prelapsarian - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

Before the fall, in the carefree days in the Garden of Eden.

From pre- +‎ Latin lapsus (“fall”) +‎ -arian.

prelapsarian (not comparable)

  1. (Judaism, Christianity) Of, or relating to the period of innocence before the Fall of man; innocent, unspoiled.
    • 2001, Stephen Brown, Marketing – the Retro Revolution, London: SAGE Publications, →ISBN, page 139:
      It is the prelapsarian Polynesia of free love, noble savagery, Kon Tiki rafting and Easter Island statuary, not the Levi’s-wearing, Toyota-driving, pédalo-pushing, efflorescent-cocktails-in-a-split-coconut-serving pseudo-paradise that awaits latter-day travellers.
    • 2004, Janet Bertsch, Storytelling in the works of Bunyan, Grimmelshausen, Defoe, and Schnabel, page 4:
      Ideally, individual stories and God's plan share the same final goal, namely, returning to a prelapsarian state of perfect communication with God.
    • 2010 June 1, Tom Service, The Guardian:
      Can you really turn a few keyboards outside London's landmarks into the equivalent of a pub honky-tonk for a good old knees-up; a 50s living room where the family would gather around the piano every evening, in some prelapsarian vision of the olden days […] ?
    • 2010 September 23, “The perils of constitution-worship”, in The Economist:
      Conservative think-tanks have the same dream of return to a prelapsarian innocence.