THAT WHOLE "GIRLS" THING WAS A MYSTERY:

Peter wrote a great deal in recent decades.  Once I was on his email list and regularly got updates with links to his latest postings and articles, and I often felt that he wrote more quickly than I could read.  He was not afraid to spar with the likes of George Will, nor to take seriously a television series or two or three and see in them a key to understanding contemporary America.   I never quite grasped his fascination with popular culture--the first sentence of this remembrance is the sum total of my writing on the subject, done in tribute; and I confess not to have been able to stomach more than the first episode of "Girls"--but I think it was the teacher in him determined to understand what moved his students, like Allan Bloom, about whom he wrote his valedictory essay, published in Public Discourse yesterday morning as he died.

I said that Peter was Southern, but I don't think he cared less about Robert E. Lee and all that.  Instead, he loved the South for its devotion to family, for its faith, for its acceptance of life with all its imperfections--and therefore its humane tolerance for people, no matter how crippled or distraught.  He wrote about anxiety and restlessness, "inquietude" in the French of his beloved Pascal and Tocqueville, and he agreed with Tocqueville that this characterized the American and the modern condition, or I should say postmodern, as he did.  He wrote about this mood as though he knew it, but not as though it could be overcome, only endured.  He taught me that Stoicism was fundamental to the South, at least as tempered by Christianity.

His was a manly piety, more comfortable in the back pews than on the altar, and more interested--at least in my limited observation--in the intellectual concerns of the Church than in its liturgy.  He did real scholarly service to Catholic intellectuals by introducing and making readily available Orestes Brownson's American Republic (ISI Books, 2003), a noble effort, written at the denouement of the Civil War, to interpret American government and its "new birth of freedom" as congruent with the Catholic and Aristotelian tradition.  In contrast to Brownson, perhaps, Peter wrote as though the metaphysical certainties of the Church could be rather glimpsed than known, but that seems to have been sufficient comfort in the face of anxious doubt.  Or maybe it was the perpetual teacher in him that aimed to unsettle certitude and to calm fright.

Tweet   @brothersjudd