Jesus set down a hard requirement for discipleship: to deny oneself and take up one's cross. Christian tradition gave this self-denial the name abnegation, and over the centuries spiritual writers treated it as essential to the Christian life. Drawing especially on Catholic authors from 1500 to 1900, this book approaches abnegation from a perspective often neglected today: the liturgical life. Abnegation, the author argues, is not merely moral discipline or gloomy renunciation; it is fundamentally an act of worship. To unite oneself to the will of Christ is to relinquish the rule of one's own will and participate in Christ's offering to the Father.
Sin seeks self-glory; liturgy seeks the glory of God. In this light, self-denial becomes not an end in itself, but a movement of love through which worship is purified and redirected toward its true object. Placed within the horizon of liturgy, the vocabulary of abnegation, annihilation, and mortification takes on a different character altogether. What can appear severe or forbidding becomes mystical rather than merely moralistic: an act of love at the heart of Christian worship, belonging not only to monasteries or spiritual elites, but to the whole Church before God.
