Secure in My Heritage: The Importance of Saint Augustine’s African Context
Aurelius Augustinus, better known as Augustine of Hippo or simply St. Augustine, is one of the most influential writers and thinkers in the history of humankind. His works helped shape nothing less than Western Christianity and Western philosophy. His Confessions created the genre of autobiography as we know it today; his City of God offered a new view of human history and a new concept of happiness and justice. He came to be hailed as one of the four “Fathers” of the Latin church—along with Ambrose, Jerome, and Pope Gregory the Great—and of those four he casts by far the longest shadow today.
Yet in celebrating Augustine’s influence on Western thought, we miss a key point: Augustine was African. For many centuries, his North African birth and Amazigh-Berber heritage have been simply dismissed, and we have ignored the fact that all his greatest works emerged from an African context. Appropriated for a Western version of Christianity based in Europe, they are read as if it does not matter where they were written. Augustine the African, the man in his own surroundings, is submerged. In fact, a core strand of the culture that Europe claims as its own stems from Africa.
It was not until I was in Augustine’s homeland of Algeria a few years ago that I realized how fundamental Augustine’s African context is to his works—and hence to the myriad writers and thinkers who have built upon them. Walking through the silent ruins of Augustine’s city in the late-fall sunlight, with the mountains behind me veiled in an autumnal haze and the blades of grass between the tumbled columns casting sharp little shadows, I looked out north toward the sea, in the direction of Italy, and I began to understand something of Augustine’s deep ambivalence about the dominant force of Rome. Much of Augustine’s mature thought depended upon his ability to look at Rome from Africa and question that dominance.
Beginning to reread Augustine’s works on my return from Algeria, I discovered that everything about his life shifts once it is fully envisioned as an African life. Capturing that shift is what is new about my book, Augustine the African. The fights Augustine got into, the alliances he made, the intellectual and philosophical positions he espoused: all are inflected by his view from Africa. The North African language of Punic helped him to think about translations of the Bible. The North African schismatic church sharpened his biblical interpretation. The politics of North Africa helped him develop his theory of just war. Africa shaped Augustine’s life and thought in far-reaching ways.
It was Augustine himself who first suggested to me the importance of Africa in his life. More than twenty years ago, I read his earliest surviving writings, a set of philosophical dialogues composed immediately after his conversion to Christianity. Augustine’s family and some former pupils took part in the dialogues, and together they offer a sort of snapshot of that particular moment in his life. In them, he talks—out of the blue, or so it seems—about being mocked by his students in Rome for his African way of speaking. Augustine had risen to be an orator at the court of the emperor, and no one in the Roman Empire was a more proficient speaker than he. And yet he wrote, “It’s one thing to be secure in my art, quite another to be secure in my heritage.” He knew that his proficiency in Latin was unequaled, but he was insecure about his background.
This was startling, and I soon began to notice other such traces in Augustine’s work. He empathized with the African queen Dido when he was at school, in a clear rejection of the Romanness he was being trained to embrace. He continued to confuse the vowel sounds of Latin spoken with an African accent, and he was aware that this was a problem. He built a whole theological vision around his own sense of himself as displaced and wandering. The more of these traces I saw, the more profoundly human Augustine became to me—passionate and complicated, prickly and vulnerable, brilliant and striving, a loyal friend, an adoring father, and a pugnacious enemy.
All his life, Augustine was acutely aware of himself as someone from a small town in Africa, not from dominant Rome or Milan. He does not, however, seem to have been particularly aware of racial difference. Nowhere does he talk about his own appearance or skin color, and although his mother would hardly have fit in with the social circles in which he moved in Rome or Milan, he does not mention her Berber origins, and we have to infer them from her name. Nor did Augustine ever preach to his congregations in terms that suggested their race was significant. In the late Roman Empire, social advancement hung on how you spoke and which region of the empire you came from, not what you looked like. An African accent marked you out as inferior, whatever your complexion.
With the exception of five agitated years in Italy, Augustine spent his entire life in North Africa, in the coastal regions of what are now Algeria and Tunisia. He was born in 354 CE to a Berber mother and a Roman father in a little town called Thagaste, not much more than fifty miles inland, close to the modern border between the two countries. He studied and taught in Carthage, on the northern edge of modern Tunis, and then traveled to Italy and spent five years in Rome and Milan. He was baptized a Christian at Milan in 387 and soon afterward headed back across the Mediterranean to his hometown. In 391 he settled in Hippo, modern Annaba, on the north coast of Algeria. He founded a monastery there, was ordained, and then became bishop. Hippo was Augustine’s home for the rest of his life. He died in 430 CE.
Augustine already cut a towering figure in the Christian world, and the pope affirmed his doctrinal authority in 431, the year after his death. His prolific writings—more than five million of Augustine’s words survive—were copied and recopied throughout the Middle Ages. As they were copied, some of their specific references to Africa were removed, and their original context was forgotten. Scribes collected Augustine’s works, emended them, excerpted them, and made them into “greatest hits” collections. Bishops took bits of his sermons and made them the basis for their own. People attributed their own or others’ works to St. Augustine: that was a good way to ensure their survival. There was not a deliberate campaign to erase his Africanness; it was just not interesting or relevant to the people who carried on the tradition—particularly after Islamic forces took control of North Africa in the seventh century and its Christian heritage seemed lost.
