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Augustine the African

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An extraordinary work of revisionist history that centers Africa in the life of one of our greatest philosophers.

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.

©2025 Catherine Conybeare (P)2025 Tantor Media Africa Philosophers Professionals & Academics
All stars
Most relevant
It was good. It filled in a certain amount of historical ‘background’ for me with regards to the region and the early history of the Christian Church. Religious history is absolutely not my thing, I've avoided it like the plague for decades, but this book was well written, clearly intelligent (without ramming it down your throat) and educational in the best way possible. The author (whose reading voice was authoritative but guiding) painted for me a warm picture of the areas in question, in particular North Africa, which generally fails to receive the interest it deserves. The author brought to life the person of Augustine, his time and place, and the people and events he lived in. She made him human. As I say I am NOT normally a student of religious history, but this book and its excellent author, brought me into a time and place and subject from which I have learned as a result and grown in my understanding. I recommend it.

An unexpected delight

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