"During the Middle Ages there existed throughout the West a real unity, based on properly traditional foundations, which we call 'Christendom', but when these secondary unities of a purely political—that is to say temporal and no longer spiritual—order were formed, this great unity of the West was irremediably broken and the effective existence of Christendom came to an end. Nations, merely the dispersed fragments of what was formerly Christendom, false unities substituted for the true one by the temporal power's will to dominate can, given the very conditions of their origin, survive only by opposing each other and ceaselessly contending among themselves in all fields. Now spirit is unity, matter is multiplicity and division; and the more one removes oneself from spirituality, the more antagonisms are accentuated and amplified. No one can deny that the feudal wars, which were quite localized and subject to the moreover to restrictive regulation by the spiritual authority, were nothing compared to the national wars that have resulted, following the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, in 'armed nations', and we have seen in our own day new developments hardly reassuring for the future."