From the book
The Sophic Hydrolith, Water Stone of the Wise
Anonymous and companion authors · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordThe main treatise piles up realiter, truly, bodily, and effectively to characterize believers' union with Christ through faith.
- In the Sophic HydrolithThe final passage first presents wars, factions, pestilence, and dearth as signs of approaching redemption.
- In this editionThe English sequence “really, truly, bodily and effectively” closely mirrors the source's emphatic series.
- A place to readUnion with Christ through faith is emphatically real, true, bodily and effective beyond human reason.
Meaning
The main treatise piles up realiter, truly, bodily, and effectively to characterize believers' union with Christ through faith. The accumulation refuses a merely empty or verbal association. Yet the phrase is explicitly said to exceed human reason and appears in a theological account of resurrection, not in an explanation of two physical substances being mixed.
Use in the book
The final passage first presents wars, factions, pestilence, and dearth as signs of approaching redemption. It then turns to the general resurrection, when soul and spirit are reunited with the body in an inseparable, everlasting union or fixation. This future renewal is distinguished from the earlier rebirth in baptism, which is called its beginning. The text does not claim that every perfection described at the end has already become outwardly visible in the baptized person.
Within this future-oriented account, union with Christ through faith is spoken of as already accomplished. Christ's power and working bring believers to glorification; their union with him is the relation through which that promised benefit is described. The grammatical difference matters: the accomplished bond is not the same as saying that the final resurrection is already past.
The fourfold phrase is especially strong because bodily and spiritual language are not opposed as simple alternatives. The promised condition has pure spiritual power, strength, agility, glory, and splendour, while body, soul, and spirit remain part of the account. “Bodily” therefore cannot simply be deleted to make the passage an inward mood, nor should it be used to invent a material mechanism which the text says is beyond reason.
Awe supplies the final qualification. The union and exaltation can scarcely be contemplated in this life without astonishment, much less directly seen. The reader receives a claim and an analogy, not a complete visualization of the promised condition. The lexicon preserves that insistence on reality alongside the acknowledged limit of present understanding.
Places to read
- Part IV: the spiritual comparison · unit 53Union with Christ through faith is emphatically real, true, bodily and effective beyond human reason.
Translation
The English sequence “really, truly, bodily and effectively” closely mirrors the source's emphatic series. Translating leiblich merely as “personally” would weaken a deliberate word, while translating wircklich only as a second “really” would hide its effective force. The supplied rendering also keeps the perfect-tense union through faith distinct from the future glorification, an important temporal relation in the sentence.
Attested forms
warhafftig; leiblich vnnd wircklich; realiter