“A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves…”

Weeks’s definition of a Unitarian turns religious belief into a compact paradox: the Unitarian is said to disbelieve almost everything others believe, yet to retain a lively faith in something not quite known. Its wit comes from the mismatch between the confidence of the definition and the uncertainty at its center.

The Definition

Weeks describes a Unitarian as someone who “very earnestly disbelieves in almost everything that anybody else believes, and he has a very lively sustaining faith in he doesn't quite know what.” The sentence balances two opposing movements: energetic denial of other people’s convictions and sustained attachment to an object the believer cannot name. Faith is not absent, but its object remains indistinct.

Irony and Context

The definition arises when Philip Carey admits that he does not know what a Unitarian is and says that he genuinely wants to understand. Weeks answers with the wry formulation, then insists that he is not making fun of Philip. He claims to have reached the definition through years of “great labour” and “the most anxious, nerve-racking study.” That mock-scholarly insistence sharpens the joke: a supposedly hard-won account of religious identity ends by confessing uncertainty about what its central faith concerns.

Significance

The remark is both a caricature and a miniature account of belief under uncertainty. Its structure refuses a simple opposition between faith and disbelief: the Unitarian’s earnest negation coexists with a sustaining, if undefined, conviction. The contrast gives Weeks’s answer its comic force while leaving the underlying question unresolved.