The spiritual journey of St Augustine

Spectator

2 days ago

When I lived in south London, my Algerian barber used to tell me that he came from Souk Ahras, 'the home town of Augustine'. I found it strange to hear a forbidding doctor of the early church described as a local boy made good, but Catherine Conybeare shows me that I should not have done. Algerians have remembered what the Church has often overlooked: that Augustine's thinking owes everything to his birth in 354 in what was then Roman North Africa.
Although five million of his words survive, they come to us from the hands of medieval copyists who were more interested in setting out his doctrines than in recording his life. They cut up his sermons and letters, removing irrelevant or cryptic local allusions. Conybeare resurrects Augustine the African by sifting this heap of words for surviving references to people and places. Although wryly describing herself as a philologist, she is also a perceptive traveller, enlivening her textual work with vivid descriptions of Augustine's cities in their prime and as they survive today.
These literary devices are hardly new. They have defined the study of late antiquity ever since the 1960s, when Peter Brown first composed a satisfying biography of Augustine of Hippo by reading his theology against the grain. They also bring diminishing returns. Augustine was too intent on spiritual realities to notice the material and urban world around him much. Even the most evocative descriptions of temples or amphitheatres he must have seen may not bring him much closer. Nor are his local observations always revelatory. It is true that his description of humans as caught in God's olive press must have resonated with African farmers who lived for the olive harvest, but the example seems as slight as an English vicar describing the Christian life as a difficult wicket or a game of two halves.
The test of Conybeare's book is not whether it generates new information but whether it refreshens and deepens appreciation of Augustine's thought. Here it succeeds brilliantly, convincingly relating his greatest achievements to his sense of being caught between Rome and North Africa. Although he had viewed his education in Thagaste (now Souk Ahras) and Carthage as just a means of escape to Rome, the city disappointed him. It struck him as London might an ambitious young writer today – filled with politicians trading off past imperial glories and a public that prized cultural polish but refused to pay for it. He preferred Milan, the seat of the powerful bishop Ambrose. But even here he ended up mainly hanging around with people he knew from home. Conybeare neatly points out that what initiated the conversion to Christianity, described in his Confessions, was a conversation with his hometown friend Alypius and an African acquaintance about the impressive piety of Antony – an African monk.
Augustine was always conscious of an inferiority when dealing with Romans, who made fun not of his race but of his tongue: he tended to mispronounce Latin. When they turned really nasty, they mocked him as a 'Punic pamphleteer' who gabbled in the native language of his country. When he returned to Africa, though, becoming a priest, then a bishop, in the coastal town of Hippo (now Annaba), he was impatient with its narrow mental horizons. His new largeness of view explains the cryptic and violent controversy he waged for decades against the Donatists, who ran a rival church in Africa. He had come back home as a proud member of a universal institution, writing that 'we are the good fragrance of Christ in every place'. Yet the Donatists said that a church's rites were only powerful if enacted by priests whose purity they had judged themselves – a principle that Augustine mocked as African self-satisfaction run mad.
Caught between two places, he now had no real home. When posh refugees from Rome turned up in North Africa after Alaric sacked the city in 410, he began The City of God to quieten their unsettling whingeing about its collapse. Augustine did not care about the looting or destruction of buildings – a city was its people. But as his giant work slowly progressed, he shifted gear, coming to argue that all Christians should consider themselves peregrini. We now often render that word as the quaint 'pilgrims', but it began as a technical term for legalised aliens. Augustine's life on the outskirts of a disintegrating empire taught him that we are all citizens of nowhere.
Italy ultimately claimed Augustine. Centuries after his death in 430, his body ended up in Pavia, under a pompous monument that makes no reference to Africa. Perhaps he would not have minded. The lesson of this book is also his teaching: even if our origins explain us, they should not limit who we become.