Augustine the African, Catherine Conybeare
Augustine the African, Catherine Conybeare
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Augustine the African

Author: Catherine Conybeare

Narrator: Catherine Conybeare

Unabridged: 10 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/12/2025


Synopsis

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by fleegan on August 24, 2025

Great book. Interesting subject. Very readable. I thought it might get kind of boring, but no! Never dull. I didn’t know much about St. Augustine’s life before I read this. And I wasn’t interested in reading some kind of comprehensive biography. The author really shows us the humanity of Augustine.......more

Goodreads review by Susan on October 06, 2025

Comprehensive biography of St Augustine, focusing on the importance of him being African. He did not come across as very appealing, constantly arguing with various different groups and people, ranting and raging over very fine points of theological detail, which leaves the modern mind somewhat bemus......more