Hamartia

Quick meaning: Hamartia is a noun meaning (Greek drama) The tragic flaw of the protagonist in a literary tragedy.

Meaning

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

More Meanings

1. (Christianity) Sin.
2. (pathology) A focal malformation consisting of disorganized arrangement of tissue types.

Example Sentences

Creon's main hamartia was his excessive pride.

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.

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.

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.

Word Forms

• hamartias

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include fault, blemish, bathos, hole, falseheart, flaw.

Related Dictionary Tools