Consciousness,
Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume
6 Number 2, August 2005
Special
Issue: Literary
Universals
_______________________________________________________________
Cognitive
Semiotics and On-Line Reading of Religious Texts:
A
Hermeneutic Model of Sacred Literature and Everyday Revelation
by
University
of Palermo
Abstract:
In this essay I propose a hermeneutic model of the higher level understanding
during on-line ritual reading by devotees of their respective sacred
literatures, using the instruments provided by cognitive sciences. The way a
devotee reads a sacred text differs from the way he or she would read a common
piece of literature or how a lay person might read the same sacred text. After providing an overview of metaphor, anthropomorphism, and
the “religious brain”, I suggest how devotee-readers might make sense of a
religious text and why it should be so important for their own personal everyday
life. Universals are implicated in this genre of literature and the way it is
interpreted.
Keywords:
religious literature, cognitive linguistics, metaphor, semiotics, limbic system,
attention, memory, higher level thinking, consciousness, empathy, rituals,
anthropomorphism, reading, authority
Almost
everybody has a favorite book or poem. Usually the favorites are the ones that,
when you get to the last page, you wish it were just the beginning, the ones
that make you notice life in a different way. Some people even say their
favorite piece of literature has “changed their life”. Good literature
leaves a sense of satisfaction or gives some sort of insight to life and to
living.
The
type of literature I want to evaluate is different from what we traditionally
expect. For the most part, the readers of these texts consider them
“sacred”: we are dealing with readers who ritually read sacred texts, and
whether revealed through divine means, or supernaturally inspired, there is a
difference between reading this sort of literature and reading Shakespeare or
Dante for this category of readers. Not only is the text read, but it is
sometimes carefully read aloud, chanted, memorized, recited in its entirety to
acquire a deeper meaning, or “chewed and swallowed” bit by bit (Christian lectio/ruminatio).
Even the paper it is written on and the ink of the text are to be considered
holy. The readers approach the reading of these texts with solemn behavior (even
by means of ablutions prior to reading), knowing that it has a teaching that
neither any other book nor any other teacher may impart, expecting it to
actually “change their lives.” For this reason its interpretation is of
vital importance, often considered a matter of (eternal?) life and death –
especially for those who misinterpret it.
It
seems reasonable to deduce that the readers of these sacred literatures, those
people that consider them “authentically sacred,” not only behaviorally
approach the writings in a different manner, but also universally apply a
cognitive process of semantic interpretation which differs from the pleasurable
reading of a “worldly” novel. This type of reading is laden with emotional
response from the devotee-reader. After having given an overview of the
fundamental relationship between certain religious literatures and the readers
of the religious systems that consider them sacred, I will take a look at
conceptual integration (explicated in Fauconnier & Turner’s “Blending
Theory”) and how it is used during the devotees’ on-line interpretation of
the text.
Metaphors and
Our Everyday World: A Cognitive Linguistics’ Perspective
Traditionally
metaphor has been considered a linguistic device used to make literature more
ornate. Aristotle wrote, “Metaphor is the application to one thing of the name
belonging to another” (Poet. 21, 1457b). This would be to compare (anàlogon)
Achilles and lion, and the reader is left to search out the common qualities:
Achilles is a lion among men such as lion is a warrior among beasts, and both
are strong and brave. The trope is simply a decorative and ornamental
phenomenon, linking aesthetic pleasure and communication, easily substituted
with a literal paraphrase like “Achilles is strong and brave.” Thus
Shakespeare - many literary critics would say - dared to compare his beloved to
a summer’s day and through metaphors we understand how lovely and temperate
she really was. From Aristotle to our days, metaphor has been considered a
linguistic device to say one thing in terms of another through substitution
simply because the two terms are alike. Yet, why should a lion be considered
“brave” when this is distinctively a human quality? And how can a day be
“lovely”? Aren’t these just further comparisons (“lovely” after all is
an adverb meaning “like love”)?
