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"). 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. Petrarch, however, disagreed with Dante’s appraisal. He believed that Celestine’s adoption of the contemplative life was a virtuous act. It was an early modern instance of the tension between lives of action and contemplation: the "vita activa" and the "vita contemplativa".