Review: Allen Callahan on Augustine the African
A new book offers insight on how Christianity coalesced around the imperial center
Detail from the cover image of Augustine the African
Saint Augustine was, as Catherine Conybeare reminds us with eloquent erudition, an African. Of his seventy-six years, he spent only five in Rome, the hub of authority for the four-hundred-year-old Church he served—barely enough time for him to be converted, baptized, and ordained. He was born, lived the rest of his life, and died, in 430 CE, on the Mediterranean coast of Africa. Conybeare’s learned, refreshingly readable biography shows us what Africa was for Augustine, and what Augustine was for Africa. The title of her new book, Augustine the African, says it all.
Or so it would seem.
For us in the twenty-first-century, Africa is, among many things, that vast continent that spans Cecil Rhodes’ imperialist wet dream of a railroad from Cairo to Capetown. But that was not Augustine’s Africa—a Roman province that comprised roughly only the territory of present-day Tunisia, northeastern Algeria, and the coast of western Libya: it excluded Egypt to the east and the rest of the Maghreb to the west, as well as all the desert lands to the south. And beyond that, terra incognita: indeed, much of what we know as Africa today was unknown to the Romans of Augustine’s time.
