The Divine Pathos

In Matthew 16:15, Jesus asked Peter, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter’s answer was, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." He recognized Jesus as the one prophesied by the Scriptures who would come to deliver His people. At this point, Peter and the other disciples had very little understanding of who He really was and why they should follow Him when threatened with suffering and even death. Jesus became their friend, but He was so much more than that. He was God in the flesh!

This begs the question of who Jesus is to us. A person’s perception depends upon his experience, assumptions, categories of thinking, degree of sensitivity, environment, and cultural atmosphere. A person will notice what he is conditioned to see. It also depends on his perception of the vital role that God could play in his life. A closer look at the relationship of the Old Testament prophets to God provides great insight into how their experience of inspiration conditioned their perception.

Abraham Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), a descendant of two important Hasidic dynasties, was born in Warsaw. After receiving a thorough Jewish education in Poland, Heschel entered the University of Berlin, where he received his doctorate for a study of the biblical prophets in 1934. In 1938, the Nazis deported Heschel and other Polish Jews from Germany. After stays in Warsaw and London, in 1940, he came to the United States to teach at the Hebrew Union College. In 1945, Heschel became a professor of ethics and mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and began to publish a series of works, ranging from studies on the piety of East European Jewry and the inward character of Jewish observance to religious symbolism, Jewish views of humanity, and contemporary moral and political issues. He wrote the Prophets I and II to examine how these great men of faith connected with their God. 

Man comes to know and experience God based on his perception of God’s ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos represents God's perfect holiness, which is the source of all morality; it represents His character. Pathos speaks to God’s emotions and the commitment He has made to His creation, referenced by His compassion and care, motivated by His love, and exemplified by passion. Logos has the idea of logic and reason, the mind of God. The question raised is about which avenue each believer chooses to follow to find any fullness in his relationship with God: His holiness represented by morality, divine pathos – His passionate love, or logos, an approach to God governed by universal principles only. Morality (ethos) alone produces a moral man, the good side of the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil. Logos alone produces a religious man. The divine pathos reproduces God’s heart in man. The spiritual man sees all three aspects of God. 

“Ethical holiness may be thought of detached from religious holiness. It has value and dignity of its own, without reference to God, the ordainer of morality; that is, the moral idea has an existence independent of the recognition that it is actualized in God.”     The Ethics of Judaism II, M. Lazarus, page 13

Authentic Spirituality

For Heschel, the prophets provide a primary model for authentic spirituality. Biblical revelation is not a mystical act of seeking God but an awareness of being sought and reached by Him: The prophets bear witness to an event that they formulate in their own words, but the event itself is God’s reaching out. It is not propositional truths about God or general norms and standards that the prophets transmit but the “divine pathos.” The divine pathos is God’s outraged response to man’s sin and his merciful response to man’s suffering and anguish. Heschel does not actually attribute “pathos” to God’s metaphysical essence but sees it as a corrective to a conception of monotheism that restricts the scope of God’s knowledge to universal principles only. 

God's call to man, which resounds so frequently in the utterances of the prophets, presupposes an ethos based not upon immutable principles but rather upon His eternal concern. God's repenting, a decision based on moral grounds, clearly shows the supremacy of pathos.  

To identify God with the moral idea would be contrary to the very meaning of prophetic theology. God is not the mere guardian of the moral order. He is not an intermediary between a transcendental idea of the good and man… As love cannot be identified with the values found in it, so the relation between God and man cannot be simply equated with the value of the moral idea. The pathos structure of divine ethos follows from the unlimited sovereignty of God. If the moral law were something absolute and final, it would represent a destiny to which God Himself would be subject. Far from being sovereign, God would then fall into dependence on rigid, objective norms.        Prophets I, page 217

Divine Compassion

According to Heschel, pathos is righteousness wrapped in mystery and togetherness in holy otherness. God rules the world by both His justice (righteousness) and His compassion (love). In Exodus 33:18-20, Then Moses said, “I pray You, show me Your glory!” And He said, “I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you and will proclaim the name of the Lord before you, and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show compassion [racham - a deep, kindly sympathy and sorrow felt for another who has been struck with affliction or misfortune, accompanied by a desire to relieve the suffering] on whom I will show compassion.” 20 But He said, “You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!” Compassion becomes the foundation whereby justice is administered. The believer finds a quality of life “in Christ” by walking in His presence by faith and not by sight, acknowledging His personal love for each.

