[In the following excerpt, Wilks argues that The Atheist's Tragedy is one of several Jacobean dramas that reveals a changing view of the notion of conscience, and that Tourneur's play explores the atheistic and Christian accounts of humans' moral nature and metaphysical destiny in order to refute the heresy of naturalist thinkers.]

Superficially, at least, The Atheist's Tragedy invites comparison with Doctor Faustus as a moral treatise directed, once again, at the presumption of those ‘forward wits’ who would exalt a puny rationalism over the mysteries of grace and faith, and whose addiction to a blasphemous and imponderable ‘deepness’ epitomized for the Renaissance a dangerous tendency to unsatiable speculation in nature and the world. Like Marlowe's, Tourneur's play is a tragedy of knowledge, a similarly graphic depiction, as Ornstein puts it, of yet another atheist's ‘harrowing journey towards the spiritual and moral knowledge which is gained by less arrogant minds through a simple act of faith’.¹ There, however, the resemblance ends. Not only is D'Amville's creator less equivocally disposed than is Faustus's towards the heady prospects of knowledge infinite—the limitless exercise of man's aspiring mind resulting, for Tourneur, in nothing more heroic than the conventional villainies of a conventionally politic brain—but his perception of positive value in the Christian myth carries a more absolute certainty of conviction, and the sufferings of the impious who incur its exemplary sanctions are, in The Atheist's Tragedy, affirmatively counterpointed by the felicities of the pious who so beatifically transcend and vindicate them. Moreover, whereas Faustus's hubris affects a godlike potentiality over mundane phenomena, avid to discern, by supernatural and forbidden means, those mysteries above nature by which her elements may be controlled, D'Amville affects only such limited and material goals—pleasure, profit, power—as are consistent with his purely naturalistic and sceptical beliefs.² His atheism does not admit the hypothesis of a God-centred universe, and denies altogether the premise that the observable order of nature is completed by a numinous order of divine grace beyond man's rational comprehension. On the contrary, and like Shakespeare's Edmund, he makes a goodness out of nature, and binds his reason to the service of her mechanistic and amoral laws. But perhaps the most fundamental distinctions to be made between the two plays are those concerning their doctrinal and metaphysical allegiances, in which a profound transition is apparent. While Faustus's revolt represents a vigorous, if perverted, release of the energies of Renaissance humanism in the face of a confining scholastic synthesis which it threatens to fracture, it is wholly evident that in the decadent world which D'Amville inherits, that synthesis is already utterly dislocated, and his revolt against faith is a logical, if equally disordered, extension of a typically seventeenth-century emancipation of nature and reason. Tourneur's atheist is one post-Reformation consequence, just as Bacon was another, of that aggressive Renaissance secularism whose Elizabethan awakenings had been so powerfully symbolized in Faustus; for in labouring to indemnify faith by deprecating nature, Calvin hammered so relentlessly on the theme of their separation, as incidentally to prosper not only the cause of those empiricists and Pyrrhonists to whom the supernatural was unknowable, but of those sceptics and mechanists to whom it was neither knowable nor necessary.

The Atheist's Tragedy is, in short, the first of a series of Jacobean dramas which together present a changed picture of the idea of conscience. In them is bodied forth that stark voluntarist world of the early seventeenth century in which the old medieval assumptions, the common property of Marlowe and Shakespeare, are nowhere in evidence. D'Amville and Borachio, who identify wholly with the new spirit of scientific rationalism, and whose godless creed denies validity to all that lies beyond ‘Nature and her large philosophy’ (1.i.4), act out their vain and wretched pretensions in a theatre of cosmic justice directed now by a Calvinist god of unqualified will, whose secret counsels and undetermined decrees impose awful constraints upon man's rational powers. For Calvin, of course, as for Christian orthodoxy in general, atheism was the ultimate blasphemy. But doubly outrageous to him was the unspeakable presumption inherent in erecting its unholy propositions upon the enfeebled inferences of man's vitiated reason, inferences culled, moreover, from the irredeemably perverted order of nature, which atheists would exalt as the aboriginal cause of all being. To deny God, moreover, was to render man indistinguishable from the brute beasts; and those who, with D'Amville, observe the ‘self-same course / Of revolution both in man and beast’ (1.i.5-6), attributing solely to nature's power the cause of man's ‘better composition’, are condemned in the Institutes as much for their perfidious exaltation of nature as for their blasphemous disavowal of its First Cause. Of such naturalists and atheists, Calvin says, ‘[They] will not say that chance has made [them] differ from the brutes that perish; but, substituting nature as the architect of the universe, [they] suppress the name of God.’³

Tourneur's play is, of course, primarily conceived as a refutation of this heresy, its overwhelmingly contrived dramaturgy a demonstration of the two quintessential truths of man's condition, whose admission by the atheist serves as prologue to his own damnation: man's wisdom is, uncontrovertibly, ‘a fool’ (V.ii.248), and there is manifestly a ‘power above [nature] that controls her force’ (V.i.103-4). Far from removing God ‘out of sight’, or burying him in nature, Tourneur's most urgent concern is to make visible at every turn God's immediate regulation of the affairs of men; to dramatize the superintendent workings of a providence that, in Calvin's words, governs all natures by a process ‘vigilant, efficacious, energetic, and ever active’,⁴ and by means which, characteristically, are above the ordinary course of nature. Neither in The Atheist's Tragedy, nor in Jacobean drama generally, do we find any trace of that Thomistic order of phenomena ruled and concatenated by laws, nor of that Shakespearean conception of providential justice which is executed through a series of rationally determinate secondary causes. Whereas for Aquinas, the perfection of divine providence required intermediary causes for its fulfilment, for Calvin and Tourneur the universe exhibits predominantly an order not of causes, but of arbitrary effects merely, not of reason, but of groundless will. Thus goodness, morality, and divine justice itself are beyond the scope either of man's reason to know, or his capacity to enact. The power that executes retributive justice upon D'Amville, contrives the arbitrary overthrow of his projects ‘in their pride’ (V.ii.272), and manifests itself ominously in extraordinary and elemental portents, is profoundly at variance with that entirely natural and reactive pattern of events which forecloses upon Richard III or Macbeth. Nor is the sudden and unexpected succour proffered to Charlemont and Castabella, which occasions in them a passive and resigned fortitude, in any way to be confused with that providence which Hamlet sees in the fall of a sparrow, and to whose eternal purposes, matured to ripeness in the nature of things, he eventually coordinates his perfected, but still voluntary, intents. Although The Atheist's Tragedy is the first play in which the revenge ethic is explicitly countermanded by the Christian Vindicta Mihi, nevertheless in the cases both of Charlemont and Hamlet, vengeance is in fact ultimately secured by the King of Kings;⁵ but in each instance, the theatre of God's judgment is shaped and determined by mutually opposed theories concerning the precise mode of its dispensation. For the super-ordinant providence of Hooker and Shakespeare is pre-eminently that universal providence conceived of by Aquinas, which is reflected in the order of creation; they are indeed synonymous, for the most part, since both affirm the Law Divine which is the reason of order in nature. But while Calvin grudgingly concedes the existence of a corrupted order of nature instinct with a universal providence which sustains it, he submits both doctrines to that of a superintending, watchful, special providence, according to which nothing happens without God's counsel, and wherein all contingency dependent merely on fortune or human free will is necessarily and absolutely negated. For Tourneur, as for Calvin, the mighty are put down from their seats, and the righteous exalted, not by a teleological ordering of means to ends in nature, but by God's active and undetermined intervention in its ordinary processes; not by virtue of divine power, but as a consequence of divine decree. Thus it is that, in the metaphysically bisected world of The Atheist's Tragedy, where there is an absolute moral disparity between those that profess ‘a divine contempt o' th' world’ (I.iv.98) and those who are sinfully enslaved to its pleasures, we are evidently urged to the contemplation of that order of transcendental justice, the evidence of which Calvin describes in the Institutes thus:

For in conducting the affairs of men, he so arranges the course of his providence, as daily to declare, by the clearest manifestations, that though all are in innumerable ways the partakers of his bounty, the righteous are the special objects of his favour, the wicked and profane the special objects of his severity. … His power is strikingly displayed when the rage of the wicked, to all appearance irresistible, is crushed in a single moment; their arrogance subdued, their strongest bulwarks overthrown, their armour dashed to pieces, their strength broken, their schemes defeated without an effort, and audacity which set itself above the heavens is precipitated to the lowest depths of the earth. On the other hand … the oppressed and afflicted are rescued in extremity, the despairing animated with hope, the unarmed defeat the armed, the few and many, the weak and strong.⁶

It is this voluntarist and determinist thesis of providence to which is conformed, in Bradbrook's phrase, the play's ‘rigid pattern of incredible events’;⁷ and the apparently causeless web of coincidence and improbability through which the tragedy is resolved has for Tourneur this specifically hermeneutic significance.

