REMEMBRANCE

Strange how words grab people differently. I've just read something by "a sacramental theologian" on how, in the Institution Narrative within the Eucharistic Prayer, Anamnesis must NEVER be translated as 'Remembrance' - because that is just too, too heretical. 'Memory', however, apparently bathes within the bright sunshine of complete heavenly orthodoxy.

There is a problem. Each word, it seems to me, is inadequate, as each suggests to the modern English ear a purely celebral recollection of a past event. That is why Dom Gregory Dix as a consummate mystagogue always used the Greek term anamnesis (which is hardly an option in liturgical texts). But I would be hard put to explain the effortless superiority of 'Memory'. We use it of nostalgia: "Memories, memories", we murmur, as we fondly recall the distant day when Auntie Mildred nearly caused an international incident by pinching the bottom of the fat Italian waiter at that slightly odd cafe a little way down from the Trevi Fountain. But 'Remembrance' does have a hint of objectivity about it: "Have this brandy glass as a remembrance of Uncle Bob".

Frankly, 'Remembrance' has a lot to be said for it. It comes ultimately from the Late Latin rememorari, used by S Jerome to render anamimneskein in Hebrews (re- being a Latin equivalent of the Greek ana-). Friends and enemies have always regarded me as a nit-picking pedant, but I can't detect any subtle difference in nuance between 'Remembrance' and 'Memory'. Neither could Cranmer, who used the two words interchangeably in his Consecration Prayer. Nor did the authors of the Caroline and Non-Juring liturgies (Grisbrooke passim) who in times of persecution rewrote his Liturgy to make it express explicitly the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharistic Sacrifice.

There is a fair bit wrong with some of Cranmer's formulae. I have never once used his Consecration Prayer* without some sense of guilt. But it has never occurred to me that I am a heretic when I say "remembrance". I do hope that liturgical revision in Ordinariates is not going to be bedevilled by hoards of people all queuing up each with his own home-made sibboleth.

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Not that he called it a Consecration Prayer, because he didn't believe in Consecration. It acquired that title when the Prayer Book was tittivated under the influence of Caroline High Churchery in 1662; a telling ikon of the tension between Cranmer's Zwinglian euchology and the rather different eucharistic beliefs of many who down the centuries have been landed with using it.