No two periods in history contrast more than the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. While Middle Age thinkers glorified God and held that the individual's duty was to uphold and cherish the Almighty, Renaissance thinkers believed that individuality and life-experience were the only way to approach divinity. While Medieval thinkers focused on the divine world and man's relation to it, Renaissance thinkers focused on this world and believed that man approached divinity by exploring it.
The leading thinkers of the Middle Ages were overwhelmingly preoccupied with the individual's responsibility to his god and his feudal lord. Medieval thinkers held the ancient Greek philosophers sacrosanct, and focused their attention either up to the heavens or back to their predecessors. Theophylact Simocattes formed a bridge from the Middle Ages to the Greek Philosophers, connecting the traditional Greek respect for reason with the nascent force of Christianity, when he opined "reason, which he possesses, is an admirable and divine trait by which he renders to God his adoration and homage" (Perry, 198). Simocattes is transfers the power of reason from man's purview to God's. The preponderant force of Christianity was the engine which drove the Medieval era.
The greatest Medieval ruler, Charlemagne, was such a proponent of Christianity that he forcibly converted the people he conquered to the Church. As the famous historian Einhard observes that the long war against the Saxons only ended when they accepted Charlemagne's terms, "which were renunciation of their national religious customs and the worship of devils, [and] acceptance of the sacraments of the Christian faith and religion" (209). Charlemagne's belief led him to wage war not only to conquer lands and gain more vassals, but to spread the Christian faith. This is a prime example of the overwhelming preoccupation with God and Christianity that characterized the Middle Ages. Addit...