St. Augustine was born in the city of Tagaste, in Roman North Africa. Today it is known as Souk Ahras and it’s a three hour car drive from the Tunis airport. But back when Augustine was a child, Tagaste was still a Roman town and had been for the five centuries, ever since the days when Carthage was smashed and rebuilt by the occupying Latins. All those years later, Latin was still the dominant language of provincial Africa and generations of wealthy Romans had owned the best land; vast estates throughout the region produced food and wool for export to Europe.

In the decades before Augustine’s childhood the new religion of Christianity, in its various forms, had unsettled the ancient patterns of power and tradition. Society was fractured between the Latin-speaking curiales class and the Tamazight-speaking Berbers of the countryside and small towns. This was the childhood of Augustine, a boy who struggled with his studies and was eager to win the approval of his curial father even as he relied on his Berber mother for care. Monica and Patricius sent Augustine away from Tagaste when he was seventeen, in order to continue his education and secure his future.

After seven years of schooling, mostly in the culturally divided city of Carthage, Augustine began to draw younger students to himself as he took on the role of a tutor. He decided to relocate to Rome, where he imagined he would flourish as a teacher. But Rome had been in decline for so long that it was no longer the center of learning it had once been. Augustine headed to Milan, where he would seek advancement and famously come under the influence of the learned bishop, Ambrose. Some slow conversion began to work within Augustine and after a few years he fell back upon an extended retreat, first to a villa outside the city and then to his distant home of Tagaste. Augustine hoped to find some peace and quiet to endure the spiritual trials of his new Christian life. Unfortunately, on the way home to Africa, Monica died.

Augustine was then thirty-five years old and had lost both parents. He continued on his way and reached his childhood home of Tagaste, where for several years he lived with a few friends in what they called their ‘monastery’. It was here, in this out of the way place, that Augustine connected with his vocation in a deeper way. In 387, while visiting the coastal town of Hippo Regius (Annaba, Algeria), the local bishop ordained Augustine and set him on the path of a much more public life. All these centuries later we know Augustine of Hippo but he forget that he was once a young man who would have been known as Augustine of Tagaste.