing schema behind Nemesius’ physiological and psychological descriptions would concern the soul’s capacity to ‘impose the word of command’ through the body’s organs. This is precisely what we find in Hum. Nat. 6–28, provided we read closely. One of the only chapters in which Nemesius touches on the physiology of the sexes is illustrative. In Hum. Nat. 25, Nemesius is describing what he calls the ‘organs of the seminal power’.32 Though these organs differ in human males and females, it is intriguing that the bishop asserts a morphological parity. ‘Women have all the same parts as men’, he writes, ‘inside and not outside’.33 Yet where Nemesius’ stress falls in this chapter is not on morphology; it is on what he takes to be an ontological given: ‘Women have free will (to autexousion) about intercourse.’ This ‘free will’ in sexual matters demonstrates, for him, that women are in this regard ‘the same as men’.34 Because ‘the desire for sexual intercourse belongs to nature’, women like men can be ‘drawn towards it when unwilling’. What matters most in On Human Nature, however, is this: ‘The act is incontestably up to us . . . and in our power (eph’ hēmin).’35 Though the ‘organs of the seminal power’ differ in human males and females,36 Nemesius holds that the power to consent to 29 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,20). 30 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 23,8–10). 31 Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 54,23–4). 32 Nem. Nat. Hom. 25 (Morani 86,1). 33 Nem. Nat. Hom. 25 (Morani 86,18–19). 34 Nem. Nat. Hom. 25 (Morani 87,12–14). These lines are bracketed in Morani’s edition because they not found in the Armenian manuscript tradition; but Nemesius’ most recent editors have treated them as genuine: Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 797. Compare Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 55,5–6). 35 Nem. Nat. Hom. 25 (Morani 85,24–86,1). 36  And thus, their ‘place’ in the sexual act differs, according to the bishop’s sketch of it: Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 55,5–6).

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106  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature a sexual act—or, crucially, to withhold consent—is sexless. It belongs to humans qua human, and not to humans qua sexed.37 Returning to Nemesius’ organizing schema, it is admittedly hard to track in Hum. Nat. 6–28. This is because he reveals it relatively late, and because he overlays it with rival articulations of the same basic schema. Doxography here, more than in any other part of On Human Nature, threatens to distract. The critical chapter is Hum. Nat. 15, where Nemesius states how his accounts of the organs of sensation, memory, and reason in Hum. Nat. 6–14 reflect his organizing schema and connect to his accounts of the organs of nutrition, pulsation, generation, res­ pir­ation, affection, and voluntary motion in Hum. Nat. 16–28. It is not immediately clear that or how Hum. Nat. 6–14 are linked to Hum. Nat. 16–28. For, when he is introducing Hum. Nat. 6, Nemesius merely says that ‘the powers of the soul are divided into imagination, thought, and memory’.38 He then proceeds to describe (i) the organs of imagination and sensation (Hum. Nat. 6–11), (ii) the organs of thought and memory (Hum. Nat. 12–13), and (iii) the organs of speech or ‘explicit reason’ (Hum. Nat. 14).39 It is tempting to read Hum. Nat. 6–14 as a self-­enclosed bloc of chapters, because, in Hum. Nat. 14, Nemesius concludes his description of ‘the powers of the soul’ which he introduces in Hum. Nat. 6. And it is therefore tempting to see a disjunction, rather than a transition, when Nemesius advances to his account of the human passions in Hum. Nat. 17–21,40 an account which seems to inform— by way of John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas—the punitive topography of Dante’s Inferno.41 Precisely because Nemesius’ first physiological schema seems to reach a conclusion in Hum. Nat. 14, it is imperative for us to ask here—immediately after Hum. Nat. 14—which schema links his chapters on intellection and memory (Hum. Nat. 12–13), say, to his chapters on anger and fear (Hum. Nat. 20–1), and beyond that, to his chapters on pulsation and the generative organs (Hum. Nat. 24–5). Fortunately, Nemesius reveals this schema in Hum. Nat. 15. Unfortunately, he buries it among rival schemas which have a certain historical interest, but none of which is structurally decisive. The bulk of Hum. Nat. 15 is given to Nemesius’ report of the rival schemas which cannot detain us. The philosopher-­bishop tells us that unnamed philo­ sophers (likely Stoics) ‘divide up the soul’ into nutritive, sensitive, and rational

37  For the ‘logic of providence’ regarding the sexes: Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 31,23–5). 38 Nem. Hum. Nat. 5 (Morani 55,6–7). 39 Nem. Hum. Nat. 14 (Morani 71,8). 40  Consider, for instance, the division of Hum. Nat. 7–11 and Hum. Nat. 16–28 in David Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque. Recherches sur la survivance de l’argumentation morale anti­ fataliste de Carnéade chez les philosophes grecs et les théologiens chrétiens des quatre premiers siècles (Amsterdam, 1973), 551, 553–4. 41  A.  A.  Triolo, ‘Ira, Cupiditas, Libido: The Dynamics of Human Passion in the Inferno’, Dante Studies 95 (1977), 1–37, here 8–11.

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The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28  107 ‘powers or kinds or parts’.42 Perhaps in his lost treatise On Human Nature,43 Zeno of Citium divides the soul into ‘eight parts’, namely the five senses, the powers of ‘speech’ and ‘generation’, and ‘the hegemon’.44 The Stoic scholarch Panaetius of Rhodes (died c.109 bce) reduces Zeno’s eight-­part schema to six, by subsuming speech under the ‘hegemon’ and by relegating the human power of generation to ‘nature’.45 And finally (in Nemesius’ non-­chronological list), Aristotle identifies five parts of the soul in his ‘books on natural philosophy’, namely the nutritive, the sensitive, the motive, the appetitive, and the cognitive.46 The purpose of Hum. Nat. 15 is to orient us to the structure of Hum. Nat. 6–28; it is a structuring chapter. But Nemesius’ encyclopaedic tendencies obscure this structure. The general impression left by Hum. Nat. 15 is of a table of complicated schemas, none of which is consistently or unreservedly deployed in Hum. Nat. 6–28. What then is the use of this chapter? It is only glimpsed at the end, when Nemesius contrasts Aristotle’s partition of the soul in his ‘books on natural philosophy’—as just noted, this is a partition into the nutritive, sensitive, motive, appetitive, and cognitive powers—with the partition of the soul in Aristotle’s ‘ethical books’.47 This is Nemesius: That is what Aristotle says in the books on natural philosophy [namely, that the human soul has five parts]; but in his ethical books he divides the soul into two primary and general categories, the rational and the irrational, and he sub­div­ ides the irrational into that which is capable of obeying reason and that which does not heed reason.48

This ‘primary and general’ division of the soul is the organizing schema of Hum. Nat. 6–28, as Nemesius then tells us in the last sentence of Hum. Nat. 15. ‘Reason has been dealt with in the earlier chapters’, he writes (meaning Hum. Nat. 6–14); ‘but we shall now make distinctions about the irrational’ (meaning Hum. Nat. 16–28).49 At the outset of Hum. Nat. 16, Nemesius reminds us of the phase of his description at which he has arrived:

42  Compare Nem. Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,4–6); and Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, notes 620–1. 43  As noted before, this is more precisely the subtitle of one of Zeno’s lost treatises, On Impulse or On Human Nature, according to Dio. Laer. Vit. VII 4. 44 Nem. Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,7–9). 45 Nem. Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,9–11). For more on this testimony: M. van Straaten, ‘Panaetius fragm. 86’, Mnemosyne (4th ser.) 9.3 (1956), 232–4. For Nemesius’ approval of Panaetius on speech: Nem. Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,10–11); and disapproval of Panaetius (sine nomine) on generation: Nem. Nat. Hom. 25 (Morani 85,23–86,1). 46 Nem. Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,12–17). 47 Nem. Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,17–21). 48 Nem. Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,17–20). 49 Nem. Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,20–1).

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108  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature Aristotle calls [the irrational] a part and a power and divides it into two, as we said . . . Of the irrational, one part does not obey reason, the other is capable of obeying reason. Further, what is capable of obeying reason is divided into two, the desirous and the spirited.50

Nemesius’ description of the organs of the irrational soul which are ‘capable of obeying reason’ is contained in Hum. Nat. 16–21. These chapters are concerned with ‘the desirous and the spirited’ powers of the soul, and their organs. Nemesius tells us this at the outset of Hum. Nat. 22: ‘This, then, is the condition of the [ir­ration­al] part [of the soul] that is capable of obeying reason.’51 And what is to come in the following chapters? Nemesius tells us that, too, in Hum. Nat. 22: ‘To that which is not capable of reason belong the nutritive, the generative, and pulsation.’52 It is therefore no coincidence that he proceeds to describe the nutritive functions in Hum. Nat. 23, pulsation in Hum. Nat. 24, and the generative organs in Hum. Nat. 25. Having described the rational soul and its organs in Hum. Nat. 6–14; having introduced us to Aristotle’s ethical schema in Hum. Nat. 15, and having then described the susceptible irrational soul and its organs in Hum. Nat. 16–21; Nemesius reintroduces us to Aristotle’s schema in Hum. Nat. 22, and describes the insusceptible irrational soul and its organs in Hum. Nat. 23–5. It should not be contentious to read Hum. Nat. 6–25, at least, in light of the Aristotelian ethical schema in which the powers of the soul—and organs of the body—are divided into: (i) ‘the rational’ (to logikon) = Hum. Nat. 6–14, (ii) ‘the irrational’ (to alogon) (α) ‘which is capable of obeying reason’ = Hum. Nat. 16–21, (β) ‘which does not heed reason’ = Hum. Nat. 23–5.53 But if this schema illuminates the structure and logic of Hum. Nat. 6–25, what are we to do with Hum. Nat. 26–8? For, we will recall that it was shown in the first section (‘En Route from Substance to Act’) that Nemesius treats Hum. Nat. 6–28 as a unity. It is possible to interpret Hum. Nat. 26–8, at once, as a shading of Aristotle’s ethical schema and as a transition to Hum. Nat. 29–43. But the former function is obscured by Nemesius’ introduction, at the head of Hum. Nat. 26, of a new rival schema: ‘They divide the powers of living beings in yet another way, calling some

50 Nem. Nat. Hom. 16 (Morani 73,7–12). 52 Nem. Nat. Hom. 22 (Morani 82,21–2).

51 Nem. Nat. Hom. 22 (Morani 82,20–1). 53 Nem. Nat. Hom. 15 (Morani 72,17–20).

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The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28  109 psychic, some natural, some vital, with psychic those involving choice, natural and vital those not involving choice.’54 The foregrounding of choice in this schema anticipates Nemesius’ shift from human power (dunamis) in the body and its organs, to the human capacity to act (praxis) in Hum. Nat. 29–43. It is not by mistake that Nemesius makes choice salient here at the close of Hum. Nat. 6–28. He wants choice to command our attention in Hum. Nat. 29–43, a part of his book that he opens as follows: ‘Since we have often made reference to the voluntary and the involuntary, it is necessary to treat these also.’55 The thematic appeal of this new schema is therefore clear. By contrast, its bearing on Aristotle’s ethical schema in Hum. Nat. 26–8 is harder to discern. Nemesius’ most important claim in Hum. Nat. 28, his description of res­pir­ ation, is that breathing is ‘one of the functions belonging to the soul’.56 This contra­dicts certain proponents of his new schema, who hold that ‘natural and vital [powers are] those not involving choice’ and that respiration is a ‘natural’ power (and therefore a power ‘not involving choice’).57 Nemesius points out that it is ‘within our power . . . to control changes in respiration’.58 It follows, he reasons, that respiration is not a natural (involuntary) but a psychic (voluntary) power. However, he is not entirely persuaded of this because ‘we cannot hold our breath for even the tenth part of an hour’.59 As a consequence, Nemesius concludes that ‘the natural is implicated within the domain of the psychic’.60 This of course means, in terms of his new schema, that the involuntary is implicated within the domain of the voluntary. This, then, is why Nemesius’ treatment of respiration comes after Hum. Nat. 6–25. Just as respiration creates a problem for the Hellenic medical schema he introduces in Hum. Nat. 26, so also it creates a problem for the Aristotelian eth­ ic­al schema by means of which he structures Hum. Nat. 6–25. According to that Aristotelian schema, irrational powers of the soul are either ‘capable of obeying reason’ or they ‘do not heed reason’. Nemesius observes that respiration is both, however—it is ‘within our power’ and it is not ‘within our power’. Because of this duplicity, respiration is a fitting power with which to conclude Hum. Nat. 6–28, and to introduce the soul’s duplicitous power par excellence—the power of choice—in Hum. Nat. 29. 54 Nem. Hum. Nat. 26 (Morani 87,17–19). Compare Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 799. 55 Nem. Hum. Nat. 29 (Morani 93,20–1). Compare Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 869. 56 Nem. Hum. Nat. 28 (Morani 89,19). Compare Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 819. 57 Nem. Hum. Nat. 26 (Morani 87,17–19) and Hum. Nat. 28 (Morani 90,14–15). 58 Nem. Hum. Nat. 28 (Morani 89,22–3). 59 Nem. Hum. Nat. 28 (Morani 90,3–6). Compare Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 823. 60 Nem. Hum. Nat. 28 (Morani 90,12).

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110  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature

The Hegemony of Thought Bolesław Domanski’s 1900 book, The Psychology of Nemesius, contains what is still the most thorough treatment of Nemesius’ chapters on sensation, memory, and cognition.61 Notably absent from Domanski’s pages,62 however, are a Platonic term and an image which figure prominently in Stoic anthropology,63 and in the last paragraph of Hum. Nat. 6.64 The term is ‘hegemon’ or ‘hegemonic part’ (hēgemonikon), and the image is that of a Greek city’s ‘chamber of the bodyguard’ (doruphorikē oikēsis). In Timaeus 70—the Platonic text Nemesius seems to recollect in Hum. Nat. 6—Plato situates this chamber directly below the human body’s ‘acropolis’, which is to say, the neck and head.65 In his 1914 source-­critical investigation, Nemesius of Emesa, Werner Jaeger gives a number of pages to Nemesius’ term ‘hegemon’ and his use of Plato’s ‘chamber of the bodyguard’ image.66 Citing Timaeus-influenced passages from Cicero’s On the Laws and On the Nature of the Gods,67 both of which are emblematically cosmopolitan texts,68 Jaeger conjectures that Posidonius is not only Cicero’s, but, later, Galen’s source for the ‘bodyguard’ image,69 and that Galen is likely Nemesius’ source for the image.70 Nemesius’ ultimate dependence on Posidonius’ Timaeus commentary is ‘still far from proven’ (and is all but certain to remain so, since that commentary is lost), but his most recent editors conclude that Jaeger’s argument for a Posidonian influence in Hum. Nat. 6 is ‘stronger than he himself made it’.71 This is because Plato’s ‘chamber of the bodyguard’ in Timaeus 70 is the heart,72 whereas—as Jaeger did not observe—in post-­Platonic authors including Cicero,73 Galen, and Nemesius, the senses are reason’s ‘bodyguard’. Posidonius’ Timaeus commentary is a likely source for this re-­description; therefore, Jaeger’s conjecture is more credible than even he realized. For us, the main interest of Jaeger’s source-­critical hypothesis is that it locates Nemesius’ citation of the Timaeus’ political physiology (the body is a city) within 61 Domanski, Die Psychologie des Nemesius, 74–114. 62 Domanski, Die Psychologie des Nemesius, 92–9. 63  G.  Reydams-­Schils, Demiurge and Providence: Stoic and Platonist Readings of Plato’s Timaeus (Turnhout, 1999), 60–70. 64 Nem. Nat. Hom. 6 (Morani 57,5–15). 65 Pl. Tim. 69d–70d. Note especially that Plato refers to the ‘hegemonic’ role of thought at Pl. Tim. 70b–c: ‘allowing the best part to lead (hēgemonein) all the others.’ 66 Jaeger, Nemesios von Emesa, 21–6. 67 Cic. Leg. I 9.26; Nat. Deor. II 56.140. 68 Cic. Leg. I 6.18–13.36; Nat. Deor. II 29.73–54.162. 69 Jaeger, Nemesios von Emesa, 22: ‘Die δορυφόροι stehen Platon Timaios 70 B . . . Aus dem Timaios nahm das Bild Ciceros Quelle Poseidonios, aus Poseidonios dann wieder Galen.’ 70 Jaeger, Nemesios von Emesa, 25–6. 71  Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, 22–3. 72 Pl. Tim. 70b. 73  More precisely, Cicero depicts the head as the body’s ‘acropolis’ and the senses as its ‘attendants’ or ‘messengers’ at Cic. Leg. I 9.26: et sensus tamquam satellites . . . ac nuntios; Nat. Deor. II 56.140: sen­ sus autem interpretes ac nuntii rerum in capite tamquam in arce . . .

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The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28  111 a tradition of Timaeus-reception that is manifestly cosmopolitan (the world is a city).74 However, this is not the light in which Jaeger, or Nemesius’ more recent interpreters, set this Timaeus citation. Jaeger takes Plato’s ‘hegemon’ and ‘bodyguard’ in Timaeus 70 to be a ‘poetic’ image of the human head and heart which must have been ‘systematized’ by Posidonius in his lost Timaeus commentary.75 By the time Nemesius composes On Human Nature, Plato’s ‘hegemon’ and ‘bodyguard’ have for centuries represented the human head and senses. This physiological image is clearly meant to visualize thought’s hegemony over the senses.76 But the question that neither Jaeger nor subsequent commentators have  posed is how Nemesius ‘systematizes’ this—certainly Platonic, arguably Posidonian—image in his physiological chapters on imagination and sensation, memory, and reason (Hum. Nat. 6–14). On our reading, the Platonic imagery at the close of Hum. Nat. 6 underlies not only Nemesius’ physiology of ‘powers of the soul’ in Hum. Nat. 6–14, but his whole description of physiology and psychology in Hum. Nat. 6–28. The logic of this reading is simple: Plato’s imagery, and Nemesius’ gloss on it, harmonize nicely with the Aristotelian ethical schema that organizes Hum. Nat. 6–28 (argued in the second section of this chapter, ‘Schematizations of Soul and Body’). What is more, Nemesius seems to go out of his way to link ‘sense and imagination’ (his topic in Hum. Nat. 6) to ‘impulsive motion’ (his topic in Hum. Nat. 27) and to the soul’s influence over ‘natural’ functions (his theme in Hum. Nat. 28). By evoking Plato’s political imagery at the close of Hum. Nat. 6, therefore, Nemesius is not merely seeking to represent the ensouled human body; he is also seeking to represent his description of that body in Hum. Nat. 6–28. For Nemesius, as for Plato and numerous Platonic commentators, the human body is structured like a city. With that much for introduction, the time has come to quote in extenso Nemesius’ conclusion to Hum. Nat. 6: Plato says that sense is the communion of soul and body in relation to the ex­ter­ ior things; for the power belongs to the soul, the organ belongs to the body, and together they receive the exterior through imagination. Of the powers of the soul, some serve and act as bodyguards, others rule and command. The ruling are thought and knowledge, those that serve are sensation, impulsive motion and imagination. For motion and imagination obey swiftly and virtually in­stant­ an­eous­ly the intentions of our reason. For we will and move at once and as one, needing no interval of time between will and motion, as can be seen in the

74  Reydams-­Schils, Demiurge and Providence, 13–15, 32–7, 208–15 (noting the brief mention of Nemesius on page 209). 75 Jaeger, Nemesios von Emesa, 22–3: ‘Die Einteilung der Seelenkräfte in δορυφορικά und ἡγεμονικά ist eine von Poseidonios stammende Systematisierung der dichterischen Ausdrücke Platons.’ 76 Jaeger, Nemesios von Emesa, 26: ‘. . . die Herrschaft der Vernunft über die Sinne.’

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112  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature movement of fingers. Among natural functions, too, some are under the hegemony of thought, such as those we call ‘affections’.77

The phrase ‘communion of soul and body’ echoes one of Nemesius’ themes in his proem (Hum. Nat. 1).78 It is a further mark of compositional technique that Nemesius restates, in these sentences, the thesis which controls Hum. Nat. 6–28 (recall the first section in this chapter, ‘En Route from Substance to Act’). For he asserts, in the last sentences of Hum. Nat. 5: ‘Specific parts of the body are assigned to each power of the soul for its function, as the argument will demon­ strate as it proceeds.’79 And Nemesius now informs us that the topic of Hum. Nat. 6—namely, imagination—has provided him with a validation of his thesis. What the philosopher-­bishop believes he has shown is that the physiology of im­agin­ation is instrumental. It is the imaginative power (of the soul) and organ (of the body) which together ‘receive the exterior through imagination’.80 Nemesius concludes Hum. Nat. 6 by underscoring that this physiology of imagination—and indeed, human physiology tout court—reflects a structure of governance. The koinōnia of soul and body reveals, throughout, signs of an immensely complex system of government without which there could be no human imputability: Nemesius’ great concern in Hum. Nat. 29–43. Nemesius tells us in the first sentence of Hum. Nat. 6 that ‘imagination is a power of the irrational part of the soul’.81 And in the chapter’s last sentences, he tells us what this entails. Imagination is one of those ‘powers of the soul’—others are sensation and impulsive motion—which ‘serve and act as bodyguards’.82 These irrational powers are created to serve and guard the soul’s rational powers— Nemesius mentions thought and knowledge—whose task is to ‘rule and command’ (archika kai hēgemonika).83 Nemesius draws his schema from Platonic imagery, but we should note that this Platonic image of rational command and irrational obedience harmonizes with—and indeed, tacitly introduces—the Aristotelian ethical schema that underlies Hum. Nat. 6–28. For Aristotle, as Nemesius informs us in Hum. Nat. 15, divides the soul into ‘the rational’ and ‘the irrational’, and then divides the latter into a part of the soul ‘which is capable of obeying reason’ and a part ‘which does not heed reason’.84 This structure is discernible in the Platonic conclusion to Hum. Nat. 6, where: (i) the soul’s rational part is designated by ‘thought and knowledge’; 77 Nem. Nat. Hom. 6 (Morani 57,5–15). 78 Nem. Nat. Hom. 6 (Morani 57,5–6). 79 Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 55,1–3). 80 Nem. Nat. Hom. 6 (Morani 57,6–7). 81 Nem. Nat. Hom. 6 (Morani 55,9–10). 82 Nem. Nat. Hom. 6 (Morani 57,7–8). 83 Nem. Nat. Hom. 6 (Morani 57,8–9). 84 Nem. Hum. Nat. 15 (Morani 72,17–20). Compare Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 629.

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The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28  113 (ii) the soul’s irrational part which is capable of obeying reason is represented by ‘motion and imagination [which] obey swiftly and virtually in­stant­an­ eous­ly the intentions of our reason’; and (iii) the soul’s irrational part which does not heed reason is suggested when Nemesius says that only some of the soul’s natural functions ‘are under the hegemony of thought’—other powers of the soul, we can infer, are not under the hegemony of thought.85 With his introduction of a Platonic political imagery in Hum. Nat. 6, and later, with his introduction of the Aristotelian ethical schema in Hum. Nat. 15, Nemesius’ concern is therefore the same—to trace the lines of influence which radiate out of the soul’s ruling part, like nerves, throughout the body.86 He is concerned, throughout his text’s physiological and psychological chapters, to identify the source and limits of human autonomy. In keeping with a tradition that ori­gin­ ates in Timaeus, wherever Nemesius describes bodily organs he is trying to describe a structure of governance. What organs reveal in Hum. Nat. 6–28 are the channels through which, and the instruments by means of which, the government of the body is realized. But how stable is that government? It is his concern with the government of the body which connects Nemesius’ evocation of Plato’s acropolis in Hum. Nat. 6, and his re-­narration in Hum. Nat. 13 of a weird scene from Galen. For, the locus of Nemesius’ hegemonic organ can be identified. According to Nemesius, thought occurs by means of an organ which he calls the ‘central ventricle’ of the human brain.87 This is argued in Hum. Nat. 12–13, where the bishop writes that ‘the origins and roots of sensation’ are in the frontal ventricle of the brain, of thought in ‘the central ventricle’, and of memory in ‘the posterior ventricle’.88 This novel cerebral topology will give rise to the ‘ventricular’ or ‘cell doctrine’ that informs medical philosophy and physiology until the early modern period in Europe.89 And because thought, for Nemesius, is channelled through this vulnerable ‘ventricle’, he believes that the hegemony of thought—and with it, the power of choice—can be disrupted or destroyed by injuries or humoral imbalances. Thus, in Hum. Nat. 13, Nemesius gives a macabre account of a 2nd-­century man of means whose senses are not disordered, but whose thinking is so deranged that he cannot be held responsible for his acts (not unlike others who are alluded 85 Nem. Hum. Nat. 6 (Morani 57,5–15). 86 Nem. Nat. Hom. 9 (Morani 66,7–9). Compare D. T. Runia, ‘Festugiere Revisited: Aristotle in the Greek Patres’, Vigiliae Christianae 43.1 (1989), 1–34, here 21: ‘Various aspects of the Aristotelian psych­ology are perfectly acceptable to the Fathers, notably the distinction between rational and ir­ration­al parts or powers shared with Plato.’ 87 Nem. Nat. Hom. 13 (Morani 69,20–2). 88 Nem. Nat. Hom. 13 (Morani 69,20–2). 89  F.  C.  Rose, ‘Cerebral Localization in Antiquity’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 18 (2009), 239–47, here 245–6; M.  R.  Bennett and P.  M.  S.  Hacker, History of Cognitive Neuroscience (Chichester, 2008), 201–5.

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114  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature to in Hum. Nat. 37, who are physiologically ‘incapable of choice’).90 This is Nemesius, apparently working from Galen’s On the Affected Parts: The senses of some of those with phrenitis are intact, while thought alone is damaged. Galen records such a sufferer from phrenitis, who, when a certain wool-­worker was working in his house, sprang up and took some glass utensils, rushed to the windows and, calling each of the utensils by name, asked the pass­ ers by if they wanted it to be thrown down below. When bystanders said they did want it, he first hurled each of the utensils and then asked those present if they also wanted the wool-­worker to be thrown down. They thought the affair was a joke, and so said that they did want it. So he took the wool-­worker and pushed him down from above. This man was healthy in all his sensations (for he knew that the things were utensils and the man was a wool-­worker), but his thinking was diseased.91

This man-­slaughtering phrenitis sufferer proves to Nemesius that damage to the brain’s central ventricle can ruin thought without disturbing sensation (whose organ is the brain’s frontal ventricle). And Nemesius believes that the inverse affliction can also be observed. ‘Others are prone to imagining and thinking they see what they do not see’, he adds, ‘but otherwise they think rationally’.92 This confirms for him that injury to the brain’s frontal ventricle can cause hal­lu­cin­ ations while leaving thought undisturbed (as it happens, Galen tells us he suffered from some such condition in his youth).93 That cerebral pathologies can diminish human culpability is a sure inference to make from Hum. Nat. 31. Here, echoing Aristotle’s treatment of involuntary misdeeds,94 Nemesius enumerates the ‘circumstances’ which late-­antique forensic orators were made to memorize early in their formations.95 An act consists of ‘who did what to whom with what, where, when, how, why—such as a person, a deed, an instrument, a place, a time, a manner, a reason’.96 Nemesius then claims (in much the same words as Aristotle) that ‘not even a lunatic could be ignorant of all these at the same time’.97 Nevertheless, he concedes (in much the same words as Aristotle) that ‘one who has been ignorant of most or the most decisive of these matters has acted on account of ignorance’.98

90 Nem. Nat. Hom. 37 (Morani 108,19–20). 91 Nem. Nat. Hom. 13 (Morani 70,12–22). Compare Gal. Loc. Aff. IV 2. 92 Nem. Nat. Hom. 13 (Morani 70,22–3). 93 Gal. Loc. Aff. IV 2. 94 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.16–18 (1111a2–21). Nemesius’ and Aristotle’s texts are printed enface in Domanski, Die Psychologie des Nemesius, 135 note 1. 95 Cic. Inv. I 26.39. 96 Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 97,15–17). 97 Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 97,25). Compare Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.17 (1111a7–8). 98 Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 97,25–98,1). Compare Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.18 (1111a15–17).

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The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28  115 Since acting through ignorance is one of Nemesius’ subgenera of involuntary acts,99 and since his criterion of involuntary acts is that they ‘are thought deserving of pardon or pity’ but cannot ‘attract praise or blame’,100 it is not only pathologies of intellection but of sensation (or imagination) which potentially disrupt or obliterate a person’s autonomy. Because of this, the bare physiology of sensation is not without juridical and political implications in On Human Nature. The hegemony of thought over a panoply of undistorted sensation, symbolized by Plato’s ‘bodyguard’ and ‘hegemon’ in Timaeus 70, is for Nemesius the conditio sine qua non of voluntary acts.101 Sense, intellection, and memory variously exhibit for Nemesius, in Hum. Nat. 6–14, the hegemony of thought. The structures of cognition are intrinsically, and observably, structures through which—per Nemesius—the soul governs the body. Yet this government is a fragile and contested one; as such, it must be guarded and defended. And it is not only injury, distress, or disease which diminish culp­ abil­ity. There is a recurring, wholly natural function—sleep—which also renders us innocent of ‘acts’. Having previously reconstructed aspects of Nemesius’ theory of oneiromancy (in chapter  3), it will be interesting to return to it—and to its doxographic origins—in a brief excursus that centres upon Hum. Nat. 12.

