The most memorable of my encounters with Sabine MacCormack was a meal we shared together in Rome one evening in March 2008. The previous semester I had taken a seminar with Professor MacCormack at the University of Notre Dame, and we had spent several months discussing St. Augustine’s Confessions and The City of God. Now, as we both happened to find ourselves in Rome for Spring Break, we met again to share not only a meal but also our experiences of the Eternal City.
A few days before our dinner, Sabine had attended a papal audience where Pope Benedict XVI had spoken about St. Augustine. After the Pope gave an address in Italian, describing the various conversions the saint had experienced throughout his eventful and fascinating life, short summaries were proclaimed in Spanish, French, German, and English. Sabine observed that each summary emphasized a different aspect of the main text, nuancing the message in light of the genius of each language. As I listened, enraptured by Sabine’s magisterial commentary on what she acknowledged to be a magisterial lecture on Augustine, I began to think that there were only two people in the Paul VI Audience Hall that afternoon who had been fully aware of each moment of the event: Sabine MacCormack, and the Pope himself.
A native German speaker, Sabine had been educated in England, undertaken extensive research in Peru, and had taught for decades in the United States. Along with Latin, English, and Spanish, she had also picked up Italian and French along the way, in addition to Quechua, the native language of Peru. Beyond these linguistic skills, Sabine’s appreciation of Benedict’s lecture had a deeper basis. Like Benedict, Sabine had devoted much of her life to understanding Augustine of Hippo. As much as she admired Benedict’s treatment of Augustine’s conversion, Sabine had a perspective on the question which Benedict was not able to experience. Unlike the Pope, who had been baptized into the Catholic Church on the very day of his birth, Sabine was able to share with St. Augustine the grace of conversion. In 2007, a year before our dinner, Sabine had been received into the Catholic Church.
After discussing the Pope’s talk at length, Sabine made a striking statement about the seminar on Augustine that I had participated in the previous semester. Having spent much of her life analyzing Augustine, Sabine now felt for the first time that she was reading him as a member of his Church. Like Augustine, Sabine had searched for the truth throughout her life; now, having grasped it more fully, she was able to encounter anew a saint who had been her guide on this quest. And yet, despite the importance of Augustine in her own process of conversion, it was not to Augustine that she had been turned, but to the God who had turned Augustine towards himself.
The internationally recognized polyglot scholar with whom I sat at dinner that night had taken an unusual path in life, intellectually as well as religiously. Born into a fractured family, Sabine had struggled as a young girl to learn to read and write. At the age of eight, Sabine was sent to her maternal grandmother’s farm in Bavaria. Here, for the first time, she encountered teachers who had the patience and kindness to help her learn to read. Near her grandmother’s farm was a one-room school where a community of Catholic nuns taught the local children, including non-Catholic children like Sabine. Sabine expressed tremendous gratitude to these sisters who had bestowed on her the gift of reading, which she otherwise may never have acquired. As she remarked to me on one occasion, once she began reading, she never stopped.
Sabine devoted her life to reading, not only for her own edification, but to share the insights that she gained with anyone who would listen. The words of Pope Benedict, delivered at the general audience which had been the subject of our conversation, could well be said of her own life: “Renouncing a life solely of meditation, Augustine learned, often with difficulty, to make the fruit of his intelligence available to others.”
Sabine’s work was breathtaking in its range of topics and depth of perception. Her first book, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (1981), examined late antique panegyrics commemorating imperial ceremonies in light of the evidence offered by Roman and Byzantine art. Sabine’s description in the opening chapter of the fruits of classical education might be taken as a summary of what she was beginning to achieve: “This ability to organize a mass of material, to hold it in the mind and to bring it out with clarity—and not the remote inaccessibility of an elitist culture—was what distinguished a man who had received the traditional rhetorical education.”
Sabine’s second book crossed from Late Antiquity to Latin America: Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (1991). Just as her first book had considered the transition from pagan Rome to Christian Byzantium, her second book explored the continuities and disruptions experienced following the Spanish conquest of Peru in 1532. Recognizing that “a vital component of our information about Inca and Andean religious practice comes from men committed to its destruction,” Sabine sought to describe “not Inca and Andean religion in isolation, but Inca and Andean religion as it was practiced, observed, and remembered during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” Despite the apparent change in focus and methodology, Kenneth Mills and Ramón Mujica Pinilla describe how in this book “Sabine brought tremendous knowledge of Classical, Biblical, Patristic and medieval theological and historical learning, and her instinctively interdisciplinary erudition, to bear on the study both of how chroniclers perceived and, effectively, ‘imagined’ native Andean religion, and of how native Andeans responded.”
