Josephine Quinn’s “Insider and Outsider” (NYRB November 6, 2025; archived) is a favorable review of Augustine the African, by Catherine Conybeare; here are some bits of Hattic interest:

He was baptized by the militant bishop Ambrose of Milan in 387, seven years after the Edict of Thessalonica attempted to enforce Christianity on all Rome’s subjects and five years after the emperor Theodosius launched a new campaign of persecution against Manichaeans. In another change of heart, Augustine gave up his imperial sinecure to return to North Africa, though not to his former companion: now he was committed to chastity. Monnica died on the way back, but Augustine finally arrived home after five years overseas in 388. After that he never left Africa again.

At first he settled in his hometown of Thagaste, where more grief awaited him with the loss of his beloved son at the age of sixteen around the year 390. The following year he was seized by the local congregation on a visit to the port of Hippo and ordained a presbyter, or priest. […] In 395 he was promoted to the unusual position of coadjutant bishop with the incumbent Valerius, a native Greek speaker who needed the support, and finally became sole bishop on Valerius’s death in 396. This prompted him to write his Confessions, an autobiographical account of his spiritual journey and his first work of real brilliance. […]

Conybeare focuses throughout on the ways in which Augustine’s developing theology and theological self-positioning were “inflected by his view from Africa.” One example is his interest in Punic, a western form of the Phoenician language originally introduced to African coastal areas by Iron Age Levantine settlers. It had been adopted by local communities and even kings by the third century BCE, seems by the third century CE to have entirely obliterated the “Libyan” languages previously used in the area, and was still widely spoken across northwest Africa in the early fifth century, alongside Latin. Punic was the first language of many African Christians, and though Augustine wasn’t fluent he seems to have had a functional understanding of it and a good sense of its importance to the Christian mission in the region. Much of our evidence for its continuing popularity comes from Augustine himself, as he renders words and phrases into Punic and back for his own congregation and finds translators, interpreters, and even a Punic-speaking bishop for others.

Conybeare argues that working in a bilingual environment and confronting the fact that words in different languages can have only an approximate correspondence affected Augustine’s attitude toward scripture. This is illustrated by an argument he had with the Bethlehem-based theologian Jerome over the latter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible into Latin. The specific point at issue may seem trivial: Jerome had translated a Hebrew word in the book of Jonah as “ivy” rather than, as had been traditional in earlier Latin versions, “gourd vine.” Augustine wrote to protest, explaining that when local Christians reacted badly to this unfamiliar new version, another African bishop had to change the wording back. Jerome was offended by the implication that he was wrong and by the idea that more than one translation could be authoritative. But Augustine’s experience in Africa of the limitations of translation convinced him that the specific wording of a biblical text was less important than its communicative power—that “different human words could still serve the single truth of God’s word.” […]

In one early exchange, he tells Maximinus, a contemporary from Madauros, that as “an African writing to Africans, and given the fact that we’re both here in Africa,” he shouldn’t mock the Punic names of Christian martyrs. This highlights the complex relationship between the concepts of “Punic” and “African” in antiquity and might suggest an alternative form of regional identification. In Latin, punicus or poenus was simply an unaspirated transliteration of the Greek label phoenix, or Phoenician, but the term was associated in particular with the great imperial city of Carthage, of more immediate concern to Romans than the ports of the Levant. From there its meaning extended to the entire region, no doubt helped along by the widespread adoption of the Punic language there, along with Carthaginian cultural practices and political institutions like the “sufetes” who served as chief magistrates in more than forty North African cities in the Roman period. By the imperial period the terms “African” and “Punic” could be used interchangeably by Roman authors, something like the modern use as synonyms, in some contexts at least, of “British” and “English,” although the latter term refers to foreign migrants who introduced their language and culture to a large region of Britain beginning around 1,500 years ago—more or less the same distance in time as that between Augustine and Dido, founder of Carthage.

Augustine certainly had Punic sympathies, from his youthful sorrow for Dido, who was abandoned by Aeneas on his way to found the Roman people, to his guarded admiration for the Carthaginian general Hannibal in his last great work, The City of God. It’s hard to put too much meaningful weight on them, however—isn’t everyone Team Dido? When he directly identified himself as Punic in the 420s, it was in response to the Italian heretic Julian of Aeclanum hurling the term at him as an insult. He responded by forcefully reclaiming it: “Do not despise this Punic man…puffed up by your geographical origins. Just because Puglia produced you, don’t think that you can conquer Punics with your stock, when you cannot do so with your mind.” Strong stuff, but more of a comment on Julian’s notions of identity than his own.

One problem here is that our own understandings of identity are difficult to align with those of the ancients. Conybeare describes Augustine as having “Amazigh—Berber—heritage,” inferring the likely Berber origins of his mother from her name, derived from that of the local god Mon, who was worshiped near Thagaste. But as Ramzi Rouighi explained in Inventing the Berbers: History and Ideology in the Maghrib (2019), “Berber” is a category constructed by Arabic soldiers and scholars more than two hundred years after Augustine’s death, and the local populations they collected under this label had no shared culture or common identity. Before modern nations and communications, collective identification tended to coalesce at a more local or cultural level than a regional or ethnic one: the city and the sanctuary. […]

Another of Augustine’s inventions was the West: he explains in The City of God that although most people divide the world into three unequal parts—Asia, Europe, and Africa—it can also be divided into two halves: the Oriens (the East, or Asia) and the Occidens (the West, comprising Europe and Africa). This new binary geography made sense in relation to the division of the Roman Empire. And it makes some sense of Augustine, too, who struggled with the Greek language of the Eastern Empire and attracted little attention there. He lived an entirely western life between Italy and Africa in an era when journeys to Constantinople and pilgrimages to the Holy Land were not at all uncommon: in the early 390s his close friend and fellow Thagastan Alypius visited Jerome, who was originally from the Adriatic coast, at his monastery in Bethlehem.

I’m pretty sure Augustine didn’t actually invent the West, but one has to forgive a certain amount of hype in favorable reviews. (We discussed Latino-Punic back in 2007 and Augustine’s reference to a Punic proverb last year; not directly related, but I will take any chance I can get to point people to the Circumcellions.)