THE Treatise on Prayer has us follow the line of the phases of [Origen’s] mystical development through the phases of prayer itself: deesis, asking for goods that are spiritual but still limited; proseuchē, in which we abandon ourselves to pure intercourse with God; and doxologia, in which we are wholly absorbed in his glorification. With Origen as with Clement, as vocal prayer is interiorized and purified, it goes beyond itself into the prayer of silence, characterizing the state of union with God in a liberation from the body. Then prayer becomes vision, but it is a vision in love, and so it flowers into enteuxis, that is, intercession for our brothers.

Origen's insistence, in this treatise, on the fact that prayer must always ascend to the Father through the Son, and never stop at the latter, must be understood in the same way as we have explained the opening out of the mysticism of the Logos into a mysticism of God. In both cases, and for the same reason, there is no question of relegating Christ to a secondary rank, as if his divinity was not fully recognized. It is simply a matter of adapting our participation in the life of the Trinity to the dynamism of this life, which causes everything to reascend to the Father through the Son in the Spirit, as everything proceeds from the Father in the inverse order.
 

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