English edit

Etymology edit

From chiliast +‎ -ic.

Pronunciation edit

  • (UK) IPA(key): /ˌkɪ.liˈa.stɪk/
  • (General American) IPA(key): /ˌkɪ.liˈæ.stɪk/, [ˌkʰɪ.ɫiˈæ.stɪk]
  • (file)
  • Rhymes: -æstɪk
  • Hyphenation: chil‧i‧as‧tic

Adjective edit

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.

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