The Heavenly Flame: The Christian Picture of the World and Modeling of the Image in the Literary Text

Abstract

A word in a literary text can acquire the character of a symbol, since its macro-semantics includes semantic connotations containing, in a compressed form, elements of the semiotic space of Christian culture. This article is devoted to the study of the semantics of the lexical unit «пламень» - «flame», which in Russian serves as one of the ways to verbalize the emotions and interpersonal relationships, contains the image of the heavenly flame as the Divine light of a righteous soul and a punishing sword for a soul mired in sin. When it included in a literary text, this lexical unit "gives" the growth of meaning to the literary text, expands its semantics. The interpretation of such a text is an attempt to construct a certain trajectory along a semantic grid of coordinates, where the key points are symbols as codes of the national culture and the Christian worldview.

Extended abstract:

A word in a literary text can be a symbol, since a word's macrosemantics can include different semantic connotations, which summarize components of the Christian semiotic space. The article under discussion is devoted to the semantic analysis of the lexeme «пламень» ("flame"), which, first, verbalizes emotions and interpersonal relations and, secondly, contains the Flame of Heaven image. This image means God's Light (or the Divine Flame) for a righteous soul and the Punishment of the Sword for a sinful soul. Being a part of a literary text, such a lexeme "delivers" part of it's meaning to the text and hence expands its semantics. The interpretation of such a text is an attempt to construct a certain line through a semantic grid of coordinates with its key points as the national culture codes and the Christian world view.

The purpose of this study is to describe how the Christian world view can affect the formation of connotative augments in the semantics of lexical units and the construction of cognitive and metaphorical models, which provide a clear understanding of such constants as life and death, human mentality etc from a religious point of view. The analysis is illustrated by the example of the word   «пламень» («flame»). Research methods used in the study are Semantic analysis and Linguo-Stylistic analysis of a literary text.

Scientific novelty of the research is the description of cultural, stylistic, figurative connotations, presented in the macrocomponent semantic structure of the literary style's lexeme “пламень” («flame») in the broad context of word usage in the National Corpus of the Russian language. The article provides examples of different meanings of the lexeme "flame". It can mean emotions, vital energy or spiritual power of a person, interpersonal relations and relate to "Flame of Heaven" given by the Lord to a warrior as courage and fearlessness, to a poet as inspiration, and to a lover as dedication and sacrifice. Destructive, devastating, negative for every human being emotions such as resentment, envy, hate, fanaticism are identified as the eternal fire of hell and relate to the theme of the posthumous punishment with a hellish cauldron, since dislike of one's neighbor in the Christian picture of the world is a sinful act.

Studying of the usage of the word “flame” contexts allows us to conclude that its conceptual field significantly expands its lexical meaning presented in different dictionaries, because it involves the biblical semiosphere, representing the dichotomous perception of the world and a man. The dichotomy is expressed by a vertical from High, Divine, Good to Low, Devilish, called the Fall from Grace. Connotative-evaluative meanings in the semantics of the word “flame” are based on the opposition that exists in the Christian world view as a flame of God's Light (the Divine Flame) and Grace and a flame, which punishes people for the Fall from Grace. The Divine Flame appears as a life-giving source that gives energy, creative breath and love to a human soul, whilst the Fall from Grace brings a fallen soul closer to the Hellish Fame and understood as self-destruction and suffering.