Augustine spent nearly his entire life in Roman Africa and wrote most of his works for an African audience. He is, of course, generally regarded as a founding father of European thought. This essay reads Augustine in the context of Africa and asks what his account of the self, belief, and political power still offers us, and where it falls short.

Introduction

Augustine died on 28 August 430, in the third month of the Vandal siege of Hippo Regius (the port at present-day Annaba in eastern Algeria), where he had been bishop for some 35 years. His friend and biographer, Possidius, bishop of Calama, tells us that during his final illness he had the penitential psalms copied and nailed to the wall beside his bed so he could read them. He left behind a library of some 1000 books (Possidius’ catalogue of his works is that long), comprising sermons and letters. Within a few generations that body of work became the single most important source of theology in the Latin West.

The path his reputation then took is curious. Augustine was born, educated, and ordained in Africa, and he spent all but five years of his adult life there. Most of what he wrote was provoked by African controversies, addressed to African correspondents or preached to African congregations. Yet in surveys of Western philosophy he usually appears as a European, the bridge between Plato and the Middle Ages, with his birthplace recorded, if at all, as a biographical detail.

To call him African in a modern nationalist sense would be anachronistic. He was a Roman citizen who wrote in Latin, thought with concepts drawn from Greek philosophy and regarded the empire as his world. But he was also unmistakably a provincial: a man from a small Numidian town for whom education was a ladder out of it, who knew that Italians laughed at his accent, and who, as a bishop, had to find priests who could speak Punic to the country people of his diocese. Peter Brown’s biography, still the standard account, shows how thoroughly the African church shaped his thought (Brown 2013; see also Lancel 2002). Reading him in that setting does not diminish him. It makes him more intelligible.

From Thagaste to Hippo

Augustine was born on 13th November 354 in Thagaste (a small town in the province of Numidia). His father, Patricius, was a small landowner and town councillor who was baptised only shortly before his death. His mother, Monica, was a devout Christian, and she had both spiritual and worldly expectations for her son. The family did everything they could to educate him, first at Madauros and then, with the help of a local patron, Romanianus, at Carthage. The route to a career in the courts or imperial service was through the study of grammar and rhetoric, and Augustine was a model of a successful student on that path.

At Carthage, at eighteen, he read Cicero’s Hortensius (a work now lost), an exhortation to philosophy, and from that point on he began to seek wisdom rather than just success. He joined the Manichees (a dualist religion that offered a perfectly rational account of evil) and remained one of their ‘hearers’ for about nine years. He also had a partner (whose name he never records) with whom he had a son, Adeodatus. He taught rhetoric at Carthage, went to Rome in 383 and in 384 was awarded the official chair of rhetoric at Milan (the seat of the Western imperial court at the time).

Milan transformed him. He heard the sermons of the Bishop of Milan, Ambrose, whose allegorical interpretation of the scriptures got rid of many of his reservations about the Bible itself. He also read the ‘books of the Platonists’ (the Latin translations of Plotinus and Porphyry), which provided him with a way of conceiving of God as immaterial and of evil as a privation rather than as a substance. In the summer of 386, he converted in a garden in Milan, as described in the 8th book of the Confessions. Ambrose baptised him at Easter 387. Monica died at Ostia later that year while they were waiting for a ship to take them home.

He returned to Africa in 388, meaning to live quietly with a few friends at Thagaste in a community of prayer and study. In 391, on a visit to Hippo, the congregation seized him and ordained him priest, a common enough practice at the time, and he accepted it with tears. He became bishop of Hippo around 395–396 and stayed until his death, preaching several times a week, judging the civil disputes that bishops were then expected to hear, travelling to councils at Carthage and writing without pause.

The Confessions and the Examined Self

Written between about 397 and 400, the Confessions is often called the first autobiography in the Western tradition. The description is not quite right. The book addresses God throughout rather than the reader, and its last four books leave Augustine’s life behind for meditations on memory, time, and the opening chapters of Genesis (O’Donnell 1992). Like modern autobiography, it seeks to examine motives rather than simply narrate events. Augustine wants to know why, as a boy in Thagaste, he stole pears he did not want and threw them to the pigs, and his answer, that he enjoyed the theft because it was forbidden and because he did it with friends, unsettles more than any account of a grand sin would have done.

The book’s opening sentence, that the human heart is restless until it rests in God, states its thesis (Augustine 1991). Human beings are made for a good no created thing can supply, and they spend their lives trying to make finite things bear an infinite weight: reputation, pleasure, career, and friends’ approval. Augustine does not exempt himself. He presents his ambition, his relationships and even his intellectual achievements as forms of disordered love, and he is candid about the habits that held him long after his mind had been persuaded. ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet’ is the line most readers remember.

