by Joanna Williams, spiked
The Church of England has turned ‘whiteness’ into a form of original sin.
Was St Augustine, one of the most revered figures in Christian history, black? The authors of the new children’s book, Heroes of Hope, produced for the Church of England, certainly seem to think so. The book’s brightly coloured illustrations portray Augustine as a dark-skinned African.
This is not an entirely baseless claim. Born in 354 AD, in what was a Roman province in north Africa, Augustine spent time in Italy before becoming bishop in the North African settlement of Hippo Regius. It is thought that his mother, St Monica, may have had Berber origins. Strictly speaking then, Augustine is more likely to have been brown than black. But the most important question, surely, is why his race matters so much to today’s Church of England.
Neither Augustine nor his contemporaries would have cared about his skin colour. An astonishing five million of the saint’s words, carefully preserved by medieval copyists, have survived the centuries. Shocking though it may seem to today’s racially obsessed progressives, those ancient scribes were more concerned with recording his doctrines than in detailing his racial origins and the precise shade of his skin. Indeed, Augustine himself, despite his prolific output, did not reveal much about his heritage or his surroundings. According to one commentator, he ‘was too intent on spiritual realities to notice the material and urban world around him much’. Yet fast forward some 1,700 years and today’s Church of England bigwigs seem to think Augustine’s intellectual, philosophical and theological legacy is worthy of recognition, primarily on account of his skin colour.