Augustine the African

In this rich and elegant biography, classicist Conybeare (The Irrational Augustine) re-centers the African cultural heritage of St. Augustine. Conybeare argues that, though Augustine’s monumental influence on Western history is rightly celebrated—including how “his Confessions created the genre of autobiography as we know it”—his mixed Roman and Berber heritage and the fact that all his writing and preaching were done in “his homeland of Algeria” have been “simply ignored.” Augustine himself was much more candid—he describes being mocked “for his African way of speaking” Latin—and his outsider status greatly inspired his thinking, according to Conybeare. Among her examples is an incident where a young Augustine rebuked a tutor who expressed anti-Christian views (opining that the Roman gods were being ignored in favor of “the tombs of martyrs with ‘hateful [African] names’ ”) by drawing on his African identity to leverage both a pro-Christian and anti-Roman critique. Another is his ambivalence in preaching against the Donatists, a schismatic African church that “read... Africa into the biblical texts.” Conybeare convincingly argues that this ambivalence infused Augustine’s masterpiece, The City of God, a “counterintuitive” work that imagined a Christian stronghold as “a place of hope for people damaged by [historical] events” like the rise and fall of empires. It’s an essential reconsideration of a seminal figure in the Western canon. (Aug.)