ABJECTION. - In ascetics, according to the etymology of the term (abicere), it means the generous renunciation of one's own personality or dignity, not only by procuring or accepting humiliations, but by seeking a habitual state of life held in contempt by men. Understood in this way, a. is therefore an attitude of excellent, indeed heroic, humility. Its stimulus is the example of Christ (Phil. 2:6-7); hence it is often encountered in the lives of the saints and is proposed by the doctrine of perfection (Imitation of Christ, I, 2, 9; II, 2; III, 13, 20, etc.).
God frequently contributes to forming the state of a., especially for souls whom he calls to mystical union. These are subjected to trials that are particularly painful and independent of their free choice: external trials (repugnant illnesses requiring very troublesome care and disgusting to others, persecutions by men, calumnies, deprivation of temporal goods or of liberty, etc.) and internal trials (vehement temptations, darkness of conscience, a vivid sense of one's own sins or defects, desolation and sadness, repugnance to good, doubts of illusion regarding divine gifts, fear of one's own damnation, etc.). "These are states in which the soul seems to succumb, to decompose, to go to ruin or to vanish. Its powers become inert, all the springs of its life are slackened: it is like a spiritual paralysis. The soul has only the feeling of a total annihilation" (C. Gay). Cf. also the passive purifications, the nights of the senses and of the spirit, in the doctrine of St. John of the Cross. In such a state, however, the soul must be far from voluntary inertia: it must rather struggle more than ever, corresponding to actual grace and remaining with Jesus in tribulations (cf. Lk. 22:28). As in a. it dies and is buried with Christ, so with him it will rise again, free from the many impediments to union with God, especially from vanity and pride.
In this connection, grave and most disastrous errors have not been lacking in the past: thus Luther, because of his pessimistic conception of fallen nature and because he confused original sin with concupiscence, affirmed that all the movements of the latter are already sins; and since such movements are inevitable, sin too would be inevitable. Thus the Quietists, whose principal exponent is Miguel de Molinos (v.), by making the perfect life consist in a state of total annihilation of the powers of the soul and of voluntary inactivity ("to wish to act is to offend God, while He wishes to act alone in us"; he who has reached mystical death "has no longer a will, and God has taken it from him"), arrived at moral irresponsibility, openly drawing from it the consequence that it is lawful to abandon oneself to temptation and to perform nefarious actions, this being conducive to humiliation (Props. 1-4, 41-52, 55-57, 61, etc., condemned by Innocent XI). Such enormities have nothing to do with the state of a. in the conception of Catholic doctrine: for this reason the Church has condemned Quietism under the various forms in which it has presented itself, especially that of passivity in temptations.
In the 17th century, Father Jean Chrysostome of Saint-Lô, of the Franciscan Third Order, founded in France the Society of Holy A.
BIBL.: sources
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menta ecclesiastica christianae perfectionis. Rome 1931, pp. 269-310; C. Gay, Vita e virtù cristiane considerate nello stato religioso, Italian trans., I. Padua 1937, pp. 452-56. Ambrogio M. Fiocchi