Augustine the African, by Catherine Conybeare. Liveright, 2025, xx + 268, $31.99.

Of the making of many books about Augustine there is no end, or something like that. Augustine’s popularity and influence, even within his own lifetime, have been rivaled, perhaps, only by the variety and extent of interpretations to which his life and work have since been subjected. The most important biography in English, as the author of the book under review readily acknowledges, is the magisterial effort of Peter Brown, entitled simply Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. First published in 1967, it is the biography against which all others are properly measured. The work was revised and reissued in 2000 and offered, in appendices entitled “New Evidence” and “New Directions,” seventy pages of reflection on freshly discovered writings. Of special note were the Dolbeau sermons, unearthed in 1990 and so not treated by Brown when his work first appeared almost three decades earlier. A careful reading of that portion demonstrates something remarkable: Augustine and his fellow North African bishops objected to the celebratory feasts at the tombs of the martyrs, not because they often led to sexual excess (true enough), but because the bishops were worried about inordinate deference to the saints and the accompanying eclipse of Christ’s work.

[Augustine] wrote with ominous determination of the need for reform, imposed from on top by himself and his fellow bishops, upon an unruly and ignorant populace. . . . If many of the Dolbeau sermons come from 397, they make plain that a further, more intimate reason had formed in Augustine’s mind to make him wish to reform Catholic practice. It was a reason rooted in his new theology of grace. He wished to lower the mood of exuberant participation in the triumph of the martyrs so that the unearthly glare of divine grace, associated with their extraordinary deaths, should not blind the average Christian to the frequent, less spectacular—but equally extraordinary—triumphs of God’s grace in their own lives. He made the feasts of the martyrs less dramatic, so as to stress the daily drama of God’s workings in the heart of the average Christian.[1]

Reform driven by a “new theology of grace”? This, and the other 512 pages of Brown, is such well-argued and researched material that one may wonder what is left to be contributed by way of biography.

Students of Augustine, however, in addition to reading their primary sources, would do well to consult James J. O’Donnell’s Augustine, in the Twayne’s World Authors Series.[2] It is this work that gives us the very helpful rubric that Augustine’s life was shaped by three conflicts: (1) against the Donatists on the nature of the church and her sacraments; (2) against Pelagius and Julian of Eclanum on the nature of grace; (3) against Vergil and the whole Roman tradition, to clarify the church’s pilgrim role in the world and her cautious relation to civil power. What about Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind by Gerard O’Daly[3] for a careful look at the nature of Trinitarian analogies, how men learn, and more? There is also Eugene Te Selle’s Augustine the Theologian,[4] not to mention O’Donnell’s own oft-criticized biography of the saint, and shorter, deeper studies like

G. G. Willis’s Augustine and the Donatist Controversy,[5] and The Irrational Augustine of Conybeare herself.[6] Such a tiny sampling of some of the leading works with which this author is familiar—and readers can add their own titles—raises a pressing question: Is another biography of Augustine needed? And, given the somewhat provocative title Augustine the African, does Conybeare’s work veer toward contemporary political ideologies, going beyond placing him in context and instead wrenching him into the twenty-first century with its many dysfunctions? These are the two questions that framed the present reviewer’s reading of the volume.

The work is divided into four sections with the following titles: part 1, “Insider, Outsider;” part 2, “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing;” part 3, “A Language for Africa;” and part 4, “From Africa to Immortality.” Conybeare divides the fourteen chapters more or less equally among the sections, though the third, despite being in some ways most interesting, is the shortest, no doubt in keeping with the limitations of the evidence. Before discussing briefly some of Conybeare’s most important insights and observations, it will be helpful first to take a few notes on the preface (xv–xx), where the author describes how she came to write the work and what she hopes it will contribute. Describing her return from a trip to Algeria, Conybeare writes:

I discovered that everything about [Augustine’s] life shifts once it is fully envisioned as an African life. Capturing that shift is what is new about this book. 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. (xvi)

On the next page, Conybeare helpfully sketches for us where her argument will lead:

[Augustine] 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. (xvii)

This careful underlining of Augustine’s pilgrim mentality, as we will see, is Conybeare’s greatest contribution in the book. For those of us who are already enamored of the bishop’s theology and careful reasoning on these and other topics, her work provides a genial and highly readable account of how some aspects of Augustine’s experience and story likely shaped those emphases.

