Chiliasts, Millenniumists, Millenarians

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 4 pages

A short note from the Commentary on the Pistis Sophia, occasioned by a passage in that text on a day of Light being a thousand years of the World, so that thirty-six and a half myriads of years of the World make one year of Light. Blavatsky's position is that Theosophists acquainted with the doctrine of the cycles of manvantaras and pralayas, and with the days and nights of Brahma, will have no difficulty finding the key to a mystery that puzzled the Christian Church from the time its lower principles separated entirely from their higher light, the divine Gnosis.

The three names of the title all belong to the same literal reading of that figure — the expectation of a physical thousand years, generally with the bodily return and reign of Christ on earth. She calls their absurdities a striking proof of the materialism of patristic theology, re-edited and kept up to date ever since, and notes that the doctrine was supported by some of the greatest names in the Church: Papias, co-disciple of Polycarp and a hearer of John; Irenaeus; Justin Martyr, who imagined the thousand years would be spent in a Jerusalem rebuilt, adorned and enlarged; Tertullian, Victorinus, Apollinarius, Lactantius, Severus and Augustine. Against this she sets the nearer tradition of the Gnostics, which the Pistis Sophia passage itself preserves.

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