Now, given this Calvinist metaphysic of intractable command, in which virtue is synonymous with divine fiat, and morality wholly unassimilated to nature, the conscience becomes merely instrumental in character, the operative and supra-rational medium of man's soul, through which the decrees of providence are transmitted and carried immutably into effect. Only to the elect is granted a partial knowledge of God's will, and the means of framing themselves in accordance with it; the rest are clouded in ignorance, their wills bound by the fetters of sin. In the case of Charlemont, the mysteries of providence are partially illuminated in his soul by the ghost's scriptural command, and thereafter he exhibits that passive patience and rapt serenity of conscience which are the inward blessings of those elected to the divine favour. As Herndl has remarked, helplessness and resigned fortitude are in general the marks of the Jacobean hero, indeed, the very measure of his virtue.⁸ In this sense, the conscience of Charlemont is quite unlike that of Hamlet; for whereas in Shakespeare, the problem of evil demands action as an essential part of its solution, in Tourneur the answer is quite specifically to take no action at all. Hamlet's conscience, moreover, is almost synonymous with that recurrent and objective process of ratiocination by which he repeatedly addresses the central epistemological questions of his own flawed universe. His ultimate perception of the good is a reasoned outcome of inferences drawn from a cumulative chain of causes in his own and others' affairs, which convince him of heaven's ordinance. Charlemont's conscience, on the other hand, is at once inimical to nature and transcendant over reason; for his moral struggle, in so far as it takes place at all, is typically not between the excitements of blood and the promptings of reason, but between ‘the passion of / My blood and the religion of my soul’ (III.iii.35-6).

In the evil characters, conscience is similarly opposed to nature, indeed, to that universal guilt in nature by which the unregenerate voluntarily, but necessarily, capitulate to every kind of corrupt depravation. Levidulcia is in some obscure sense aware of sin, but fatalistically regards her concupiscence as a ‘natural sympathy’, seemingly the ‘free effect’ of her own ‘voluntary love’, but an effect she can neither restrain, nor give reason for (IV.v.16-21). D'Amville, though similarly enslaved to sin, seeks to circumvent conscience altogether by rationalizing his perverted and unnatural lust for his niece, by an argument ‘merely out / Of Nature’ (IV.iii.135-6), whose logic he will enforce as a blasphemous and provocative challenge to her ‘great supposed protector’ (IV.iii.160). Conscience is in the wicked merely a ‘yoke’, silenced for so long, but sensitive in its moral judgments just so far as is necessary to drive them unwillingly and at last to a self-confessed conviction of sin, by which testimony they are, in Calvin's words, deprived ‘of all pretext for ignorance’.⁹ Thus it is that, although Levidulcia's suicide is committed in ‘detestation of my deed’ (IV.v.82), and D'Amville's self-destruction infers to him the ‘judgement I deserved’ (V.ii.266), neither character is capable of true repentance, merely of that remorse by which the inevitable fact of divine justice is automatically acknowledged.

The Atheist's Tragedy, then, is a dramatic dissertation which explores the theoretical implications of two mutually exclusive accounts of man's moral nature and metaphysical destiny.¹⁰ On the one hand are the atheists, whose radical creed, illegitimately filiated to the new spirit of scientific enquiry, substitutes for the empiricist study of second causes, a wholly discrete and amoral belief in nature as an autonomous mechanism, governed by purely physical laws of cause and effect. Set against them are the Christians, Charlemont, and Castabella, whose invincible faith in a transcendental Being above nature, to which infinite power its processes are inscrutably subject, is so spectacularly vindicated in the climactic overthrow of their oppressors. D'Amville would have had an immediate and mythic authenticity for a contemporary audience; as an archetypal atheist, he represents a synthesis culled from popular opinion and various Renaissance confutations of atheism.¹¹ The antecedent elements of this synthesis have been thoroughly explored by Ornstein and others,¹² whose valuable researches have served to illuminate, through contemporary perspectives, the atheist's characteristically scientific outlook, his elevation of an inadequate natural philosophy, his view of man as animal, and his attachment to such typically Epicurean goals as pleasure, power and profit.

In a somewhat undramatic exposition, therefore, D'Amville and Borachio systematically rehearse the cardinal tenets of their ‘large philosophy’: nature's laws determine the ‘self-same course / Of revolution both in man and beast’ (I.i.5-6), who are in consequence only to be distinguished by ‘man's … better composition’ (I.i.9); his ‘being's excellency’, on the contrary, need to be ascribed to nothing above his ‘Nature’ (I.i.14,15). Since it is true, moreover, that all life must yield to ‘Nature's weakness’, and death casts up ‘Our total sum of joy’ (I.i.16,17), the rational man owes it to himself to accumulate and augment the earth-bound felicities of which ‘Wealth is Lord’ (I.i.30), by the industrious increase of his own power and substance. Himself a part of nature's mechanism, he is nevertheless able through his intellectual capacity to understand and adapt to his own ends her autonomic processes, by these means ensuring the continuance of that posterity wherein lies man's only claim to eternity. By the energetic propagation of himself, both in his own progeny and the resources ‘Whereby they live and flourish’ (I.i.58), the rationalist may in some measure escape the central fact of human mortality to which his materialist creed condemns him. Thus D'Amville can say of Rousard and Sebastian:

Here are my sons …
There's my eternity. My life in them
And their succession shall for ever live,
And in my reason dwells the providence
To add to life as much of happiness.

(I.i.123-7)

In this resides the chief difference between what Murray calls the rational atheists, D'Amville and Borachio, and their sensualist counterparts, Levidulcia and Sebastian, for whom reason is entirely submerged in the instinctive and indiscriminate indulgence of physical lust.¹³ For them, a compulsive carnality is justified in the name of ‘Wise Nature’ (I.iv.78): Levidulcia upbraids Castabella for an unnatural chastity in refusing to wed the ailing Rousard, in a long harangue which repudiates the dictates of ‘reason’ and the ‘barren mind’ (I.iv.69) as essentially subversive of that ‘work / Of generation’ (I.iv.75) by which nature revives her age. Distinctly animal-like in her predatory licentiousness, Levidulcia exemplifies not so much reason's inadequacy as what Calvin describes as its total deformity and ruin.¹⁴ D'Amville, by contrast, denigrates with Borachio the foolish improvidence of spending either one's substance or oneself on ‘a minute's pleasure’ (I.i.27), and his subsequent attempt to gratify his physical appetites by ravishing his daughter-in-law is subordinated to the eminently rational task of securing descendants. The Atheist's Tragedy, indeed, examines several varieties of godlessness,¹⁵ and Soquette, Fresco and the false precisian Languebeau Snuffe collectively symbolize that irredeemably sin-laden and degenerate world which is so markedly a feature of the Calvinist mythos. But it is D'Amville primarily who exemplifies what, for his creator, is the monstrous iniquity, not only of accommodating nature's perverted amoralism to the depraved misuses of reason, but of blasphemously opposing the providence of a merely human reason to a divine providence whose very existence it would deny. In the voluntarist and dislocated universe in which he operates, the atheist is crushed finally by those vast metaphysical dichotomies whose sanctions he so casually pretermits, and the vanity of his ambitions is adumbrated in the series of ironic reversals by which they are successively and summarily negated. All his schemes and plots come to nothing: the murdered Montferrers reappears to haunt him, his disinherited nephew returns to claim his lawful patrimony, the enforced marriage of Rousard and Castabella proves sterile, and the judgment intended for Charlemont falls quite literally upon his own head. But more than this, their overthrow awakens him to a conscience-stricken perception of his own guilt and the generalized inadequacy of human reason that testifies irresistibly to the reality of an avenging and outraged Deity.