Part 1 traces Augustine’s early biography, beginning of course in Thagaste in 354, taking him to Carthage (still in ch. 1), to Italy, Ambrose, and conversion (ch. 2), then “Coming Home” (ch. 3). The pace is brisk, following the outlines of the Confessions and relying heavily on a wide range of primary source material, all of which Conybeare translates very capably and sometimes with verve. When speaking of the woman Monica forced Augustine to put away before his conversion (to seek a more noble and career-advancing mate), and the resultant bitterness he felt, Conybeare translates from Confessions 6 as follows:

The woman I had slept with for years was torn from my side as an obstacle to the marriage. She was deeply embedded in my heart, and it was left slashed and wounded and trailing blood. She returned to Africa, vowing to you, God, that she would never be involved with another man; and she left with me the son born from her. (26)

Conybeare, with wisdom and sensitivity, comments, “Augustine said very little about this young woman in his Confessions, and he refused to name her. In this way, he accorded her a final shred of dignity and ensured that she would never be known beyond their private circles” (27). Conybeare also gives a compelling account, familiar to many but told here with deft skill, of how the deaths of Monica, Nebridius, and finally his own son Adeodatus devastated and shook Augustine. The first part of the work concludes in chapter 4, “Going to Hippo,” and carefully sets the bishop within his proper context. To quote just a few satisfying lines:

Composing the Confessions [c. 396] was what truly represented a fresh start for Augustine. In that work, he gathered together the disparate threads of his own life. At last, he had made time to reflect, and to draw the years of vertiginous change into a single satisfying trajectory. At last, he could work out how to put God and God’s plan at the center of the story. (65)

The four chapters of part 2 show the bishop at work in a variety of difficult settings in Hippo. Of particular interest is how Conybeare seeks to tell the Donatists’ story sympathetically, that is, from their perspective, as she brings to the surface many social tensions and conflicting interests. Augustine the African finds himself uncomfortably arguing on behalf of remote Roman power, against the native interests in which he was raised. Says Conybeare:

Its opponents began calling the group Donatists, but the name didn’t stick until Augustine took up the theme and drove it home. He used the term literally hundreds of times as he hammered at the African church, varying it with hostile references to the “faction of Donatus.” As far as the Donatists were concerned, however, they were the rightful African church. They called themselves simply Christian. (75)

Conybeare describes the bishop’s long effort to wrest away from the Donatist camp his beloved predecessor Cyprian, taking us into chapter 6. She also details his tireless use of song and poetry to combat the Donatist threat and shows his versatility in learning from his opponents. Augustine read and internalized the work of a Donatist named Tyconius, who in the early 380s wrote something called the Book of Rules. As Conybeare explains:

The first systematic exposition of biblical interpretation in Latin, it provided guidelines for readers to move beyond a literal interpretation of the Bible—which, understandably, often left them baffled—and to use instead an interpretation based on symbols. (85)

Tyconius, as she explains, was the first to teach on typology in Latin, and this was not lost on Augustine. “The anti-Donatist fight radically sharpened Augustine’s own interpretation of Scripture: both the care with which he read it, and the range and detail of the passages that he could adduce” (86). He put these new skills to the task of driving a wedge between the Donatists and Cyprian on the topic of baptism, as well as their claim to be the only true church. In the process, Augustine the African sided with the distant and Imperial Roman power. And though he was not the first to advocate the use of magisterial compulsion with respect to his opponents (and would later regret this appeal), Augustine was ultimately successful at the Council of Carthage (June 411) by relying on his Spanish friend Marcellinus, who presided and ruled in his favor. Part 2 concludes in chapter 8, with a riveting description of the council’s aftermath and the bishop’s public debate with the disgraced Donatist Emeritus. Conybeare ends the chapter with one of many brief and interesting vignettes from her travels to places prominent in Augustine's biography. Here she encounters persons ruminating over animosities that have still not quieted after sixteen hundred years.