Excursus: The ‘Pythagorean’ Theory of Divination in Dreams The final allusion to a ‘doctrine of the Hebrews’ in On Human Nature suggests that Judaic authority has a natural aspect, for Nemesius, which surpasses its ‘Judaic’ character and illuminates his post-­Hellenistic sense of the history of phil­ oso­phy in an interesting way. Nemesius writes this in Hum. Nat. 12: The different kinds of thought are judgement, assent, avoidance, and impulse . . . It is [thought] which foretells the future to us through dreams, which the Pythagoreans say is the only true method of divination, following the Hebrews. Its organ is also the central ventricle of the brain and the psychic pneuma within that ventricle.102

This extract is the core of Hum. Nat. 12, Nemesius’ remarkably short chapter on thought.103 This chapter comprises the second of a three-­part survey in Hum. Nat. 6–13, in which Nemesius reviews the ‘powers of the soul’ in light of a 99 Nem. Nat. Hom. 32 (Morani 98,5–6). 100 Nem. Nat. Hom. 29 (Morani 94,6–12). 101 Compare W.  Telfer, ‘Autexousia’, The Journal of Theological Studies (NS) 8.1 (1957), 123–9, here 127–8. 102 Nem. Nat. Hom. 12 (Morani 68,6–13). 103 Nem. Nat. Hom. 12 covers ten lines in Morani’s edition. The only shorter chapter is Nat. Hom. 10, a six-­line statement on the sense of hearing.

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116  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature ­ ypothetical distribution of their interface with the brain. The soul, he stipulates h at the end of Hum. Nat. 5, has three signal powers—‘imagination, thought, and memory’104—and these powers must, he postulates, be channelled by and through distinct substructures of the brain.105 Nemesius’ sharpest formulation of this comes in Hum. Nat. 13, where he writes that ‘the origins and roots of sensation lie in the frontal ventricles of the brain’— he is treating sensation, here, under the rubric of imagination—‘of thought in the central ventricle, and of memory in the posterior ventricle’.106 His cognitive top­ ology corresponds to a novel cerebral topology in late antiquity, and helps to give rise to the ‘ventricular’ or ‘cell doctrine’ that will control medical philosophy and physiology until the early 16th century.107 To reflect both typologies—cognitive and cerebral—Nemesius characterizes: (i) sensation in Hum. Nat. 6–11 (frontal ventricle); (ii) thought in Hum. Nat. 12 (central ventricle); and (iii) memory in Hum. Nat. 13 (posterior ventricle). In Hum. Nat. 14, he returns in a slightly more discursive way to the question of thought, treating it not ‘according to the division of certain parts of the body’, as in Hum. Nat. 12, but according to a division of the soul’s ‘rational aspect’ into tacit and explicit logos.108 It is in this context—which is to say, in the border zones of late-­antique physiology and psychology—that Nemesius makes his last mention of the Hebrews.109 And here, the Pythagoreans—and this is the sole occurrence of Puthagoreioi in On Human Nature—are said to ‘follow’ (akoloutheō) the Hebrews. Judging by the sense that Nemesius seems to give to akoloutheō in other parts of his text,110 he presumably means that the Pythagoreans received from the Hebrews a ruling that oneiric divination is ‘the only true method of divination’.111 This is very interesting.

104 Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 55,6–7). 105  William Telfer astutely notes that although Nemesius ‘located mental faculties in the brain, he did not assign locality to the soul’: Telfer, ‘Autexousia’, 127. 106 Nem. Nat. Hom. 13 (Morani 69,20–2). 107 Rose, ‘Cerebral Localization in Antiquity,’ 245–6; Bennett and Hacker, History of Cognitive Neuroscience, 201–5. 108 Nem. Nat. Hom. 14 (Morani 71,6–8). For the influences on Nemesius, here, and for his influence on later tradition: C.  Panaccio, Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham, trans. J. P. Hochschild and M. K. Ziebart (New York, 2017), 50–7. 109  There is one further occurrence of the term Hebraioi, but there it designates a source of ca­non­ ic­al authority: Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 121,10). 110  Compare Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 1,9–12): Apollinaris ‘follows’ Plotinus, and others, in his doctrine of soul; and Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 29,19–21): Xenocrates ‘follows’ Pythagoras in his doctrine of soul. 111 Nem. Nat. Hom. 12 (Morani 68,10).

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The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28  117 There is no allusion, in On Human Nature, to what Walter Burkert calls the Herakleides-­Anekdote,112 that is, to an incident which is first attested in a fragment by Heraclides of Pontus (died c.310 bce), according to which Pythagoras is the first to deny that he is a ‘wise one’ (sophos), preferring to call himself a ‘lover of wisdom’ (philosophos).113 There is indeed no hard evidence in On Human Nature with which to plead that Nemesius traces the origin of the Hellenic term and institution of philosophia to Pythagoras. Nevertheless, the priority of Pythagoras and his phratry is so common in late-­antique doxographies that there is no cause to doubt that when Nemesius cites the Pythagoreans, he means to cite Hellenic philosophy’s first and most august ‘school’. Since Nemesius asserts in Hum. Nat. 12 that the Pythagoreans follow the Hebrews on so ponderous a matter as the ‘true method of divination’, it is reasonable to take this as evidence, in On Human Nature, of what has been termed the ‘dependency theme’ in patristic literature.114 If the Hebrews are instructed by Moses, while the Pythagoreans follow the Hebrews, then it is not rash to conclude that Pythagoras—the Hellenes’ first philosopher—must himself have been instructed by Moses, or by the Pentateuch. Chronologies arrived at by patristic ventures in ‘universal history’ would demand the latter.115 A Hellenistic version of this ‘dependency theme’ is distilled in a question which is (reputed to have been) put by a Syrian Neopythagorean philosopher,116 Numenius of Apamea, in the mid 2nd century ce: ‘What is Plato but Moses speaking Attic?’117 Given that Nemesius cites ‘Numenius the Pythagorean’ at the

112  W.  Burkert, ‘Platon oder Pythagoras? Zum Ursprung des Wortes “Philosophie” ’, Hermes 88 (1960), 159–77, here 163. 113  Pieter van der Horst suggests, on the basis of a Heraclitean dictum which contains the first extant occurrence of philosophos (Fr. 35, Diels), that ‘it may be the case that Heraclitus [in this fragment] ridiculed or criticized Pythagoras’ use of the word philosophos’. In view of Heraclitus’ surviving attack on Pythagoras (Fr. 40, Diels)—which may have been invited by the opening lines of a Pythagorean text On Nature (see Dio. Laer. Vit. VIII 1.6)—this is not an unreasonable conjecture. Thus, it may still be possible—conjecturally—to trace the term philosophos to ‘Pythagoras’, that is, to archaic Pythagorean circles: P. W. van der Horst, ‘Philosophia Epeisaktos: Some Notes on Josephus, Ant. 18.9’, Studies in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Leiden, 2014), 55–6. 114 D. Ridings, The Attic Moses: The Dependency Theme in Some Early Christian Writers (Göteborg, 1995). For a more recent—and a truly brilliant—handling of this theme: G.  Boys-­Stones, ‘The “Dependency Theme” ’, Post-­Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of its Development from the Stoics to Origen (Oxford, 2001), 176–202. 115  No effort is taken by Nemesius to delineate a ‘universal history’ in On Human Nature, but this concern is prevalent in his milieu, and in several of his sources—notably, Theophilus of Antioch and Eusebius of Caesarea: M.  Wallraff, ‘The Beginnings of Christian Universal History: From Tatian to Julius Africanus’, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 14 (2011), 540–55. 116  Mark Edwards sees in this nothing but ‘a false parallel between Plato and the Pentateuch, condensed into a motto which may not even have been his [Numenius’] own’: M. J. Edwards, ‘Atticizing Moses? Numenius, the Fathers and the Jews’, Vigiliae Christianae 44 (1990), 64–75, here 73. A less sceptical approach is taken in G.  F.  Sterling, ‘The Theft of Philosophy: Philo of Alexandria and Numenius of Apamea’, The Studia Philonica Annual 27 (2015), 71–85. 117 J. G. Cook, The Interpretation of the Old Testament in Greco-Roman Paganism (Tübingen, 2004), 36–41, here 36.

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118  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature head of Hum. Nat. 2,118 it is not reckless to conjecture that this celebrated question might figure in the backcloth of Nemesius’ text.119 It is by no means necessary, however, to trace Nemesius’ allusion to a theory of Hebraic priority to Numenius. For the Neopythagorean’s theory is roughly contemporary with a Christian theory introduced by Justin Martyr in his First Apology,120 and intensified by Justin’s Syrian protégé, Tatian of Adiabene (died c.185), in his diatribe To the Greeks.121 Tatian accuses the Hellenes of imitating the arts of barbarian peoples—and most notably, the ‘barbarian philosophy’ of Moses.122 Ultimately, however, Nemesius’ allusion to a Judaean–Pythagorean nexus can be presumed to stem from a Judaic theory which can be traced, by way of parallel testimonies in Clement’s Stromata,123 and Eusebius’ Preparation for the Gospel,124 to an early Alexandrian commentator on the Pentateuch named Aristobulus (died c.145 bce).125 According to Eusebius, Aristobulus wrote, in a  commentary dedicated to one of the Ptolemies (likely Ptolemy VI Philometor),126 that ‘Pythagoras transferred many things from [Judaic] laws and inserted them into his own body of doctrines’.127 To this, Eusebius adds a further statement by Aristobulus: ‘It seems to me that [Moses] has been meticulously followed in all this’—the origin of the world as narrated in Genesis 1—‘by Pythagoras’.128 It is certainly not a mark of dependence per se, but we should not fail to notice that where Aristobulus speaks of Moses being ‘meticulously followed . . . by Pythagoras’,129 Nemesius speaks of ‘the Pythagoreans . . . following the Hebrews’.130 Even though we posit no dependence on Aristobulus (via Eusebius), the prov­en­ ance of Nemesius’ theory begins with this Alexandrian commentator whom Eusebius calls a ‘Hebrew philosopher’.131

118 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 17,16–18). 119  Compare Clem. Strom. I 22; Eus. Praep. Ev. XI 9–10. 120 Just. Apol. I 59–60. 121 Tat. Orat. 31, 36–41. 122  The definitive study of this early Christian motif is G. G. Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity (Tübingen, 1999). 123 Clem. Strom. I 22. 124 Eus. Praep. Ev. XIII 12. 125 M. R. Niehoff, Jewish Exegesis and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria (Cambridge, 2011), 59: ‘The available excerpts from his “commentary works” (βίβλοι ἐξηγητικαί) indicate that he [Aristobulus] raised “questions” on the biblical text and solved them by extended answers.’ See, too, Boys-­Stones, Post-­Hellenistic Philosophy, 82–5. 126  According to Clem. Strom. I 22. Compare P. Gorman, ‘Pythagoras Palaestinus’, Philologus 127 (1983), 30–42, here 31–2; M.  LeFebvre, Collections, Codes, and Torah: The Re-­characterization of Israel’s Written Law (New York—London, 2006), 191–3. 127 Eus. Praep. Ev. XIII 12. Compare Clem. Strom. I 22. 128 Eus. Praep. Ev. XIII 12. 129 Eus. Praep. Ev. XIII 12. 130 Nem. Nat. Hom. 12 (Morani 68,10–11). 131 Eus. Praep. Ev. XIII 11.

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The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28  119 This foray into the history of Pythagoras Palaestinus—a tradition which tended, incidentally, to assign Pythagoras’ birthplace to Syria132—has been necessary to fill out Nemesius’ elliptical reference to Pythagoreans in Hum. Nat. 12. Nemesius holds that certain Pythagorean beliefs and practices derive from the laws and customs of the Hebrews; and given his milieu, we can infer that he holds that Pythagoras extracted certain tenets and prohibitions from a pre-­LXX Greek rendering of the Pentateuch.133 The theory of Hebraic priority, however, and the sense of Hellenic dependence that it is meant to inculcate, should not block our realization that Nemesius cites the Hebrews in Hum. Nat. 12 as a Judaic authority which coincides with that of a Hellenic philosophical tradition. On the question of divination, the authority of Moses’ phratry is virtually indistinct from that of Pythagoras’ phratry. When Nemesius reports that ‘the Pythagoreans say [that divination in dreams] is the only true method of divination, following the Hebrews’,134 the truth of Pythagorean divination is in no way diminished or impugned. Nemesius’ theory of Hebraic priority is a Judaic theory, and in this sense, his reference to Pythagoreans in Hum. Nat. 12 is a mark of Judaic influence on the bishop of Emesa. But it is crucial that Nemesius nevertheless holds to a theory of doctrinal transferral. Aristobulus relates that ‘Pythagoras transferred many things from [the Hebrews’ laws] and inserted them into his own body of doctrines’.135 Once this transferral of Hebraic doctrines (or ‘laws’) has been posited, it becomes possible to cite a ‘doctrine of the Hebrews’ or a ‘doctrine of the Pythagoreans’ without distinction. With Nemesius’ last reference to the Hebrews, therefore, in On Human Nature, there is a sense in which Judaic authority has ceased to be Judaic. In purely doxographical terms, Hum. Nat. 12 features a Hebraic precept which has become—or rather, has been made—integrally Hellenic. But there is a more profound sense in which the Judaic authority of Hum. Nat. 12 has ceased to be Judaic. This is because it concerns a matter which is, on Nemesius’ reckoning, purely natural. Nemesius holds that ‘things that are natural are the same for all’,136 and, furthermore, he seems to be convinced that oneiric divination is the only natural mode of divination. When he comments that it is given to some to ‘prophesy the

132  Gorman, ‘Pythagoras Palaestinus’, 37: ‘Pythagoras was not only known as a borrower from the Mosaic law to both Alexandrian Jews and Greeks of the pre-­Christian era, but also as a native of Syria who had sojourned in Phoenicia and lived the life of an anchorite and prophet, like Elijah, atop Mt. Carmel in Palestine.’ 133  Gorman, ‘Pythagoras Palaestinus’, 32: ‘Aristobolous assumed the existence of a pre-­Septuagint Greek translation of the books of Moses which, according to Aristobolous, Pythagoras apparently consulted so that the τῶν παρ᾿ ἡμῖν naturally refers to the Pentateuch and could be supplemented by νομίμων.’ 134 Nem. Nat. Hom. 12 (Morani 68,10–11). 135 Eus. Praep. Ev. XIII 12. 136 Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 120,4–5).

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120  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature future’,137 the bishop seems to have in mind a divine office.138 Oneiric divination, however, is for him a natural capacity of the human soul. It is simply given in On Human Nature that human thought (dianoētikos) can, on occasion—as Nemesius puts it in Hum. Nat. 12—‘foretell the future to us through dreams’.139 This natural power is not cut off from divine influence. ‘There have been many divine epiphanies in times of need’, Nemesius asserts in Hum. Nat. 42, ‘many remedies given to the sick in dreams, many predictions fulfilled in every generation’, and so forth.140 It is on this terrain, in On Human Nature—a terrain of natural cognition, diffuse revelation, and universal history—that the Pythagoreans are made to follow the Hebrews on the question of ‘the only true method of divination’.141 The result of this tortured doxographical narrative is something that a 4th-­century philosopher-­bishop holds to be a well-­attested anthropological datum: Christians and Judaeans, Hellenes and ‘barbarians’ can occasionally perceive the divine will, and the course of future events, in dreams.

Guarding the Natural Familiar Order At the close of Hum. Nat. 6, after Nemesius says that certain of the soul’s irrational powers ‘act as the bodyguards’ of human reason, he adds that these powers are placed ‘under the hegemony of thought, such as those we call “affections” ’.142 Since Nemesius gives his description of the affections in Hum. Nat. 16–21, we should expect the hegemony of thought to inform these chapters. And it does. A brief characterization of these chapters will serve to introduce our reading of them, which centres upon what Nemesius calls in Hum. Nat. 20 the ‘natural familiar order’ of reason and affection. Significantly, his description of this order reintroduces the Platonic image of reason’s physiological ‘bodyguard’.143 In On  Human Nature, the role of the passions in human life is theorized—and imagined—politically. In Hum. Nat. 16, Nemesius labours over the definition of the term ‘affection’. For our present purposes, however, his most important move in this chapter concerns physiology. It is here that he first alludes to a Galenic triad which he later calls ‘the three ruling organs that govern a living being’ (tōn triōn archōn organa tōn dioikousōn to zōon),144 and specifically, that govern a human being: 137 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,16–17). 138  Prophēteuō is a hapax in the Nat. Hom., and given its context—an encomium—its denotation must remain nebulous. However, compare Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 120,18), citing the prophets of Israel; and Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 122,17), defending the validity of prophetic and mantic phenomena— but also, crucially for us, distinguishing them. 139 Nem. Nat. Hom. 12 (Morani 68,9–10). 140 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 122,18–21). 141 Nem. Nat. Hom. 12 (Morani 68,10). 142 Nem. Nat. Hom. 6 (Morani 57,5–15). 143 Nem. Nat. Hom. 20 (Morani 81,10–13). 144 Nem. Nat. Hom. 28 (Morani 91,26–7).

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The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28  121 (i) the brain, which is in humans the organ of reason; (ii) the heart, which is the organ of desire; and (iii) the liver, which is the organ of spirit.145 Admittedly, it is only the heart and liver which figure in Hum. Nat. 16, but their designation in this chapter as the organs that govern desire (epithumia) and spirit (thumos) introduces this Galenic triad within On Human Nature—and with it, prepares a concept of dioikēsis which is used to describe this system in subsequent chapters of the treatise (covered in chapter 5).146 It is this concept of dioikēsis in Nemesius’ final chapters—which should of course call to mind the presence of what we have called oikeiōsis in his prologue (developed in chapter 2)—that will later permit us to trace, or rather to retrace, the logic of governance which informs the living human body,147 the human city,148 and ultimately, what may be called the ‘world city’ in On Human Nature.149 Just as oikeiōsis denotes the demiurgic intelligence and justice of creation in On Human Nature, so dioikēsis will denote the divine intelligence and justice of providence. This anticipatory comment on Hum. Nat. 16 prepares us for Hum. Nat. 17, in which Nemesius locates the ‘affections’ within the Aristotelian ethical schema that he introduced in Hum. Nat. 15 (see the second section of this chapter, ‘Schematizations of Soul and Body’). ‘As we said’, Nemesius begins Hum. Nat. 17 (referring to Hum. Nat. 15), ‘the irrational part of the soul that is capable of obeying reason is divided into two, the desirous and the spirited’.150 In Hum. Nat. 17, Nemesius concerns himself with the influence of bodily mixture (krasis) on desire, and the complex role of formation (paideia), regimen (diaita), habit (ēthos), training (gumnasia), and drugs or medications (pharmakeia) on the human soul’s power to ‘master the affections’ (kratein tōn pathōn).151 This marks a return to Nemesius’ pages on Hippocratic–Galenic theories of the soul in Hum. Nat. 2. We could also recall Nemesius’ observation in Hum. Nat. 3 that human reason is ‘sometimes mastering the body, and sometimes being mastered’.152 In Hum. Nat. 18–19, Nemesius describes the soul’s desirous part (via pleasure and distress), and in Hum. Nat. 20–1 its spirited part (via anger and fear). Nemesius’ physiology of affection is consistently represented in terms of a Platonic and Hellenic political imaginary. The bishop warns of pleasures which

145 Nem. Nat. Hom. 16 (Morani 73,11–16): liver and heart; and Nat. Hom. 24 (Morani 85,6–11): brain, heart, and liver. 146  The term dioikēsis occurs twice in Nemesius’ treatise, but the verb dioikeō accounts for eleven other occurrences that can be brought under that rubric. 147 Nem. Nat. Hom. 24 (Morani 85,6–11). 148 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,8–12). 149 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 135,6–15). 150 Nem. Nat. Hom. 17 (Morani 75,8–9). 151 Nem. Nat. Hom. 17 (Morani 75,20–76,4). 152 Nem. Nat. Hom. 3 (Morani 42,11–16).

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122  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature threaten to ‘enslave us’,153 and of sudden distress—as when ‘a city is sacked’—which nevertheless leaves ‘totally unaffected’ one who is taken up in contemplation.154 Pleasure and distress, he says, both threaten to take us ‘prisoner’, when we should rather be ‘overpowering them’.155 When we guard and preserve the ‘natural familiar (oikeian) order’ of the body, he suggests in Hum. Nat. 20, anger, which arises ‘in the region of the heart’,156 acts as ‘the bodyguard of reason’.157 Anger is authorized to rush out of its garrison and ‘attack’ in circumstances which ‘reason judges . . . worthy of resentment’.158 And conversely, he writes in Hum. Nat. 21, when the heart is besieged by fear: ‘All heat runs together into the heart, seeking that which rules over it, just as the people, when they are afraid, take refuge with their rulers.’159 When he later reports that the heart is one of the ‘ruling organs that govern a living being’,160 there can be no doubt that he means to be read governmentally— which is to say, literally. The affective body, in On Human Nature, is structured like a city. Having thus set out the irrational powers and organs ‘which are capable of obeying reason’ (Hum. Nat. 16–21), Nemesius can logically proceed to the ir­ration­al powers and organs ‘which do not heed reason’ (Hum. Nat. 23–5). Throughout, Nemesius holds quite closely to the Aristotelian ethical schema he introduces in Hum. Nat. 15. Yet we should return to Nemesius’ opening statement in Hum. Nat. 17. ‘The irrational part of the soul’, he says there, ‘is capable of obeying reason’.161 This concept of physiological ‘obedience’ calls for further reflection, for it is governmental in a precise sense. To describe organs as ‘obedient’ (epipeithēs) suggests, not a blind or a violent displacement of force and matter, but a logic of deference. There is therefore a governmental resonance in Nemesius’ inherited physiological terminology. Nevertheless, this form of ‘obedience’ is of course not governmental in a banal sense. Nemesius implies that organismic deference is not in the first instance a matter of human choice, since without it ‘life cannot be sustained’.162 If human choice is the condition of possibility of human politics in On Human Nature (argued in chapter  5), and if the body’s logic of deference precedes and underlies our power of choice, then in what sense is the body’s logic of deference ‘governmental’? In Hum. Nat. 16, Nemesius writes that the human heart (desire) and liver (spirit) are ‘capable of obeying reason’ because: ‘They are of a nature to obey

153 Nem. Nat. Hom. 18 (Morani 77,7–11). 155 Nem. Nat. Hom. 19 (Morani 80,20–2). 157 Nem. Nat. Hom. 20 (Morani 81,10–13). 159 Nem. Nat. Hom. 21 (Morani 82,3–5). 161 Nem. Nat. Hom. 17 (Morani 75,8–9).

154 Nem. Nat. Hom. 19 (Morani 80,15–20). 156 Nem. Nat. Hom. 20 (Morani 81,2). 158 Nem. Nat. Hom. 20 (Morani 81,11–12). 160 Nem. Nat. Hom. 28 (Morani 91,26–7). 162 Nem. Nat. Hom. 16 (Morani 73,18–20).

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The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28  123 reason and to submit to it, and to move as reason commands, in the case of those who are in a natural condition.’163 Nemesius’ caveat reintroduces the theme of human pathology. And in Hum. Nat. 18, for instance, Nemesius specifies that ‘the competent judge in all matters is not a person taken at chance, but the person of know­ledge and in a natural state’.164 This is not without interest, but it is rather Nemesius’ choice of the verb keleuō (‘decree’) in Hum. Nat. 16 which discloses the proper horizons of organismic ‘obedience’ in On Human Nature. Outside of Hum. Nat. 16, where it is the human soul’s rational power that ‘commands’, through the brain and nerves, the body’s other hegemonic organs, the heart and liver—and thereby, the human soul’s irrational powers of spirit and desire—Nemesius refers in his prologue (Hum. Nat. 1) to the human affections which are seated in the liver and heart. This is meant to reveal—as the bishop tells us there—a unique organization of powers: ‘We see in our soul the irrational and its parts . . . devoted to the service of the rational part.’165 The salient physiological principle, for Nemesius, is governmental. It is only the human being, in On Human Nature, who is both ruler and ruled. Humankind is an emblem of the world, a parvus mundus (in Burgundio of Pisa’s medieval translation),166 precisely because the deference to reason which is inscribed within the human body elevates it over all non-­human bodies. But we should note that in the beginning of his prologue, Nemesius seeks to prove that ‘the natural role of the irrational [is] to serve the rational’,167 by invoking a prin­ ciple which he considers to have been ‘confessed by all humans in common’—that the human body serves the human soul.168 Nemesius’ treatment of the passions in Hum. Nat. 16–21 is conceived, by him, as a further proof of that principle. Whether Nemesius is describing human passions and reason, or irrational and rational animals, he expects to see ‘the latter commanding, the former being commanded’.169 The bishop is nevertheless aware that the rational brain’s control of the body, much less of ‘the whole creation’, is virtually annihilated when we sleep.170

The Life of Necessity According to Nemesius, injury, distress, or disease can diminish the human power of command—and thus, human culpability. But there is a recurring

163 Nem. Nat. Hom. 16 (Morani 73,16–18). 164 Nem. Nat. Hom. 18 (Morani 80,10–11). 165 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,19–20). 166  G. Verbeke and J. R. Moncho, Némésius d’Émèse, De Natura Hominis. Traduction de Burgundio de Pise (Leiden, 1975), 21. 167 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,25–6). 168 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,9–13). 169 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,21). 170 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,18).

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124  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature nat­ural state—sleep—which also renders us innocent of our ‘acts’. For Nemesius believes that, as he asserts in Hum. Nat. 25, dreams are not in our power.171 And sleep is not only a recurring phenomenon in life: it recurs in the pages of On Human Nature. One of Nemesius’ remarks on sleep in the last of his physiological chapters will help us to conclude our treatment of Hum. Nat. 6–28. The philosopher-­bishop of Emesa writes this in Hum. Nat. 28, concerning the fact that sleepers never cease to breathe: ‘Because of this necessity, the soul remains active throughout this part [namely, the respiratory organs] no less when we are asleep, since it knows that if it should slacken for even the shortest time the living being would perish.’172 What should give us pause in this extract is that a sleeper who ceases to breathe necessarily ceases to be a sleeper—namely, by becoming a cadaver. The living being who ‘commands the whole creation’, in the words of Nemesius’ prologue, is still of necessity a single breath away from destruction.173 Nemesius believes—with Plato, and with Gregory of Nyssa—that ‘virtue has no master’.174 But breathing is a different matter. ‘It is necessary for a living person to breathe’, the bishop repeats in Hum. Nat. 34;175 and this necessity can be reduced to measure by a water-­clock.176 Even more humiliating is the fact that ‘we can hold back evacuations both often and for a long time’;177 but not invariably, and not indefinitely. The rectal muscles that Galen terms the ‘guards’ (phulakes) of the bowels,178 and that Nemesius calls the ‘doorkeepers (pulōrous) of evacuations’,179 finally yield to the body’s necessity. The only animal that ‘recognizes the motions of the stars, their intervals and their dimensions’, is thus bound to other, lower ‘intervals and dimensions’ which ultimately become necessities.180 This is a ‘natural’ and ‘vital’ sense of necessity which Nemesius defines in Hum. Nat. 22–8, where he stipulates that: (i) ‘Natural necessity’ describes a bodily function which ‘carries out its specific work not according to our judgement or choice, but naturally’.181 (ii) ‘Vital necessity’ describes a type of bodily motion (he cites pulsation) which is ‘not in our power’ to halt or to initiate, but which occurs ‘both when we will it and when we do not will it’.182

171 Nem. Nat. Hom. 25 (Morani 85,23–86,1). 172 Nem. Nat. Hom. 28 (Morani 90,9–11). 173 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,18). 174 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 110,6). Compare Pl. Resp. X 617e; Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 17.11. 175 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 103,21–2). 176 Nem. Nat. Hom. 28 (Morani 90,3–6). 177 Nem. Nat. Hom. 27 (Morani 89,4–5). 178  Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 814. 179 Nem. Nat. Hom. 27 (Morani 89,3). 180 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,12–13). 181 Nem. Nat. Hom. 23 (Morani 84,22–3). 182 Nem. Nat. Hom. 26 (Morani 87,22–5).

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The Organization of Powers: On Human Nature 6–28  125 In Nat. Hom. 34, the bishop offers a more generic definition of ‘necessity’: (iii) The term ‘necessity’, he clarifies, ‘I apply to those things that always occur in the same way, such as the cycle of the year’.183 ‘Natural’ and ‘vital’ necessity are defined by human choice—namely, by an absence of human choice. And when we note in Hum. Nat. 2 how Nemesius deduces human freedom from his observation that ‘human acts take a thousand different routes’,184 even his generic definition of ‘necessity’ could be referred to human choice. Just as Nemesius denies the power of choice to non-­human animals because he believes that ‘the whole species is moved by a single impulse’,185 so he can deny choice to celestial bodies whose motions and positions ‘always occur in the same way’.186 Variability is a marker of contingency, and contingency is a precondition of choice. There is a human life of necessity, however, which Nemesius takes very ser­ ious­ly. In his prologue (Hum. Nat. 1), he concedes that ‘humankind has a share in . . . plants on account of the powers of nutrition and generation’.187 He is still developing this world-­picture in Hum. Nat. 23, where he describes the nutritive power and organs of the soul. The human ‘share in’ plants is no mere metaphor in On Human Nature. For, Nemesius believes that the Demiurge has forged morphological links between ‘the disparate natures . . . so that the whole creation is one and akin (sungenē)’.188 And his description of the nutritive organs can certainly be read in a morphological, rather than a metaphorical way. This is Nemesius: The veins are like roots of the liver that draw the food from the stomach, as the roots of plants draw it from the earth. For the abdomen is like the earth which provides food to plants, the veins which carry up the juice to the gates and hollows of the liver from the abdomen and the intestines through the intestinal membrane are like roots, the liver itself is like a stem, while the veins that are divided off from the hollow vein which grows off the bulging parts of the liver are like trees and branches.189

Humankind’s nutritive organs take the form of a plant, it is tempting to conclude, because they are the organs which the irrational soul needs to perform a plant-­ like function.190 183 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 102,13–14). 184 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 36,26). 185 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 36,23–4). 186 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 102,13–14). 187 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,15–17). 188 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 3,3–12). 189 Nem. Nat. Hom. 23 (Morani 84,2–7). Compare Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, notes 746–9. 190  Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 12 (Kotter and Ledrux 304,84–5).

