Augustine of Hippo has been the subject of a number of outstanding modern biographies. These include a ­famously readable account of his life by Peter Brown, a scholarly masterpiece by Serge Lancel and a brief but insightful portrait by Henry Chadwick.

Augustine’s role in the formation of Western philosophy and theology is widely known. His explorations of the nature of time, selfhood and memory in Confessions, meanwhile, have influenced the Western concept of personhood, perhaps even preparing the way for fiction and its explorations of how the self develops in response to changing circumstances. Yet there is always something new to be said about this extraordinary figure. 

Catherine Conybeare’s book is both fresh and timely – fresh because she provides a wealth of contextual detail, something that many earlier biographies lack, and timely because, as her title suggests, she is sensitive to contemporary interests in ethnicity and culture. As well as being the most important Latin theologian in the Western world, Augustine was an African from a lower-middle-class background. He was born in Thagaste in 354. Now part of Algeria, the town then belonged to the Roman Empire and possessed many of the features of a Roman settlement, including a forum and an amphitheatre. Conybeare shows that Augustine’s heritage was not something to be outgrown and cast aside. Rather, it was central to the theology he bequeathed to us. It is a new approach and one much to be welcomed. Conybeare’s narrative is enhanced by her own research and travels in North Africa and Italy – the details she provides of landscapes, viewpoints and archaeology give a rich sense of the environments Augustine occupied.

Confessions, of course, is the source of what we know of Augustine’s intellectual journey towards Christianity and his inner life, but Conybeare also digs into his pre-Christian explorations, his enormous correspondence, his sermons and his monumental experiment in Christian political philosophy, The City of God. What emerges is a portrait of a vulnerable and conflicted man, capable of deep friendship and lasting enmity, an outsider who longed to belong. Rowan Williams once suggested that of all the early Christian fathers, Augustine was the one to whom the word ‘freedom’ meant the least. He did not seek freedom, but communion. The theme of restless longing is woven into his writings, from the opening words of Confessions on.

Out of his African homeland, Augustine only had to open his mouth to sound provincial. He could not escape who he was. Conybeare helps us to appreciate how a nagging sense of inferiority drove him to seek recognition, first as an academic in Rome and then in Milan. After being baptised in 387, he returned home to confront his background and live out his faith. In 391 he settled in Hippo, also in modern-day Algeria, and four years later was ordained its bishop. Conybeare gives a greater proportion of space than other biographers to his struggle with the Donatists, a schismatic Christian movement in North Africa, because this was the conflict in which the divisions of his own identity were most clearly exposed. The Donatists claimed that they were the true African church. Augustine, as bishop of Hippo, consistently and unsuccessfully called on them to reconcile with Rome. Eventually, he agreed to use the force of the state in an attempt to impose unity. 

It was deeply traumatising for Augus­tine to realise how fragile the Roman state was, yet he was never uncritically supportive of Roman claims to greatness. He recognised that loss and failure were written into the script of human endeavour. As a child, he had absorbed the Aeneid and been haunted by the death of Dido, the African queen of Carthage, abandoned by Aeneas before he founded Rome. Augustine died in 430, just as the Vandals were about to overrun Roman North Africa. The City of God is not only a theological response to the impending tragedy. It is also in many ways the work that helped reconcile the African and the Roman in him. 

Conybeare has produced a psychological study of Augustine as well as an insightful exploration of his life. Augustine’s mother, Monnica, has often been underestimated by commentators and subjected to naive criticism. One of the many virtues of Conybeare’s book is that it offers a more sympathetic and plausible portrait of this formidable woman than other works. Augustine the African is beautifully written, thoroughly engaging and highly recommended.