Augustine the African

A NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR

An extraordinary work of revisionist history that centers Africa in the life of one of our greatest philosophers: "Excellent, short, and highly readable.... Traces a grittier story of a life lived almost entirely in a small area of what is now eastern Algeria, where Augustine’s local origins and experience profoundly shaped both his life and his thought. Conybeare’s argument is that because of his contributions to the genres of philosophy, autobiography, and Christian theology, ‘a core strand of the culture that Europe claims as its own stems from Africa.” —Josephine Quinn, New York Review of Books

Publishers Weekly • Fall Preview Top 10 [Religion and Spirituality]

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.