In thus objectifying D'Amville's anagnorisis, Tourneur clearly takes his cue from the ideas propounded in prose confutations of atheism;¹⁶ for it was widely recognized that no matter how vaingloriously such scoffers made ‘pregnant wit’ the architect of their own ‘commodious providence’ (I.i.110,112), they were nevertheless unable to escape the fearsome agonies of conscience. William Vaughan's treatise reaffirms Calvin's dictum that the vulnerability of atheists in this respect amounted to ‘an example of the fact that some idea of God exists in every human mind’,¹⁷ notwithstanding that such knowledge may be temporarily effaced or obscured by repeated wickedness. In The Golden-grove (pub. 1600) Vaughan declares:

Thus we see, that there is engraven in the hearts of men a certaine feeling of Gods nature, which can never be rooted out. And although swinish Atheists doe laugh at that, which I have written touching the Godhead, yet that is but a laughter from the teeth outward, because inwardly the worme of conscience gnaweth them much more sharply then all hote searing irons.¹⁸

So it is that D'Amville, to whom the murder of Montferrers is but a matter for ‘violent laughter’ (II.iv.89) and who seems able to ‘disburden’ his conscience by the ‘satisfaction’ of further crimes (IV.iii.96), comes to realize before he dies that a creed built upon the freedom of the reason can only deliver him at last to a ‘loathsome horror’ of sin (IV.iii.225) and an abject terror of death.

Given this connate and finally inextinguishable insight available even to the unregenerate conscience, it is easy to appreciate the widespread Renaissance supposition that those who attempted to root out its ‘engraven’ knowledge of God's nature were nothing but fools. D'Amville and Borachio congratulate themselves on their ‘amplitude of wit’ (I.i.119), and the ‘judicious’ design of their Machiavellian plot (II.iv.101), but the final cataclysm which overwhelms him demonstrates to D'Amville the precariously limited strength of natural understanding. In spite of the vaunted wisdom by which he attempts to outreach other men's wit, D'Amville's self-inflicted death-stroke duly humbles him to the Psalmist's truth (‘The Fool hath said in his heart, There is no God’: Psalms 14:1), and justifies the scathing obloquies enunciated in such treatises as Fotherby's Atheomastix:

But what is the Atheist then, if he be not a man? I finde it affirmed, in the writings of the learned, both of Divines, and Philosophers, both of Christians and Pagans; yea, and that by full consent; that all impious Atheists, and deniers of God … are in very deed, not better than mere Fooles. Who, being destitute of reason (the true specificall difference of a man) cannot truly be called men, but in an abusive and unproper acception.¹⁹

But although before his death and judgment, D'Amville experiences the ‘fearful torments’ of conscience, and confesses to the foolishness of unbelief, there is for him neither hope of conversion nor escape from the unalterable decrees of a providence which strikes down the wicked even as it safeguards the innocent. For atheists were authoritatively considered to be numbered among the reprobate, eternally predestined to damnation; and of those ‘beastes’ who make ‘open profession of contempt against [God] and all religion’, John Dove has this to say:

But as for these, they mocke God in despight of him, they sinne upon malice, and therefore their blasphemye is against the Holy Ghost, which is love and charitye. There is no hope of their conversion, because our Saviour hath already pronounced sentence of damnation against them, saying: Their sinne shall never be forgiven, neither in this life, nor in the life to come.²⁰

If the course of D'Amville's damnable career ironically describes, in its purely secular orientation, that ‘self-same course of revolution’ as more fundamental forms of life—its genesis, state and decay yielding in a limited and finite sense to ‘Nature's weakness’²¹—that of Charlemont suggests the regenerate progress of a soul elected to the divine favour and therein confidently assured of its salvation. Symbolically drowned in the wars and ‘buried’ by his uncle, he is metaphorically reborn, in the aftermath of the ghost's visitation, to a blissful and self-reliant piety, schooled to attend with patience that ‘success of things’ by which he ultimately inherits all the blessings he formerly ‘Stood ready to be dispossessed of’ (V.ii.280). He embodies, with Castabella, the Calvinist virtues of patient fortitude, chastity, and a passive submission to the divine will. After his imprisonment, he is translated to that serene state of grace and peace of conscience which distinguish the adopted souls of the elect, and bears himself thereafter, in the manner of his father, with such a native goodness as if ‘regeneration had been given / Him in his mother's womb’ (II.iv.66-7). The wholesale transformation that comes over Charlemont,²² from a wayward ‘inclination’ and ‘affection to the war’ (I.ii.2,14) that would place the obligations of family honour above its mutual and ‘contracted life’ (I.ii.93), to a humbled and obedient acquiescence in the will of providence as revealed by the ghost, seems in this light not so much an inconsistency in Tourneur's characterization, as a deliberate attempt to suggest that moment of regeneration which Calvinists believed manifested itself as much in the outward demeanour of the believer as in the inner assurance of his own conscience. ‘True regeneration’, says Thomas Morton, in his Treatise of the threefolde State of man,

is not so small a matter, neither maketh so light a chaunge in a man, but that it may be plainly discerned where it is present … For regeneration being a totall and a supernaturall change of the minde, will, affections, thoughtes, wordes and dedes of a man, cannot be hid or doubtfull for any long time, but will shewe it selfe both to the eyes of other men, and much more to the conscience of the beleever himselfe.²³

It is partly because the change of ‘minde’ and ‘conscience’ is ‘totall’ and moreover ‘supernaturall’ in origin, that its psychological implications remain unexplored in Charlemont. On the contrary, change is merelly imputed to him without inner turmoil or obvious moral struggle, somewhat in the manner of ‘that fire’ which, in the words of his counterfeit funeral oration, ‘revive[s] the ashes of / This phoenix’ (III.i.35,36), so that divinity comes to seem, in very truth, the description, rather than the instruction, of his life (III.i.40-1). Nevertheless, its outward effects are clearly evinced in the graveyard: for what to D'Amville is a place ‘full / Of fear and horror’ (IV.iii.285), its disinterred death's-heads mortifyingly vexatious to his conscience, to Charlemont and Castabella, on the contrary, is as ‘fit a place for contemplation’ (IV.iii.3) as for sleep. Moreover, the sight of their innocent composure convinces the atheist that there is indeed

                    some other
Happiness within the freedom of the
Conscience than my knowledge e'er attained to.

