Christianity took off slowly, evolving within small communities of converts around the Mediterranean. We get some sense of how far it had traveled by the 40s and 50s CE from Saint Paul’s letters to correspondents in Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome. Paul had no contact with Christian communities in Africa or anywhere west of Italy, although later tradition held that thanks to the efforts of Saint Mark there was a Christian bishopric at Alexandria in Egypt.
The new religion seems to have reached northwest Africa only in the later second century CE, as attested by reports that twelve martyrs in the region of Carthage were condemned and executed by a zealous Roman governor in 180. It quickly attracted many more adherents there, despite or perhaps because of the dangers: around 200 the Carthaginian scholar Tertullian called the blood of martyrs the seed of the Christian Church and reported that mobs were attacking Christian tombs. Carthage was also the scene of the martyrdom of a young mother, Perpetua, and her pregnant slave Felicity in 203, recorded in a vivid contemporary account said to have been written in large part by Perpetua in prison before she and Felicity were exposed to wild beasts.
Over the course of the third century Roman Africa became one of the nurseries of early Christianity, an incubator of Latin theology, and a hotbed of resistance to intermittent Roman demands that the empire’s subjects recognize its gods. When the Romans martyred Carthage’s bishop Cyprian in 258, he was already one of eighty-seven bishops in the region. By the early fifth century, with the last martyrdoms a century in the past and Christianity firmly established as the Roman state religion, there were more than eight hundred—compared to around eighty in Italy.
One of them was Augustine, bishop of Hippo, and according to Catherine Conybeare’s excellent, short, and highly readable new biography, he was more African than he often appears. In contrast to accounts of his career that emphasize the time he spent as a young man in Italy, his involvement in the wider church, and his influence on Western civilization, Augustine in Africa traces a grittier story of a life lived almost entirely in a small area of what is now eastern Algeria, where Augustine’s local origins and experience profoundly shaped both his life and his thought. Conybeare’s argument is that because of his contributions to the genres of philosophy, autobiography, and Christian theology, “a core strand of the culture that Europe claims as its own stems from Africa.”
Augustine was born in 354 CE in the small town of Thagaste, now Souk Ahras, forty miles south of the Algerian coast and just over twenty miles from the Tunisian border. The family was respectable but not wealthy, and they struggled to raise the funds to send him to school, first south to the larger city of Madauros and then north to Carthage for further studies in 370, when he was sixteen. Carthage would have been a revelation to a young man from the sticks. A huge and cosmopolitan port, it had once been Rome’s greatest enemy, though the story that the city was sown with salt after the Roman sack of 146 BCE is a nineteenth-century myth. In the fourth century CE it was one of Rome’s grandest colonies and still the largest center of Christianity in the region. Already showing signs of the contrasuggestibility that would characterize his long career, Augustine embraced a different Asian religion that he found there, Manichaeanism.
The prophet Mani had lived in the Parthian Empire, east of the Euphrates, in the third century CE. His eclectic theology incorporated aspects of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Mithraism. It revolved around dual material forces of darkness and light at work in the universe and focused on the possibility of redemption through asceticism: a small number of “Elect” (both male and female) rejected worldly possessions and concerns, became vegetarians, and thus liberated particles of light trapped in dark matter. Their reward was deliverance from the wandering of their souls at the ends of their lives; the best that the larger class of “Hearers,” who supported them, could hope for was to be reborn as one of the Elect. Manichaeanism is almost forgotten today, but in its time it was popular as far east as China, where it survived until the fourteenth century, and across the Roman Empire, despite being proscribed by the emperor Diocletian in 302.
Augustine remained a Manichaean for at least a decade, during which he was living with a woman he never names and their son, Adeodatus, born when he was around seventeen. When he finally decided in 383 at the age of twenty-eight to move to Rome, apparently for better teaching opportunities, it was with Manichaean support and accommodation in a Manichaean house.
