hylic

From Medieval Latin hylicus, from Ancient Greek ὑλικός (hulikós, “wooden, material”), from ῡ̔́λη (hū́lē, “wood, matter”) + ‎-ικός (‎-ikós, “-ic, forming adjectives”). As a noun, a clipped calque of homo hylicus (“hylic man”).

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈhaɪlɪk/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈhʌɪlɪk/
• Rhymes: -aɪlɪk

hylic (not comparable)

1. (chiefly Gnosticism) Synonym of physical, material, or base. [1820s]
   • 1828, The New Jerusalem Magazine and Theological Inspector, page 155:

     ...a part of mankind were by original constitution altogether hylic or material...

   • 1840, Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, translated by Edward Cox, A History of the Church, volume 1, page 133:

     The Enthymesis or Achamoth, which was born of the Sophia, the last of the æones, and had fallen from the Pleroma, animated all matter, and produced three orders of beings,—the spiritual, the physical [sic, intending psychical], and hylic natures. The natural Demiurgos formed, in imperfect representations of the Pleroma, a new world, of which he is the ruler, while Satan, the king of the hylic natures, governs here upon earth.

   • 1914, Rufus Matthew Jones, Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries, page xiii:

     There was in man... a visible body..believed to be composed, according to many of the Gnostics, of a subtle element... which they named the hylic body, and a sheath of gross earthly matter which they called the choical body.

• psychic, pneumatic

• See also Category:English terms prefixed with hylo-

hylic (plural hylics)

1. (Gnosticism) A base man, a person of merely physical concerns without mindfulness of either intellectual or spiritual matters.

• psychic, pneumatic

• “hylic, adj.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.