Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Theology Of or relating to the period after the fall of Adam and Eve.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Pertaining to anything which follows a lapse or failure.
  • adjective Christianity The state of being which followed the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[post– + Latin lāpsus, fall; see lapse + –arian.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

post- (“after”) + lapsus (“of the fall”) + -arian (“of or pertaining to”)

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word postlapsarian.

Examples

  • Do we know, a priori, that it was impossible for God to have established with national Israel, a kind of postlapsarian, typological, pedagogical (a word frequently used by

    Heidelblog 2009

  • Pleasure soon turns into the pain of postlapsarian knowledge, fury at her entrapment, and hatred of her consort, Pluto.

    Passion and Precision 2010

  • Pure sex is paradisal, but we lost it; postlapsarian lovemaking is represented as shockingly inferior.

    Heroic Milton: Happy Birthday Kermode, Frank 2009

  • The ones who took billion-dollar bites from the apple are suffering postlapsarian blues.

    THE FILM OF TOMORROW 2008

  • Benjamin Black/John Banville's neo-noir, set in 1950s Ireland and America, conjures up a very postlapsarian world indeed, in which characters do evil in the purported service of some greater good.

    Christine Falls 2007

  • So Christ reveals what the postlapsarian world is like and thankfully what it ought to be like.

    Just as art advances and elevates creation Tusar N Mohapatra 2007

  • But Alfric is the extreme signifier of Roman Catholicism's violent signified, whereas the novel's various misguided Protestants merely signify postlapsarian man's natural depravity.

    The Little Professor: 2007

  • So Christ reveals what the postlapsarian world is like and thankfully what it ought to be like.

    Archive 2007-09-01 Tusar N Mohapatra 2007

  • Benjamin Black/John Banville's neo-noir, set in 1950s Ireland and America, conjures up a very postlapsarian world indeed, in which characters do evil in the purported service of some greater good.

    The Little Professor: 2007

  • But Alfric is the extreme signifier of Roman Catholicism's violent signified, whereas the novel's various misguided Protestants merely signify postlapsarian man's natural depravity.

    The Sisters of Soleure 2007

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • since it is one of the narrative's implications that the myth of the Fall can be understood as a fall into language, then the secondary, postlapsarian nature of language might be the very thing the Wake seeks to overcome by replacing it with a putative directness of communication that preceeded the Fall. intro to FW ix

    January 13, 2007

  • i always saw it as reflective consciousness; a loss of innocence in becoming aware that one is aware fits more perfectly. think of the Adamites or Brethren of the Free Spirits if you wish.

    February 2, 2009