“I never intended to write a biography of Augustine,” says Catherine Conybeare, a classicist and author of Augustine the African (Liveright). In her book, which is exactly that—a biography—Conybeare reclaims Augustine’s North African identity, exploring how his cultural context set the stage for his writings. In doing so, she challenges centuries of scholarship and thinking on Augustine that dismiss his North African context. She demonstrates how Augustine—and, by extension, core ideas of Christian thought—are grounded in an African context. By tracing how his lived experience shaped his theology, Conybeare invites readers to see Augustine not as a detached, universal intellect, but as a person whose insights were born of a particular place and people.
She says that she first became interested in Augustine when she came across a short passage where he talks about how his students “sneered at his African accent” while he was teaching in Rome. “I found that so extraordinary,” she says. “Both that they should have sneered at it and that it clearly cut so deep that some years later and in a very different environment he still remembered and mentioned it in his writing.”
From there, Conybeare says, she started finding other similar moments, “particular pressure points in his life where his Africanness came to the fore.” She realized that Augustine had some sense of himself as African and that even when this wasn’t explicit in his writings—especially as they were passed down to modern readers—it had a profound impact on Augustine’s sense of who he was.
Augustine often occupies a privileged space in our minds, the theologian of all theologians, divorced from all cultural context. What do we gain by understanding him as a product of a specific time and culture?
We gain a lot when we see him as a human and his ideas as generated by someone in a particular place and time. You’re right: He is the theologian to end all theologians, and that means his thought becomes incredibly disembodied.
One hears and reads work on Augustine again and again that cherry-picks his ideas, that puts together ideas from different works written 40 years apart. Historically, people have used his writings almost as if they were scripture; they’re so capacious. You can pluck a line from Augustine to prove almost any point. I think using Augustine’s work like this has little to do with him, the actual person generating the ideas.
I’m not trying to say that Augustine wasn’t great. On the contrary, if anything, I find him even more of a genius now after writing Augustine the African. I admire him even more after realizing fully what a complicated and embattled context his ideas emerged from.
I hope in telling the story of him as a situated, embodied human being, it helps people think more fully about where his ideas come from. We currently rely on modes of communication that are very disembodied and soundbite oriented. Just to tell a story that reaches across time to another human being, one of the founders of our fundamental ideas—that’s incredibly important, and I hope it helps the current moment. I hope it helps people to think about their modern opponents as human beings with their own context and investments and informative experiences.
You write in the preface of your book that a “core strand of the culture that Europe claims as its own stems from Africa.” Why is understanding Augustine’s context so important?
I would point to the inverted map on the cover of the book. We’re so used to looking at the world in a certain way, with some nations on top and others underneath. I want this book to make people think differently about where they are situated in the book vis-à-vis others.
Now, Augustine’s Africa was, of course, North Africa, not the whole of the continent of Africa. But any effort to balance our Eurocentric history by including an African perspective helps emphasize global connection rather than global division. It’s important to understand just how deep-rooted and longstanding those connections are.
Keeping that in mind, is there anything missing in the story we typically hear about Augustine of Hippo’s life?
People acknowledge that Augustine was born in North Africa, and most people know that he went back to North Africa after having a really formative period in Italy. But some people say, basically, “Well, yes, Augustine was from Africa, but he was really Roman.” Somehow or other, his Roman identity displaces or overpowers his African identity.
In addition, many of us are particularly influenced in our understanding of Augustine’s life by The Confessions, which is such a compelling narrative—it’s how most people come to Augustine. And, of course, The Confessions ends in Italy: The autobiographical part basically ends with his mother’s death in Ostia, which was the port city of ancient Rome. Readers never hear about him going back to North Africa after this happens. So accounts of his life and impressions of him overall are shaped by that.
All of Augustine’s major works were written in North Africa; he returned in 388 and he didn’t die until 430. He only lived in Italy for five years. It’s a well-documented period of his life thanks to The Confessions, but the fact is that his life was almost entirely shaped by North Africa, not by Italy. And yet, despite this, modern readers tend to read his other works abstracted from place. In this sort of disembodied way, we read Augustine for his ideas rather than for why these works were written, where they were written, and among whom. That’s very much what I was putting into the narrative about his life and writings.
