CATRICALA' M. From vultus to flumen: rethorical and cross-linguistic profiling of misericordia

It is clear that in every religious discourse, the rhetorical elements , are not an ornament, a redundant decoration, and that it can be useful to reflect about the true valence of the religious figurative discourse. The cognitive paradigm offers a new perspecitve and allows to test new interlinguistic analysis of different corpora. The pivotal points of this study are three: 1. the quantitative analysis of the bulla apostolica, of other texts of Pope Francis,and of a sample of the Acta Sanctorum; 2. the qualitative analysis of examples; 3. the analysis of the function of the metaphors of mercy. The ultimate aim is that of offering some linguistic remarks about the meaning of these figurative expressions and that of understanding their nature as Idealized Cognitive Model of Lakoff (1987). According to this model, linguists in general distinguish the religious metaphors from the others. In particular many of them agree that the literal language would be radically insufficient to express the Divine transcendence and the recourse to the metaphors would be necessary to make partially accessible God’s greatness to human experience It is evident that this is just one of the possible interpretations of the figurative code of the Catholic doctrine and in particular of the perception and way of feeling and being believers and merciful. The function of the religious imagery is more complex and some alternative explicative models can show its multi-faceted configuration.