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126  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature The soul’s nutritive power, function, and organs are of interest to Nemesius at the close of Hum. Nat. 6–28, precisely because they, like the other powers, functions, and organs which occupy him in Hum. Nat. 22–8, accentuate the defining power of humankind. That power is choice. That Nemesius has not forgotten the relevance of Hum. Nat. 22–8 in his text’s final chapters is stated by him in Hum. Nat. 32: People enquire whether natural occurrences such as digestion and growth are voluntary. But it is shown that they are neither voluntary nor involuntary. For the voluntary and the involuntary are both [in a sense] in our power, but digestion and growth are not [in any sense] in our power. . . . But acts done through desire or anger were shown to be voluntary, since if right they are praised and if wrong they are blamed . . . and their origin is in the agents.191

Nemesius believes and seeks convincingly to demonstrate in Hum. Nat. 6–28 that the body is organized by the powers of the soul. As this observation in Hum. Nat. 32 suggests, his theorization of the human body’s organs and lower functions are oriented to his concern in Hum. Nat. 29–43 with the human capacity to be the ‘origin’ of acts. Certain moments in the physiological and psychological chapters of Nemesius’ anthropological text—such as his descriptions of the motion of the blood and substructures of the brain—are of signal interest to historians of ­science. This chapter has centred on the broader question of whether On Human Nature 6–28 can be read as a unit which contributes to Nemesius’ cosmopolitan anthropology. Once the soul’s government of the body is identified as Nemesius’ guiding concern—a concern which he articulates in images and formulas taken from Plato’s Timaeus, the Hippocratic On Human Nature, and Galen’s On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body—the compositional logic and formal integrity of On Human Nature 6–28 come into view. Nemesius depicts all parts of the human body as organs by means of which the soul’s government of the body is—by a divine, archaic logic which is obscured (but not negated) by injury and pathology—realized. For Nemesius, in other words, the human body is an organization of the human soul’s powers.

191 Nem. Nat. Hom. 32 (Morani 98,10–19). For the sense in which Nemesius holds that ‘involuntary’ experiences can be ‘in our power’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 29–32 (Morani 93,20–99,9).

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5

The Logic of Law On Human Nature 29–43

Carneades’ Legacy In 1945, the University of Louvain published David Amand’s study of a form of reasoning that he attributed to a sceptical Platonic scholarch, Carneades of Cyrene (died c.129 bce). Amand’s Fatalism and Freedom in Greek Antiquity traced the survival of Carneades’ anti-­fatalist arguments in ‘pagan’ texts from Cicero to Proclus,1 and in Christian texts from Justin Martyr to John Chrysostom and several of the obscurer late 4th-­century authors.2 The final chapter of Amand’s book treats Nemesius’ defence of human autonomy in Hum. Nat. 29–43.3 What sets Amand’s interpretation of Hum. Nat. 29–43 apart from those by Bolesław Domanski, Friedrich Martin März, Alberto Siclari, and Martin Streck4 is his strict attention to the arguments which were initiated—so he convincingly argues—by Carneades, creator of what is called the New Academy.5 (‘To me it seems old’—Cicero drily objects—‘at least, if we count Plato as a member of the Old Academy’.)6 At the core of Carneades’ form of anti-­fatalist polemic lies the logic of law. And the oldest evidence of this reasoning is preserved in Cicero’s 1  D. Amand (or E. Amand de Mendieta), Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque. Recherches sur la survivance de l’argumentation morale antifataliste de Carnéade chez les philosophes grecs et les théologiens chrétiens des quatre premiers siècles (Louvain, 1945; reprint Amsterdam, 1973), 73–7. 2  He examines the anti-­fatalist arguments (inter alia) of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Epiphanius of Salamis, Diodorus of Tarsus, and an anonymous Arian commentator on Job: Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque, 383–548. 3 Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque, 549–69. 4 B. Domanski, Die Psychologie des Nemesius (Münster, 1900), 129–68; F. M. März, ‘Anthropologische Grundlagen der Christlichen Ethik bei Nemesios von Emesa’ (Doctoral thesis of the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, December 1959), 92–174; A. Siclari, L’antropologia di Nemesio di Emesa (Padova, 1974), 223–301; M. Streck, Das schönste Gut. Der menschliche Wille bei Nemesius von Emesa und Gregor von Nyssa (Göttingen, 2005). Briefer contributions include: R.  Sharples, ‘Nemesius of Emesa and Some Theories of Divine Providence’, Vigiliae Christianae 37.2 (1983), 141–56; idem, ‘Threefold Providence: The History and Background of a Doctrine’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 46 (2003), 107–27; S. Föllinger, ‘Willensfreiheit und Determination bei Nemesios von Emesa’, Aspekte spätantiker Anthropologie (Leipzig, 2006); and J.  Söder, ‘Nemesios von Emesa über das freie Entscheidungsvermögen’, Wille und Handlung in der Philosophie der Kaiserzeit und Spätantike, ed. J. Müller (Berlin, 2010). 5 Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque, 571–86, here 571: ‘Nous nous bornerons uniquement à reconstituer, hypothétiquement et par voie de conjecture, le contenu intellectuel de l’argumentation morale antifataliste de Carnéade.’ (Amand’s italics.) 6 Cic. Acad. I 12.46.

Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature: A Cosmopolitan Anthropology from Roman Syria. David Lloyd Dusenbury. Oxford University Press. © David Lloyd Dusenbury 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856962.003.0005

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128  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature fragmentary Latin dialogue On Fate, in which Carneades, who wrote nothing, is obliquely credited for it.7 This is Cicero’s rendering of his unidentified Greek source, which is perhaps traceable (in some form) to the African scholarch, Carneades: ‘If all things take place by fate, all things take place with an antecedent cause; and if desire is caused, so also those things which follow desire are caused. Therefore assent too is caused. But if the cause of desire is not situated within us, then not even desire itself is in our power. And if this is so, those things which are caused by desire also do not rest with us. It follows therefore that neither assent nor action is in our power. From this it results that there is no justice in praise or blame, in honours or punishments.’ But as this is erroneous, they hold it to be a more likely supposition that not everything that takes place, takes place by fate.8

To imply that ‘there is no justice in praise or blame, in honours or punishments’ is of course to imply that there is, in Nemesius’ phrase, no possible justice in ‘law or political order’ (nomos ē politeia).9 For without ‘honours or punishments’—which Cicero calls laudationes et vituperationes, and Nemesius seven times calls epainoi kai psogoi—political order is inconceivable.10 The form of reductio ad absurdum that Cicero transmits, here, is decisive in the final chapters of On Human Nature. And we are indebted to Amand for having noticed in many early Christian texts the traces of what can be called, non-­ dogmatically, Carneades’ legacy.11 It will suffice to glance at a couple of anti-­ fatalist pages in Basil of Caesarea’s Sermons on the Six-­Day-­Work, where he counters then-­current theories that placed humans in thrall to the stars. This is Basil: If the origins of our virtues and vices are not in our power (eph’ hēmin), but correspond to the necessities of our birth, it is useless for lawgivers to define what we ought to do and what we ought to avoid. It is useless for judges to honour virtue and punish vice. The guilt is not in the thief, not in the murderer . . . [for

7 Cic. Fat. 11.23–14.33; Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque, 78–80. For the possibility of an Epicurean influence here see P.  M.  Huby, ‘An Epicurean Argument in Cicero, De Fato XVII-­40’, Phronesis 15.1 (1970), 83–5. Despite Huby’s title, she reminds us that ‘we have very little indication of what Cicero’s sources were’, and she suggests an Epicurean influence without asserting it. 8 Cic. Fat. 17.40. 9 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 124,4). 10 M. Morani, Nemesii Emeseni, De natura hominis (Leipzig, 1987), 94 (two times), 95 (two times), 104 (one time), 114 (two times). 11  For ‘Carneades’ legacy’, see the caveats cited in an earlier note: Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque, 571.

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  129 they are] urged by an irresistible necessity to act . . .12 And we will see the great hopes of Christians fade and vanish, for there is no reward for justice and no punishment for sin if humans never act according to their choice (kata prohairesin).13

Amand is right to connect Nemesius’ reasoning in Hum. Nat. 29–43 to the Carneadean critique of fate which is re-­elaborated, here, by Basil. It will be argued in this chapter, however, that Amand is mistaken when he describes Hum. Nat. 35–38 as ‘an independent opuscule directed against fatalism’.14 We could note that Streck, too, isolates Hum. Nat. 35–38 in his recent in­ter­pret­ ation of Nemesius.15 On the reconstruction offered here, there is nothing ‘independent’ about the logic of law as it functions in Nemesius’ anti-­fatalist arguments in Hum. Nat. 35–38. The type of reasoning that figures prominently in those chapters is decisive throughout the concluding phase of Nemesius’ text (Hum. Nat. 29–43). What is more, the logic set out in Hum. Nat. 35–38 informs the entire arc of On Human Nature. If it were not for Nemesius’ theory of human freedom, informed by Carneades’ critique of fate, his 4th-­century cosmopolitan anthropology would become unrecognizable.16

The Absurdity of Fate Let us begin in medias res with a reading of Hum. Nat. 35, Nemesius’ chapter ‘On Fate’. This brief chapter serves to introduce Nemesius’ belief that human autonomy gives meaning to the forms of human and divine law—which is to say, to human cities and the divine world city. This belief, though it is articulated late in On Human Nature, promises to illuminate the whole text. For we may recall that when Nemesius introduces the Platonic world-­picture in Hum. Nat. 2, he promises to return to it ‘in our treatment of fate’.17 The philosopher-­bishop’s critique of fate is, then, anticipated from the first pages of On Human Nature. But several terminological comments should be made before we move into Hum. Nat. 35. There is a marked concentration of new terms in this chapter, and a shift of tone within it. Registering these can prepare us to recognize the chapter’s significance for our interpretation of the text:

12  Compare Basil’s thieves and murderers to the adulterers and murderers at Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,23–4). 13 Bas. Hex. VI 7 (132b–133c, here 133b–c). 14 Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque, 562. (My translation, my italics.) 15 Streck, Das schönste Gut, 39–44, 115 (where Streck comments on Amand’s division of the text). 16  That Nemesius makes no mention of Carneades or Cicero is immaterial. 17 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 34,16–17).

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130  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature (i) Nemesius states in his proem that he believes humankind to be ‘by nature . . . a political animal’,18 and our reconstruction of Nemesius’ theory of human nature has therefore been ‘political’. It must be pointed out, however, that Nemesius’ term for ‘the political’ (politeia) only appears for the first time in Hum. Nat. 35. That this term does not denote a ‘form of government’ or a ‘regime’ in On Human Nature is made clear both by his use of the verb politeuō (‘have a form of government’) in Hum. Nat. 34,19 and by his later use of politeia in Hum. Nat. 42–3.20 Nemesius never uses politeia to designate a determinate regime or form of government, but rather—always—the bare fact that humans live in hierarchic, collective orders. Other animals form quasi-­polities, ‘of which there are many types’, and which are ‘governed by certain forms of rule and hegemony’. The singularity of politeia is that only humankind is ‘receptive of governance and care by lawgivers’.21 For Nemesius, therefore, politeia is also intrinsically related to legal order. (ii) There is a striking and unique concentration of the terms atopia and atopos in Nemesius’ chapter on fate.22 The chapter ends, in fact, with that descriptor: ‘absurd’ (atopos).23 This seems to suggest that the concept of fate strikes Nemesius as singularly indefensible. This could be because the proponents of fate, by denying humankind’s power of choice, deny the possibility of a human city—and with it, of a divine world city. Precisely because Nemesius’ anthropology is cosmopolitan, the concept of fate—as a threat to the metaphysical coherence of any divine or human politeia—is for him the height of absurdity. To subvert the idea of a world city is, he says here, to ‘ruin or demean the world’.24 And it may be because Nemesius’ anthropology is cosmopolitan that he first uses the term ‘blasphemy’ in connection to fate. (iii) Nemesius writes in Hum. Nat. 35 that it is ‘blasphemous and absurd’ to inculpate the deity, by way of fate’s necessity, for the crimes committed in human cities.25 And ‘blasphemy’ in On Human Nature seems to consist in the assertion that God misgoverns the world city—or, what comes to the same, that the world is not a city. For the only other time Nemesius uses the term is in Hum. Nat. 43, where he urges his text’s recipients—twice— to ‘in no way condemn the works of providence or blaspheme’.26 This suggests that the Greek offence of blasphemy denotes the Roman crime of 18 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,20–1). 19 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 102,23–5). 20 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 124,4–6) and Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,10–11). 21 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,6–12). 22 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,12–106,13). 23 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 106,13). Compare the closing sentences of Dam. Fid. Orth. II 25 (Kotter and Ledrux 350,35–40). 24 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,21–3): tō panti lumainontai. 25 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 105,3–5). 26 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 135,11–15).

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  131 maiestas laesa, or in its modern form, lèse-­majesté.27 When a world-­ citizen impugns the world’s divine sovereign, it is blasphēmia. Once this is reckoned with, it becomes possible to believe that Nemesius is sincere when he writes in Hum. Nat. 35 that ‘one must not even listen to such ideas’.28 Nemesius believes that the idea that the human soul is corporeal and mortal, for instance, should be patiently controverted—as in the pages of On Human Nature. The idea that God is a tyrant, however, or that there is no justice in the world—he seems to believe that this is an idea which must be silenced. We could recall that this was the cause for Plato’s expulsion of the poets and rhapsodes from his ideal city—they impugn the divine. Having introduced the lexical peculiarities of Hum. Nat. 35, let us turn to the form of reasoning within which they figure. Nemesius opens his main chapter on fate by citing ‘those who ascribe the cause of everything that happens to the rotation of the stars’.29 The stars have not appeared in his text since Hum. Nat. 1, where he claims that ‘the motions of the stars’ were created for the sake of animals (both rational and irrational);30 and where he celebrates the fact that humankind ‘in contemplation enters into the heavens, recognizes the motions of the stars’.31 Our observation and calculation of celestial motion is not for Nemesius a mark of human subservience to stellar influence, but of human mastery. The only living thing which contemplates the heavens, the bishop writes, also ‘rules all things’ (pantōn archei) through its inborn reason—the very power of contemplation.32 It could of course be predicted, therefore, that he would reject the idea that the stars are ‘the cause of every­thing that happens’.33 Nemesius’ objection to fate not only reveals the centrality of legal phenomena in his text, and the mediated (but undiluted) presence of Carneades’ pre-­Christian argumentation, but casts a new light over the whole problematic of mastery and instrumentality which has shaped On Human Nature. This is Nemesius: Those who ascribe the cause of everything that happens to the rotation of the stars are not only in conflict with ‘common concepts’ but also exhibit the whole of political order as useless.34 For laws are absurd, and law courts are superfluous since they punish those who are in no way responsible. Praise and blame are irrational, and prayers are senseless, since everything occurs according to fate. 27 J. Harries, Law and Crime in the Roman World (Cambridge, 2007), 17. 28 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 105,3–5). 29 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,13). 30 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,5–9). 31 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,12–13). 32 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,17). 33 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,13). 34  The expression ‘common concepts’ (koinais ennoiais) here is doubtless a quasi-­technical echo of the Stoic terminus technicus for ‘one of the privileged items of a priori knowledge given us by nature’: G.  Boys-­Stones, Post-­Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of its Development from the Stoics to Origen (Oxford, 2001), 39.

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132  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature Providence also is eliminated together with piety, while humankind is found to be a mere instrument of the rotation above—for by this not only the parts of the body, but also all the thoughts of the soul are said to be stimulated to act. In a word, those who say such things annihilate what is in our power and the nature of the contingent—which is nothing less than to ruin or demean the world (tō panti lumainontai).35

This paragraph is a signal confirmation of our whole reconstruction of Nemesius’ thought, and a concise introduction to the final chapters of his text. Nemesius’ concern here is only incidentally with a sidereal conception of fate—to which, nevertheless, he will return in Hum. Nat. 36, ‘On What is Fated through the Stars’.36 The celestial bodies in this chapter, as the creators or bearers of fate, are unimportant. Nemesius’ anti-­fatalist reasoning is at no point determined by or restricted to the stars; it is anti-­fatalist in the most basic sense. His target is not a concrete doctrine of fate, but rather the reduction of human life to a mode of necessity which, he claims, all believers in fate either confess or imply— and he does not care whether they confess or imply it.37 What Nemesius passionately rejects is the idea that ‘humankind is a mere instrument’ (ton anthrōpon organon monon).38 This is the crux. He cannot accept this reduction of the human to a tool, regardless of whether humankind is depicted by ‘pagans’ as a mere instrument of stellar rotation or by Christians as a mere instrument of God.39 Nemesius indicates this himself in the sentence which follows those quoted above. It is immaterial to him, and to his argument, whether fatalism implicates ‘the stars themselves’ or ‘the stars’ demiurge, God’ in human crimes.40 What Nemesius condemns is any doctrine—‘pagan’ or Christian— which strips humans of free will, reducing them totally to a life of necessity. A purely instrumental conception of humankind is, he believes, an absurdity. We have already remarked a concentration of the terms atopia and atopos in Hum. Nat. 35, but we have not yet noted a doubling of the charge of absurdity in Nemesius’ argument. The concept of fate is ‘absurd’, he suggests, because it renders human cities and the divine world city—which is to say, political orders and the cosmopolitan order—‘absurd’. For Nemesius, it is the salience of the p ­ ol­it­ical— and especially, what will be called here ‘the evidence of law’—that reveals the 35 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,13–23). Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 7 (Kotter and Ledrux 256,131–49). 36 Nem. Nat. Hom. 36 (Morani 106,15–107,26). 37 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 105,6–18): ‘Some say that both what is in our power and what is according to fate are preserved . . .’ 38 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,18–19). Compare Alex. Fat. 13 (Bruns 181,14, 182,12–20); and R. Sharples, ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias, De Fato: Some Parallels’, The Classical Quarterly 28.2 (1978), 243–66, here 254–6. 39 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 115,15–27). 40 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,23–105,3). Compare Bas. Hex. VI 7 (132b–133a).

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  133 absurdity of fate. We will turn in a moment to the evidence of law in Hum. Nat. 29–43 (in the third section of this chapter, ‘The Evidence of Law’), but here we will restrict ourselves to the sense and significance of politeia in Hum. Nat. 35. In the first place, observe that political order (politeia) is, for Nemesius, a basic anthropological datum. His topic is human nature, and he states in Hum. Nat. 1 that this nature is intrinsically ‘political’ (politikos).41 When he writes in Hum. Nat. 35 that the concept of fate implies that ‘the whole of political order is useless’ (pasan politeian achrēston), he clearly means to imply that fate is a useless ­concept.42 A philosophical anthropology must concern itself with, and render an account for, human law and law courts, praise and blame—in a word, politeia. Because anthrōpos is intrinsically politikos, anthropology is intrinsically political. An anthropology which cannot account for the political is as useless as a physi­ ology which cannot account for the human hand or face.43 In the second place, observe the tiered structure of Nemesius’ argument. He argues that human political orders and a divine cosmopolitan order—meaning, the givenness of human cities and the world city—are not only symmetrical but intricated. Note how he proceeds. The doctrine of fate implies that ‘law courts are superfluous’, and he immediately adds that ‘providence also is eliminated’. Since fate invalidates human punishments, he reasons, fate invalidates divine punishments. (It is ultimately providence that punishes the wicked—without, according to Nemesius, diminishing or negating human choice.) Since ‘praise and blame are irrational (paralogoi)’ in a fatalistic city, so too, he says, ‘prayers are senseless (anoētoi)’ in a fatalistic world.44 This is why Nemesius forcefully concludes that to ‘annihilate what is in our power’, by espousing fate, ‘is nothing less than to ruin or demean the world’.45 Because the world is a divine polity, to deny the possibility of a polity—praise and blame, punishment and reward—is to deny the divine governance of the world. And this, therefore, is the first and only doctrine that the bishop of Emesa calls ‘clearly blasphemous’—the denial that the world is a divinely instituted polity whose governor is the deity.46

The Evidence of Law The person is an ineliminable concept in On Human Nature, and it is highly significant that Nemesius’ only use of the Greek term for ‘person’—prosōpon— occurs in a discussion of legal identity and imputability. 41 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,20–1). 42 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,14–15). 43  For the human hand: Nem. Nat. Hom. 27 (Morani 88,13–17); and for the human face: Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 123,21–4,16). For both, compare Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. 8.8 (Forbesius I: 144–9). 44 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,13–23). 45 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,21–3). 46 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 105,3–5).

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134  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature A legal act, as Nemesius specifies in Hum. Nat. 31, is established by rhetors in a law court—or hypothetically, for that matter, by young boys in a school of ­rhet­oric—by reference to a set of ‘circumstances’ which stick in the memory and rattle off the tongue even more so in Greek than in English. If one needs to settle a question of fact in a forensic setting (quid facti)47—potentially, a question bearing on life and death—it is necessary to determine: ‘Who did what to whom with what, where, when, how, why—such as a person, a deed, an instrument, a place, a time, a manner, a reason.’48 Nemesius adds to this stock list of ‘circumstances’ what is, for us, a crucial definition: ‘A person is the agent or patient of an act.’49 The context of this definition establishes that a prosōpon, whether the agent or patient of an act—must be a human. (Note that the terms ‘agent’ and ‘patient’, here, derive from the Latin terms persona agentis and persona patientis, and not from contemporary denotations of the English terms.) And however modest or banal it may seem, this forensic definition poses—and, if Nemesius is to be believed, resolves—the question of human freedom. Or rather, this definition underlies any human legal order, and it is the prevalence of legal order in human life which constitutes, for Nemesius, irrefragable evidence of natural human freedom. We have briefly examined the role of law in the Carneadean critique of fate, which Nemesius reprises in Hum. Nat. 35. The logic of law is by no means restricted to Nemesius’ anti-­fatalist polemic in Hum. Nat. 35–8, however. It recurs throughout Hum. Nat. 29–43, and it is impossible to comprehend these chapters or On Human Nature without first comprehending this logic, which is not uniquely Carneadean. For it is an Aristotelian logic of law which is tacitly ­introduced in Hum. Nat. 29, ‘On the Voluntary and the Involuntary’, and which introduces the last phase of Nemesius’ text. Since Bolesław Domanski published The Psychology of Nemesius in 1900, commentators have recognized Nemesius’ indirect—and conceivably, direct—­ in­corp­or­ation of material from Nicomachean Ethics III in his chapters on human volition, deliberation, choice, and autonomy (Hum. Nat. 29–34, 39–41).50 Writing in 1945, David Amand concludes:

47 J. Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 1999), 122: ‘To get at the facts was the job of every iudex.’ 48 Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 97,15–17). 49 Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 97,17). Friedrich März is struck by Nemesius’ use of prosōpon: März, ‘Anthropologische Grundlagen der Christlichen Ethik bei Nemesios von Emesa’, 50. He takes no interest, however, in the term’s forensic definition. März comments instead that Nemesius says nothing concerning the ‘metaphysical sense’ of prosōpon (die metaphysische Bedeutung des Wortes Person nichts aussagt). This is incorrect, since—as will be argued in this section—the legal sense of prosōpon informs its metaphysical sense for Nemesius. 50  The passages printed in parallel columns in Domanski’s footnotes are compelling: Domanski, Die Psychologie des Nemesius, 129–49.

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  135 Nemesius attaches . . . great importance to the philosophical proof of autonomy (autexousion). His demonstration is entirely Aristotelian. An even slightly attentive reading of chapters 29 to 34 and 39 to 41 of his treatise leaves no doubt about the ultimate literary source of this section of his work. It is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics III.51

More recently, in his 2008 monograph The Notion of That Which Depends on Us in Plotinus and Its Background, Erik Eliasson observes that Nemesius ‘entirely follows Aristotle’s discussion’ in Nicomachean Ethics III, ‘both as to the disposition and the examples given, as well as to the points made’.52 A contrast could be made, in passing, between Gregory of Nazianzus’ insistence in Oration 23 that he is reason­ing ‘in the way of fishermen’—meaning, the apostles—‘not of Aristotle’ (ouk Aristotelikōs);53 and Nemesius’ open reliance in Hum. Nat. 39 on what—in his phrase—‘Aristotle says well (kalōs)’.54 What commentators seem not to have recognized, however, is that it is a legal concept—namely, imputability—which provides a backcloth for Nemesius’ use of Aristotle in these chapters.55 And what is more, this legal–political backcloth is authentically Aristotelian. Returning briefly to Nemesius’ ultimate source, here, can help us to perceive more clearly his own concern with legal phenomena in the last chapters of On Human Nature. Aristotle opens Nicomachean Ethics III 1 by stipulating that ‘it is only voluntary acts for which praise and blame are given’.56 It is highly per­tin­ent to call to mind, here, the salience of ‘praise and blame’ in the Carneadean formulations transmitted by the Hellenistic philosopher Cicero—and reprised, several centuries on, by the post-­ Hellenistic philosopher Nemesius. The formula in Cicero’s ­anti-­fatalist argument, laudationes et vituperationes,57 is already heard in Aristotle’s formula, epainoi kai psogoi,58 and eventually, of course, it is heard again in Nemesius’ epainoi kai psogoi.59 We could observe, in passing, that the last phrase is put into medieval Latin by Burgundio of Pisa in his rendering of On Human Nature, with vituperationes et laudes.60 (Many of Europe’s scholastic 51 Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque, 559. (My translation; Amand’s italics.) 52 E. Eliasson, The Notion of That Which Depends on Us in Plotinus and Its Background (Leiden, 2008), 154. 53  Greg. Naz. Orat. 23.12, in the translation of D. T. Runia, ‘Festugiere Revisited: Aristotle in the Greek Patres’, Vigiliae Christianae 43.1 (1989), 1–34, here 25. Compare Epiph. Panar. 76.37.16. 54 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 113,17–18). 55 Domanski, Die Psychologie des Nemesius, 129–68; Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque, 549–69; März, ‘Anthropologische Grundlagen der Christlichen Ethik bei Nemesios von Emesa’, 92–174; Siclari, L’antropologia di Nemesio di Emesa, 223–301; Streck, Das schönste Gut, 39–121; Eliasson, The Notion of That Which Depends on Us, 153–5. 56 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.1 (1109b31–2). 57 Cic. Fat. 17.40. 58 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.1 (1109b31). 59  Note that Nemesius more than once inverts the formula, writing psogoi kai epainoi. 60  G. Verbeke and J. R. Moncho, Némésius d’Émèse, De natura hominis. Traduction de Burgundio de Pise (Leiden, 1975), 133.

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136  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature master-­ thinkers read Nemesius in Burgundio’s translation.)61 By translating Nemesius’ Greek into medieval Latin, Burgundio unconsciously effected a 12th-­ century ce echo of a lost 1st-­century bce text by Cicero which Nemesius himself never cites. What matters here, however, is that ‘praise and blame’ is not only a legal–­pol­it­ical formula in the tradition of Carneades and Cicero (and therefore, in Hum. Nat. 35–38), but also in the tradition of Aristotle (meaning, Nemesius’ direct or ­indirect source in Hum. Nat. 29–34, 39–41). Consider how Aristotle immediately justifies his concern with the ‘voluntary’ in Nicomachean Ethics III 1: ‘This will also be of use to the lawgiver in assigning rewards and punishments.’62 That the topic of the voluntary bears on legal–political punishment is a commonplace in Aristotle’s day which is still relevant for Nemesius. Yet it antedates Aristotle. In Laws IX, for instance, Plato concedes that: ‘In all the cities, by all the lawgivers who have ever arisen, there have been held to be two forms of ­in­just­ices—voluntary and involuntary—and offences have been so legislated.’63 The voluntary–involuntary distinction is thematized in Plato’s Laws, and he could hardly place a heavier stress on its universality. Suffice to say here that this is one of the most basic distinctions of ancient—and indeed, modern—legal theory. In Plato’s wake, Aristotle is fully cognizant of this (as is Nemesius), and his references to legislation are by no means limited to the first paragraph of Nicomachean Ethics III. The legal effect of the voluntary is imputability. Or stated more forcefully, the human will—as the condition of possibility of imputability—is a logical conditio sine qua non of human law. Aristotle’s principle of imputability is this: ‘Humans are the origin of their acts.’64 Nemesius echoes this principle, asserting in Hum. Nat. 39 that one who acts voluntarily is ‘the origin of their own acts’.65 It is therefore notable that Aristotle refers to archaic legislation to illustrate his principle: One stops enquiring how one shall act as soon as one has carried back the origin of action to oneself, and to one’s hegemonic part, for it is this part that decides. This can be illustrated by the ancient political orders depicted in Homer. The kings used to proclaim to the people the measures they had chosen.66

61  For the character of Burgundio’s translation: Verbeke and Moncho, Nemesius d’Émèse, lxxxvi–c. For its dissemination and influence: H. B. Wicher, ‘Nemesius Emesenus’, Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries. Volume VI, ed. P. O. Kristeller and F. E. Cranz (Washington, D.C., 1986), 39–43. 62 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.1 (1109b34–5). 63 Pl. Leg. IX 861b. Compare Lys. Phil. 11. 64 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 3.15 (1112b32–3). 65 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 113,8–9). 66 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 3.17–18 (1113a5–9).

