Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 37

CITY OF GLOBALISTS

to mistake temporal universals for heavenly
universals.
Global citizens might also understand
their political commitments in this world
as a plausible moral substitute for religious
commitments in the next world. Thus it is
more probable that individuals who "bow
with respect before the truth [of global citi-
zenship] that [they] accept without discus-
sion" bow before truths they understand as
morally correct as drawn from their worldly
nature, rather than their heavenly one. Such
engagement in the global City of Man-like
all earthly political projects-draws one's
attention away from citizenship in the City
of God. And the purely materialist global
citizen might see no need to participate in
a City of God if they considered it a morally
indeterminate quest about nonmaterial mat-
ters. Why trouble oneself with such things if
the activity threatened to draw one toward a
disheartening abyss?
Here Augustine theorizes that political
diversity acts as less of a hindrance to the
City of God, given that this earthly state of
affairs procures a greater acknowledgement
of the primacy of the "peace of heaven":
This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns
on earth, calls citizens out of all nations,
and gathers together a society of pil-
grims of all languages, not scrupling
about diversities in the manners, laws,
and institutions whereby earthly peace is
secured and maintained, but recognizing
that, however various these are, they all
tend to one and the same end of earthly
peace. It therefore is so far from rescind-
ing and abolishing these diversities, that
it even preserves and adopts them, so
long only as no hindrance to the wor-
ship of the one supreme and true God is
thus introduced. Even the heavenly city,
therefore, while in its state of pilgrimage,

avails itself of the peace of earth, and, so
far as it can without injuring faith and
godliness, desires and maintains a com-
mon agreement among men regarding
the acquisition of the necessaries of life,
and makes this earthly peace bear upon
the peace of heaven; for this alone can
be truly called and esteemed the peace
of the reasonable creatures, consisting as
it does in the perfectly ordered and har-
monious enjoyment of God and of one
another in God.7

For Augustine, the City of God "preserves
and adopts" the political diversity of many
nations because such diversity reinforces the
idea of the importance of the peace within
particular political communities. Men who
are in political communion with one another
as fellow citizens in particular cities of men,
much like other communion-producing
modes of human association, have a taste as
to what the perfect communion of heavenly
citizenship entails.

I

n his introduction to Democracy in
America, Tocqueville writes that he was
"under the pressure of a sort of religious
terror . . . produced by the sight of this irre-
sistible revolution that for so many centuries
has marched over all obstacles, and that one
sees still advancing today amid the ruins it
has made."8 Tocqueville was fascinated by
the establishment and development of the
United States, an interesting outlier in a
world that he thought was being overrun by
democratic revolution. If, as I have suggested
in this essay, Pierre Manent is correct in
identifying the final stage of the democratic
revolution in terms of the growing yearn-
ing within the West for universal political
homogeneity, then the American citizen
might be more concerned with what the
establishment of a global city amounts to in
37
Modern Age - Fall 2014

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