If you persist in calling the considerations of realists from Aristotle through Aquinas to Feser “gymnastics,” I will conclude you are not prepared for serious conversation.
My late friend and favorite protestant seminary professor, who disagreed with Aquinas, was a mathematics professor at the USNA before he “qualified” in theology. He said the virtue of mathematics was that it taught one to reason dispassionately from premises one thought to be false.
That may be why geometry was considered a qualification for entry to philosophical academies in Athens.
...
What the NT Church “manifestly believed” is what’s at issue here.
If you persist in calling the considerations of realists from Aristotle through Aquinas to Feser “gymnastics,”
The monk I referenced used the term "gymnastics:"
Aristotle picked up just such common-sense concepts as “what-it-is-to-be-X” and tried to explain rather complex philosophical problems with them. Thus, to take a “common-sense” concept like substance–even if one could maintain that it were somehow purified of Aristotelian provenance—and have it do paradoxical conceptual gymnastics in order to explain transubstantiation seems not to be not so anti-Aristotelian in spirit after all... That the bread and wine are somehow really the body and blood of Christ is an ancient Christian belief—but using the concept of “substance” to talk about this necessarily involves Greek philosophy (Br. Dennis Beach, OSB, monk of St. John’s Abbey; doctorate in philosophy from Penn State; http://www.praytellblog.com/index.php/2010/05/30/transubstantiation-and-aristotle-warning-heavy-philosophy)
But trying to justify transubstantiation involves gymnastics from gymnastics.
I will conclude you are not prepared for serious conversation.
Serious? Again, what involves serious gymnastics is trying to justify "Take, eat, this is my body which is broken for you" to mean this crucified body is not manifestly one of flesh and bones which identified the true incarnated Christ versus one whose appearance etc. did not correspond to what He manifestly and truly was as regards the flesh, but is a speck of bread (and wine) that like the body of the true Christ on earth actually is what it appears and would test to be, yet the Catholic is to believe the bread does not even exist once the priest utters a formula, as instead this is the true body and blood of Christ in disguise regardless of what it looks like and would test as being - until the non-existent bread looks like it is behaving as bread by decaying.
Yet the metaphorical meaning easily conforms to what we see in Scripture, from people being "bread" to water being sacred blood, to the word of God being saving nourishing milk and meat.
What the NT Church “manifestly believed” is what’s at issue here.
Indeed, and the Catholic contrivance of the Lord's supper is just one of the distinctive Catholic teachings are not manifest in the only wholly inspired substantive authoritative record of what the NT church believed (which is Scripture, in particular Acts through Revelation, which best shows how the NT church understood the gospels).
Nothing more should be need to be said. May God grant you mercy and grace.