John's translation of the pseudo-Dionysius had a great influence on medieval thought, but his
magnum opus on the division of Nature had very little. It was repeatedly condemned as heretical,
and at last, in 1225, Pope Honorius III ordered all copies of it to be burnt. Fortunately this order
was not efficiently carried out.
CHAPTER IX Ecclesiastical Reform in the Eleventh CenturyFOR the first time since the fall of the Western Empire, Europe, during the eleventh century,
made rapid progress not subsequently lost. There had been progress of a sort during the
Carolingian renaissance, but it proved to be not solid. In the eleventh century, the improvement
was lasting and many-sided. It began with monastic reform; it then extended to the papacy and
Church government; towards the end of the century it produced the first scholastic philosophers.
The Saracens were expelled from Sicily by the Normans; the Hungarians, having become
Christians, ceased to be marauders; the conquests of the Normans in France and England saved
those countries from further Scandinavian incursions. Architecture, which had been barbaric
except where Byzantine influence prevailed, attained sudden sublimity. The level of education
rose enormously among the clergy, and considerably in the lay aristocracy.
The reform movement, in its earlier stages, was, in the minds of its promoters, actuated
exclusively by moral motives. The clergy, both regular and secular, had fallen into bad ways, and
earnest men set to work to make them live more in accordance with their principles. But behind
this purely moral motive there was another, at first perhaps unconscious, but gradually becoming
more and more open. This motive was to complete the separation between clergy and laity, and, in
so doing, to increase the power of the former. It