Augustine the African

by Catherine Conybeare

Overview

An extraordinary work of revisionist history that centers Africa in the life of one of our greatest philosophers.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430), also known as Saint Augustine, was one of the most influential theologians in history. His writings, including the autobiographical Confessions and The City of God, helped shape the foundations of Christianity and Western philosophy. But for many centuries, Augustine's North African birth and Berber heritage have been simply dismissed. Catherine Conybeare, a world-renowned Augustine scholar, here puts the "African" back in Augustine's story. As she relates, his seminal books were written neither in Rome nor in Milan, but in Africa, where he had returned as a wanderer during a perilous time when the Western Roman Empire was crumbling. Using extant letters and other shards of evidence, Conybeare retraces Augustine's travels, revealing how his groundbreaking works emerge from an exile's perspective within an African context. In its depiction of this Christian saint, Augustine the African upends conventional wisdom and traces core ideas of Christian thought to their origins on the African continent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798228610033
Publisher:	Tantor
Publication date:	08/12/2025
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Catherine Conybeare, a renowned classicist, is the first woman to write a biography of Augustine since journalist Rebecca West nearly a century ago. Reinterpreting the writings of Augustine and his contemporaries has formed the heart of her scholarly work. She has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. She is Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities at Bryn Mawr College and lives in Pennsylvania.

Editorial Reviews

"Catherine Conybeare vividly draws the thread of Augustine’s African identity through his life and work in a fresh and elegant way, offering insights for scholars and general readers alike. She has enlarged my perspective on this monumental, complicated man, and I’m grateful."

Madeline Miller

"In this highly readable and innovative account, Catherine Conybeare has performed the challenging task of bringing alive this often-sidelined basis of Augustine’s life. With both verve and precision, she makes us see how central his African world was to the man and his ideas."

Brent Shaw

"Catherine Conybeare’s vital and exhilarating biography of Augustine portrays him, newly, in the context of his African society and identity. Through her meticulously researched yet utterly compelling account, we live with [Augustine] through the upheavals that shaped his faith and his work. Conybeare’s is an important contribution and this is, simply, a wonderful book."

Claire Messud

"History buffs and Augustine scholars will be delighted by the level of detail here and impressed by Conybeare’s own translations of the Latin sources...A scholarly biography that places Augustine’s ambivalence toward Africa at the center of his and Christianity’s story."

Kirkus Reviews

"Catherine Conybeare has a genius for turning disarticulated details into edifying drama. It will be liberating to get an African Augustine who leaves us with more options than sublime indifference or earnest handwringing."

Jim Wetzel

"A long-needed survey of the great theologian’s hinterland. Augustine’s African identity both exposed him to condescension and prejudice from his contemporaries and gave him invaluable critical distance from the prevailing ideologies of empire. His contemporary significance becomes clearer than ever in this excellent study."

Rowan Williams

2025-05-28
Caught between two continents.

St. Augustine’s influence on Western philosophy in general and Christian theology in particular can hardly be overstated, yet little has been made of his North African heritage—an oversight that Conybeare, a professor at Bryn Mawr college, has set out to redress. Aurelius Augustinus was born in 354 C.E. in Thagaste (present-day Algeria), a city founded by indigenous Amazigh (Berber) peoples, of which Augustine was one, and at the same time part of the larger Roman Empire. This duality, Conybeare contends, characterized Augustine’s life and work. He grew up idolizing Roman culture, but when, at 28, he traveled to Rome to teach rhetoric, he felt “profoundly out of place,” especially when his students “sneered at his African accent.” Still, Augustine was appointed master of rhetoric in Milan, where he gave speeches in praise of the Roman emperor. While there, Augustine converted to Christianity, but he grew homesick for Africa, so he returned and was ordained as bishop of Hippo, where the contradictions piled up. He found himself stuck between two versions of Christianity: the Roman church in Africa and the African church. Augustine fought against the African church on behalf of the Romans, yet fought against the Roman view of original sin after a Roman deacon attacked Augustine’s African heritage. He defended local African languages, and at the same time only spoke Latin himself. Within these contradictions Augustine forged his doctrines of grace and free will and wrote masterful books, includingConfessions andCity of God. “Appropriated for a Western version of Christianity based in Europe,” Conybeare writes, these works “are read as if it doesn’t matterwhere they were written.” History buffs and Augustine scholars will be delighted by the level of detail here and impressed by Conybeare’s own translations of the Latin sources, while casual readers may find themselves lost in the weeds.

A scholarly biography that places Augustine’s ambivalence toward Africa at the center of his and Christianity’s story.

Kirkus Reviews