Public life in Africa, as elsewhere, could learn from this, though it is easily sentimentalised. Our political and religious cultures tend to reward displays of certainty and treat admitting error as weakness. Augustine’s book makes a sustained argument that self-knowledge begins with recognising that one’s motives are mixed and one’s judgement unreliable. That is not a theory of government. It is, however, a precondition of accountability, because leaders who cannot imagine their own fallibility rarely build institutions capable of correcting them.

Belief and Understanding

Augustine’s conversion was both intellectual and moral, and he never thought faith required him to stop thinking. In his sermons he urged his hearers to ‘believe so that you may understand’ (crede ut intellegas), and the formula, recast centuries later by Anselm of Canterbury as ‘faith seeking understanding’, describes his method well. Belief was where inquiry began. One accepts the testimony of scripture and the church much as a pupil accepts a teacher’s authority, then labours to understand what one has accepted (Rist 1994; Mendelson 2000).

The situation is more difficult than either the advocates or the detractors of it would have us believe. Augustine was well read in the philosophy available to him, and he engaged with the Manichees, the sceptics and the pagan thinkers on their own terms. He was ready to say that if an interpretation of Scripture led to a conclusion at variance with what was certainly known about the natural world, then that interpretation must be wrong. In The Literal Meaning of Genesis, he explicitly warned that those who spoke nonsense about the heavens and the earth were, in fact, bringing Scripture into disrepute with the learned. He was no modern rationalist, and he was no obscurantist either. Any attempt to use Augustine to support one side or the other in the current debate about science and religion will misrepresent him.

African universities, seminaries and churches have reason to take this seriously. Religious conviction runs deep on the continent, and so, in some quarters, does a habit of treating questions of history, science and public health as settled by appeal to religious authority. Augustine offers a precedent within the Christian tradition for a different stance: conviction willing to be tested and expecting understanding to be earned.

The City of God and the Limits of Power

In August 410, a Gothic army under Alaric sacked Rome. Militarily, the event mattered less than its symbolism; the city had not fallen to a foreign enemy in some eight hundred years. Refugees reached Carthage and Hippo, and with them came the charge that Rome had fallen because it had abandoned its gods for Christ. Between about 413 and 426, Augustine’s reply grew into the twenty-two books of The City of God.

Two Cities, Two Loves

The fundamental idea of the work is that humanity is not divided by nation or by church but into two cities which are distinguished by what they love. ‘Two loves have made two cities,’ says Augustine in Book 14: the love of self to the contempt of God makes the city of man; the love of God to the contempt of self makes the city of God. The two cities are interwoven throughout history and cannot be identified with any one of the visible institutions. The Roman Empire is not the city of God, and neither is the visible church (Augustine 1998), which contains many who will not in fact be of the church.

The upshot is a complete devaluation of politics. Augustine doesn’t hate the state at all. He accepts that peace on earth is a real good, that Christians ought to regard it as such and to support it, and that rulers can in fact rule justly. The point he makes is that no political order can have any ultimate significance, and he is utterly sceptical of the self-aggrandising claims of the imperial power. Rome’s history, as he tells it, is a long history of ambition masquerading as virtue.

Justice and the State

The most famous passage on the subject is in Book 4. Without justice, what are kingdoms but great gangs of robbers? He makes the point with the story of a pirate who was brought before Alexander the Great. When asked what he meant by plundering the seas, he said he did exactly what the Emperor did. The only difference was that he did it with a single ship and so was called a robber, whereas Alexander did it with a great fleet and so was called an emperor.

Readers in Africa hardly need the anecdote explained. The continent has known states whose power was real but whose justice was not, and whose development was measured in infrastructure rather than in the dignity of the people who live beside it. Augustine supplies no constitutional model for a modern republic, and it would be foolish to read The City of God as a handbook of democratic reform. Instead, it offers a habit of mind: a refusal to let a government, party, or church’s success stand as proof of its legitimacy and an insistence on asking what ends its power actually serve.

The Harder Legacy

An honest account of Augustine has to grapple with the aspects of his legacy which trouble his readers, and two of these in particular stand out.

Grace and Human Responsibility

The first of these is the matter of grace. From around 411 Augustine was embroiled in a controversy with the British monk Pelagius and his adherents, who maintained that men could, with the aid of God’s law and the example of Christ, choose the good and live a sinless life. Augustine came to the conclusion that this was a gross underestimation of the damage that sin had done to the human will. He came to believe that the will could not turn to God without the assistance of grace, that grace was a free gift rather than something that could be earned and that God’s choice of those who would be saved preceded any merit on the part of the individual. Those positions became the bedrock of Western theology (Catholic as well as, via Luther and Calvin, Protestant). In the doctrine of predestination, they also gave rise to some of the most difficult and painful questions in the Christian tradition, and they have been the subject of ongoing dispute ever since.

