The Ethical and Aesthetic Function of Light (in Serbo Croation)

Abstract

Pagan solar and fire metaphors, which Christianity accepts and modifies and which are frequent in the early literature of the Serbs and Bulgarians, experience very wide use in the 14th and 15th centuries, i.e., in the period when Hesychasm (Palamism) becomes a peculiar poetics of the early Renaissance. With the Hesychasts antique solar metaphors acquire a new poetic-religious semantics. For the Hesychasts light becomes a postulate of philosophy and aesthetics. From the Bible, liturgy and early literature the given metaphors also pass into oral folk creation, into the living conversational language, and into numerous personal names, surnames and toponyms where they survive to the present day with a somewhat altered poetic semantics.