Pop art: Simon Webb on our whitewashed African roots

‘Their writings helped define the tradition that forms part of the background to modern Quakerism.’

The church fathers were a group of theologians who lived from the early years of Christianity to around 750CE. Many Friends know little about them, but their writings helped define the background tradition of much of modern Quakerism. Some of their works are required reading for trainee priests in other traditions, where they even have their own subject: patristics. Patristic writings cover such subjects as the nature of Jesus, his connection to God and the Holy Spirit, and the way Christian communities should be organised.

Students of art history would also do well to be aware of these remarkable figures: paintings of them are often seen among the works of European Old Masters. Those pale, male painters usually portray them as white men, but a significant number were African. The pictures of Augustine by Botticelli are good examples: they show an Italian with a white beard. Other painters show him in a verdant European landscape. But their subject was Augustine of Hippo, born in what is now Algeria.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of Augustine as a thinker. His Confessions may be the first Christian autobiography, and his other books have had a profound influence. (In this talk of fathers we should not forget Augustine’s mother, Monica, also canonised in some traditions, and probably a Berber.)

Other Africans include Tertullian (from Carthage in modern Tunisia), Origen (Egypt) and Athanasius (also Egypt). Like Augustine, Athanasius fought bitter battles with believers whom he defined as heretics, in his case the Arians, who had a different view of the nature of Jesus. Athanasius was forced into exile, which made him, in effect, the intermittent bishop of Alexandria. Athanasius was also the friend and biographer of Antony the Great, a desert father and another Egyptian whom painters also show looking remarkably pasty. 

Some count Origen, who was martyred nearly a century before Athanasius was born, as a heretic himself. His writings on Christian doctrine and biblical interpretation were, however, ground-breaking. Tertullian, a contemporary of Origen’s, died a heretic, but his writings against paganism and his insightful ideas about the nature of Jesus remain crucial.

Today many people from places like Algeria and Egypt, who look as Origen, Athanasius, Tertullian and Augustine would have looked, will be Muslims. The spread of Islam was one factor that made Europe the pre-eminent Christian continent, for a time. Meanwhile Christian and Jewish communities persisted in North Africa and the Middle East, as they do today – Afghanistan’s Christians being one contemporary concern. Despite the ‘whitewashing’ effect of much of our Christian art, European inheritors of the Christian tradition should not forget that their faith had some of its early nurturing from people of colour.

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