Mystical Supper

I have been attempting to explain our understanding of anamensis in regard to the Divine Liturgy. One scholar, Arnesen, presented an understanding of the concept which many scholars have found flawed in three ways. First, where ἀνάμνησις appears in Scripture, the meaning of the term is restricted to “personal, mental remembrance”. This interpretation is based on limited data. Arnesen quotes D.R. Jones, who writes that “too many ambiguities” exist in the meaning of ἀνάμνησις in the Septuagint in order to provide authority for any particular interpretation. Such ambiguities are unsurprising, owing to the semantic range of the word. Scholars maintain that, statistically, Arnesen’s approach is poor and his sample size is too small to establish the true meaning of this term in the Bible.

A second flaw in his reasoning is that he links too closely the Christian notion of anamnesis with the doctrine of transubstantiation of the Eucharistic species promoted by Roman Catholics and some Anglicans. The concept of transubstantiation of the bread and wine into Christ fully present in the sacramental species cannot and ought not to be localized to a single point in the Divine Liturgy, since the Eucharistic celebration as a whole is, in essence, transubstantiative. Similarly, the entire Eucharistic celebration is anamnetic although, unlike transubstantiation, anamnesis may refer to a particular   sequence of the Eucharistic prayer. In continuation of his misleading parallel between the Roman Catholic idea of transubstantiation and anamnesis, he claims that, like the Western doctrine of transubstantiation, anamnesis in its Christian sense denigrates the sacramentality of the Eucharist. “The theory of anamnesis,” says Arnesen, “has a subversive effect to the theory of transubstantiation in that it undermines faith in the living Lord who is always there before us and calls us to worship.” On the contrary, if the Lord is understood to be “living” and “always before us” in worship, then the Eastern Christian concept of anamnesis does not obscure the sacramentality of the Eucharist but supports it, as long as the entire sacramental celebration, as an encounter with the transcendent God in signs accessible to the senses, is understood as anamnetic.

This, hopefully, highlights one of the differences between Eastern and Western Christianity and Catholicism.