Recent
psycholinguistic and cognitive research on metaphor has strongly proven that
metaphor is a conceptual phenomenon, more governed by thought than by language,
and has little to do with special cognitive processes of literal interpretation
(see, for example, Gibbs, 1994 and Katz et al., 1998). Starting with
Metaphors We Live By in 1980, a seminal study of conceptual metaphor, George
Lakoff and his colleagues have since then studied and theorized on the fact that
metaphors are entrenched in the way we represent ourselves and the world around
us. At times they are so entrenched, in fact, that they are considered literal:
it is difficult to consider expressions such as, “Oh! I see!” “I’m going
to defend my argument,” or “The company’s growing” as manifestations of
conceptual metaphors like Knowing is
Seeing, An Argument is a War, A Social Organism is a Plant. Metaphors are
classified then by the degree of conventionality, or how much they are
entrenched in our daily lives. Many words we tend to consider literal have
metaphorical origins (Sweeter, 1991), and it has been shown how difficult it is
to find literal meanings of words. Psycholinguistics has shown that metaphorical
phrases are understood in the same manner as literal phrases. It would be honest
to say that literal and metaphorical are not to be considered contraries; a
word’s meaning is “more or less metaphorical.” Indeed cognitive
linguistics has restored the variety of colors to what was classically
considered a black and white trope, clearly distinguished from its literal
dichotomous counterpart. The cognitive process behind metaphoric comprehension
is not an extraordinary feat for the human mind, nor is it, as Locke said, a
“verbal abuse.” Literal and metaphoric are gradual points on a semiological
spectrum, and not diametrically distinct.
Metaphor
is conceptual, and another great claim of cognitive science is that human reason
is for the most part metaphorical. The process which construes metaphor is a
basic mental capacity by which people understand themselves and the world around
them and thus are to be treated as universals. The ability to combine unrelated
ideas to express what would otherwise be inexpressible is part of our
socio-communicative abilities, acquired along the ages, dating back some 30,000
years ago, when religion and art were just being invented (Mithen, 1996). The
discovery of conceptual integration (see Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) has made
it possible to understand how humans create new patterns of thought via mental
spaces (conceptual “packets” construed on-line) and how human creativity is
essentially a matter of being able to blend partial structure. The emergent
structure creatively arises by composing, completing and elaborating the
elements and relationships recruited into the blend where new inferences arise.
What
occurs in conceptual integration, or “blending,” is that we combine two
concepts to generate a third. This is what happens with metaphors: we use a more
common object to talk about a more abstract object, and what we get out of this
combination is a new concept not proper to either of the input spaces. So we
speak of the mind in terms of container, saying “I’ve got an idea in the
back of my head”, or “he’s out of his mind,” although we have never seen
a box full of ideas, nor have we ever lost the ideas that flow out of our
container-mind. Cognitive linguistics has upheld the fact that our language is
strongly embodied, and metaphors are not always based on objective pre-existing
similarities. “The cognitive linguistic view maintains that – in addition to
objective, preexisting similarity – conceptual metaphors are based on a
variety of human experience, including correlations in experience, various kinds
of nonobjective similarity, biological and cultural roots shared by the two
concepts, and possibly others,” (Kövecses, 2002: 69). What we see and feel
everyday, the experiences we live and how we perceive them will shape much of
our language and the way we think about certain ideas, and in this context, we
will see how they shape people’s relationship with religion, how this
relationship changes their personal view of themselves, and for what reasons we
need to treat them as literary universals.
Anthopomorphism:
God Created in Man’s Image
God
has been thought of not only in human scale, but using human-like qualities.
Divine agency is seen in terms of the most complex object that man knows of, and
that is himself, and as anthropologists have noticed, there is little choice
(Boyer, 2001: 143). The cognitive system of humans automatically infers many
operations to avoid an overload on itself, and it recruits information from all
its resources. “[A] lot happens beneath that Cartesian stage, in a mental
basement that we can describe only with the tools of cognitive sciences” (ibid.,
18). People know a lot about themselves, much more than other things in the
world, and human beings become the easiest source for information to produce
inferences, which is why it seems all so natural to say that a lion is brave.
God was created in man’s image, and it is an anthropological universal that
supernatural beings are considered to have a mind (ibid., 143-144),
placing man much closer to the Divine than to the animal on the Great Chain of
Beings.