(IV.iii.285-7)

But the play also develops, in its opening scenes, two other patterns of contrast sub-joined to the central metaphysical debate between the values of godliness and godlessness: the contrast between honour earned and honour bought, and between love and lust. The dramatic purpose of these minor themes is at an obvious level further to distinguish the Christians and the atheists, but they serve also to underline that universal deformity of both reason and nature to which the whole of creation is heir. Charlemont, in his desire to fight in the wars, is identified with family honour rather than with his uncle's dynastic acquisitiveness; but from the very outset, he too demonstrates the inadequacy of his reason. Encouraged by his uncle's offer of gold to supply his expenses, he advances the claims of honour in a moving interview with Monteferrers, the ironic effect of which is to remind us how far the unreasoning naiveté of the soldier has been manipulated by the scheming politician.²⁴ For Charlemont's sincere desire to earn honour has been seconded, and thus subtly undermined, by his uncle, who would ‘disinherit’ his ‘posterity’ to secure its ‘purchase’ (I.i.88-9). Moreover, it is D'Amville who originally applies the epithets of honour to a project rooted merely in Charlemont's unthinking ‘disposition’ and ‘affection’ for the wars, and does so in order to coordinate his nephew's somewhat nebulous and irrational motives to the unscrupulous machinations of his own Machiavellian intellect. The reasons of honour are properly neither Charlemont's own, nor, from his point of view, fully rational; for they are allowed to predominate over both his obligations to Castabella and his duty to his father. Indeed, as its only surviving scion, the increase of honour to his ‘house’ actually threatens its survival. Nevertheless, we are meant to admire the sincerity, if not the soundness, of his motives, their nobility, if not their logic; for it is the ‘soldier's heart’ in which love and courage are so ‘near allied’ (I.iv.48) that is deliberately opposed to the perverted rationality of the atheist, simultaneously indifferent to all egos except his own, and all motives other than power and wealth.

Just as Charlemont's quest for honour demonstrates the frailty of his understanding, so Castabella's fidelity in love is never permitted to question the play's general thesis concerning the wholesale depravity of purely ‘natural’ instincts. For Castabella, love is opposed to lust just as in the broader dispensations of the play-world, morality is abstracted from nature, a term which, for Christians and atheists alike, carries the same meaning.²⁵ She therefore never directly denies the arguments of nature, whether addressed, by Levidulcia, to her ‘blood’, or by D'Amville, to her reason; but rather sublimates her love as a ‘chaste affection of the soul’, above the adulterate promptings of the flesh, a virtue she describes as the very ‘minion of Heaven's heart’ (II.iii.1-4). Forced to marry Rousard against her will, she refuses to submit divine ordinances to the judgement of reason, and yields her ‘duty’ if not her ‘heart’ to heaven's ‘pleasure’ (II.iii.13-14). These antitheses are more fully debated in the charnelhouse, where D'Amville rationalizes his incestuous designs upon Castabella by arguments drawn from that ‘general liberty / Of generation’ which nature allows to all creatures other than man:

                    Incest? Tush!
These distances affinity observes
Are articles of bondage cast upon
Our freedoms by our own subjections.

(IV.iii.124-7)

Castabella's protests are not addressed to the logic of D'Amville's philosophy, only to its insufficiency; for, as she points out, to argue ‘merely out / of Nature’, prescribing authority and law from its example, not only ignores the omnipotent goodness of God, but is unworthy the ‘Prerogative of Nature's masterpiece’ (IV.iii.135-6,138). Confessing that the ‘horror’ of the argument confounds the capacity of her ‘understanding’, she commends herself to the protection of ‘patient Heav'n’, and prayerfully invokes the thunderbolts of its wrath (IV.iii.163-4).

Whereas for the atheists, the moral law represents an artificial restraint upon man's natural freedoms, for the Christians it supererogates the laws both of nature and reason. Their translation to the realms of grace is apotheosized above all in the graveyard, where their chaste slumbers—in a place, moreover, where on every hand, lust and murder commit sin together—symbolize a blessed indifference either to sense or sensuality, and a supreme confidence in the directing hand of heaven. This sublime contempt of a world conceived of as a charnel-house of moral decay and corruption - a world from which only the elect can remain aloof—is surely the dramatist's attempt to give meaning to the central Calvinist theorem of a fragmented and divided universe, wherein all ‘Guilt is from nature, whereas sanctification is from supernatural grace’.²⁶ To D'Amville, the sight of Charlemont and Castabella asleep among death's-heads, suggests a peace of conscience beyond the scope of knowledge; and indeed, divines such as Thomas Morton would have confirmed that the excusing consciences of the faithful in regard both of their own and imputed righteousness could deliver them to just such a state of serene transcendence over sin, death and suffering: ‘This excuser’ [sic] he says,

is he who only can abide the trials of God's justice, who maketh the faithful rejoyce in all miseries; yea secure in regard of danger. It maketh them triumph over sinne, Sathan, hell, death and damnation, and replenisheth their hearte with such a perfect peace, whereby they feele the joyes of heaven, even whilst they live upon earth.²⁷

But, as Morton goes on to point out, this kind of excusing conscience ‘commeth of a true faith’,²⁸ a faith which, inaccessible to merely rational knowledge, is awakened in Charlemont by the summoning mandate of heaven, revealed in turn by his father's spirit, whose essence is, by definition,

Above the nature and the order of
Those elements whereof our senses are
Created.

(III.i.85-7)

Charlemont's moral development in the play, therefore, to some extent counterpoints D'Amville's own, and involves his progress from an earthly code based upon the rationale of honour, to a heavenly code of patience; from a somewhat passionate impulsiveness, to the ineffable peace of conscience; in short, from the folly of corrupted reason, to the supra-rational wisdom of faith. Thus his initial pursuit of honour not only leads him unerringly to that species of ‘ill success’ previsioned in the forebodings of Montferrers and the presageful tears of Castabella; but its brittle logic is unilaterally abrogated by a divine imperative which insists that the onus of revenge, to which Charlemont is by honour and convention ostensibly bound, is the absolute prerogative of the King of Kings. But even then, Charlemont's ‘doubtful heart’ (II.vi.67) is slow to credit the full implications of what has been revealed to him: he attempts first to rationalize the ghost's appearance as an ‘idle apprehension’ or a ‘vain dream’ (II.vi.61), and even a second visitation fails to rid him of the painful conviction that his wrongs are both heavier than ‘patience can endure to bear’ (III.i.145), and that their cause is the business still of his ‘understanding to deliberate’ (III.i.136). Only after his fight with Sebastian, during which the ghost, reappearing for the third time, interposes between Charlemont and the prosecution of his revenge, is he finally content to resign the dubious propositions of both honour and passion to the ultimate dispositions of ‘Him … / to whom the justice of revenge belongs’ (III.ii.33-4).

Partly as a result of his religious forbearance in not striking down Sebastian whilst he had the chance, Charlemont is arrested and thrown into prison, an experience which so humbles the ‘pride’ of his ‘mortality’, and so arms him against the weight of his afflictions (III.iv.27-9), that he becomes heir to what Calvin called ‘the exulting confidence of the saints’.²⁹ As with Job, the value of suffering for Charlemont lies in simply accepting its incomprehensibility, and he learns the absolute futility of all efforts to commensurate divine with human justice, of all attempts to measure ‘our conditions’ by our deserts. (Cf. Job 6:2, ‘Oh that my grief were thoroughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together’.) For to submit providential punishment to the judgment of unaided reason is merely to increase its power to hurt; in this sense, ‘profane conceit’ and ‘our own constructions’ are, as Charlemont comes to acknowledge, the ‘authors of / Our misery’ (III.iii.13-16). To accept such affliction, on the other hand, is to acquire not just a ‘heart’ above the reach of maliciousness, and a ‘fortitude’ in scorn of all contempt, but a sovereign ascendancy over the passions:

But now I am emp'ror of a world,
This little world of man. My passions are
My subjects, and I can command them laugh,
Whilst thou dost tickle 'em to death with misery.

(III.iii.44-7)

Charlemont's stoical fortitude epitomizes the Christian mystery of redemptive suffering expressed in Matthew 24:13, that ‘he that shall endure to the end, the same shall be saved’; a truth vindicated in retrospect, when, standing possessed of all the symbols of heaven's favour and the world's regard, Charlemont's triumph is declared by the Judge to illustrate ‘the power of that eternal providence’, which, he affirms

Hath made your griefs the instruments to raise
Your blessings to a greater height than ever.