How much did Augustine publish during his lifetime?
Well, we have a couple thousand letters remaining from that time period, and 400 of them are Augustine’s. I think it was historical scholar Jim O’Donnell who did the actual math, but we have 5 million words surviving of Augustine’s. And that’s only what survives today. That’s just an extraordinary volume of writing. My book, for context, is about a hundred thousand words, I think.
You point out that later transcribers of Augustine’s work may have taken out pieces of his writing that would have made his North African identity more obvious.
Absolutely. In the course of writing this book, I didn’t just read Augustine’s core theological works; I’ve read all of his letters and a lot of his sermons. And the sermons in particular suffer from this process of redaction.
When you read a complete sermon, there’s all this circumstantial detail in it. There is often a lot included about where it was preached, to whom it was preached, and what’s going on in the community—because of course Augustine is often preaching in response to specific events.
But that’s exactly the sort of material that got stripped away when Western Europeans in the Middle Ages were copying his sermons because they were interested in using them as basis for their own sermons. What interested these transcribers, of course, was not what was going on in Carthage, Hippo, or wherever Augustine was teaching or preaching, but instead the theological nugget they could take away.
We knew this happened with other sermons written during a similar time period, but we have proof this also happened with Augustine because, in the 1980s, an amazing set of 26 new Augustine sermons was discovered. Known as the Dolbeau sermons for the man who discovered them, these all appear to be unredacted. And, in some cases, they are longer versions of already discovered sermons, which we can now assume were, at some point, redacted. So now we can see exactly what happened and what material was stripped away and what carried on through the tradition.
Taking a step back, what should people know about North Africa during the time Augustine was alive?
Modern readers are conditioned to think that Rome was the center and North Africa was some sort of backwater. It’s very important to say that this was absolutely not true.
For one, the whole strip of the Maghreb—the area of North Africa that is now the coastal regions of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya—is incredibly fertile land. It was highly cultivated during Late Antiquity. It was the major exporter of grain to Rome, and it also exported huge amounts of olive oil. The olive press is an important metaphor in Augustine’s sermons; that’s not by coincidence.
It’s also an intellectually dynamic area. Carthage, in particular, is a major center of learning. So is Madauros, in present-day Algeria, where Augustine went to secondary school. Many people were learning to write in Roman-style schools and universities; Latin was the language of the elites. Further east, Alexandria in Egypt had been a major place of learning for 200 or 300 years by Augustine’s time.
There was already a very well-rooted tradition of Christianity by the turn of the third century. Perpetua was martyred at Carthage in 203, I believe. Bishop Cyprian of Carthage was martyred in 258. Tertullian left important writings. So intellectually and theologically, North Africa was already a thriving and important place.
While the area to the north was Romanized, Indigenous African communities who were pushed back by the Romans lived along the southern border. There was also a vibrant Indigenous culture even in the Romanized areas, particularly the Amazigh, or Berber, culture. Numidian culture was also vibrant in what is now modern Algeria.
What do we know about Augustine’s family?
In terms of borders, both ancient and modern, Augustine was born in Thagaste (now Souk Ahras in Algeria), on the border between Algeria and Tunisia, or Numidia and Africa Proconsularis. And Hippo, where he ended up, is firmly in Algeria/Numidia.
We don’t know a lot about his family. His father was a Roman citizen named Patricius who was a sort of town councilor in the small town where Augustine was born. He was clearly a landholder, but he wasn’t wealthy. He was, as it were, at the bottom of the top—in Roman terms, there being basically only the elite classes and everyone else.
Augustine’s mother was clearly from a reasonably moneyed family. From the anecdotes about her in The Confessions, we know she grew up in a family that enslaved people, that clearly had a degree of prosperity. We also assume that she was Amazigh, or Berber, because of her name. Monica isn’t a Roman name, and it seems to reference the Libyan god Mon, who was worshipped in areas quite close to Augustine’s birthplace. But other than that, we don’t really know anything about Monica’s parentage. And, of course, just because Patricius was Roman doesn’t mean anything about his ethnicity—he’s just a Roman citizen.
