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. Although Felix was later exonerated by an imperial tribunal in 314, the Donatists continued to condemn all who maintained any contact with those who had lapsed during the persecution. They claimed support from Isaiah 52:11.
The factors that animated Donatism are extremely complex and disputed among historians. Augustine viewed them as motivated by sheer arrogance. Donatists, on this reading, saw themselves as the exclusive possessors of a tangible holiness and an unblemished church and tradition. Those opposing this position saw in it a rigorism inimical to the spirit of the Gospels. Yet, in their eyes, the Donatists were seeking to preserve the identity of the Church in marked contrast to the world. They were seeking to uphold the idea of the Church as a fellowship of the holy/perfect.
As Conybeare notes that “it is a bitter truth that Augustine the African was fighting against the African church” and that it was deeply ironic that “there was no significant difference between the two sides.” Among their commonalities was a common appeal to the great third-century Carthaginian bishop Cyprian. To the Donatists, Cyprian’s rejection of the validity of the sacraments outside the Catholic Church was support for their viewpoint. Augustine responded with the Cyprianic dictum: “There is no salvation outside the Church” (salus extra ecclesiam non est). And this church was a catholic, that is, a universal church, one that stretched way beyond the shores of Africa. For Augustine, the Donatists were refuted by the Scriptures since the latter predicted a worldwide church, but the Donatists were restricted to Africa. In other words, although Augustine was ever ready to defend his African roots, his commitment to the catholicity of Christianity prevented his Africanness from becoming an Afrocentricity.
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.” It was as an African that Augustine was able to subvert the standard Romanocentric narrative of history and not only favor Carthage but also create a remarkable theology of history that continues to be of great value in thinking about our temporal world. His Africanness prevented him from lapsing into total despair about the potential collapse of the Roman imperium.
Conybeare could have included at this point a contrast with his contemporary, the irascible Jerome (c. 347‒420), though it bears noting that Conybeare does discuss the “acrimonious debate” between Augustine and Jerome over the translation of the Bible and the inspiration of the Septuagint. Jerome was absolutely overwhelmed by reports that he heard about the sack of Rome in 410. “The whole world is sinking into ruin,” he told one correspondent. To another, he stated that 2 Thessalonians 2:7, that intriguing verse long understood by patristic exegetes to be a reference to Roman rule, had been fulfilled, the end of history was nigh, and the coming of “Antichrist is at hand.” Jerome, like so many other Romanocentric Christians of his day, seems to have been utterly unable to conceive of a Rome-less world. But not so Augustine the African, whose vantage point in Roman Africa as both an “outside and insider” to the Roman imperium gave him the intellectual and affective resources to craft a vision of time and eternity that still enthralls.
A final chapter narrates Augustine’s theological battle with Pelagianism in the person of Julian of Eclanum (c. 386‒c. 454), with whose family Augustine was on intimate terms. This theological debate about the nature of human freedom and choice also involved, as Conybeare aptly shows, issues of social status (Julian came from a higher social class) and Augustine’s African origins. Julian made overt anti-Punic sneers in his replies to Augustine and even slandered his mother, Monica, as a meribibula (“a little drunkard”).
The epilogue that rounds out this intellectually absorbing biography narrates, in delightful prose, Conybeare’s journey to Pavia in Lombardy to see Augustine’s tomb in the Basilica di San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, where intriguingly the sixth-century philosopher Boethius is also buried. The final resting-place of the North African theologian was, to Conybeare’s mind, yet another indication of the way in which Augustine’s African existence—“the landscape in which he thrived, the people he loved there, the intellectual passions that shaped his life”—had been totally obscured. Those of us who lecture on Augustine and his corpus, as well as all who are interested in this fascinating figure from late antiquity, are much in Conybeare’s debt for rescuing Augustine the African from his European palimpsest.
