In our Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1475 “Metaphors of Religion”, we investigate religious meaning-making in language, and we assume that metaphors have a fundamental share in this process. Two further assumptions guide us as broad principles in our research. Firstly, as a working basis, we borrow from Lakoff (1986) the model according to which in metaphors, meaning is transferred between semantic domains. Secondly, applying this model to religion, which cannot directly articulate its ultimate subject (the transcendent), we operate with the assumption that religion in its meaning-making process draws from its semantic environment (source domain), transferring meaning to its own domain (target domain).
In the conference, our focus is on light as one of the basal metaphors in religious communication pointing to transcendence. A ground-breaking contribution was Hans Blumenberg’s ([1960] 2010) analysis of light as an absolute metaphor that, due to its high degree of abstraction lacks a real reference to metaphors in the material world and cannot be explained through other metaphors. He thus declared it to be unsuitable as a source domain. The conference aims to challenge this assumption and invites contributions to test Blumenberg’s hypothesis.
We aim to approach textual and visual sources from different religious traditions and compare them through the four dimensions: experience, its bodily dimension, organization into knowledge, and translation into action (e.g. through rituals or other means of regulation) as dialectical processes between the mental and the social.
