HOW IS RELIGIOUS DISCOURSE POSSIBLE? The Constitutive Role of Metaphors in Religious Discourse

The creation and use of metaphors is an indispensable element of our mental skills and our ability to use language. Modern studies of metaphor underline its almost unlimited range. Perceived this way, a metaphor is not only a rhetorical figure occurring in poetical language and in several different specific types of discourse. The ability to create and use metaphors is used in everyday and scientific language, in political and religious discourse. Probably, there is no such a field in human life in which a metaphor does not bear some or even significant role. This is the case in religious discourse, where metaphor occurs not only as a stylistic trick to beautify sacral texts but also plays a fundamental role indispensable for thinking and religious experience. Studying metaphors, their importance for religious language and a religious person's life, I will refer mainly to the theory of metaphor formed within cognitive linguistics. Cognitive theory of metaphor is not the only valuable theory that has been formed for the last two thousand years. However, I find it especially useful for the religious language analysis. Cognitive theory of metaphor was based on a well-known work by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Metaphors We Live By. It initiated some interesting reflection not