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  137 Aristotle’s theory of imputability is at once political and legal. One is a legal ­person, he says here—one of ‘the people’—precisely because one bears within oneself a monarchic power, a ‘hegemonic part’. In the tradition within which Nemesius writes, therefore, it is in the power of a legal person to act precisely as it is in the power of a sovereign to enact. This is why Cicero is right—and later, Seneca is right67—to translate the Greek formula eph’ hēmin with the Latin phrase in nostra potestate.68 The question of the voluntary is a question of imputability, and imputability is ultimately a question of the power to act. The political is a form of order which is predicated on this power—the human power of choice. (It is precisely the political dimension of the will which is lost in the typical English rendering of eph’ hēmin as ‘up to us’.)69 The origin of the sovereign’s act is identical to that of a citizen’s act. For Aristotle writes: ‘The origin of the act is within you.’70 Aristotle concludes from this that ‘therefore virtue is in our power, and so also is vice’.71 Nemesius rephrases this formula, which is nevertheless immediately recognizable in its late-­ antique Christian form: ‘Choice is the origin of sin and righteousness.’72 In Nemesius, the latter formula is connected to a statement of the principle of imputability which is more striking than any in Nicomachean Ethics III. This is Nemesius: ‘Choice precedes all acts, and it is not only our act, but our choice which is liable to judgement.’73 The crucial term here is hupodikos—‘liable to judgement, liable to be tried, subject to punishment’.74 This term is a hapax in On Human Nature, but it designates, as we shall see, the ‘imputable’ entity with which Nemesius is concerned throughout On Human Nature. To be human, according to him, is to be liable to judgement (hupodikos)—because humans have the power of choice (prohairesis). The term hupodikos has not received any real attention from Nemesius’ editors and commentators.75 But given its bearing on our reconstruction, we should pause over the term and the question of its possible sources. 67 Eliasson, The Notion of That Which Depends on Us, 97–106, here 97: ‘We have reasons to take the notion of in nostra potestate to be the established Latin translation of the notion of ἐφ’ ἡμῖν. Seneca in fact develops a distinctive notion of in nostra potestate . . .’ 68  The decision is noted, but not interrogated, in S. Botros, ‘Freedom, Causality, Fatalism and Early Stoic Philosophy’, Phronesis 30.3 (1985), 274–304, here 282. 69  This is borne out by Eliasson’s treatment of eph’ hēmin—although he translates it slightly differently, as ‘that which depends on us’—in the Nicomachean Ethics. The legal thematic in Aristotle’s text is totally absent: Eliasson, The Notion of That Which Depends on Us, 47–61. 70 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 5.14 (1114a19). Compare Eth. Nic. III 5.6 (1113b21–2): ‘Acts of which the origins are within us, are in our power and voluntary.’ 71 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 5.2 (1113b6–7). 72 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 116,3–4). 73 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 115,27–8). 74  H.  G.  Liddell and R.  Scott, A Greek-­English Lexicon, rev. H.  S.  Jones with R.  McKenzie, et al. (Oxford, 1996), 1880; G. W. H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford, 1961), 1448. 75 C. F. Matthaei, Nemesius Emesenus, De natura hominis, Graece et Latine . . . (Halle an der Saale, 1802), 320; W. Telfer, Cyril of Jerusalem and Nemesius of Emesa (London, 1955), 415; Morani, De natura hominis, 115; R.  Sharples and P.  van der Eijk, Nemesius, On the Nature of Man (Liverpool, 2008), 199.

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138  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature To begin with, hupodikos could very naturally be inspired by Nemesius’ own experience in ecclesiastical and civil courts. By virtue of his episcopate, he would have been vested with certain judicial powers in Emesa. The character of the episcopalis audientia in Roman Syria, however, is exceedingly hard to determine.76 It should moreover be held in mind that Nemesius may well have presided over trials, and decided questions of justiciability, as a high Roman official in ­ Cappadocia Secunda. But as we have seen in chapter 1, this seems unlikely to ever rise above the level of a conjecture. All that is certain, then, is that Nemesius cites ‘the gospel’ in Hum. Nat. 40 to justify his claim that human choice is hupodikos. For directly after he states that our choice is ‘liable to judgement’, he quotes a logion from Matthew 5: ‘Whoever looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’77 (There is a similar, non-­ prophetic hypothetical in Hum. Nat. 30,78 where Nemesius denies that ‘the beauty of a prostitute’ annuls the power of choice in ‘one who saw her’.)79 The relevance of this to Nemesius’ claim that ‘choice . . . is liable to judgement’ is clear,80 but there is no trace of hupodikos in Jesus’ saying. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to consider scripture as a source for Nemesius’ use of the term. And as it happens, hupodikos is a hapax in New Testament (as in On Human Nature). This means that the evidence can be rapidly assessed. The term only appears in Romans 3, where it has a gravely cosmopolitan meaning.81 For this is Paul in his letter to the first generation of Christ-­believers at Rome: ‘We know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that . . . the whole world may become liable to the judgement of God.’82 However significant this statement may be in the history of cosmopolitan theory, there is no reason to conjecture that Paul’s use of hupodikos determined Nemesius’ use of the term. The Pauline text is nevertheless suggestive from a systematic perspective. For the meaning of hupodikos in Romans 3 can sharpen our perception of Nemesius’ concern with legal phenomena in Hum. Nat. 29–43. Whereas, for Paul, it is the promulgation of a divine law which renders humans ‘liable to judgement’, for Nemesius it is the natural power of choice which renders humans ‘liable to judgement’. There is no contradiction here, but there is a basic— and illuminating—difference. To formulate this difference concisely we can introduce a pair of Latin legal principles, one of which can be dated to Nemesius’ period, and the other of which is a modern civil distillate of a principle of 76 Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity, 191–211; G.  Schiemann, ‘Syro-­Roman Law Book’, Brill’s New Pauly, ed. H. Cancik and H. Schneider (Leiden, 2008), archived online at brillonline.com, consulted on 5 June 2017. 77 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 115,28–16,1). Compare Matthew 5:28. 78  Perhaps taken from Origen: Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 882. 79 Nem. Nat. Hom. 30 (Morani 96,2–10). 80 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 115,27–8). 81  For a brief reflection on Paul’s place in the history of cosmopolitan theory: J. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York, 1991), 77–93. 82  Romans 3:19.

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  139 medieval canon law,83 which is itself rooted in scholastics’ juridical readings of the sacred page and of patristic writers, such as Nemesius. Paul’s thesis in Romans 3 can be represented by the modern legal formula,84 nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege.85 There is no crime—and thus, there can be no punishment—in the absence of law.86 There can be no transgression in the absence of interdiction. (Already in Peter Lombard’s institution-­ shaping Sentences, we read: ‘There could be no sin if there were no interdiction.’ This is a scholastic paraphrase of Paul within a gloss on Ambrose of Milan’s On Paradise.)87 An act qua act is never a crime. It is only an act committed by one who is ‘under the law’, in Paul’s phrase, which renders them ‘liable to judgement’ (hupodikos). The promulgation of law is therefore a precondition of guilt. This is why Paul writes that ‘the law . . . speaks to those who are under the law’—final conjunction, ‘so that, in order that’ (hina)—they ‘may become liable to judgement’ (hupodikos genētai).88 Culpability, here, is not established with reference to the human will alone, but to the human will in relation to the legal rule. It is not the human mind as such in Romans 3, but the human mind in as much as it is ‘under’ divine law that renders humans ‘liable to judgement’. This could perhaps be due, in part, to Paul’s epoch-­shaping theorization of the divided mind or will in Romans. Regardless, Nemesius’ concept of imputability in On Human Nature—which is signalled by the term hupodikos—differs from Paul’s in that it is oriented to the will, not the rule. One of Nemesius’ contemporaries, Augustine of Hippo, formulated a legal principle which has migrated from late-­antique ecclesiastical law to late-­modern criminal law, and which is of some use in the present context. In a sermon on perjury (Sermo 180), Augustine stipulated that the tongue cannot make us guilty unless our mind is guilty (ream linguam non facit nisi mens rea).89 According to a later version of this canon, the act does not make one guilty unless one’s mind is guilty (actus non facit reum, nisi mens sit rea). To this day, the Latin forensic term mens rea denotes a ‘guilty mind’—or less literally, the presence of ‘criminal intent’—and its origin can be traced back to Augustine’s homiletic line. 83 V.  Mäkinen and H.  Pihlajamäki, ‘The Individualization of Crime in Medieval Canon Law’, Journal of the History of Ideas 65.4 (2004), 525–42, here 531. 84  The apostle’s legal reasoning in this epistle is so subtle and shifting, so internally conflicted and polemically determined that it defies crystallization—and certainly, defies crystallization by a 19th-­ century civil law maxim. However, the highly restricted claim here is that the nullum crimen sine lege principle illuminates—without, of course, exhausting—the inner logic of Romans 3:19–20, which Paul revisits in Romans 7:7–13. 85  It is credited to Anselm von Feuerbach, writing in 1801. Note, however, that von Feuerbach’s original formulation reads nulla poena sine lege: V. Krey, Keine Strafe ohne Gesetz. Einführung in die Dogmengeschichte des Satzes ‘nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege’ (Berlin, 1983), 18–19. 86  In the absence of law, the infliction of harm is regarded as iniuria, not punitio: Justin. Inst. 4.4. 87  Peter Lombard, Sententiarum libri quatuor, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1855), II 35.1 (col. 734): Non enim consisteret peccatum, si interdictio non fuisset. 88  Romans 3:19. 89 Aug. Serm. 180 2.2. (The sermon’s most recent editor believes that it is impossible to date accurately.)

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140  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature In late-­modern legal parlance, mens rea signifies the mental—which is to say, the volitional—element of crime. It is therefore a nebulous and contested, but a decisive, criterion of guilt. Nemesius insists that it is a culpable intention of the mind (in Augustine’s Latin, mens rea) which renders us ‘liable to judgement’ and ‘subject to punishment’ (in Nemesius’ Greek, hupodikos). ‘To do wrong is voluntary’, Clement of Alexandria already insists in a chapter of the Stromata (c.200) which is studded with Platonic extracts.90 Like Clement and many other early Christian philosophers, Nemesius believes that the only conceivable power which could render an intention of the mind culpable is choice (prohairesis). Humans are liable to judgement only because humans are by nature free. Nemesius’ concern with legal phenomena in On Human Nature is not institutional but anthropological, not positive but natural. ‘Things that are natural’, he claims in Hum. Nat. 41, ‘are the same for all’.91 He means this. And Nemesius is solely concerned with what he takes to be the unvarying human root of all positive legal forms—prohairesis—and not with the variegated, shifting formations (and deformations) of legal culture. His question of human will—and with it, of the logical integrity of law—is, by Nemesius’ design, no less urgent in our century than in his. We will recall Plato’s introduction of the voluntary–involuntary distinction in Laws IX. It has been recognized ‘in all the cities’, Plato writes, ‘by all the lawgivers who have ever arisen’.92 There is no modesty—false or real—in this framing of this basic legal question. And in Plato’s milieu, the speech-­writer Lysias claims in his brief Against Philon that it is ‘a just custom of all humankind’ to pardon involuntary offences.93 It is in this vein, throughout Hum. Nat. 29–43, that Nemesius sets law in the light of human will, and sets will in the light of human law. The bishop of Emesa unshakeably believes that a ubiquity of law in human cities testifies to a natural power of human choice. This late-­antique philosopher-­ bishop is convinced that human freedom is discernible in all regimes, in all epochs. For as he writes in Hum. Nat. 39: ‘By nature every people makes use of some laws, knowing that it is in their power to observe the laws.’94 We will return to this passage in the coming pages. It is first necessary to note that Nemesius cites the prevalence of legal phenomena as a proof of human autonomy.

90 Clem. Strom. V 13. The datings of the Stromata (c.198–203) proposed by A. Méhat, Étude sur les Stromates de Clément d’Alexandrie (Paris, 1966), are carried forward by R. E. Heine, ‘The Alexandrians’, in The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature, ed. F.  Young, L.  Ayres, and A.  Louth, with A. Cassiday (Cambridge, 2004), 117–30, here 118. 91 Nem. Nat. Hom. 41 (Morani 120,4–5). 92 Pl. Leg. IX 861b. 93 Lys. Phil. 11: ‘It is a just custom just of all humankind that in the face of the same crimes we should be . . . indulgent to the poor or the congenitally disabled because we regard their offenses as involuntary.’ Incidentally, it is likely that ‘speech-­writer’ originated as a term of abuse: Pl. Phaed. 257c, 277a–b. 94 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 114,6–7).

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  141 This is an Aristotelian logic—and later, it seems, a Carneadean logic—which Nemesius applies to human cities and the divine world city, to human and divine laws. In the final chapters of On Human Nature, it is this logic which is taken to imply the clarity of human freedom (as conditio sine qua non of human and divine law), the absurdity of fate (as denial of human freedom and thus of all law), and the sublime beauty of divine providence (as perfect recompense for human freedom, and perfect complement to human law). A further reference to legislation in Nicomachean Ethics III will contribute to this phase of our reconstruction. This is Aristotle: But if it is apparent that one is the origin of one’s acts, and if we are unable to trace our conduct back to any other origins than those within ourselves, then acts of which the origins are within us, are themselves within our power and voluntary. This seems to be attested by our behaviour in private life, and by the practice of lawgivers. For they punish and penalize those who do evil (unless it is done under compulsion, or through ignorance for which a person is not responsible), and honour those who do fine things, in order to stimulate the one and repress the other. But no one tries to stimulate us to do things which are not within our power and not voluntary.95

The evidence of law in Nicomachean Ethics III is this. Certain things must be ‘within our power and voluntary’, because law is a technique of ‘punishments and rewards’,96 and because it is senseless to punish or reward things which are ‘not within our power and not voluntary’.97 In other words, law is ubiquitous; law is not senseless; and therefore human freedom is ubiquitous. This is Nemesius’ reasoning throughout the final chapters of On Human Nature, where the evidence of law, à la Aristotle and Carneades, is a recurring theme. It is the power of choice (prohairesis) which renders human acts i­m­put­able—and thus, which renders us liable to judgement (hupodikos).98 Nemesius writes that ‘every people makes use of some laws’.99 Therefore, he reasons, humankind must by nature possess the power of choice, and must by nature be liable to—human and divine—judgement. The prevalence of human law is an ir­re­fut­able sign, in On Human Nature, of the presence of natural human freedom. Nemesius subtly introduces this thematization of law in Hum. Nat. 29. We will recall that Aristotle opens Nicomachean Ethics III by observing that his investigation of the voluntary will ‘be of use to the lawgiver in assigning rewards and ­punishments’.100 Immediately before this, Aristotle writes: ‘It is only voluntary 95 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 5.6–7 (1113b19–28). 96  Compare Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.1 (1109b34–5) and III 5.7 (1113b23). 97 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 5.6–7 (1113b19–28). 98 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 115,27–8). 99 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 114,6–7). 100 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.1 (1109b34–5).

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142  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature acts for which praise and blame are given. Those that are involuntary are judged leniently, and sometimes even pardoned.’101 In giving his criterion (gnōmōn) of the voluntary and involuntary in Hum. Nat. 29, Nemesius echoes Aristotle and keeps his legislative references to ‘punishment’ and ‘pardon’—plus Aristotle’s (and Carneades’) legalistic formula, ‘praise and blame’—without, however, referring to law per se or introducing the figure of the lawgiver. This is Nemesius: An act is a rational operation. Acts attract praise and blame, and some of them are done with pleasure . . . Again, some acts are pitied and thought deserving of pardon, some are hated and punished. So let [our criterion] of the voluntary be that it always attracts praise or blame . . . [Our criterion] of the involuntary [is] that it is thought deserving of pardon or pity.102

Nemesius’ primary criterion of the voluntary (hekousios) and the involuntary (akousios) evokes the valuative and punitive techniques of ancient law—particularly the latter, with its reference to ‘pardons’ (eleountai) and ‘punishments’ (kolazontai). What is more, his ultimate source here—Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics III 1— cites the law explicitly for this criterion. The logic of law is thus discernible in Nemesius’ introduction to the final chapters of On Human Nature. Legal terminology comes to the fore in Hum. Nat. 31, in which, between his treatments of the involuntary (Hum. Nat. 30) and the voluntary (Hum. Nat. 32), Nemesius examines the ‘not-­voluntary’. The not-­voluntary is a form of mixed (miktos) act in which, he says, ‘the origin is involuntary (archēn akousion) but the conclusion is voluntary (telos hekousion)’.103 Nemesius cites as not-­voluntary a scenario in which ‘one involuntarily kills an adversary but rejoices at his slaughter’.104 (Note in passing that Nemesius’ Greek term, echthros, suggests an adversary, not a public enemy.)105 It is here that he lists the forensic ‘circumstances’ introduced earlier—‘who did what to whom with what’, and so on.106 We noted then the importance of Nemesius’ use of the term ‘person’ (prosōpon) in

101 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.1 (1109b31–3). 102 Nem. Nat. Hom. 29 (Morani 94,3–12). 103 Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 96,21–2). 104 Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 96,14–15). 105  Pace Telfer, Nemesius of Emesa, 386: ‘kill a foe’. Nemesius’ medieval and early modern trans­ lators are more sensitive. Burgundio denotes the non-­political character of the enmity by rendering echthros with inimicus (rather than with hostis, ‘foe’). Burgundio’s text reads, ut cum quis involuntarius inimicum occiderit, laetatur autem in occisione: Verbeke and Moncho, De natura hominis, 122. Nemesius’ first English translator signals the personal animus—which is, of course, the heart of the exemplum—by picturing a scene in which ‘a man killeth his enemy at unawares . . . and yet is glad that he is slain’: G. Wither, The Nature of Man: A learned and uſefull Tract, written in Greek by Nemeſius, ſurnamed the Philoſopher . . . (London, 1636), 461 (tyopography lightly modernized). 106 Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 97,15–17).

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  143 this passage to denote a legal sense of identity and imputability. ‘A person’, he informs us, ‘is the agent or patient of an act’.107 In On Human Nature, the concept of a person is defined by a capacity for voluntary, not-­voluntary, and involuntary acts. A catalogue of involuntary acts that Nemesius offers in Hum. Nat. 31 is worth quoting in full.108 The person is the agent or patient of an act, as when a son has struck his father in ignorance. The deed is that which was done, as when someone has caused blindness when wishing to slap. The instrument as when one threw a stone thinking it was pumice stone.109 The place as when one has collided with someone he did not know was coming when making a turn in a narrow pass. The time as when, in the night, someone has thought a friend was an enemy and slew him. The mode, as when someone has killed someone by hitting him gently and not violently (for he did not know that he would die if hit gently). The reason, as when someone has given someone a drug to cure them, but the one who took it died because the drug proves to be harmful to them.110 Not even a lunatic could be ignorant of all these at the same time, but one who has been ignorant of most or the most decisive of these matters has acted on account of ignorance.111 Among them the most decisive are the purpose and effect of the act, that is, the reason and the deed.112

It is by no means unimportant that Nemesius, by means of this catalogue, orients his treatment of the voluntary, not-­voluntary, and involuntary to the genre of legal casuistry. All of these ‘circumstances’ are made to represent hard, but still relatively prosaic cases—this is true even of the first, myth-­laden scenario113— with which any highly developed jurisprudence, such as Roman law in the late 107 Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 97,17). 108  Nemesius’ direct or indirect dependence on Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.17–18 (1111a7–19) is beyond doubt, and this catalogue also has points of contact with the surviving commentary tradition. His catalogue is nevertheless unique: Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 886. 109  Compare Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.17 (1111a12–13): ‘A person might mistake . . . a heavy stone for a pumice stone.’ 110  Compare Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.17 (1111a13–14): ‘One might kill a man by giving him medicine with the intention of saving his life.’ 111  Compare Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.17–18 (1111a7–8, 15–17): ‘Now no one but a lunatic could be ignorant of all these circumstances together . . . but one who has acted in ignorance of any of them is held to have acted involuntarily, and especially so if ignorant of the most decisive of them.’ 112 Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 97,17–98,3). Compare Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.18 (1111a17–18): ‘The most decisive of the circumstances seem to be the act itself and its reason.’ 113  But there is another scene of involuntary parricide, which seems to lack mythic undertones, at Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 97,5–8). Note too that Aristotle incorporates mythical references into his

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144  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature 4th century, must be thoroughly acquainted. This catalogue therefore has the function, inter alia—a function which has not, to date, been noted—of accentuating the presence of legal-­juridical discourse in Nemesius’ last chapters (Hum. Nat. 29–43), much as medical-­anatomical discourse is accentuated in his text’s middle chapters (Hum. Nat. 6–28). If this discursive aspect of Nemesius’ catalogue is not unimportant, neither is it ‘most decisive’. But the bishop tells us what is ‘most decisive’ here—‘the purpose and effect of the act, that is, the reason and the deed’.114 This is a virtually verbatim recollection of a sentence in Nicomachean Ethics III, where Aristotle concludes: ‘The most decisive of the circumstances seem to be the act itself and its reason.’115 Why are the ‘reason’ (aitia) and the ‘deed’ (pragma), in Nemesius’ gloss on this Aristotelian material, the most decisive? Because the rest—instrument, place, time, and mode—are not intrinsically personal. A time, a place, a tool, or a mode may have legal bearing or even a legal status, but they are not legal persons. They may co-­ constitute acts, but they cannot—qua time, place, tool, or mode—­ initiate acts. According to Nemesius’ definition, we will recall, ‘an act is a rational operation’ (praxis estin energeia logikē).116 By definition, then, it is only a rational being—a person—that can initiate an act. And within the limits of Nemesius’ catalogue, it is only the ‘reason’ and ‘deed’ which designate persons—namely, the agent and patient of an act. The term ‘reason’ (aitia) seems to designate the agent’s voluntary, not-­voluntary, or involuntary contribution to a ‘deed’ (pragma) in which the patient is variously affected (blinded, killed, and so on). Thus, the ‘reason’ pertains to the agent, and the ‘deed’ to the patient of an act. It is critical to observe, here, that Nemesius specifies that the patient is no less a legal ‘person’ (prosōpon) than the agent. The one who is blinded here is, in prin­ ciple, capable of blinding. The one who is killed here is, in principle, capable of killing. This means that the patient is, in principle, capable of perpetrating a legal ‘act’—an occurrence which can only be described, analysed, and judged with reference to a singular ‘cause’: the human will. Reason and deed are therefore the ‘most decisive’ for Aristotle and Nemesius, but it is nevertheless the ‘instrument’ (organon) that may prove to be most il­lu­ min­at­ing for us—precisely because the ‘cause’ (aitia) of an instrument’s motion never lies within itself. What Aristotle says of the legal person—namely, ‘the origin of the act is within you’117—is precisely, per definitionem, what can never be

catalogue of ‘circumstances’ at Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.17 (1111a12–13): ‘A person might mistake their son for an enemy (polemion), as Merope does.’ 114 Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 98,2–3). 115 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 1.18 (1111a17–18). 116 Nem. Nat. Hom. 29 (Morani 94,3–12). 117 Arist. Eth. Nic. III 5.14 (1114a19). Compare Eth. Nic. III 5.6 (1113b21–2): ‘Acts of which the origins are within us, are in our power and voluntary.’

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  145 true of an instrument. When the origin of an act lies outside oneself, it is a ‘cause’ (aitia); but when the origin of an act lies within oneself, it is a ‘reason’ (aitia). When an effect cannot be imputed to one, it is a ‘thing’ (pragma); but when an effect can be imputed to one, it is a ‘deed’ (pragma). What separates ‘cause’ and ‘thing’ from ‘reason’ and ‘deed’ is the human will. To the instrument pertain causes and things; to the person belong reasons and deeds. This returns us to the concept of instrumentality in Hum. Nat. 35 (introduced in the second section of this chapter, ‘The Absurdity of Fate’), where Nemesius objects that the doctrine of fate reduces the ‘person’ (prosōpon) to ‘a mere instrument’ (organon monon).118 Are human reasons and deeds, he asks there, in our power in the same way that ‘burning is up to fire, since fire burns by its nature’?119 The question is facetious, and rhetorical.120 Are human acts no more voluntary, he asks—and therefore, no more imputable—than the motions of ‘a flute and other instruments, and all irrational and lifeless things, when anyone makes use of them’? But that, he says, is ‘absurd’ (atopos).121 The argument of Hum. Nat. 6–28 is that ‘the body is the instrument (organon) of the soul’, and that it is ‘divided up in correspondence with the powers of the soul’.122 Nemesius believes that it is ‘the natural role of the irrational to serve the rational’, and that the union of body and soul exhibits this instrumental logic.123 However, he attacks the concept of fate in Hum. Nat. 35 precisely because it instrumentalizes the soul. ‘Not only the parts of the body’, he reports here, ‘but also all the thoughts of the soul are said [by fatalists] to be moved to act’.124 If the ‘thoughts of the soul’ are not what moves a person to act, but rather, are themselves ‘moved to act’, then every occurrence has a ‘cause’ but no occurrence has a ‘reason’. The body may be an instrument of ‘the soul’, but the concept of fate implies that the soul is itself an instrument of other bodies. A ‘flute girl’ (aulētris) is herself no more than a flute which—not who—is being played upon.125 The

118 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,18–19). 119 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 106,7–10). 120 Other terms could be used. For instance, George Boys-­Stones desribes these sentences as ‘strictly ad hominem’: G. Boys-­Stones, ‘ “Middle” Platonists on Fate and Human Autonomy’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 50 (2007), 431–47, here 439. 121 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 106,11–13). Note that substitutability is the crux of Nemesius’ questions, here, regarding ‘fire’ and ‘a flute and other instruments’. For clarity and fluidity of ex­pos­ ition, however, I reverse the substitutions implied by his questions. This in no way affects the logic. Nemesius asks: ‘Do fire and flutes (etc.) have as much will as humans? That is absurd.’ I ask: ‘Do humans have as little will as fire and flutes (etc.)? That is absurd.’ To propose a substitution—this is Nemesius’ point—is a sign of profound confusion. 122 Nem. Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 54,23–4). 123 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 13,25–6). 124 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,19–20). 125  The comparison is not Nemesius’ but is suggested by his reference to lyres and flutes: Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 106,11–13). There is a highly pertinent passage in Bardaisan of Edessa: Bard. Leg. 543,26–544,15 (Drijvers 8–11). For the figure of the ‘flute girl’ in classical antiquity: M. L. Goldman, ‘Associating the Aulêtris: Flute Girls and Prostitutes in the Classical Greek Symposium’, Helios 42.1 (2015), 29–60; and in late antiquity: K.  Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, ad 275–425 (Cambridge, 2011), 297–301.

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146  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature instrumentalist is herself nothing but an instrument. There is no ‘origin of the act’ within her, and thus, no intrinsic dignity.126 The prosōpon, in On Human Nature, is a counter-­concept of the organon. The body is an instrument of the person, but to conceptualize—or to treat—a person as ‘a mere instrument’ is nihilistic.127 (The fore-­echoes of Kantian ethics are not false: Kant stands in this line.) To deny the will is to ‘annihilate what is in our power’, and this—the elimination of the person, the prosōpon—‘is nothing less than to ruin or demean the world’.128 The reduction of the human to a tool, in On Human Nature, is not only nihilistic, but—because law is ubiquitous, and law testifies to human will—absurd. Nemesius returns to this line of reasoning in Hum. Nat. 39: It is in our power to be just or unjust. . . . If nothing is in our power, laws are superfluous. Yet by nature every people makes use of some laws, knowing that it is in their power to observe the laws—and most name gods as their lawgivers, as the Cretans with Zeus and the Lacedaemonians with Apollo. Thus a knowledge of what is in our power is naturally inbred in all humans. The same is to be said concerning praise and blame and all such arguments which disprove that every­ thing occurs by fate.129

Despite the interest of Nemesius’ argument here, there is cause for a formal note to be made. We will recall that Amand describes Hum. Nat. 35–38 as ‘an independent opuscule directed against fatalism’, in which law comes to the fore thanks to Nemesius’ reception of the Carneadean critique of fate.130 Yet here in Hum. Nat. 39, Nemesius tells us that he is still advancing ‘the same’ (ta auta) line of reasoning as in Hum. Nat. 35. Law is ubiquitous (‘every people makes use of some laws’), and this ubiquity is conclusive evidence of our will, and of our knowledge of our will (‘a knowledge of what is in our power is naturally inbred in all humans’). Still, the signal phrase in these sentences is again ‘praise and blame’. This is the first time since Hum. Nat. 35 that Nemesius has written—inverting the ancient formula—‘blame and praise’.131 In the last of the sentences just quoted from Hum. Nat. 39 (‘the same is to be said’), the bishop is therefore referring us

126  Compare the term ‘dignity’, for instance, to Nemesius’ use of eugeneia to describe all humankind at Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,3–6). In any case, the term is not anachronistic. Nemesius’ contemporary Augustine insists upon the natural and ineradicable dignitas of a slave girl, to which the late-­antique market is, perversely, blind: Aug. Civ. XI 16. 127 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,18–19). 128 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,19–23). 129 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 114,2–11). 130 Amand, Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque, 562. (My translation, my italics.) 131 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,16–17: hoi psogoi kai hoi epainoi) and Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 114,10–11: tōn psogōn kai tōn epainōn).

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  147 back to his Carneadean argument from law in Hum. Nat. 35. This proves that the logic of law is not confined to Hum. Nat. 35–38; it is salient in Hum. Nat. 39. And Nemesius deploys the philosopheme ‘blame and praise’ (psogoi kai epainoi) one more time in a structuring aside in Hum. Nat. 40, where he writes: We say categorically that everything that is done by us voluntarily is in our power (for it would not be said to be a voluntary act if it were not in our power), and without qualification whatever is followed by blame or praise and in regard to which there is encouragement and law; for all this was demonstrated in what came before.132

What chapters of On Human Nature are referenced by the phrase, ‘in what came before’?133 The presence in this aside of the ‘blame and praise’ trope alerts us to the fact that Nemesius is here not only referring to his reasoning in Hum. Nat. 35 and 39, for instance, but in Hum. Nat. 29. For it is in Hum. Nat. 29 that he introduces his criterion of the voluntary—namely, that the voluntary ‘always attracts praise or blame (epainon ē psogon)’.134 Nemesius is at pains, here, not to let this criterion be forgotten since it is still informing his argument in Hum. Nat. 40. Coupled with later references to law and political order, in Hum. Nat. 42–3 (to which we will turn presently), this demonstrates that the Aristotle’s logic of law—which harmonizes with Carneades’ critique of fate—recurs throughout Hum. Nat. 29–43 and structures the concluding phase of Nemesius’ text. Drawing heavily—but perhaps not directly—on material from Nicomachean Ethics III, Nemesius is convinced that the prevalence of law in human life proves conclusively that ‘a knowledge of what is in our power is naturally inbred in all humans’, and that this link between law and autonomy is one of the most compelling ‘arguments which disprove that everything occurs by fate’—which is to say, by necessity.135 The evidence of law in the last chapters of On Human Nature is therefore twofold. First, the form of law testifies that ‘choice precedes all acts (praxeōs)’.136 This is of course not to say that choice precedes all human passions or motions—most of which are, in fact, not-­voluntary (‘mixed’) or involuntary. We will recall Nemesius’ treatment of involuntary physiological functions in Hum. Nat. 22–8 (reconstructed in chapter  4). As he points out in Hum. Nat. 26, much bodily motion is ‘not in our power’, and occurs ‘both when we will it and when we do not will it’.137 But Nemesius insists that choice precedes all acts, having defined ‘act’ as

132 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 114,15–18). 134 Nem. Nat. Hom. 29 (Morani 94,8–9). 136 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 115,27).

