HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
Type: interpretive argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — the church's competence to regulate the administration of the sacraments "their substance being untouched" is well-grounded and evidenced by uncontested adaptations of other apostolic and even dominical practice (the evening Supper moved to a morning fast, the agape detached, the kiss of peace repositioned), and concomitance secures that no grace is thereby withheld; but whether the lay chalice is a mere manner or part of the instituted sign given to the faithful is exactly what is disputed, and the candour of Constance's own concession — reversing an admitted dominical-and-apostolic practice by positive law — together with Rome's earlier Gelasian language calling the division of the mystery "grave sacrilege," keeps the authority claim from being clearly sound · advanced by the Councils of Constance (1415) and Trent (Sess. 21) and by Thomas Aquinas; contested by Luther and the Reformers.
The hinge of the Catholic case is a distinction, not a denial. Constance and Trent do not claim that Christ instituted the sacrament under one kind, nor that the early church communicated the laity under one kind — both councils grant the opposite outright. What they claim is that the church's authority is competent to change the manner of administration for grave and reasonable causes: Christ instituted a substance (the whole Christ, truly received), while the administration of that substance — who receives which species, in what posture, at what hour, after what fast — is committed to the church to order "for the profit of those who receive." On this account "communion under both kinds" is a disciplinary form, reformable by the same authority that shaped a hundred other details of the rite, not a divine precept fixed beyond the church's power. The Reformers answered that no human authority may abridge a form the Lord himself instituted and commanded for all — "Drink ye all of it." This page weighs the authority premise on its own terms: may the church licitly withdraw the cup? It keeps that question apart from two it does not settle — whether "Drink ye all of it" is a binding precept (weighed at "Drink ye all of it"), and whether the whole Christ is received under one species (weighed at concomitance).
The substance/administration distinction, defined at Trent. Trent states the claim in its sharpest form: "this power has ever been in the Church, that, in the dispensation of the sacraments, their substance being untouched, it may ordain, or change, what things soever it may judge most expedient, for the profit of those who receive, or for the veneration of the said sacraments, according to the difference of circumstances, times, and places" (Sess. 21, ch. II), and it anathematizes the denial: "if any one saith, that the holy Catholic Church was not induced, by just causes and reasons, to communicate, under the species of bread only, laymen … let him be anathema" (canon 2).1 The load-bearing phrase is substance being untouched: the res of the sacrament — the whole Christ received unto grace — is not diminished; only the mode of its delivery is altered.
Concomitance secures the substance. The distinction only works if withdrawing the cup takes nothing of the res away, and that is exactly what Aquinas's doctrine of concomitance supplies: because the risen Christ is indivisible, one who receives the host alone receives Christ whole and entire and "is not defrauded of any grace necessary to salvation" (Trent, Sess. 21, ch. III). So the change is, by the councils' lights, a change of administration and not of substance — the layman loses no grace, only a mode of receiving.2
The church already reshaped other instituted forms — without any charge of sacrilege. This is the strongest positive lever. Christ instituted the Supper in the evening, as the close of a meal, and Paul's Corinthian church still received it that way (1 Corinthians 11:20–21); yet the church moved reception to the morning and bound it with the eucharistic fast — reversing the dominical setting without anyone alleging Christ was disobeyed. The agape love-feast, joined to the Eucharist in the apostolic age, was detached from it and eventually suppressed. The kiss of peace (Romans 16:16; 1 Cor 16:20) was repositioned and in the West largely dropped from lay practice. Foot-washing, which Christ enjoined with an explicit "ye also ought to wash one another's feet" and "I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done" (John 13:14–15), was never made a universal sacrament or standing rite. And Paul himself claims the regulative power in the very chapter that transmits the institution: "the rest will I set in order when I come" (1 Corinthians 11:34). If the church licitly ordered all of these — some of them dominical in origin — then a power to regulate the manner of reception is not a Tridentine novelty but the church's ordinary competence over the administration of holy things.3
Grave and reasonable causes. The councils did not claim an arbitrary power but a power exercised "by just causes and reasons": the danger of spilling the Precious Blood as communicants multiplied, irreverence and the difficulty of the chalice among "old, young, and children" (Aquinas's stated grounds), the scarcity or spoiling of wine in some regions and seasons, and the practical management of vast congregations. The withdrawal, on this account, was a prudent response to real hazards, not a doctrinal downgrading of the cup.4
The candour of the admission cuts the hardest. The most striking feature of the Catholic case is what it gives away. Constance grants "that Christ instituted this venerable sacrament … under the forms of both bread and wine," and "that this sacrament was received by the faithful under both kinds in the early church" — then rules "notwithstanding this" that the one-kind custom "should be held as a law."5 Here an admitted dominical-and-apostolic practice is reversed by positive ecclesiastical law. That is precisely the point on which the Reformers seized: where is the line between a reformable discipline and a form Christ fixed? If an authority may set aside a practice it concedes Christ instituted and the apostles kept, on the ground that its substance is otherwise secured, the same reasoning seems to place no instituted form beyond reach. Luther drew exactly that conclusion, inverting Constance's premise: to deny both kinds to the laity "is not in the power of any angel, much less of any pope or council."6
Rome had once called this very act sacrilege. The self-reversal is sharper still because an earlier Roman voice condemned dividing the sacrament in the strongest terms. Pope Gelasius I (c. 494), in the decretal Comperimus gathered into Gratian's Decretum, ruled that those who receive "a portion of the sacred Body alone" and "abstain from the cup" must "either receive the sacraments in their entirety, or be repelled from them entirely, because the division of one and the same mystery cannot occur without grave sacrilege."7 The medieval discipline did to the laity what Gelasius called sacrilege. Aquinas met the difficulty by restricting Gelasius to the clergy — "Pope Gelasius is speaking of priests, who, as they consecrate the entire sacrament, ought to communicate in the entire sacrament" — but the decretal's own context is the Manichaeans, laymen who shunned the wine, so the restriction to priests is a reading the text does not obviously bear.8 That the same authority could first anathematize the division and later mandate it is the counter-case's strongest single fact.
