held in a single form, it may be observed in enough of its forms so
that we can finally mark the varieties and the limits of its changes.
Only in this way can naturalism be explained and defined. Seeing
it in perspective involves a considerable step backward through the
centuries; but it can be taken quickly.

All literature is founded on some concept of the nature of man.
When a major new literary trend appears it either assumes or
defines some new concept of man and therefore of his place in the
world. Such a new image takes its shape against the background
from which it has emerged and against which it has in some way
reacted. Naturalism has its roots in the Renaissance, its back-
grounds in the Middle Ages. The medieval idea of man (which
lived on, indeed, through the nineteenth century) was of a fallen
creature in a dualistic universe. This dual universe was divided
into heaven and earth, God and Satan, eternal and temporal, and,
in man, soul and body. Its values pointed always toward the eternal,
toward salvation and God--away from the temporal, the worldly,
and the natural; for nature was under God's curse. Man too, by his
own Fall, was under God's curse. Having both body and soul, he
was torn in the eternal battle between good and evil. Man's physi-
cal nature--his desires and instincts--was, by and large, the
Devil's playground; it had contributed to the original Fall and it
continued to corrupt his will and his reason. Nonhuman nature
was not only under God's curse; it was also unpredictable because
of the workings upon it of fiends and the occasional miraculous
intervention of God or a saint.

Reliable truth came from God to man through particular mirac-
ulous revelations and through the permanent miraculous authority
of the Scriptures, which were interpreted and systematized by the
Church. The Church was ordained by God; its head, the Pope, was
divinely inspired. Emphasis on authority prevailed: in matters of
dogma the Church Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries were
consulted; religious practices and personal morality were rigidly
prescribed by the wisdom of the past, for neither man's impulses

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