Unbelief

UNBELIEF. - Term used in theology to indicate the absence or the repudiation of the supernatural virtue of faith: it is therefore a form of infidelity. If the lack of faith depends on absolute impossibility or on invincible ignorance, one has so-called improper incredulity, also called negative, which is found, for example, in children before Baptism and in pagan adults to whom the Gospel has not yet been announced. This incredulity 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 contrary, incredulity properly so called, or positive incredulity, since it is due to voluntary ignorance or to the conscious denial of faith, is gravely culpable (cf. John 15:22; Rom. 11:20; II Thess. 1:8-10). Here we are dealing only with positive incredulity, which can be brought about in various ways: a) First of all, by the voluntary denial of the motives of credibility, a denial which, by suppressing the preambles of faith, renders all belief impossible. Accordingly, anyone who professes atheism is an unbeliever, because by denying the existence of the witness, who is God, he removes from faith every foundation. The same must be said of the conscious denial of, or positive doubt about, the fact of Revelation.

b) Incredulity also occurs by rejecting 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, whoever denied or positively doubted the omniscience of God or his veracity would place himself in the condition of being unable to believe, because he would come to deny or to doubt the truth of his testimony.

c) Incredulity can result furthermore from the denial of, or positive doubt about, the material object of faith. Considered under this aspect, incredulity is complete if it entails the denial of the whole content of Christian Revelation, as happens in the believer who abandons the Church to adhere to a false religion, for example to Buddhism; it is partial if it implies the repudiation of some or even of a single revealed truth, as happens in the believer who renounces the Catholic faith in order to give his name to a heretical sect, for example to Calvinism.

d) Finally one arrives at incredulity by impugning 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.

Incredulity is generally considered by authors as the greatest sin, after formal hatred of God. Indeed sin consists essentially in turning away from God, and consequently it will be the more grave the more it separates one from God. Now incredulity separates one from God to the greatest degree possible (cf. Sum. Theol., 2a-2ae, q. 10, 1, 3), especially because, by rejecting faith, it destroys the principle of salvation, the foundation and the root of justification (cf. Denz-U, 801). The malice of incredulity can then vary according to the different aspects under which it is regarded. Thus as to extension, that is, the number of truths denied or of errors professed, the incredulity of the pagan is greater (more extensive) than that of the Jew, the incredulity of the Jew greater than that of the heretic. On the other hand, as to intensity, that is, the voluntary and deliberate resolution to renounce the faith, the ranking follows the inverse order. In fact, in the pagan who has had no news of the Gospel, or only insufficient and inaccurate news, faith is simply absent: it is a deficiency, not a fault, and therefore his is a purely negative incredulity. In the Jew, on the other hand, it is positive, culpable, and therefore worse than the incredulity of the pagan, because the Jew knows the whole revelation of the Old Testament, which he has corrupted with his false interpretations. But far more grave is the incredulity of the heretic, who, by pertinaciously repudiating the divine dogma, comes to destroy the virtue of faith that already existed in his soul by virtue of the sacrament of Baptism. For this reason St. Thomas affirms that, considered in itself, "the incredulity of the heretic is the worst" (Sum. Theol., 2a-2ae, q. 10, a. 3).

The intimate reason for incredulity lies in the very nature of faith, which is not only a free act, but also difficult to accomplish, because it demands assent concerning truths of which no internal demonstration is given to us, an assent not only theoretical but also practical, by which the whole man must be interiorly reformed in such a way that faith becomes the norm of his entire life through the observance of precepts that are burdensome and repugnant to corrupted nature. It is clear, then, that faith cannot be unanimous, and that, consequently, the fact of incredulity occurs, due to the resistances of pride (John 6:44), of disordered attachment to earthly goods (Eph. 4:17; I Tim. 6:10), of luxury, of avarice (Luke 16:27-31) and of the other passions. Positive incredulity always has its cause in evil works (John 3:19) and for this reason the Vatican Council declared that the Catholic can never abandon his faith without sin (Denz-U, 1797).

Incredulity must not be regarded as a rare, extraordinary phenomenon, but as a permanent, continuous fact, which has always occurred and is always renewed, every time that God reveals himself to man either directly or indirectly through the mediation of others (Isa. 53:1; Rom. 10:16). Life and history are set upon this great choice: God-not God, faith-incredulity. Until the end of the world the preaching of the Gospel will always arrive at the same result that the apostolate of St. Paul had among the Jews residing in Rome, of whom "some believed the things which were spoken, and some believed not" (Acts 28:30). Nevertheless, if incredulity is a persistent fact that is mysteriously rooted in the life of humanity, it does not always present the same physiognomy: both in its causes and in its reasons it is measured by the modalities of the time and depends more or less on the vicissitudes of history. Thus at the beginning of the evangelical preaching, beyond Judaism there emerge many other forms of incredulity, such as Gnosticism, Marcionism, Montanism, etc., which were followed by the Christological and Trinitarian heresies of the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries. Manichaeism had a great diffusion; energetically opposed and decisively beaten by St. Augustine, it reappeared strong and threatening in the renewed form of the heresy of the Albigensians. Other heretical sects came to be added to the preceding ones in the following centuries. But it is with the Protestant Reformation and especially with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that incredulity ceases to be partial and becomes complete, inasmuch as it is not limited to the repudiation of one or of some truths defined by the Church, but rejects in a block the entire deposit of Revelation and even denies the possibility of the supernatural order. Thus one arrives at naturalism and rationalism, which in the 18th and 19th centuries end by concentrating solely on reason applied to the study of phenomena and their laws, that is to say, on science.

Among the principal forms of incredulity still alive and operative in the intellectual, moral, political and social order, mention must be made of communism, the existentialism of Heidegger and of Sartre, the idealism of G. Gentile and of B. Croce, the pure rationalism of P. L. Couchoud, laicism, indifferentism. Incredulity is also implicit in modernism (Denz-U, 2109).

Emanuele Chietini