Pathos (parvae animae I ex III)

Humans have always seen themselves as more than simply bodies. We often talk about our social, psychological, emotional, and physical needs. We separate our souls from our bodies. In the Classical period, depending on whom you asked, you would hear a different set-up for who we are. The Romans saw us as corpus (body), spiritus (life-essence), and anima (soul). The Greeks devided who we are as people even further: pathos (emotion, and base feelings), ethos (character and morality), and logos (intellect).
The Greek divisions are still obvious in our common dialectic. We speak of logic, a purely intellectual faculty. We speak of ethics, those things that tell us who we are as people. And we use words such as sympathy (feeling the same), pathetic (something emotional), and telepathy (distant feeling).
Today, I should like to investigate the idea of pathos more fully.
As previously mentioned, pathos would be what we would label today as emotion. Ancient rhetoricians, and even rhetoricians of today, often appealed to pathos in their speeches. Orators appealed to the people's emotions, striking into them fear of their opponents, pity for themselves and pride for what the speaker is referring to.
The great Cicero often appealed to the Pathos of his listeners, conjuring up such stirring anecdotes that his audience, often the senate or other politicians, would feel compelled out of emotional duty, to side with him. After reading countless speeches about how evil and menacing Cataline was, it was obvious why the Cataline conspiracy was such a big deal in Roman history.
Similarly today, we are appealed to pathetically by our entertainment we enjoy. We watch a movie where a character faces insurmountable odds and comes out on top and we feel elation. No person back in 1976 who saw Rocky could have watched the dramatic ending without feeling inspired. Movies like Rudy, Remember the Titans, and Radio all make us feel a certain sense of euphoria and determination to fulfill our own possibilities. Stories such as Romeo and Juliet, Antigone, or Oedipus Rex, on the other hand, make us feel miserable and give us a sense of dysphoria.
Elementary, Middle and High Schools, corporations and other social groups hire "motivational speakers" who speak strictly to our pathos, inspiring us by giving us feelings of our own possibilities.
Similarly, in Ministerial circles, the pathos is commonly evoked (as are the ethos and logos, but more on those later). A priest, pastor or minister often times preaches sob stories, or inspiring tales to get us to make a change in our behavior. Does this work? Of course it does. Who, when reading about the faithful servant who worked all his life and felt unaccomplished was revered by large masses post mortem, or the disadvantaged child whose faith was rewarded, can help but want to be a better person?
Is this wrong? Should our sermons and homilies draw us to change based on our easily swayed emotions? Personally, I should think that we ourselves can make ourselves more immune to this kind of rhetoric. However, I do acknowledge that if the world is already driven by pathetically inclining people to adhere to one's specific ideologies, then those who are in the congregation are just as viable subjects for pathetic rhetoric as any other people.
So, yes, we are often swayed to be better servants because of our emotions and feelings. However, this is not wrong. In fact, I would argue that the tool of pathetic rhetoric is aptly fitted to reach out to those who are highly inclined to pathological suggestion.