On the basis of four treatises on prayer from the third century, this
paper investigates the role of angels in connection with the act of
praying. The sources are: Clement of Alexandria's Stromateis, Book 7, Origen's Peri Euchês, Tertullian's De Oratione and Cyprian's De Oratione Dominica.
Despite of the different emphases in these treatises, they all
accentuate the social relations connected with the act of praying. Most
important are the vertical relations to the triune God and the
horizontal relations to the fellow Christians. The authors, however,
envisioned that more celestial agents were involved in the act of
prayer, e.g. angels, but the authors understood the role of angels
differently. For instance, Clement describes the angels as praying by
themselves (Stromateis 7.7), whereas Origen points out that the angels pray with the Church (Peri Euchês 31.5); and Cyprian mentions the angel Raphael's role as mediator between humans and God (De Oratione Dominica
33). There are many more examples. The aim of the paper is to
investigate these different roles of angels with the purpose of
sketching out the "social world" in which the Late Antique Christians
shaped their Christian identity.
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