Religion

Africa is the setting for several of V. S. Naipaul’s finest fictional stories — In a Free State, A Bend in the River, Half a Life. Africa is the setting for several of V. S. Naipaul’s finest fictional stories — In a Free State, A Bend in the River, Half a Life. And there is a pattern to the themes in the African works: fear, post-colonial disintegration, isolation, approaching catastrophe, a sense of being trapped in a way of life that is hovering on the borders of savagery. It is an unforgettable vision, but it remains that of an outsider. In The Masque of Africa, Naipaul goes deeper; this is the account of a journey through five countries with the purpose of ‘investigating the effects of African belief on the progress of civilisation’.

Half a century ago I read W. G. Hoskins’s book, The Making of the English Landscape, when it first came out. It was for me an eye-opener, as it was for many people. Half a century ago I read W. G. Hoskins’s book, The Making of the English Landscape, when it first came out. It was for me an eye-opener, as it was for many people. It told us of the extent to which our landscape had been made by man, not God, and taught us to look much more observantly at it. Since then, landscape history has become a major subject. So has media and political interest in what we are doing to it. In addition, another subject has come up in the shape of ‘man-made climate change’.

The emperor Augustus was the original god/father. Julius Caesar was often referred to as ‘the divine Julius’, but his nephew (and adopted son) was the first Roman to have temples dedicated to him in his lifetime. If uncle Julius had died a natural death, or in some brave battle, the Roman upper class would never have suffered the decimation (and then some) which Caesar’s ‘son’ and heir visited upon it under the rubric of vengeful piety. His last and greatest enemies had had nothing to do with Caesar’s death. Mark Antony had been Julius’s number two and was actually Octavian’s brother-in-law; Cleopatra had been his uncle’s most passionate love.

Peter Hitchens writes a stern column most weeks in the Mail on Sunday. It expresses disdain not only for today’s politicians but also for those of us who vote for them. The weekly Hitchens can leave even his fellow right-wingers feeling demoralised. He argues that David Cameron’s Tories are no better than Gordon Brown’s clowns. Anyone who swallows campaign promises from Wesmtinster’s stinking fraudsters — a plague on all their second houses — is, in his view, a fool. Hitchens is brave and clever. He writes fluently, with the eye of a shrewd reporter. The best newspaper columnists have always been contrarians, but surely few have been so consistently against everybody with such Old Testament hotness.

Taming the Gods is an extended essay about the secular state, something which would until recently have been regarded as a non-issue by English-speaking readers. The separation of Church and State is taken so much for granted in the West, that one can easily forget how recent and local its origins are. Religious beliefs, wrote Edward Gibbon, are ‘considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful’. As usual, Gibbon was fathering on the Romans the instincts of enlightened Englishmen of his own day. For the secular state was born in 18th-century England, and adopted by Revolutionary France.