Conceptual Blending in Early Christian Discourse

A Cognitive Linguistic Analysis of Pastoral Metaphors in Patristic Literature

Aleksander Gomola

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783110580631
• eBook ISBN: 9783110582048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics

Cognitive linguists and biblical and patristic scholars have recently given more attention to the presence of conceptual blends in early Christian texts, yet there has been so far no comprehensive study of the general role of conceptual blending as a generator of novel meanings in early Christianity as a religious system with its own identity. This monograph points in that direction and is a cognitive linguistic exploration of pastoral metaphors in a wide range of patristic texts, presenting them as variants of THE CHURCH IS A FLOCK network.

Such metaphors or blends, rooted in the Bible, were used by Patristic writers to conceptualize a great number of particular notions that were constitutive for the early church, including the responsibilities of the clergy and the laity, morality and penance, church unity, baptism and soteriology. This study shows how these blends became indispensable building blocks of a new religious system and explains the role of conceptual blending in this process. The book is addressed to biblical and patristic scholars interested in a new, unifying perspective for various strands of early Christian thought and to cognitive linguists interested in the role of conceptual integration in religious language.

Produced with the support of the Faculty of Philology, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.

1The aim and theoretical framework of this monograph

1.1The aim and scope of this monograph

The patristic era is arguably the most prolific and creative period in the history of Christianity. While the patristic scholar and the theologian focus on the content of the ideas developed in that period, the cognitive linguist will be more interested in the processes underlying their formulations in language since “to some extent the debates of early Church were exercises in linguistic analysis.”1 Yet first of all, he will seek to account for the stunning conceptual creativity of the patristic authors, who created plethora of images, metaphors or generally conceptualizations many of which have been essential elements of the Christian doctrine till today.

The theory that explains creativity and novelty in language is Conceptual Blending Theory, proposed and developed by Fauconnier, Turner and other scholars (see below). According to conceptual blending or conceptual integration theory, new meanings are created in language by conceptual integration that is the creative process of combining elements grounded in our human and cultural experience. Conceptual integration is a universal cognitive-linguistic process responsible for creating novel meanings in all spheres of human experience, in everyday communication, in literature, science and politics, as well as in religion. As Christianity in the first four centuries of its history witnessed an unprecedented growth in new concepts, ideas and meanings, examining patristic literature through the lens of Conceptual Blending Theory may shed more light on how conceptual integration contributed to this process.

In recent years both cognitive linguists and biblical and patristic scholars have been employing the methodology of conceptual integration theory or conceptual metaphor theory (as developed by Lakoff and Johnson2) to study Christian language and its imagery, and a number of studies have been published, some of which I mention below. I am not going to present an exhaustive examination of scholarly literature using cognitive linguistic methodology with reference to early Christian texts and will instead limit myself to some major or more recent works that will help locate this monograph within their context.

The role of conceptual integration with reference to particular Jewish, Gnostic and early Christian writings has been explored by the biblical scholars Bonnie Howe, Mary Therese DesCamp, and Hugo Lundhaug, among others. Howe has examined conceptual metaphors and conceptual integration in 1 Peter with respect to its moral teaching;3 DesCamp has demonstrated how conceptual integration was responsible for the reinterpretation and reshaping of biblical stories in Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum;4 Lundhaug has analyzed the role of conceptual blending in rituals on the basis of two gnostic texts – the Gospel of Philip and the Exegesis of the Soul.5 All three researchers show how conceptual integration allowed the authors of the texts in question to create novel meanings and develop their ideas. Conceptual blending theory has also been for some time an important research perspective informing socio-rhetorical studies of the earliest Christian texts, as initiated by Vernon K Robbins.6 More recently, several scholars have examined the role of conceptual integration in creating novel meanings in biblical texts (Jewish and Christian alike) and in biblical translation.7 There have not been, however, any serious attempts to explore the role of conceptual integration in later (i. e. patristic) Christian texts.8

Cognitive linguists agree that Christian figurative language is an example of “pervasive aspect of human thought and language that is part and parcel of human rationality,”9 yet they seem to have devoted less attention to it and to its conceptual potential than have biblical scholars. Although they have explored metaphors for God and the concept of Trinity, elements of the biblical narrative, Jesus’ teaching in the gospels, the life-as-a-journey metaphor in the Judeo-Christian tradition or selected examples of typological exegesis,10 it seems that their interest in these undoubtedly fascinating linguistic phenomena has been limited. Even though they often emphasize the role of conceptual blending and related processes that lie behind a substantial part of Christian language, cognitive linguists prefer literature or political rhetoric as the object of their inquiry.11 As a result, there has so far been no wide-ranging study of early Christian language proposed by a cognitive linguist.

From all of this it follows that cognitive linguistics has paid only lip service to Christian language while biblical scholarship, even though it has demonstrated the role of conceptual integration in this language, has focused only on isolated texts from the earliest decades of Christianity. Yet, if we wish to understand the global role of conceptual integration in the later decades and centuries of Christianity we need a bigger picture, one that will show the role of conceptual integration within the larger corpus of patristic literature, when the process of creating new meanings and ideas was most dynamic; and it is in this direction that the monograph goes. Instead of focusing on one text or one author, it examines, through the lens of Conceptual Blending Theory, the role of one specific conceptualization of the church as a flock in a wide spectrum of selected patristic writings: from the Apostolic Fathers to Augustine.