133 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 114,18). 135 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 114,9–11). 137 Nem. Nat. Hom. 26 (Morani 87,22–5).

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148  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature ‘a rational operation’.138 And second, the form of law testifies that it is only human choice which renders us ‘liable to judgement’ (hupodikos).139 Without the power of choice, legal and political order are literally inconceivable. Nemesius’ conclusion from all this is that only a person is capable of being ‘li­able to judgement’, and that a person is intrinsically ‘liable to judgement’, inasmuch as he defines a ‘person’ (prosōpon) by the power of choice, and thus, by the capacity to act. Our conclusion is that the prosōpon is a structuring concern in Nemesius’ final chapters, and that the legal identity and imputability of persons informs that concern throughout.

Excursus: The Platonic, Stoic, and ‘Egyptian’ World Cities It is not human law which makes the world a city. For immediately after Nemesius writes that ‘every people makes use of some laws’, he observes that ‘most name gods as their lawgivers’.140 Crucially, however, the peoples revere different gods— and observe different laws. Zeus is the archaic lawgiver of Crete, Apollo of Sparta, and so on. Deepening the impression of political disunity, in Hum. Nat. 34—his chapter on deliberation—Nemesius obliquely denies that global governance is a le­git­im­ate matter of human deliberation.141 Echoing ultimately Nicomachean Ethics III 3,142 Nemesius writes this: ‘For we do not deliberate how our enemies or those who live a long way off might have a good form of government, although that is a matter of deliberation among them.’143 In On Human Nature, as this indicates, the world city is not a cipher for Rome or Constantinople.144 It is not an imperial city or a ‘civilizing’ polity. The Syrian bishop’s world city cannot be enriched or perfected by conquest.145 This is in harmony with one of the conclusions in Katja Maria Vogt’s monograph on early Stoic cosmopolitanism. ‘The Stoics are cosmo-

138 Nem. Nat. Hom. 29 (Morani 94,3–12). 139 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 115,28). 140 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 114,6–9). 141 See C.  Humfress, ‘Law’s Empire: Roman Universalism and Legal Practice’, The City in the Classical and Post-­ Classical World: Changing Contexts of Power and Identity, ed. C.  Rapp and H. A. Drake (Cambridge, 2014). 142  Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 909. 143 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 102,23–5). Compare Arist. Eth. Nic. III 3.7 (1112a33–4): ‘No Lacedaemonian deliberates about the best form of government for Scythia’, and so on. 144  For Rome: C. Edwards and G. Woolf, ‘Cosmopolis: Rome as World City’, Rome the Cosmopolis, ed. C. Edwards and G. Woolf (Cambridge, 2003); and for the gravitational shift to Constantinople in the 4th century: B. Ward-­Perkins, ‘A Most Unusual Empire: Rome in the Fourth Century’, The City in the Classical and Post-­Classical World: Changing Contexts of Power and Identity, ed. C.  Rapp and H. A. Drake (Cambridge, 2014). 145  For the Hellenistic roots of late-­antique conceptions of Rome as a ‘divinely ordained . . . im­per­ ium sine fine over the entire orbis terrarum’: R. Strootman, ‘Hellenistic Imperialism and the Ideal of World Unity’, The City in the Classical and Post-­Classical World: Changing Contexts of Power and Identity, ed. C. Rapp and H. A. Drake (Cambridge, 2014), here 56–7.

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  149 politanists’, Vogt writes. ‘They are not, however, cosmopolitanists in the sense of calling for the establishment of . . . worldwide political institutions. The city in which all human beings live need not be created; it is the world.’146 But whatever Nemesius’ resemblances to the Stoics, and whatever his debts to their concept of oikeiōsis (sketched in chapter 2), they do not prevent him from breaking decisively with the Stoic idea of a world city. At the same time, and despite his regard for Plato’s Timaeus (indicated in chapter  3), he criticizes the Platonic concept of a world city.147 Nemesius criticizes, too, what seems to be an ‘Egyptian’ theory transmitted (or concocted) by theurgically inclined Platonists. All this occurs in Hum. Nat. 36–8. The Stoic world city is criticized because it is ruled by fate—which Nemesius takes to mean, necessity148—and because the persons and occurrences in this city recur ‘to infinity’ (eis apeiron).149 The Stoics’ is not a myth of cosmopolitan judgement (or justice), but of the impossibility of judgement (or justice). This myth will be described presently by Nemesius, who gives us one of the most vivid descriptions on record of the Stoic idea of recurrence. In contrast to the Stoics, Nemesius calls the Platonists ‘the wisest of the Hellenes’ in Hum. Nat. 37, as he will again in Hum. Nat. 43.150 The Platonic concept of the world city ‘differs only slightly’, he says, ‘from the divine oracles’.151 Nevertheless, the Platonic world city is criticized by the bishop because it is ruled by law,152 and because this rule of law ‘cuts away’ the efficacy of prayer in Plato’s city.153 A brief review of Nemesius’ objections to the Stoic and Platonic world cities will help clear the way to his concepts of divine governance (dioikēsis) and providence (pronoia) in the very last chapters of On Human Nature. The Stoics’ rule of fate is a rule of necessity, says Nemesius in Hum. Nat. 37. Fate is defined by them, he says, as ‘an inexorable and unalterable order and

146 K. M. Vogt, Law, Reason, and the Cosmic City: Political Philosophy in the Early Stoa (Oxford, 2008), 4. (Vogt’s italics.) 147  Pace Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 929: ‘It is not clear who these are.’ In the first place, there can be no doubt that ‘the wisest of the Hellenes’ at Nem. Nat. Hom. 37 (Morani 108,3–4) are the Platonists, just as ‘the wisest of the Hellenes’ at Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,26) are the Platonists. The parallel between Nat. Hom. 37 and Nat. Hom. 38 (hypothetical fate) secures the former, and the parallel between Nat. Hom. 2 and Nat. Hom. 43 (reincarnation) secures the latter. In the second place, Nemesius informs us when he shifts from the Platonists to the Stoics at Nat. Hom. 37 (Morani 108,16–17: hoi Stōikoi horizontai), and then again in the next chapter, when he shifts from the Platonists to the Stoics at Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 111,14: hoi de Stōikoi phasin). The structure of both Nat. Hom. 37 and 38, then, is the same: Nemesius offers a critique of Platonists, and then of Stoics. 148 Nem. Nat. Hom. 37 (Morani 108,15–109,8). 149 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 111,24). 150 Nem. Nat. Hom. 37 (Morani 108,3–4) and Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,26). 151 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 110,11–13). 152 Nem. Nat. Hom. 37 (Morani 108,2–15). 153 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 109,10–111,13).

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150  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature binding together’.154 The grid of Stoic causes, the nexus causarum, is locked.155 It possesses necessity, and it destroys human autonomy. From the Stoics’ logic, he suggests, ‘it necessarily follows that not even choice is in our power’.156 Nemesius could revive, here, the Carneadean line of reasoning from human law to human choice—and tacitly, he does. Yet more explicitly, he revives his thematization in earlier chapters of On Human Nature of the rational soul’s op­pos­ ition (enantiotēs) to the body’s urges and the irrational soul’s desires. His reasoning is compressed, but it interlocks with more than one of our themes in the preceding chapters. Nemesius writes this in Hum. Nat. 37: The battle in the case of the one who has self-­control and the one who lacks it is superfluous [in the Stoics’ world city]. For if it is determined of necessity that one will act and the other abstain, what is the use of one’s inner conflict and ­contention? . . . For choice is that which fights with desire and conquers in the case of those who are self-­controlled.157

On reflection, this argument from the ‘superfluity’ of inner conflict can be read as a modulation of Nemesius’ argument from the ‘superfluity’ of law. The soul’s power to oppose the body’s urges (examined in chapter 3), and to govern bodily desires (detailed in chapter 4), are precisely what the rule of law reveals—and the rule of fate annihilates. This is mordantly confirmed by a scene in Diogenes Laertius’ late-­antique Lives of the Philosophers. ‘We are told’, says Diogenes, ‘that Zeno [of Citium] was once flogging a slave for having stolen. When the latter said, “I was fated to steal!” Zeno replied, “Yes—and to be flogged too!” ’158 Fate is abhorrent to Nemesius because it destroys the human will—and with it, the logic of law—by destroying the soul’s power to oppose transgressive drives and destructive urges. The Stoic world is for him a city only in appearance; it is a vast machina in which we live and move but never act. The rule of necessity inspires a Stoic myth of consummate monotony, which can be clarified by a comment in Hum. Nat. 34. Nemesius points out there, we may recall (from chapter 4), that he uses the term ‘necessity’ to designate (inter alia) ‘those things that always occur in the same way, such as the cycle of the year’.159 Because all motion is necessary in the Stoic world, it could be predicted that all motion must either ‘always occur in the same way’, or—like the cycle of the 154 Nem. Nat. Hom. 37 (Morani 108,16–17). Compare Wither, The Nature of Man, 521: ‘The Stoics define [destiny as] a certain concatenation of causes which may not be avoided, or a fast knitting together of causes which may not be altered.’ (Typography lightly modernized.) 155  It is ‘more of a causal network than a mere chain’: J. Opsomer, ‘The Middle Platonic Doctrine of Conditional Fate’, Fate, Providence and Moral Responsibility in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought: Studies in Honour of Carlos Steel, ed. P. d’Hoine and G. Van Riel (Leuven, 2014), 138. 156 Nem. Nat. Hom. 37 (Morani 108,22–5). 157 Nem. Nat. Hom. 37 (Morani 108,25–109,6). 158  Dio. Laer. Vit. VII 23. 159 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 102,13–14).

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  151 year—must always recur in the same way. It is the latter intuition that informs Stoic eschatology, which is modelled on the recurring cycles—the spiralling ‘necessity’—of celestial motion. In Hum. Nat. 38, Nemesius responds to the Stoics’ doctrine that all cities and persons and occurrences in the world are fated to infinitely recur. This is how Nemesius describes their cosmopolitan myth: The Stoics say that the planets are established again into the same sign according to the magnitude and longitude in which each was in the beginning when the world was first formed, and at set revolutions of time they bring about the conflagration and destruction of all things and again they establish the world anew in the same state, and, as the stars travel once again in the same way, each of the things that came to be in the preceding revolution is thought to be unchanged. For Socrates and Plato will exist again, and each human being with the same friends and fellow-­citizens, and they will have the same experiences, meet with the same events and the same undertakings, and every city and settlement and field will be reconstituted as before. The reconstitution of the world comes to pass not once but many times—or rather, to infinity—and the same things will be re-­established without end. . . . For there will be nothing foreign beyond what occurred before, but everything will be the same—down to the minutest detail— without any change.160

Intriguingly, this is a myth—‘the reconstitution of all things’, in Nemesius’ phrase—which recurs in modern philosophy.161 Louis-­ Auguste Blanqui and Friedrich Nietzsche revive it, with fanatical precision, in the late 19th century.162 Returning to Nemesius, his reply to the Stoics is curt and doctrinaire. ‘Some say that the Christians imagine the resurrection because of this [Stoic] reconstitution, [but this is] far wide of the truth. For the oracles of Christ foretell that the resurrection will occur once, and not cyclically.’163 This is a solid piece of patristic reasoning.164 It is not, however, a rebuttal of the Stoics’ logic. For Nemesius’ reply is no more than a clarification of Christian doctrine—of what ‘the Christians imagine’. His critique of the myth is implicit, and prophetic.

160 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 111,14–112,6). 161 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 111,23–4). 162  It is not unlikely—and not widely known—that Nietzsche lifted his myth from Blanqui’s 1872 essay, L’éternité par les astres. Roughly a decade after Blanqui announced infinite recurrence in space (1872), Nietzsche announced infinite recurrence in time—and Nietzsche appears to have logged an encounter with Blanqui’s idea in one of his Zarathustra-period notebooks (1883). The evidence, much of it from Nietzsche’s papers, is laid out in the introduction to L.-A. Blanqui, Eternity by the Stars: An Astronomical Hypothesis, trans. F. Chouraqui (New York, 2013). 163 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 112,3–6). 164  Compare Aug. Civ. XII 18, 20–1.

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152  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature A conjectural reconstruction of Nemesius’ objection to Stoic ‘reconstitution’ could rely on his statement in Hum. Nat. 1 that repentance is a human prerogative which is held by ‘every human and for ever throughout their lifetime in this world—but no longer after death’.165 This is not the place to interrogate Nemesius’ concept of metanoia—and much less, to describe the tremendous resonances of this term outside On Human Nature.166 The term occurs in Hum. Nat. 18, in a paragraph on pleasure, in which Nemesius writes that ‘no repentance (metanoia) ever follows’ upon true pleasures;167 and is otherwise only represented in Nemesius’ prologue (Hum. Nat. 1), where it occurs with some frequency.168 The singularity of repentance, however, like the singularity of resurrection, likely derives in some way from Nemesius’ conception—and the late-­antique Christian conception—of human freedom. Repentance involves an acute sense of imputability—a consciousness of being ‘liable to judgement’—which is dis­cern­ ible in, and ultimately deferred to, the resurrection. One is resurrected, in the Christian tradition, because one is guilty or forgiven. It is not for nothing that ‘the forgiveness of sins’ and ‘the resurrection of the body’ are conjoined in the last lines of the ancient symbol that the Latin tradition calls the Credo. Resurrection could thus be analysed as a doctrine of judgement—and yes, of ‘reconstitution’—which is non-recurrent precisely because it symbolizes a life of freedom; while Stoic ‘reconstitution’ could be analysed as a doctrine of nonjudgement which is recurrent precisely because it symbolizes a life of necessity. In Nemesius’ city, there is crime and punishment—and repentance, and forgiveness. In the Stoics’ city, there is inexorable motion and infinite repetition. The contrast is less stark with the Platonists, whom Nemesius—and not only he, of course—takes to be ‘the wisest of the Hellenes’.169 We are not meant to miss the discrepancy when Nemesius writes that ‘the oracles of Christ’ forcefully contra­dict the Stoics,170 but that Platonic doctrine ‘differs only slightly from the divine oracles’.171 Still, Nemesius criticizes a fundamental tenet the Platonic world city—namely, that it is ruled by law.172 There is a sort of irony, here, that we should register before we proceed. Neither Nemesius nor any of his commentators seems to recognize that his critique of the Timaeus’ world city on precisely this point—the rule of law—is a Platonic critique. This lack in the literature on Nemesius is perhaps not surprising, since 165 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 10,13–14. 166  For a definition of repentance that is congruent with Nemesius’ anthropology, but not taken from him: Dam. Fid. Orth. II 30 (Kotter and Ledrux 366,21–2). 167 Nem. Nat. Hom. 18 (Morani 77,19–25). For the modification of Plato’s mature theory of pleasure in post-­Hellenistic Platonism: G.  Van Riel, Pleasure and the Good Life: Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists (Leiden, 2000), 94–176. 168 Morani, De natura hominis, 168. 169 Nem. Nat. Hom. 37 (Morani 108,3–4). 170 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 112,3–6). 171 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 110,11–13). 172  The classic treatment of the ‘world city’ idea in the wake of Plato’s Timaeus is G.  Reydams-­ Schils, Demiurge and Providence: Stoic and Platonist Readings of Plato’s Timaeus (Turnhout, 1999).

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  153 there is a considerable literature on ancient Platonic interpretations of providence and fate in the Timaeus, yet it seems not to be commonly recognized that the ‘legislative’ concept of fate opens Plato’s deity to a Platonic charge of divine ­in­just­ice.173 For in the dialogue Politicus, one of Plato’s most formidable dramatis personae—‘the Eleatic’—formulates a brilliant critique of what Plato later calls ‘the form of a law’.174 The Eleatic reasons, here, that ‘it is not best (ariston) for the laws to be sovereign’ because positive law is ‘not the most perfect right (orthotaton)’.175 Why is law not, for Plato, ‘the most perfect right’? Because it is a formal pretence of law that it should remain in force ‘for all time’, and that it should govern ‘all things’ designated in the statute and situated in the law-­state.176 The Eleatic’s critique of law’s pretence is basic, but cuts deep. He simply reminds his interlocutor that ‘none of the human things is ever at rest’; then gestures towards ‘the dissimilarities (anomoiotētes) of humans’; before he then denies that any code of laws could conceivably meet the subtlest demands of the idea of justice.177 Plato’s trenchant critique of ‘the form of a law’ in the Politicus is informed by a keen sense of human singularity, and Nemesius’ sense of this is even more acute than Plato’s. For Nemesius writes in Hum. Nat. 43: Each of us is liable to differ in two ways—one relative to others, and one relative to oneself. For the alteration and change in each person even internally each day is great, both in one’s way of life and habits, needs and desires and their consequences. For this creature is quick-­changing in its needs and susceptible to outer influences. So it is necessary also that the providence beneficial for each should be different, complicated, and variegated . . . if it is to be present to help each person on each occasion in a fitting way. The differences between particulars are unlimited, and so the logic of a providence beneficial to each must be unlimited—but if unlimited, then unknowable for us.178

This is a tremendous passage, to which we will return (in the sixth section of this chapter, ‘The Incomprehensibility of Providence’). It must suffice here to point out that the Eleatic’s critique of law in the Politicus graphs nicely onto Nemesius’ description of the natural-­born person in the last chapters of On Human Nature. The philosopher-­bishop’s objection to the Platonic world city in Hum. Nat. 38 derives precisely from his sense of a human’s singularity. ‘It is peculiar to providence’, he says, ‘to apportion to each according to what is beneficial for each’.179 This, however, is precisely what law qua law is powerless to effect. In the Platonic 173  The reading of Plato’s Politicus, here, stems from D.  L.  Dusenbury, Platonic Legislations: An Essay on Legal Critique in Ancient Greece (Dordrecht, 2017), 4–7, 27–30. 174 Pl. Leg. IV 718b–c. 175 Pl. Pol. 294a–d. 176 Pl. Pol. 294b: peri hapantōn kai epi panta ton chronon. 177 Pl. Pol. 294b. 178 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 133,11–21). 179 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 108,13–14).

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154  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature world city—a city ruled by law—‘what is beneficial for each’ could never be perfectly apportioned. But in Nemesius’ world city, because God governs all things freely (see the fifth section of this chapter, ‘The Prevalence of Dioikēsis’), providence is able to meet each human in the ‘unlimited’ dissimilarities of time and space. Unlike the world city of the Timaeus, therefore, Nemesius’ city is governed without laws by one who is ‘wiser than the laws’ (tōn nomōn . . . sophōteron).180 This is Plato’s highest political ideal in the Politicus. Thus, without seeming to know it, Nemesius’ critique of the Timaeus is that its world city fails to reflect Plato’s highest political ideal. Nemesius’ does. The Syrian bishop’s world city is governed without laws, by one who is wiser than all laws—namely, the Christians’ God. Nemesius’ second critique of the Platonic world city, in Hum. Nat. 38, is that the rule of law ‘cuts away’ the efficacy of prayer.181 This derives from the temporal aspect of the critique of law just outlined. Nemesius offers this exemplum, which at once illuminates an ancient Platonic theory of hypothetical fate and Nemesius’ objection to it: The choice of things that are done is in our power, as a condition. When the things that are in our power are established, what is fated follows on from these themselves as from a condition. For instance, it is in our power whether to sail; that is the condition. But on the basis that we sail, there follows what results from this condition, that we shall or shall not be shipwrecked . . . So what precedes and is in our power is as a condition, the consequences are as a result of the condition and not in our power, but of necessity.182

Nemesius admires the elegance of this legal or ‘hypothetical’ model of fate and commends it for recognizing that ‘some acts in accordance with choice are in our power’.183 This, of course, is crucial. There is real freedom in the Platonists’ world city, where the Stoics only posit necessity. Nevertheless, he believes that precisely by introducing law—‘deaf and inexorable law’184—into the order of necessary consequences, the efficacy of prayer—and with it, the divine imperium—is diminished. On the legal model of fate, he reasons, one can only logically pray not to be shipwrecked before setting sail. Nemesius is incredulous. A paragraph in Hum. Nat. 43 clarifies his disbelief. ‘In the grip of necessity’, the bishop writes there, ‘we 180 Pl. Pol. 299c. 181 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 109,10–111,13). 182 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 109,24–110,3). 183 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 110,7–8). 184  To paraphrase a line from Livy Hist. II 3.4: leges rem surdam, inexorabilem esse. The same line is paraphrased by Kant, in 1794, as ‘lex est res surda et inexorabilis’: I. Kant, ‘Das Ende aller Dinge’, Kants Werke. Akademie-­Textausgabe . . . Band VIII. Abhandlungen nach 1781 (Berlin, 1968), 338.

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  155 immediately take refuge with the divine and with prayers’. The instinctiveness of this behaviour—the fact that humans tend to ‘call upon God involuntarily’—­ suggests to him that it is natural. And therefore, reliable. Nemesius sees in the human impulse to pray in the grip of ‘sudden distresses and fears’ a ‘strong demonstration’ of the efficacy of prayer, a demonstration which, he says, ‘cannot be denied’. Nemesius is more impressed by an ‘ignorant’ or ‘unlearned’ behaviour which he takes to be a sign of nature, than by the Platonists’ learned denial.185 Nemesius is unconvinced, too, by those he calls in Hum. Nat. 36 ‘the wise men of the Egyptians’. He seems to have in mind the Egyptian high priest, Abammon, who figures in Iamblichus’ book On the Mysteries (a 15th-­century title concocted by Marsilio Ficino), or the ‘Egyptian’ doctrines transmitted by other late-­antique Platonists.186 On Nemesius’ telling, the epopts of late-­antique Egypt hold that all of human life is fated by the stars, but that ‘prayer alone is in our power (eph’ hēmin)’. The Syrian bishop dismisses this ‘Egyptian’ circumscription of human freedom to what he calls ‘attendances on the gods and expiations’.187 On Nemesius’ theory of providence—which he contrasts with Platonic, Stoic, and ‘Egyptian’ theories of fate—a merchant, say, is free to sail or not to sail.188 If imperilled by a storm, the merchant and his crew can then logically cry out for divine protection.189 The merchant’s ship may break up on the rocks and sink, but it is never fated to sink.190 The logic of divine world-­governance is such, in On Human Nature, that God—whom the bishop calls the ‘Lord and Maker’ of ­necessity—is free. The divine will is not only ‘unfettered’ by fate, but by the forms of divine law.191

The Prevalence of Dioikēsis The last five chapters of On Human Nature treat six questions in succession. In Hum. Nat. 39–41, Nemesius poses three questions concerning human ­autonomy—whether it is, what it is, and its divine cause or reason (aitia).192

185 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,15–21). 186 Nem. Nat. Hom. 36 (Morani 106,15). For ‘the Egyptians’: Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 924; and for Ficino: P.  Thillet, ‘Jamblique et les mystères d’Égypte’, Revue des Études Grecques 81 (1968), 172–95, here 172–4. 187 Nem. Nat. Hom. 36 (Morani 106,15–107,26). 188 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 102,1–4). 189  ‘Contrary to what one might expect (in light of the Stoic teaching on fate), prayers . . . were quite common in Stoicism, especially Roman Stoicism’: R. M. Thorsteinsson, Jesus as Philosopher: The Moral Sage in the Synoptic Gospels (Oxford, 2018), 96. 190 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 109,25 and 110,20–3). 191 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 111,1–13). 192 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 112,8–11). Compare the opening sentences of Dam. Fid. Orth. II 25 (Kotter and Ledrux 338, 3–7).

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156  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature A chapter is given to each question.193 Then, in Hum. Nat. 42–3, he poses three questions concerning divine providence—whether it is, what it is, and what it concerns.194 Nemesius discusses whether and what providence is in Hum. Nat. 42; and in Hum. Nat. 43, he turns to his third question—what providence concerns.195 There, in the last pages of On Human Nature, he defends a strong conception of ‘providence for individuals’ (ta kath’ hekasta pronoias)—in Burgundio’s 12th-­century Latin, singularia providentia.196 In both cases—in his treatment of human autonomy and divine providence— Nemesius is making use of an ancient rhetorical scheme in which there are three types of question.197 Nemesius’ African contemporary, Augustine, divides the Latin quaestio into three genera—an sit, quid sit, quale sit.198 This triplex scheme is a rhetorical commonplace in late antiquity which structures Nemesius’ concluding chapters. By resolving ‘the three questions’ concerning autonomy and providence, Nemesius’ means for his treatments to be comprehensive. But why is this important? Nemesius’ editors and commentators have not noticed that after he treats the question of whether there is divine providence, and what providence is—that is, once he turns to his third question, of what providence concerns—Nemesius introduces a new term to denote, precisely, the divine governance of the world. This term is dioikēsis.199 In Hum. Nat. 42, Nemesius concludes the treatment of his second question— what providence is—by defining it as ‘the will of God’ (theou boulēsis).200 More precisely, he defines providence as ‘the will of God by which all things receive a 193  Whether it is: Nem. Nat. Hom. 39; what it is: Nat. Hom. 40; and its cause or reason: Nat. Hom. 41. 194 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 120,13–14). 195  Whether it is: Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 120,15–125,2); what it is: Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 125,3–17); and what it concerns: Nat. Hom. 43. Note that Maximus the Confessor draws upon these chapters in Max. Amb. Ioh. 10.100–4. 196 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,14). For Burgundio’s Latin: Verbeke and Moncho, De natura hominis, 166. Compare Wither, The Nature of Man, 640: ‘providence over particular things’. 197 Arist. Post. II 1 (89b); Cic. Orat. 14.45. 198 Aug. Conf. X 10.17: tria genera esse quaestionum, an sit, quid sit, quale sit. 199  We will recall from chapter 1 that the term has a richly cosmopolitan significance in Diogenes’ report of Zeno of Citium’s anthropology. Taken more broadly, dioikēsis often has a bureaucratic sense, describing a functionary or office-­holder who ‘controls’, ‘administers’, and ‘orders’ a city or a province: Liddell and Scott, A Greek-­English Lexicon, 432–3; Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, 372–3. It is telling that Aristotle uses dioikein in Politica V to signify the offices—the diffuse powers of ‘control’—that a tyrant seeks to eliminate. A tyrant is not content—like a monarch—to rule, but insists on governing. In short, the tyrant treats dioikēsis as his sole prerogative: Arist. Polit. V 8.22 (1313a2–4). Our choice to translate this as ‘governance’ is due to the fact that divine dioikēsis in the Nat. Hom. is sovereign (neither bureaucratic nor tyrannical), and that Nemesius frequently links dioikēsis to terms denoting ‘rule’ and ‘command’. Compare, for instance, Nem. Nat. Hom. 24 (Morani 85,7–8) and Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,8–12). In English, the term ‘governance’ evokes ‘government’—the locus of rule and command—but also the concrete operation of control in a jurisdiction. The core of Nemesius’ concept of dioikēsis, it is suggested here, is the operation of pronoia. 200 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 125,7). Compare Verbeke and Moncho, De natura hominis, 158: voluntas dei.

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  157 fitting settlement (diexagōgēn)’.201 The formulation is juridical.202 Nemesius’ term, diexagōgē, can denote—and may, in part, denote here—a form of life. But its primary denotation is juridical; it refers to a settlement obtained in court.203 The term dioikēsis is therefore introduced by Nemesius to denote the actualization of ‘the will of God by which all things’—through the mysteries of divine judgement— ‘receive a fitting settlement’. Nemesius subtly signals the conceptual and terminological distinction between ‘providence’ (pronoia) and ‘governance’ (dioikēsis) in Hum. Nat. 38, where he writes that Plato’s Timaeus contains ‘a double account of fate’. What he means by this, he says, is that Plato distinguishes the substance of fate (‘the soul of the world’), and the operation of fate (‘the divine law that admits of no infringements’).204 When Nemesius then reintroduces the Platonic theory of fate in Hum. Nat. 43,205 he is only interested in the question of fate’s operation. Immediately, he deploys the term dioikēsis to describe the operation of fate in the Timaeus—that is, the divine governance of the Platonic world city. The first pages of Hum. Nat. 43 are a locus classicus of what George Boys-­Stones calls ‘the doctrine of three providences’.206 In this post-­Platonic formalization of parts of the Timaeus,207 a ‘first god’ installs a tier of lesser gods to oversee the heavens, and a host of ‘spirits’ (daimonas) to oversee the earth.208 The lesser gods realize a ‘second providence’, while the atmospheric spirits manage a ‘third providence’. Reporting on this doctrine, Nemesius writes the following: ‘The existence of the second and third providences is said to derive from the first, since potentially all things are governed by the first god, who appoints both the second and third providences.’209 What is crucial for us is that Nemesius reports—in keeping with a late-­antique reception of Plato’s Timaeus—that, in potentia, ‘all things are

201 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 125,6–7). This is copied word-­for-­word in Dam. Fid. Orth. II 29 (Kotter and Ledrux 358,4–5). 202  This should not surprise. As Erik Eliasson points out in The Notion of That Which Depends on Us, 12: ‘The notion of providence (πρόνοια, providentia), seems to originally have been mainly a legal notion of forethought, or premeditation. As for the philosophical development of this notion into a more technical notion of divine providence, we only find elements of such a theory of providence in Plato, mainly in Laws X.’ 203  Nemesius’ early modern translator may convey his meaning best. George Wither has, ‘all created things receive a government fit for them’: Wither, The Nature of Man, 604. Compare Telfer, Nemesius of Emesa, 431: ‘whereby all existing things receive their most favourable outcome’; Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, 208: ‘by which all things receive a suitable way of life’. 204 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 109,10–12). 205  Compare Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 126,18). ‘This is not providence (pronoia)’, Nemesius concludes his new description of the Platonic theory, ‘but fate and necessity’. 206  Boys-­Stones, ‘ “Middle” Platonists on Fate’, 445. Compare Sharples, ‘Nemesius of Emesa and Some Theories of Divine Providence’, 146–52; idem, ‘Threefold Providence’, 107–10; Opsomer, ‘Middle Platonic Doctrine of Conditional Fate’, 161–7. 207 Pl. Tim. 41a–42e. 208 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 125,21–126,18). 209 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 126,12–15).

