Alexandrin de La Ciotat

Alexandrin de La Ciotat (born Honoré Colomb; 1629–1706), also known as Alexandrin de La Cieutat and, in Latin, Alexandrinus Civitatensis, was a French Capuchin friar, preacher, spiritual director, and mystical writer. A member of the Capuchin province of Saint-Louis, he is known for his only published work, Le Parfait Dénuement de l'âme contemplative, a treatise on interior solitude, mystical denudation, mental prayer, acquired and infused contemplation, the prayer of quiet, and the discernment of authentic and false passivity in prayer.

Alexandrin belonged to the seventeenth-century French Capuchin and Franciscan tradition of mystical theology associated with Benoît de Canfield, Hendrik Herp, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and related authors. His work was approved by the Dominican theologian Alexandre Piny, and was later praised by Henri Bremond as a true treatise of mysticism.

Life

Honoré Colomb was born at La Ciotat in 1629. His father was the captain of a merchant ship. In 1648 he made profession in the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin under the religious name Alexandrin de La Ciotat. The name followed the Capuchin custom of identifying friars by their town of origin.^[1][2]

Alexandrin belonged to the Capuchin province of Saint-Louis. He was known for piety and zeal in preaching, and served as guardian in several convents of his province. He died at Marseille in 1706.^[1][3]

Little else is known of his life. Later accounts emphasize that he lived and worked in the south of France, away from the chief literary and ecclesiastical centres of the kingdom.^[4] His book nevertheless places him within a wider French Capuchin mystical current, one in which the life of prayer was treated as the aim of religious observance.^[5]

Works

Alexandrin is known for one work, Le Parfait Dénuement de l'âme contemplative, dans un chemin de trois jours, par lequel Dieu nous appelle à la solitude intérieure, afin que nous nous consacrions à lui dans la plus haute contemplation. It was published at Paris by Denys Thierry in 1680.^[6] A second, revised and enlarged edition appeared at Marseille in 1681, published by Charles Brébion.^[7] The full title alludes to Exodus 5:3, in which God calls his people to go a three days' journey into the wilderness to sacrifice to him.

The book is arranged as a three-day itinerary toward interior solitude and contemplation. Alexandrin describes the first day as the stripping of man from man, the second as the stripping of the soul from the soul, and the third as the stripping of the spirit from the spirit.^[8] In the first part he treats detachment from riches, human respect, resentment, self-love, servile fear, spiritual sensuality, purity of intention, and mental prayer. In the second he treats the interior operations of the soul, recollection, introversion, acquired contemplation, and the passage from meditation toward contemplation. In the third he treats negative or purely mystical contemplation, passive prayer, imageless contemplation, and union with God.^[9]

The volume also includes a treatise on ecstasies, ravishments, revelations, and illusions, and ends with what the title calls a concise key to the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.^[1][2]

The work received approbations from Savignac, a doctor of the Sorbonne, and from Alexandre Piny, a Dominican theologian. Savignac praised the book for explaining the way of detachment, the illuminative life, acquired contemplation, and negative or purely mystical contemplation.^[10] Piny praised Alexandrin for treating the most mysterious questions of the mystical life and highest contemplation with clarity and conviction, especially the possibility of contemplation without forms or images and the fruitfulness of ceasing from one's own operations in order to let God act.^[11][12]

Spiritual teaching

Sources and tradition

Alexandrin's mystical theology belongs to a Dionysian and Franciscan current. Jacques de Blois, in the Dictionnaire de spiritualité, says that Alexandrin is linked with Dionysian theology through Hendrik Herp and Benoît de Canfield, while drawing especially on personal experience.^[1] Bremond likewise describes him as a disciple of Herp and an informed representative of the Franciscan tradition.^[12]

The work also shows affinities with the broader Rheno-Flemish and Franciscan mystical tradition. Alexandrin cites or echoes authors such as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Bonaventure, Jan van Ruusbroec, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and Teresa of Ávila.^[13] Dominique Tronc notes that Alexandrin had read Le Jour mystique by the Capuchin Pierre de Poitiers, published in 1671, and that at least one passage of Le Parfait Dénuement follows it closely.^[14]

