Pathos

I've been reading 'The Greek Way' by Edith Hamilton and have been impacted by the section on tragedy. Hamilton finds the tragic par excellance in Aeschylus. She notes that tragedy is the ability of a great soul to feel. It is not the innocent being punished. This, the innocent being punished, she categorically states, is pathos. When you hear the word pathos, you think immediately of pathetic, which sounds almost comic now that it is a word that has been misused for so long. Applying trajedy and pathos to the Iraqi war for example, I would conclude that the soldier doing the fighting is experiencing the tragic, in that he is a great soul who I'm sure is feeling deeply. I would apply pathos to the innocent child who has been killed under 'friendly' fire. The one whose picture doesn't make it into Time magazine, or Fox news, or some such other media outlet. In the tragic, there is hope, in that the great soul can feel great joy as well as great pain, and I suppose the Stoic would say it is not prudent to feel very deeply in either direction, whether happy or sad. But what is the poetic, philosophic soul to do, but feel deeply? On to pathos. This is the one that in real life is so heartbreaking. There is no hope. No supernal light in the blackness. There is just utter dispassionate and disinterested destruction and mindless extinction. Morally neutral, pathos is found in both the good and the evil, the result of fickle Fortune, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. An Iraqi child running down his street to retrieve a ball who gets caught in a hail of gunfire. Or from before, just one nameless child thrown into a mass grave with impunity, though the punitive would later catch up with the Despot who dug the nameless graves for the nameless. This is where one must walk cautiously if he is to keep his faith intact. The question of the heretic, 'whence evil'? Tragedy and pathos seem to be the conduit, the great regulators of evil. But I'm not going to delve any deeper here, but rather having stated the problem, will pose various answers in later posts.