I argue in the monograph that the image of the church as a flock should be perceived as a complex network of interrelated conceptual networks that, once created, were taken over and elaborated upon by subsequent Christian authors who modified them and adopted them to their doctrinal, pastoral or polemical needs. Such blends, in order to be meaningful and useful in the Christian discourse, were required to exhibit some novelty, yet at the same time they needed to be intrinsically consistent and to correspond with one another. The Conceptual Blending Theory provides both a theoretical background for the explanation of how this was achieved, as well as a methodology for their identification, classification and analysis.

The main advantage of the broad approach taken in this study, focusing as it does not on one but on many texts, is that it allows us to see the regularity of specific cognitive-linguistic processes underlying the conceptualizations created by the patristic authors and to recognize that the same conceptual network – like the same chemical element found in various compounds – is responsible for producing a great number of novel meanings crucial for the development of many aspects of Christian doctrine: from ecclesiology, through baptismal theology and penitential practices, all the way to soteriology and Christology. In other words, it provides ample evidence that conceptual integration processes employing shepherding imagery played a central role in the development of a distinct and unique thought system that underpinned the Western civilization for almost two millennia and is still the system billions of people in the world identify with.

The monograph is a study of conceptual integration as the meaning creation mechanism in patristic literature, and although I attempt to place the metaphors for the church as a flock in the broader context of early Christian doctrine and practice, my approach is that of a cognitive-linguist, not a biblical or patristic scholar. This means that many issues pertinent to a more thorough, biblical or patristic study of a particular author or text, are necessarily ignored in my analysis. For the same reason, many patristic texts that are rarely placed next to each other in patristic scholarship may be grouped together in this study if they exhibit similarity with regard to the conceptual networks they include. Since pastoral imagery with all its elements is generally faithfully rendered in English translation and since I wish to make this study more accessible to cognitive linguists and other non-biblical scholars, I refer to the original Greek or Latin versions of the patristic texts only when it is necessary.12

There are – to paraphrase T.S. Eliot – “passage(s) not taken” in this monograph and at least two must be mentioned. First, I have not analyzed the conceptual networks identified in patristic texts in the context of rhetoric techniques employed by church fathers and in the context of rhetorical education of many of them, for the simple reason that this would demand a separate study based on the theory and categories of classical rhetoric. It must be said, however, that such a study would be a significant extension and completion of my monograph, and would show in more detail the role of conceptual integration in early church language. Second, I have not aimed at a more quantitative analysis of the metaphor of the church as a flock with regard to its frequency, distribution in patristic texts or its popularity with some authors. It is not, therefore, a corpus study of the presence of this metaphor in patristic texts, since it seeks first of all to demonstrate its role as a conceptual tool in early Christian literature. On the other hand, because my aim was to examine the presence of the image of the church as a flock in patristic literature as extensively as possible, I take into account all of its genres: (homilies, doctrinal and exegetical treatises, letters, polemical texts, church orders, and so on) and all major Eastern and Western authors.

1.2Conceptual Blending Theory

The methodological framework of this monograph is Conceptual Blending Theory or Conceptual Integration Theory. Since, as we have seen above, this theory is a well-established approach in biblical and early Christian studies, there is no need to provide a detailed presentation of the theory, and instead I will provide below only a brief overview of its most important tenets and claims, all of which are essential in the context of this monograph and which follow, first of all Fauconnier’s, Turner’s, and Coulson’s theoretical approaches.13 First, I discuss the blending or the conceptual integration process and demonstrate its role in creating novel meanings in language. Then I examine how selected vital relations are compressed in blends and how in this way blends achieve human scale. Next I show how blending manifests itself in three types of blends or conceptual networks of increasing levels of complexity. Since conceptual blending is a cognitive process that goes beyond language I also briefly examine the material anchors of blending and its role in human rituals, as these nonlinguistic aspects of blending with shepherding imagery are also analyzed in this monograph. Finally, I discuss in more detail the folk model of shepherding that is the organizing frame of all the conceptual networks discussed in my study.

1.2.1How blending works

Conceptual Blending Theory informs ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The aim and theoretical framework of this monograph
• 2 Conceptual blending in biblical exegesis
• 3 The cultural background of the image of the church as a flock
• 4 A taxonomy of blends which constitute the image of the church as a flock in early Christian discourse
• 5 THE FLOCK OF THE CHURCH IS THE FLOCK OF ISRAEL (FCFI)
• 6 SHEPHERDS ARE THE SHEPHERD (SAS)
• 7 The THE CHURCH IS GOD’S FLOCK (CGF) blend in the New Testament and shepherding imagery in The Shepherd of Hermas
• 8 The CGF blend as a conceptual instrument in early church life and practice
• 9 The THE CHURCH IS GOD’S FLOCK blend as a conceptual instrument in early church liturgy and theology
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Ancient and Medieval Sources
• Index of Biblical Sources and Pseudepigrapha