I BEGAN reading this book with a “hermeneutic of suspicion”, focused on the “African” bit of the title. I did not want to read a book that made St Augustine of Hippo out to be a racial-justice campaigner, or an excluded outsider facing down the Roman “Establishment”.
I need not have worried. Catherine Conybeare’s book is not contrived, or special pleading. My only remaining concern is that calling Augustine “the African”, though a useful shorthand, could mislead readers. Calling something “African” now does not mean the same as it did back then, when people who spoke of Africa meant the strip of territory, south of the Mediterranean basin, running east-west between modern Egypt and the straits of Gibraltar.
The best thing about reading this book is that Conybeare, a scholar and expert, writes in such an accessible way, drawing the reader in, painting vivid scenes, and showing the living Augustine within them. She wears her scholarship lightly, but it is in the footnotes for those who want it.
Augustine is not just some historical bloke. He is also one of those intellectual meta-topics that a lifetime’s study is not enough to master. The best that we can hope for is to peek beneath the gilding of piety, and to approach him in a balanced way. In those aims, the book certainly succeeds. It sketches North Africa (Thagaste, where he was born, Carthage, where he was educated, and Hippo, where he lived and worked for most of his life as a monk and bishop) as a series of places that are bustling, diverse, unstable, sometimes violent: the kind of places that nowadays we might — nervously — label “vibrant”.
Most of us know several Augustines. We like the Confessions Augustine, who is like us, sinful and searching. We like Augustine the preacher and pastor, with his wisdom and biblical knowledge. We are less keen on Augustine the opponent of Pelagius; for many of us struggle with predestination, even if we grasp its logic. But Augustine the warrior against the Donatists (a schismatic, “pure” African national Church, at odds with other Christians) leaves us cold.
This is surely because Donatism was defeated. But this book brings it to life, in a warfare rooted in hot and dusty streets and in separate gathered congregations, believing more or less the same things, but suspicious of one another’s motives and authenticity. With Conybeare as guide, that strife becomes an icon of all the petty controversies in our own fractured Christian loyalties.
The book ends with the author’s pilgrimage to Pavia, where Augustine’s body now rests. It is a journey that I had planned to make myself one day. It is a high compliment to Conybeare, as well as to Augustine, that, after reading about her journey, though I still may go, I no longer feel the need to.
The Revd Dr Cally Hammond is the Dean of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Augustine the African
Catherine Conybeare
Profile £25
(978-1-78816-750-5)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50