Unlike Carthage, Rome was by then past its prime, living in the shadows of its former glory. The Roman Empire had effectively been divided in two for almost a century, with the western half governed from Milan, while power and wealth resided principally in the eastern capital of Constantinople. Rome was a disappointment to Augustine, in particular because his students there failed to pay their fees. He remained a little over a year, until he was able to secure an appointment with the imperial court as master of rhetoric. He arrived in Milan in 384 as he was turning thirty. He was soon joined by his widowed mother, Monnica, and other North African friends and relatives, who constituted an expat circle around the new imperial servant. The mother of his son, though, was sent back to Africa after around fifteen years of cohabitation to make way for a more advantageous marriage with a young heiress.
That marriage never took place; instead Augustine finally joined his mother in the Christian church. He was baptized by the militant bishop Ambrose of Milan in 387, seven years after the Edict of Thessalonica attempted to enforce Christianity on all Rome’s subjects and five years after the emperor Theodosius launched a new campaign of persecution against Manichaeans. In another change of heart, Augustine gave up his imperial sinecure to return to North Africa, though not to his former companion: now he was committed to chastity. Monnica died on the way back, but Augustine finally arrived home after five years overseas in 388. After that he never left Africa again.
At first he settled in his hometown of Thagaste, where more grief awaited him with the loss of his beloved son at the age of sixteen around the year 390. The following year he was seized by the local congregation on a visit to the port of Hippo and ordained a presbyter, or priest. This seems to have come out of the blue, though “cruel gossip” claimed that Augustine’s tears at the event were of disappointment at not being appointed straight to the rank of bishop, a relatively common occurrence in this period of feverish growth for the new state religion. In any case he accepted his fate and was given a place to live in the church garden, where he built a small monastery and remained for the rest of his life. In 395 he was promoted to the unusual position of coadjutant bishop with the incumbent Valerius, a native Greek speaker who needed the support, and finally became sole bishop on Valerius’s death in 396. This prompted him to write his Confessions, an autobiographical account of his spiritual journey and his first work of real brilliance.
Conybeare describes in engaging detail what it meant to be a bishop in Africa in this period. Augustine preached constantly, and the rest of the time he wrote—more than five million words altogether, enough to sustain an entire sector of the academy ever since. In the background were all the bureaucratic struggles of middle management in a huge organization—the problems of filling posts and even in those days of filling churches—exacerbated, it seems, by Augustine’s rather difficult character. His appointment as coadjutant bishop had been controversial, and it was complicated by accusations that he sent a love potion to a married woman. He was always dogged, furthermore, by suspicions of Manichaeanism, however much he emphasized his theological differences from his erstwhile comrades and insisted that he had only been a Hearer in the now heavily suppressed religion.
Conybeare focuses throughout on the ways in which Augustine’s developing theology and theological self-positioning were “inflected by his view from Africa.” One example is his interest in Punic, a western form of the Phoenician language originally introduced to African coastal areas by Iron Age Levantine settlers. It had been adopted by local communities and even kings by the third century BCE, seems by the third century CE to have entirely obliterated the “Libyan” languages previously used in the area, and was still widely spoken across northwest Africa in the early fifth century, alongside Latin. Punic was the first language of many African Christians, and though Augustine wasn’t fluent he seems to have had a functional understanding of it and a good sense of its importance to the Christian mission in the region. Much of our evidence for its continuing popularity comes from Augustine himself, as he renders words and phrases into Punic and back for his own congregation and finds translators, interpreters, and even a Punic-speaking bishop for others.
Conybeare argues that working in a bilingual environment and confronting the fact that words in different languages can have only an approximate correspondence affected Augustine’s attitude toward scripture. This is illustrated by an argument he had with the Bethlehem-based theologian Jerome over the latter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible into Latin. The specific point at issue may seem trivial: Jerome had translated a Hebrew word in the book of Jonah as “ivy” rather than, as had been traditional in earlier Latin versions, “gourd vine.” Augustine wrote to protest, explaining that when local Christians reacted badly to this unfamiliar new version, another African bishop had to change the wording back. Jerome was offended by the implication that he was wrong and by the idea that more than one translation could be authoritative. But Augustine’s experience in Africa of the limitations of translation convinced him that the specific wording of a biblical text was less important than its communicative power—that “different human words could still serve the single truth of God’s word.”
