The Collaborative International Dictionary
Spiritualize \Spir"it*u*al*ize\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Spiritualized; p. pr. & vb. n. Spiritualizing.] [Cf. F. spiritualiser.]
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To refine intellectiually or morally; to purify from the corrupting influence of the world; to give a spiritual character or tendency to; as, to spiritualize soul.
This seen in the clear air, and the whole spiritualized by endless recollections, fills the eye and the heart more forcibly than I can find words to say.
--Carlyle. To give a spiritual meaning to; to take in a spiritual sense; -- opposed to literalize.
(Old Chem.) To extract spirit from; also, to convert into, or impregnate with, spirit.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1630s, from spiritual (adj.) + -ize, or from French spiritualiser. Related: Spiritualize; spiritualizing; spiritualization.
Wiktionary
vb. 1 To make spiritual; to invoke spirituality. 2 To refine intellectually or morally; to purify from the corrupting influence of the world; to give a spiritual character or tendency to. 3 To give a spiritual meaning to; to take in a spiritual sense; opposed to literalize. 4 (context chemistry obsolete English) To extract spirit. 5 (context chemistry obsolete English) To convert into, or impregnate with, spirit.
WordNet
v. give a spiritual meaning to; read in a spiritual sense [syn: spiritualise] [ant: literalize]
elevate or idealize, in allusion to Christ's transfiguration [syn: transfigure, glorify]
purify from the corrupting influences of the world; "During his stay at the ashram he was spiritualized" [syn: spiritualise]
Usage examples of "spiritualize".
The Eco camps would approach the same mononature in an attempt to unite with it, commune with it, return to it, spiritualize it.
It has ever been with them, and is still, a foremost and controlling article of faith, an article for the most part held in its literal sense, although there is a powerful sect which spiritualizes the whole conception, turning all its details into allegories and images.
By his influence their ideas were slowly and with great difficulty spiritualized and made to approach his own in some degree.
But that Jesus himself modified and spiritualized the meaning of the phrase when he employed it, even as he did the other contemporaneous language descriptive of the Messianic offices and times, we conclude for two reasons.
Before advancing another step, it is necessary only to premise that some of the Jews appear to have expected that the souls on rising from the under world would be clothed with new, spiritualized, incorruptible bodies, others plainly expected that the identical bodies they formerly wore would be literally restored.
Instead of spirit being materialized, matter is spiritualized and nature transfigured into the ideal home of ideal entities.
America, there was only a very weak link with the sublime Western Gothic traditions of the spiritualized meaning of life, but under the Culture-distorting regime since 1933, America has been completely disenchanted.
Even the innocuous nightingales were moralized, spiritualized, turned into citizens and anglicans -- and along with the nightingales, the whole of animate and inanimate Nature.
She spiritualized everything, and I wondered if she had always been like this or if she had learned it from her deceased husband, whom I had met in Canada and remembered as an ethereal person.
Deity for a nobler one, to bring back the Jews to the Elohistic idea in a spiritualized form, and to transform the Jahveh or Jehovah of the times of the Judges into a God of all the earth--universal, one and absolute, that God in spirit and in truth of whom Jesus, the last of the prophets, completed the revelation.