(V.ii.271-4)

Above all, it is Charlemont's submission of his conscience to this directing power that not only enables him miraculously to elude the mortal dangers to which he is everywhere exposed, but delivers him up to that euphoric acceptance of mortality in which the churchyard's ‘humble earth’ comes to seem the ‘world's condition’ (IV.iii.21-2) at its best, and death, a victory, whose ‘honour’ lies beyond the exigent of a merely mundane existence. In short, his conscience is imbued with those ‘inestimable felicities’ which, according to Calvin, sustain the ‘pious afflicted’ once the light of providence has entered their souls:

But once the light of Divine Providence has illumined the believer's soul, he is relieved and set free, not only from the extreme fear and anxiety which formerly oppressed him, but from all care. … This, I say, is his comfort, that his heavenly Father so embraces all things under his power—so governs them at will by his nod—so regulates them by his wisdom, that nothing takes place save according to his appointment: that received into his favour, and intrusted to the care of his angels, neither fire, nor water, nor sword, can do him harm, except in so far as God their master is pleased to permit. … Hence the exulting confidence of the saints. … ‘The Lord taketh my part with them that help me’ (Ps.cxviii.6) ‘Though an host should encamp against me my heart shall not fear’ (Ps.xxvii.3) ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil’

(Ps.xxiii.4).³⁰

But the intimately regulated order of effects predicated by the Calvinist conception of providence, though it frequently supercedes, does not ultimately pre-empt the existence of what the reformer calls ‘inferior causes’ in the dispensation of divine justice; indeed, it is often through such causes that the divine will is visibly manifested, affording categorical proof that all events, whether in or above the realm of nature, proceed from the secret counsel of God. To this end, Calvin affirms in the Institutes:

the Christian will not overlook inferior causes … If he is not left destitute of human aid, which he can employ for his safety, he will set it down as a divine blessing; but he will not, therefore, be remiss in taking measures, or slow in employing the help of those whom he sees possessed of the means of assisting him. Regarding all the aids which the creatures can lend him, as hands offered him by the Lord, he will avail himself of them as the legitimate instruments of Divine Providence.³¹

The fixed contemplation of a superintending providence therefore enables Charlemont to entertain each and every opportunity of escape as evidence of its beneficent favours. Thus he accepts the offer of money to redeem him from prison as the induction to ‘some end / Of better fortune’ (III.iii.59-60), acknowledging the courtesy of Sebastian in being its instrument. Later on, having killed Borachio in self-defence, he again makes his escape, forswearing his own inclinations to submit to the law, on the supposition that ‘It may / Be Heaven reserves me to some better end’ (IV.iii.35-6). Finally, it becomes clear that the better end for which he has been preserved is to become just such a ‘legitimate instrument’ of providence, as those inferior causes of ‘aids’ and ‘means’ by which he has hitherto been assisted. Entering in time to interrupt ante flagrantem the graveyard assignation of Soquette and Snuffe, he appropriates the latter's disguise of sheet, hair and beard, wisely forbearing to ‘expostulate’ the purpose of such a ‘friendly accident’ (IV.iii.71-4); a purpose which in fact triumphantly declares itself when he is made the means of Castabella's deliverance from ‘the arm of lust’, frightening D'Amville away by his opportune emergence from the charnel-house. Charlemont's sojourn in the churchyard thus culminates in his sublime conviction that his sufferings have been justified; that heaven has made him ‘satisfaction’ for his ‘wrongs’ by reserving him for the ‘worthy work’ which has just now crowned the actions of his life (IV.iii.179-85). This unspeakable exaltation of conscience and spirit continue to sustain him throughout the trial-scene, where his impregnable courage in the face of death prompts D'Amville to request his body after execution, in order to find out by his ‘anatomy’ the efficient cause of a ‘contented mind’ (V.ii.167). ‘My wit’, says D'Amville,

Has reached beyond the scope of Nature; yet
For all my learning I am still to seek
From whence the peace of conscience should proceed.

(V.ii.156-9)

But the peace of conscience is not to be achieved either by ‘art’ or by ‘Nature’; nor is it within the comprehension of a merely naturalistic ‘Philosophy’ (V.ii.161, 166); rather, as Charlemont affirms, it ‘rises in itself’, being a spiritual state of purely supernatural origins. In all these assumptions, the atheist displays the insufficiency of his reason, for the moral serenity and guiltless courage of his victims are the imputative effects of Divine grace; and it is specifically to heaven, therefore, that Charlemont in the end attributes all his blessings, including those ‘gracious motives’ which ‘made’ him ‘still forbear / To be mind own revenger’ (V.ii.275-7).³²

Just as the congruent pattern of events in the graveyard confirms Charlemont in the mysteries of a luminous faith, so a parallel series of events, by their very unnaturalness, contribute to the overthrow of D'Amville's proud reason, and enforce him to a final recognition that there is a power above nature. The providence that safeguards the innocent and emancipates them to the beatific consolations of a liberated conscience, in like manner and by similar extraordinary processes, so binds the unregenerate conscience of D'Amville that he succumbs, like Macbeth, to its stricken imaginings. Paradoxically, his conscience becomes increasingly susceptible, as it veers towards unreason, to the evidence of that order of supernatural truth by definition incommensurable with a view of life rooted exclusively in rerum natura. Ghostly apparitions, real or imagined, combine to remind him inescapably of the ‘loathsome horror’ of his sin: and Charlemont's macabre disguise precipitates him to that state of distraction where such sights as the staring death's-head (IV.iii.211), the vision of Montferrers' ghost in ‘A fair white cloud’ (IV.iii.235), and its later manifestations in a dream (V.i.27-31), prove inexorably vexatious to his conscience, and awaken it, hitherto benumbed or seared, to the sinful enormity of his crimes. He is reduced, like Faustus, to that abject state of morbid terror said to afflict unrepentant sinners, and particularly atheists, once they became subject to intimations of their own mortality. Like Faustus, he suffers apocalyptic visions of annihilation, crying out in an agony of guilt to be overwhelmed by mountains, or consumed in the elements, so that his body, ‘circumvolved’ within a cloud, might be scattered by thunder to ‘nothing in the air’ (IV.iii.249-52).³³ Like Faustus, his soul is shaken by paroxysms of despair as it confronts the truth it has hitherto desired to avoid: accusing himself of cowardice, D'Amville admits that

                    the countenance of
A bloodless worm might ha' the courage now
To turn my blood to water. The trembling motion
of an aspen leaf would make me, like
the shadow of that leaf, lie shaking under it.

(IV.iii.236-40)

Tourneur's portrayal of D'Amville's spiritual desperation, and the leaf-like tremblings of his conscience, seems influenced by Calvin's doctrine that even among those who ‘deny the being of a God’, a sense of deity is nevertheless engraved upon their consciences; of atheists the Institutes affirm:

The most audacious despiser of God is most easily disturbed, trembling at the sound of a falling leaf. How so, unless in vindication of the divine majesty which smites their consciences the more strongly the more they endeavour to flee from it. They all, indeed, look out for hiding-places, where they may conceal themselves from the presence of the Lord, and again efface it from their mind; but after all their efforts they remain caught within the net.

… [In such cases] the gnawings of conscience is not unlike the slumber of the intoxicated or the insane, who have no quiet rest in sleep, but are continually haunted with dire horrific dreams.³⁴

But having put, for the moment, his brain in ‘order’, making it the ‘happy instrument’ both of Charlemont's rearrest and the sealing up of his own ‘assurance’, D'Amville endeavours to evade all further excoriations of conscience by closeting himself with the gold coins for which he murdered his brother, ‘ravishing’ his ‘sense’ with their angels' voices (V.i.9). Moreover, he takes ironic refuge in what Tourneur evidently sees as an habitual and characteristic blasphemy inherent in the atheist's creed: the sacrilegious denial of astrological influence. Like Shakespeare's naturalist Edmund, who denies not only an ‘enforced obedience’ to the planets, but also their ‘divine thrusting on’ (King Lear, I.ii.130-1), D'Amville despises the ‘ignorant astronomer’ whose ‘wandering speculation’ would make the stars the arbiters of ‘men's fortunes’ (V.i.10-12). Instead, his reductivist faith equates the stars with gold, and reason with God:

These are the stars, the ministers of fate,
And man's high wisdom and superior power
To which their forces are subordinate.