Augustine had a brother to whom he barely refers, although we know that he was at his mother’s deathbed. And it’s thought Augustine had a sister as well, because of a letter he writes to her when she is head of a convent in Hippo.
Do we know anything about how Monica’s Amazigh ethnicity would have influenced Augustine?
The honest answer is that there’s terribly little context. One thing Augustine writes about is the practice of what he calls laetitiae, or feasting in graveyards, which seems to be typical of an exuberant North African Christian devotion. His mother clearly engages in this practice herself. Then, when she gets to Italy, Ambrose of Milan tells her not to do it anymore, and she immediately stops. Augustine later makes it his priority to eradicate this practice from the North African church once he’s ordained back in Africa. So that’s one distinctively North African practice that Monica brings into the family, which Ambrose encourages her to end and Augustine eradicates from North Africa.
The other way her background may have been relevant is in relation to a schismatic African church that had become the majority church in North Africa by the time Augustine returned there from Italy. Monica may well have worshiped in that church and not the Roman one when Augustine was a child. We will never know, but the energy with which Augustine opposed the other church may take something from that awareness of his and his mother’s former error.
What was this schismatic group? Why had it split off from the rest of the church?
This actually ended up being an important part of my book because of the energy with which Augustine opposed this group, which he named the Donatists—the name by which they are still known. They just called themselves Christians.
We call the Donatists schismatic rather than heretical because they actually believed the same things as the Roman church. Both groups said the Nicene Creed, they read the same Bible, they believed in the Trinity. But the story goes back to the Great Persecution, a severe persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire that happened around 300 under Emperor Diocletian and that was particularly bloody in North Africa.
During this time, clergy were required to surrender copies of scripture to the imperial forces to be destroyed. One set of churchmen capitulated, and one set refused. Long story short, the Donatists were, as it were, the spiritual descendants of the ones who refused. They then, eventually, argued that people who had handed over the scripture had nullified their authority to celebrate the sacraments of baptism and ordination. Augustine’s church, the opposing church, was more accommodationist. So there became these differing genealogies of who had been legitimately baptized and ordained over the century or so between the Great Persecution and when Augustine was ordained.
The other key thing about the Donatists is that not only were they found in North Africa, but they also read the Bible in ways that linked both Christianity and Christ much more strongly with North Africa than would be perhaps a natural read.
And Augustine is firmly on the side of the Roman church in Africa?
Exactly. He comes down on the Donatists very strongly indeed. It shows up in his writing in several ways—he tried to force the Donatists to formal debate. He repeatedly emphasizes the different stories of these two churches. He is part of planning delegations to the Roman emperors to plead with them to issue an edict to suppress the Donatist church. And ultimately it shows up in the violent suppression or forced assimilation of the Donatist church.
Why do you think he had such strong feelings?
It’s really complicated, and that’s why I spent so much time in the book on this. Augustine returns to Africa having converted to Christianity, and he discovers that the Donatists don’t recognize his baptism, because he was baptized in Milan into the Roman church.
In coming back to Africa, he seemed to have thought he was coming home and returning to the familiar. But he discovers that the African church is not his church, and it rejects him. So that’s complicated. And then once he gets ordained and has a formal position in the church, he is instrumental in putting down the African church.
I think all of this was not only complicated for him, but it lent some of the energy to his anti-Donatist writing, which is prodigious. A significant percentage of his surviving writings is anti-Donatist. I think it reflects his feeling undermined. He had a deep sense that who he was and what he wanted to be was undermined by the successful presence of this church in North Africa.
Would this split have been something everyday people were aware of? Would Augustine have known about the Donatists and the Roman church growing up, for example?
I suspect people weren’t aware. Christians just went to the local church. Around the time of Augustine’s birth, there had been another anti-Donatist effort led by an imperial functionary named Macarius, but I doubt that would have impinged much on Augustine’s childhood.
And then, when he was growing up, the two churches went through a period of coexistence. It wasn’t until the late 380s or early 390s that two very articulate and pugnacious people were elected to opposing sees in the two respective churches and everything flared up again. So no, he probably wouldn’t have been aware of any of this until he returned to North Africa from Rome.