It would be wrong to say Augustine rejected human responsibility. He was quite the opposite, and his account of the divided will in the Confessions is an account of responsibility as it is experienced from the inside. His later writings, however, do so strongly on the theme of the will’s dependence on grace that many (in his own time and ever since) have found it extremely difficult to see where any room is left for freedom.

The Problem of Religious Coercion

The second is the matter of coercion, and that is the more difficult one. For much of Augustine’s career the biggest church in large parts of Numidia was not his. The Donatists went back to a dispute over clergy who had handed over the scriptures during the persecution under Diocletian. They maintained that such clergy and all those ordained by them were invalid and that the sacraments of such men and all those ordained by them were invalid. They saw themselves as the true church of Africa. Augustine fought them for many years and initially was opposed to the use of force. After the imperial edict of unity in 405 and the Conference of Carthage in 411 (which found against the Donatists), he came to support the use of state penalties as a means of bringing them back. In a letter to the Donatist bishop Vincentius circa 408, he justifies this by reference to the parable in Luke’s gospel of the master telling his servants to ‘compel them to come in’ (Brown 2013).

The argument was shaped by the circumstances. The Circumcellions (the Donatist militants) had attacked the Catholic clergy, and Augustine felt that pressure could be used to open minds which habit had closed. None of this makes the argument any less dangerous. It was cited for over a thousand years as a justification for the persecution of heretics, and it is a stark demonstration that intellectual distinction in no way guarantees moral correctness. There is an additional irony in the matter. The Donatist schism in part was an African argument for the purity and independence of the church in the face of imperial power, and at the crucial moment Augustine was on the side of the empire.

In African contexts where the religious majority may well look to the state to enforce their beliefs, the point needs making at all. A church can speak with confidence in the public sphere and still be a defender of the freedom of those who hold different views. Augustine, when it was the case, didn’t.

Augustine and African Intellectual History

What does Augustine actually offer to the project of an African Renaissance as this journal understands it? Not reflected glory. His significance is not derived from the fact that he was born in Africa (a theologian of the highest order emerging from Numidia is in no way evidence of the intellectual potential of Africa). His relevance to the project is in the fact that he corrects a history which has so often been told with the African setting entirely absent.

That has very real implications for how theology, philosophy and history are taught on the continent. Augustine is in the same curriculum as Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen and Athanasius in the African universities and seminaries, as one of the participants in the debates which established the terms of those debates rather than as a precursor of a European tradition. He is there as someone to be argued with. African scholars are in no way bound to accept his views on grace, on sexuality or on coercion, and the most interesting work on Augustine has been done by those who take his questions seriously and are prepared to reject many of his answers.

You don’t have to turn your back on the rest of the world’s traditions in order to claim him. Augustine was shaped by Cicero, Plotinus, Paul and the bishops of Carthage, and his work utterly demolishes any attempt to neatly categorise ideas as African or European. The more fruitful thing to do is to get a proper grasp of how ideas actually circulated throughout the Mediterranean and to acknowledge that Africans were very much part of that process.

Conclusion

Augustine raised questions which have not gone away: why do people desire what can never satisfy them? How is belief related to understanding? Can power be just? What is owed to the dissenter? His answers were of course coloured by his Christian faith and by the circumstances of a bishop in a provincial see in a declining empire. Some of them are still illuminating; others (particularly the ones on coercion) are precisely the ones that have merited the criticism they have.

He’s also a reminder that intellectual life in Africa didn’t start with mission schools, colonial universities or the institutions of independence. 1600 years ago in Hippo and Carthage, African Christians were having debates about grace, authority and the meaning of history, and their debates had an impact on the thinking of a much wider world. To study that past properly and to be prepared to disagree with it where it is in fact wrong is a far better basis for intellectual renewal than either to ignore it or to turn it into a shrine.

References

1. Augustine (1991). The Confessions. Translated by H. Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2. Augustine (1998). The City of God against the Pagans. Edited and translated by R.W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Brown, P. (2013). Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. 45th anniversary edn. Berkeley: University of California Press.
4. Lancel, S. (2002). Saint Augustine. Translated by A. Nevill. London: SCM Press.
5. Mendelson, M. (2000, rev. edn.) ‘Saint Augustine’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/ (Accessed: 10 October 2026).
6. O’Donnell, J.J. (1992). Augustine: Confessions. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
7. Rist, J.M. (1994). Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptised. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.