A
human-like God is nonetheless, in Justin Barrett’s term, “theologically
correct” (1999). The devotees of the Eastern or Western religious considered
here will say that God has a lot of human-like qualities—and He has even
become human, for Christians taking the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, or for
Hindus as an avatar like Krishna—yet he is not quite “like” a
human. The God presented in the Tanakh or in the Qur’an has a mighty hand, and
His eyes see everything, but these are metaphors of His omnipotence and His
omniscience. In a way the devotee juggles with two different mental spaces: one
is human-God, to which he can relate; the other, which builds on the first, is a
supernatural-God, far more different than what he can ever imagine. The Muslims
are warned that God is beyond anything one might devise by the way of concept or
definition: a concept which is half way between the via remotionis and
literalists’ anthropomorphism (Bausani, 1980: 16-17). Although God has
revealed Himself in and through the Holy Word, the religious reader shifts
between knowing and not being able to know. The starting point of devotees’
understanding of God, despite His infinite qualities, is seeing Him as the
perfection of man.
Religious
Literature: Differences and Universals
At
this point, I want to emphasize that not all religious traditions have a
“Book”: even though the Greeks, for example, had a very complex pantheon and
a very advanced scriptural system, they did not have a book of do’s and
don’ts. Notwithstanding this fact, I believe that, had there been such a
sacred text, ritualistic readings would not have been absent.
With
this in mind, I will constrain my object of study to being less general,
considering here the texts of the Semitic and the Indian phylogenetic religious
systems, with which most Westerners are familiar, and whose literatures have
been esteemed within a global view of culture. They have been considered the two
major streams of religious thought (e.g. Zaehner, 1969 and Parrinder, 1964).
Because of similar, though not identical, characteristics of the devotee’s
approach to the sacred texts, particularly relevant to the degree of authority
attributed to the text, it is in my opinion possible to create a model of
on-line interpretation which could be used with devotional literature of other
religious systems, although they are of completely different socio-historical
origins. The cognitive factors involved suggests that these practices are
statistical, if not absolute, universals.
Phylogenetically
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are traceable back to the Semitic story of
Abraham. Yet the latter two must not be considered “modifications” of the
Jewish tradition: Christianity was not the result of a schism of Judaism, and
Islam is not an unorthodox version of Christianity. It is crucial to say that
they are not simply “heresies” but religious systems all in all with
profound differences. Moreover, within these religious systems there are many
other divisions, some of which have over the years become stable orthodoxies,
such as Protestantism or Shiitism. Similarly, the Hindus’ preoccupation of how
to flee from the “samsara,” the eternal cycle of reincarnation, which
was taught in the Upanishads, became that of the Buddhists and the
Jainists, but whether we consider one as the historical product of the other or
fruit of supernatural illumination, common sense can guide us in respecting each
one distinctively.
Even
a brief survey of the traits that distinguish sacred literature from secular
literature not only puts the typology into perspective, but is paramount in
discriminating the cognitive activity (e.g. on-line interpretation, embodied
self-awareness) of the reader when interpreting the books of the living and the
books of Life. Even within religious literature, it is wise to distinguish
between sacred literature (the “Bibles” and “Qur’ans”) from saintly
literature, that is, the wisdom and devotional literature of saints. Objectively
the content is not much different, nor the style, nor the language. What makes
the canonical literature so “meaningful” to the reader is the emotional
content linked to the authority of the text and its meaning. Authorship of these
holy texts is considered divine, whether written by hand of God, communicated
under dictation or holy inspiration. In any case, the written word is the word
of God formalizing His will. The lay reader’s approach to the Qur’an,
the Bible or the Vedas is entirely different from the devotee’s; for
the former, the attention will be displaced from a spiritual meaning, and, like
for any other literature, a historical, sociological, anthropological or
aesthetic interpretation will emerge, whereas the latter will place his or
her attention almost completely on a “revealed” meaning during a spiritual
reading.
How
is it that sacred literature should have such a long lasting impact on the life
of the devoted readers? I suggest it is the ritualistic aspect of the reading
activity and the authority of the text, the conceptual integration made between
the text and the reader’s personal life, and various neurological and
emotional processes that make sacred literature so meaningful for the devotee.
These issues are certainly present across genetically and areally distinct
religious traditions. The question of the intentio auctoris and the
interpretation of texts have been studied at great length (for example in Eco,
1979), but the nature and the use of sacred texts differs greatly from more
common writings. Without focusing on what meaning the author(s) of a sacred text
wanted to give it, I will delve into the meaning given by the users of the text
to the reading process, considering the universal cognitive factors tied to the
course of action and why it is so important to that reader.