(V.i.24-6)

Reassured in his convictions by this profane conceit, D'Amville falls asleep; but the complacency of his beliefs and the counterfeit security they represent are almost immediately countermined by his nightmare vision of the ghost of Montferrers, who refutes his atheistical presumption by reminding him that ‘with all thy wisdom th'art a fool’, and by predicting the imminent destruction of all his projects. We recall, with Calvin, that for the audacious despiser of God there can be no quiet rest in sleep, and prepare to behold the atheist finally caught up in the ‘net’ of providence, his conscience smitten by the divine wrath the more he endeavours to evade it.

Now the precise relationship between providential power and astrological fate was a subject of considerable controversy during the Renaissance, and the uses to which these concepts are put in The Atheist's Tragedy has occasioned a degree of critical dissension, if not outright confusion.³⁵ Tourneur appears to align himself with a leading proponent of judicial astrology, Sir Christopher Heydon, who, in A Defence of Judiciall Astrologie, affirms that ‘the providence of God in the ordinarie government of the world, doeth as well shine in disposing the meanes, as in ordaining the ende’, and holds that such ends can be effected inter alia through stellar influence.³⁶ And indeed, throughout the play, D'Amville's blasphemous denigration of all such influence is answered by ominous and unnatural portents in the heavens, which culminate, as we have seen, in the nightmare appearance of Montferrers. Thus on the occasion of the murder, D'Amville and Borachio gloat upon the macabre elegance of their plot, carried unobserved through the very eye of observation, by the unwitting but ‘instrumental help’ of servants made drunk for the purpose; and its successful execution through the agency of others, suggests to D'Amville's scornful pride a heinous comparison, which credits himself with

That power of rule philosophers ascribe
To him they call the supreme of the stars,
Making their influences governors
Of sublunary creatures, when their selves
Are senseless of their operations …

(II.iv.136-40)

In thus denying the ability of the stars to exert a governing influence upon the sublunary world, D'Amville is, of course, denying the existence of a power beyond them whose rule they merely reflect and mediate. However, this assertion is ironically interrupted in mid-sentence by thunder and lightning, clearly intended as a spectacular augury of heaven's power over nature, which D'Amville attempts to rationalize scientifically as a ‘mere effect of Nature’ (II.iv.142). The thunder and lightning motif recurs in Act IV, where Castabella, propositioned by D'Amville's ‘argument’ of ‘love’ (IV.iii.83), petitions heaven to express its wrath in thunderbolts and enflame the skies with lightning, rather than thus endure the burden of man's wickedness. And in due course, its power is asserted, and wickedness warded off, if not precisely in the manner desiderated by Castabella's entreaty, then at least no less auspiciously by the happy intervention of Charlemont, providentially preserved for this ‘blessed purpose’ by the protecting hand of God. A few lines later, D'Amville reenters distractedly; stricken now with guilty horror, the sight of the stars, so far hidden in apparent complicity with his black and deep desires, convinces him that their present luminescence challenges ‘payment’ of him (IV.iii.230). Similarly the sky, hitherto darkened and obscured until the ‘close deed / Was done’ (IV.iii.223-4), now meets him in the face with her ‘light corrupted eyes’ (IV.iii.229): the empyreal witnesses of that divine power which is has been his temerity to deny.

Now in all these instances, Tourneur seems at least partly concerned to show the astrological scepticism of the atheist emphatically contravened by the manifest evidence of God's power as revealed in his creation; for the awesome impressiveness of the firmament, with its infinite multitude of stars, was held to be one proof of the existence of its creator. This is in fact the conventional Calvinist dogma, unexceptionable either to polemicists against astrology or against atheism. So the anonymous W. P. in his Foure Great Lyers, maintains that the firmment is ‘an Alphabet written in great letters, in which is described the majestie of God’, and that the ‘wonderfull varietie of Starres’ is so convincingly the work of his hands as ‘maketh sinners and wicked menne inexcusable before the judgement seate of God’.³⁷ John Dove's A Confutation of Atheisme declares in similar vein that

No man is such a rusticke, so brutish and voyde of common sense and reason, but as often as he looketh up to heaven, if he deny this, his own eyes shall witnes against him, for although this be not sufficient to bring him to the perfecte understanding of that God by whose providence he seeth the world is governed, yet what his eye hath seene, his tongue may tell.³⁸

The difficulty here is that Tourneur goes beyond this to a cosmological theory in which the stars are not merely the latent and inert corruscations of God's glory, but specifically the active agents of his providence, and their subordinate influence upon the fortunes and destiny of the atheist is manifestly proportionate to his denials of their significance. The playwright's association with Sir Christopher Heydon (to whom he dedicated The Transformed Metamorphosis³⁹) has apparently led him to adopt in these instances a somewhat intrusive and anomalous metaphysic of astrological determinism, logically at odds with his more typical concern to show God's direct intervention in the affairs of men, and strictly inconsistent with the mainstream Calvinist orthodoxy which elsewhere informs the play. Somewhat ironically, therefore, D'Amville's scorn for the ‘planet-struck’ ignorance of the astronomer is actually closer in spirit to those theologians of the period who accused astrologists of a contempt for God's providence, and whose characteristic objection to the sort of astrological fate developed in The Atheist's Tragedy was that, even where it postulated God as first cause, it assumed his will to be irreversibly expressed in the order of the stars, thus confining to second causes what was by definition supernatural and unknowable.⁴⁰ It is true that it was the judicial phase of the art which most antagonized its opponents. But to dogmatic reformists, even the moderate claims of a Heydon, that the divine government might shine as well in disposing the means as in ordaining the ends, infringed the Calvinist doctrine of special providence, according to which no phenomenal causes must be sought for except the secret will of God. Thus John Chamber, whose Treatise Against Judicial Astrologie was the immediate inspiration for Heydon's Defence, reasons that astrology must necessarily be opposed to divinity in that ‘The hearts and wayes of all men are in the hands of God, who doth dispose and turne them, as seemeth best to him.’⁴¹ Calvin himself in A little booke concernynge offences uncompromisingly proscribes not just astrology, but all notions of secondary causation and conditional necessity which threaten to usurp God's immediate regulation of the universe: ‘For we neither dreame of intricate knottes of causes with the Stoikes, nor submit the governance of the worlde to the Starres, nor imagine a necessitie of things in the very nature of things it selfe.’⁴²

But in fact, what seems a philosophic inconsistency in The Atheist's Tragedy is perhaps more apparent than real. D'Amville's scepticism, though counterposed somewhat inaccurately to a thematic systasis of religion and astrology, is in fact bred partly of an established stage convention in which any systematic repudiation of stellar influence (of the sort to which, for example, Edmund, Fletcher's Alquazier, and Chapman's Byron are prone) is to be equated, if not in every case with outright villainy, then with certain dangerous and autarchic tendencies of mind and will, which immediately triggered the still medieval prejudices and suspicions of a Renaissance audience. Indeed, as Don Cameron Allen suggests, the assumptions of astrology were so widely accepted at all levels of society, that in spite of the theological ordinances against it, a disbelief in its major hypotheses could be regarded paradoxically as a sinister aberration,⁴³ eminently consonant, therefore, with the unregenerate and irreligious scepticism of a D'Amville. And it is primarily at this level, where theology merges with popular superstition and a polymorphous dramatic tradition, that the genesis of Tourneur's beliefs must be sought; indeed, a popular Calvinism seems not to have been entirely incompatible with at least a modified form of astrologia naturalis. The Huguenot poet, Du Bartas, for example, manages to combine a belief in the unilaterality of the divine will, with an equally firm conviction that its dispositions may be predicted in the ‘fatal influence’ of the planets:

