hamartia

English

Etymology

From Ancient Greek ἁμαρτία (hamartía, “tragic failure, sinful nature”), from the verb ἁμαρτάνω (hamartánō, “to miss the mark”).

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /həˈmɑː.ti.ə/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˌhæˌmɑɹˈtiː.ə/, /ˌhɑːˌmɑɹˈtiː.ə/
• Rhymes: -iːə

Noun

hamartia (usually uncountable, plural hamartias)

1. (Greek drama) The tragic flaw of the protagonist in a literary tragedy.

   Creon's main hamartia was his excessive pride.

   • 2006, David Ratmoko, On Spectrality: Fantasies of Redemption in the Western Canon, Peter Lang, →ISBN, page 71:

     Understanding hamartia as “ignorance of the injurious act,” Lacan distinguishes Greek tragedy from the Renaissance version on the basis that the latter supplants hamartia with the hero's privileged knowledge.

   • 2008, Daniel Greenspan, The Passion of Infinity: Kierkegaard, Aristotle and the Rebirth of Tragedy, Walter de Gruyter, →ISBN, page 81:

     The plot and the tragic figure at its center, destroyed through an act of hamartia, should be tailored to the production of pity and fear. Oedipus is not so much a person as he is a hamartia delivery system, a moving, empty center within the motions of the play, who through his vulnerability to hamartia and its disastrous consequences reveals the pitiable and the fearful to the audience.

   • 2014 October 21, Oliver Brown, “Oscar Pistorius jailed for five years […] ”, in The Daily Telegraph (Sport)‎^[1]:

     But ever since the concept of "hamartia" recurred through Aristotle's Poetics, in an attempt to describe man's ingrained iniquity, our impulse has been to identify a telling defect in those brought suddenly and dramatically low.

2. (Christianity) Sin.
   • 2020, Paul M. Blowers, Visions and Faces of the Tragic […] , Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 127:

     As a consequence of the primeval peripety, the Adamic fall narrated in Genesis 3, they have all inherited the catastrophic and tragic hamartia, as it were, of original sin, the engrained powerlessness of the soul to will the good, much less to do it, along with the deep disorientation of the soul's root desire.

3. (pathology) A focal malformation consisting of disorganized arrangement of tissue types.

   Coordinate term: hamartoma

Derived terms

• hamartiology
• hamartoma

Translations

tragic flaw

• French: hamartia (fr)
• German: Hamartie f, Irrtum (de)
• Polish: Hamartia
• Spanish: hamartia f

sin — see sin

malformation of tissue

• German: Hamartie f

See also

• hubris
• peripeteia

References

• “hamartia”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
• “hamartia”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.

Anagrams

• Mata Hari