Abstract

The paper focuses on the relations between hermeneutics, spirituality and imagination. The theoretical frame is formed by the notion of imaginative sets. These sets of dominant cultural images inscribe themselves into our understanding of the meanings of texts or spiritual contents. One such imaginative schema has undoubtedly been the image of reading as nourishment and the subsequent image of reading as pleasure or sweetness. The latter will be used here as an example of how from cultural images emerge metaphors by assigning certain meaning to them. The basis of these images goes back to early Christian times and to the metaphor of learning as eating. Medieval hermeneutics adopted these images according to its cultural forms. However, the use of the metaphor of sweetness in the Middle Ages differs from the use of the similar metaphors in the early Christianity because of the changed meaning attributed to the image. The imaginative set of sweetness reached their peak with Cusanus, but it appeared sporadically afterwards and is still active today when people say about nutritious reading or the savouring of texts. Imaginative sets thus not only have their history of petrified metaphors, but also the history of reactivations of images.