Above all, Augustine’s theology was influenced by arguments with other local Christians he called Donatists, a schismatic movement that split the African church in the fourth century CE. Conybeare makes the theological differences involved unusually comprehensible. Donatism was not a heresy. Donatist Christians had the same view of the Trinity as orthodox Catholics and the same view of the relationship between Hebrew and Christian scripture. Their differences were related largely to process and the question of purity, and they had emerged out of the trauma of Rome’s persecutions of Christians in the third and early fourth centuries. Donatists took a radical stance against any form of accommodation with Rome, especially against those Christians whom they considered traditores—traitors, but literally people who had “handed over” sacred books to the persecutors. Donatists also believed that apostates were unable to transmit the Holy Spirit because of their own impurity, and so any baptisms they had conducted were invalid and should be reperformed. This idea was absurd to traditional Catholics like Augustine, for whom sanctity resided in the rite of baptism itself, not in the purity of the person who performed it.
Things had come to a head in 311 with widespread opposition to the appointment of a new bishop of Carthage, Caecilian, on the grounds that he had been ordained by a traditor. The matter was resolved in his favor by appeal to the new Roman emperor, Constantine, who was already sympathetic to Christianity and interested in its doctrine. By then, however, there was a rival bishop of Carthage, Donatus, who gave his name to the growing resistance movement. The two factions started to appoint their own bishops to the same sees across the region, which explains in part the vast number of African bishops in this period. By Augustine’s time the majority of Christians in the region were Donatists, and outbreaks of violence between the factions were becoming a problem. The dispute dominated the next two decades of his life, until an African church council called by the emperor Honorius in 411 finally suppressed the Donatist church, leading to forced conversions and even executions.
There’s no question that living and fighting with Donatism sharpened Augustine’s writings in biblical exegesis, but the experience also helped crystallize his objections to African exceptionalism. Donatism was an intensely regional belief system limited to northwest Africa and strongly focused on it. Donatists took seriously the biblical saying that “the last shall be first,” and they took it to refer to the relatively late turn to Christianity in Africa. This led to some creative interpretation of scripture, for instance of the dialogue of the lovers in the Song of Songs, who are understood by standard Christian doctrine as Christ and the Church. According to Donatists, the Church asks not “where you lie down at noon” but simply “where will you lie down?,” to which Christ replies, “in the south”—meaning Africa. Augustine mocks these innovations and repeatedly invokes against them the views of “the churches across the sea.”
This is not the only dispute in which Augustine rejected a narrowly African perspective on Christian practice. One of his first campaigns as a presbyter was against the regional tradition of feasting in cemeteries, which he associated with drunkenness and vice; again he argued that “the churches across the sea” provided better models. Augustine considered himself primarily a member of a universal church, and he was prepared to insist on Africa’s place in that community but not to claim that it was special: for Augustine, Conybeare writes, “the great church was the whole world, not a bite-size piece of Africa.” Africa certainly shaped his experience, his ideas, and his practice, but within Africa, Conybeare writes, he was “simultaneously insider and outsider.”
All this raises an interesting question about Conybeare’s further suggestion that Augustine should be seen not only in his African setting or as having an “affiliation to Africa” but as having a distinctively “African identity.” He tends to use the term “African” in a more functional than sentimental way, especially in correspondence with foreigners more familiar with (North) Africa as a whole than its subregions. He notes to a Roman official that the novelist and orator Apuleius of Madauros is better known to “us Africans” than the Greek philosopher Apollonius, and he tells his friend Paulinus in Italy that “Africa thirsts with me for your company.” But he certainly doesn’t identify with all other Africans: in another letter to the Roman commander in the area he encourages him to take up arms against the “African barbarians” who threaten the empire from the south. As Conybeare points out, this is the African background of his famous defense of “just” war in order to keep the peace, a doctrine with local origins that has had greater historical traction than his views on translation or the Donatists. It is also, though, tricky to reconcile with a strong “sense of himself as an African.”
