I have no idea why you cite these scriptures.
So it would seem. The question then is do you seek the meaning, or simply an affirmation of what you bring to the text?
Matthew 13:13
"Therefore I speak to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand."
Jeremiah 5:21
"Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not."
Isaiah 6:9-10
"And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear you indeed, but understand not; and see indeed, but perceive not ... "
John 15:5
"I am the vine: you the branches: he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for without me you can do nothing."
I suggest the Sacraments are the means by which one can come to abide in Christ
John 14:18
"I will not leave you orphans, I will come to you."
John 6:35
"And Jesus said to them: I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall not hunger: and he that believeth in me shall never thirst."
Luke 22:19
"And taking bread, he gave thanks, and brake; and gave to them, saying: This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me."
Luke 24;30-31
"And it came to pass, whilst he was at table with them, he took bread, and blessed, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him... "
+++
Now At the Last Supper the word for remembrance is
anamnesis:
In Plato's Meno, Socrates is challenged with what has become known as the sophistic paradox, or the paradox of knowledge:
Meno: "And how are you going to search for [
the meaning of a mystery] when you don't know at all what it is, Socrates? Which of all the things you don't know will you set up as target for your search? And even if you actually come across it, how will you know that it is that thing which you don't know?"
In other words, if you don't know any of the attributes, properties, and/or other descriptive markers of any kind that help signify what something is (physical or otherwise), you won't recognise it, even if you actually come across it. And, as consequence, if the converse is true, and you do know the attributes, properties and/or other descriptive markers of this thing, then you shouldn't need to seek it out at all. The result of this line of thinking is that, in either instance, there is no point trying to gain that "something"; in the case of Plato's aforementioned work, there is no point in seeking knowledge.
In
Phaedo, Plato develops his theory of anamnesis in a way of living that would enable one to overcome the misleading nature of the body through
katharsis (Greek: καθαρσις; “cleansing” from guilt or defilement). For Plato the body and its senses are the source of error; knowledge can only be regained through the use of our reason, contemplating things with the soul (
noesis) (see 66 b–d).
Secondly, he makes clear that genuine knowledge (
gnosis), as opposed to mere true belief (
doxa), is distinguished by its content. One can only know eternal truths, for they are the only truths that can have been in the soul from eternity. Though it can be very useful to have a true belief about, say, the best way to get from London to Oxford, such a belief does not qualify as knowledge; how could the human soul have known for all eternity a fact about places that have existed for less than 2,000 years?
Neoplatonism
For the later interpreters of Plato, anamnesis was less an epistemic assertion than an ontological one. Plotinus himself did not posit recollection in the strict sense of the term, because all knowledge of universally important ideas (
logos) came from a source outside of time (
Dyad or the divine
nous), and was accessible, by means of contemplation, to the soul as part of
noesis. They were more objects of experience, of inner knowledge or insight, than of recollection. Despite this, in Neoplatonism, the theory of
anamnesis became part of the mythology of the descent of the soul.
Porphyry's short work
De Antro Nympharum (ostensibly a commentary on the brief passage in
Odyssey) elucidated this notion, as did Macrobius's much longer Commentary on the
Dream of Scipio. The idea of psychic memory was used by Neoplatonists to demonstrate the celestial and immaterial origins of the soul, and to explain how memories of the world-soul could be recalled by everyday human beings. As such, psychic recollection was intrinsically connected to the Platonic conception of the soul itself. Since the contents of individual "material" or physical memories were trivial, only the universal recollection of Forms, or divine objects, drew one closer to the immortal source of being.
Anamnesis is the closest that human minds can come to experiencing the freedom of the soul prior to its being encumbered by matter. The process of incarnation is described in Neoplatonism as a shock that causes the soul to forget its experiences (and often its divine origins as well).
Philosophical data from
wikipedia
Christianity, of course, breaks with Platonism — I would say advances its knowledge, by virtue of Revelation — on a number of important points.
Primarily here, rather than recollecting forgotten memory — in the Christian Tradition souls are created natures and thus limited in their knowing even in their perfect state, but as Our Lord is the
Logos of God, the divine
nous incarnate, then when He enters the soul, the soul is filled with supernatural knowledge which transcends its natural capacity to know, and even transcends the sensible capacity to know what it knows ... this we call the beatific vision.
If Union with the Divine is the object of true philosophy, it is the property of the ascetic, for what is generally forgotten is that philosophy contained a very important and vital aspect: theurgy — the necessary ascetic disciplines to attain knowledge.
The flight of the alone to the Alone, as the Neoplatonists would have it, was simply beyond the capacity of most of humanity, who do not possess sufficient intellectual rigour and the will to self-discipline to attain such a state of asceticism, are
a priori condemned to perdition — so too is the implicit message of the doctrine of Pelagius that Augustine refuted so strongly — for if Pelagius is right, then we are all lost ...
This is why the gnostics split humanity into pneumatics, psychics and hylics — only pneumatics are saved, psychics are saved by attachment to a pneumatic, and hylics, the vast majority of humanity, are irredeemably written off and lost.
If however, there is One who might establish a Sacrament, a sacred act which, if repeated or recollected in spirit and in truth, becomes sacred in itself by the union of that act with the One who instituted it. For the Ancients, even the utterance of the Divine Name was a sacramental act, as they believed that He who gave the Name is in the Name when the Name is uttered.
Now the obvious argument is that
anamnesis means simply recollection, but two things should be born in mind: The one is that Our Lord established the Act of Remembrance, and He was no ordinary man; so the second is that, in remembering Him, in a sense in the act of the soul lifting itself toward Him, he comes to the soul.
So one might argue that the Sacraments of the Church are the Gift of God in that they enjoin the person to God, by the descent of God upon the person participating in the sacrament, which means every single living being can participate simply by the honest desire to do so, and that this Mystery of the Descent into the Soul transcends, to a super-natural degree, beyond even that of the communion of the most exalted mystic with God, for there is not one mystic of the Church who shows anything othger than the most profound reverence to the Rite.
Thomas
The Church's transubstantiation doctrine means that the host and the wine are the literal body and blood of Christ that are implicated in the sacrifice that accomplishes the remission of sins.