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158  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature governed (dioikeisthai) by the first god’.210 The sense that dioikeō conveys, here, is a technical one that Nemesius establishes in a number of passages. For this is not the first time that Nemesius has spoken of a divine dioikēsis in the Platonic tradition. In Hum. Nat. 38, he says that Plato himself ‘differs only slightly from the divine oracles which say that providence alone governs all things (dioikein ta panta)’.211 It is unnecessary to stress the importance of this insertion of dioikēsis into a form of doctrine that Nemesius ascribes to ‘the divine oracles’, and—with minor fixes—to Plato. Later, in Hum. Nat. 43, when he is still introducing his report of the post-­Platonic idea of ‘three providences’, Nemesius says: ‘Plato, then, holds that providence governs (dioikein) both the universal and the individuals (ta kath’ hekasta).’212 Nemesius concurs with this, insisting in Hum. Nat. 43 that dioikēsis encompasses individuals no less than universals (‘for the universals consist’, he adds in a proto-­nominalist vein, ‘entirely of particulars’).213 There is no reason to doubt that dioikēsis is a technical term within On Human Nature. It is consistently used to designate the Christian and Platonic—and, on one occasion, Peripatetic214—theories of the operation of pronoia. Nevertheless, the first time the term is used, it could appear to bear no relation to providence. But as our reconstruction will bear out in the coming pages, Nemesius’ first use of the term is integral to his concept of divine world-­governance—and thus, to his theory of providence. Let us return for a moment to Hum. Nat. 23, where Nemesius describes a system of organs which is ‘incapable of obeying reason, since it performs its own work not according to our judgement or choice, but naturally’.215 He is speaking, here, of the organs of the nutritive power. This power belongs to what we have called ‘the life of necessity’ (in chapter 4), and its organs are many. Nemesius lists them seriatim. They are ‘the mouth, the gullet, the belly, the liver and all the veins, the intestines’, and so on.216 Nemesius specifies that the elimination of waste is integral to nutrition. It is the nutritive power and its organs which ‘transform’ (metaballei) the matter which is consumed by mouth, and finally ‘extrude the waste’.217 This is where divine dioikēsis begins in the pages of On Human Nature. For Nemesius then writes: ‘These are the powers which govern (dioikousai) the nourishment of the parts of the body, and from them come growth in height and in girth. Waste is separated out through the stomach, through urine, through vomiting, through sweat . . .’218

210 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 126,13–14). Compare Verbeke and Moncho, De natura hominis, 160: . . . quasi potestate omnia a primo deo disponantur qui statuit et secundos et tertios provisores. 211 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 110,11–13). 212 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 125,21–2). 213 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 130,14). 214 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 127,15–16). 215 Nem. Nat. Hom. 23 (Morani 84,21–3). 216 Nem. Nat. Hom. 23 (Morani 83,15–17). 217 Nem. Nat. Hom. 23 (Morani 83,2–5). 218 Nem. Nat. Hom. 23 (Morani 83,5–7).

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  159 The rationale for hearing ‘governance’ in this physiological use of the verb dioikeō will be stated presently. We should first establish that there is nothing mystifying about this introduction of dioikēsis, beginning with the body’s lowest functions. On the contrary, a brief return to Hum. Nat. 1 will show how the body’s lowest organs and functions are linked to higher orders—and indeed, to the very highest orders—of being. For we will recall (from chapter 1) that Nemesius’ scala naturae links humankind to ‘lifeless things on account of the body and the mixture of the four elements’.219 The link is intimate. As Nemesius states in one of his prologue’s asides, because our bodies are ‘constituted by the four elements’, it is necessary for us to consume ‘the elements from which we are constituted’.220 Our consumption of water and wine, meat and grain, is a mark of our ‘communion’ (koinōnia) with the elements. Whenever we consume ‘seeds, fruit, and flesh’—says Nemesius—we are ultimately consuming water, fire, air, and earth.221 It is notable that Nemesius’ description of nutrition, here in Hum. Nat. 1, contains an echo of what we have called oikeiōsis—just as his description of nutrition in Hum. Nat. 23 will contain a fore-­echo of what he later calls dioikēsis. This is because oikeiōsis (a cluster of related terms) denotes the harmony and justice of divine creation for Nemesius, just as dioikēsis (a term he uses more than once) denotes the harmony and justice of divine providence.222 He writes in Hum. Nat. 1 that every living thing ‘is nourished by what is akin to (oikeiō) and like it’.223 When Nemesius later writes of the organs which ‘govern (dioikousai) the nourishment of the parts of the body’, the verb dioikeō can therefore be given a precise sense. Our nutritive organs identify and distribute the elemental matter which is ‘akin’ (oikeios) to us and sift out and eliminate all the matter which is ‘useless’ (perittos). The metabolic process is a dioikēsis. Metabolic dioikēsis is not only a sign and a form of our ‘communion’ with the elements, however. For we will observe that what Nemesius writes in Hum. Nat. 1 is that ‘humankind has a share in (koinōnei) lifeless things on account of the body and the mixture of the four elements, and in plants on account of the powers of nutrition’.224 Nemesius of course pictures our nutritive system in the form of a plant (covered in chapter 4). ‘The veins are like roots of the liver’, he writes, ‘that draw the food from the stomach, as the roots of plants draw it from the earth’.225 If

219 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,15–16). 220 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 7,12–8,1). 221 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 8,2–15). For no apparent reason, Nemesius gives the elements here in this irregular order—water, fire, air, and earth. In Nat. Hom. 5 (Morani 47,5–6), however, he treats them in the normal, ‘ascending order’—earth, water, air, and fire. 222 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 31,16–23) and Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 123,1–7). 223 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 8,1–2). 224 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,15–17). 225 Nem. Nat. Hom. 23 (Morani 84,2–3).

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160  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature this structural resemblance is a sign of divine oikeiōsis, there is no reason that a functional resemblance should not be a sign of divine dioikēsis. It is of course not only to plants and the elements that the divine oikeiōsis links us. Nemesius continues, in Hum. Nat. 1, by saying that we have a kinship with ‘irrational animals . . . on account of desire and spirit’, and a number of other ­powers which are ‘all shared (koina) by humans and by irrational animals’.226 What is the bearing of this on divine dioikēsis? This question returns us to the rationale for translating a physiological use of dioikeō as ‘govern’ in Hum. Nat. 23. Nemesius writes there, prosaically, of the ‘powers which govern (dioikousai) the nourishment of the parts of the body’.227 Why is it necessary—or justified—to relate this occurrence of the verb to a theme of ‘governance’ (dioikēsis) in On Human Nature? Surely the more muted, recent translations of the verb—‘administer’ and ‘provide’—will serve?228 That is not the case, however. Nemesius’ pre-­modern and early modern trans­ lators are to be preferred, here. For Burgundio has: hae sunt virtutes quae escam particularum corporis disponunt.229 This rendering serves to connect Nemesius’ description in Hum. Nat. 23 to his later treatment of providence, since dispono is—this will be confirmed in a moment—Burgundio’s preferred term for dioikeō. And much later, in his 17th-­century version of the text, The Nature of Man, George Wither has: ‘These are the faculties which order the nourishment of the parts of the body.’230 That Wither detects a political connotation here, in the term ‘order’, can be seen by turning ten pages further in his translation of Nemesius. For in Wither’s version of Hum. Nat. 24, we then read of ‘three principal parts’ of the human body ‘which govern the entire living-­creature’.231 These parts are the brain, the heart, and the liver—and Wither accentuates, or rather conveys, the political tonality in Nemesius’ description (on which, more presently). Burgundio translates the same phrase in Hum. Nat. 24 unobjectionably: ex tribus principiis disponunt animal.232 By keeping dispono, he prepares the reader for the return of this term in Hum. Nat. 43 (in Burgundio’s numbering, cap. 42), where we read, for instance: Quoniam autem bene et decenter et quod solummodo ut convenit disponit deus omnia . . .233 The divine ‘distribution’, ‘allotment’, or ‘ordering’ of the world at the end of Burgundio’s translation still chimes with the ‘distribution’,

226 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,17–19). 227 Nem. Nat. Hom. 23 (Morani 83,5–6). 228 Telfer, Nemesius of Emesa, 362: ‘It is these processes that administer the nourishing of the members of the body’; Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, 146: ‘These are the faculties which provide the nourishment of the parts of the body.’ 229  Verbeke and Moncho, De natura hominis, 105. 230 Wither, The Nature of Man, 398. (Typography lightly modernized.) 231 Wither, The Nature of Man, 408. (Typography lightly modernized.) 232  Verbeke and Moncho, De natura hominis, 107. 233  Verbeke and Moncho, De natura hominis, 169.

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  161 ‘allotment’, or ‘ordering’ of the body—by the liver, heart, and brain—in its middle chapters.234 This brief comment on the translation of Nemesius is meant to show that the rationale for translating dioikeō as ‘govern’ in Hum. Nat. 23 lies in Nemesius’ use of dioikeō in Hum. Nat. 24. In the latter passage, there can be no doubt that physio­logic­al dioikēsis—including metabolic dioikēsis—is a form of ‘governance’. Nemesius believes, with Galen, that the human body is functionally organized by a triad of organs—the brain, heart, and liver. Nemesius introduces this triad in Hum. Nat. 24 as ‘the three ruling organs (archōn) that govern (dioikousōn) a living being’.235 Later, in Hum. Nat. 28, he repeats this formula, observing that ‘the three ruling organs (archōn organa) that govern (dioikousōn) a living being’ have come into being ‘for themselves’—which is to say, are not exhaustively analysable as ‘organs’.236 This returns us to our kinship with non-­human animals, a kinship which Nemesius, much like Posidonius (in a fragment preserved by Galen) signally ascribes to the powers of ‘desire and spirit’.237 For, the liver is our ‘organ of desire’, as he informs us in Hum. Nat. 16, while the heart is our ‘organ of spirit’.238 We could of course infer from this that if the body is ‘governed’, in part, by the liver and the heart, if the liver and the heart are the ‘organs’ of desire and spirit, and if desire and spirit are ‘shared’ by humans and beasts, then desire and spirit must be ‘governed’. Of course, they are. It is in Hum. Nat. 16 (quoted in chapter 4) that Nemesius claims that our liver (desire) and heart (spirit) are ‘capable of obeying reason’, because they are ‘of a nature to obey reason and to submit to it’.239 This is why he calls the organ of thought—the cerebrum—‘the hegemonic part’.240 In On Human Nature (this is of course not original), it is the brain that governs the body’s other governing parts—the heart and the liver. Within the human body, therefore, dioikēsis arcs from the consumption and incorporation of elements to the government of the passions. But what—we could repeat—is the bearing of this on divine dioikēsis? Nemesius’ conception of divine dioikēsis is precisely that of ‘providence for individuals’.241 He denies that a concern with the lowest debases the highest. ‘They do not say that the sun and its rays

234  The terminological continuity is lost in the most recent translations. Compare Telfer, Nemesius of Emesa, 367: ‘the three organs that regulate the life of man’; Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, 151: ‘the three principles that manage the body’. 235 Nem. Nat. Hom. 24 (Morani 85,7–8). 236 Nem. Nat. Hom. 28 (Morani 91,23–7). 237 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,17–19). Compare Pos. Frag. 33 (Edelstein and Kidd); Gal. Plac. V 476–7. 238 Nem. Nat. Hom. 16 (Morani 73,11–16). 239 Nem. Nat. Hom. 16 (Morani 73,16–18). 240 Nem. Nat. Hom. 9 (Morani 66,9). 241 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,14).

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162  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature are polluted when they shine on filth’, he observes in Hum. Nat. 43 (an ancient trope). ‘In what way’, then, ‘do they think that God is defiled?’242 Of course, the question is rhetorical. The Syrian bishop holds that ‘the divine’ is, by definition, ‘unharmed, uncorrupted, and undefiled’.243 The target of Nemesius’ question is the Aristotelian notion that ‘the Demiurge neglects the rule and governance (archēs kai dioikēseōs) of particulars’.244 Note the terminology; it will recur. For the bishop asserts that the deity ‘governs (dioikousan) our affairs’,245 and ultimately confesses that ‘God governs (dioikei) all things . . . fairly and suitably’.246 Nemesius’ use of dioikēsis in his most basic and forceful statements concerning divine providence is not likely to be unconscious. It signifies a choice. Terminologically, then, there is no reason to doubt that the operation of providence is signified by dioikēsis in Hum. Nat. 43. And doctrinally, it is clear that Nemesius’ theory of divine dioikēsis covers a terrain dense with individuals and particulars. The jurisdiction of providence and the efficaciousness of divine governance are not limited to heavenly spheres or divine ideas. They descend to our level—and below it, says Nemesius, to ‘the unperceived’ (tōn anaisthētōn).247 Divine governance is present, here and now, in human cities, in human bodies, and throughout the wild places of the earth. And it is because his conception of providence is cosmopolitan that Nemesius warns that ‘it is illicit or unlawful to think of God’—recall our comments on blasphēmia (in the second section of this chapter, ‘The Absurdity of Fate’)—that he ‘neglects the rule and governance (dioikēseōs) of particulars’.248 No body in Nemesius’ world city—human or non-­ human, animate or inanimate—is neglected by his God. One consequence of Nemesius’ theory of divine world-­governance will concern us presently (in the sixth section of this chapter, ‘The Incomprehensibility of Providence’); it renders providence ‘incomprehensible’ (akatalēptos). Here, we should ask what Nemesius takes to be the ‘best’ and ‘most certain’ proof of his theory.249 He states this very clearly in Hum. Nat. 43, and it should come as no shock. Concerning dioikēsis, Nemesius writes: ‘This is best comprehended if we look at the political order of humans.’250 Nemesius’ conception of dioikēsis informs his description of the powers and organs of a living body, yet he tells us that the sharpest reflection of divine world-­governance is in human cities. This is because the world is a city. That final inference—that the world is a city—is reinforced by the context of the sentence just quoted. For, beyond ‘the political order of humans’—politeia in the strict sense is restricted to the divine and human koinōnia, since only a 242 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 131,12–16). For the trope of undefilable light: Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 1040. 243 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 131,16–18). 244 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 131,10–11). 245 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 129,18). 246 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 135,6). 247 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,4). 248 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 131,5–11). 249 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,10). 250 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,10–11).

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  163 rational entity can be a ‘citizen’—Nemesius recognizes the signs of quasi-rational hierarchies, hegemonies, and forms of governance in the quasi-polities elaborated by other living things. Note, in particular, that in the context of his treatment of divine dioikēsis, Nemesius chooses to bestow the same term—dioikēsis—on non-­ human ‘cities’, and only then, finally, on human cities: For all things depend upon the divine will and derive from it their continuance and preservation. That a multitude of individuals is receptive of providence is clear from the living things that are governed (dioikoumenōn) by certain forms of rule and hegemony, of which there are many types. For bees and ants and most creatures that live collectively are subject to hegemons which they follow obediently. But this is best comprehended if we look at the political order of humans—for humankind is clearly receptive of governance (dioikēsis) and care by lawgivers and rulers. But how would what is receptive of these not be receptive of the Demiurge’s providence?251

There is no aspect of this paragraph which does not invite a lengthy treatment. To take a single instance, Nemesius’ allusion to bees.252 In the second volume of Francis Dvornik’s study of the origins of Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy,253 it is possible to trace a valorization of bees’ spectacularly hege­ mon­ic hive-­system to the idea of a divine world city.254 In his text On Mercy, Seneca, mistaking the queen bee for a king—a confusion which might have pleased the cross-­dressing Nero, if he had caught it—deduced from the structure of a hive that ‘nature herself conceived the idea of a king’.255 Much later, in his polemic Against Celsus, Origen asserts that bees form their hives ‘in imitation of rational beings’;256 and in his Homilies on Isaiah, Origen transfers to Christ the (mistaken) title of ‘king bee’.257 One of Origen’s con­tem­por­ ar­ies, Cyprian of Carthage (died 258), seeks to prove the unity of the Godhead from the solitude of a king (queen) bee in a hive.258 And most suggestively, Constantine’s African courtier Lactantius (died c.325), in his Epitome of the 251 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,4–13). 252  Compare Bas. Hex. VIII 4 (172d–176a). 253 F.  Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy: Origins and Background (Washington, D.C., 1966). For the politics of bees in later European thought, but before Bernard Mandeville’s epochal Fable of the Bees (1714): J.  Woolfson, ‘The Renaissance of Bees’, Renaissance Studies 24.2 (2010), 281–300. 254  It is notable, in this context, that Plato explicitly rejects the hive-­city analogy at Pl. Pol. 301d–e. I am grateful to Gerd Van Riel for reminding me of this in a conversation at the University of Leuven. 255 Sen. Clem. I 19.2; cit. Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy, II: 527–8. Nor was cross-­dressing Nero’s sartorial métier. He was known for wearing, in his gamier moods, ‘the skin of some wild animal’: T. Power, ‘Nero in Furs (Suet. Ner. 29)’, Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 73 (2014), 205–9. 256  Cit. Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy, II: 603. 257  Cit. Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy, II: 601. 258  Cit. Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy, II: 607.

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164  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature Divine Institutes, coordinates the ‘king bee’ trope with a formidable statement concerning the world city: ‘In this world republic (mundi republica), unless there had been but one ruler, who was also its founder, either the whole structure would have been destroyed or it could never have been founded.’259 This indicates that it is not only Nemesius’ statements, here in Hum. Nat. 43, but his exempla which derive from a Hellenistic, and a patristic, cosmopolitan discourse. Turning from animal quasi-­polities to human polities, the prominence of legal order in this paragraph must of course be observed. It should not be necessary to revisit the theme, however. Nemesius here binds political order (politeia) to legal order (nomothesia), and both to human governance (dioikēsis), but this is to be expected. For in Hum. Nat. 42, Nemesius treats legal and political order as substitutable terms.260 And indeed, this is implicit in the Aristotelian logic of law that inspires his defence of human freedom (in the third section of this chapter, ‘The Evidence of Law’). That legal order is not posited in animal ‘cities’ should only call for a brief comment, since it has been extensively argued that Nemesius believes that freedom of will is a conditio sine qua non of the forms of law, and that non-­human animals— lacking reason—lack freedom of will. Animals realize city-­like hierarchies, but their ‘cities’ are not theorized by Nemesius as law-­governed. (In this he seems to differ from Basil, who asserts that animals ‘have the law of nature . . . within them’, though they lack ‘the gift of reason’.)261 The contrast we are meant to detect, in Nemesius’ lines, is that while other living things are ‘governed (dioikoumenōn) by certain forms of rule and hegemony’;262 and while all living things are ‘receptive of governance (dioikēseis)’—ultimately, of divine governance; nevertheless, it is only humankind which is ‘receptive of governance . . . by lawgivers’.263 Law is a uniquely human art, as are the ‘stochastic arts’ of medicine and ­navigation.264 Non-­human ‘cities’ are governed by instinct, not law; and the divine city—the world city—is governed by divine freedom, not law. (For the last point, revisit the fourth section of this chapter, ‘Excursus: The Platonic, Stoic, and “Egyptian” World Cities’.) Divine governance, in On Human Nature, is therefore an operation of providence which is most sharply reflected in law-­governed cities, yet which is not itself a matter of law. Nemesius’ world city is governed—to again echo Plato’s Politicus—without laws by one who is ‘wiser than the laws’.265 Nemesius thematizes one effect of this doctrine—namely, the incomprehensibility of providence—in a remarkable way in the last pages of his text.

259 Lact. Epit. 2. The ‘king bee’ trope is introduced earlier in the same chapter: ‘si multi sint in examine apum reges, peribunt aut dissipabuntur, dum regibus incessit magno discordia motu’. Cit. Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy, II: 613. 260 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 124,4). 261 Bas. Hex. VII 4 (157a). 262 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,7–8). 263 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,11–12). 264  For the ‘stochastic arts’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 103,2–5). 265 Pl. Pol. 299c.

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  165

The Incomprehensibility of Providence Murder is a theme in the last chapters of On Human Nature, and this is not only because the wilful destruction of a human by a human is a topic that any philosophical anthropology should address. More concretely, this is because Nemesius’ topic in Hum. Nat. 42–3 is divine world-­governance, and as he asks—though the question is not his—in Hum. Nat. 43: ‘Where neither law nor reason rules, how could one say that the overseer is a god?’.266 Now, it is the Platonic world city which is governed by law. Nemesius rejects this aspect of the Platonic world-­picture (covered in the fourth section of this chapter, ‘Excursus: The Platonic, Stoic, and “Egyptian” World Cities’), yet he believes that the world is governed by divine reason in a pure and ‘unfettered’ form.267 His question, then, becomes: How could divine reason rule a city— namely, the world—in which murder is commonplace, and in which brutality often secures ‘power, wealth, high office, and the other good things in life’?268 Nemesius’ concept of the human will of course helps him to resolve his question. As he writes in Hum. Nat. 40: ‘Moving or not moving, desiring or not desiring, striving or not to acquire unnecessary things, lying or not lying, giving or not giving, rejoicing or not rejoicing in what one should, and all such matters in which vice and virtue are displayed—all these are in our power.’269 On the whole, therefore, Nemesius takes killing or not killing to be ‘in our power’—and at origin, a matter of human and not divine culpability. Insofar as killing is an act, it is imputable to the human who freely decides to kill. If this seems to resolve the problem of murder in a divinely governed polity, it clearly fails to eliminate the problem of killing. For we will recall (from chapter 4) the phrenitis sufferer reported by Galen whose ‘thinking was diseased’ due to a lesion in his brain’s central ventricle, and who therefore killed a harmless worker. Onlookers in the street ‘thought the affair was a joke’ until the nasty coup de grâce.270 This is a case of killing in which, for Nemesius, the immoral act is not imputable to the killer. To whom, then—if not to God—is this act of violence imputable? And what about killings by those who are not mentally ill, but who nevertheless kill involuntarily? We will of course recall Nemesius’ catalogue of killers in Hum. Nat. 31 (from the third section of this chapter, ‘The Evidence of Law’). The one who insensibly killed a friend in the dark; the one who unintentionally killed with a gentle blow; the one who inadvertently killed by prescribing a drug.271 We

266 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 128,19–20). 268 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 128,20–3). 270 Nem. Nat. Hom. 13 (Morani 70,12–22).

267 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 111,12–13). 269 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 114,22–115,3). 271 Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 97,17–98,3).

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166  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature will furthermore recall the case Nemesius sketches of a not-voluntary killing, in which ‘one involuntarily kills an adversary but rejoices at his slaughter’.272 To whom are these killings to be imputed, since none of the killers has decided to kill? Nemesius opens his treatment of providence, in Hum. Nat. 42, by intensifying the problem: It has been sufficiently stated in the foregoing that humans are autonomous [Hum. Nat. 39], in what matters we are autonomous [Hum. Nat. 40], and for what reason we were born autonomous [Hum. Nat. 41]. But since not everyone who has it in mind to kill actually kills (in some cases he kills, but in others not, because his act is thwarted and does not result in death), we said that providence is the cause of these events, and not fate.273

Crucial to Nemesius’ theory of imputability is his assertion that ‘it is not only our act, but our choice which is liable to judgement’.274 One who decides to kill, and fails, is nevertheless liable to judgement—certainly to divine, and conceivably to human, judgement. This is clear. What is remarkable is that Nemesius ascribes to providence the failure to kill or the killing of one who has made the choice to kill. ‘Providence’, he writes, ‘is the cause (aitian) of these events’.275 Providence is not the cause of the choice to kill, or of the striving to kill—but Nemesius holds that providence is the cause of the killing. How could this be? It is out of the question that this is due to hasty composition on Nemesius’ part or to overhasty interpretation on ours. For in Hum. Nat. 43, Nemesius refers to the sentences just extracted from Hum. Nat. 42. He reiterates in Hum. Nat. 43 that murder is a ‘work’ (ergon) of providence, for which God is nevertheless in no sense culpable. This is Nemesius: ‘Many works of providence are not the works of nature, as was shown in the case of murder. For nature is part of providence, not providence itself.’276 Nemesius’ primary concern in On Human Nature is with ‘nature’. In his final chapters, however, he deepens the horizon. Nature, he says here, is only a part (meros) of providence—and providence is his final topic. Where, it is therefore reasonable to ask, can we best observe providence—in contradistinction to nature? It is ‘best comprehended’, he tells us, ‘if we look at the political order of humans (tōn anthrōpōn politeian)’.277 Yet what do we see when we ‘look at the political order of humans’? The scene is ugly. In Nemesius’ century, as in ours, there are ‘many injustices, many murders’. ‘In a word’, he concludes, ‘human

272 Nem. Nat. Hom. 31 (Morani 96,14–15). 274 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 115,27–8). 276 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 128,10–11).

273 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 120,7–12). 275 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 120,11). 277 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,10–11).

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  167 city-­life is full of evildoing’. Note that Nemesius’ word for ‘city-­life’ (empoliteuomai), here, refers not to any human polis, but to every human’s life in the divine ‘world city’.278 And in the bishop’s ‘world city’, as in ours, it cannot be denied that many brutalizers and killers ‘elude justice’ (though ‘others are punished’). Because of this, most humans—Nemesius calls them ‘the masses’279—seem to conclude that ‘neither what right reason nor the law requires is what consistently occurs’.280 It is moreover no secret that good people are often destroyed in court-­ sanctioned, ‘wrongful killings’.281 Nemesius pleasingly associates the deaths of ‘Socrates and the saints’ in this context—he means the philosopher condemned in 399 bce, and not some late-­antique ‘Socrates’—and we could recall from chapter 1 the bishop Silvanus’ martyrdom at Emesa in 312 ce.282 Nevertheless, Nemesius regards murder—judicial or criminal—as a work of providence, in as much as it is providence that permits a murderous intention to be realized. (The murderer is still the origin of the act, and as such, culpable.) This is why Nemesius asks, a bit plangently, on the final page of his (unfinished) treatise: ‘Why did not a just providence prevent these murders?’283 One of Nemesius’ replies to this question stands out for its elegance and formal quality. It is precisely because the Syrian believes: (i)   in a divine ‘rule and governance of particulars’;284 and because (ii)  ‘particulars are unlimited for us’; and because (iii)  ‘the unlimited is unknowable for us’;285 that Nemesius therefore believes: (iv) that the ‘logic of providence’—which is to say, the logic of divine world-­ governance—is ‘incomprehensible for us’.286 Nemesius then apostrophizes a line from Paul’s letters, saying to God: ‘How unsearchable are your judgements!’287 But his recognition of the opacity of divine judgement, and the sublimity of divine world-­governance, is not essentially mystical. It is formal. 278 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 128,15–17). A free translation. It is hard to render empoliteuomai here (at empoliteuesthai tois anthrōpois). Burgundio is perhaps most successful, translating with omnem malitiam conversari in hominibus: Verbeke and Moncho, De natura hominis, 162. 279 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 135,14). 280 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 128,15–19). 281 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 135,18–19). 282 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 136,3). Compare Eus. Hist. Eccl. VIII 13.3–4 and IX 6.1. 283 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 135,20). 284 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 131,10–11). 285 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 133,9–10). 286 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 133,2–3). Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 29 (Kotter and Ledrux 364,72–4). 287 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 133,3–4). Compare Romans 11:33.

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168  Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature Thus, Nemesius adds a formal clarification to his proof. The particular, he says, is less comprehensible than the universal.288 But more concretely, the ‘particular’ with which providence is most concerned is a highly mutable, complex, and free entity—the human. ‘This creature is quick-­changing in its needs’, says Nemesius, ‘and susceptible to outer influences’.289 (We could recall the ‘shifting, variegated life’ that Augustine senses within himself in the Confessions, or some of Basil’s lines on human mutability in his Sermons on the Six-­Day-­Work.)290 Because of this, Nemesius reasons: It is necessary also that the providence beneficial for each should be different, complicated, and variegated . . . if it is to be present to help each [human] on each occasion in a fitting way. The differences between particulars are unlimited, and so the logic of a providence beneficial to each must be unlimited—but if unlimited, then unknowable for us.291

A cunning, but not for that reason unconvincing, reversal has taken place. By conceiving of providence as a free and direct governance of particulars by God, by centring providence on the governance of humankind, and by finishing his (unfinished) text with an accentuation of the mutability and complexity of humans, Nemesius is finally in a position to treat the apparent chaos of history as a sign of the sublimity of divine world-­governance. The logic of a ‘providence for individuals’ lies infinitely beyond individuals. There are ‘bitter deaths and unmerited slaughters’ in the divine world city,292 the Syrian bishop can reason, precisely because ‘the overseer is a god’.293 What the general justice of a law-­like fate would never permit, the particular justice of God consents to—though the bishop warns, in this context, that ‘there are many forms of consent’.294 Emblematic of this, for him, is the divine consent to a murderous spectacle he calls ‘the Cross’. Nemesius is of course referring to a drama in which the action, in his words, ‘seems absurd (atopou)’—the death, as an innocent convict, of the one he calls ‘Son of Man’ or ‘Son of Humankind’ (ho huios tou anthrōpou). Yet the logic behind God’s consent to that piece of theatre-­of-­cruelty is at least partly revealed, Nemesius believes, in a cosmopolitan Gesamtkunstwerk in which all humans somehow figure.295 For Nemesius, that drama, which we would now call salvation-­ history (Heilsgeschichte), is defined by the hope of resurrection.296 The Syrian bishop is

288 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 133,10–11). 289 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 133,15–16). 290  Compare Aug. Conf. X 17.26; and Bas. Hex. VI 10 (141c–144a). 291 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 133,15–21). 292 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 135,19). 293 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 128,19–20). 294 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 134,3–4). 295 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 134,6–8) and Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 134,16). Compare Bas. Hex. VI 7 (133c); Dam. Fid. Orth. II 29 (Kotter and Ledrux 358–64). 296 Nem. Nat. Hom. 38 (Morani 112,5–6).

