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φυσις = custom?
Posted: April 24th, 2014, 2:47 am
by timothy_p_mcmahon
I've recently encountered a lot of (undocumented) assertions that φυσις was used in NT-era Greek to mean 'custom' rather than 'nature'.
I had always thought that φυσις denotes what is inherent or natural in contrast to νομος as humanly devised custom.
Does φυσις carry the sense of 'custom'?
Re: φυσις = custom?
Posted: April 24th, 2014, 3:01 am
by Stephen Carlson
The key verse you have to wrestle with is 1 Cor 11:14 οὐδὲ ἡ φύσις αὐτὴ διδάσκει ὑμᾶς ὅτι ἀνὴρ μὲν ἐὰν κομᾷ, ἀτιμία αὐτῷ ἐστιν. Keeping one's hair short is a custom, not "natural" at least in the modern sense of the word.
In fact, probably the biggest difficulty in dealing with this term is not to read in the post-Enlightenment dichotomy between natural and artificial, yet still make sense to all those of us firmly rooted in that post-Enlightenment viewpoint.
Re: φυσις = custom?
Posted: April 24th, 2014, 7:09 am
by cwconrad
I'll just state the obvious here: conceptions about what is "natural" are very much a matter of cultural convention. As for the post-Enlightenment antithesis of "nature" and "convention", that's not so far-removed -- if it doesn't even, at least in part, derive from -- the 5th-century BCE antithesis of νόμος and φύσις.