“Epistolary
Reading”: Difficult or Meaningful?
Through
the divine literature, God has revealed Himself. The reader considers him or
herself as the audience of the Holy Word, and what was rationally a book written
centuries before now becomes a personalized letter. This “epistolary
reading”, as I call it, of the sacred literatures is hardly ever present in
other literary readings. Even in the case of an author who may directly address
the audience, the reader comprehends that it is all simply a rhetoric device.
What is praised as the Eternal Book has a transcendent Being as its author. That
book is read as if it were written at that very instant for the reader-devotee.
Everything is pertinent, every word and comma (even a pause of silence) has a
meaning: it is up to the reader to understand it.
The
devotee spends considerably more time in reading and interpreting the sacred
literature than what is dedicated to a secular piece of narrative. We may
compare the attention given to sacred literature by a devotee in general with
that of any common reader of poetry. Poetry in itself usually contains a more difficult
and complex linguistic and syntactic structure, thus often necessitating more
attention, and the reader may have an overall sense of satisfaction after having
studied the text to seize its “deeper meaning,” which may concern the fate
of humanity or the pleasures of the world. Further on I will show that one of
the main factors in determining the text as important for the reader lies in the
value given to its authority.
I
believe that during the reading of such an important text for a reader, a
strategy of delayed categorization is used. Although the normal reader of a
sacred text may delay categorization for fractions of seconds, enough to assess
the situation presented, the religiously inclined will further retard his
process of categorization, rendering the text more flexible
and adapted to his personal-life situations. In certain cases, delayed
categorization may frustrate the reader because of “a period of uncertainty
that may be quite unpleasant, or even intolerable” (Tsur, 2003: ch. 1) which
may be why certain lay readers tend to describe the Bible or the Vedas as “difficult
readings.”
Cognitive
Factors Involved in On-line Ritual Reading of Religious Literature
In
interpreting the sacred text, the devotee begins from a semiotic mental space,
which is the event of approaching the text. “This signification, or ‘semiosis’,
whether it be an act of communication or of private thinking, is always part of
a situation which serves as background” (Brandt and Brandt, 2002: 64). The
devotee-reader is like a person who has prepared him or herself psychologically
to knock at the door of a benefactor. The reader is opening up a channel of
communication with the Divine, in which he or she wishes to learn to compute the
divine will or learn the divine teachings. This mental space is where the
devotee starts to interpret the text, in that the reader’s context will
influence his or her reception of the text itself and the allocation of a
particular meaning: accordingly this is the base space from which the other
spaces will be constructed, and it includes volition, intention, information and
action. The way the text will be read heavily depends on the context: the reader
is performing a daily prayer (or perhaps is sad and wants to be consoled through
the sacred scripture), the place is an open space, very quiet (or either a
church with the organ playing in the background, or a private room), he or she
has performed a rite before taking to the reading (an ablution with fresh,
running water, or invocation of the Holy Spirit, or some prayer or gesture).
While Eco’s The Name of the Rose may be read anywhere, needing only
minimal contextual silence to concentrate on the text, the devotee-reader of the
sacred literature will actively and intentionally search for an
“appropriate” environment and perhaps will not even look at the text if not
prepared psychologically (or spiritually). Roman Catholic and other Christian
denominations invoke the Holy Spirit by means of rhythmic and repetitive
prayers, Muslims are taught ritual ablution, or physical cleaning, because
“ritual pureness is half of the faith [and] light” (Hadith XXIII),
and Hindus and Jews have similar rites.
These
cognitive-behavioral ritual preliminaries can be considered religiously as a
purification of oneself to be worthy to receive a divine teaching; what happens
from a neuro-physiological point of view is
that one enters a state of quiet, slowing down the rate of breathing and of the
heart’s beating. These ritual preparatory methods have a rhythmic and
repetitive quality, such as singing or repeating a mantra or prayer or
repetitive bowing, and may continue in the very reading of the text. This
repetitive behavior can have consequential effects on the limbic and autonomic
nervous systems, driving “cortical rhythms to produce ineffable, intensely
pleasurable feelings” (Newberg and D’Aquili, 2001: 88).
