Augustine the African, Catherine Conybeare, Profile Books, £25

In 146 BC, on the shores of the Gulf of Tunis, the ancient city of Carthage was razed to the ground. For centuries, the seat of the great Punic Empire served as a key centre of power in the Mediterranean. Now, Roman troops stormed her last bastions, enslaving all whom they found. Only the citadel would remain, too formidable to touch, and its ruins lay silent for more than a century, a reminder to all who stood against the might of this new imperial power. Refounded and resettled by the Emperor Augustus in 29 BC, the Romans turned these ruins into a major city at the heart of their imperium in North Africa.

Catherine Conybeare begins her elegant new biography of Saint Augustine of Hippo here, on unfamiliar shores, in the shadow of this new empire, at the start of the fourth century. Since the refounding of Carthage, much had changed. The Roman Republic had become a flourishing empire, and Christianity was vying for dominance as the formal state religion. Within a lifetime, everything would change again. Conybeare’s narrative is a refreshing take on a familiar tale. In unpicking his African origins, she hopes to show the influence this had on his life and major works. For a thinker who has been so thoroughly Europeanised over the centuries, and whose writings were canonical for medieval schools of thought, this is no small task.

Few biographers fail to miss Augustine’s provincial origins. However, they are often downplayed, with attention usually given to the scholarly interpretation of his works. Conybeare offers an altogether more intimate tale, in which the personal is bound up closely with the spiritual and political. Through his eyes we see the destructive schism between the Donatist heretics and the origins of a distinctly ‘catholic’ church, the divisive Council of Carthage, and decades-long disputes with the heretic Pelagians. He also provides a view into the political struggles between the imperial court and the quasi-autonomous Counts of Africa, who were given to frequent rebellion, all the while developing the philosophical origins of core tenets of western thought.

We follow as a young Augustine leaves his Numidian birthplace of Thagaste in 370 AD to study in this re-founded Carthage, an ideal place for an aspiring orator with a taste for rhetoric. An early cradle of Christianity, the city was riven with factional disputes and rival theologies, including the widespread North African sect of Donatism and the thriving, illicit cult of Manicheanism. Upon arrival, Augustine was seduced by the contrarian teachings of the latter, and embraced it. We are swept along during his younger years as an ambitious, debauching, secular rhetorician known to steal other men’s wives. He even fathered a son, Adeodatus, with an unnamed lover. Some years later, at the urging of his benefactors, he strikes out for the imperial heartland, settling under the tutelage of the captivating Bishop Ambrose in Milan. These peregrine travels through the Italian peninsula read as a gallop through late-imperial Rome, and one of the strengths of this book is that it provides an intimate portrait of this often obscure period.

Italy proves a turning point in unexpected ways. It is a time of uncertainty, equal parts illuminating and unsatisfying. He sheds his secular ambitions, questions his Manicheanism, and finally converts to Christianity, though all the while ambivalent to Italy itself. Personal tragedies abound. His lover leaves him, and his mother dies unexpectedly after his conversion. Bereft and adrift both personally and professionally, his reasons for remaining in this unfamiliar land dwindle. Five years later he sets sail back to Africa, never to return to the mainland.

Yet, if Augustine hoped to find solace in his homeland, he was mistaken. During these first years as a convert back in North Africa he is frequently taunted for his flirtations with Manicheanism and finds himself at theological loggerheads with the influential Christian Donatist movement. He is dragged into bitter disputes between this sect and ‘catholic’ orthodoxy, and engages in constant ‘theological warfare’ against thinkers such as Aurelius, Bishop of Carthage.

A naturally offensive stance earns him many critics, especially among the educated Romanised elites, each of them eager to turn his poor, provincial, Punic origins against him. Combined with his sexually liberal years as a Manichean cultist, there is no shortage of ammunition to use against him when he was ordained, in 391, as presbyter of Hippo. Allusions to his treacherous ‘Carthaginian’ nature punctuate the work of his opponents, from the biblical scholar Jerome to the excommunicated aristocrat, Bishop Julian, who readily derides him as a ‘Punic pamphleteer’ of oriental disposition.

Yet these feuds were, ironically, a source of great creativity for Augustine. These battles with provincial African sects provided much of the impetus behind his historical interpretation and shaped his engagement with various movements for the rest of his life. Such savage criticism often honed his most important arguments, from the doctrine of ‘original sin’ to the just war tradition, which remains the most enduring form of military and ethical thought on war and peace. Conybeare shows how this was rooted in a complex relationship with his homeland.

While this focus on his ‘Africanness’ can at times feel forced, the narrative remains persuasive and engaging throughout and reaches a satisfying conclusion. Nor does this approach undermine her broader attempt to recover Augustine’s itinerant character as a man never quite at ease with his place in society, and to explore the role that his homeland had in shaping his thought.

Key historical events intrude throughout Augustine’s life, which maps the decline and fall of the western reaches of Roman imperial power. In his youth, the Empire seemed unflinching and immovable, yet during his lifespan its authority chips, fractures, and finally collapses. The sack of Rome in 410 by Alaric the Visigoth caused extensive dislocation and disruption, sending a profound psychological shock to the wider empire. This had an immediate impact on Augustine’s career, as wealthy migrants from the Italian peninsula resettled in North Africa, reopening fissures in an already contested religious environment. In an attempt to shore up imperial authority and resolve the Christian schism with the Donatists, the Emperor called the Council of Carthage the following year. Augustine was at the centre of the religious debate that followed, which, for the first time, revealed the links between political and theological authority.

The sack of Rome presaged a long-term collapse in imperial authority marked by successive civil wars, all of which came to a head in 430. Germanic Vandals, who had converted to the Arian heresy, swept down from Iberia to Tunis and besieged the city of Hippo. There, an elderly Augustine had spent the last years of his life waging a new theological war against a new sect of heretics, the Pelagians, and even under siege he continued his verbal crusade. Yet the stress of the Vandal blockade, and perhaps a lack of nourishment, had the better of him, and just three months later he died from a sharp fever. For a narrative which delights in the allegory of old Carthage, this seems fitting, adding an element of tragic mythology to an already extraordinary life. When the Vandals razed Hippo the following year, they preserved only two things, the cathedral of Augustine, and the great library that accompanied it.

Augustine is often imagined as separate from his own history, cut off from the peculiar period in which his views formed. Conybeare rectifies this with alacrity. In tracing the African origins of this towering thinker, Conybeare anchors Augustine in real, difficult, human disputes, refusing to get bogged down in extraneous details. She places him back where he belongs: the context of late imperial Rome, with all the messy, doctrinal disputes of early Christianity, and the decline of the western empire. If, by the end, this all seems rather obvious, that is perhaps her lasting achievement. To have made apparent and accessible what was clear to those who looked.