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.