Denudation

The central theme of Alexandrin's work is dénuement, or denudation: the stripping of the soul before God. In the introduction to Le Parfait Dénuement, he gathers several traditional expressions of mystical theology, including immediate union with God, seeing God as far as possible in this life, holy idleness, death or annihilation in oneself, deification, and transformation in God, and interprets them as converging upon the same reality. To be united to God without intermediary means the complete stripping away of created things; to cease acting means the stripping away of sensitive and intellectual operations; to die or be annihilated in oneself means the stripping away of reflections and thoughts.^[8][15]

This denudation is not merely moral renunciation. Alexandrin presents it as the purification of the whole human person so that the soul may be restored to simplicity and resemblance to God. Sin, in his account, divides the soul, multiplies its powers, and separates it from the simplicity of its origin. The soul returns to God by being stripped of creatures, self-will, images, and inward multiplicity.^[8]

Alexandrin gives the doctrine a strongly Christological form. He presents the nakedness of Christ on the cross as the supreme lesson in mystical theology: Christ, unable to teach by words or gestures at the moment of his Passion, teaches by his nakedness that the soul must be stripped of sin, creatures, and self in order to approach the Father and be united to God's will.^[8][16]

Mental prayer and contemplation

Alexandrin wrote for souls who, in his view, were often hindered by uncertainty and lack of experienced spiritual direction. He says in the preface that some spiritual persons fail to advance in prayer because they are not taught that the ways by which God leads them are elevations toward contemplation. His book presents itself as a kind of celestial map by which the soul may leave the world and return to God.^[17][18]

He maintains that mental prayer is not reserved for clerics, religious, or learned persons. In the first day of the book he argues that all Christians, according to their capacity, ought to practise mental prayer, can practise it, and already possess in ordinary human love an analogy for what prayer requires.^[19] For this reason, he describes mental prayer as an art of loving God, using the language of love in order to make the practice accessible to lay and secular readers.^[20]

Alexandrin distinguishes meditation from contemplation. Meditation is discursive and reflective; it reasons upon divine truths and draws from them affections and resolutions. Contemplation, by contrast, is a simpler regard toward God, increasingly freed from multiplicity and discursive operation.^[21] He describes the ordinary progression as passing from meditation to affective prayer, from affective prayer to acquired contemplation, and from acquired contemplation to infused and passive contemplation.^[22] Yet he adds that God may raise the simple and unlearned directly and suddenly to the heights of contemplation.^[23]

In the third part of the work, Alexandrin reduces prayer to three principal kinds. The first is meditation, understood as reasoning or reflection. The second is an effusion of grace or divine touch at the summit of the spirit, raising the will to divine love and illuminating the understanding; this is affirmative contemplation. The third is negative and purely mystical contemplation.^[23]

Negative and imageless contemplation

Alexandrin's most distinctive teaching concerns negative or purely mystical contemplation. He describes it as contemplation without forms or images, an obscure repose in which the soul does not perceive the object it contemplates, the manner in which it tends toward it, the way in which it rests in it, or how it has been lost in it.^[24][21]

In this state, the soul does not act by its ordinary natural operations. Alexandrin says that one should not strictly say that the soul rests in God, since even resting would imply a natural action of the soul. Rather, God rests in the ground of the soul, fills it with his presence, and occupies it with his operation.^[21] The soul is passive not by vacancy, negligence, or laziness, but because it receives the divine operation without attempting to increase or preserve it by its own movement.^[24]

Alexandrin also insists that negative contemplation does not always begin as total abstraction from all thought and image. It commonly begins with simple and denuded likenesses or views, which are gradually purified until they vanish into a repose in which the soul, filled with God, cannot freely form desires or thoughts.^[25] The soul must therefore not reject every light or sensible union as soon as it appears; rather, it must avoid clinging to such lights as the end of contemplation and allow itself to be transformed beyond them.^[25]

