INCREDULITY. — A term used in theology to indicate the absence or repudiation of the supernatural virtue of faith: it is therefore a form of infidelity. If the lack of faith depends on absolute impossibility or invincible ignorance, there is what is improperly called i. [incredulity], also called negative incredulity, found, for example, in children before Baptism and in pagan adults to whom the Gospel has not yet been announced. This i. is involuntary and therefore free from all guilt (Rom. 10, 14). For this reason Pius V, on 1 October 1567, condemned the following proposition of Baius: «purely negative infidelity is a sin in those to whom Christ has not been preached» (Denz-U, 1068). On the other hand, properly so called i., or positive i., since it is due to voluntary ignorance or the conscious denial of faith, is gravely culpable (cf. Io. 15, 22; Rom. 11, 20; II Thess. 1, 8-10). Here we are concerned only with positive i., which can take place in various ways:
a) First of all, through the voluntary denial of the motives of credibility, a denial which, by suppressing the preambles of faith, makes every belief impossible. Therefore anyone who professes atheism is an unbeliever, because, by denying the existence of the witness, who is God, he removes every foundation from faith. The same must be said of the conscious denial of, or positive doubt about, the fact of Revelation.
b) I. also occurs through rejection of the formal and specific motive of every act of faith, namely, the authority of God, the right of the divine witness to be believed when he attests a truth or a dogma. Consequently, anyone who denied or positively doubted God’s omniscience or his truthfulness would place himself in a condition in which he could not believe, because he would thereby deny or doubt the truth of his testimony.
c) I. can also result from denial of or positive doubt concerning the material object of faith. Considered under this aspect, i. is complete if it entails denial of the entire content of Christian Revelation, as occurs in the believer who abandons the Church in order to adhere to a false religion, e.g. Buddhism; it is partial if it entails rejection of some, or even only one, revealed truth, as occurs in the believer who repudiates the Catholic faith in order to join a heretical sect, e.g. Calvinism.
d) Finally, i. is reached by attacking the very norm of belief, which is the authority of the ecclesiastical magisterium: the conscious and pertinacious refusal to submit to its infallible definitions in matters of faith constitutes the sin of heresy.
I. is generally considered by authors the greatest sin after formal hatred of God. Indeed, sin consists essentially in turning away from God and consequently is graver the more it separates one from God. Now i. separates one from God to the greatest degree possible (cf. Sum. Theol., 2a-2ac, q. 10, 1, 3), above all because, by rejecting faith, it destroys the principle of salvation, the foundation and root of justification (cf. Denz-U, 801). The malice of i. may also vary according to the different aspects under which it is considered. Thus, with regard to extent, that is, the number of truths denied or errors professed, the i. of the pagan is greater (more extensive) than that of the Jew, and the i. of the Jew greater than that of the heretic. With regard, however, to intensity, that is, the voluntary and deliberate resolve to repudiate the faith, the order is reversed. In fact, in the pagan who has had no knowledge of the Gospel, or only insufficient and inaccurate knowledge, faith is simply absent: this is a deficiency, not a fault,
and therefore his is purely negative i. In the Jew, on the other hand, it is positive, culpable, and consequently worse than the i. of the pagan, because the Jew knows the whole revelation of the Old Testament, which he has corrupted through his false interpretations. But the i. of the heretic is far more serious; by pertinaciously repudiating divine dogma, he destroys the virtue of faith that already existed in his soul by virtue of the sacrament of Baptism. For this reason St. Thomas states that, considered in itself, «the i. of the heretic is the worst» (Sum. Theol., 2°–2°, q. 10, a. 3).
The intimate reason for i. lies in the very nature of faith, which is not only a free act but also difficult to perform, because it requires assent to truths for which no internal demonstration is given—an assent that is not merely theoretical but also practical, through which the whole person must be inwardly reformed, so that faith becomes the norm of the whole of life through the observance of precepts burdensome and repugnant to corrupt nature. It is clear, then, that faith cannot be unanimous and that, consequently, the fact of i. occurs, owing to the resistance of pride (Io. 6, 44), disordered attachment to earthly goods (Eph. 4, 17; I Tim. 6, 10), luxury, avarice (Lc. 16, 27–31), and the other passions. Positive i. always has its cause in evil works (Io. 3, 19), and therefore the First Vatican Council declared that a Catholic can never abandon his faith without sin (Denz-U, 1797).
I. should not be regarded as a rare or extraordinary phenomenon, but as a permanent, continuous fact, which has always occurred and is continually renewed whenever God reveals himself to man, either directly or indirectly through others (Is. 53, 1; Rom. 10, 16). Life and history are structured around this great choice: God—not God, faith—i. Until the end of the world, the preaching of the Gospel will always produce the same result as did the apostolate of St. Paul among the Jews residing in Rome, of whom «some believed the things said, while others did not believe» (Act. 28, 30). Yet, although i. is a persistent fact mysteriously rooted in the life of humanity, it does not always have the same features: both in its causes and in its reasons, it corresponds to the circumstances of the age and depends to a greater or lesser degree on the vicissitudes of history. Thus, at the beginning of evangelical preaching, besides Judaism there emerged many other forms of i., such as Gnosticism, Marcionism, Montanism, etc., followed by the Christological and Trinitarian heresies of the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries. Manichaeism gained wide currency; vigorously opposed and beaten back by St. Augustine, it reappeared, strong and threatening, in the renewed form of the heresy of the Albigensians. Other heretical sects were added to those already mentioned in subsequent centuries. But it was with the Protestant Reformation, and especially with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, that i. ceased to be partial and became complete, inasmuch as it no longer limited itself to repudiating one or several truths defined by the Church, but rejected the entire deposit of Revelation wholesale and even denied the possibility of the supernatural order. Thus naturalism and rationalism were reached; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they ended by concentrating exclusively on reason applied to the study of phenomena and their laws, that is, on science.
Among the principal forms of i. still alive and operative in the intellectual, moral, political, and social spheres, mention should be made of communism, the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre, the idealism of G. Gentile and B. Croce, the pure rationalism of P. L. Couchoud, laicism, and indifferentism. I. is also implicit in modernism (Denz-U, 2109).
Italian trans., Turin 1937; G. Baroni, È possibile perdere la fede senza peccato? Dottrina dei teologi dei secc. XVII-XVIII, Rome 1937; G. Combès, Le retour suffitif du paganisme, Paris 1938; G. B. Guzzetti, La perdita della fede nei cattolici, Venegono 1940; L. Febvre, Le problème de l'incroyance au XVIe siècle. La religion de Rabelais, Paris 1942; A. Dal Covolo, La psicologia dell'incrédulo alla luce del quarto Evangelo, Milan 1945; M. F. Sciacca, La filosofia oggi, Verona 1945; E. Borne, L'incroyance, in Apologétique, 2nd ed., Mayenne 1948, pp. 852–73; M. J. Guitton, Difficultés de croire, Paris 1948. For a broader and more complete bibliography, cf. Borne, op. cit., p. 873. Emanuele Chietini