The
limbic system, which has generally been associated with complex aspects of
emotions and includes the hypothalamus and the amygdala, has been elevated to
the status of “transmitter to God” by researchers such as Joseph, Persinger,
Ramachandran, and Austin, although Newberg and D’Aquili remind that it works
with other structures (ibid.: 185). The amygdala’s primary function,
besides being the “sensory gateway to the emotions” (Aggleton and Mishkin,
1986), is to be alert for unexpected movements which may signal danger. Since
ritual actions are for the most part made up of distinct, irregular behavior
(repetitive bowing, twirling, chanting, keeping one’s hands raised in the air,
etc.), the amygdala (with the help of the lateral hypothalamus) may be
stimulated enough to produce what is a sense of awe (Newberg et
al., 2001: 88-9; D’Aquili and Newberg, 1999: 102). This could justify the
sense of authority the reader has, perhaps augmented by the ritual aspect of the
reading, and be related also to the superior attention allocated to the act of
reading the sacred text.
The
hypothalamus — in evolutionary terms, the oldest part of the limbic system
— controls the autonomic nervous system, thus regulating
survival-related body functions like aggression, sex, hunger, thirst, and
hormonal systems like the ones relating to reproduction and growth. It has been
shown that there is a direct connection between hormones such as vasopressin,
which among other functions serves to regulate blood pressure and testosterone,
and religious practices like meditation and rituals (Newberg et
al., 2001: 44). In general, there may also be a decrease of blood pressure,
heart rate, respiration, as we have already mentioned, which are products of the
hypothalamic activity and may aid in the immune system function (ibid:
86). Moreover, the emotions generated by the hypothalamus tend to be stimulus
bound (D’Aquili and Newberg, 1999: 39). Researchers have experimented with
chemical stimulation to produce certain emotional effects, but have discovered
that the emotional structures of the brain cannot be activated like the way it
is when the person is performing a ritual within a cognitive and religious
context, triggering “positive psychological states ranging from mildly
pleasant sensations to feelings of ecstasy” (Newberg et
al., 2001: 88-9). The same
effect may occur spontaneously by the stimulation of hypothalamic or limbic
structures, perhaps “because of an accumulation of certain life experiences”
(D’Aquili and Newberg, 1999: 103).
Andrew
Newberg and colleagues (Newberg et al.,
2001: 29-31; D’Aquili and Newberg, 1999: 34-37) have studied the prefrontal
cortex, the area associated with attention, and its role in generating intention
and mediating emotion. Not only are its connections to the limbic system,
generally associated with the prompting of emotions, the most intricate and
tight of the whole cerebral cortex, but it is also the only area that receives fibers
from all of the sensory channels, integrating all the data received through
vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. It is involved in the structuring of
conceptual frameworks because of its synapses with the verbal-conceptual
association area in the inferior parietal lobe, assisting the formation of
abstract concepts and putting them into words. The prefrontal cortex is set in
the frontal lobe, which includes the motor cortex responsible for the movements,
often associated with goal-oriented behavior. Studies on humans have shown that
prefrontal damage results in the inability to concentrate on complicated
problems and to plan and to orient one’s behavior for future tasks. Because of
its connections with the limbic system, prefrontal patients have difficulty
in emotion modulation, and seem to exhibit apathy. Indeed neurologists consider
this to be the seat of the will.
Antonio
Damasio has clinically studied the importance of the prefrontal cortex for
attention and emotions, synthesis and analytic reasoning, memory and purposeful
actions, among other things, and more fundamentally the relationship between
emotion and cognition. Prefrontal patients, like in the classical case of
Phineas Gage, retain intellectual abilities such as language and calculations
but seem to become emotionally flat, socially inappropriate and hyper-rational,
not being able to motivate decisions (Damasio, 1994). The lack of temporal
organization of information and of concentration, not the lack of memory,
impairs free recall in prefrontal patients, in that the information is not
blocked or inaccessible, but the patients have difficulty in searching their
memories (Miall, 1995). This is important for conceptual integration of the
mental spaces construed, as will be discussed.