Passivity and false idleness

Because Alexandrin wrote in the period of the controversies over Quietism, his teaching on passivity is careful. De Blois notes that Alexandrin wrote amid the condemnations that affected many spiritual works, but judges his doctrine on prayer to be firm and solid.^[1]

Alexandrin distinguishes true passive contemplation from artificial idleness. He warns that some souls try to enter passive contemplation by their own efforts, suspending thoughts and images in order to place themselves in idleness. Such persons, he argues, remain in a natural abstraction, a dangerous repose, and a false idleness, since passive contemplation is an operation into which God alone can introduce the soul.^[26][27]

At the same time, Alexandrin warns that souls genuinely drawn into quiet prayer may be tempted to believe that they are wasting their time because they are no longer producing distinct acts. Bremond cites Alexandrin's warning that the devil may use the soul's own reasoning to persuade contemplatives that they are idle during this divine occupation.^[28][27] For Alexandrin, the cessation of natural operations is fruitful only when it is consent to God's action, not self-induced emptiness.

Pure love and spiritual purification

The first part of Le Parfait Dénuement treats moral and ascetic purification as the necessary foundation of contemplation. Alexandrin distinguishes servile and interested love from filial and pure love. Servile love seeks spiritual profit, merit, consolation, or security; filial love seeks only the good pleasure of God.^[29]

He also criticizes what he calls spiritual sensuality: attachment to sweetness, sensible devotion, extraordinary graces, or the taste of prayer. Drawing on Ruusbroec's language, he describes some spiritual persons as seeking savour and consolation rather than God himself. Such attachment, in his account, causes instability, discouragement, and possessiveness in prayer.^[30][16]

Alexandrin's teaching on purity of intention is strongly influenced by Benoît de Canfield's doctrine of the divine will. He commends a method of acting actually, uniquely, voluntarily, assuredly, clearly, and promptly for the sole purpose of pleasing God.^[31] In this respect, his mystical theology is inseparable from the purification of ordinary acts, motives, affections, and self-regard.

Reception and interpretation

Alexandrin's work received formal approval before publication. Savignac, a doctor of the Sorbonne, commended the book for guiding souls through the spiritual life, acquired contemplation, and negative mystical contemplation.^[10] Piny's approbation was more explicitly mystical. He praised Alexandrin for showing that contemplatives may contemplate without forms or images, that such contemplation remains luminous even when nothing distinct is perceived, and that prayer is never more fruitful than when the soul ceases from its own operation in order to let God act.^[11][12]

Henri Bremond gave Alexandrin a favourable place in his history of French spirituality. He called Le Parfait Dénuement a beautiful book and a treatise of mysticism in the strong sense of the term.^[32] In his discussion of Piny, Bremond described Alexandrin as a lucid intelligence, an experienced director, and a writer of distinction.^[12] Bremond also used Alexandrin to illustrate the agreement of different mystical schools on the substance of contemplative doctrine, even when their vocabularies and methods differed.^[12]

Bremond contrasts Alexandrin with Piny. Alexandrin gives an ordered mystical theology, distinguishing the three days or stages of meditation, acquired contemplation, and infused contemplation. Piny, in Bremond's interpretation, tends to simplify the mystical life by reducing it to abandonment to God's good pleasure. Yet Bremond argues that the two writers agree on the essential point: mystical repose is a perfect abandonment of the soul to God's will and an annihilation leading to union.^[12]

Modern Franciscan and mystical scholarship has continued to treat Alexandrin as a representative of the seventeenth-century Capuchin mystical reform. The Franciscan Authors database identifies him as a Provençal Capuchin spiritual writer in the apophatic tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius.^[3] Dominique Tronc includes Alexandrin among the figures of seventeenth-century Franciscan mysticism and presents substantial extracts from Le Parfait Dénuement on pure or negative contemplation, passive prayer, and the marks of the soul called to mystical contemplation.^[33]