Conybeare rightly devotes a substantial section of her biography to this dispute given that it deeply involves what it meant for Augustine to be African. As she observes: “Whatever else was claiming Augustine’s attention through the decades of his bishopric, the resistance of the African church must have been a nagging pain. It threatened his sense of identity.” She also spends significant space working through Augustine’s massive City of God, which took him close to 15 years to write. By Augustine’s own admission, the book was “a long and arduous” task, some 250,000 words in Latin. To Conybeare, “Augustine could not have developed the core themes of The City of God so richly and so counterintuitively without his viewpoint from Africa.” 

Quite a number of years ago, it was estimated that every year there are some 500 articles and monographs, both popular and scholarly, written throughout the world on the North African pastor-theologian-saint Augustine (354‒430). At the time when I heard this statistic, I was preparing to work on my doctoral thesis. I had written one of my two master’s theses on Augustine and his De civitate dei and was seriously contemplating doing my Ph.D. thesis on Augustine. But the overwhelming amount of secondary literature played a role in deterring me from pursuing doctoral studies on the theologus magister of Hippo Regius. Nevertheless, I have read Augustine assiduously over the intervening years and regularly teach courses on his life and thought at the master’s and doctoral level. One would naturally think, therefore, that given 50 years of study of the Augustinian corpus and world (I received my Ph.D. in 1982), there would be little I didn’t know about the man. But, to echo Isidore of Seville’s comment about the North African theologian, if anyone says that they have read all of Augustine, they are a liar. There seems to be always more to discover and learn about this deeply influential and remarkable theologian.

Enter a new biography of Augustine, Augustine the African, by Catherine Conybeare, the Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College. Her focus on his being an African—an obvious perspective but one that has been largely overlooked—yields a fresh and, for this reviewer, necessary take on Augustine. In Conybeare’s hands, small details that I had never noticed about Augustine’s Africanness take on new significance. For instance, there was his passionate interest as a young boy in the heart-wrenching end of Dido, Queen of Carthage, as told in the Roman epic the Aeneid. When an African grammarian named Maximus, a resident of the Roman-Berber intellectual scene in Madauros in Numidia, mocked the Punic names of a number of Christian martyrs—Miggin, Sanamis, and Namfano—Augustine retorted with evident pride in his African roots: “I don’t think that you could have forgotten yourself so far, as an African writing to Africans, and given the fact that we’re both here in Africa, that you should think that you have to criticize Punic names.” Augustine then went on to state that numerous learned men had recognized that there was much wisdom contained in books written in Punic. Sadly, none of those books are extant. All that remains of the Punic language are a small body of inscriptions and various lines and words of Punic embedded in Latin works (“Latino-Punic” texts). It bears noting that, despite this defense of Punic, Augustine could not speak the language. At best he was, as Conybeare puts it, a dabbler in the language.

Given Augustine’s love of Africa—which Conybeare teases out with great expertise—his bitter conflict with Donatism, a quintessential African movement, must at first sight appear difficult to explain. During the last wave of imperial persecution that had begun in 303, there was a minority faction, led eventually by Donatus Magnus (c. 270‒c. 347), that insisted that the validity of the sacraments was rooted in the holiness of those administering them. When a certain Caecilian was elected bishop of Carthage in 311, the Donatists contested the legitimacy of his election because among those involved in Caecilian’s ordination was Felix of Aptunga, who was believed to have committed apostasy.

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