Both Kinds - Communion in _

A term often found in historical discussions of the Eucharist to refer to the administration of both the bread and the wine to lay-persons.

While almost all evangelical Christians would think it strange that there should be any other option, the medieval Church often offered lay-persons only the bread at the Holy Communion. The popular explanation is given that—esp., with the consolidation of the concept of transubstantiation—the wine (which became Christ's blood) would be desecrated if it was spilled or got dripped over onto the men's beards. As a result, 'both kinds' were administered only to members of the clergy but lay-persons received only 'one kind.' The crumbs of the bread, of course, could still be spilled; this lead eventually to the use of wafers which were placed directing into the mouths of the celebrants by the priests.

The Reformers, though they disagreed among themselves over how to understand the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, rejected transubstantiation, and returned to the practice of 'both kinds.'

In contrast to this popular conception of "both kinds", however, Anglican scholar of liturgy, Dom Gregory Dix, has this to say:

The second century church had practiced communion under one kine alond from the reserved sacraments; in the third century, and probably earlier, communion was given to infants at the liturgy from the chalice alone. But communion under both kinds separately was normal at the liturgy everywhere until the seventh-ninth century, when the barbarous behaviour of the times cause so many profanations that various devices were tried to protect the contents of the chalice, e.g., the use of a spoon (in the East) or a metal tube (in the West), intinction, and so forth. None of these were very satisfactory . . . They increased in frequency in the West . . . and official directions to do so only begin towards the end of the thirteenth century, when the innovation was already firmly established. It remained the normal Western custom down to the sixteenth century. It is to be noted that Luther is responsible for that misrepresentation of the custom as 'the denial of the cup to the laity', which imports a note of caste-prejudice. It was as much 'avoided by' as 'denied to' the laity originally; and the Western discipline 'denies the cup' to the clergy (from the Pope down) just as much as to the laity when they do not happen to be celebrating, but only communicating. (The Shape of the Liturgy (1945), 630f n3.)