I hold, that God (as The first cause) hath given
Light, Course and Force to all the Lampes of Heav'n:
That still he guides them, and his Providence
Disposeth free, their Fatall influence:
And that therefore, (the rather) we below
Should studie all, their Course and Force to know.(44)

Even Calvin, as we have seen, does not totally repudiate the interposition of what he calls inferior causes, and in An Admonicion against astrology judiciall actually goes so far as to concede the principle that ‘god can use the naturall meanes to chasten men withall’.⁴⁵ For in fact to argue that the divine decrees were exclusively effected without the intercourse of natural causes was to labour the freedom of God's will at the expense of all logic, human or divine, inviting the obvious charge, levelled in this instance by Sir Christopher Heydon, that ‘God governeth inordinately, and so most absurdly, disturbing the order of causes. … For that cannot be truely said to be naturall, which is effected immediately by the powerfull and outstretched arme of God …’⁴⁶ But, allowing for a certain rhetorical exaggeration, this is very close to what the doctrine of special providence actually implied: that God indeed arranges his government so as to declare by the clearest manifestations that even where his justice is effected by natural means, it is necessarily above nature's corrupted law, and proclaims itself most strikingly in a specifically unnatural irrelatedness to the order of causes. Ultimately, the question resolves itself into one of attribution, and a more exact definition of what is ‘natural’ than is usual in contemporary treatises, or for that matter in Tourneur's thought: there is, after all, no literal deus ex machina in The Atheist's Tragedy, and the wickedness of its protagonist is punished by ‘natural’ means, but so unnaturally disposed as to suggest, as far as lies within the limits of conventional realism, the active intervention of the ‘powerfull and outstretched arme of God’. On this minimal definition of what is natural, all the extraordinary punishments which bring out the destruction of D'Amville have individually a material cause; but Calvinists would argue that God is the first, efficient and active cause from which such punishments proceeds, sin (rather than the stars, or any generalised instinct of nature) being the true impulsive cause, which provokes God into sending them.

So it is that in the opening scene of Act V, the overweening presumption which leads D'Amville to credit his ‘real wisdom’ with the creation of a state that will ‘eternize’ his ‘posterity’, and ironically to ridicule the foolish worshipper of a ‘fantastic providence’, is countered promptly by the providential annihilation of his posterity and the ‘wisdom’ by which it was to be sustained. His closet-bound meditations are interrupted by servants who enter with the body of Sebastian, ‘Slain by the Lord Belforest’ (V.i.49); while simulteneously the dying groans of the sickly Rousard emanate from a chamber ‘within’. In each instance, the wages of sin have been wrought through a material cause; but the dramatic effect of the untimely deaths is naturalistically indefensible,⁴⁷ intended to suggest the unmistakable intervention of that efficient cause from which all such retribution derives. This effect is confirmed in Rousard's case when we recall how, on the ‘very day’ of his marriage to Castabella, an inexplicable ‘weakness’ surprised his health:

As if my sickness were a punishment
That did arrest me for some injury
I then committed.

(III.iv.65-7)

And indeed the idea that sickness can have, in such cases, a moral rather than a strictly natural cause—so explicit, moreover, as to be capable of bringing even atheists to acknowledge God—is endorsed by Martin Fotherby's Atheomastix, which states that ‘even Physitians themselves doe finde in many sickenesses, that they be divine punishments’.⁴⁸ At this prospect of death, D'Amville's conscience succumbs once again to brainsick and fatal visions, and for a moment its incandescent imaginings confuse the face of the messenger with that ‘prodigious apparition’ which had haunted his dream. Calling for a doctor, he offers him gold to inspire ‘new life’ into the bodies of his sons; but he learns too late that neither gold nor the ‘radical ability of Nature’ (V.i.85) can restore the heat of life to those in which it is palpably extinguished. Confronted thus by the incomprehensible dissolution, apparently by nature, of the very monument he had raised in her honour, and deprived further of his meretricious faith in wealth, D'Amville appeals amazedly to the doctor, who confirms his dawning suspicion that there must indeed be a ‘power above Nature’, by rehearsing the classic argument against atheism, a proof drawn a posteriori of the existence of God:

                    A power above Nature?
Doubt you that, my lord? Consider but
Whence man received his body and his form:
Not from corruption like some worms and flies,
But only from the generation of
A man, for Nature never did bring forth
A man without a man; nor could the first
Man, being but the passive subject, not
The active mover, be the maker of
Himself; so of necessity there must
Be a superior power to Nature.

(V.i.104-14)

Increasingly distracted and troubled in his conscience, D'Amville curses treacherous nature for having ‘abused his trust’, and determines to arraign her as a forger of false assurances in the ‘superior court’ of ‘yond Star Chamber’ (V.i.118-20); and the pun here evidently implies his oblique recognition that the stars have, after all, a power to influence man's destiny, and that his own ultimate fate will be decided in the high court of divine justice. In the eschatology of the play's final scene, D'Amville opposes for the last time the providence of his reason to the providence of God, and his downfall enacts the widespread Renaissance belief not only that few atheists escaped unpunished, but that the manner of such punishments, in the words of Fotherby, ‘inforceth divers of those Atheists to confesse [God] who before had denied him’.⁴⁹

Thus, at the tragic climax, D'Amville interrupts the trial of Snuffe, Cataplasma and the minor workers of iniquity, entering ‘distractedly, with the hearses of his two sons borne after him’, appealing to the judges for ‘Judgement, judgement’ (V.ii.68). His own guilt-stricken terror of death causes him to marvel at the cheerful courage of Charlemont and Castabella, who, falsely accused for murder and adultery, mount the scaffold with the joyous alacrity of spirit which comes of a clear conscience. Whereas Charlemont calls for a glass of water, the apprehension of his victims' imminent end so harrows D'Amville's soul, freezing up ‘the rivers of his veins’, that, in contrast to his nephew, he calls for wine to bolster his courage; but again, his conscience becomes a prey to that stricken and phantasmagoric state in which ‘nothing is but what is not’, and the wine appears to change into blood, the ‘filthy witness’ of his own past crimes.⁵⁰ Having wrought himself up, by its consumption, to a ‘bastard valour’, and goaded by his conscience to an unreasoning and frenzied desperation, he dismisses the executioner, determining himself to become the ‘noble’ instrument of his nephew's death. As he raises up the axe, and Charlemont prepares himself for an ‘unexampled dignity of death’, D'Amville accidentally strikes out his own brains, a dramatic coup intended by Tourneur to demonstrate that in the theatre of God's justice, the atheist has secured both the judgment for which he came, and the due measure of his deserts, accomplished, moreover, by the extraordinary intervention of the deity.