Mental Spaces
and Hermeneutics: The Reader in the Text
I
will now present a hermeneutic model of a passage from sacred literature, and
demonstrate how the interpretation performed by the devotee-reader will provide
him with a sense of revelation, or personal insight, which will not normally
emerge in a lay-reader. It is because of the authority given to the text (as has
been mentioned and will be expounded further) and the cognitive aspects
implicated during ritual actions that the text becomes so important to the
reader. There is a myriad of factors involved, ranging from cognitive to social,
but it may be simplified by breaking down the process into the mental spaces
drawn in during the process, keeping in mind the complexity of the “religious
brain”.
One
teaching that has been summoned for its universality is the Golden Rule, a
principle of ethics. The moral of this teaching is that everyone must do (or not
do) what one wishes to have done (or not done) to himself or herself. I have
chosen to apply this teaching to the current model for various reasons. One
reason is for its brevity, which is convenient for this paper because of the
density of the subject matter. Moreover, often only a few phrases (perhaps
longer than the one analyzed here) are chosen to be read for meditation by the
devotee-reader: here we will use the Christian version of the Golden Rule, taken
from the New Testament, however the teaching (and the wording) is essentially
identical to that of other religions and faiths. Another reason I have chosen
the Golden Rule is because it does not necessitate particular background
knowledge of any particular religious system, in that it can be considered a
general ethical principle, not necessarily tied to any one culture, a literary
universal in itself. It can be used for a basic model, despite its profoundness.
The
Golden Rule proposes a situation that may or may not be present in the life of
the reader-devotee, as is typical of the teachings of sacred literatures, that
is, presenting life situations which are generic and possible, guiding the
faithful towards attitudes and actions considered orthodox to that religious
system. The universal nature of these “teachings” is not in the subjects,
but in the interpretation. In certain texts, the intention of the author was not
to spiritually guide or educate (for example, the Song of Songs was
originally a nuptial poem and then was used to explain what is often referred to
as unio mystica). Even historical or mythological stories are
generalized, by means of the Specific is
General metaphor. The Bhagavad Gita story of Arjuna, for example,
who is ultimately convinced by Krishna to fulfill his obligations of dharma,
has been “revealed” ultimately as the story of a struggle between good and
evil, between what is naturally pleasing and what is supernaturally gratifying.
A great
deal of attention is placed on the text, and the devotee considers it
authoritative, and we have already explored what might be taking place neuro-cognitively.
The authority and the respect given to the text is because of conceptual
compression. The text’s real author and its implied author (the Divinity) are
metonymically compressed by means of a representational relationship, for
example, in the case of inspired literature, and the text with its author(s) by
means of a cause-effect relationship. Likewise, the implied reader metonymically
becomes the real reader, notwithstanding the fact that the text was written
centuries before (fig. 1).
The
specific text, thus, presents a new mental space which contains a particular
situation or story, in our case the Golden Rule. This presentation space is
influenced by the base space mentioned in the previous section, and it is
distinctly figurative: the written text has many “slots” which will be
filled by the reader. The passage to be read is sometimes predetermined, when it
is prescribed by some religious authority, as is the case with Muslims’ salat
or Roman Catholics’ Liturgy of the Hours. A meaningful interpretation
of the text in the case of predetermination obviously enhances the mystical
experience of the devotee, who a priori feels as if it is pointing
towards him.
The
text is carefully read to comprehend the words and the syntax. The devotee wants
to be able to understand every single word, often recognizing references to
people and places, and strives to avoid ambiguities. In the study of devotional
literature, there are often references to other sacred texts, allusions that
work off of precedingly established meanings. These types of allusions are a
literary universal (Hogan, 1997: 227).[1]
The text in and of itself helps construct a new space in which the text is
presented. For the devotee, God is mystically speaking to him hic et nunc
via the divine scripture. Only the reader can interpret what it means for him
when God tells him, “Do to others what you would wish them do to you,” and
it all depends on his life situation in that moment. It is God communicating to
him, and as in every communicative act, the listener spares no effort in
understanding what the speaker wants to say. The interpretation of sacred
literatures requires an active intelligent act on behalf of the devotee, which
the religious leaders warn as not always being simple. His or her interpretation
will be based on what background knowledge there is of that text, but it must
always be meaningful, because it is given by a divine author(ity) to the
devotee. It is up to the reader to be able to find a meaningful interpretation,
although with increased knowledge it may differ, but nonetheless be significant
and important to him or her personally. The characters of the stories represent
roles to be filled by the reader, and they represent exempla. What is
read needs to be studied, repeated, memorized, and applied to one’s personal
life constantly, thus becoming an absolute mental space which will be present
during everyday life activities. This is a teaching to be applied to one’s
life, to be meditated, and to be given life through one’s actions, thoughts
and words. It is the “mirror of perfection.”
