Discipline and learning receded and the Church declined. Between 1046 and 1049, Henry the III of Germany, had appointed a string of popes, the latter, Pope Leo IX, being the most significant. Pope Leo IX separated the government of the Church from that of the Roman nobles and secular rulers that it had been previously associated with. He introduced a hierarchy way of organizing the Church. Church officers would now appoint other church officers rather than Lords or Kings as previously. Pope Leo IX, considered it a corruption of the Church for clergyman to be married, and this was done away with. Accusations were made and clerics were forced to swear before the Pope that they had not purchased their offices. "Thus, by the death of Leo's successor in 1057, the leadership of the Papacy as secular-moral judge of the Church was finally firmly established among most clerics."(Spark - High Middle Ages 8). And so the Church continued to grow more powerful from this time on. All scientific or philosophical studies were supervised by, and in most cases produced by the Church. These alleged explanations of the world and everything it contained were produced by Biblical studies and the Aristotelian system, which became standard Church doctrine. The Aristotelian system was the theories of the ancient philosopher Aristotle, and in many cases were erroneous laws of physics, although these theories paved the way for the later philosophers. "It claimed that the rate of fall of an object was determined by its weight, held that matter was constructed out of four possible elements, with different matter containing different combinations of these four, and described the universe as the Greek astronomer Ptolemy had described it, as a static and finite thing in which the Earth occupied the central position, with the sun and planets in revolution and the distant stars inhabiting its farthest edges.