Sabine’s third monograph, The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine (1998), returned to the Roman empire. In her preface, Sabine makes a striking confession: “When I first read Augustine’s City of God as an undergraduate, I thought he was citing Vergil only for purposes of refutation and that the Aeneid emerged from this treatment as a mere shadow of itself. Years later, and after a good deal of effort, I am much less sure.” Later in the preface, Sabine articulates the cross-fertilization that had been occurring in her own mind over the past ten years:
The question as to how and why Augustine read and remembered Vergil has continued to hold my attention for so long precisely because it does not allow simple answers. In writing during these same years about the cultural and religious changes that engulfed the empire of the Incas after the Spanish invasion in 1532, I have become ever more aware that such changes defy straightforward categorization. This does not mean that they are unintelligible; it simply means that to understand them requires patience and a willingness to stand back from ready solutions.
Her final book, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain and Peru (2007), wove together all of these strands, showing “how Roman and classical literature provided a framework not simply for the comprehension of empires, Inca and Spanish, in their mutual and contrapuntal resemblance to Rome, but for the construal of historical experience itself.” Sabine concluded the book with a poetic flourish: “History being the teacher of life, the Roman past allowed room for contradiction, for uncertainty and for not knowing, not claiming to know everything. Room, above all, for what was and is yet to be learned.”
On June 16, 2012, Sabine MacCormack died suddenly from a heart attack while tending her garden in her home in South Bend. For me, this was a tremendous shock. During the years following my graduation from Notre Dame and my entry into the Order of Preachers in 2008, I had seen Sabine each time I visited my family in South Bend. We had often spoken about our mutual love of the Dominican saints of Peru, St. Rose of Lima and St. Martin de Porres, and I had harbored a hope to help her gain access to the archives of a Dominican priory in Peru that she had not yet been allowed to visit. In May 2012, when I had seen her last, she seemed in perfect health, full of her inimitable zest and vigor. And yet, with the suddenness of Augustine’s conversion in the garden, Sabine underwent a new conversion as she tended the roses in her garden.
Looking back on the speech of Pope Benedict which had moved Sabine so deeply, I am struck by the forcefulness of Benedict’s description of the death of the saint:
We need permanent conversion. Until the end we need this humility that recognizes that we are sinners journeying along, until the Lord gives us his hand definitively and introduces us into eternal life. It was in this final attitude of humility, lived day after day, that Augustine died.
Rather than taking away her life, the Lord had given Sabine his hand.
At a reception following her funeral Mass on June 22, I had a conversation with one of Sabine’s colleagues who had first met her some years before she came to Notre Dame. At that time, Sabine was studying Augustine intensely, but had not yet decided whether he was good or bad. Troubled by Augustine’s acquiescence to the use of violence in the context of the Donatist schism, Sabine displayed a fascinated ambivalence towards the saint. This was a further revelation of the depth of Sabine’s encounter with Augustine, for it showed that hers was not a superficial acquaintance or uncritical affirmation. Having struggled through the complexities and paradoxes of Augustine’s life and thought, Sabine had eventually concluded that Augustine was fundamentally worthy of admiration and respect. Although she may have maintained a critical distance concerning some of Augustine’s prudential decisions, Sabine could see the wisdom embodied and expressed by the saint, and to make that wisdom available to others.
Sabine was a restless person, always on the move, always engaged in a feverish and yet paradoxically demure whirl of research trips, lectures, and dinner parties. And yet, by the end of her life, she had found an answer to the questions that had dominated her life. Since we have lost the opportunity—for now—to ask Sabine about this answer, perhaps we can be content with the words of the Pope who had moved her so deeply at that Papal Audience on February 27, 2008:
Even today, as in his time, humanity needs to know and above all to live this fundamental reality: God is love, and the encounter with him is the only response to the restlessness of the human heart; a heart inhabited by hope, still perhaps obscure and unconscious in many of our contemporaries but which already today opens us Christians to the future.