The parallels may not transfer. The agape, the evening-to-morning shift, and the kiss of peace are circumstances of the rite — its setting, timing, and accompanying gestures — none of them part of the sacramental matter handed to the communicant with an explicit "drink ye all." The uncontested power to regulate circumstances does not settle whether the cup itself is a circumstance or a constituent of the instituted sign. And Trent's own theology tells against treating it as a bare circumstance: the separate consecration of bread and wine sacramentally represents the blood poured out apart from the body — Christ's death (Sess. 22, ch. I) — so the twofold species is closer to the instituted sign than to the hour or the posture. The church now concedes as much, commending both kinds for the sake of "the fuller sign."9
What holds. That the church possesses real authority over the administration of the sacraments — their substance untouched — is not seriously in doubt, and the historical record proves it: the church demonstrably reordered instituted and apostolic practice (the Supper's hour, the fast, the agape, the kiss of peace, the non-institution of a foot-washing rite) without anyone treating these as disobedience to Christ, and Paul himself asserts the regulative power over the Supper he has just transmitted. Concomitance supplies the missing premise that makes the withdrawal a change of manner and not of substance — nothing of Christ or of saving grace is lost under one species. On this ground the Reformation's absolute claim, that no authority may touch any instituted form, plainly overreaches: the church touched many.
What is overstated. The Catholic case proves the church may regulate circumstances; it does not, by itself, prove that the lay chalice is a circumstance rather than part of the instituted sign given to the faithful. That is the whole question, and the parallels beg it. Two facts keep the authority claim from closing. First, the candour of the concession: Constance reverses a practice it admits Christ instituted and the apostles kept, which makes "mere discipline" a strained label for the thing being changed and hands the Reformers their sharpest lever. Second, the Gelasian reversal: Rome had itself called dividing the mystery "grave sacrilege," and Aquinas's confinement of that ruling to priests reads against a text aimed at laymen — so the tradition is not univocal, but self-contradicting across the centuries. The disciplinary framing is also weakened, not helped, by the ease of reversal: the cup was withdrawn, conceded again (Basel's Compactata, Pius IV's 1564 indult), withdrawn again, and finally reopened at Vatican II — a pattern that shows the practice was always within the church's power to move, but equally shows it was never the immovable "law" Constance called it.
Where the dispute really turns. Everything rides on where the cup falls — administration or substance. Grant the substance/administration line and that the lay chalice sits on the administration side, and the withdrawal is licit, secured by concomitance and paralleled by a dozen other reforms. Deny the second premise — hold that the twofold species is part of the instituted sign, the divinely appointed sign of the blood shed — and the withdrawal abridges a form the Lord fixed, and the church's own earlier sacrilege-language stands as witness against it. Neither premise is self-evident; each is defended by a serious tradition. That is why the question is genuinely two-sided.
Contested. The church's competence to regulate the manner and administration of the sacraments, their substance untouched, is well-grounded — attested by the uncontested reshaping of other dominical and apostolic forms, and made a change of mode rather than of res by concomitance, which secures that the one-kind laity lose no grace. By the lights of canon law and ecclesiology the Catholic distinction is coherent and defensible, and the Reformation's absolute denial (no authority may alter any instituted form) is refuted by the church's evident regulation of many. But the distinction does not by itself locate the cup on the administration side of the line, and two things resist placing it there: the candour of Constance's concession, which reverses an admitted dominical-and-apostolic practice by positive law and so supplies the Reformers their strongest lever, and Rome's own earlier Gelasian ruling that dividing the mystery is "grave sacrilege," escaped only by a restriction to priests that the decretal's laymen-context strains. Strong by one discipline's lights and weak by another's, with no clear winner and the whole issue resting on the unsettled prior question whether the lay chalice is a reformable circumstance or a fixed constituent of the instituted sign — hence contested. (See also the historical prong of this same question — Did the medieval withdrawal reverse ancient Roman discipline? — which weighs the Gelasian evidence in full, the practical prong — Was the danger of spilling a sufficient warrant? — and the related dominical-command and concomitance arguments, on which this authority question leans.)