In one early exchange, he tells Maximinus, a contemporary from Madauros, that as “an African writing to Africans, and given the fact that we’re both here in Africa,” he shouldn’t mock the Punic names of Christian martyrs. This highlights the complex relationship between the concepts of “Punic” and “African” in antiquity and might suggest an alternative form of regional identification. In Latin, punicus or poenus was simply an unaspirated transliteration of the Greek label phoenix, or Phoenician, but the term was associated in particular with the great imperial city of Carthage, of more immediate concern to Romans than the ports of the Levant. From there its meaning extended to the entire region, no doubt helped along by the widespread adoption of the Punic language there, along with Carthaginian cultural practices and political institutions like the “sufetes” who served as chief magistrates in more than forty North African cities in the Roman period. By the imperial period the terms “African” and “Punic” could be used interchangeably by Roman authors, something like the modern use as synonyms, in some contexts at least, of “British” and “English,” although the latter term refers to foreign migrants who introduced their language and culture to a large region of Britain beginning around 1,500 years ago—more or less the same distance in time as that between Augustine and Dido, founder of Carthage.
Augustine certainly had Punic sympathies, from his youthful sorrow for Dido, who was abandoned by Aeneas on his way to found the Roman people, to his guarded admiration for the Carthaginian general Hannibal in his last great work, The City of God. It’s hard to put too much meaningful weight on them, however—isn’t everyone Team Dido? When he directly identified himself as Punic in the 420s, it was in response to the Italian heretic Julian of Aeclanum hurling the term at him as an insult. He responded by forcefully reclaiming it: “Do not despise this Punic man…puffed up by your geographical origins. Just because Puglia produced you, don’t think that you can conquer Punics with your stock, when you cannot do so with your mind.” Strong stuff, but more of a comment on Julian’s notions of identity than his own.
One problem here is that our own understandings of identity are difficult to align with those of the ancients. Conybeare describes Augustine as having “Amazigh—Berber—heritage,” inferring the likely Berber origins of his mother from her name, derived from that of the local god Mon, who was worshiped near Thagaste. But as Ramzi Rouighi explained in Inventing the Berbers: History and Ideology in the Maghrib (2019), “Berber” is a category constructed by Arabic soldiers and scholars more than two hundred years after Augustine’s death, and the local populations they collected under this label had no shared culture or common identity. Before modern nations and communications, collective identification tended to coalesce at a more local or cultural level than a regional or ethnic one: the city and the sanctuary.
Personal identity is even harder to pin down in the ancient world. In Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (1989), the philosopher Charles Taylor even traces its origins to Augustine and his articulation of interior being, the notion that “in the inward man dwells truth.” This was the first real sign, as Taylor sees it, of “the sense of ourselves as beings with inner depths, and the connected notion that we are ‘selves.’” Augustine’s sense of his own self as developed in The City of God, was not, however, as African, Roman, or any other ethnopolitical category but, in Conybeare’s words, as “displaced and wandering.” This isn’t a negative sentiment in context: Augustine’s City of God is a caravan city, with the central idea that the people of God—Christians—are wandering in this world on their way to their eternal home.
His wanderings still had their limits. Another of Augustine’s inventions was the West: he explains in The City of God that although most people divide the world into three unequal parts—Asia, Europe, and Africa—it can also be divided into two halves: the Oriens (the East, or Asia) and the Occidens (the West, comprising Europe and Africa). This new binary geography made sense in relation to the division of the Roman Empire. And it makes some sense of Augustine, too, who struggled with the Greek language of the Eastern Empire and attracted little attention there. He lived an entirely western life between Italy and Africa in an era when journeys to Constantinople and pilgrimages to the Holy Land were not at all uncommon: in the early 390s his close friend and fellow Thagastan Alypius visited Jerome, who was originally from the Adriatic coast, at his monastery in Bethlehem.
Augustine died in 430 at the grand age of seventy-six, with Hippo under Vandal siege and his West undergoing fundamental change. As Conybeare puts it, “Where Alaric had negotiated with emperors, twenty years later the Vandals simply ignored them, and took swaths of the former empire for their own.” The following year the Vandals took Hippo, paving the way for a new Western world.
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