Pope Leo XIV’s first official journey to Africa has began with a captivating cease in Algeria. Right here the pontiff’s go to to the Grand Mosque of Algiers is an try and strengthen Christian-Muslim relations. The cease can be to pay homage to Saint Augustine, founding father of the order that he’s a member of.
Catherine Conybeare, a professor of historical past, language and the classics, has written a e-book revising Augustine’s story to position his African origins and beliefs on the centre. We requested her about it.
What’s the major take-away from the e-book?
Above all, that one of many foundational figures within the European mental custom got here from Africa and spent nearly his total life there.
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It emphasises the worldwide church’s debt to Africa. That is why, for the quilt of the e-book, I needed an image of Italy and north Africa with the north and south polarities reversed. The view from Africa is so vital, it adjustments the way in which we take a look at all the things.
Who was Saint Augustine?
Saint Augustine (354-430 CE) was a rhetorician (persuasive speaker) and thinker from what’s now Algeria. He was educated in north Africa and rose to the rank of official orator on the court docket of the emperor in Milan – after which, after years of religious looking, underwent a dramatic conversion to Christianity and returned to north Africa.
There, he was ordained first as priest then as bishop within the coastal metropolis of Hippo, trendy Annaba, the place an impressive Roman website stays to at the present time. He spent the remainder of his life in Hippo, instructing, preaching, debating, and writing his magnificent works of theology.
He’s maybe greatest identified for his Confessions, an prolonged work of prayer, autobiography and theological reflection, all addressed to God. However there are different essential works as properly, together with The Metropolis of God, On the Trinity, and the Literal That means of Genesis. Altogether, they make him some of the vital figures within the basis of the Christian church, and one of many biggest theologians ever – if not the best.
Augustine stays extremely vital within the historical past of western thought, even past his theological contributions. His concepts on time, reminiscence, language, the interpretation of texts, political concept, and the writing of historical past itself are all elementary to thinkers working in these fields. He has influenced successors, from the Italian poet Petrarch and German theologian Martin Luther to the Austrian-born British thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein and German-born US historian and thinker Hannah Arendt.
Why is Augustine so vital to Pope Leo XIV?
Pope Leo XIV is a member of the Augustinian order, based within the thirteenth century, eight centuries after Augustine’s dying.
In his very first speech from the balcony in St Peter’s Sq. the pope described himself as “a son of Saint Augustine”. He’s the primary Augustinian pope – probably as a result of Martin Luther, the nice Protestant reformer, was additionally an Augustinian, and the governing physique of the Roman Catholic church has averted electing a pope from the order.
However past his affiliation to the Augustinian order, the pope reveals deep affinities, each mental and religious, with Saint Augustine. Pope Leo’s emphasis on love and peace, which we hear in each public utterance, brings him near his theologian predecessor. Augustine put love on the coronary heart of his theology, even arguing that love within the human realm is an indication of God.
Pope Leo additionally emphasises dialogue, and dialogue was on the coronary heart of how Augustine practised each philosophy and theology. The best way by which the pope expresses his ideas within the language of the Bible can be deeply Augustinian: Augustine’s works are sometimes so deeply interwoven with scriptural language that it’s arduous to inform the place the Bible ends and his unique phrases start – and so it’s with the pope.
The pope has just lately been utilizing the very Augustinian idea of the “need for domination” to criticise the instigation of struggle.
Augustine argued that this need corrupts and ruins those that construction their lives round it, even worse than the harm they do to the dominated.
Above all, Augustine is exceptional for his mental humility. He put looking and questioning, versus in search of dogmatic solutions, on the coronary heart of his theology. This too is a sign attribute of Pope Leo.
Did his work affect Islam in any approach?
His work didn’t, so far as I’m conscious, affect Islam. However I’ve found, in dialog with colleagues in Algeria, that he’s admired and welcomed as a pre-Islamic thinker, and therefore he might help to construct bridges between Christianity and Islam.
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Why is it vital to reclaim him as an African?
It suggestions the view of the world in the direction of the worldwide south, and particularly to Africa, whose significance is so usually neglected in our narratives of mental historical past.
Furthermore, the truth that he was each African and Roman gave him a particular insider/outsider view of the Roman empire. He had an intensive Roman schooling and excelled in Latin, philosophy, and rhetoric. On the identical time, all his closest associates and associates have been additionally from Africa.
When he got down to critique the empire in his e-book The Metropolis of God, his view was very a lot from its periphery: he noticed the empire from an indirect angle, with guarded admiration however with out complacency, and with no sense that it must be inevitable or everlasting.
Catherine Conybeare, Leslie Clark Professor within the Humanities and Professor of Greek, Latin, and Classical Research, Bryn Mawr School
