Jean Sallier

Jean Sallier (born July 7, 1806 in Aix-en-Provence , † January 2, 1861 in the Grande Chartreuse ) was a French Roman Catholic clergyman, Carthusian and mystic.

Life

The prevented monk

Uldaric Sallier came from a Provencal noble family on his mother's side and a wealthy legal family on his father's side. His father François Sallier (1767-1831) was mayor of Aix from 1802 to 1806, where a street is named after him. Uldaric grew up in Aix and on the family castle Vauclaire in Meyrargues . At the age of eleven he saw the death of his older brother (as a result of an accident). He practiced in contact with Eugen von Mazenod , Bishop Pierre-Ferdinand de Bausset-Roquefort (1757-1829), Bishop François Melchior Charles Bienvenu de Miollis (1753-1843), the Jesuit Nicholas Tuite MacCarthy (1769-1833) and other clergymen early in piety and felt called to seclusion from the age of 17, but met bitter resistance from both parents. At her request, he continued his theology studies in the famous Saint-Sulpice seminary in Issy-les-Moulineaux (where he had François Libermann as a fellow student), but was forced to return home by the July Revolution of 1830 .

Escape to the Charterhouse

After the death of his father, he was ordained a deacon in 1832. Since his mother was still against admission to the monastery, he fled the seminary in Aix in 1833 and hiked via Grenoble to the Charterhouse Grande Chartreuse. There he was welcomed by the Superior General Jean-Baptiste Mortaize (1798-1870) and dressed on October 5, 1833 after a month of postulate. He took the religious name Jean (after John the Baptist). At the end of 1833 he was ordained a priest in Grenoble, made his vows in 1834 and was immediately promoted to novice master.

Collegno, Montrieux and Death in the Grande Chartreuse

In 1838 he was sent to the Collegno Charterhouse in the west of Turin to stabilize the convent there . In the actual mission he failed because he was not fit to be a superior. But he won an admirer and friend in the person of King Charles Albert of Sardinia-Piedmont . From 1841 to 1846 he was a novice master there (and also once traveled to the Certosa of Pavia ). His mother, who had visited him several times in the Grande Chartreuse and in Collegno, died in 1846. He himself, now deaf, was recalled to the Grande Chartreuse and in 1847 transferred to the Montrieux Charterhouse near Toulon , which had been bought back a few years earlier . He stayed there for ten years, but his growing reputation for holiness caused unrest, so that the new Superior General Charles Marie Saisson (1806–1877) brought him back in 1857. Three years later he died of stomach cancer in the Grande Chartreuse. He left behind various unprinted writings as well as 1500 letters.

Appreciation

Sallier once said that outside the monastery he felt like a fish without water. In this way he corresponded to the ideal of piety, which was not atypical in the 19th century, which was completely absorbed in contemplation and self-mortification (French: “la haine de soi”), mortification and privation. As a martyr of this ideal, his name found its way into the list of important representatives of spirituality, although he never published a line. For his contemporaries he embodied the ideal in such a perfect way that throughout his life their judgment accompanied him like a label: “un saint” (a saint).

literature

• Augustin Devaux: "SALLIER (JEAN), chartreux, 1806–1861". In: Dictionnaire de spiritualité 14, 1990, col. 239 f.
• Victor Marie Doreau: Vie du Père Dom Jean Sallier de l'ordre des Chartreux, 1806–1861 . Retaux-Bray, Paris 1888 ( online ).
• Philippe de Lignerolles and Jean-Pierre Meynard: Histoire de la spiritualité chrétienne. 700 auteurs spirituels. Editions de l'Atelier, Paris 1996, p. 216.

Web links

• Vauclaire Castle website