Grace? You immediately lost me when you matched Thomist vs Palamite. It would be helpful if you could spell out each one, with clear examples.
From our point of view, you Latins’ more rigorist approach to marriage (the forbidding of the ordination of married men to major orders in the Latin Rite, and the lack of ecclesiastical divorce) is not likely to be a sticking point, unless you would propose to change our canon law on these points to fit yours, particularly when the pastoral use of annulments has become functionally indistinguishable from our ecclesiastical divorce — a point I realize offends your hard-liners and idealists, but a fact nonetheless. (Incidentally, we too have annulments, but they are exceedingly rare.)
The greater problem would definitely be the Orthodox view that one can divorce up to 3 times.
There is yet another issue, not raised, but definitely a sticking point from the Catholic position (and I would appreciate it if you would refrain from using the term Latin, generically). That would be CONTRACEPTION. From what I have read, the Orthodox position has evolved over the past decade and now resides with the couple's spiritual director, i.e. pastor. This is not to suggest that catholics do not use artificial contraceptives but not in cooperation with official church teaching. Perhaps there are even certain priests who give a wink and not approval while carefully selecting their words. The bottom line is that the Catholic Church steadfastly maintains a ban on the use of all artificial contraceptives.
Your comments are, as always, appreciated.
Actually, on the matter of remarriage (the real issue in a divorce) there is a matching problem going the other way: you Latins will permit any number of marriages after widowing, while our limit of three marriages (with increasingly penitential rites for the second and third) applies even when the prior marriage ended in the death of a spouse. I suspect if the doctrinal and ecclesiological matters could be ironed out, allowing different canon law to persist in different rites of a reunited church could smooth out both problems.
On the matter of grace, the Orthodox understanding is that grace is the eternal and uncreated energy or activity of God in which we are able to participate (again after the fall) by virtue of the Incarnation, Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ and the descent of the Holy Spirit. The clearest formulation of this understanding occurs in the writings of St. Gregory Palamas, and in the decisions of the Fifth Council of Constantinople which vindicated his views against Barlaam of Calabria, who subsequently died in the communion of your church after being consecrated as Bishop of Gerace.
Aquinas, in contrast, wrote of “created grace”, even considering sanctifying grace within this category, holding that without created grace somehow the effect of grace would not be real (an argument I do not follow, perhaps because I am insufficiently familiar with the niceties of Aristotelian thought). To the Orthodox is absurd: the only holiness is God’s holiness, so sanctification, and thus sanctifying grace, must be a participation in God.
The critique of the doctrine of purgatory offered by St. Mark of Ephesus in his “Against the Latin Chapters Concerning Purgatorial Fire” also turns on this, and purgatory is seen by the Orthodox as part and parcel of the erroneous doctrine of created grace. (Though if you want, you can separate it out as another, separate, sticking point.)
You are also right that contraception might be a sticking point — the Orthodox position does take into account the fact that the ancient understanding of conception on which patristic commentary which equated contraception with abortion rested is inaccurate — so that our bishops see little difference in whether the technology used to avoid conception involves a barrier, spermicide and/or hormones (providing it is not abortifacient) or only the minute monitoring of a woman’s fertility and periodic abstinence. Certainly NFP has the virtue of calling couples to a mild asceticism if they wish to avoid children for a time and the poetic virtue of greater intimacy. The argument of the couple being open to God is addressed in our usage by reference to the spiritual father’s blessing — not necessarily their pastor, some Orthodox Christians have a monastic priest, or even a simple monk know for spiritual discernment as their spiritual father — and that of openness to child bearing by the fact that, absent serious medical reasons, a blessing is not given for a couple to remain childless indefinitely.
As to my preference for the usage of the Fathers at the time of the Western schism (or of all Arabic speakers, regardless of religions) of using Latin as the name for those of your confession, remember that as an Orthodox Christian, I do not credit your communion’s claim to be the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church since I believe that Church subsists in the Orthodox Church, organized as it has been from the beginning as local churches, each fully Catholic in the original sense, not as universal, but “according to the whole”, each completely the Church even as each offering of the Eucharist is completely the Body and Blood of Christ. “Latins and Uniates” is infelicitous, “papists” is usually thought offensive, so I’ll stick with St. Mark of Ephesus and the folks in my patriarchate’s Old Country. (Honestly, I thought we’d gotten over my insistence on this usage a while back when someone posted an explanation written by a Jesuit of a homily Patriarch +Bartholomew gave on a visit to Rome, in which the Jesuit in explanations written as if in +Bartholomew’s voice repeatedly wrote “You Latins...” You’re the first to complain since then.)