This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Catherine Conybeare’s Augustine the African might, at first glance, with its upside-down map of the Mediterranean and its quest for an African origin to the famed Roman saint, appear to be another entry into the culture war attacks on “Eurocentrism”.
Yet in fact this beautifully written and closely researched book is a powerful reminder of the intellectual validity and importance of questioning established and inherited narratives, when done with care rather than contempt.
The first thing that must be said about Augustine the African is that it is written in an attractive fashion, an elegiac and elegant style that perfectly suits the life and times of Augustine. Most of all it is a book startlingly charged and suffused with a sense of curiosity and compassion towards its subject, a quality that gives the text an almost novelistic sense of emotional urgency.
Conybeare makes full use of the richness of biographical and autobiographical material on the life of Augustine to bring the Bishop of Hippo and his circle to full life and colour. The emphasis on his African context, far from feeling like an anachronistic projection, is fully justified by the result, like a light thrown on an artwork from a new angle, offering new dimensions and possibilities. This African light illuminates her narrative throughout, and gives the story of Augustine’s life a coherence that is hard to deny.
The “Africanness” of Augustine is a case made from deep reading and an imaginative instinct for the sources, pointing to the unusual survival of Punic alongside Roman throughout North Africa; and the unique dynamics of the African Church, with its distinctive customs and Donatist schisms. Rather than falling into the trap of treating Roman Africa as a subaltern identity, Conybeare paints a persuasive portrait of a provincial identity, closely linked to a hyperlocal patria of home town and patronage networks.
Africa, in the context of the book, means the Roman province, which encompassed the former African possessions of its one-time rival city state, the Phoenician colony of Carthage. This included much of modern Tunisia and parts of modern Algeria and Libya. The inhabitants were diverse, including Phoenician, Greek and Roman settlers, but also what we would call an indigenous population of Berbers, who in Augustine’s time spoke the Punic language brought by the Carthaginians. Augustine himself was born to a Roman father and a Berber mother, and he would have spoken Punic as well as Latin.
We hear the sneering of Rome’s elite at Augustine’s rustic ways
The book traces Augustine’s life, deploying his Africanness as a continual leitmotif. We follow Augustine from his boyhood haunts to the shining lights of Carthage, leaving behind the child that wept over the abandonment of Queen Dido by Aeneas, and observing the development of the restless and urbane rhetorician. We discover him in Rome and Milan, encountering the sneering of the Roman elite at his rustic provincial ways, and explore again the extraordinary story of his conversion and return to Africa.
Though one of the most dramatic and familiar passages of Augustine’s life, familiar from the Confessions, and related with great skill, it forms only the earliest part of the book, the bulk of which deals with the mature Augustine, and his complicated career in Africa.
The moment when a thrice-bereaved Augustine, having lost best friend, mother and son, is forcibly conscripted by the locals of Hippo into the priesthood is one of the most masterful passages of the book. The absurdity and seriousness of the scene are equally asserted, but the most powerful element is the imaginative reconstruction of Augustine’s own state of mind, overwhelmed by a vocation he has not sought.
It’s a testament to the book’s clarity that readers are not left wondering why such extraordinary scenes happen — the demand for competent preachers and the fierce ecclesiastical competition for the best citizens which typified the province of Africa.
A combination of well-chosen detail, a gift for description and genuine flashes of insight infuses this neglected portion of Augustine’s life with animation and vigour. We trace the great clashes with the Donatists and Manicheans, the parish politics of ancient Africa, and the subtle arguments with exiled elites following the Sack of Rome in 410 AD.
This last event, apocalyptic and terrifying for the imperial centre, is given important context by the African focus of the book. Augustine’s own equanimity makes more sense when you recall the event’s immediate impact on Africa was a load of jumped-up wealthy refugees blaming Christianity for weakening the Roman spirit. For Augustine, a bishop and famed preacher, this represented a pastoral and theological challenge that he had to meet with energy and imagination.
It is in this context that Augustine writes the City of God, which Conybeare is able to frame as an African as well as Roman text, one written on the imperial periphery by a local leader with a foot firmly in both worlds. The sense of Augustine as presenting a regional pride and realism is persuasive, but Conybeare’s argument is more subtle. She presents a picture of a Roman world of competing cosmopolitan centres, in which even Rome herself has lost all but a symbolic centrality, and ambitious young men are easily lost between competing faiths, vocations and relationships. Augustine’s sense of spiritual homelessness is at once well explained by this context, and made to feel urgently modern and familiar.
Augustine’s role in Roman history comes into a new focus. Half outsider critically distanced from lamenting Romans, half insider deeply versed in Roman history and culture, he was perfectly placed to perform a spiritualising synthesis, critically re-reading Roman history and raising up in its place the City of God and the salvation history of mankind itself. This sense of Western history emerging from its periphery is a valuable and consistent theme in the book.
One of the most compelling aspects of Conybeare’s telling of the story of Augustine’s life is the tantalising, almost utopian yearning for a life of peace, beauty and contemplation. His retreat with his mother and friends to the villa of Cassiciacum has some of the quality of Evelyn Waugh’s “low door in the wall” in Brideshead Revisited — an almost impossible vision of joy that would forever haunt his life.
Augustine’s dream of establishing a monastic community with friends and family shares the dualism of the rest of the narrative. It is at once an ideal of Roman otium and of African kinship and ascesis. It is the example of fellow African, the Egyptian St Anthony, which provokes the great change in Augustine’s life, and which he longs to imitate.
Yet this dream was never to be — and Conybeare skilfully draws out the ethical and political obligations that drew an idealistic Augustine into the messiness of Africa’s religious and civil politics. We finally leave Augustine dying amidst the disintegration of the Vandal invasion, still exerting every sinew and connection to try and bring about peace and renewal. Here too, we see the two-fold quality of Augustine, a man of duty and desire, of Rome and Africa alike.
