Annotatio CCV
”Thou art just, O Lord, and thy judgment is right.” — Psalm 118:137
Ambrose, in the commentaries, inquiring into the allegory of the letter צ [Tzadi], from which this little verse begins, seems to be in the opinion that, the sin of unbelief remaining, certain offenses are remitted to unbelievers by God.1 For he thus writes: “There is also another kind of consolation for those who have paid grave penalties, as it is written in Isaiah: ‘Comfort ye my people, for his sin is loosed’2 — even if faith was lacking, the penalty had satisfied.” St. Thomas, in the third volume of the Summa Theologica, question 86, article 3, illustrating this passage, says: “In that word of Ambrose, ‘faith’ cannot be taken for that by which one believes in Christ; because, as Augustine says upon that [saying] of John, ‘If I had not come, and had not spoken to them, they would not have sin’3 — namely, [the sin] of unbelief (for this is the sin by which all sins are held [retained]) — but it is taken for conscience, because sometimes, through the penalties which one patiently sustains, he obtains the remission of a sin of which he has no awareness.”