Augustine the African

By: Catherine Conybeare

Narrated by: Catherine Conybeare

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

Sensitivity of the author/reader. Loved the accent on Northern Africa.

Great listen and astute analysis of Augustine. His journey through life was caught beautifully by this author.

Fresh Story Through Return to Primary Sources

It would be a mistake to call this revisionist history as the author, a Latin scholar, went back to sources and, with her own knowledge of their latin of the time and place, looks at the history from a new point of view that does not derive entirely from the Catholic Church and its habit of controlling narratives that "improve" history. In this book, the author views her subject as a man in difficult times who can only be understood properly in context, and makes an excellent case the Augustine, educated in Roman ways despite being North African, was under extreme pressure during his enforced elevation to a bishopric in conflict with the Roman Church. Along with other returns to primary sources such as the finds as Qumran and Nag Hammadi makes clear the reasons that suppression was practiced quite apart from the hostility of Iraneus, and brings the history of the late empire and its transitions into coherence. A very loving and intellectually astute presentation of a major figure in Western History who has been understood only, in some areas, as a defender of Rome. Not quite so simple.