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The Logic of Law: On Human Nature 29–43  169 clear on this. There can be no hope of cosmopolitan justice if the human soul is mortal, and if we ‘circumscribe human things by this life’.297 Sceptics are right to say that what ‘the law requires’ is not ‘what consistently occurs’ in human life.298 Nemesius’ reply to this, however, is that the lawlessness of history is not a sign of divine absence, but of divine world-­governance. Injustice in the world is not a sign that the world is not a city—that humankind is not free, that human acts are not imputable, and that we are not ultimately innocent or guilty. On the contrary, the brutality of history becomes, for Nemesius, an arcane, but formally coherent and pristine indication of the fact that the world city is governed by ‘right reason’ (orthos logos), and that humankind is free.299 ‘One must not make one’s own ignorance’, Nemesius warns, ‘into an abolition of the Guardianship of things’. And in the last pages of his treatise, human ig­nor­ ance is a theme. The divine logic that steers human life in this world-­age can only be half-­perceived ‘by imagination of a sort, and that dim’. (There are echoes, here, of Paul in I Corinthians.) Humans can only hope to form ‘images amid shadows’ with which they try, ‘conjecturally’, to limn the outer edges of a divine reason that moves, omnipresently and with infinite complexity, through global history.300 Yet according to this 4th-­century bishop of Roman Syria, to deny ‘the Guardianship of things’ in the sanguinary history of a free and culpable humankind is not only to misrecognize what he calls, in one place, ‘the nature of God’.301 It is to misrecognize ourselves.

297 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 128,23–7 and 129,15–30,1). 298 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 128,14–23). 299 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 128,15–19). 300 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 133,21–34,3). Compare I Corinthians 13:12. 301 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 131,16–17).

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Epilogue The Legacy of an Early Christian Anthropology

What is human nature for Nemesius of Emesa? He defines ‘nature’ (phusis) in Hum. Nat. 39 as that which brings to pass all ‘birth, growth, decay’.1 Yet in Hum. Nat. 43, he writes that it is ‘the nature of God’ to be ‘beyond all alteration’.2 The concept of a created phusis which causes all birth and decay cannot be the same as that of an uncreated phusis in which ‘all alteration’ is inconceivable; but Nemesius never clarifies. As this suggests, his concept of phusis is vague.3 What is certain is that human nature is, for Nemesius, one of a myriad of natures on earth. It is because of this that he can write, in Hum. Nat. 40, that ‘turning one’s eye to all plants and animals’ can deepen self-­knowledge. For in human bodies, as in those of deer and swine and the crops they feed upon (to borrow from a catalogue in Hum. Nat. 1), ‘change is continuous’.4 Nemesius indicates, too, that human nature is an ‘idea’ (eidos) of the Christian Demiurge.5 It is frustrating that he never states the ontological status of demiurgic ideas. This might be because, although Nemesius assures us in the middle of On Human Nature that he will later define Platonic ideas—he never does.6 This is one of the lacunae which prove that On Human Nature is not a finished text. Yet this lacuna should not conceal from us that Nemesius decides to break—on his telling—with much late-­antique Platonism on precisely the ‘idea’ of human nature. This rupture occurs at a decisive moment of his critique of reincarnation, in Hum. Nat. 2, when he writes: Some say that there is not only one species (eidos) of soul, but . . . as many as there are species (eidē) of living creatures. Those who hold to the doctrines of Plato strenuously objected to this. For Plato said that fierce and proud and greedy

1 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 112,18). Compare Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 115,6–10). 2 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 131,16–17). 3  A relevant contrast is the opening of John of Damascus’ chapter, heavily influenced by Nemesius, ‘On Humankind’ (Peri anthrōpou): Dam. Fid. Orth. II 12 (Kotter and Ledrux 298–304). 4 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 117,11–13). For deer, swine, and crops: Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 12,13–17). 5 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 3,11–12). 6 Nem. Nat. Hom. 13 (Morani 69,15–16). Compare Nem. Nat. Hom. 13 (Morani 68,17–69,4); R. Sharples and P. van der Eijk, Nemesius, On the Nature of Man (Liverpool, 2008), note 604.

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172  Epilogue: The Legacy of an Early Christian Anthropology souls [of humans] take in exchange [after death] the bodies of wolves and lions, those that were given to self-­indulgence assume the bodies of asses, and the like.7

We will recall from chapter  3 that Nemesius cites a 2nd-­century philosopher, Cronius, whose literal interpretation of Plato’s reincarnation myth seems to have rested on the hypothesis that ‘all souls are rational’.8 Nemesius blankly rejects Cronius’ hypothesis. The Syrian bishop also cites the Syrian scholarch, Iamblichus, who interprets Plato’s myth in ethical, rather than biological, terms.9 But it is significant that Nemesius holds a doctrine of demiurgic ideas to which—on his telling— Platonic commentators in the centuries before him had ‘strenuously objected’. And it is significant that on the just-­quoted question of the number of nature-­ generating demiurgic ideas, Nemesius cites a treatise On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body by ‘the marvellous physician’ (as he calls him) Galen.10 In Hum. Nat. 2, the Syrian bishop commends the Anatolian medical philosopher for concluding that ‘each species (eidos) of animal’ has ‘a different species (eidos) of soul’. Against much late-­antique Platonism—the great bulk of which has not come down to us—Nemesius asserts with Galen that the ‘species (eidos) of soul’ necessarily differs in keeping with the ‘species (eidos) of body’.11 Whatever else could be inferred from this, it confirms that human nature is one of a myriad of natures in On Human Nature, and that humans differ essentially, for Nemesius, from all non-­human entities on earth—not only in the form (eidos) of their bodies, but in the form (eidos) of their souls. Humankind is unique both physically and metaphysically (though ‘metaphysics’ is a word Nemesius never uses). Anthrōpos is a metaphysically unique phusis; but it is merely one phusis. The date tree, too, is a species—a demiurgic idea—in the bishop’s rudimentary botany. (He differentiates, in passing, date and fig trees—Phoenix dactylifera and Ficus carica, in post-­Linnaean botany.)12 Curiously, it is in his chapter on taste that Nemesius observes that all species have what he calls ‘distinguishing qualities’. ‘Each species (eidos) of animal and plant has distinguishing qualities (idiazousai poiotētes)’, we read in Hum. Nat. 9, ‘for we get one taste perhaps from pork and another from goat’.13 What then are the ‘distinguishing qualities’ of humankind? Mercifully, this topic is not broached in the bishop’s chapter on taste. In Hum. Nat. 10, Nemesius asserts that ‘only humans and apes do not move their ears, while all other living creatures that have ears move them’.14 But it is not 7 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 34,22–35,3). 8 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,4–5). 9 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 35,7–11). 10  ‘Marvellous physician’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,10). 11 Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,9–20). 12 Nem. Nat. Hom. 9 (Morani 67,2–3). 13 Nem. Nat. Hom. 9 (Morani 66,17–21). 14 Nem. Nat. Hom. 10 (Morani 67,9–11). (Morani brackets the line beginning ‘while all other’; but it is found in all the Greek manuscripts and has been restored: Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 579.) Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 18 (Kotter and Ledrux 320,20).

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Epilogue: The Legacy of an Early Christian Anthropology  173 this ‘ridiculous’ piece of lore that distinguishes humankind, for him.15 Nor is it ‘the power of laughter’, which Nemesius thinks is unique to humans. Nor is it the power to ‘throw off through repentance the blame for sins committed’,16 though Nemesius calls repentance a divine ‘prerogative’ (presbeion) of humans, as is the resurrection of their bodies on the last day.17 Nor is it, finally, the experience of ‘intellectual pleasures’, which he holds to be ‘unique to humans qua human (kath’ ho anthrōpos)’.18 Without denying the anthropological significance of contemplation or resurrection, repentance or laughter—or immovable ears—in On Human Nature, they are not the distinguishing marks which structure Nemesius’ treatise. The specific differences that structure On Human Nature are taken from two ‘pagan’ def­in­ itions of that nature, both of which Nemesius recollects in Hum. Nat. 1. (i) The human is a ‘rational mortal animal, receptive of intellect and knowledge’.19 This is likely taken from Pseudo-­Galen’s Medical Definitions,20 but it resembles a shorter formula—‘animal, rational, mortal’—analysed by the Syrian Platonist, Porphyry, in his tradition-­shaping Introduction to Aristotle’s Categories.21 (ii) The human is a ‘political animal’. This seems to be a conscious echo of Aristotle’s definition of anthrōpos in Politics I.  Where the philosopher writes in the 4th century bce: ‘Humankind is by nature a political ­animal (phusei politikon zōon)’; the philosopher-­bishop writes in the 4th century ce: ‘Humankind is by nature . . . a political animal (phusei . . . politikon zōon)’.22 For Nemesius, both ‘pagan’ definitions of human nature—the Platonic (and Galenic), in which humans are rational; and the Peripatetic, in which they are political—signal that humans are by nature free. Human freedom is Nemesius’ architectonic idea. It is freedom which divides animality into human (rational) and non-­human (irrational). ‘There is no commonality’, we recall him saying in Hum. Nat. 33, ‘between humans and irrational animals regarding choice’.23 Human choice is a natural power (dunamis), emanating from a rational substance

15  For the ape’s body (per Galen) as ‘ridiculous’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 37,9–20). And for Nemesius’ only other comment on apes: Nat. Hom. 2 (Morani 36,24–6). 16 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 10,8–12). 17 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,22–11,1). 18 Nem. Nat. Hom. 18 (Morani 80,6). He notes that intellection—and thus, intellectual pleasures— can be ‘practical’ or ‘theoretical’; and he calls the latter ‘purer’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 18 (Morani 80,3–11). 19 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 11,3–4). 20 M. Morani, Nemesii Emeseni, De natura hominis (Leipzig, 1987), 11; Sharples and van der Eijk, On the Nature of Man, note 231. 21 Por. Is. 3 (9.7–12.11 Busse). 22 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 9,20). Compare Arist. Polit. I 1.9 (1253a). 23 Nem. Nat. Hom. 33 (Morani 99,23–100,3).

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174  Epilogue: The Legacy of an Early Christian Anthropology (ousia), which is realized in a human act (praxis).24 Acts are governed by ‘law and political order’ in human cities;25 and not only acts, but unactualized choices are governed by an incomprehensible providence in the divine ‘world city’. It is in the last chapters of Nemesius’ (unfinished) treatise that he makes some of his most forceful claims concerning what is ‘natural’ for humans. We will recall his claim in Hum. Nat. 39 that it is ‘by nature’ (phusikōs) that ‘every people (pan ethnos) makes use of some laws’. He infers from this that ‘a knowledge of what is in our power’—namely, a ‘power to observe the laws’—‘is naturally (phusikōs) inbred in all humans’.26 What other knowledge is ‘naturally inbred in all humans’? Nemesius writes this in Hum. Nat. 43: No slight indication of there being . . . providence for individuals (ta kath’ hekasta) is that knowledge of it is naturally (phusikōs) ingrained in humans. For in the grip of necessity we immediately take refuge with the divine and with prayers, as if nature (phuseōs) led us uninstructed. But nature (phusis) would not have led us uninstructed to what was not of a nature (to mē phusin) to happen . . . But everything that follows something naturally (phusikōs) offers a strong proof which permits no denial.27

When these texts are read in conjunction it becomes clear that humans possess ‘by nature’ (phusikōs), in On Human Nature, the raw concepts or intuitions without which, according to Nemesius, human cities and the divine ‘world city’ become ‘absurd’ (atopoi).28 A natural-­born recognition that we are both ‘rational’ (à la Porphyry) and ‘political’ (à la Aristotle)—and thus, that we are ‘liable to judgement’ (à la Nemesius’ reading of Jesus)—may be inchoate, but for Nemesius it is real.29 For the philosopher-­bishop of Emesa, to be human is not only to be free but to know that ‘it is in our power (eph’ hēmin) to be just or unjust’.30 It is this know­ ledge which renders us ‘liable to judgement’ (hupodikos) not only in human cities, but in the divine ‘world city’.31 It is this knowledge, too, which conditions a human desire to ‘throw off through repentance the blame for sins committed’.32 And it is this sequence of ideas which inspires the cosmopolitan reading of Nemesius’ On Human Nature in the preceding chapters. 24 Nem. Nat. Hom. 34 (Morani 103,10–15). 25 Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 124,4): nomos ē politeia. Note that Nemesius’ disjunctive (‘or’) has been made a conjunctive (‘and’), here, without misrepresenting his thought. 26 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 114,2–10). 27 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 132,13–21). Compare Max. Amb. Ioh. 10.103 (Constas I: 316). 28 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,13–23). 29 Compare Matthew 5:28; Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 115,27–116,2). 30 Nem. Nat. Hom. 39 (Morani 114,2). Compare Arist. Eth. Nic. III 5.2 (1113b6–7). 31 Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 115,28). 32 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 10,8–12).

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Epilogue: The Legacy of an Early Christian Anthropology  175 A similar reconstruction of Nemesius’ anthropology can be read off the pages of an 8th-­century treatise, On the Orthodox Faith, by a high-­born Christian of early Islamic Damascus, Cyrene bar Mansur.33 Since Cyrene took the name ‘John’ after becoming a monk of the Palestinian desert,34 he is known to later tradition as ‘John of Damascus’.35 And it has long been recognized that book II of John’s On the Orthodox Faith transmitted blocs of Nemesius’ text in both the Byzantine and Islamicate zones, and in Europe.36 That a 12th-­century translator of Nemesius’ On Human Nature, Burgundio of Pisa, also made a Latin translation of John’s On the Orthodox Faith, suggests the treatises’ many centuries of tangled history. Without recounting that history, we could note that Burgundio’s translation of John, with its copious borrowings from Nemesius, was later emended by the Oxford philosopher Robert Grosseteste (died 1253).37 When medieval master-­thinkers such as Roger Bacon (died 1292) and Duns Scotus (died 1308) cite On the Orthodox Faith in Grosseteste’s version, they are at times citing material by Nemesius—‘though not under the name of Nemesius’.38 The Emesene bishop’s influence on later philosophy is so broad, yet so concealed, that he could perhaps be called a secret master-­thinker of Byzantium and Europe. Our only concern here, however, is with Nemesius’ concealed influence on book II of John’s On the Orthodox Faith. Our reconstruction of Nemesius’ anthropology began with what he calls ‘a familiar idea that humankind has a share in (koinōnei) lifeless things, partakes in the life of irrational animals, and participates in the intelligence of rational beings’.39 It is in part due to John’s reception of Nemesius that this remains a ‘familiar idea’ in Christian philosophy until the late 17th century. For we read this in On the Orthodox Faith II: ‘It must be recognized that humankind has a share in (koinōnei) lifeless things, partakes in the life of irrational animals, and participates in the intelligence of rational beings.’ The Syrian monk goes on to assert, in much the same words as the Syrian bishop, that ‘humankind has a share in 33  Or, in many modern histories, ‘Mansur ibn Sarjun’. For the question of the Damascene’s name, and the suggestion of ‘Cyrene bar Mansur’: S.  W.  Anthony, ‘Fixing John Damascene’s Biography: Historical Notes and His Family Background’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 23, 4 (2015), 607–27, here 625–6. I am grateful to Samuel Noble for pointing me to this contribution. 34 A. Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford, 2002), 3–8. Compare  D.  J.  Sahas, John of Damascus on Islam: The ‘Heresy of the Ishmaelites’ (Leiden, 1972), 47–8. 35 Sahas, John of Damascus on Islam, 7: his writings ‘bear mostly the name “John of Damascus” and sometimes simply “John presbyter and monachus” ’. 36  H.  B.  Wicher, ‘Nemesius Emesenus’, Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries. Volume VI, ed. P. O. Kristeller and F. E. Cranz (Washington, D.C., 1986), 35, 39–40. 37  Wicher, ‘Nemesius Emesenus’, 35; I. Backus, ‘John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa: Translations by Burgundio (1153/54), Grosseteste (1235/40) and Lefèvre d’Etaples (1507)’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986), 211–17, here 211. 38  Wicher, ‘Nemesius Emesenus’, 35, 40. 39 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 2,13–15).

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176  Epilogue: The Legacy of an Early Christian Anthropology (koinōnei) lifeless things on account of the body and the mixture of the four elements’, and so on.40 As this suggests, Nemesius’ world-­picture is John’s. And what is more, John—like Nemesius—calls the human ‘a little world in the great world’.41 It is the principle of human governance which inspires Nemesius’ panegyric in Hum. Nat. 1. ‘Humankind is sovereign over the heavens’, he intones. ‘Humankind crosses the seas, in contemplation enters into the heavens’, and so on.42 Likely writing with Nemesius’ text before him, John too panegyrizes humans as ‘contemplating the visible order’, as having been ‘initiated into the mysteries of the realm of thought’, as ‘belonging to earth and heaven’, and as being both ‘temporal and immortal’.43 Nemesius’ rhetoric of human dignity—dignitas hominis, in later European tradition—is heightened by John in On the Orthodox Faith II.44 Our reconstruction of Nemesius’ theory of the Fall, in chapter 2, is juridical. And this is more sharply formulated by John, in his pages on the Paradise-­scenes in Genesis. Drawing upon Nemesius in his chapter ‘On Paradise’, John writes that ‘in the midst [of Paradise] God planted the tree of life and the tree of knowledge’. He continues: ‘The tree of knowledge was for a trial (apopeiran) and legal ordeal (dokimēn) . . . of humankind’s obedience and disobedience. Hence it was named “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”.’45 John thinks of the planting of ‘the tree of knowledge’ (as Nemesius also calls it), and of the divine prohibition to eat from that tree, as the initiation of what is in purely formal terms a legal ‘ordeal’ (dokimē).46 Of course, this is no ordinary ‘ordeal’. As John stresses, bodily torment and mental anguish are both unthought­of in Paradise.47 But the juridical nature of this drama is no minor concern, for John; he returns to it in the last chapter of On the Orthodox Faith II.48 What the prohibited fruit reveals, for him—as for Nemesius—is the duplicity of human freedom. John writes that ‘God made humankind by nature sinless’, yet ‘gave them free will (autexousion)’. The Fall is therefore ‘the result of [human] choice’.49 The power of human choice is a structuring concern in On the Orthodox Faith II, as in On Human Nature, for—in John’s words—‘there is no virtue (aretē) in what comes-­to-­be from mere force’.50 This informs John’s physiology 40 Dam. Fid. Orth. II 12 (Kotter and Ledrux 304,81–97). 41 Dam. Fid. Orth. II 12 (Kotter and Ledrux 300,30). Compare Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,5–6). 42 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,9–18). 43 Dam. Fid. Orth. II 12 (Kotter and Ledrux 300,31–4). 44  One critical figure in the humanist reception of both Nemesius and John is the French theologian, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples. Compare Backus, ‘De Fide Orthodoxa’, here 211–12; and E. F. Rice, ‘The Humanist Idea of Christian Antiquity: Lefèvre d’Étaples and his Circle’, Studies in the Renaissance 9 (1962), 126–60, here 126–7, 137–40. 45 Dam. Fid. Orth. II 11 (Kotter and Ledrux 286–8; and for the juridical valences: 288 note 1). 46  For ‘tree of knowledge’: Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 6,21); Dam. Fid. Orth. II 11 (Kotter and Ledrux 288,17–18). 47 Dam. Fid. Orth. II 11 (Kotter and Ledrux 286,6–7). 48 Dam. Fid. Orth. II 30 (Kotter and Ledrux 370,64–6). 49 Dam. Fid. Orth. II 12 (Kotter and Ledrux 302,43–6). 50 Dam. Fid. Orth. II 12 (Kotter and Ledrux 302,50).

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Epilogue: The Legacy of an Early Christian Anthropology  177 and psychology, much as it informs Nemesius’ chapters on physiology and psych­ology—a number of which John more of less copies (and reorders).51 The soul is defined by John—as by Nemesius—as a ‘bodiless’ (asōmatos) substance which is ‘making use of an organized body’ (organikō kechrēmenē sōmati) in this life.52 Of the soul’s manifold ‘uses of an organized body’, what John calls ‘impulsive motion’ is controlled by reason.53 Yet reason is susceptible to a host of influences—not least, in Nemesius’ and John’s milieux, to the conjectural influence of celestial bodies. John’s most intriguing reception of Nemesius is first glimpsed in his chapter ‘On Light, Fire, the Luminaries, Sun, Moon, and Stars’. We will recognize John’s form of reasoning in the following lines. It does not originate with Nemesius, though he seems to be John’s source for it; rather, it has been traced back by David Amand to Carneades in the 2nd century bce.54 This is John: The Hellenes assert that all our affairs are governed (dioikeisthai) by the rising and setting and collision of these stars . . . But we [Christians] hold that . . . we have been created with free wills by the Demiurge and are masters over our own actions. For if all our actions depend on the rotation of the stars, it is by necessity that we do all we do—and neither virtue nor vice comes to be by necessity. If then we possess neither virtue nor vice, we do not deserve praise (epainōn) or rewards, blame (psogōn) or punishments—and God will prove to be unjust, since he gives good things to some and adversity to others . . . And reason will be superfluous to us—for if we are not masters of any of our actions, deliberation is quite superfluous. Reason, indeed, is granted to us only that we might take counsel; and hence all reason (logikon) implies freedom of will (autexousion).55

John’s cosmopolitan reasoning, here, is no different from Nemesius’ in his critique of the theory that humankind is ‘a mere instrument of the rotation above’. For both John and Nemesius—here in the Emesene’s words—‘those who say such things annihilate what is in our power . . . which is nothing less than to ruin or demean the world’.56 And this is no chance convergence. For Nemesius’ logic of law is no less decisive in the final pages of On the Orthodox Faith II than in the final pages of On Human Nature. John copies Nemesius’ forensic definition of human ‘acts’ with near-­total precision. This is John, though we have analysed much the same lines in Nemesius’ treatise: 51  Consult the table printed in Wicher, ‘Nemesius Emesenus’, 36. 52 Dam. Fid. Orth. II 12 (Kotter and Ledrux 302,51–60). 53 Dam. Fid. Orth. II 12 (Kotter and Ledrux 308,116–18). 54  D. Amand (or E. Amand de Mendieta), Fatalisme et liberté dans l’antiquité grecque. Recherches sur la survivance de l’argumentation morale antifataliste de Carnéade chez les philosophes grecs et les théologiens chrétiens des quatre premiers siècles (Louvain, 1945; reprint Amsterdam, 1973), 571–86. 55 Dam. Fid. Orth. II 7 (Kotter and Ledrux 256–8). 56 Nem. Nat. Hom. 35 (Morani 104,13–23).

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178  Epilogue: The Legacy of an Early Christian Anthropology An act is a rational operation. Acts attract praise and blame, and some of them are done with pleasure . . . Again, some acts are pitied and thought deserving of pardon, some are hated and punished. The voluntary, therefore, always attracts praise or blame . . . [whereas] the involuntary is thought to be deserving of pardon or pity.57

That the forensic terms in John’s lines are not of marginal importance is confirmed by the fact that he copies from Nemesius a comment that ‘if an act were not in our power (eph’ hēmin)’, it would never ‘be said to be a voluntary act’. And what is John’s evidence for this? He copies from Nemesius what we called, in chapter 5, ‘the evidence of law’: John asserts, in Nemesius’ words, that the voluntary is ‘whatever is followed by blame or praise and in regard to which there is encouragement and law’.58 Of course, all the vagaries of human will are only ultimately known to the deity who governs the ‘world city’. This is why John defines providence, meticulously copying Nemesius’ formulation, as ‘the will of God by which all things receive a fitting settlement (diexagōgēn)’.59 And this is why John’s providence, like Nemesius’, is incomprehensible. In the Damascene’s words, which contain echoes of Nemesius, ‘the convolutions of divine providence are many’ and ‘we cannot interpret them in words or grasp them by the intellect’.60 One of these ‘convolutions’ is the Cross, which both Nemesius and John call ‘something great and wonderful’. Though Jesus’ Roman punishment ‘seems absurd (atopou)’, it is through his death that ‘the salvation of humans’ is revealed.61 From the crime-­drama of Paradise to the punishment-­drama of the Cross, Nemesius’ early Christian anthropology is not only received by John of Damascus, but transmitted by him throughout Europe and the Byzantine zone—and indeed, throughout much of the Islamicate zone. A reception history of Nemesius (and John), however, has yet to be written.62 What is human nature for Nemesius of Emesa? In the first pages of his treatise, he says that all humans qua human are ‘born in the image and likeness of God’. 57  Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 24 (Kotter and Ledrux 344,6–12); Nem. Nat. Hom. 29 (Morani 94,3–12). 58 Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 26 (Kotter and Ledrux 352,5–8); Nem. Nat. Hom. 40 (Morani 114,15–18). 59 Compare Dam. Fid. Orth. II 29 (Kotter and Ledrux 358,4–5); Nem. Nat. Hom. 42 (Morani 125,6–7). The same definition, attributed to the ‘God-­bearing fathers’ (theophorous pateras), appears in Max. Amb. Ioh. 10.100 (Constas I: 310). 60 Dam. Fid. Orth. II 29 (Kotter and Ledrux 364,72–4). 61 Compare Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 134,6–8); Dam. Fid. Orth. II 29 (Kotter and Ledrux 360,34–7). 62  Emil Dobler, however, has begun to write it: E. Dobler, Nemesius von Emesa und die Psychologie des menschlichen Aktes bei Thomas von Aquin (S. Th. Ia–IIae, qq. 6–17). Eine quellenanalytische Studie (Werthenstein, 1950); idem, Zwei syrische Quellen der theologischen Summa des Thomas von Aquin— Nemesius von Emesa und Johannes von Damaskus (Freiburg, 2000); idem, Falsche Väterzitate bei Thomas von Aquin. Gregorius, Bischof von Nyssa oder Nemesius, Bischof von Emesa? (Freiburg, 2001).

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Epilogue: The Legacy of an Early Christian Anthropology  179 Humans are called to ‘discover the nature of things’ (tēn tōn ontōn phusin ereuna), and to ‘become the house and temple of God’.63 The ‘summit of rational nature (logikēs phuseōs)’—thus, of human nature—is to ‘turn from evils’ and ‘choose things that are good’.64 But in the last pages of his treatise, he alludes to the ‘bitter deaths’ that humans inflict, or have inflicted on them.65 He has heard reports of ‘those who slaughter their enemies or take them captive and work all manner of evil on them’. He knows that human cities are stalked by ‘polluted murderers’ and ‘stealers of goods’;66 and he knows that violence and exploitation can lead to ‘power, wealth, high office’.67 Nemesius’ On Human Nature is unfinished, but the criminality depicted in its final sentences is suggestive. For to be human is to be faced with a choice—to rise, or to fall.

63 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 15,9–19). 64 Nem. Nat. Hom. 1 (Morani 5,18–19). 65 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 135,19). 66 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 135,21–136,16). 67 Nem. Nat. Hom. 43 (Morani 128,20–3).

