Reframing History
Professor Catherine Conybeare breaks ground in her new book "Augustine the African."
Again and again, Bryn Mawr College Greek, Latin, and classical studies professor Catherine Conybeare has found herself drawn not just to the mighty intellect of preeminent theologian and philosopher Augustine of Hippo but to his essential humanity.
“He is the towering figure of the period that interests me most, the 4th and 5th centuries,” the Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities says during an interview in the Old Library’s London Room about her new book, Augustine the African. “I started by reading his correspondence. I found such a humane figure. I find a lot of his letters very moving.”
Conybeare, who is believed to be the first woman scholar to write a biography of Augustine (354-430 C.E.), breaks ground with her laser focus on his North African roots and Berber heritage, via his mother, and their implications.
She argues that his ties to modern-day Algeria had significant influence on his seminal works, including Confessions and The City of God—and, though not directly commented upon, offer a message for our times.
In other words, Conybeare says, “the foundations of Western thought came from Africa.”
It is her fifth book and the third on the man credited with shaping Christianity and such tenets as free will, grace, and original sin.
Conybeare creates a rich portrait through close examination of Augustine’s varied letters, sermons with references to rural Africa, and books that capture the conflict between his Roman education and his experiences as a middle-class African, down to his Italian aristocratic students sneering at his North African accent. It made him feel, she writes, “like a foreigner and outsider at a moment when he’d expected his greatest success.”
Conybeare reveals that behind the legend there was “a brilliant and fallible” man, an outsider longing to belong and find communion. “It makes this foundational figure human,” she says.
Arguably, Conybeare emphasizes, Augustine’s life serves as a reminder of the humanity in each of us, needed more than ever, in this time of polarization and constant online invective. “We’ve forgotten other people’s humanity,” she says. “The book can help us see other human beings, present or past, as many-faceted.”
When Augustine, disappointed in Italy, returned to his hometown of Thagaste, his homecoming was “far from triumphant,” Conybeare writes. “His newfound Christianity needed constant reassertion.”
“The foundations of Western thought came from Africa.”
On top of that, he suffered great tragedy. Augustine had already lost his mother, a force in his life who helped him understand the need for faith rather than mere reason in his commitment to Christianity. Now his only son also had died, leading him to retreat in grief to Hippo and, Conybeare asserts, make an institutional commitment to Christianity.
“Augustine’s theology of earthly wandering and longing for the heavenly city was grounded in his own experience of dislocation and displacement,” she writes, “a clear-eyed appraisal of the ways in which the earthly world falls short.”
Even though Augustine argued passionately against Donatists, North African Christians who broke from the Roman Catholics, he came to realize that Rome wasn’t the be-all and end-all. The book’s cover image, which Conybeare requested, further emphasizes that point—the map of the Mediterranean region is from Africa’s point of view, leaving boot-shaped Italy inverted.
“It helps people see the living crucible in which ideas are formed,” she says. “He has these ideas, theological and otherwise, that are so influential. But they came into being in very particular moments in conversation with very particular people.”
Brent Shaw, the Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics, Emeritus at Princeton University, says Conybeare’s challenge was to find something new and significant to say about a man who has “centuries of scholarly effort and publication devoted to him and his ideas.” Clearly, she succeeded, he adds. “She has the talent and the training to do both.”
“It helps people see the living crucible in which ideas are formed."
An early review from the British magazine Literary Review praised Conybeare for producing “a fresh and timely … psychological study of Augustine” that is “beautifully written, thoroughly engaging and highly recommended.”
Conybeare began research on Augustine the African in 2014, as the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining steam, and started writing in 2020, a month before George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent social justice protests. “In the moment it felt as if I was riding a wave,” she says.
The book, of course, has come out in a very different political environment. The premise seems much more provocative. Conybeare also expects it will anger some fundamentalist Christians. “You could not read this book and think God wrote the Bible,” she says, “or indeed, that the architecture of Christian belief was not built by real people in a real time and place.”
As for Augustine, she says, her hope is that he would “feel seen and honored.”
“I never tire of his company,” Conybeare adds. “He always has something interesting to say.”
Augustine the African
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. 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.
Published August 12, 2025, by Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Published on: 08/15/2025