Dictionary

felix culpa en · NOUN

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin fēlīx culpa (“blessed fault”), via Roman Catholic theology, first used in Latin in the 4th century CE.

Meanings

1. (literary) A series of miserable events that will eventually lead to a happier outcome.
   • What happens, though, if you, the filmmaker, can't get the malevolence to work? That's where Jaws had its happy misfortune, its felix culpa. When the mechanical sharks failed to work[…][Steven] Spielberg and his cast had nothing to do but hole up evening after evening in a Martha's Vineyard house and spitball about the script, story and characters. 2025 June 14, Nigel Andrews, “They don’t come any bigger”, in FT Weekend (Life & Arts section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 13:
2. The Biblical story of the fall of Adam and Eve, the original sin, seen as fortunate (fēlīx), because it led to Christian redemption and the eventual hope of Heaven.
   • I have shown that among older writers the fall of Adam was termed felix culpa, a fortunate sin, because it had been expiated with immense benefit by the incarnation of the Son of God: for he gave to the universe something more noble than anything there would otherwise have been amongst created beings. 1951, E. M. Huggard, transl., Theodicy, translation of original by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Appendices:

Forms

Synonyms

blessing in disguise