Preface

The editors of this book originally conceived the idea of a festschrift for John Crossett after reminiscing one evening about how much he had given to us, his former students, and how little we had repaid him. At that time, we hoped to be able to hand him a copy of this book on his sixtieth birthday and, by that token of our affection and admiration, to make him some small return for the endless effort he lav­ished on us, both during and after the time we were his perverse and obstreperous students.

We were too slow; he is now dead. Instead of being a gift for him, this volume has become a memorial to him. It is, however, not his only nor his best memorial. All of us who were influenced by his peculiar combination of selfless dedication to truth and warm care for others are his true memorial. In the best of our work and character, his spirit lives on.

In planning the book, we decided to look for a unifying theme that would honor Crossett and also elicit fruitful new studies from his former students and colleagues. The classical concept of hamartia seemed an ideal choice for both purposes. Crossett had worked out an extraordinarily useful definition of hamartia as double-mindedness (a definition explained at length by James A. Arieti in the first essay of the volume). With this idea, Crossett had helped to elucidate the genre of tragedy as it was practiced in a variety of cultural settings. At the time of his death, he had nearly completed his share of the commentary and translation for a new edition of Aristotle’s Poetics, which he was preparing jointly with Hippocrates G. Apostle. He had also written extensive research notes and essays on the function of hamartia in the work of dramatists as diverse as Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Anouilh, and he had examined the notion of tragedy evident in the non-dramatic works of poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. He had also extended his research on the term to include its role in ethical and theological contexts. In particular, he had carried out extensive philological and theological studies of the New Testament in order to trace the shift in meaning from “error” in older Greek writings to “sin” in Christian documents.

Unfortunately, most of Crossett’s research on hamartia survives only in rough draft and will never see print. Therefore, it seems all the more appropriate for us to extend the investigation here, knowing that no other topic could have pleased him more. As we discovered when we first sent out letters of inquiry to potential contributors, the concept is also germane to the scholarship of many of his col­ leagues and former students. Like logos and eros, hamartia has had a profound and pervasive influence on Western culture. It has played a part in areas as diverse as Greek history and Renaissance drama, Hellenistic theology and Victorian fiction. Because of its significance in Greek philosophy and literary criticism, the term has been most influen­ tial in those subsequent ages which self-consciously returned to the standards of antiquity, most notably the Renaissance and the eighteenth century. But even in the Middle Ages, when the Greek classics were little known, and in the nineteenth century, when many writers were turning away from the neo-classicism of the preceding century, the notion of hamartia often proves useful in interpreting works of philosophy and literature.

Nearly half the essays in this volume discuss hamartia in connection with Greek antiquity. James A. Arieti investigates its importance as the primary unifying theme in the work of the Greek historian Herodotus. Norman Kretzmann considers the term in its New Testament definition and examines the old problem cogently posed by Plato in the Euthyphro: Does God disapprove of a thing because it is bad, or is a thing bad because because God disapproves of it? Carol Lindsay Begley and Janet Smith both investigate hamartia as a threat to rational thought and discourse—an abrogation of the all-important Greek commitment to logos. Begley interprets Euripides’s Hippolytus as a play about errors of the tongue, and Smith discusses the importance of the idea of tragic misologia in the dialogues of Plato, particularly in the Phaedo. Hippocrates G. Apostle brings together in one essay a variety of Aristotelian distinctions between the various forms of error, and Lloyd Gerson discusses the Old Stoic paradox “All errors are equal,” pointing out the psychological and ethical assumptions that underlie it and make it alien to the philosophy of Plato and the Middle Stoa.