‘There is one sense in which Aquinas certainly did not believe in worlds. This is the sense in which certain Greek philosophers held that there is an infinity of worlds…Aquinas asserts what he calls the “unity of the world”. He claims, too, that the very concept of world denotes a “unity of order”.’

The rise of political and spiritual disunity in early modern Europe coincides with what Patočka calls
the desire to “project […] the division of Europe upon a division of the world” — in a word, colonialism.