The Insufficiency of the Cross, part One: Anamnesis

Over the course of three papers, I will demonstrate that the Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross was insufficient in itself for the Salvation of man, that His work on the Cross is developed within the hearts of man through the working of the Holy Spirit, and that Christ indeed did have to ascend into Heaven so that man might be fully saved.  This is part one.  All quotes from Pope Saint John Paul II are taken from his encyclical, Dominum et Vivificantem, unless otherwise stated.

The entire resting point for the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials in the wake of WWII was that somewhere deep within the consciousness of man there is a fire sparked, where knowledge of basic right and wrong is “re-cognized” by each individual within himself.  At a certain level, basic right vs. wrong is still expected and proclaimed by the world, even on a superficial level.  The concept of knowledge as recollection is a concept which the Greek philosopher Plato is known to hold: that knowledge already exists within the soul of the person as something one could “recollect”.  He utilizes imagery and myths of the afterlife to demonstrate this, saying the soul had been reincarnated again and again and had already encountered everything as the source of this recollecting knowledge, that “the truth of all things always existed in the soul”, because “the soul is immortal”.  Though the jury is out as to whether Plato himself believed his own afterlife myths or whether he merely utilized them as imagery readily grasped by his audience, the point he was making using these myths is actually true: the soul does have intuitive knowledge of things, especially as pertains to the moral order in the natural law.  It has this knowledge of inherent goodness because of an imprint on the soul into the hearts of man, so that man can access this knowledge in a way very much like true memory or recollection.  This “remembering” would later be referred to by Cardinal Ratzinger as Anamnesis, and for Pope Saint John Paul II would be the precise way in which the Image of God is present in the personhood of man.  Anamnesis, though spoken of in different verbiage by JPII, is paramount and central to an understanding of his encyclicals and essays, since for John Paul II holds that the “capacity to command what is good and to forbid evil, placed in man by the Creator, is the main characteristic of the personal subject”.  

(As an aside, even the early Church Fathers utilized Platonic imagery when describing the afterlife, especially concerning the souls of the damned: “Plato said that Rhadamanthus and Minos would punish the wicked who came before them; and we say that this is what will happen, but at the hand of Christ, and to the same bodies, reunited with their souls and destined for eternal punishment, and not for a thousand year period only, as he said (Justin, Martyr, The First Apology, paragraph 8)”.  Later on Justin writes concerning the relative commonality of Divine reality within philosophical thinkers of gentile origin: “there seem to be seeds of truth among all people; but they are proved not to have understood them accurately when they contradict each other (First Apology, paragraph 44)”.  In this I think we can at least entertain the idea that for someone as smart as Plato, mythological imagery was used merely because it was what was at hand, was understandable at the time, and was sort of the best one could do without the gift of direct Divine Revelation.  The fact that he would hit upon some very real beliefs of the early Christians without Divine Revelation bears witness to the fact that through our reason we are able to come to certain knowledge of some deeper truths of the world, and even if we may be lacking in ability to understand how it might be possible we can come to knowledge that it is possible.)

Anamnesis can be equated with the Christian idea of conscience, that  “most secret core and sanctuary of a man, where he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his depths”.   Here in the core of the consciousness of man the person cannot divorce himself from the basic principles of doing good and avoiding evil, for no other reason than it seems good to act thus.  Moreover, it is not simply a basic personal orientation towards personal goodness or values: on the contrary, “In the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience…. There is profoundly imprinted upon it a principle vis-a-vis the objective norm which establishes and conditions the correspondence of its decisions with the commands and prohibitions which are at the basis of human behavior”. 

How can we speak of this knowledge in any other way than a recognition of what is true?  And in this Plato is not far from the truth of the matter, for how can we recognize something that is completely foreign to our minds and that we have never encountered before?  We each have in fact encountered the moral order before: not in a prior life through reincarnation (which again I doubt even Plato believed to be the case), but we have encountered it at the very moment of our Creation, and behold it once more through a recognition of what already exists within the mind of God, even if we do not attest to the existence of God Himself: “The conscience is the voice of God, even when man recognizes in it nothing more than the principle of the moral order which it is not humanly possible to doubt, even without any direct reference to the Creator”.  

Because the immortality of the soul can never be isolated from the immortality of God, Anamnesis provides the image of man as immortal only insofar as he is created in the image of God, and not by virtue of the knowledge of things within his soul.  This is why we can still speak of individuals who do not attest to the existence of God both as being themselves immortal, created in the Image of God, and have themselves the purpose and therefore obligation of pursuing God: all men have the same foundational inclination towards God because even those peoples in the farthest reaches of the wilderness are seeking that which makes them truly happy in their own unrepeatable and unique lives.  Happiness itself has been observed to be the most subjective thing in the world, nearly impossible to objectively measure; this is because of the unique perceptions and experiences the unrepeatable human subject encounters throughout the physical world around him.  At the same time, the source of happiness is also universal and objective, as “the Church truly knows that only God, whom she serves, meets the deepest longings of the human heart, which is never fully satisfied by what the world has to offer”.  The personal encounter with God, experiencing Him through our daily lives in a unique way according to the knowledge of good written on our hearts and adhering to the moral order “remembered” there is what makes us unique and truly happy.  This is why JPII writes that it is this very ability to “remember” the truth about the moral order and natural law, the “capacity to command what is good and to forbid evil, placed in man by the Creator, is the main characteristic of the personal subject”.  The recognition of Anamnesis truly allows Man to access to Divine Truths which are beheld by the mind of God and which do not need man’s own personal experience, limited as it is by the potential of faulty senses and subject to individual incorrect reasoning.