Hamartia

In his Between Earth and Heaven: Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and the Meaning of Christian Tragedy , Roger Cox analyzes the Aristotelian theory of tragedy and finds it, shall we say, wanting: “The Aristotelian doctrine of hamartia is completely misleading.” Cox doesn’t think it fits many Greek plays, if any, and certainly doesn’t fit the tragedies written by Christians.

It comes not from observation of the plays, but from Aristotle’s moralism: “Aristotle seems to take it for granted that in the real world virtue always produces happiness, and evil conduct or error inevitable leads to suffering. If, in a literary tragedy, an apparently good man suffers, then it must be because of some hamartia , peculiar to himself as an individual . . . . unless we can find some kind of hamartia in such characters as Antigone and Hippolytus, the plays in which they appear are not tragedies at all – just revolting spectacles.” In Cox’s view, “no moralizing can ever touch the real meaning of tragedy,” which he summarizes, quoting Walter Kaufmann as: “Tragedy occurs when men have come to see that even an exemplary devotion to love, truth, justice, and integrity cannot safeguard a man from guilt” (pp. 11-13).