Alessandrino de La Ciotat

ALESSANDRINO de LA CIOTAT. - Capuchin mystical writer, in the world Honoré Colombo, b. at La Ciotat (Lower Provence) in 1629, took the religious habit in 1647, d. at Marseilles in 1706. Most pious, he was superior in various convents, a spiritual director and a zealous preacher. He left a single but precious work: Le parfait dénuement de l'âme contemplative... avec un traité des extases, ravissements, révélations et illuminations, published in Paris in 1680 and in a second, enlarged edition at Marseilles the following year.

The treatise is divided into three parts: the first deals with detachment from earthly things by means of voluntary poverty, in order to attend to the meditation of divine things; the second, with affective prayer and with active and passive contemplation; the third, the most important, with mystical contemplation, which consists in the union of the soul with God through the complete stripping away of everything and of itself, so as to live only the divine life. "The mystical life is a tomb, in which the contemplative soul dies to the natural life and to its own actions in order to live only the life of Jesus Christ." The solid doctrine and the lucid exposition earned A. the warm praises of Fr. Piny (v.).

Egidio Caggiano

raire du sentiment religieux en France, VII, Paris 1928, p. 88; J. De Blois, s. v. in DSp, I, col. 302.

Egidio Caggiano