Prophecy consists in the inspired communication of divine attitudes to
the prophetic consciousness. The divine pathos is the ground-tone of all
these attitudes. Echoed in almost every prophetic statement, pathos is
the central category of the prophetic understanding of God.
To the prophet, God does not reveal himself in an abstract absoluteness, but in a specific and unique way--in a personal and intimate revelation to the world. God does not simply command and expect obedience; He is also moved and affected by what happens in the world and he reacts accordingly. Events and human actions arouse in Him joy or sorrow, pleasure or wrath.
He is not conceived as judging facts, so to speak, "objectively," in detached impassibility. He reacts in an intimate and subjective manner, and thus determines the value of events. Quite obviously in the Biblical view, man's deeds can move Him, affect Him, grieve Him, or, on the other hand, gladden and please Him. This notion that God can be intimately affected, that he possesses not merely intelligence and will, but also feeling and pathos, basically defines the prophetic consciousness of God.
The idea of pathos is both a paradox and a mystery. He Who created All should be affected by what a tiny particle of His creation does or fails to do? Pathos is both a disclosure of His concern and a concealment of His power. The human mind may be inclined to associate the idea of God with absolute majesty, with unmitigated grandeur, with omnipotence and perfection. God is most commonly thought of as a First Cause that started the world's mechanism working, and which continues to function according to its own inherent laws and processes. It seems inconceivable that the Supreme Being should be involved in the affairs of human existence.
This divine pathos is the key to inspired prophecy. God is involved in the life of man. A personal relationship binds Him to Israel; there is an interweaving of the divine in the affairs of the nation. The divine commandments are not mere recommendations for man, but express divine concern, which, realized or repudiated, is of personal importance to Him. The reaction of the divine self (Amos 6:8; Jer. 5:9; 51:14), its manifestations in the form of love, mercy, disappointment or anger convey the profound intensity of the divine inwardness.
Pathos is not, however, to be understood as mere feeling. Pathos is an act formed with intention, depending on free will, the result of decision and determination. The divine pathos is the theme of the prophetic mission. The aim of the prophet is to reorient the people by communicating to them the divine pathos which, by impelling the people to "return," is itself transformed. Even "in the moment of anger" (Jeremiah 18:7), what God intends is not that His anger should be executed, but that it should be appeased and annulled by the people's repentance.
To the prophets, the divine pathos is not an absolute force which exists regardless of man, something ultimate or eternal. It is rather a reaction to human history, an attitude called forth by man's conduct; an effect, not a cause. Man is in a sense an agent, not only the recipient. It is within his power to deserve either the pathos of love or the pathos of anger.
God's concern for justice grows out of His compassion for man. The prophets do not speak of a divine relationship to an absolute principle or idea, called justice. They are intoxicated with the awareness of God's relationship to His people and to all men.
Justice is not important for its own sake; the validity of justice and the motivation for its exercise lie in the blessings it brings to man. For justice, as stated above, is not an abstraction, a value. Justice exists in relation to a person, and is something done by a person. An act of injustice is condemned, not because the law is broken, but because a person has been hurt. What is the image of a person? A person is a being whose anguish may reach the heart of God.
The task of the prophet is to convey the word of God. Yet the word is aglow with the pathos. One cannot understand the word without sensing the pathos. And one could not impassion others and remain unstirred. The prophet should not be regarded as an ambassador who must be dispassionate in order to be effective.
An analysis of prophetic utterances shows that the fundamental experience of the prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the divine pathos, a communion with the divine consciousness which comes about through the prophet's reflection of, or participation in, the divine pathos. The typical prophetic state of mind is one of being taken up into the heart of the divine pathos. Sympathy is the prophet's answer to inspiration, the correlative to revelation.
Prophetic sympathy is a response to transcendent sensibility. It is not, like love, an attraction to the divine Being, but the assimilation of the prophet s emotional life to the divine, an assimilation of function, not of being. The emotional experience of the prophet becomes the focal point for the prophet's understanding of God. He lives not only his personal life, but also the life of God. The prophet hears God's voice and feels His heart. He tries to impart the pathos of the message together with its logos. As an imparter his soul overflows, speaking as he does out of the fullness of his sympathy.
Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual's crime discloses society's corruption. In a community not indifferent to suffering, uncompromisingly impatient with cruelty and falsehood, continually concerned for God and every man, crime would be infrequent rather than common.
The prophet is not only a censurer and accuser, but also a defender and consoler. Indeed, the attitude he takes to the tension that obtains between God and the people is characterized by a dichotomy. In the presence of God he takes the part of the people. In the presence of the people he takes the part of God.
Is it proper to apply the term "personal" to God? We have suggested that the outstanding feature of a person is his ability to transcend himself, his attentiveness to the nonself. To be a person is to have a concern for the nonself. It is in this limited sense that we speak of God as a personal Being: He has concern for nondivine being.
He is always felt as He Who feels, thought of as He Who thinks, never as object, always as a Being Who wills and acts.
He is encountered not as universal, general, pure Being, but always in a particular mode of being, as personal God to a personal man, in a specific pathos that comes with a demand in a concrete situation. Prophetic thought is not focused upon His absoluteness, as indeterminate being, but upon His "subjective" being, upon His expression, pathos, and relationship. The dichotomy of transcendence and immanence is an oversimplification. For God remains transcendent in His immanence, and related in His transcendence.
Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets I, II (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1962). I.3-4, 8 II.24-26.
Copyright by Susannah Heschel. Reprinted with permission.
I disagree with the way Heschel writes, he mystifies the Lord. It's like Heschel is saying, "The Lord is personal, He has emotions. But let's not get carried away with humanizing Him." I say we are created in His image and that He is more personal than we are. We are less human than He is. God is the standard to live up to. Perhaps what it means to be truly human is to be more like God and less like an animal. God wants desperately to bring us up to His level, and He communicates directly to and through the prophets to tell them how to have this rich, wonderful personal relationship with Him, and stop being animals.
Posted by: John Plummer | November 19, 2016 at 09:46 AM
Since reading 'The Prophets' I have grown to appreciate and love this author. He is fresh and refreshing to my soul. It is good to see a Jewish man write in a balanced way of the character of God in a plain, profound but understanding way. We need more of his kind.
Posted by: Michael Ooten | October 09, 2013 at 05:40 PM