David Lloyd Dusenbury: The World City: A Reconstruction of Nemesius of Emesa’s De Natura Hominis

This paper will sketch a new and coherent interpretation of Nemesius of Emesa’s conspectus of late-antique anthropology, De Natura Hominis (ca 390). The Stoics held that “the world … is like a city and a polity”. Their Hellenistic ‘world city’ theory likened “human nature” (natura hominis) to “a code of civil law” (Cicero Fin. III 62–67). Now, the bishop of Emesa rejects numerous Stoic tenets. His ‘world city’ is not theirs. Moreover, he criticizes aspects of the Platonic ‘world city’, as set out in the Timaeus. Nevertheless, for Nemesius – as for the Stoics, and late-antique Platonists – the human person is a natural-born world-citizen who is in communion with the whole of creation, and indeed with the Demiurge, since humankind is a “child of God” (θεοῦ τέκνον). Thus, Nemesius opens the Nat. Hom. with an elaborate description of divine creation as οἰκείωσις, and his (unfinished) text closes with a closely argued defence of divine providence as διοίκησις. Nemesius accepts in Nat. Hom. 1 that humankind is “by nature … a political animal”, and his description of human nature is thoroughly political. It is the idea of a ‘world city’ which gives structural and conceptual unity to Nemesius’ Nat. Hom. – a unity which his 19th and 20th-century source-critical interpreters failed to recognize.