The Saints Confess That They Are Sinners

And so all the saints grieve with daily sighs over this weakness of their nature. As they search their shifting thoughts and the secret, inmost recesses of their conscience, they cry out in entreaty: “Do not enter into judgment with your servant, for in your sight no man living will be justified”; and: “Who will boast that he has a chaste heart? Or who will be confident that he is pure from sin?”; and again: “There is not a righteous man on earth who does good and does not sin”; and also: “Who knows his faults?” So they have recognized that man’s righteousness is weak and imperfect and always needs God’s mercy. That is why one of them, whose iniquities and sins God purged away with the live coal of his word sent from the altar, said, after that marvelous vision of God, after he had seen the Seraphim on high and heavenly mysteries had been revealed to him: “Woe is me! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” And I imagine that perhaps even then he would not have felt the uncleanness of his lips, had it not been given him to recognize the true and complete purity of perfection through the vision of God. At the sight of God he suddenly became aware of his own uncleanness, of which he had known nothing before. For when he says, “Woe is me! For I am a man of unclean lips,” he shows that his confession refers to his own lips and not to the uncleanness of the people, which comes after: “and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” [a]

But even when in his prayer he confesses the uncleanness of all sinners, he takes in, in his general plea, not only the mass of the wicked but the good as well, saying: “See, you are angry, and we have sinned. In them we have been always, and we will be saved. We have all become like one unclean, and all our righteousnesses like filthy rags.” What, I ask, could be clearer than this saying? The prophet includes not just one of our righteousnesses but all of them. Looking around at everything that is thought unclean and disgusting, because he could find nothing in the life of men fouler or more unclean, he chose to compare them to filthy rags. It is useless, then, to raise the sharp point of a nagging objection against this perfectly clear truth, as you did a little while ago when you said: “If no one is without sin, then no one is holy; and if no one is holy, then no one will be saved.” The puzzle of this question can be solved by the prophet’s testimony. “See,” he says, “you are angry, and we have sinned.” That is: when you rejected our pride of heart or our carelessness, and took your help away from us, at once the abyss of our sins swallowed us up. It is as if someone were to say to the bright body of the sun, “See, you have set, and at once murky darkness has covered us.” And yet, though he says here that the saints have sinned, and not only sinned but always remained in their sins, he does not altogether despair of salvation. He adds: “In them we have been always, and we will be saved.”

I will compare this saying, “See, you are angry, and we have sinned,” with the apostle’s words: “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?” Again, what the prophet adds, “In them we have been always, and we will be saved,” corresponds to the apostle’s next words: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” In the same way, this passage of the same prophet, “Woe is me! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips,” seems to agree with the words quoted above: “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?” And what follows in the prophet, “And see, one of the Seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a coal, or stone, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar. And he touched my mouth and said, ‘See, with this I have touched your lips, and your iniquity is taken away and your sin is purged,’” is just what seems to have fallen from the mouth of Paul when he says, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” You see, then, how all the saints truly confess that they are sinners, not so much in the person of the people as in their own. And yet they by no means despair of their salvation, but look for full justification from the grace and mercy of the Lord, since they do not hope to obtain it by virtue of their frail human state.