Over and over in your book, you describe how Augustine was both an insider and an outsider wherever he went. The story you just told—of arriving home and thinking his conversion would be welcomed and instead it wasn’t even recognized—is one example of this. How else did this tension show up in his life and writings?
This is probably pressure he didn’t begin to feel until he got to Italy, where his students disdained him for his provincial accent. But for the rest of his life, I think, he was aware of this tension.
He was educated in the Roman system, brought up on Roman literature, deeply acculturated to an imaginative worldview that put Rome at the center of everything. And yet, he grew up in North Africa. After his conversion, he returned to North Africa. He couldn’t get rid of his education; he excelled within the Roman matrix. To excel as an orator to the extent that you give celebratory speeches at the emperor’s court—that’s as high as you can go in Latin achievement.
At the same time, from his sojourn in Italy onwards, he’s deeply aware of himself as rooted in a place that’s not part of that narrative. Adding to this tension is that while he grew up with a very pro-Rome narrative, he was also exposed to the North African anti-Rome narrative.
Parenthetically, this is why I wanted the flipped map on the cover of the book: to emphasize that the book—and Augustine himself—looks at things differently, from the south side of the Mediterranean.
But it seems like it wasn’t just as an adult that Augustine felt torn between Rome and North Africa. You write about this even in his childhood.
Absolutely. Augustine describes himself as a young boy reading the Aeneid, which gets its name from Aeneas, the Trojan hero who goes on to be the proto-founder of Rome. Aeneas is washed up in Carthage and falls in love with the city’s queen, Dido. He ends up leaving her, however, to pursue his quest.
Augustine was obsessed with this story. And not with the character of Aeneas—he refers to him merely as “some Aeneas or other” and then immediately moves on. But he talks again and again about how Dido died and how much he wept as a little boy reading about her death. It was such a powerful narrative for him. And her story is very sympathetic and very memorable; perhaps this isn’t so remarkable. But when you put it next to the noticeable dismissiveness of Aeneas, it becomes yet another example of how Augustine centers North African figures in The Confessions, not more obviously Roman or Italian figures, something that happens more than once and which is significant when looked at as a whole.
Could you point to a specific passage or theme in Augustine’s work that reads differently when you take into account the fact that he was African?
The first 10 books of The City of God retell the story of Rome and the Roman gods. The first five argue that the gods don’t protect you in this life, and the second five argue that the gods don’t protect you in the afterlife either. And I think the way he retells the Roman stories shows his African angle.
The two obvious examples are Regulus and Lucretia, both of whom are ostensibly historical figures, but who would have had mythical status in the Roman psyche.
Regulus was seen as an honorable soldier who, after being captured in battle, swore to the Carthaginians that he would represent their case at the Roman Senate and then return to Carthage. According to the Roman story, he advised the Senate not to capitulate to the Carthaginian demands. He returned to Carthage knowing that he would be killed for failing to negotiate peace, and he died in captivity. The Carthaginians, in this version, are stereotyped as faithless and untrustworthy, murdering Regulus despite him keeping his word to return.
Lucretia, meanwhile, was seen to be this perfectly pure wife who died by suicide after being raped by the king’s son. It is because of her killing herself, the story goes, that Rome became a republic and outlawed the monarchy.
Augustine retells both of those stories. He recognizes their importance, but he reevaluates exactly why they’re important. In the case of Regulus, Augustine says, he swore an oath to the wrong gods. His oath, therefore, meant nothing. And Lucretia’s act wasn’t heroic; it was self-murder.
All of a sudden, these stories, which had been so magnificent and vital to the Roman mythos, are unraveled.
On a more thematic topic, I also think what Augustine does with the theme of the wanderer or the pilgrim in The City of God is profoundly indebted to his own sense of displacement. He says that the “citizens of God all wander on this Earth and find their home in the afterlife.” It’s not a new idea, but the detail and feeling with which Augustine develops it has very much to do with his African context.
This article also appears in the January 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 1, pages 20-25). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Wikimedia Commons/Rafadesantiago (CC BY-SA 4.0), Saint Augustine
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