Nemesius

• One of the successors of Eusebius in the see of Emesa. Beyond this fact nothing is known of his life.
• Nevertheless,he remains an interesting personalityon account of

the treatise On the Nature of Man which he wrote during the last decade of the 4th century.

• He emerges from this work as a man of liberal Greek education, widely read in philosophy and medicine, and with a good deal of knowledge of psychology and physiology.
• Valuable as a quarry to the classical philologist and historian of philosophy, it yields less to the theologian, though it is essentially a piece of Christian apologetic.

• On the Nature of Man: The author attempts to construct on a mainly Platonic basis, a doctrine of the soul and its union with the

body which would be in agreement with revelation. Thus he deals in the introduction (ch.1) with the nature of man, who consists of soul and body. He was created to be the link between two worlds, the phenomenal and the intelligible. The world was made for man and lower creatures exist for his sake. The first chapter ends with a panegyric on man.