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Incarnation and second person

Menschwerdung / Zusatz / Menschliche Natur

Incarnation is the becoming human of the Son, identified as the second person of the Godhead.

From the book

The Sophic Hydrolith, Water Stone of the Wise

Anonymous and companion authors · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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Orientation

At a Glance

  • The wordIncarnation is the becoming human of the Son, identified as the second person of the Godhead.
  • In the Sophic HydrolithPart III: benefits and their rank · unit 9 announces the spiritual benefits of the art through a mirror-like image of Christian belief.
  • In this editionThe English translates Zusatz plainly as “addition” and immediately preserves the author’s explanation “became at once God and man.”
  • A place to readThe second person’s incarnation is announced within the mirror of Christian belief.

Meaning

Incarnation is the becoming human of the Son, identified as the second person of the Godhead. Menschwerdung gives that sense directly; Zusatz, “addition,” expresses it through the material analogy. The text explains the added earthly body as flesh and blood, humanity or human nature. It does not mean that the Son begins to exist at the incarnation or becomes a different divine person.

The comparison involves reception and participation. The believer must know Christ not as God alone but as God and man. The material language of addition therefore serves a theological account of the person through whom salvation is enjoyed, not a literal recipe for assembling divinity.

Use in the book

Part III: benefits and their rank · unit 9 announces the spiritual benefits of the art through a mirror-like image of Christian belief. It distinguishes the persons within one inseparable divine being and places incarnation beside birth, suffering, death, resurrection and exaltation in the second person. This anticipates the fuller theological argument rather than giving a separate history of the earthly matter.

Part IV: the spiritual comparison · unit 21 draws a pointed comparison with an incompletely prepared material subject that would be harmful as medicine. Likewise, the reader who does not know Christ more fully cannot rightly receive the spiritual medicine of the soul. The deficiency is in that person’s knowledge and reception, not a lack of goodness or perfection in Christ. The author then directs attention to the appointed fullness of time and explains his “addition” as becoming God and man, the Son of Man.

Part IV: the spiritual comparison · unit 22 specifies the comparison’s two sides. The material account requires a related and highly honoured metallic body for the tincture’s effect. The theological account names human nature as the earthly body united with the divine nature of God’s Son. Both become one indissoluble body in the author’s analogical language.

This later addition must not be erased to preserve a flattened slogan of one matter without foreign addition. The book distinguishes stages and purposes. Nor should that distinction be stretched into a claim that every theological relation can be reconstructed from a material combination. The person-and-natures discussion supplies further limits to the analogy.

Places to read

  1. Part III: benefits and their rank · unit 9The second person’s incarnation is announced within the mirror of Christian belief.
  2. Part IV: the spiritual comparison · unit 21Addition is explained as the Son’s becoming God and man, to be known by the believer.
  3. Part IV: the spiritual comparison · unit 22Human nature is the earthly body united with the Son’s divine nature in the comparison.

Translation

The English translates Zusatz plainly as “addition” and immediately preserves the author’s explanation “became at once God and man.” In the next unit “as it were metallic” carries the German gleichsam and marks comparison rather than identity. “Humanity or human nature” retains the source’s explanatory restatement, while “one indissoluble body” preserves its strong union language. Reading these phrases together prevents the editorial paraphrase from either suppressing the incarnation’s human reality or making the divine nature a destructible material ingredient.

Attested forms

andern Persohn; Menschwerdung; Zusatz; Gott vnd Mensch; menschen Sohn; Fleisch vnd Blut; Menschheit; Menschliche Natur; einem vnauflößlichen Corpus