Augustine the African
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
