millenarian

comparative more millenarian · superlative most millenarian

1. ChristianityPertaining to the belief in an impending period of one thousand years of peace and righteousness associated with the Second Coming of Christ and his reign on earth.First known use 17th c.

   Franciscans coming from Iberia were particularly prone to the millenarian enthusiasm which gripped southern Europe around 1500, and which the Franciscan Order had so long fostered. They believed that they were living in the End Times […]

   2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin, published 2010, page 699

   1 more example

   Mirandola cultivated a Dominican friar, Savonarola, whose millenarian visions had provoked revolution: in the wake of France's invasion, he had inspired a popular uprising in Florence, its ruling Medici family replaced by a people's republic.

   2011, Thomas Penn, Winter King, Penguin, published 2012, page 108

   Synonyms: millennial

2. Pertaining to any of various religious or social movements which believe in a coming or ongoing radical change to existing world order.First known use 20th c.

   Restoration of the old empires was not the aim of the totalitarian revolutions in Russia and Germany, since both wanted to bring back the millenarian empire.

   2007, Bryan-Paul Frost, Daniel J. Mahoney, editors, Political Reason in the Age of Ideology, page 182

3. Lasting or expected to last a thousand years.

   […] contrasts with the rapid decline and demise of the millenarian empire of Byzantium.

   1994, Catalan Review, volume 8, page 222

   2 more examples

   But the ashes of Auschwitz fell on Hitler's folly, on the announcement of the millenarian Reich.

   1997, Olivier Clément, Conversations with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, page 159

   In a few years, by fueling a sense of regained confidence within its own people, which suffered from the fall of a millenarian empire, Ataturk managed to readapt Turkish traditions in the framework of a new model of state.

   2006, Journal of Middle Eastern geopolitics, volume 1

plural millenarians

1. A person who believes in an apocalyptic millennium.

   Like Marxists, wokies are millenarians, working for a magical tomorrow that owes nothing either to past practice or to human frailties.

   2021 June 6, Daniel Hannan, “Communism is evolving. But the new version is no more toxic than the old one”, in The Daily Telegraph

   Synonyms: chiliast, Adventist