Augustine’s Identity Tension
A Feature Review of
Augustine the African
Catherine Conybeare
Liveright Publishing, 2025
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Reviewed by Alden Bass
Augustine may be the greatest intellectual influence on Western culture. Beginning soon after his death in 430, he became one of the most cited figures in Europe, shaping not only theology but also philosophy, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines up to the present. One could be forgiven for assuming he was European.
As her title states, classicist Catherine Conybeare reminds us that Augustine was an African. Roman North Africa was his birthplace, the site of his education and formative experiences, and the place where he led the church as bishop for nearly forty years. Outside of a five-year sojourn in Italy in his twenties, he lived his entire life in North Africa, in what is now Algeria. Conybeare narrates this African life in elegant prose, free of footnotes and academic jargon, revealing a man shaped by the culture and landscape of the Maghreb. “Everything about his life shifts,” she argues, “once it is fully envisioned as an African life” (xvi).
Augustine was a voluminous writer—his surviving works fill dozens of volumes—and a comprehensive account of his life and writings has rarely been attempted. The greatest remains Peter Brown’s 1967 biography Augustine of Hippo, still considered a classic of the historical biography genre. Conybeare chooses instead to focus on the major works and episodes that best reveal Augustine’s Africanness.
The book consists of fourteen short chapters organized into four sections. The first section traces Augustine’s early life and career as told in his autobiography, Confessions. Augustine grew up in Thagaste, a small town near what is now the border of Tunisia and Algeria. His family was middle class—wealthy enough to harbor ambitions for a promising son but too poor to fund them. Fortunately, Augustine won a scholarship from a local patron and was able to receive a full classical education. At this stage of his life, fresh out of school, Augustine wanted nothing more than to get out of Africa. His sights were set on the Eternal City: Rome.
Yet in Italy, he encountered discrimination because of his African accent, a provincial marker that undermined his rhetorical brilliance. Despite a successful career and promotions that landed him in the imperial capital of Milan, Augustine could not feel at home in Italy. He sought out other young professionals from Africa, and together this band of friends formed a household. They dedicated themselves to reading philosophy and staging Socratic dialogues. Augustine’s teenage son Adeodatus (from his common-law African wife) was part of these conversations, as was his mother Monica, who had followed him to Italy. Conybeare points out how important other Africans were in this process—his mother, preeminently, but also the philosopher Marius Victorinus and successful expatriates like Ponticianus and Alypius.
After his baptism, Augustine and his friends determined to return to Africa and found a monastery on his family land. Here the narrative of the Confessions ends. Conybeare picks up the story in Augustine’s letters. She argues (“reading between the lines”) that his letters show him struggling to settle back into Africa. Though quickly ordained as priest and then bishop in Hippo, Augustine was dogged by his checkered moral past and his involvement with the Manichaean movement before his conversion. Some fellow bishops distrusted him; rumors circulated about his irregular ordination. Writing the Confessions itself was partly an effort to clear his name. Conybeare observes moments in his correspondence where he embraces his African heritage, particularly in his surprising defense of the native Punic language, which was considered barbaric by the literate classes.
The remainder of the book charts Augustine’s evolving sense of African identity. The second section examines his interactions with the Donatists, a powerful local church that claimed to be the True Church in Africa, through his polemical writings. This is where Conybeare’s thesis faces its greatest challenge. Though Augustine’s desire to live in Italy never returned, he continuously looked to Rome as the model for the church. She does not ignore his predilection for the “church across the sea” (his term for the Italian churches), but his dedication to the universal, or Catholic, church complicates her argument about his African identity.
Again and again, Augustine sided with the imperial church of Rome over the local Donatists. He spent most of his career trying to suppress this rival church, which he considered provincial and narrow-minded. The Donatists were making precisely the kind of claim about Africa that one might expect from someone invested in African identity—they believed that after a worldwide apostasy, Africa would be the last faithful remnant. Yet Augustine mocked their provincialism, famously comparing them to “frogs croaking at the edge of a pond, ‘We are the only Christians,’ while the sun never sets on God’s church catholic.”
Conybeare suggests that Augustine felt “affronted, even betrayed” that locals were claiming African identity in ways he couldn’t accept (112). Perhaps he saw something of his own struggles in their stubborn independence from Rome. Or perhaps—as she hints—his opposition was “completely out of character” because “the arguments of the African church had touched a very deep nerve” (112). In this book, Augustine’s fierce campaign against the Donatists reveals an unresolved tension about his own relationship to Africa.
The third section of the book examines Augustine’s sermons, showing how he engaged his African audience in their agricultural world and their civic life. The final section turns to The City of God, Augustine’s magnum opus written in response to Rome’s sack by Alaric in 410. Here Conybeare finds Augustine wrestling with Rome’s fragility and refusing to “shore up Roman self-confidence,” instead insisting that Christians should see themselves as pilgrims with no earthly home—neither Rome nor Africa.
Conybeare’s most compelling contribution lies in her attention to the ambiguity to Augustine’s identity, however we try to define it. He was caught between Italy and Africa, never fully at home in either. He was also caught between social classes—as educated as anyone in the empire, yet without the family name to gain entrance into elite circles. His relatively low social status plagued him throughout his career, as she shows through a series of interactions with high-status Romans who passed through Africa. At times Augustine acts deferential, using his rhetorical training to gain access; at other times, he remains aloof. Conybeare paints a portrait of nagging insecurity that ebbs throughout his life but never really disappears.
In her final chapter, Conybeare directly addresses Augustine’s fatherhood. Augustine’s love for his son Adeodatus shines clearly, despite the limited references to him in his writings. (Adeodatus died young, shortly after their return to Africa.) Over the course of his episcopal career, Augustine “adopted” several other promising young men, most of whom disappointed him. She writes that he was “haunted by an ideal of the affection between father and son” (219). Augustine was certainly drawn to the monastic life, but perhaps part of him also felt drawn to domesticity, or at least to the role of father and mentor. Once again, he finds himself caught between competing desires.
Conybeare’s biography doubtless will become an important resource for understanding the great man’s life in context. Aside from its other strengths, the book has the virtue of brevity—at under 200 pages, it’s immensely readable. She is also able to bring the ancient world alive. As she notes in the preface, the book was partially inspired by a trip to North Africa. Her narrative is embroidered with descriptions of the villages, mountains, and seashore of the region, helping readers visualize the landscape that shaped Augustine’s imagination.
Whether one fully accepts Conybeare’s thesis that Augustine’s Africanness was central to his identity remains an open question. The evidence she presents sometimes seems to cut both ways—Augustine’s consistent deference to Italian authority and his contempt for Donatist provincialism sit uneasily with the portrait of a man proudly claiming his African roots. But even readers who remain skeptical of her strongest claims will benefit from her careful attention to Augustine’s social world, his class anxieties, and his position as a colonial subject who never quite fit in the imperial center but could never quite go home again either. It’s also a valuable reminder that the “Western tradition” does not flow solely from Europe. In Conybeare’s hands, the towering figure of Western thought becomes thoroughly human: brilliant but insecure, cosmopolitan but provincial, an African intellectual navigating an empire that both celebrated and disdained his origins.
Alden Bass
Alden Bass teaches theology at Lipscomb University, where he specializes in the study of early Christian preaching and biblical interpretation. He is also the preaching minister at the Lindsley Ave. Church of Christ in downtown Nashville.
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