chiliastic

English

Etymology

From chiliast +‎ -ic.

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˌkɪ.liˈa.stɪk/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˌkɪ.liˈæ.stɪk/, [ˌkʰɪ.ɫiˈæ.stɪk]

• Audio:

  (file)

• Rhymes: -æstɪk
• Hyphenation: chil‧i‧as‧tic

Adjective

chiliastic (comparative more chiliastic, superlative most chiliastic)

1. Pertaining to the religious doctrine of a thousand-year period of peace and prosperity.

   Synonym: millenarian

   • 1971, Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Folio Society, published 2012, page 139:

     The social anthropologist can recognise in the millenarian sentiments of the Interregnum a parallel phenomenon to the chiliastic movements which still occur in the underdeveloped countries of today.

   • 1989, Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces, Faber & Faber, published 2009:

     The evanescent quality of Debord's later writing, his chiliastic serenity, is patent here: a voice speaking from a world one might want to make and then to live in, but also the voice of the mad professor in Eric Ambler's spy thriller Cause for Alarm.

   • 2012 March 5, George Monbiot, “How Ayn Rand became the new right's version of Marx”, in The Guardian‎^[1]:

     Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult.

   • 2018, John Gray, “The problem of hyper-liberalism”, in TLS‎^[2]:

     In his pioneering study The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), Norman Cohn showed how Nazism was also a chiliastic movement.

Related terms

• chiliasm

Translations

millenarian

• German: chiliastisch (de)
• Serbo-Croatian: hilijanski
• Swedish: kiliastisk