Conceptualizations of Spiritual Life
A Cognitive-Linguistic Perspective
Abstract
The article examines selected spatial conceptualizations of inner life and spiritual experience in the writings of Augustine of Hippo, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, William Law, and Etty Hillesum. The source material consists of texts representing different periods and traditions of Christian spirituality, while the secondary literature includes both studies in the history of spirituality and works in cognitive linguistics, whose tools were employed in the analysis. Particular attention is devoted to the container, centre–periphery, up–down, and source–path–goal image schemas. The central thesis of the article is that descriptions of spiritual life are deeply grounded in embodied human experience and rely on basic cognitive structures derived from experiences of space, movement, and architecture. The observations demonstrate that the same image schemas may be used to conceptualize different aspects of religious experience and may acquire different meanings depending on their theological and spiritual context.
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