hamartia

Noun

hamartia (usually uncountable, plural hamartias)

1. (Greek, usually) The tragic flaw of the protagonist in a literary tragedy.
   • 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.2006, David Ratmoko, On Spectrality: Fantasies of Redemption in the Western Canon, Peter Lang, →ISBN, page 71
2. (usually) Sin.
   • 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...2020, Paul M. Blowers, Visions and Faces of the Tragic […] , Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 127
3. (usually) A focal malformation consisting of disorganized arrangement of tissue types.