For the Judge, as for all who behold it, the strangeness of this counterstroke exhibits the same power of eternal providence which has made of Charlemont's griefs the instruments of his new-found blessings: an unimpeachable conclusion, given the Calvinistic certainties upon which the play is founded, and one that would be echoed fulsomely by Fotherby, for whom such signal displays of Divine retribution were a cause as much for the godly to ‘rejoyce’ as for the ungodly to tremble. Indeed, if we assume what on the evidence seems likely, that Tourneur's play is in its ideological structure a dramatic redaction of academic treatises on atheism, then the pervasive and laboured moralism by which it is contrived, and the curiously epiphanic tone of its ending, may have been suggested by just such a passage as follows from Atheomastix, which in its summary exposition of Tourneur's plot could as well serve as a homiletic prologue for The Honest Man's Revenge, as a cautionary epitaph upon The Atheist's Tragedy. ‘For if we looke with judgement’, says Fotherby,

into the lives and deaths, of those prophane persons, that have beene Gods most direct and professed Enemies, and, most gloried and triumphed in their impieties and blasphemies, as though there were no God at all to regard them; wee may easily observe, that none of them hath escaped the revenging hand of God, but that all of them have constantly falne into great calamity, and evermore ended their ungodly lives, with unnaturall, untimely, and unfortunate deathes. Which constancy, in those mens so certaine infelicity (more than in other mens, that are in other kindes wicked) doth openly proclaime, that this their punishment commeth not out of the dust; neither is it sent unto them by blind chance and fortune (for, there is no such constancie) but that it onely proceedeth from that divine providence, which both heareth, and seeth, and knoweth all things: Yea, and taketh speciall notice of those that are Atheists, as of his most daring and audacious enemies: culling them out by the head, from among all other men, to be the selected spectacles of his wrath and indignation. That they who disclaimed him in their lives, yet might proclaime him in their deathes: declaring unto all men, that the God, whom they denied, had now, by their punishment, prooved himselfe a God indeed.⁵¹

Culled out ‘by the head’ in this manner, to be the selected spectacle of the divine wrath, it need hardly be added that D'Amville is damned for his sins, not only because he dies in the commission of murder, but as a reprobate atheist, the sentence of damnation has already been passed upon him.⁵² Indeed, Fotherby alludes to one of the darker implications of the doctrine of predestination, when he infers that God ordains the spectacular crimes of atheists and their equally spectacular punishments, according to his secret will: ‘As though he had made them to no other purpose, but to glorifie himselfe, by taking just vengeance upon their ungodliness.’⁵³ But by the more palpable evidence of his revealed will. D'Amville's profane faith in reason and his blasphemous exaltation of nature are anathema; and in his dying moments, the atheist proclaims their demonstrable insufficiency, driven by his conscience to render himself inexcusable before ‘yond’ power' that struck him down:

There was the strength of natural understanding
But Nature is a fool. There is a power
Above her that hath overthrown the pride
Of all my projects and posterity.

(V.ii.257-60)

Notes

1. Robert Ornstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960) p. 123.

2. For a more sustained comparison of The Atheist's Tragedy and Doctor Faustus, see Ornstein, The Moral Vision, pp. 122-4, and Irving Ribner (ed.), The Atheist's Tragedy, the Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1964), lxiii.

3. Institutes, I.v.4.

4. Institutes, I.xvi.3.

5. For discussions of The Atheist's Tragedy in the context of the revenge tradition see Fredson Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1940), pp. 139-43; and Brian Morris and Roma Gill (eds.), The Atheist's Tragedy, New Mermaids Edition (London: Benn, 1976), pp. xviii-xxiv; also T. M. Tomlinson, ‘The Morality of Revenge: Tourneur's Critics’, Essays in Criticism, 10 (1960), 134-47.

6. Institutes, I.v.7-8. For a Calvinist interpretation of the play see Michael H. Higgins, ‘The Influence of Calvinistic Thought in Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy’, RES, 19 (1943), 255-62.

7. M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), p. 184.

8. Herndl, The High Design, p. 163. I have at several points found Herndl's discussion of natural law beliefs in Jacobean tragedy invaluable.

9. Institutes, II.ii.22.

10. Cf. Ribner (ed.), The Atheist's Tragedy, xxxvii.

11. Ornstein, ‘The Atheist's Tragedy and Renaissance Naturalism’, SP, 51 (1954), 194-207; see also The Moral Vision, p. 120.

12. See ‘The Atheist's Tragedy and Renaissance Naturalism’; The Moral Vision. For more general discussions of Renaissance atheism see E. A. Strathmann, ‘Elizabethan Meanings of Atheism’, in Sir Walter Raleigh: A Study in Elizabethan Skepticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951); G. T. Buckley, Atheism in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1932); P. H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (San Marino, Calif.: Huntingdon Library 1953).

13. Peter B. Murray, A Study of Cyril Tourneur (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), pp. 60-1.

14. Institutes, II.ii.12.

15. Cf. Murray, A Study of Cyril Tourneur, p. 87.

16. I am indebted, as are all who have written on this subject, to the avenues of research suggested by Strathmann's major study: Sir Walter Raleigh: A Study in Elizabethan Skepticism.

17. Institutes, I.iii.2.

18. William Vaughan, The Golden-grove (London, 1600), sig.C2.

19. Martin Fotherby, Atheomastix: Clearing four Truthes, Against Atheists and Infidels (London, 1622), sig.M5⁴.

20. John Dove, A Confutation of Atheisme (London, 1605), sig.A4.

21. Cf. Murray, A Study of Cyril Tourneur, p. 62.

22. This transformation has been noticed by Una Ellis-Fermor in The Jacobean Drama: An Interpretation (London: Methuen, 1936), p. 166, and by Murray, A Study of Cyril Tourneur, p. 100. I am indebted also in the following paragraphs to Murray's perceptive comments on the relationship between honour and reason in Charlemont, ibid., pp. 99-104.

23. Thomas Morton, A Treatise of the threefolde state of man, sigs.S6^v, S7.

24. Cf. Brian Morris and Roma Gill (eds.), The Atheist's Tragedy, p. xiv.

25. Cf. Herndl, The High Design, p. 223.

26. Institutes, II.i.7.

27. A Treatise of the threefolde State of man, sig.S5.

28. ibid., sig.S5.

29. Institutes, I.xvii.11.

30. Institutes, I.xvii.11.

31. Institutes, I.xvii.9.

32. My italics.

33. See Hosea 10:8; Luke 23:30; Revelation 6:16. For a more general discussion of Tourneur's borrowings see Ornstein, The Moral Vision, pp. 120-6.

34. Institutes, I.iii.2.

35. See J. M. S. Tompkins, ‘Tourneur and the Stars’, RES, 22 (1946), 315-19; Ribner (ed.), The Atheist's Tragedy, pp. xliii-xlvi; Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy, pp. 176-8. Murray disagrees with the determinist interpretations of the above-mentioned critics when he states that the stars ‘do not function as they should, if they were truly in control of the actions of men’ (A Study of Cyril Tourneur, p. 95). For more general studies see Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England, pp. 201-24 and Don Cameron Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1941).

36. Sir Christopher Heydon, A Defence of Judiciall Astrologie (Cambridge, 1603), sig.q4^v.

37. W. P., Foure Great Lyers, Striving who shall win the silver Whetstone (London, 1585), sig.B7. W. P. is identified as William Perkins by H. Dick in ‘The Authorship of Foure Great Lyers (1585)’, The Library, IV, 19 (1938-9), 311-14.

38. Sig.C4.

39. According to the hypothesis advanced by Kenneth Cameron in ‘Tourneur's Transformed Metamorphosis’, RES, (1940) 18-24, p. 20.

40. Cf. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England, p. 215.

41. John Chamber, A Treatise Against Judiciall Astrologie (London, 1601), sig.D1.

42. Jean Calvin, A little booke concernynge offences, trans. A. Goldinge (1567), sig.F7^v.

43. The Star-Crossed Renaissance, pp. 184-5.

44. Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas: his devine weekes and workes, trans. J. Sylvester (London, 1605), sig.L2^v.

45. Jean Calvin, An admonicion against astrology judiciall, trans. G. G(ylby) (London, 1561), sig.C3.

46. A Defence of Judiciall Astrologie, sig.q4^v.

47. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy, p. 178.

48. Sig.T6^v.

49. ibid., sig.N2.

50. Macbeth, I.iii.141, II.ii.48.

51. Atheomastix, sigs.N2, N2^v.

52. See John Dove, sig.A4, quoted above.

53. Atheomastix, sig.N2^v.