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Titles of Ancient Works Alex. Fat. Alexander of Aphrodisias, De Fato Arist. Eth. Nic. Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea Arist. Hist. Anim. Aristotle, Historia Animalium Arist. Part. Anim. Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium Arist. Polit. Aristotle, Politica Arist. Post. Aristotle, Analytica Posteriora Aug. An. Orig. Augustine of Hippo, De Anima et eius Origine Aug. Civ. Augustine of Hippo, De Civitate Dei Aug. Conf. Augustine of Hippo, Confessiones Aug. Enarr. Augustine of Hippo, Enarrationes in Psalmos Aug. Epist. Augustine of Hippo, Epistulae Aug. Mag. Augustine of Hippo, De Magistro Aug. Serm. Augustine of Hippo, Sermones in Epistolas Apostolicas Bard. Leg. Reg. Bardaisan of Edessa, Liber Legum Regionum Bas. Hex. Basil of Caesarea, Homiliae in Hexaemeron Bry. Oecon. Bryson, Oeconomicus Cal. Plat. Tim. Calcidius, In Platonis Timaeum Commentarius Cic. Acad. Cicero, Academica Cic. Fat. Cicero, De Fato Cic. Fin. Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum Cic. Inv. Cicero, De Inventione Cic. Leg. Cicero, De Legibus Cic. Orat. Cicero, Orator Clem. Prot. Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus Clem. Strom. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata Dam. Fid. Orth. John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa Dio. Laer. Vit. Diogenes Laertius, Vitae Philosophorum Epiph. Panar. Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion Epist. Diog. Epistula ad Diognetum Eus. Hist. Eccl. Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiastica Eus. Praep. Ev. Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Evangelica Gal. Elem. Galen, De Elementis secundum Hippocratem Gal. In Hipp. Galen, In Hippocratis De Natura Hominis Gal. Libr. Pro. Galen, De Libris Propriis Liber Gal. Loc. Aff. Galen, De Locis Affectis Gal. Nat. Fac. Galen, De Naturalibus Facultatibus Gal. Plac. Galen, De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis Gal. Usu Part. Galen, De Usu Partium Greg. Naz. Carm. Nem. Gregory of Nazianzus, Carmen ad Nemesium

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182  Titles of Ancient Works Greg. Naz. Epist. Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistolae Greg. Naz. Orat. Gregory of Nazianzus, Orationes Greg. Nyss. In Eccl. Gregory of Nyssa, In Ecclesiasten Homiliae Greg. Nyss. Hom. Op. Gregory of Nyssa, De Hominis Opificio Herm. Irris. Hermias the Philosopher, Irrisio Gentilium Philosophorum Hipp. Flat. Pseudo-­Hippocrates, De Flatibus Hipp. Nat. Hom. Hippocrates(?), De Natura Hominis Hipp. Somn. Hippocrates(?), De Somniis Iamb. Vit. Pyth. Iamblichus of Calchis, De Vita Pythagorica Just. Apol. I Justin Martyr, Apologia Prima Just. Mon. Pseudo-­Justin Martyr, De Monarchia Justin. Inst. Justinian I, Institutiones Juv. Sat. Juvenal, Satirae Lact. Epit. Firmianus Lactantius, Epitome Divinarum Institutionum Livy Hist. Livy, Historiarum ab Urbe Condita Lucr. Rer. Nat. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura LXX Septuaginta Lys. Erat. Lysias, Contra Eratosthenem Lys. Phil. Lysias, Contra Philonem Max. Amb. Ioh. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua ad Iohannem Nem. Nat. Hom. Nemesius of Emesa, De Natura Hominis Orig. Cels. Origen of Caesarea, Contra Celsum Orig. In Gen. Origen of Caesarea, Homiliae in Genesim Petr. Satyr. Petronius, Satyricon Philo Op. Mund. Philo, De Opificio Mundi Pl. Ep. Plato(?), Epistulae Pl. Gorg. Plato, Gorgias Pl. Leg. Plato, Leges Pl. Ph. Plato, Phaedo Pl. Phaed. Plato, Phaedrus Pl. Pol. Plato, Politicus Pl. Resp. Plato, Respublica Pl. Tim. Plato, Timaeus Plin. Hist. Nat. Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis Plot. Enn. Plotinus, Enneades Plut. Fat. Pseudo-­Plutarch, De Fato Por. Is. Porphyry of Tyre, Isagoge Pos. Frag. Posidonius of Apamea, Fragmenta Sen. Clem. Seneca, De Clementia Sen. Epist. Seneca, Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium Sext. Adv. Phys. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Physicos Tat. Orat. Tatian of Adiabene, Oratio ad Graecos Them. Epist. Themistius, Epistula De Re Publica Gerenda Theoph. Autol. Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum Vind. Nat. Gen. Vindicianus(?), De Natura Generis Humani

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Bibliography Consulted Editions of Nemesius of Emesa’s De Natura Hominis Alfanus, N. Nemesii episcopi Premnon Physicon sive ΠΕΡΙ ΦΥΣΕΩΣ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΥ liber, a N. Alfano archiepiscopo Salerni in Latinum translatus. Ed. C. Burkhard. Leipzig, 1917 Ellebodius, N. ΝΕΜΕΣΙΟΥ ΕΠΙΣΚΟΠΟΥ ΚΑΙ ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΟΥ ΠΕΡΙ ΦΥΣΕΩΣ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΥ, ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ ΕΝ. Nemesii episcopi et philosophi De natura hominis, Lib. unus . . . Antwerp (Antuerpiae), 1565 Matthaei, C.  F. Nemesius Emesenus. De natura hominis Graece et Latine. Post editionem Antuerpiensem et Oxoniensem, adhibitis Tribus codd. Augustanis . . . Halle an der Saale (Halae Magdeburgicae), 1802 (Facsimile edition Hildesheim, 1967) Morani, M. Nemesii Emeseni, De natura hominis. Leipzig, 1987 Sharples, R., and P. van der Eijk. Nemesius, On the Nature of Man. Liverpool, 2008 Telfer, W. Cyril of Jerusalem and Nemesius of Emesa. London, 1955 Verbeke, G., and J.  R.  Moncho. Némésius d’Émèse, De natura hominis. Traduction de Burgundio de Pise. Leiden, 1975 Wither, G. The Nature of Man: A learned and uſefull Tract, written in Greek by Nemeſius, ſurnamed the Philoſopher; ſometime Biſhop of a City in Phœnicia, and one of the moſt ancient Fathers of the Church . . . London, 1636

Ancient Works Alex. Fat. Alexander of Aphrodisias on Fate. Ed. I. Bruns. Trans. and comm. R. Sharples. London, 1983 Arist. Eth. Nic. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Greek with trans. H.  Rackham. Cambridge, Mass., 1934 Arist. Hist. Anim. Aristotle. Historia Animalium. Greek with trans. A. L. Peck. Cambridge, Mass., 1965 (3 vols) Arist. Part. Anim. Aristotle. Parts of Animals. Movement of Animals. Progression of Animals. Greek with trans. A. L. Peck and E. S. Forster. Cambridge, Mass., 1961 Arist. Polit. Aristotle. Politics. Greek with trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, Mass., 1944 Arist. Post. Aristotle. Posterior Analytics. Topica. Greek with trans. H.  Tredennick and E. S. Forster. London, 1966 Aug. An. Orig. Augustine of Hippo. De Anima et eius Origine libri IV. (Patrologia Latina 44.) Ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1865 Aug. Civ. Augustine of Hippo. The City of God against the Pagans. Latin with trans. G. E. McCracken. Cambridge, Mass., 1957 (7 vols) Aug. Conf. Augustine of Hippo. (i) Confessions. Ed. with comm. J. J. O’Donnell. Oxford, 1992 (3 vols) (ii) The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Trans. F. J. Sheed. London, 1943 Aug. Enarr. Augustine of Hippo. (i) Enarrationes in Psalmos. (Patrologia Latina 36.) Ed.  J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1861

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184 Bibliography (ii) Enarrationes in Psalmos, I–L. Ed. D. E. Dekkers and J. Fraipont. Turnhout, 1956 (iii) Expositions on the Book of Psalms. Trans. A. C. Coxe. Ed. P. Schaff. New York, 1888 Aug. Epist. Augustine of Hippo. (i) Epistola. (Patrologia Latina 33.) Ed. J.-P.  Migne. Paris, 1902 (ii) Epistulae CI–CXXXIX. Ed. K. D. Daur. Turnhout, 2009 Aug. Mag. Augustine of Hippo. De Magistro liber unus. (Patrologia Latina 32.) Ed. ­J.-P. Migne. Paris 1877 Aug. Serm. Augustine of Hippo. Sancti Aurelii Augustini Sermones in Epistolas Apostolicas II. Ed. S. Boodts, F. Dolbeau, G. Partoens, et al. Turnhout, 2016 Bard. Leg. Reg. Bardaisan of Edessa. The Book of the Laws of Countries. Dialogue on Fate of Bardaisan of Edessa. Syriac with trans. H. J. W. Drijvers. Assen, 1965 Bas. Hex. Basil of Caesarea. Homélies sur l’Hexaéméron. Ed. with French trans. S.  Giet. Paris, 1968 Bry. Oecon. S. Swain. Economy, Family, and Society from Rome to Islam: A Critical Edition, English Translation, and Study of Bryson’s Management of the Estate. Cambridge, 2013 Cal. Plat. Tim. Calcidius. On Plato’s Timaeus. Latin with trans. J.  Magee. Cambridge, Mass., 2016 Cic. Acad. Cicero. De Natura Deorum. Academica. Latin with trans. H.  Rackham. Cambridge, Mass., 1951 Cic. Fat. Cicero. De Oratore Book III. De Fato. Paradoxa Stoicorum. De Partitione Oratoria. Latin with trans. H. Rackham. Cambridge, Mass., 1942 Cic. Fin. Cicero. De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum. Latin with trans. H.  Rackham. Cambridge, Mass., 1931 Cic. Inv. Cicero. De Inventione. De Optimo Genere Oratorum. Topica. Latin with trans. H. M. Hubbell. Cambridge, Mass., 1931 Cic. Leg. Cicero. De Re Publica. De Legibus. Latin with trans. C.  W.  Keyes. Cambridge, Mass., 1928 Cic. Orat. Cicero. Brutus. Orator. Latin with trans. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell. London, 1962 Clem. Prot. Clement of Alexandria. The Exhortation to the Greeks. The Rich Man’s Salvation. To the Newly Baptized. Greek with trans. G. W. Butterworth. Cambridge, Mass., 1919 Clem. Strom. Clement of Alexandria. Les Stromates. Greek with French trans. M. Caster. Paris, 1951–1954 (2 vols) Dam. Fid. Orth. John of Damascus. La foi orthodoxe 1–44. Ed. with French trans. B. Kotter and P. Ledrux, with V. Kontouma-Conticello and G.-M. de Durand. Paris, 2010 Dio. Laer. Vit. Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Greek with trans. R. D. Hicks. Cambridge, Mass., 1925 Epiph. Panar. Epiphanius of Salamis. The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis. Books II and III (Sects 47–80, De Fide). Trans. F. Williams. Leiden, 1994 Epist. Diog. ‘Epistle to Diognetus.’ The Apostolic Fathers, Volume II. Greek with trans. B. D. Ehrman. Cambridge, Mass., 2003 Eus. Hist. Eccl. Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History. Greek with trans. K. Lake, H. J. Lawlor, and J. E. L. Oulton. Cambridge, Mass., 1932 (2 vols) Eus. Praep. Ev. Eusebius of Caesarea. Evangelicae Praeparationis libri XV. Ed. E. H. Gifford. Oxford, 1903 (4 vols) Gal. Elem. Galen. On the Elements According to Hippocrates. De Elementis ex Hippocratis Sententia. Greek with trans. and comm. P. De Lacy. Berlin, 1996 Gal. In Hipp. Galen. In Hippocratis De natura hominis commentaria tria. Ed. J. Mewaldt. Leipzig—Berlin, 1914 Gal. Libr. Pro. Galien, tome I. Greek with French trans. V. Boudon-Millot. Paris, 2007

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Bibliography  199 Van Riet, S. ‘Stoicorum veterum fragmenta arabica. A propos de Némésius d’Émèse.’ Mélanges d’islamologie. Volume dédié à la mémoire de Armand Abel par ses collègues, ses élèves et ses amis. Ed. P. Salmon. Leiden, 1974 Van Straaten, M. ‘Panaetius fragm. 86.’ Mnemosyne (4th ser.) 9.3 (1956), 232–4 Vázquez Buján, M. ‘Vindiciano y el tratado De natura generis humani.’ Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandum 2 (1982), 25–56 Verbeke, G. ‘Aristotélisme et Stoïcisme dans le De fato d’Alexandre d’Aphrodisias.’ Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 50.1 (1968), 73–100 Verbeke, G. Filosofie en Christendom in Het Mensbeeld van Nemesius van Emesa. Brussels, 1971 Verbeke, G. ‘Man as “Frontier” according to Aquinas.’ Aquinas and the Problems of His Time. Ed. G. Verbeke and D. Verhelst. Leuven—The Hague, 1976 Verbeke, G. ‘La dignité de l’homme dans le traité De hominis opificio de Grégoire de Nysse.’ Annales de Philosophie 27.1 (1979), 139–55 Verbeke, G. ‘Foi et culture chez Némésius d’Émèse.’ Paradoxos politeia. Studi patristici in onore di Giuseppe Lazzati. Ed. R. Cantalamessa and L. G. Pizzolato. Milan, 1980 Verbeke, G., and J. R. Moncho. ‘L’Anthropologie de Némésius.’ Némésius d’Émèse, De natura hominis. Traduction de Burgundio de Pise. Ed. G.  Verbeke and J.  R.  Moncho. Leiden, 1975 Vladimirskij, F. Antropologija i kosmologija Nemesija, episkopa Emesskago, v ich otnošenij k drevnej filosofi i patrističeskoj literature. Žitomir, 1912 Vogt, K.  M. Law, Reason, and the Cosmic City: Political Philosophy in the Early Stoa. Oxford, 2008 Von Arnim, H., ed. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta. Volumen I. Zeno et Zenonis Discipuli. Stuttgart, 1964 Von Arnim, H., ed. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta. Volumen II. Chrysippi Fragmenta, Logica et Physica. Stuttgart, 1964 Wallraff, M. ‘The Beginnings of Christian Universal History: From Tatian to Julius Africanus.’ Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 14 (2011), 540–55 Ward-Perkins, B. ‘A Most Unusual Empire: Rome in the Fourth Century.’ The City in the Classical and Post-Classical World: Changing Contexts of Power and Identity. Ed. C. Rapp and H. A. Drake. Cambridge, 2014 Watt, J. W. ‘Syriac and Syrians as Mediators of Greek Political Thought to Islam.’ The Greek Strand in Islamic Political Thought: Proceedings of the Conference held at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, 16–27 June 2003. Ed. E.  Gannagé, P.  Crone, et al. Beirut, 2004 Watt, J. W. Rhetoric and Philosophy from Greek into Syriac. Aldershot, 2010 Watt, J. W. ‘The Syriac Aristotle between Alexandria and Baghdad.’ Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 7 (2013), 26–50 Way, A.  C. ‘Gregorius Nazienzenus.’ Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries. Volume II. Ed. P. O. Kristeller and F. E. Cranz. Washington, D.C., 1971 Wessel, S. ‘The Reception of Greek Science in Gregory of Nyssa’s De Opificio Hominis.’ Vigiliae Christianae 63 (2009), 24–46 Wessel, S. ‘Human Action and the Passions in Nemesius of Emesa.’ Studia Patristica 47 (2010), 3–14 Whealey, A. ‘ “To Tatian on the Soul”: A Treatise from the Circle of Tatian the Syrian and Justin Martyr?’ Recherches de Théologie Ancienne et Médiévale 63 (1996), 136–45

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abammon (Egyptian priest)  155 Acts of the Apostles  7, 11 Africa (Roman province)  2–4 Albert the Great  xv–xvi Alexander of Aphrodisias  14–15 Alexander of Hales  xv–xvi Alexandria  10, 118 Amand, David  xv, 17, 26, 127–9, 134–5, 146–7, 177 Ammonius Saccas  13, 93 Anaxagoras of Clazomenae  xx, 13 anger  121–2, 126 animal ‘cities’  xviii–xx, 33, 162–4 Antioch 8–9 Antiochene exegesis  9 apes 172–3 Apollinaris of Laodicea  10, 36–7, 66, 96 Apollo  146, 148 Arabic translation of Nemesius (circa 880)  6, 17–18 Arian controversy  10 Aristobulus 118–19 Aristotelian philosophy  xxi–xxii, 14–15, 96, 109, 111 Aristotle  xxii–xxiii, 13–15, 17–18, 27–8, 35–7, 39, 42–3, 49, 62, 66–7, 74, 80–2, 96, 106–8, 112, 114, 134–7, 141–2, 144–5, 173–4 Aristotle’s Categories 173 Aristotle’s History of Animals  14–15, 80–2 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics  xxii–xxiii, 13, 27–8, 49, 134–44, 147–9 Aristotle’s On the Parts of Animals 82 Aristotle’s Politics  39, 42–3 Aristotle’s Topics 17–18 Armenian translation of Nemesius (circa 720)  xxi, 6 Asclepiades of Bithynia  83 Augustine of Hippo  xxiii, 1–4, 24, 72–3, 139, 156, 168 Babylon  10–11, 49–50 Baghdad  xv–xvi, 17–18 ‘barbarians’  xvii, xxi, 118, 120 Basil of Caesarea  xvii-xix, 21–2, 128–9, 164

Bathsheba 10–11 Baynes, Norman Hepburn  26 Beatus Rhenanus  xvi bees 163–4 Bender, Dietrich  5, 24–5 bile  xxiii, 96–7 Billy, Jacques de  22 birth  xix, xxiii–xxiv, 1–2, 34, 50, 56–7, 61–2, 89, 95, 131, 166, 171, 174 ‘necessities of our birth’ (Basil)  128–9 Blanqui, Louis-Auguste  151 blood, circulation of  19–20 bowels  97, 124–5, 158 Boys-Stones, George  157–8 brain, as ‘hegemonic part’ of the body  123, 126, 160–1 brain, structure of  20–1, 73–4, 113–16, 165 breath  20, 39–40, 72–3, 95, 109, 124 Bryson’s Management of the Estate 46 Burgundio of Pisa  49, 55, 70–1, 123, 135–6, 160–1, 175 Caesarea Mazaca  xxiii–xxiv Cain 60 Calcidius  31, 71 Cappadocia Secunda (Roman province)  21–5, 138 Caracalla 8 Carneades of Cyrene  127–9, 131, 136, 141–2, 147, 177 ‘Cartesian automaton’ (Fell)  xvi, 19 Chase, Michael  5–6, 10, 24–5 children  xx, xxiii Christ (see Jesus of Nazareth)  10–11, 15, 77, 79, 93, 151–2, 163–4 Chrysippus of Soli  14, 32 Cicero  32, 42–3, 110, 127–8, 135–7 Circe 49–50 Cleanthes of Assos  14, 95 Clement of Alexandria  xxii, 77, 118, 140 clothing 61–4 cognitive localization. See brain, structure of Colossians 77 Cono Norimontanus, Johannes  6

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202 Index Constantinian revolution  xvii, 9, 163–4 Constantinople  14–15, 148–9 contemplation  70, 73–4, 121–2, 131, 173 corals  41, 45–6 I Corinthians  50, 76, 169 II Corinthians  11, 77 ‘cosmic elements’ (see elements)  7, 45, 75–80, 101 Cretans  xxi, 146 Crete 148 Critias 95 Cronius  15, 87–8, 172 Cross (see Jesus of Nazareth)  xxii, 10–11, 168, 178 crows 41 Cyprian of Carthage  163–4 Cyrene bar Mansur (see John of Damascus)  175 Damascus  9, 175 Dante’s Inferno 106 date trees  172 David 10–11 death  xix, 1–2, 38–9, 55–9, 63–5, 72–3, 84–90, 165–9 Debru, Armelle  100 deer 171 Democritus  16–17, 95 Descartes, René  xviii desire  xxiii, 34, 37, 42, 45, 69, 74–5, 90–2, 98, 105–6, 120–3, 126, 128, 150, 153, 160–1 Dicaearchus of Messene  95–6 digestion  125–6, 159–60 Dinarchus 95–6 Diogenes Laertius  31–4, 150 divination  73–4, 115–20 ‘divine oracles’  10–11, 16, 33, 76, 86, 149 Domanski, Boleslaw  100, 110, 127–8, 134 dreams  xxiii, 72–4, 115–20, 123–4 Duns Scotus  175 Dvornik, Francis  163 ears 172–3 Egypt  11, 155 Egyptians  xxi, 155 Elagabal 8 Elagabalus (or Varius Avitus Bassianus)  8–9, 13 elements (see ‘cosmic elements’)  30, 44–5, 47, 52–4, 64 Eliasson, Erik  135 Elijah 10–11 Ellebodius, Nicasius  6, 18, 21–2 Emesa (modern Homs)  xxiii–xxiv, 8–10, 13, 21 Emesenes 8

Empedocles  33, 44 Enoch 10–11 Ephrem the Syrian  49–50 Epicurean philosophy  14, 85 Epicurus  14, 16–17, 77, 83 Epistle to Diognetus xvii Ethiopians xxi ethnicity  xvii, xx–xxi, xxiii Eunomius of Cyzicus  10, 96 Euripides 13 Eusebius of Caesarea  9, 21, 118 Eusebius of Emesa  9, 24 Eutychians 10 eyes 77–8 Fabricius, Johann  5–6, 19–20, 22, 24 face  xx, 133 fate (see providence)  xix, 14, 30, 33–4, 85–6, 127–34, 141, 145–55, 157–8, 166, 168 fear  13, 106, 121–2 Fell, John  xvi, 19–20, 22–3 Ficino, Marsilio  155 fig trees  172 ‘First God’  xix, 157–8 Fleet Street  xv–xvi, 18 Foucault, Michel  xx, 35 Galatians 77 Galen of Pergamum  12–14, 29–30, 38, 52–4, 64, 73, 76–8, 81–4, 89–91, 96–8, 110, 113–14, 124, 161, 165, 172 Galenic medical philosophy  xvi, 12, 30, 38, 78, 100, 120–1 Galen’s Elements according to Hippocrates 52 Galen’s On My Own Books 81 Galen’s On the Affected Parts 113–14 Galen’s On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato 53 Galen’s On the Natural Faculties 82–3 Galen’s On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body  82, 87, 89–90, 126 Genesis  9, 44–5, 50–6, 58–63, 65, 76, 118, 176 Georgian translation of Nemesius (circa 1130)  6 Gernet, Louis  61–2 goats 172 God, nature of  xix, 15–16, 86, 169, 171 ‘God the Word’  10–11, 93 Gratian (Roman emperor)  21–2 Gregory of Nazianzus  21–4, 135 Gregory of Nyssa  xvii–xix, xxii, 5–6, 44–5, 67, 70, 72–3, 124 habit  xxiii, 64, 121 Harvey, William  19–20

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Index  203 heart  19–20, 96–7, 110–11, 120–3, 160–1 never ceases to move (Vindicianus)  4 ‘Hebrews’ (see Judaeans)  16, 56–9, 65–6, 115–20 Hellenes (or pagans)  xxiii, 16–17, 34, 65–6, 84–90, 117–18, 120, 149, 152, 177 Helvius Vindicianus  2–4, 24 Henze, Matthias  49–50 Heraclides of Pontus  117 Heraclitus  13, 66, 95 heredity  xx, 95 Hippocrates of Cos  12–13, 29–30, 82–3, 96 Hippocratic–Galenic medical philosophy  xxiii, 12–13, 52, 64, 75–6, 78, 96–8, 100–1, 121–2, 126 Hippocratic On Breaths 73 Hippocratic On Human Nature  3–5, 12–13, 29–31, 52, 64, 76, 101, 126 Hippo Regius  xxiii–xxiv housing  61, 63–4 ‘holy man’  11 humankind  xviii–xxiv, 67–71, 171–4 ‘child of God’  34 ‘political animal’  28, 34, 39, 46, 62, 130, 173–4 ‘rational mortal animal’  1–2, 66, 173–4 humours  30, 80, 95, 98–9, 113 Iamblichus of Chalcis  13, 15, 28–30, 71, 87–8, 155, 172 Iamblichus’ On the Mysteries 155 Ibycus 16 imagination  53–4, 76, 102–3, 106, 111–13, 115–16, 169 ‘incarnation of God’  10–11, 93 infants xxiii ‘intellectual natures’  37, 41, 45–6 ‘intellectual soul’  29–30, 36–8, 68–9, 81, 104 intestines. See bowels Jaeger, Werner  xvi, 25–6, 34, 41–2, 56–7, 100, 110–11 Jesus of Nazareth (see Christ, and Cross, and Son of Man)  7, 11, 138, 174, 178 Job 77 John Chrysostom  127 John of Damascus (or Cyrene bar Mansur)  55, 106, 175–8 Jouanna, Jacques  12 Judaeans (see Hebrews)  xix, xxi, 10–11, 16, 18, 59, 65, 118–20 Julia Domna  8 Justinian’s Institutes xxiv Justin Martyr  118, 127

Kant, Immanuel  35, 74, 146 kidneys 96–7 La Bigne, Marguerin de  22 Lacedaemonians 146 Lactantius 163–4 Lamech 60 laughter  59, 172–3 Lazarus 77 Lefèvre d’Etaples, Jacques  xvi Le Nain de Tillemont, Louis-Sébastien  23–5 Libanius of Antioch  21–2 ‘little world’ (mikros kosmos)  3, 48, 67–8, 70, 100 liver  96–7, 120–3, 125, 158–61 ‘Lord and Maker’  xviii–xix, 155 Lucretius 1 LXX. See Septuagint Lysias  55, 140 magnetite  41, 47 Magnus of Emesa  21 Magnus of Nisibis  21 al-Mahdi (Abbasid caliph)  17–18 Manichaeans  4, 10 Mark 7 Markus, R. A.  42–3 martyrdom  9, 167 März, Friedrich Martin  127–8 Matthaei, Christian  77 Matthew 138 Maximin Daza  9 medicine  3, 21, 29, 64, 82–3, 164 memory  20, 106, 113, 115–16 men (see women)  36–7, 41, 105–6, 155 Menander  11, 13 microcosm. See ‘little world’ Migne, J.-P.  6 Millar, Fergus  8 ‘mixture’ (krasis)  xxiii, 34, 45, 64, 75, 78–80, 93, 95–9, 121, 159–60, 175–6 Morani, Moreno  36–7, 41, 47–8, 52, 74, 77, 95, 100–2 Moses  xviii–xix, 18, 44–5, 117–19 Moses bar Kepha (Jacobite bishop)  17–18 Mosul 17–18 Motta, Beatrice  6–7, 26 murder  10–11, 16–17, 60, 128–9, 143–4, 165–8 navigation  21, 164 Nebuchadnezzar 49–50 Neoplatonic philosophy (see Platonic philosophy)  13, 27, 44, 60, 73–4, 79, 93 Nero 163–4 nerves  113, 123

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204 Index Nestorians  10, 18 New Academy (see Old Academy)  127–8 Nietzsche, Friedrich  11, 151 Noachide Laws  60 Noah 60 Numenius of Apamea  117–18 Nutton, Vivian  12, 64

Pseudo-Galen’s Medical Definitions  66, 173 Pseudo-Justin’s On Monarchy xxiv Ptolemy VI (Egyptian king)  118 pumice stone  143 Pythagoras  33–4, 44, 96, 117–19 Pythagoras Palaestinus 119 Pythagoreans  15, 87, 95–6, 115–20

Old Academy (see New Academy)  127–8 ‘oracles of Christ’  11, 151–2 Origen of Caesarea  10, 65–6, 163–4 ‘Origenism’ 10 Orontes River  8

Quellenforschung  xvi, xxiv questions, three types of  156

pagans (see Hellenes)  4, 9, 16, 21, 49–50, 95, 132, 173 Panaetius of Rhodes  106–7 Paul of Tarsus  11, 77, 138–9, 169 Pelagian controversy  10 Pelagius 10 Persians xxi Philo of Alexandria  56–9, 65–6 Philopator 14–15 Plantin, Christophe  21–4 ‘plant from heaven’  71 plants  31–4, 44–5, 47, 58–9, 82–3, 125–6, 159–60, 171 Plato  xix, 33–4, 37–9, 44, 55, 62, 82–3, 86–8, 90–1, 110–13, 117–18, 124, 127–8, 136, 151–3, 157–8, 171–2 Platonic ideas  171–2 Platonic philosophy  xvii–xix, 14–15, 30, 34, 36–9, 42–4, 69, 71, 85–8, 90–1, 97–8, 110–13, 120–2, 127–9, 140, 149, 152–5, 157–8, 165, 171–2 Plato’s Phaedo  13, 38–9, 95–8 Plato’s Politicus  152–4, 164 Plato’s Republic 62 Plato’s Timaeus  xvii–xviii, 70–1, 85–6, 98–9, 110–11, 113, 115, 126, 149, 152–4, 157–8 pleasure  14, 67, 121–2, 142, 152 Plotinus  13, 15, 27, 36–7, 79, 93 ‘political animal’. See humankind Polybus of Cos  12–13, 29 Porphyry of Tyre  1–2, 15, 93, 173–4 Posidonius of Apamea  61–4, 110–11, 161 ‘potential intellect’  36 Proclus 127 prophecy 119–20 prostitution  138, 145–6 providence (see fate)  xix–xx, 16–17, 33, 121, 130–3, 141, 149, 152–69, 173–4, 178 Psalms  50, 63, 73, 76

race xx–xxi ‘difference of colour’  xx Ramelli, Ilaria  42–3 ‘rational mortal animal’. See humankind reincarnation  30, 66, 83–91, 102, 171–2 repentance  85, 152, 172–4 resurrection  11, 30, 151–2, 168–9, 172–3 Robert Grosseteste  175 Roger Bacon  175 Romans 138–9 Rome  2–3, 8, 10, 61, 138, 148–9 Runia, David  14–15, 17 scripture. See ‘divine oracles’ and ‘oracles of Christ’ Seneca  61–4, 137, 163–4 sensation  20, 31–4, 44–5, 69, 76, 100–1, 106, 110–16 Septimus Severus  8 Septuagint (or LXX)  50, 54, 119 Severan dynasty  8 Sextus Empiricus  33–4, 44 Sheldonian Theatre (Oxford)  xv, 19 Siclari, Alberto  100, 127–8 Silvanus of Emesa  9, 167 Simmias of Thebes  95–8 Skard, Eiliv  56–7, 65, 76, 78 slavery  xxi–xxii, 39, 150 sleep  72–4, 94, 115–20, 123–4 Socrates  9, 38–9, 62, 95–7, 151, 167 Solomon 10–11 ‘Son of Man’ (or ‘Son of Humankind’)  168 Sparta 148 spirit  34, 42, 45, 68–9, 100–1, 108, 121–3, 160–1 ‘spirits’ (daimonas) 157–8 stars (see fate and providence)  70, 124–5, 128–9, 131–2, 151, 155, 177 ‘stochastic arts’  21, 164 Stoic philosophy  xvii–xviii, 11, 14, 28–34, 40, 42–3, 46–7, 95, 106–7, 110, 148–52, 155 Streck, Martin  6, 129

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Index  205 Susannah  10–11, 16 Swain, Simon  6, 46 swine 171–2 Syria Phoenice (Roman province)  1–2, 7, 10, 22, 24 Syriac translation of Nemesius (circa 820)  6 Tatian of Adiabene  118 Telfer, William  25, 79 Thales  13, 66 Themistius  14–15, 46, 61–2, 64 Themistius’ Letter on Government  46, 61–2 Theodorus of Asine  15, 87–8 Theodosius I (Roman emperor)  14–15, 21–2 Theodotus 21 Theophilus of Antioch  57–9 ‘theoretical philosophy’  15–16 Thomas Aquinas  xv–xvi Thucydides 13 Timothy I (Nestorian patriarch)  18 Trier 2–3 Tubal 60

Uexküll, Jakob von  xviii Valentinian I (Roman emperor)  2–4 Valla, Georgius  6, 18 Varro xxiii Vincentius Victor  2 Vogt, Katja Maria  31, 148–9 water-clocks 124 Wessel, Susan  100 Wicher, Helen  19 William of Conches  xv–xvi Wither, George  18, 22–3, 160–1 women (see men)  xxi–xxii, 105–6 Xenocrates 96 Zeegers-Vander Vorst, Nicole  59 Zeno of Citium  28–34, 106–7, 150 Zeno’s On Human Nature 28–33 Zeus  31–2, 146, 148 ‘zoophytes’ 41