Here
the presentation space is built by what we have in the base space, and includes
elements and relationships such as an active role which performs upon a passive
role, an intentional action, motivated by the desire of being the beneficiary of
the effect of that action: “do unto others as you would wish them do to
you.” We would have two presentation spaces: one for reality and one for
another possible world. The imperative “do” is a space builder, opening up
another mental space: here there is a second-person commanded to perform a
temporally present act upon a third-person. The second part of the Rule, “you
would wish,” in turn, builds an ideal presentation space where the active and
passive roles of the first presentation space are inverted, so that the
second-person desires a temporally imprecise act performed by a third-person
(fig. 2). There is no mentioning of the second person being in the same
situation as the third (it is ideal, temporally imprecise), but this will be
inferred as we shall see further on.
The
text will always point to the devotee-reader and to his or her life-story, which
constitutes the reference space, another mental space. This is a deictic space,
anchoring the meaning to a specific context, here, the reader. I would consider
the proper reading of sacred literature by a devotee as a metaphor, where the
text is the source and the reader-devotee is the target. Story, projection and
parable are basic to human everyday thought, and we are used to
identifying
ourselves with others (as Turner, 1996 has largely illustrated), which is also
why humans are capable of empathy. In
the text, any of the stories’ personæ will lose their role to the
reader, who will fill the roles by identifying with them as we shall see further
on (all roles except for that of the Divinity: it is God who is talking to the
reader throughout the text, and such a compression would be incompatible for the
devotee’s expectations).
The
reader is the protagonist of the reading, and listens devoutly to the Divine
Word, which will virtually act out his or her life-story, giving him or her an
example to follow through another story. The devotee is actively reading the
Divine Word, to which he or she is completely passive, impotent, and submissive.
The addressed “you” of the text is the reader him or herself, here and now,
with all of his or her will, desires and life situations, by virtue of the
metonymic compression (this is what I call an “epistolary reading” of the
sacred text); the “others” is a prompt for a third person in relationship to
the reader which is recruited from the reader’s everyday life (for example the
family next door) and this space is also made up of what he or she actually does
through personal actions. Because we are dealing with a deictic space, the
attention will naturally be allocated on the reader’s life (after all, the
devotee is reading the sacred literature for him or herself), so the reader will
become the agent of the actions.
The
reader so far has finished reading the text, and mental spaces dealing with the
text and the reader who believes that the divine scripture is written for him or
her have been built. The reader starts to make the connections between written
text and real life, exploring the deeper meanings of what is being “said to
him or her”. There is a mapping across the counterparts of the mental spaces
built so far, based on analogy, metaphor, relationship and so on. These elements
and relationships are blended into another space called virtual space, in which
the text story becomes the figura (Auerbach, 1953) of his or her own
personal life. The devotee already knows that he or she is the main actor of the
scenario and has recruited (in our example) his or her neighbors to perform the
role of the “others” to whom he or she must actively “do” a deed. The
devotee was, however, also presented with the role of who has a deed done. It is
at this point that it is understood that the reader must be subjected to the
same deed he or she must eventually do, but this is the interpretation given (it
is not explicit in the text). The devotee virtually becomes the poor family (figuram
implere), perhaps the father if the reader is a man, or the mother if she is
a woman (by analogy that is via another compression). “[I]t appears to be a
psychological universal that one’s self-conception is structured into a
hierarchy of properties; properties such as sex and race are high in the
hierarchy while properties such as ring size are lower. It appears that readers
and auditors identify in their self-conception and they prefer works involving
characters with whom they identify” (Hogan, 1997; 236). The devotee is
virtually commanded to “Do unto yourself what you do wish,”
and the tense is the present, now, at a moment which is highly empathetic
towards his or her neighbors. He, the father of a poor family (the reader
thinks, for example), might wish for receiving food and clothing or being
offered a job.
