Great refusal

The great refusal (Italian: il gran rifiuto) is the error attributed by poet Dante to one of the souls he found trapped aimlessly at the Vestibule of Hell (in his poem Inferno, first part of the Divine Comedy).^[1][2] Though occasionally taken as referring to Esau, Diocletian, or Pontius Pilate, the phrase is usually believed to refer to Pope Celestine V, and to his laying down of the papacy on the grounds of age. Dante may have deliberately conflated some or all of these figures in the unnamed shade.

Dante[]

Behind Dante’s adverse judgement of Celestine was the Thomist concept of recusatio tensionis, the unworthy refusal of a task that is within one’s natural powers.^[3]: 42 Petrarch, however, disagreed with Dante’s appraisal. He believed that Celestine’s adoption of the contemplative life was a virtuous act.^[3]: 44 It was an early modern instance of the tension between lives of action and contemplation: the vita activa and the vita contemplativa.^[4]

Later elaborations[]

• Critic Northrop Frye considered that “the ‘gran refiuto’, the voluntary surrender of one’s appointed function, is a frequent source of tragedy in Shakespeare.”^[5] He suggests that Lear’s Division of the Kingdoms is an example of this.

• Alfred North Whitehead used the phrase great refusal for the determination not to succumb to the facticity of things as they are—to favour instead the imagination of the ideal.^[6]

• Herbert Marcuse took up Whitehead’s concept to call for a refusal of the consumer society in the name of the liberating powers of art.^[7]

• Jacques Le Goff considered that “the ‘hippie’ movement is indicative of the permanent character—re-emerging at precise historical conjunctures—of the adepts of the gran rifiuto.^[8]

References[]

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