Gregory Palamas and the Theology of prayer: key insights for priestly formation
Keywords:
Gregory Palamas, prayer, divine energies, essence and energies, participation, deification, Hesychasm, priestly formation, patristic theology, experience of GodAbstract
This article examines the theology of prayer in Gregory Palamas through his doctrinal articulation of the distinction between divine essence and energies, situating it within the context of the fourteenth-century Hesychast controversy and the Greek patristic tradition. Against approaches that reduce prayer to a devotional, psychological, or merely ascetical practice, the study argues that, in Palamas’s theology, prayer constitutes the ontological locus in which the human being truly participates in the divine life. Through a hermeneutical analysis of primary sources and a critical engagement with modern scholarship, the article explores the notions of participation (methexis) and deification (theosis) as central categories of Palamite anthropology and soteriology. It is argued that the experience of prayer, understood as real participation in the uncreated energies, does not compromise divine transcendence or simplicity, but rather presupposes and safeguards them. Finally, the article considers the implications of this theology for contemporary priestly formation, proposing an understanding of presbyteral formation as a process of ontological configuration in communion with God, in which doctrine, spiritual experience, and ecclesial life are integrally united.
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