Augustine the African

Despite being regarded as one of the Fathers of the Latin church, St. Augustine was neither Italian nor European; he hailed from the village of Thagaste in modern-day Algeria and only spent five years of his life in Italy. Augustine craved more than the provincial life his Berber status prescribed, and his studies took him to the North African city of Carthage, then to Milan and Rome, where he converted to Christianity. Spurred by grief after the deaths of his mother and son, Augustine returned to Africa at a unique moment, when Christianity was growing exponentially and in need of leaders. Augustine's career as preacher and bishop spanned sweeping changes in the Roman empire and the church. Painting Augustine as pugnacious, persistent, and passionate, Conybeare reexamines Augustine's prolific writings--which still influence Christian thought--in light of his African perspective. Conybeare's expertise and respect for Augustine shine brightly in her latest profile on the saint (after Routledge Guidebook to Augustine's Confessions, 2016). Readers of church history and admirers of Augustine will appreciate her meticulous and fond treatment.

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 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 events" like the rise and fall of empires. It's an essential reconsideration of a seminal figure in the Western canon. (Aug.)

Latin philologist Conybeare (The Routledge Guidebook to Augustine's Confessions) offers a fresh new perspective on St. Augustine (354--430), the early theologian of the nascent Christian church in the waning days of the Roman Empire in the late fourth century CE. She views him in the context of being an African, born on the edge of the Roman Empire in what is now Algeria, to parents who were not of an elite social class. Using her linguistic expertise in classical Latin, Conybeare pieces together clues about Augustine's sense of self from his own words. She posits that he knew himself to be an outsider in imperial aristocratic circles in Rome, where he became a renowned orator because of his accent and upbringing. Yet he was also an insider since he aspired to those classical literary traditions, Latin was his native language, and he championed imperial Christian orthodoxy. VERDICT Outsider and insider, African and Roman, are the interwoven threads this book examines. For its fascinating look at the life of St. Augustine, it deserves a broad audience of readers.--Karen Bordonaro

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.