THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 769
upon as the source from which the new currents of human thought and action in Western Europe emanated.^
Not so easy, however, is it to fix a satisfactory date for the opening of the Middle Ages. They have been dated from Charlemagne, the founder oT the Holy German Empire, the patron of learning, the maker of codes of law. The better starting-point is thepontificate of Gregory the Great, Avho is well called the last of the Fathers and the first of the mediteval popes. From that date, the rift between the Eastern and the Western Churches, which was already wide as a result of the arrogance of the bishops of Rome, rapidly grew to be unhealable.
The ]y[iddle Ages, with their limits, fall easily into 3 periods, but it must be confessed that the first, extending from GOO-1050, is a period of warring elements, with no orderly development. Hildebrand properly opens the Middle Ages as a period of great ideas, conscious of its power and begetting movements which have exerted a tremendous influence upon the history of the Church. From the moment that monk entered Rome, the stream of ecclesiastical affairs proceeded on its course between well-defined banks. During the 500 years that followed, the voice of the supreme pontiff was heard above all other voices and controlled every movement emanating from the Church. In this period, the doctrinal system, which is distinctively Imown as the mediaeval, came to its full statement. It was the period of great corporate movements, of the Crusades, the Men-^ dicant orders, of tlie' cathedrals and universities, of the canon law and the sacramental combination and of the Reformatory councils^
The third period of the Middle Ages, wliich this volume traverses, is at once the product of the former period of Gregory VII. and Innocent III. and, at the same time, the germinative seedplot of new forces. The sacerdotal keeps its hold and the papacy remains the central tribunal and court of Europe, but protects were heard — vigorous and startling from different quarters, from Prag, Paris, Oxford — which, without overthrowing old
1 Gregorovius, VII. 273, well says that "theoretically and practically the Reformation put an end to the universal power of the papacy and closed the Middle Ages as an epoch in the world's history." 3d
770 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
institutions,sliookthe confidence ill their Apostolicappointment and perpetuity. Theselast two centuries of the mediaeval world betray no consuming passion like the Crusades, for all efforts of the pope to stir the dead nerves of that remarkable impulse were futile. And Pius II., looking from the bluffs of Ancona out upon the sea in the hope of discerning ships rigged to undertake the recoil quest of the East, furnishes a pathetic spectacle of an attempt to call forth energies to achieve the dreams of the past, when for practical minds the illusion itself has already disappeared.
The Reformatory^councils endeavored to iimlo what Ilildebrand and Innocent III, had built up and Thomas Aquinas had sanctioned, the control of the Church and society by the wilLof the supreme pontiff. The system of the Schoolmen broke down. Wyclif, himself endowed with scholastic acuteness, belonged to^ that modern class of men who find in practical considerations a sufficient reason to ignore the contentions of dialectic philosophy. And, finally, the Renaissance completely set aside some of the characteristic notions of the AnddTe A^s, stirring the in^ terest of man in all the works of God, and honoring those who in this earthly sphere of action wrought out the products of intellectual endeavor in literature and art, on the platform and in the department of state.
This last period of the Middle Ages appears to the student of general history as a period of presentiments — and efforts on the part of scattered thinkers, to reach a more free and rational mode of thought and living than the mode they had inherited from the past. The period opening with Hildebrand and extending to Boniface VIII. furnished more imposing personalities, — architects compelling by the force of intellectual assertion, — but fewer useful men. It created a dogmatic unity and triumphed by a policy of force, but the rights of the individual and the principle of liberty of thought and conscience, with which (iod has chosen to endow mankind, it could not consign to permanent burial.
However, ij2_s£itp, of the efforts put forth in tlie closiiig^^HlS*^ of the Middle Ages to shake off the fetters of the rigid ecclesiastical compulsion, it failed. The individual reformers and