CHAPTER 3 What Is “Remembrance” (anámnēsis)?

CHAPTER 3

What Is “Remembrance” (anámnēsis)?

At the Last Supper, while distributing communion to the disciples, the Lord explained this communion as an entry into a sacrificial offering. The words of Christ themselves, “broken for you,” “poured out for you and for many,” which He spoke about His Body and Blood, establish this sacrificial character. They establish a link between the Last Supper, as communion, and the sacrifice that Christ Himself accomplished on the Cross once and for all. At that time, they were commanded to do this in His remembrance, repeatedly and unendingly, “until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26), that is, until the end of the age, or, the Second Coming of Christ in glory. The correspondence between the communion at the Last Supper and its repetition until the end of the age is defined as a “remembrance.” What does such an anamnesis mean? Is it just a normal recollection, a reminder about the past that happened at one time but no longer exists, a subjective reflection in the soul and nothing more? Obviously, this interpretation of the words of Christ is completely unacceptable. The apostle Paul’s completely serious strictness when speaking of worthiness for communion contradicts it [this interpretation]: “Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment upon themselves” (1 Cor. 11:28–29). What also contradicts it is that the communion itself is explained not as a remembrance of the Last Supper, as the event that instituted the Eucharist, but as a proclamation (katangéllete) of the death of the Lord: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). In this way, “remembrance” is defined much more broadly according

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to its power and meaning. It is not only a personal memory of a given event, all the more since the only immediate participants and witnesses were his twelve disciples present at the Supper (the apostle Paul himself was not in that group, although he “received from the Lord what [he] also handed on”; 1 Cor. 11:23), excluding all of those numberless Christian generations that have also engaged in that remembrance “until he comes.” Rather, “remembrance” is a genuine, creative power, existing in the world, and our co-remembrance is an entry into that power—a real, ontological communion with it. Plato also discusses the anamnesis of the ideas, the heavenly prototypes of being that the soul beholds before it descends to earth, but his notion of prototype remains at the level of abstract universality. Here, however, the power of anamnesis relates to a concrete event that occurred not in an abstract heaven, some other concrete reality, but in the world, alive in all of life’s fullness. “Remembrance” here is equal to that which is remembered, and possesses all of its power. The Lord communes even now His Sacrificial Body and Blood perfectly, just like He did at the Last Supper, regardless of all empirical distinction, which obtains only on a surface level. “Remembrance” implies precisely the power of identification, ontological oneness, and not a merely subjective assimilation; this is what the sacrament of “transmutation” consists in. And this power of identification established at the command of the Lord has the force of a creative act, entrusted to us: “with this, you make my remembrance.”

We have to fully grasp and accept this oneness of an act that, in a sense, multiplies itself, sacramentally repeating in endless repetitions, removing the boundaries of space and time in their limitedness. Generally speaking, nothing in the world disappears, nothing returns to nonbeing, to the nothingness out of which the world was created, although it may vanish from our subjective memories and be forgotten. The world’s memory of everything that has happened within it, and of all human life, will be revealed at the Dread Judgment of Christ: the books will be opened (Rev. 20:12), and all the past will repeat itself as if by its own power, although it will not have abiding significance and will be abolished, submerged in the “outer darkness.” However, in a completely special, unique, and exceptional sense, the world preserves the “remembrance” of the earthly life of the Godman, in which Divine power is imprinted in the total, sinless holiness of a creaturely human existence. The

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complete fullness of the earthly life of the Savior, accomplished in time, is preserved in a way that continues or repeats itself for all time. The Lord is with us always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. A symbolic testimony of this is given in the Church year, in which not only are the feasts called to mind, but also the whole gamut of events and features of the earthly life of Christ, even if only in consecutive recollections of the events in the Gospel in the weekly cycle of readings. Repetition in time and on specific dates reveals the inexhaustible power of Divine actions.

