How transcendence is signified through metaphors: a contribution to the understanding of the emergence of religious meaning

Abstract The article intends to understand the metaphor used in religious communication against the background of Peirce’s semiotics not as a single sign, but as a process consisting of different types of signs to connect two different domains. To this end, the concept of domain is first clarified in contrast to related concepts of schematicity, and then the distinction between metaphor and types of contiguous sense relations within a single domain is discussed, followed by a discussion of the relationship between mapping and blending and a brief summary of the basic assumptions of Peirce’s semiotic approach. Subsequently, the metaphorical process is reconstructed on the basis of empirical material as a mapping of two discrete semantic domains. Finally, the functioning of metaphors in religious use is analyzed. As a result, the metaphorical sign process generally consists in the interplay between index and icon mediated by a symbol and in the oscillation between types of sense relations within a single domain and metaphor. In religious communication, a metaphor is a semantic concretization of the religious code, which consists in the distinction between transcendence and immanence. Religious meaning is created by the intertwining of a known (immanent) source domain with religion as an unknown (transcendent) target domain.