The process of the rescuing, copying, and preservation of manuscripts, the very survival of Augustine’s works in ancient libraries, is a European story. It was in the Europe of the Middle Ages and early modern period that Augustine’s legacy was curated and honored. All this erased the distinctive African context of Augustine’s life and work. It made it easy to forget that Augustine was African.
Restoring Augustine’s erased Africanness was likewise a process grounded in his writings, however precious that real-life glimpse of a view from Algeria proved to be. I am a Latin philologist, a close reader of texts, and that type of reading was at the heart of my research for my book. Augustine’s personality and his affiliations, as well as his ideas, emerge in the tiniest details of the Latin texts he wrote, in his particular choice of words or emphasis or tone, in the other authors he referenced or the ones he avoided. That is why all the translations in Augustine the African are mine, and why I occasionally flag a particular Latin word or phrase as I write, even though I assume most of my readers will not know Latin: the way Augustine would seize on a particular formulation and repeat it is very revealing.
Augustine was both an insider and an outsider. He was born into the Roman Empire as a Roman citizen, but his birthplace was a small town in Africa and his father was merely a town councillor. His rights as a citizen of the Roman Empire were the same as anyone’s, but his humble origins threatened to limit his prospects. Nevertheless, he excelled at school and became in some ways the consummate Roman. He made rhetoric his profession, and no one knew the classics of Roman literature better than he. But he never forgot his African origins. When, in The City of God, he set out to justify the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire and to retell that empire’s history, he buttressed his argument with his unparalleled knowledge of the Roman tradition. He showed a profound respect for the richness of that heritage. But again and again he questioned and subverted that tradition, needling his Roman audience by retelling their favorite stories at a slant—which was clearly inspired by his view from Africa. He often approached a question with a slightly oblique stance that helped him to see new possibilities.
The seventy-six years of Augustine’s life were marked by extraordinary change in North Africa and in the Mediterranean region as a whole. After undergoing a turbulent period in the third century, the empire seemed at the time of his birth secure and prosperous. The emperor Constantine had put an end to the persecution of Christians early in the fourth century, and Christian practices were spreading vigorously. A brief pagan revival under the emperor Julian in the early 360s failed to reverse the trend. By the end of the century, when Augustine was ordained bishop, Christianity was the official state religion—though exactly what style of Christianity was vigorously contested—and the “pagan” religion of the Romans was eroding. But so were the borders of the empire. The incursion of armed groups increasingly threatened its stability, and in 410 CE a band of soldiers under the command of the Goth Alaric succeeded in sacking Rome, the historic and sentimental center of the empire. As Augustine lay dying, another band of invaders, the Vandals, had entered Africa from Spain and overrun the northwest coast. They were besieging Hippo when he died. Just a few years later, they took control of Carthage, and they ruled North Africa for the next century.
Augustine’s writing demonstrated an increasing anxiety and fear for his patria, his home, as an entire way of life began to change. He was anxious about his intellectual inheritance, too, so toward the end of his life, he gathered together his works in chronological order and wrote short descriptions of each of them, criticizing what he thought he had got wrong: he called the resultant list his Reconsiderations. He planned to do the same for his copious letters and sermons, but the urgency of theological debate diverted him into other writing projects. Fortunately, a monk from his monastery, Possidius, appended to a reverent biography of the great saint a further checklist of his works, and the two lists provided guidance for all those who wanted to keep track. Many of Augustine’s writings had, of course, already circulated beyond Africa, but it seems that his library itself survived the Vandal siege intact. After his death, his books were rescued and taken—we do not know by whom—across the Mediterranean to safer territory. That miraculous survival is what makes possible a detailed reconstruction of Augustine’s life and work.
Instrumental in shaping the doctrines of the Christian church at a crucial stage of its development, Augustine’s thoughts on free will, grace, and original sin were foundational. His influence has historically been felt wherever the Church has spread—and, indeed, beyond: my Algerian hosts told me how they revered him as a towering pre-Islamic figure and considered him one of their own. But Augustine’s expansive and tenacious intellect shaped whole spheres of thought beyond the church as well. Political theory, language studies, the history of interpretation, ideas about the self and interiority and introspection, the narration of history itself: all of these would look very different without Augustine’s many writings. His thoughts on time and memory and a child’s acquisition of language are starting points for countless studies. In almost any field of humanistic study, Augustine was there first. His influence continues to this day.
As we read Augustine’s work, however, we need to imagine that we are looking at the world from North Africa. Sicily is very close; beyond it lies the toe of Italy’s boot. But Africa is Augustine’s landscape, and his world extended from there. Placing Africa at the center of Augustine’s work forces us to see it afresh. It upends conventional knowledge and brings core ideas of Christian thought to their very origins on the African continent. This is the story of Augustine the African.
EDITORIAL NOTE: Excerpted from Augustine the African. Copyright (c) 2025 by Catherine Conybeare. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
