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Stoic philosophers in antiquity held that ‘the world is like a city and a polity’, and that human nature is like ‘a code of civil law’ (Cicero, De Finibus III). In his late-antique treatise On Human Nature, Nemesius rejects a variety of Stoic tenets. His world city is certainly not theirs. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that the Syrian philosopher-bishop held—with the Stoics—that humans are, by birth, world-citizens who are in communion with the whole of creation, and indeed, with the Demiurge. It is the ancient idea of a ‘world city’, it is claimed here, which gives structural and conceptual unity to On Human Nature—a unity which many of Nemesius’ interpreters have failed to discern.

Like other early Christian writers, Nemesius condemns any theory which denies that humans are by nature free. Though he believes that the human body is an instrument, he passionately rejects the idea that ‘humankind is a mere instrument’. He cannot tolerate any reduction of humans to the status of a tool, whether by ‘pagans’ (in theories of fate), or by Christians (in theories of providence). In this chapter, we reconstruct Nemesius’ theories of human freedom and divine providence. The bishop believes that human laws—and, hence, crime and punishment—are inconceivable in the absence of human choice. Since all cities have laws, he reasons, humans must have a natural power of choice. From this cosmopolitan line of reasoning (which has roots in Greek antiquity), Nemesius derives a subtle theory of divine world-governance in the final pages of his (unfinished) treatise.

In this chapter, we begin to reconstruct Nemesius’ anthropology, beginning with On Human Nature 1. And what we are meant to take from Nemesius’ prologue is something he calls a ‘familiar’ idea: that the world is a divine polity. The Platonic commentator Calcidius seems to have been a rough contemporary of Nemesius’ (and may have been a Syrian). In the first pages of his monumental Timaeus commentary, Calcidius refers to the ‘city or republic of this sensible world’. Nemesius never uses such precise terminology, but there is much to suggest that he structures his treatise with an eye to this archaic, yet philosophically sophisticated world-picture. It is in his prologue, too, that Nemesius sketches his theory of human origins—featuring a bold interpretation of the Fall which seems to turn upon his use of Galen’s medical vocabulary.

In this chapter, on Human Nature 2–5, Nemesius denies that the soul is a body, a harmony, a mixture, or a quality. His cosmopolitan anthropology rests on the conviction that the human soul is an incorporeal and immortal substance. Yet this creates two acute problems for the bishop. First, how is an incorporeal soul united to a body? And second, is it possible for an immortal soul to be united to a non-human body? In settling the first question, Nemesius draws on both Plato and Galen. ‘The body is an instrument of the soul’, he writes. This is a concept which underlies his physiology and psychology. In his handling of the second question, though, Nemesius uses Galen’s medical philosophy to refute Platonic theories of reincarnation. This is a far-reaching decision: it means that Nemesius’ idea of human nature, as such—as an idea—diverges from much of the Platonic tradition in late antiquity.

This chapter argues that the physiological and psychological chapters of Nemesius’ treatise are not random memoranda on the human organism or disjecta membra taken from a range of late-antique sources. On the contrary, it is claimed here that Human Nature 6‒28, where the medical anthropology of the Platonic–Galenic tradition comes to the fore, mark a decisive phase in Nemesius’ argument. The human is defined by the bishop as the only living being which is at once ruler (intellect) and ruled (body). In Human Nature 6‒28, this image of humankind is given an anatomical proof. Nemesius describes the parts of the human body as organs of the soul by means of which—by a divine logic which is obscured, but not negated by injury and pathology—the soul’s government of the body is realized.