Augustine the African

An extraordinary work of revisionist history that centers Africa in the life of one of our greatest philosophers.Augustine of Hippo (354430), also known as Saint Augustine, was one of the most influential theologians in history. His writings, including the autobiographicalConfessionsandThe City of God, helped shape the foundations of Christianity and Western philosophy. But for many centuries, Augustines North African birth and Berber heritage have been simply dismissed. Catherine Conybeare, a world-renowned Augustine scholar, here puts the African back in Augustines 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 Augustines travels, revealing how his groundbreaking works emerge from an exiles 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.