Part 3 fascinates, albeit briefly, with its two chapters describing the preacher who seeks to meet the needs of his congregation, irrespective of their language. Thus we read that he

preached during the festival of John the Baptist. He gave examples of the word for God in Latin (deus), Greek (theos), and Punic (ylim, also transcribed as ilim). Each word is obviously different, though each had two syllables, and once the word for God had been spoken, “those two syllables have fulfilled their purpose and passed on; but the thing that I conceived in my heart has not.” (126)

The takeaway here is simple and plain: Punic helped Augustine to point to a reality that transcended language (126). This leads into a fascinating discussion of Augustine’s dispute with the crotchety Jerome, and the former’s sustained and not always successful efforts to connect with working-class speakers of the Punic tongue in and around Hippo. Chapter 10, “Preaching and Social Class,” would justify the cost of the book on its own. In both these chapters Conybeare is a cautious and careful scholar, not overstating her conclusions when based on slim evidence, yet suggesting productive ways to think about how God’s Word, and its preaching, impacted in surprising ways people whose education and interests were quite different from Augustine’s own.

Part 4, the last fifty pages or so before a tidy epilogue, takes us through the increasing “fragility” of Roman power in North Africa (ch. 11), retells the story of fugitives from Italy reaching Hippo and Augustine’s response to this tragedy, after Rome was sacked in 410 (ch. 12), the gruesome death of his friend and Roman politician Marcellinus, and how he scrambled afterward to make sense of it all (ch. 13). As Conybeare writes:

Scholars have often observed that Augustine’s vision of the world grew darker and more embittered as he aged. Certainly, his part of the empire was increasingly precarious, and the general insecurity inflected his political thought as well as his theological battles—the two being inseparable from each other. What is remarkable to me, on the contrary, is that Augustine didn’t give up. . . . Augustine never succumbed to the temptation simply to bury himself in books. He carried on trying to engage with those he thought had the power to improve things. He carried on believing that there were good men in the world who would behave responsibly under the most taxing circumstances. Each new correspondence was implicitly a statement of hope. (199)

The final chapter (14), which is entitled “The Lost Son,” is the most suggestive in its argument and may come closest to psychologizing the saint. Here, Conybeare seeks to weave together many different strands in the bishop’s life, all of which derive from his African identity, carry through the turbulent years before his conversion and the devastating death of his son Adeodatus, and terminate with his protracted conflict against the consummate insider and aristocrat Julian of Eclanum. The story here is told in much greater detail and theological richness in Brown’s biography. But we cannot fault Conybeare for that, for her aims are different. Brown talks of Augustine being a very reluctant combatant, laboring on into his old age (dying in 430) against a much younger man. Julian’s ideas had been condemned more than once already, but he did not quit carrying the banner of Pelagius to Augustine’s doorstep with his prolific writing. At stake was original sin, the question of the innocence of infants and their eternal destiny.

In the bitter polemic of this debate, it was as if Augustine were fighting once again with all those who had made him feel like an outsider in Italy, a mere migrant from Africa, all those years ago. His hard-won accumulation of experience and authority seemed to count for nothing. His opponent was a man who could have been his son; Augustine’s tenacity in argument told how far the errant son had strayed. The themes of the debate reopened emotional wounds that should have scarred over long before. Augustine was still dictating enraged responses to Julian when his health suddenly took a turn for the worse. (220)

Opinions on the validity of Professor Conybeare’s interpretation will vary. As someone who has sought for a long time to study Augustine and his interpreters, I found her suggestions and insights remarkably compelling, though conclusive proof of her suggestive claims probably lies outside the realm of possibility, absent further evidence.

The book as a whole is beautifully written, imaginative, very well-researched, and a quick read. It is probably not the best entry point for those who want to study Augustine seriously. Henry Chadwick’s Augustine: A Very Short Introduction[7] holds that spot. But, after some of the titles mentioned above, especially Brown’s biography, this volume by Conybeare is a thought-provoking and insightful retelling of the man’s life and thought. It succeeds in presenting a new perspective and does not succumb to shallow and insipid ideologies. It is, rather, sound scholarship and will not easily be supplanted.

Endnotes

[1] Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (University of California Press, 2000), 453–4.

[2] James J. O’Donnell, Augustine, Twayne’s World Authors Series 756 (Twayne, 1985).

[3] Gerard O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind (University of California Press, 1987).

[4] Eugene Te Selle, Augustine the Theologian (Herder and Herder, 1970).

[5] G. G. Willis, Augustine and the Donatist Controversy (SPCK, 1951).

[6] Catherine Conybeare, The Irrational Augustine (Oxford University Press, 2006).

[7] Henry Chadwick, Augustine: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2001).

David C. Noe is the pastor of Reformation Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was formerly professor of classics at Calvin University. Ordained Servant Online, September–October, 2026