The prophets had no theory or “idea” of God. What they had was an understanding. Their God-understanding was not the result of a theoretical inquiry, of a groping amid alternatives about the being and attributes of God. To the prophets, God was overwhelmingly real and shatteringly present. They never spoke of Him from a distance. They lived as witnesses, struck by the words of God rather than as explorers engaged to ascertain the nature of God; their utterances were the unloading of a burden rather than glimpses obtained in the fog of groping. 

The autonomy of ideas may result in their isolation or even in their being regarded as independent, eternal, self-subsisting essences. To the prophets, the attributes of God were drives, challenges, and commandments rather than timeless notions detached from His Being. They did not offer an exposition of the nature of God but rather an exposition of God's insight into man and His concern for man. They disclosed attitudes of God rather than ideas about God.    The Prophets II, Abraham Heschel, Page 1

Delight in the Lord

Viewing God first through His divine pathos causes the believer to live by His words. Psalm 119:77, May Your compassion come to me that I may live, for Your law is my delight. This delight is a byproduct of the life force represented by the person and passion of Christ’s love for each one. Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart (Psalm 37:4). God’s love must be received, or it cannot have its effect. John says You did not choose Me, but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit and that your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you. This I command you, that you love one another (John 15:16-17). By first receiving His unconditional love personally, we are able to love others with that love (1 John 4:19). 

“Some say that the soul is divisible and that one part of it thinks, another desires. What is it then which holds the soul together, if naturally divisible? Assuredly, it is not the body: on the contrary, the soul seems rather to hold the body together; at any rate, when the soul is gone, the body dissolves into air and decays. If, then, the unity of soul is due to some other thing, that other thing would be, properly speaking, soul. Why not attribute unity to the soul?”     Aristotle, De Anima, I, 411b

Aristotle’s (not a believer) thoughts about the soul and its unity of thought and desire suggest that a force within the soul unifies the mind and emotions. Aristotle only saw two elements of the soul, while the Scriptures teach that the soul includes the mind, emotions, volition, conscience, and self-consciousness. James tells us that when man refuses to ask from God in faith, he is double-minded (literally, two souls), unstable in all his ways (James 1:5-8).  

Establishing Righteousness

History, what happens here and now, is the decisive stage for God’s manifestation. His glorious disclosure is not in a display of miracles, evoking fascination, but in establishing righteousness, evoking appreciation… Isaiah speaks about God, and his intention is to say that the Lord of heaven and earth, of nature and history, finds His true exaltation in justice.      Prophets I, page 214

Isaiah 33:5-6 says The Lord is exalted, for He dwells on high; He has filled Zion with justice and righteousness. And He will be the stability of your times, a wealth of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge; the fear of the Lord is his treasure. In this life, man's only stability is when he is rightly related to his God. The resulting fear of the Lord, a reverence for Him that enthrones Him in the believer’s life, becomes the real treasure. 

The prophet does not see the human situation in and by itself. The predicament of God, Who has a stake in the human situation. Sin, guilt, and suffering cannot be separated from the divine situation. The life of sin is more than man's failure; it is a frustration to God. Thus, man’s alienation from God is not the ultimate fact by which to measure man’s situation. The divine pathos, the fact of God’s participation in man's predicament, is the elemental fact. Therefore, the essential meaning of pathos is not to be seen in its psychological denotation, as standing for a state of the soul, but in theological connotation, signifying God as involved in history. For the biblical understanding of history, the idea of pathos is as central as the idea of man being an image of God is for the understanding of creation.   The Prophets II, page 6

The Divine Within

The individual confronts that which cannot be expressed in words. Heschel insists  this is not a psychological state but an encounter with a mystery “within and beyond things and ideas.” The divine is “within” because the self is “something transcendent in disguise.” The divine is “beyond” because it also is “a message that discloses unity where we see diversity; that discloses peace where we are involved in discord…God means: No one is ever alone.”

Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love; give preference to one another in honor; not lagging behind in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to prayer, contributing to the needs of the saints, practicing hospitality. Romans 12:9-13 

Once the believer experiences the divine pathos, he becomes equipped with the power of God’s love to love God and others. The compassion expressed by God’s care of His creation becomes the motivation of each believer to enunciate that same compassion to others by preferring others in honor and being hospitable to all. “The certainty of God’s love, mercy, and compassion enabled the prophets to accept His anger. To the prophets, the gulf that separates man from God is transcended by His pathos.”     

In sum, the divine pathos is the unity of the eternal and the temporal, of meaning and mystery, of the metaphysical and the historical. It is the real basis of the relation between God and man, of the correlation of Creator and creation, of the dialogue between the Holy One of Israel and His people. The characteristic of the prophets is not foreknowledge of the future, but insight into the present pathos of God.     The Prophets II, page 11