A Temple of Kingdom and Clay: The Reception of Nemesios of Emesa’s On the Nature of Man and the Making of Theological Anthropology in the Christian East

Abstract

This dissertation examines the reception and transformation of On the Nature of Man (ONM), a fourth-century CE Greek treatise attributed to Nemesios of Emesa, as it moved across Greek, Armenian, Syriac, and Arabic traditions between the seventh and tenth centuries. Nemesios sought to represent the human being—with her intricate, interconnected system of organs, her spiritual virtues and vulnerabilities, and her absolute free will—as “the house and temple of God.” Bridging classical philosophy and scriptural exegesis, ONM stands as one of the foundational works of Christian theological anthropology. Yet the work’s lasting significance was forged as much through its later adaptation and interpretation as through its initial composition. In the centuries following Nemesios’s death, amid the Christian East’s response to new political and theological conditions shaped by the rise of Islam, ONM circulated not as a static relic but as a generative source, animating a wide range of authors who brought it to bear on their own culturally inflected and intellectually varied efforts to reckon with the nature and purpose of human life. Each of this dissertation’s four body chapters traces how ONM was received and repurposed within a particular cultural-linguistic context. In the Greek tradition, monastic authors drew on its account of the human passions to support a program of ascetic transformation and spiritual illumination. In early medieval Armenia, ONM was selectively deployed to endorse a theological vision that regarded human nature as fully intelligible only in light of Christ’s nature. Syriac authors adapted ONM in divergent ways to support competing theories of the soul; over time, however, the distinctions between these approaches were obscured by scribal conflation and interpolation. In Arabic, ONM took shape along two separate lines of transmission: on the one hand, it circulated in a full Christian translation that softened—but did not fully obscure—its emphasis on the intrinsic intimacy between humanity and divinity; on the other, it was integrated, with significant revision, into an esoteric Islamic work that introduced its core anthropological tenets to a theological vision grounded in divine transcendence and unknowability. Through close engagement with Greek, Armenian, Syriac, and Arabic materials—many of them heretofore untranslated—this project offers the first comparative study of ONM’s reception history across the Christian East. At the same time, that history serves as a vantage point for reconsidering what is signified by the term “theological anthropology” itself: not a fixed body of thought, but a shifting target shaped by historical contingency and the idiosyncratic concerns of those seeking to understand what it means to be human. By tracing the movement of a single text across languages, confessions, and centuries, this project ultimately invites readers to imagine theological anthropology not as a legacy to be preserved, but as a living tradition of interpretive practice.