Book Review: Religion, Language and the Human Mind edited by Paul Chilton and Monika Kopytowska
Religion, Language and the Human Mind, edited by Paul Chilton (Editor), and Monika Kopytowska (Editor), Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2018.
This book should be considered a landmark text in the emerging field of religion and language/religious language. What can linguistics tell us about religion and what can religious forms of language use tell us about the human mind? Quite a bit it seems! — though you will need to buy the book to find out. I will only touch on a few highlights from the book that I found interesting. The book is divided into three parts. Part I surveys the development of modern studies of religious language and the diverse disciplinary strands that have emerged. Part II focuses on metaphor as central to religious language. Part III covers some new linguistic tools and applications that have been deployed to uncover new insights into ritual, religious art, and religious electronic media.
The bulk of the authors of the essays in the book argue that metaphor is key to religious language and most of these authors relied on “Conceptual Metaphor Theory” or CMT to understand the nature and operations of metaphor. I myself am not so convinced that metaphor is key to religious mind but certainly metaphor is central to any form of human cognition and to that extent at least it will also be central to religious form of cognition. For CMT (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) metaphor refers to a group of cognitive operations that depend on cognitive fluidity or the inter-mixing of conceptual domains. Conceptual elements or representations in one semantic domain are related to or mapped into another conceptual domain. The source domain may concern physical objects, for example, while the target domain may involve something more abstract such as time. Each cross-domain mapping has internal structure such as slots, relations, and properties. The conceptual blend resulting from a cross-domain mapping can be a nonsensical concept and thus discarded or it could result in a new and innovative way to think about physical objects (an object must be marked by time for example). The base domains can be inherited schemas or they can be learned or derived from the surrounding culture. Many are rooted in our concrete 3 dimensional spatial sensing systems. Thus there are domains related to orientation and navigation in space such as near-far and path-goal. The general direction of the cross-domain mappings in CMT appears to be from concrete physical or graspable domains to more abstract domains.
But what has CMT-related analyses uncovered about religious cognition? In terms of source domains for God, CMT investigators have produced a veritable wealth of domains including everything from container to force domains. It is difficult to find a source domain NOT yet ascribed to God. As far as I can tell after reading essays and papers in this book applying CMT to various religious texts from the Zohar to the Hebrew Bible, ancient Tantric texts, the Buddhist diamond and heart sutras, texts within the Islamic prophetic tradition and various Christian doctrinal works, religious discourse is like any other complex topic area or discourse tradition. Except for a slight preference for spatial orientational domains as base domains, I could discern no particular religious preferences for certain source domain mappings.
Perhaps we need to look more closely at cognitive structure within the mappings. Bisschops (2018) points out that conceptual mappings between a source and a target domain are not necessarily value neutral. Many mappings assign a positive or negative value to the target domain and resultant metaphor. For example “God is a loving healer.” We evaluate one domain of experience by comparing it to another in these value ascribing mappings. Religious experiences, practices, traditions, cultures provide value-laden source domains that then generate whole universes of evaluative metaphors to cognize the world around us. Another theory or technique much referred to by authors of the essays was “Conceptual Blending Theory” (CBT) first proposed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002). In CBT, concepts are built from interlocking networks of source domains rather than one source domain. In CBT, a basic diagram capturing the operation of blending or mapping is composed of at least two inputs (from traditional source domains), an abstract space and then a space dedicated to blending concepts. Blendings can be triggered or promoted via many processes involving cognitive fluidity but typically appear to occur when there is some identity or commonality between elements in spaces/domains. I am convinced conceptual blendings are fundamental to all forms of mental creativity and certainly characterize our experiences of dreams. I have argued that dreams are a major source of religious ideas. But conceptual blendings are, like metaphors, ubiquitous. They are a way the human mind operates.
Many animals can accomplish simple types of conceptual blending but only humans exhibit double-scope blending where the frame and matching/identity properties of to-be-blended elements come from each of the 2 input spaces. Does double-scope blending characterize religious forms of cognition? Not on the face of it. And none of the authors of the essays in the book appeared to make such a claim. Recent applications of mathematical topological theory to the study of conceptual mappings and blendings promises to yield new insights in this area of the religion–language relationship. I have high hopes however that a CMT scholar may discover something unique about the conceptual blendings that characterize religious cognition. When we cognize a supernatural agent, for example, what blendings occur?
Another domain that I believe is particularly important for religious language is the sense of “agency.” With respect to language and agency, all known languages display a variety of grammatical devices for representing agency and the ways in which agency operates in the real world. Indexicality, for example, would be impossible without a conception of agency. It requires fitting speech to context, through appropriate use of deictics like pronouns and demonstratives. In conversation we use deictics like ‘‘you’’ or ‘‘I’’ with a sense of things being centered on an origin we call “I”. From that deictic origin we derive commonly used notions such as ‘‘close,’’ “intimate,” “myself,” ‘‘far,’’ “foreign” and ‘‘other,’’ etc. In normal everyday speech the agent is constantly referred to, assumed or operated upon. It is the object of the bulk of linguistic interchange. In some disorders like obsessive compulsive disorder and some forms of schizophrenia, patients feel as if the thoughts they are having are demonic or not their own. In schizophrenia, for example, patients cannot make the indexical distinctions between one’s own speech production, and others’ speech. They therefore ascribe some speech content to alien/other agents. Our ability to distinguish self from others and sometimes the “real” from the “false” requires the ability to attribute agency correctly … is it coming from me or from some other source outside me?
One of the most interesting papers in the book was by the editors. Chilton (2018) has developed Deictic Space Theory to model how agents/speakers position various entities (other people, objects, events, supernatural agents, etc.) in relation to themselves — a deitic origin. Using background information, including cultural information and indexical cues, the agent cognizes various entities in terms of positions they occupy in deitic space — namely a space composed of three intersecting axes of time, space and modality. The modality axis captures our sense of what we construe as real or true; that which is closest to us, present, now and within our grasp. Indexicality, therefore, measures our subjective sense of the real and the true; our certainties including those related to supernatural worlds and agents. As entities increase their distance from us spatially (attention), temporally (past or far future) and modally, our epistemic judgments are adjusted accordingly. Chilton argues that you can add vectors to that tridimensional deictic space to represent an entity dynamically moving or changing with respect to the agent. In addition, whole other reference frames with their own tridimensional deitic axes can be positioned within the original deitic coordinates representing a second agent or speaker. These other frames embedded within the original base deitic frame can interact with the base frame. The axes of the embedded frame can follow a vector toward the base frame or the axes can be translated topologically so that the origin of the embedded frame coincides with the origin of the base frame until the base frame dissolves or is translated to another position with the embedded frame. It seems to be this modeling process might be a powerful tool for capturing our relations to supernatural agents.
I have touched on only a few topics in this important volume in the emerging field of religion and language. Soon the tools developed by linguists will be brought to bear upon the old questions of the religious psyche.
Reviewed by Patrick McNamara