How can one express in the language of time these supratemporal events, which, although they bear the stamp of temporality (for they were confined to the boundaries of space and time), at the same time abide beyond it? They are eternal in their Divine power, but are welded together in time, and are revealed in it and through it. This dual, antinomical character was inherent in the Incarnation and its dual-naturedness, in which the True God united Himself with human nature, and became the True Man. Divinity reveals itself to humanity, and the latter receives in itself the revelation of the Divine. This is the whole mystery of the Incarnation, and it also includes the Divine Eucharist. Though it occurred on one day, at a specific place and time, it also takes place supratemporally in heaven in just the same way that it is “repeated” on earth as “remembrance.” By the power of God, in this frequent repetition, they are fused together into a unity reaching all the way to the total identification that is sacramentality. A sacrament is a manifestation of the power of God that creates and completes oneness under the veil of empirical actions in the flesh of the world, and in this sense it is an ever-occurring, or repeating, Incarnation. Thus, the Eucharist is a single sacrificial offering. In it, sacrifice is offered to God. What is this sacrifice and how is it offered? What are its contents? Its contents are defined, in Christ’s words of institution, as His death on the Cross through the “breaking of the Body” and the “shedding of Blood.” This is what allows for the possibility of communion. However, such a narrow, limited understanding of the sacrificial offering is contradicted by the fact that the Last Supper, with the communion of the Body and Blood, occurred before the sacrifice itself, “in the night in which Christ was handed over,” and not on Great Friday when He was crucified and exclaimed, “It is finished!” and delivered His spirit to the Father. In this way, the limited power of time as a mere succession of events is jettisoned, and the whole earthly activity of Christ is

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synthesized together, including the offering of sacrifice. The sacrifice itself in the words of the Lord (in the teaching on the Eucharist in John 6) is presented as independent of time and temporal succession, as a kind of indwelling praesens: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life . . . for my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink”— this is the Incarnation in its full capacity.

This “separation” of the liturgical offering that took place at the Last Supper from its “accomplishment” in time at the death on the Cross on Golgotha, in addition to the explanation of its supratemporality in St. John, precludes us from conceiving of it merely as one among many events in the earthly life of the Lord. Rather, it demands that we see in it an all-encompassing event or union-event that synthesizes all things in itself. In other words, we necessarily come to the conclusion that the whole matter of sacrifice, the sacrifice of Christ itself, is not only the crucifixion but His entire cruciform life, which was, in its entirety, a path to Golgotha, beginning in the manger in Bethlehem and the persecution of Herod. The latter also is not some accidental occurrence in His life that may not have happened. On the contrary, in a concentrated way, it expressed the sacrificial quality of all its events, and for this reason could not not have happened. The only sinless One, coming into the sinful world, breathing its plague-stricken air and living among sinners, inevitably needed to taste the agony of the Cross even before approaching the Cross on Golgotha. Its total inevitability, outward and inward, was for Him completely obvious and repeatedly expressed by Him with increasing urgency.1 For this reason it is strange and incorrect to measure the length of his sacrificial path as stretching merely from Gethsemane to Golgotha, when in fact it bore Him on through all the places of his earthly advent, beginning in Bethlehem and continuing on through Egypt.2 The point is that the sacrifice of Christ encompasses his entire earthly life, the whole Incarnation, as is expressed in the following texts from the Epistle to the Hebrews: “When Christ came into the world, He said, ‘Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me’. . . . Then I said, ‘See, God, I have come to do Your will, O God’ (in the scroll of the book it is written of me)” (Heb. 10:5,7); “And by God’s will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all” (Heb. 10:10). This notion of the universal character of the sacrifice of Christ is also expressed

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in liturgical texts, which likewise by no means allow one to treat the Divine Liturgy simply as a mere recollection of the Last Supper. Consider, in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the prayer of offering at “It is right and fitting”: “You brought us out of non-existence into being, when we had fallen you raised us up again, and left nothing undone until you had brought us up to heaven and had granted us your Kingdom that is to come . . . ,” and further, at the beginning of the epiclesis: “Remembering therefore this our Savior’s command and all that has been done for us: the Cross, the Tomb, the Resurrection on the third day, the Ascension into heaven, the Sitting at the right hand, the Second and glorious Coming again. Offering you your own of your own—in all things and for all things” (and likewise, but even more extensively, in the liturgy of St. Basil the Great).