ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how the focal point of much Anglican worship, the Eucharist, creates and sustains 'communities of memory' in which the person of Jesus is kept central to the formation and sustaining of the identity of Christians. Eucharistic theology, of course, spans a spectrum of belief, and has done at least since the Reformation; eucharistic definitions and controversies most often centre on the presence of Christ in bread and wine, with accusations of idolatry on the one hand, and reductionism on the other. One person who understood the centrality of memory to human identity and experience, and whose theorising about memory has been pervasively felt in western psychology is, of course, Sigmund Freud. Jan Assmann, a German Egyptologist, inspired by Maurice Halbwachs and formed by an academic discipline with a keen awareness of cultural specificity, nuances Halbwachs's concept of collective memory by distinguishing between the relatively short-term 'communicative memory' of oral societies and the longer, 'objectivised' 'cultural memory'.