Nemesius

Nemesius was a late-fourth-century Christian bishop of Emesa (the present-day city of Homs in Syria), in the Roman province of Phoenicia Libanensis, and the author of the anthropological treatise On the Nature of Man (Peri physeos anthropou). Virtually nothing about his life can be established independently of that work. Internal evidence shows that he wrote as bishop of Emesa and that he knew the teaching of Eunomius of Cyzicus (who died in 393) as well as the Christology of Apollinaris of Laodicea; on that basis scholars generally date the treatise to the last decade of the fourth century or the very beginning of the fifth. Emesa itself was an important city of the civil diocese of the East and belonged ecclesiastically to the orbit of the patriarchate of Antioch. No ancient biography, synaxarion notice, or contemporary letter supplies a birth year, a place of origin, a family, or a date or place of death.

On the Nature of Man is a systematic account of the human being that seeks to reconcile Christian doctrine with the philosophical and medical learning of late antiquity. Nemesius treats the soul and its relation to the body, the elements and humours, the senses, imagination, intellect, the passions, free will, fate, and divine providence. He draws extensively on Plato, Aristotle, Stoic ethics, Neoplatonist psychology (especially Porphyry), and the medical writings of Galen, including discussions of the brain, the nerves, and the localization of psychic functions. He defends the soul’s immortality and its creation by God, while also insisting on a real, unconfused union of soul and body against extreme dualisms. Theologically he is Nicene and anti-Apollinarian: he affirms that Christ assumed a complete humanity, including a rational human soul. He argues that human freedom is indispensable to moral responsibility and to the justice of divine judgment, and that providence extends to individuals as well as to the cosmos.

A pagan magistrate named Nemesius appears in letters of Gregory of Nazianzus, who urged him to convert to Christianity. Some modern scholars have proposed that this official is the same man who later became bishop of Emesa, but the identification is not proven and remains a hypothesis. No other works by Nemesius of Emesa survive, although the treatise itself alludes to further discussion of the soul that he hoped to write. He is not known to have belonged to a monastic order, and there is no documentary evidence concerning marriage or children. He does not appear as the object of a liturgical cult in the principal Eastern synaxaria or in the Roman Martyrology, and no feast day is securely attached to his name.

Despite the obscurity of his biography, the treatise circulated widely. It was translated into Latin (notably by Alfanus of Salerno in the eleventh century and by Burgundio of Pisa in the twelfth), and also into Syriac, Armenian, and Arabic. In the Latin Middle Ages it was often transmitted under the name of Gregory of Nyssa. Later Christian writers who used it include Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus in the East and, in the West, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. Through these channels Nemesius became an important intermediary by which Galenic physiology and Neoplatonic psychology entered medieval Christian anthropology. His discussion of the union of soul and body was also of interest to later Christological reflection. Beyond the treatise, however, the historical record is silent: his birth, death, burial, and any local veneration remain unknown.