"Saints need sinners"
About this Quote
Watts lands a small, almost mischievous sentence that quietly undoes a whole moral architecture. "Saints need sinners" isn’t consolation for bad behavior; it’s a jab at the storybook binary that props up respectability. The line works because it flips the dependency: virtue doesn’t stand alone as a self-powered achievement. It needs contrast, an audience, a foil. Without the sinner, the saint loses the mirror that makes sainthood legible.
That inversion is classic Watts: the Zen-inflected insistence that opposites don’t merely coexist, they generate each other. The subtext is less "be nice to sinners" than "watch how your goodness is constructed". If sainthood requires someone else to play the degraded role, morality starts to look like a social arrangement, not a cosmic scoreboard. The saint’s purity can smuggle in a kind of hunger: for distinction, for superiority, for certainty. The sinner becomes functional, even necessary, to sustain the saint’s identity.
Context matters: Watts spent his career translating Eastern philosophy for a Western culture addicted to guilt, self-improvement, and moral bookkeeping. In that milieu, "saints need sinners" reads like a diagnosis of the purity economy: communities often organize around exclusion to produce the feeling of righteousness. It also hints at a deeper, more uncomfortable reciprocity: what we condemn "out there" often stabilizes what we want to believe about ourselves.
The sting is that it doesn’t let anyone off the hook. Sinners aren’t merely failing; saints aren’t merely winning. They’re co-authors of the same script.
That inversion is classic Watts: the Zen-inflected insistence that opposites don’t merely coexist, they generate each other. The subtext is less "be nice to sinners" than "watch how your goodness is constructed". If sainthood requires someone else to play the degraded role, morality starts to look like a social arrangement, not a cosmic scoreboard. The saint’s purity can smuggle in a kind of hunger: for distinction, for superiority, for certainty. The sinner becomes functional, even necessary, to sustain the saint’s identity.
Context matters: Watts spent his career translating Eastern philosophy for a Western culture addicted to guilt, self-improvement, and moral bookkeeping. In that milieu, "saints need sinners" reads like a diagnosis of the purity economy: communities often organize around exclusion to produce the feeling of righteousness. It also hints at a deeper, more uncomfortable reciprocity: what we condemn "out there" often stabilizes what we want to believe about ourselves.
The sting is that it doesn’t let anyone off the hook. Sinners aren’t merely failing; saints aren’t merely winning. They’re co-authors of the same script.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|
More Quotes by Alan
Add to List