So
far, I might mention that the whole interpretative act could have gone entirely
differently, which is why this is only one possible example. A different reader
might have considered the text referred to someone else, for example, if the
text is not considered to be sacred. Many times we may have encountered this
text ourselves, even orally, yet we may not have actually gone through with the
blend, and may have stopped at simply comprehending the phrase. Now, to stop and
think of who the “others” are and “what to do” means to delay
categorization by building more elaborate mental spaces connected by cross-space
mappings. Why should this be taken as something the devotee-reader must do? Why
does this become so important for the reader? More interestingly: how and why
does this type of sacred literature actually change the life of the devotee?
The
reader-devotee builds another mental space, which is set up by a schema that
will be relevant for the reader’s given meaning and for the emotional value of
his interpretation. The schema here will be that of wanting to please the
Divinity for whatever reason, which is why the reader approaches the sacred
literature, that is, expecting a divine lesson. “Ontogenetically, the devotee
develops a disposition to see his life played out in the scriptures, but this
can happen as a result of entering a religious tradition where the
textualization of the divine has already taken place” (Todd Oakley, personal
communication). It is a force-dynamic schema in that there is a moral constraint
caused by the authority that is attributed to the text. This space commands what
is going to emerge, and explains why the text is so important for the
devotee-reader, and probably less important for the lay reader.
From Reading
to Acting
The
elaboration loop that goes from the relevance space to the blend of the virtual
space, through the reference space and the presentation spaces is the process
for which the blend “do unto yourself what you wish” begins to take a more
complete form (fig. 3). It explains how the selective projection takes place:
some content is selected from the personal life experiences of the subject (past
actions that he or she wants to reenact, the present situations that he or she
still needs to choose, the neighbor) and projected according to the text. Thus
the second person (the reader) is virtually in the same situation as the third
person (the other), although the text does not say “Do to others what you
would wish them do to you if you were in their present personal life
situation.” This latter part is not explicit and is inferred through what
emerges from the blend.
The
degree of authority which will be relevant will drive the devotee to accept the
text as epistolary. If the devotee has some confirmations on the text’s
authority, then he or she will be convinced to accept the text addressed
personally (this confirmation may come from the superiors of his or her
religious system, from society, or from personal conviction such as faith). The
more this schema structures the virtual blend, the more there will be an
interpretation of the text that will be the content of the meaning space.
Everything becomes less virtual and more concrete, the volatile and intended
action will not be performed on a virtual self, and there is the realization
that the action must be towards the other because 1) it is wanted by the other,
2) because it is wanted by the author-authority (i.e., God, whom the
reader-devotee wishes to please), 3) because it is wanted by the reader-devotee
him or herself. The devotee lives in the blend. The personal context of the
reader-devotee will be influenced when he or she approaches the sacred text
again, whether he or she adheres to the command or refuses the teaching, and the
hermeneutic process will also influence subsequent behaviors in such a context.
Conclusions
The
interpretation, or the meaning, given to the sacred text by the reader obviously
differs from person to person, but through this model of interpretation we have
noticed some universals because of the very nature of the literary subject
matter, the authority given to the text, and the cognitive factors involved
during on-line ritual reading. A similar sense of “awe” as has been
described here is potentially possible in other types of readings, such as
poetry, or even other types of appreciation of the arts, but for the category of
devotee-readers, we must say that it goes beyond mystical experience or
contemplation towards everyday revelation and conviction of a life-changing
experience. When the mental space of relevance, of the respect for the Divinity
and wanting to please It, becomes more and more reinforced, it becomes an
absolute mental space which will be integrated with the devotee’s everyday
life.
The
Brandts’ version of Fauconnier & Turner’s conceptual integration as it
was here exposed is (coincidentally) very similar to Saint Augustine of
Hippo’s lectio divina as it is prescribed in its steps: the base space
coincides with the statio, the lectio would be the presentation
space, the reference and the relevance space correspond to meditatio and oratio,
the virtual space could be compared to the contemplation, and the
significance space would be the action. Even more so, it is suggested so
as to delay categorization during this type of ritual reading, but all religious
systems teach to take time to read and fully understand the meaning that is in
the sacred text.
Every
religious system teaches its faithful to carefully read and discover what God
wants to reveal to them now, during their reading of the sacred text, and when
the faithful have searched and found a correspondence with their own personal
life story, they feel like they are reading a letter from God. It would be
difficult to say that something like that wouldn’t change your life – that
is, if you believe in it.
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